[ARandumGuy]

Many musicians have giant screens in their live sets, which display incredibly detailed visuals. When you're spending hundreds of thousands of dollars (if not more) on a live setup, it looks really amateurish to have an orange dot in the corner of the screen.

Yes, there are workarounds. But artists shouldn't have to deal with that when it worked perfectly fine beforehand. In addition, the more stuff you add to your setup, the higher chance that something will go wrong.

[dkonofalski]

Professionals who spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on a live setup are not going to be using the internal I/O of their Macbook/Mac Pro. They're going to have dedicated video output cards that would not be affected by this. Those cards are specifically for having 100% control over the output.

The right call her for Apple is to allow users to give permission to specific apps to disable this but let's not start with the idea that pros are outputting directly from their computers without the right hardware.

[thepasswordis]

>Professionals who spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on a live setup are not going to be using the internal I/O of their Macbook/Mac Pro. They're going to have dedicated video output cards that would not be affected by this. Those cards are specifically for having 100% control over the output.

Have you ever worked in this industry? Because yes they absolutely are.

The people building the video walls (renting them), and the people actually running the visuals are not the same people.

[dkonofalski]

Yes. I currently work in this industry.

[thepasswordis]

And you've never met a VJ with an old macbook pro?

[dkonofalski]

Of course I have. A VJ with an old Macbook Pro isn't someone for whom this dot makes the display "unusable". If it did, then they wouldn't be using it because they could also have notifications, OS alerts, security prompts, or anything else that shows up on a display come up during their performance.

[honkdaddy]

There's a _massive_ difference between an unremovable and highly visible orange dot and the small chance that "notifications, OS alerts, security prompts etc." could pop up. I think it's undeniable that there's a contingent of people who play live video who will be negatively affected by this change and I'm surprised so many in this thread are implying that if they don't own a playback card, their experience doesn't matter.

[radley]

> because they could also have notifications, OS alerts, security prompts

Most will be using HDMI out as a second screen, so those won't show up

> Yes. I currently work in this industry

What do you use for video output? I'm a hobbyist and used iPad & TouchViz with HDMI plug. I just picked up Resolume and planned to use a Mac Mini M1 w/ Monterey and HDMI out. I'm livestreaming, so I'm only doing 1080.

[ComputerGuru]

Do Not Disturb/Focus is a thing.

[myself248]

Airplane mode nearly prevents almost all the triggers that would cause such things to pop up. I thought this was standard VJ advice; turn on airplane mode before a performance.

Doesn't fix the orange dot, but it helps pretty much everything else.

[nathancahill]

Reminds me of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NfUeUCErCmQ

[Groxx]

You meet professionals not taking professional precautions in every field. It doesn't mean they're in the right, it means they're playing fast and loose and hoping common stuff doesn't bite them and their clients.

[dkonofalski]

Yup! And that leads to situations just like this. I'm not saying it's right or wrong. I'm just saying that people who depend on not being surprised by stuff like this prepare for stuff like this because it happens, in whatever form it takes.

[munk-a]

> The right call her for Apple is to allow users to give permission to specific apps to disable this but let's not start with the idea that pros are outputting directly from their computers without the right hardware.

The unfortunate case with a preference is that as soon as you enable such a permission folks can force users to enable that permission to use their invasive software. The orange dot exists because applications have been abusing privacy by invasively using audio and visual recording to spy on people. The solution to this problem isn't very simple and while the orange dot is causing headaches the lack of an orange dot also causes headaches.

[q-big]

> The solution to this problem isn't very simple and while the orange dot is causing headaches the lack of an orange dot also causes headaches.

If both options have a disadvantage, give users a choice which of the evils they prefer, for example in the pre-boot environment.

P.S. I am of course aware that it is not typical for Apple to give users a choice.

[munk-a]

As per my comment - the unfortunate truth is that offering users a choice means denying users the freedom from being creeped on as every app under the sun asks for silent microphone access "for design reasons". We've seen how ineffective app permissions (that can't be selectively restricted by the OS as on Android) have been for iOS devices. Apps boot up and demand access to contacts, your camera and your microphone and if you refuse they quit out.

