iThread (AKA Apple Thread)

[imref]

I downloaded 14.0.1 last night. Other than the widgets, I don’t see much difference so far. I had my apps organized into groups anyway (aside from some constantly-used ones), so the App Library thing doesn’t really matter to me. The weather widget is nice. I notice it appears you have to push it all the way to one side or the other—seems like you can’t put it in the middle with app icons to either side.

Same here.  Pinning text chats is nice but that’s about it so far.

[1995hoo]

Anybody know what might cause some (but not all) iCloud e-mail messages to keep marking themselves as unread after I mark them as read? I use my iCloud address solely for immediate family members because it's a convenient way to separate that correspondence into a spam-free account. I have four messages from yesterday, all from my mom, that I read and that then showed up as unread. So I manually marked them read, only to see them marked as unread yet again. This morning when I signed on, they were still marked unread, and when I marked them read, about five minutes later they were unread again. It happens across all three devices (PC, iPhone, and iPad), and I've restarted all three of them since last night. It also doesn't happen with every message—I have six other messages from my mom from yesterday (and three from my brother) that are all behaving properly.

The e-mail client I use for iCloud messages on my PC is Mozilla Thunderbird, if that makes any difference. The problem is not happening in my other two personal e-mail accounts from a different provider. I use Windows Mail for those two. I have Outlook available and have considered consolidating all three e-mail accounts in that software for consistency with the software work uses, but there are some things I dislike about Outlook, so I haven't done anything about it so far.

Same here.  Pinning text chats is nice but that’s about it so far.

When you made that comment, I hadn't tried that pinning feature. I've tried it now and it's fairly useful for keeping the two most active text-message senders and recipients at the top, but it's hardly earth-shaking.

[dracnal]

Anybody know what might cause some (but not all) iCloud e-mail messages to keep marking themselves as unread after I mark them as read? I use my iCloud address solely for immediate family members because it's a convenient way to separate that correspondence into a spam-free account. I have four messages from yesterday, all from my mom, that I read and that then showed up as unread. So I manually marked them read, only to see them marked as unread yet again. This morning when I signed on, they were still marked unread, and when I marked them read, about five minutes later they were unread again. It happens across all three devices (PC, iPhone, and iPad), and I've restarted all three of them since last night.

Short answer is it's a known bug MS introduced within the last 36 hours or so. Supposed to be a fix out today. If it's still doing it tomorrow morning, see if you can find a place to manually check for updates. Even if you don't get them yourself, your devices should get them on their own. If it's still happening on Friday, then its time to look for alternate reasons. But yeah, my company sent an alert to all hands about the bug so we wouldn't be surprised when customers called in asking about it.

[1995hoo]

Thanks. I suppose the other solution would be to delete the messages, but one of them in particular is one I need to save for a few more days. I guess I can pull another window around in front of the e-mail window so I don't see the "unread" messages when I look at that PC screen.

[dracnal]

Thanks. I suppose the other solution would be to delete the messages, but one of them in particular is one I need to save for a few more days. I guess I can pull another window around in front of the e-mail window so I don't see the "unread" messages when I look at that PC screen.

Try making a subfolder and dragging them there? I haven't played with Apple's mail for five or six years, so I can't remember if the unread count shows all unread in the mailbox, or just the ones in the main inbox folder. The latter is how most mail programs work, but Apple likes to do things differently sometimes.

[1995hoo]

It's just bizarre that it's only doing it as to those four messages from yesterday. I have five messages from this morning that all properly show as having been read and that aren't flipping back again. So strange.

[dracnal]

It's just bizarre that it's only doing it as to those four messages from yesterday. I have five messages from this morning that all properly show as having been read and that aren't flipping back again. So strange.

My best guess would be they've pushed a fix that corrects the problem and prevents it from happening with new messages, but are still trying to find a way to get it to update messages received that have the issue. Here's the note from our internal IT team, who is tasked in part with keeping up to the minute on news affecting MS or Apple products and relaying the info to the outward facing IT folks:

Good Afternoon,
We have received reports from users that their mobile email apps are not properly syncing the “read status” of messages between their phone and desktop email.
While this issue appears to be most prevalent on iPhone via the Apple Mail app, Microsoft has confirmed that the issue is due to a service update which has caused issues with Exchange ActiveSync and the syncing of message status.
This issue does NOT appear to be affecting the Outlook app on either Android or iOS, and only currently affecting native mail apps, such as those from Samsung, iOS, or Google.
Microsoft has begun pushing out a fix for this, and the issue should be resolved on all devices by the end of the day tomorrow, October 6th.

[bluestreak]

One of the widgets that I really like (love actually) is the photo widget. It shows you pictures from your catalog, some random, some on a particular anniversary, some with a theme (one day it was weddings, another it was food pics. Sometimes it is pics of my old dogs), and changes them a couple of times a day. The algorithm is really good at picking pictures (it’s usually a landscape or people. It’s nice seeing pictures from years ago that are lying dormant on my phone. They have been so good, I almost always end up sharing them with friends as a blast from the past.

[HalfSmokes]

amazon photos does an 'on this day' notification that is really similar

[imref]

Just ordered a new ARM-based MacBook Pro 13", hoping that my software will run on it.

[dracnal]

Just ordered a new ARM-based MacBook Pro 13", hoping that my software will run on it.

If you look at the consistency they've maintained with their charging cables over the years, I think you can be secure in knowing that prayer is about your only option to help ensure your software will work fine. 

