by SOLAR_FIELDS 14 hours ago
Apple has historically never been good at multiple users at the same machine. Even MacOS is still pretty bad at it. IMO incentives are not aligned here, they want everyone purchasing their own iPad, so i suspect that their strategy is to not invest too much into profile management as it risks cannibalizing their hardware sales.
Like 20 years ago OS X server had pretty great support for it.
I worked a university lab and had an account on the lab server. I could walk up to any computer in the lab and login and get the exact same desktop experience with all my files and settings. The computing power was all on the local machine, but it basically mounted my user folder from the server.
That was the only time I worked anywhere with that setup on Macs, but it worked so well. Though it was admittedly not your standard office environment — there were frequent compelling reasons for me to be using different machines in different parts of the lab, and not a lot of compelling reasons for me to use that account from a computer on a remote network.
20 years ago, I would still have bought a Mac, nowadays they don't sell any hardware that I would pay for.
I don't pay extra for have less options than on PC hardware, my desktop and laptops can be upgraded at will and without gunpoint prices (forgetting about the whole AI stuff that affects everyone anyway), thus all my use of Apple hardware is project specific and taken from the company's hardware pool.
> Even MacOS is still pretty bad at it.
What problems do you see with multiple users on macOS? I don't use it intensively, but I've never noticed issues.
As a very simple example, airdrop to macOS with multiple logged in users will frequently pop up the confirmation notification in the user account that is not active.
Facetime too. I shared a laptop with my wife for like 2 years, so it was an ok experience, but we noticed those little things.
I wonder if this was a design choice, so if I’m on the computer and a call comes in for them, I can let them know and maybe hand it off?
The alternative would be they would have to answer on their phone (assuming they have an iPhone, which may not always be the case), then use handoff to get it on the Mac.
Could be, but I've never wanted that. I just answer it on my iPhone or my desktop Mac.
Perhaps I don't understand it but the encryption security model for MacOS/iPadOS/iOS currently doesn't allow multiple different encryption keys for each user. So any user can decrypt the whole drive and while it does enforce user permissions, the security model can't support true multiuser.
I actually don't know if Windows or ChromeOS support this either but this is certainly something Linux can with LUKS et. al.
Yep on ChromeOS each user's home dir is separately encrypted with their own password.
As soon as I added a 2nd user, my Samba share totally broke and days later I still don't have it working. It was fine for over a year and now I'm close to deleting my 2nd user just so I can access my Mac Mini across the network again.
USB security prompt disappears when multiple MacOS accounts signed in
Still a problem for me, and has been for years, but I may be holding it wrong. https://discussions.apple.com/thread/255929514?sortBy=rank
The solution posted in the discussion is not really secure.
For me quitting preview, or maybe it is settings, resolves it.
Switching users while changing displays often results in an incorrect resolution. That’s such a basic thing: different users have different preferences for their displays and keyboards attached to the displays. Yet this doesn’t work reliably, as if during some moments the login window just doesn’t want to adjust resolutions.
"Fast user switching" has been a feature since OS X 10.5 Leopard. It kind of requires an instructional video though.
Here's an early one I found: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJKRgs2IUg4&t=7s ("18 years ago")