It can be empowering to users to deny bad choices - since it prevents users from being coerced by malicious software (i.e. tiktok, facebook, instagram - not like virus laden software).

That all said there is some legitimate functionality being lost with this decision.

[jcims]

offering choice ~ denying freedom

empowering ~ deny bad choices

Just my opinion, but these linguistic contortions undermine your point.

Providing users with a decision in which there is an asymmetry and/or incentives could be setting them up for manipulation. But i think there are ways to balance the asymmetry vs. just removing the choice. A simple report showing which apps were watching/listening along with screen time could be useful, for example.

[munk-a]

I hope this isn't nitpicking but I don't consider those linguistic contortions. A minimum wage empowers workers to receive an (ideally) living wage while, on the surface, restricting them from being able to sell their time for ever lower amounts. There are a lot of debates as to the efficacy and justifiability of things like a minimum wage but it's important to remember that any prevailing sense of the linguistic definitions you might assume is a local effect. Comparing American vs. European definitions of empowerment is a pretty clear demonstration of this where in Europe the ability to live a good healthy life is paramount and restrictions that promote that life style are generally considered empowering.

I do think there might be some other solutions but I also think the orange dot is, for almost all users, a perfectly acceptable solution - visually obvious without being obnoxious.

[GekkePrutser]

The OP mentioned a preboot setting specifically which would not be per app and be tricky enough to scare regular users from being tricked into doing it. Sounds like a good solution for Pro users.

[munk-a]

Yea - a preboot setting actually seems like a pretty rational way to allow this fix. I don't think it's easy to get ignorant users to mess around with bios or other system level settings.

[EugeneOZ]

Malware can make this choice for you and you will never know about that.

[q-big]

That is exactly the reason why I suggested that the user makes such choices in a pre-boot environment.

[kayodelycaon]

I think you underestimate how many places do use the internal I/O. My tiny church has a single iMac doing both recording and running slides. Small concert venues aren't much better.

Some of the conventions I've gone to ran everything in a room off a single laptop. (I've set up such things.)

Concerts aren't much better. Only the largest events and venues have the kinds of "professional" setups you're thinking of.

[dkonofalski]

This isn't going to matter to a tiny church. A decklink is less than $300, and that's if you splurge. A church can get one for like $60.

Again, we're talking about "professionals" vs., at best, prosumers and consumers. Those applications are not unusable because of a small dot.

[rurp]

I really don't understand why you are being so dismissive of many users, just because they don't meet your personal definition of "professional". This change makes some use cases objectively worse, and telling thousands of people to spend hundreds of dollars plus some amount of time to mitigate a change they didn't ask for is not a respectful position, IMO.

I think this change would be fine as a default, but it should be configurable by the end user.

[dkonofalski]

I'm not being dismissive and this has nothing to do with my personal definition of the word "professional". You mis-framing my position doesn't help this discussion at all.

The point is that users never had control of the output on external monitors. This situation is exactly like the situation that's happened multiple times on every OS where someone discovers a way to do something that relies on some function that they either misunderstand or are misusing (think Y2K). Just because it hasn't bitten people in the ass doesn't mean that it's a good way of doing it. People in this thread have commented surprised that Apple hasn't run into this issue during internal uses by its production teams but the reality is that Apple's production teams don't run off the built-in I/O because that's not how you run a video system you need 100% control of.

I agree that Apple should find a way to make this better (or at least hide it on secondary displays) but that's only a workaround. Today it's an orange dot. Tomorrow, it'll just be some other display indicator. The fact is that you can't (and have never been able to) control what displays from the OS on these secondary monitors. The fact that it's just now biting people in the ass is their fault, not Apple's.

[sgerenser]

One issue is I don’t think software like PowerPoint or Keynote can output to a DeckLink or similar. A quick Google search indicates you need to use ProPresenter, which is a big change for someone who just wants to display PowerPoint slides.

[dkonofalski]

That's partially true but only if you're only looking at DeckLink devices exclusively (which are mostly for full video productions) that rely on some specific things to function. There are other cards that have software that can capture the video from any window and use it as an I/O source. Think OBS but to an I/O device instead of to a virtual camera.

[indymike]

> They're going to have dedicated video output cards that would not be affected by this. Those cards are specifically for having 100% control over the output.