[HalfSmokes]

External GPUs not supported- which seems odd especially for the Mac mini

[The Chief]

So I hear Google is not the default search in iOS 14.

[imref]

So I hear Google is not the default search in iOS 14.

it is on my phone running iOS 14.1

[DCFan]

it is on my phone running iOS 14.1

Mine too. I have a google app so I don't really know what the default search choice is or what the alternatives are.

[HalfSmokes]

It’s on mine, easy to change, but it’s still there.

[The Chief]

https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-now-shows-its-own-search-results-threatening-google-ios14-2020-10

[imref]

https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-now-shows-its-own-search-results-threatening-google-ios14-2020-10

hmm, I searched for a term on the home screen, it opened the Google search results.

[HondoKillebrew]

I have an iPhone 11.  Very few of my texts to the number of a friend of mine go through.  Most get a "not delivered" bounce-back.  And, when I get texts from him, they show up repeated 3 to 5 times.  Texts to and from others are working fine.  I only experience this with this particular number.   Any thoughts on how to address this? 

Nevermind:  I think I fixed it by turning off messaging, restarting the phone, turning on messaging, then restarting again. 

Happening again, but with some other numbers.  Ugh. 

[dracnal]

I have an iPhone 11.  Very few of my texts to the number of a friend of mine go through.  Most get a "not delivered" bounce-back.  And, when I get texts from him, they show up repeated 3 to 5 times.  Texts to and from others are working fine.  I only experience this with this particular number.   Any thoughts on how to address this? 

Nevermind:  I think I fixed it by turning off messaging, restarting the phone, turning on messaging, then restarting again. 

Happening again, but with some other numbers.  Ugh.

Not sure if it will affect Apple texts because that's outside the scope of my job, but I do know that iPhones and iMacs will run into issues if there are attachments above a certain size in the mailbox. If you've got a habit of texting pictures to people, and you have backups of the pictures, try deleting them from the message threads to see if that helps.

[HondoKillebrew]

Not sure if it will affect Apple texts because that's outside the scope of my job, but I do know that iPhones and iMacs will run into issues if there are attachments above a certain size in the mailbox. If you've got a habit of texting pictures to people, and you have backups of the pictures, try deleting them from the message threads to see if that helps.

Really appreciate the response.  I just went ahead and deleted the conversation with my friend, including attachments, to see if that helps. 

[imref]

Got my M1 MacBook Pro yesterday. Setup has been more interesting than past machines.  I initially tried to configure it by restoring a backup from a Time Machine drive, but got an error that for some reason the new Mac couldn't read the backup.  So I then used the migration tool to copy from my old Mac, which took about 3 hours.  After that everything seemed to be working except for a few licensing issues tied to the hardware ID on the previous machine. I decided that since my current machine was four years old I'd be better off starting from scratch, and I wanted to re-install all my apps anyway since they all needed to be updated to support the Apple hardware.  That's when the fun started.

I booted into System Options (which is a different process on the M1 hardware - rather than holding down option-R on boot up, you hold down the power button).  I then erased the hard drive and tried to reinstall Big Sur.  That gave me an error that I was unauthorized to install Big Sur.  Apparently the new Macs have a new security system that ties the Mac to the Apple ID I provided on initial setup. There's a bug in Big Sur so instead of giving you a chance to enter your username/PW, it gives you an error.

There are a couple of work-arounds - one is to go into iCloud and delete the machine, the other was to open terminal and use a command to reset the password, then re-erase the hard drive. Once I did that, I was prompted for my Apple ID/PW to reinstall Big Sur.

After the reinstall it automatically downloaded my files from iCloud, but the default setup is to keep Documents and Desktop as local folders, not synched to iCloud, so they were both empty which caused a mild panic attack. It's a fairly easy fix to tell the Mac to use iCloud as default documents/desktop folders, so that's fixed.

The only other issues were with activating Office (I don't have a subscription to O365 and so I had to reset my license for Office 2019 with Microsoft to activate it on the new machine.)  And I have one other old software package for work that required changing user permissions and applying two patches to get it to license and boot.

So far, I haven't really noticed any difference compared to my 2017 MBP.  Safari is a bit faster, but that's about it. The battery life is supposed to be between 12-17 hours so that will be nice if I ever start traveling again.  The keyboard is a bit better but I use an external keyboard and touchpad so that doesn't help. The biggest downside is that this model only has two USB-C/Thunderbolt ports whereas my old MBP had four.  The only way to get four on a MBP now is to buy one with an Intel chip.

[HalfSmokes]

Reading that, I'll wait a couple of years for the hiccups to get taken care of

[imref]

Reading that, I'll wait a couple of years for the hiccups to get taken care of

Unless you urgently need a laptop, I'd wait for expanded M1 options (16" MBP, 13" MPB with more than 2 USB/Thunderbolt ports), etc.  If you need one now, I'd still get the M1.

The MacBook Air is an especially attractive option for $300 less than the Pro. The only difference between the M1 MacBook Air and MacBook Pro is that the Pro has a fan and thus can run a bit hotter (and it uses 8 cores instead of 7 in the Air).  The MBP also has slightly longer battery life.

I'd guess that for 99% of the buyers, the Air, for $999, is the better option.

[HalfSmokes]

I use Mac mini’s at home, the m1 seems meh. No external GPU support is a big miss