@matigo Well, Microsoft was a different company back then, as you have pointed out here before.
@nitinkhanna Yes, I think that standalone licenses get auto-updated once you install Microsoft 365. It's not really ideal—sometimes you need those older versions.
Since Microsoft is jacking up the price of their Office suite via Microsoft 365 by 50% starting February, I did a cost comparison between the annual 365 subscription version vs. the standalone Office for Mac 2024 product. I found that the standalone product will be much less than the yearly subscription past the two-year mark. Since MS seems to be adding functionality with dubious usefulness like Copilot to even the Mac version, I reasoned there's no need to keep doing the yearly subscription, and figured I'd bite the bullet with the standalone product.
First time in 13 years that I've bought a standalone Office product. Feels like a breath of fresh air, actually.
@peemee Interesting. I never noticed that process in the menu—learned something new.
Then again, it's really only for people who go to the Print dialog and then decide they don't want a physically printed page, they want a PDF instead, so they go to the PDF submenu that's only accessible from the little button at the bottom of the Print dialog box. I wonder how long that command has been there for. It's still available in macOS Tahoe.
@matigo What does your canine companion think of Christmas, do you suppose?
// @spacenerdmo
@peemee I would hate it if my "smart" TV was updated with features I didn't want or need, either. Hope that the Japanese smart TV manufacturers don't follow suit.
This seems to be all over the tech news now, so you're not the only one.
What would Copilot do for your TV watching? Would it be useful in any way? I guess it's a generative AI kind of thing for finding information on programs and movies or something like that?
@matigo Haha, soliciting active feedback from users… that's something that Apple never does, at least not that I've seen. Perhaps it aggregates feedback received via its websites, Apple Support channels and from its media events, but in the end, it's the product managers and the Big Man on top who makes the decisions as to what to leave and what to cut.
That's why there are third-party developers, who are able to more flexibly serve the needs of people who want a more customized experience. "There's an app for that." 😆
Oh, and about the Windows Start menu sending requests to Bing, you probably know that this can be disabled via a registry setting. (I just did this—very easy.) I know, sending user queries in the Start menu straightaway to Bing is not something that Microsoft should even be doing in the first place, but at least there are workarounds to disable their poor behavior.
@matigo Oh, so you're not a fan of the "elimination" of Launchpad on macOS Tahoe. It's still kind of there, accessible using the same trackpad gesture from the Spotlight bar, although it isn't full-screen any more and it's more just like an app grid/list. I've always used Alfred for launching apps via quick text entry, so Launchpad's being repurposed into something else did not bother me much. There has been a lot of anger about it on the forums, though, and I wonder why it would have been such a big deal to just leave it. Maybe Apple will reverse their decision.
As for "AI stuff being integrated" into the clipboard, which OS are you referring to?
Yes, I agree with you about the mostly seamless flow between Apple products. Gone are the plug-and-play days of syncing data.
@hazardwarning Ah, vinyl records. I remember the special brush and cleaning fluid that I used to carefully clean the records in my Dad's collection, which eventually got passed down to me. I don't own those records anymore, nor do I have a record player, although my teenage daughter might be amused if she saw one of those actually working. I doubt that many kids these days even know what a record player is or how it works.
// @matigo
@matigo An OS with "no surprises"? What do you mean by "no surprises"? Maybe you mean frequent updates that "break things"?