Um, no, how about the built in one worked fine, didn't require me to buy a very expensive additional piece of hardware. This change took away functionality that worked before the upgrade?

> let's not start with the idea that pros are outputting directly from their computers without the right hardware.

If professional means derives income from work, you would be wrong. If pro means works for an organization with unlimited budget, you would be right.

[dkonofalski]

>built in one worked fine

It had the same problem that it still has. The OS can place items on the display that you don't want in the middle of a presentation/performance. The only thing that "worked fine before" is that you were ok with what the OS put there because it was rare for that to happen.

>If professional means

It means that a dot in the upper right hand corner makes the function "unusable". If that's the case, then a professional would not extend/mirror a desktop display. They make sure that they control exactly what is being displayed and you can't (and have never been able to) do that with macOS.

[Dylan16807]

> It had the same problem that it still has.

It's not reasonable to say it's the "same" problem when they changed it this much.

> The only thing that "worked fine before" is that you were ok with what the OS put there because it was rare for that to happen.

So rare it may have never happened. So yes, it did work fine. Are you implying that's wrong? There's no way to make a bulletproof setup, after all. Maybe with an external device you get a glitched or blank screen instead of a notification, but any hardware or software could fail. Possible chance of failure is not the same as a constant 100% chance problem, and does not excuse a constant 100% problem.

[dkonofalski]

>they changed it this much.

They didn't change it much. They added an indicator to the existing OS UI when a recording device is active. That's the only change that was made. As I've said elsewhere here, they could have added anything to the UI in the past and it would have had the same effect. People just didn't care because that stuff didn't affect them.

>There's no way to make a bulletproof setup, after all.

No one is saying it needs to be bulletproof. If it did and that's important to your production, you'd have backups to switch over to immediately. You're taking what I'm saying out of context and arguing straw men. If a small dot on the screen makes things "unusable" for you, then your setup is wrong. If anything that you don't want on the screen that you didn't put there is important for you, then you need to create your setup to function like that and allow for that.

All I'm saying is that there are people all over here, professionals or otherwise, who claim that a small dot on the screen is a dealbreaker for their ability to do their jobs. If that's the case, then they've been leaving their livelihoods up to chance because every OS has the ability to display things on an external display on top of a full-screen application. I'm glad some people were lucky enough for that not to happen but people whose livelihoods depend on that don't leave those things to luck.

[Dylan16807]

> They didn't change it much.

They changed the percentage of time you have an OS overlay on the screen drastically. That's the metric I was using.

> No one is saying it needs to be bulletproof.

When you accuse people in situations where the dot matters of "leaving their livelihoods up to chance" for using normal output, you basically are saying that the notification-stopping part of the system has to be bulletproof. Swap 'bulletproof' with 'nigh-perfect, far in excess of all the other parts of the system' if you want.

And no, that's not going "by their own logic" or anything. Refusing to accept a constant dot in the corner does not mean a single notification would ruin their career.

[indymike]

>>If professional means

>It means that a dot in the upper right hand corner makes the function "unusable".

I'm pretty sure professional has nothing to do with dots in the corner. There's really not much to defend about this change, and this change really reduces the utility of macbooks for many people who derive their income from work using that macbook. Hopefully, apple gets the message from users and fixes it.

[dkonofalski]

>I'm pretty sure professional has nothing to do with dots in the corner.

It absolutely does in terms of this conversation thread since that's what the topic of discussion is.

>really not much to defend about this change

Yes, there is. It makes the vast majority of Mac users aware of when their input device is activated in situations where they may not know.

>reduces the utility of macbooks for many people who derive their income from work using that macbook

It absolutely does not. It only affects the very small portion of users for whom the dot is a dealbreaker, that have to capture audio while presenting, that are not technical enough to follow the steps to remove the dot, and that also have never cared before about the OS being able to render chrome on their work/display output.

[ratww]

> Professionals who spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on a live setup are not going to be using the internal I/O of their Macbook/Mac Pro

Why not? The internal I/O is pretty good! Except for this issue, obviously.

[dkonofalski]

Because professionals can't take the chance that an in-app notification (from another app) or a menu bar or something else will end up in their output. We're not just talking about an external monitor here.

[ratww]

This is not really an issue with a machine prepared for live performances or presentations. Until now.

Portability is essential for some people, and MacBooks have pretty reliable IO.

[dkonofalski]

Yes it is. Notifications can pop-up if someone forgets to disable them. Any OS prompts can pop-up on the display. You don't leave those types of things to chance.

[littlestymaar]

Well, this is a “no true Scotsman” fallacy. In practice they do. It's not frequent but I've seen that a few times and it it's always “fun” to watch.

So it shows that there's a lot of professionals out there not following best practices (which isn't surprising to be honest, it's the case in every industry, including super critical ones…).

Maybe the orange dot will actually help these people start using best practices in the end… (note that I'm not defending Apple's move when saying so, I really hate their tendency to think there customers are wrong and because they are Apple they know better)

[ratww]

The "prepared" in my post implies that notifications are disabled.

Also notifications won't really be an issue for anyone but people using the machine both for personal and professional stuff. In the worse case, you can have different user accounts. A professional machine used for VJing or even audio recording will have zero notifications.

[EricE]

use any professional audio interfaces like DANTE? Just activating DANTE causes the stupid orange dot to show, even if you are only sending audio OUT from your Mac to, say, a digital mixing board.

There is ZERO reason to force the dot on every display. Restrict it to the display(s) also showing the menu bar and this becomes a non-issue. I can't believe anyone involved in this at Apple thought this was a remotely reasonable thing to do!

[smoldesu]

Wow, this is one of the most misinformed takes I've seen in a while. I know a number of performers who use a Macbook for their visuals, and they absolutely just plug their machines into whatever I/O is available at their venue. I don't know where you're getting this idea that everyone just lugs around a rackmount AV machine, and if they don't they're not truly a "professional".

[dkonofalski]

We're not talking about a rackmount AV machine. We're talking about a tiny device that can output to HDMI.

And, again, we are talking about situations where this orange dot would make the function "unusable". Those situations are not situations where a professional uses the built-in I/O and leaves things to chance.

[barneygale]

My friend has VJ'd large clubs and music festivals on her ancient Macbook without ever using an external display driver.

There's not a lot of money in the scene for most people. They use the software/hardware they have. Hiding notifications and colourful dots from the OS shouldn't really be an issue.

[palimpsests]

there’s quite a few people here replying to you letting you know how there are indeed situations where A/V professionals have and are continuing to use built-in I/O. I have seen the same. A properly prepared machine is immune to the issues I’ve heard you describe in this thread (notifications, etc).

It sounds like there’s something about all of these responses that isn’t resonating with you because I see a pattern of responding and letting us know our experiences are essentially invalid, for some reason. Are you able to speak to why that’s important to you? Why does this seem so far-fetched / unbelievable to you?

[dkonofalski]

I think you're misreading what I'm saying. I have only been responding to people that are saying that the dot makes this setup "unusable". The machine you're describing is not possible without a dedicated hardware I/O device because the OS always has access to display devices and apps cannot override that.

If the dot makes their setup unusable, then the situation prior to Monterey should also have made their setup unusable because the OS could have popped up an alert dialog at any time (or any kind of OS chrome). Using built-in I/O is absolutely fine in professional settings but not for settings where you need complete control of what's being displayed and that's precisely what they're complaining about. They never had completely control of what was being displayed. They were just OK with it because it either didn't bother them often or it wasn't a dealbreaker for whatever they were doing. If you need to know that you're only going to see what you want to see, you have to use hardware I/O.

I've never said anyone's experiences are invalid. Stop talking down to me like a child and making things up.

[dang]

You posted a ton of comments to this thread (over 60 of them!) perpetuating a massive flamewar, and broke the site guidelines in a whole bunch of places, including outright personal attacks. We ban accounts that carry on this way, and we've had to warn you about breaking the site guidelines more than once in the past.

We don't want flamewars here. Please make your substantive points thoughtfully and without swipes in the future—regardless of how wrong other people are or you feel they are.

Btw, when discussion degenerates to the level of people arguing about what each other did or didn't say, that's a sure sign that the conversation has become tedious and uninteresting to those not involved in the spat, and that it's time to step away from the comment box.

You weren't the only person in the thread doing these things, but (from the subset I've seen), your account was behaving the worst, both qualitatively (in terms of how badly you were breaking the site guidelines) and quantitatively (in terms of how many posts you made and how much fuel you added to the flames).

Could you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and take the intended spirit of this site more to heart from now on? I don't want to ban you, but if this keeps happening, we'll end up having to, because it's not what this site is for and it destroys what it is for.

[gwd]

> I have only been responding to people that are saying that the dot makes this setup "unusable". The machine you're describing is not possible without a dedicated hardware I/O device because the OS always has access to display devices and apps cannot override that.

This seems to be the crux of the disagreement in this thread. You're equating the effect of two quite different things:

1. A pop-up that's quite intrusive / potentially embarassing, but has (say) a 1/100 chance of happening any given show, and in any case would only be there for a few seconds; the rest of the show would be unaffected

2. A small but intentionally noticeable orange dot that's there 100% of the show for every show

Yes, if you want to be a top level professional, then you can afford to have neither. But I can certainly imagine people / venues where #1 would be considered a normal cost of doing business, but #2 would not.

That said, if fixing them both is as easy and inexpensive as people in this thread seem to think, then the small "nudge" by #2 to get them to fix #1 is probably beneficial for the ecosystem overall.

[umanwizard]

The point you're not addressing is that in practice, before this change, people usually had close enough to full control, except for maybe a <1% chance of something going wrong. The OS can, in principle, do anything, but in reality it usually doesn't. Whereas with this new orange dot, there is a 100% chance of it being there.

It's easy to imagine a pretty wide range of people for whom a tiny theoretical risk of the OS going crazy and showing some kind of notification even with notifications disabled is acceptable, but an orange dot that's 100% deterministically guaranteed to be there isn't.

[palimpsests]

Hi,

Thanks for explaining, I hear what you are saying about dedicated hardware giving much more control. In the case of this dot and an external monitor / display, and until the OS is updated, that definitely sounds like a great option.

Perhaps I was misreading what you are saying; regarding:

> If the dot makes their setup unusable, then the situation prior to Monterey should also have made their setup unusable because the OS could have popped up an alert dialog at any time

It sounds like we are in disagreement around current un-usability because of (dot/notifications/etc) implying past un-usability. I get what you are saying in theory, and agree with you.

However, in my life experience, and many others in this thread, I am hearing counterexamples to this statement. The way in which I observed you responding to these statements is what invalidating _to me_. My felt experience is not "making things up".

I do not know your age and I am making no assumptions about that. The intention of my original comment was to: respectfully and kindly share the impact of how I have been receiving your comments, gain more understanding about your perspective on this issue, and offer an (obviously subjective) reflection to you about a communication pattern that I noticed in the comments here.

This sort of reflection is always coming from place of curiosity and so carries an implicit invitation to deepen into greater shared understanding and connection; I have no attachment to you receiving that reflection and I apologize if it did not land well for you. I understand these kind of things do not always translate so well in text.

[unethical_ban]

Yeah, I'm watching this unfold and I don't see how the other person can't see the problem.

Someone spends a thousand, or two thousand dollars on a high-end device with state-of-the-art ports and graphics and processing, and because "OS notifications sometimes pop up if you don't disable them", real pros buy a piece of middleware hardware that does nothing but filter out a software issue?

[dkonofalski]

Yes, exactly. If you need to be able to control what goes to the display and take that away from the OS, you need a hardware I/O device.

OS notifications and alerts are just examples of any number of things that could be displayed that are unwanted. In situations where something like that makes the setup "unusable", you have to have a hardware I/O device. There's not another option.

[dkonofalski]

>But artists shouldn't have to deal with that when it worked perfectly fine beforehand.

It didn't work perfectly fine beforehand, though. They just didn't care about how it worked before. Now, suddenly, they do.

[baxuz]

I don't get what's so bad about an orange dot in the menu bar? Hopefully they are running the presentation in fullscreen mode anyway?

[EugeneOZ]

It's rendered on the external screen also, even when there is no menu bar.

For me, it's good, not bad. I’m sorry that for some people it means they need to do their job a little bit less careless, but the overall importance of this dot is worth it.