So as the title says, I run a homelab with various technologies — Proxmox, Home Assistant, a reverse proxy, lots of Ubiquiti equipment, and so on. Over the years I’ve consumed countless hours of articles, stack overflow posts, youtube channels, and knowledge bases to keep myself up to speed on how to use this equipment and what new outcomes I should aim for.
I’m also deeply invested in the Apple ecosystem, with Apple TVs, iPads, Phones, Macbook Pros, and even a homepod. I’ve noticed that the Apple equipment has far less documentation on the whole. I watch Apple events to learn what new features a device will have, but I don’t really see a lot of tutorials or even instruction on how to use it.
Where do you go to get the kind of in-depth learning for your Apple devices that is needed to make expert use of them? Do you have favorite youtube channels that I haven’t discovered yet? Please post below and let me know!
You can check the homebridge communities for a lot for Apple nerding. Hackingtosh also comes to mind.
Realistically you cannot expect to level Apple’s target audience with Proxmox’s or even HA’s.
The most advanced feature that Apple has IMO is Shortcuts, so maybe try to master that?
The real question is, do you know what your goal is or you just want to aimlessly learn stuff?
I second this I learned the most of Apple hardware and software by doing hakintosh in the mid 2000s as a high schooler. Nothing like having to fix kext issues on the only computer you have. This got me started in Linux and home server/lab setup. I helped run an e-commerce website deployed on a VPS from the experience.
When Nokia and their Linux OS died around the time I graduated college I went iPhone and android to see which is most like Linux. I then started my career so I wanted something more turn key I’m now in full Apple ecosystem. I still have a home lab. I don’t expect a lot of people to be technical with Apple but they are out there.
The best way to learn how something works is to make it do something it wasn’t designed to do.
I take on a homelab or Apple ecosystem project every weekend to keep my skills sharp. What I’ve noticed after several years of doing this is that I know a whole lot more about what the homelab services can do than I do about the iPhone in my pocket. Today, for example, I forced myself to go through the Health app and enter things like medications. Pretty soon my devices were reminding me to take my medication and asking me to log what I took. Despite all the reading I do about Apple products, I didn’t realize that the app would remind me to take the medication. That’s really useful!
Another example is when I learned how to make the iPhone make white noise. Who knew that the accessibility features included that? Or that you can choose ocean waves or rain instead of the white noise? And here’s something I learned entirely by accident when trying to pay for something at the store — pressing the sleep button three times toggles the white noise feature. I don’t think that’s written down anywhere.
This is why I need some of those in-depth tutorials. They always expose you to a dozen tangentially related capabilities while you’re learning about the subject of the moment.
I have learnt a lot of tricks just through comments here and on Reddit. You can change what the ‘Triple Click The Side Button’ does in a setting under Accessibility. I use it to toggle VoiceControl to control my phone while driving. There is a manual for every iOS version. Maybe all the tips and tricks are covered there.
Eclecticlight has some of the best articles I’ve seen in terms of how Apple’s “it just works” actually does or doesn’t work under the hood. MacRumors forums are one of the better places I’ve found to interact with the community for those niche issues/use cases that only come up for a handful of people. The Mac Geek Gab podcast is another place where enthusiasts can come together to share tips tricks and cool stuff found.
As far as YouTube goes, there seems to be mostly people who will “review” a device at the specs level with no actual use, and then there’s those people who make a video for every little update saying “100 new features in iOS 17.1”, and then they tell you about pixel shift here, a font change there… mostly useless information.
There’s MKBHD and Snazzy Labs, but even they leave lots to be desired at the enthusiast level of interest.
I once spent a hand full of hours with top tier apple tech support on an issue w my MacBook. They could not figure it out. No one on the internet seemed to have the issue, nor know how to solve it. Eventually, I figured it out myself (a mismatch between some combination of iCloud/laptop/keychain passwords, I forgot which specifically, where making it impossible for me to change lock screen settings)
This is the kind of thing I’d love to have enthusiasts around to figure out. I’d have found that for other products. But I think your typical apple user would just go with apple support when they throw their hands up and say to factory reset the laptop. And far too many of apples user base is that typical user.
The folks over at The Accidental Tech podcast are the first that comes to mind. But that’s less learning and more week-to-week discussions.
As far as tutorials go, check out all the things from David Sparks - MacSparky.com. In addition to all his field guides (those do cost money), there’s his podcasts like Automators, and Mac Power Users.
You use Apple devices how Apple tells you to, or use something else.
You’re basically running a BSD Unix system with an actual nice GUI. Any Unix resource is fine if you’re ok digging into the guts a bit.
The anti Apple gang will be salivating with not terribly relevant Apple stuff to say though.
“I’ve noticed that the Apple equipment has far less documentation on the whole.” Since the ios/macOS are closed source it’s falls more on Apple to provide documentation. Most of the good Apple resources are the programming references(https://developer.apple.com/).
Signing up as an Apple developer is a good way to get access to lots of information on ios/mac specific items. Most of home lab type stuff is going to be an adaptation of a 'nix process.
It’s frustrating since the programming references aren’t really great resources on how to do something though the UI. You have to figure out how the functionality you want is exposed.
I’m in the same boat as you. I’m also a web developer and sure we use macOS all the time to code but the actual production environments are always going to be Linux.
Why? Imagine buying a ton of Macs just to host servers vs buying off-the-shelf hardware-optimized rack servers. It just doesn’t make sense. So of course Linux is always going to be the target: I’m not going to throw out my Raspberry Pi to replace it with a Mac mini.
That said, I do wish UNIX would support containerization (specifically Docker) the way Linux does. I very much prefer FreeBSD to any Linux distribution other than Alpine Linux.
I’m still pretty new to the Apple ecosystem but already got sucked into multiple devices. The YouTube channel “Proper Honest Tech” has been the only “in depth” source I’ve used, though while some things are fairly rudimentary or easy to find, he’s had a few videos detailing apps or features I hadn’t touched.
One thing I desperately want to make much better use of are shortcuts–the app is basically a (very) high-level programming language.
Totally an aside, but it’s funny I’ve been mostly out of networking and ipsec/cybersec for… a very long time… and only recently been realizing how far out of date I am while looking into pfSense and OpnSense info after finding an issue with my consumer/gamer router.
I’m very much going to be hitting up other resources mentioned in this thread too.
I agree–it’s much easier to find support for my Ubuntu on Intel server than my macOS on M1 server…
I spend a lot of time reviewing Linux documentation when there is overlap, but it would be great to create such a community…
I always write up my own guide as I’m going in case I need to recreate it. Some of those I write up and post on my own website in case anyone else needs it in the future. Still, sometimes I’m not really sure what finally fixed the problem (e.g., I had a weird issue between CloudFlare and DEVONthink Server that finally resolved but is ridiculously easy to break–and I’m still not sure why the “solution” works…).
While it’s not for everybody, the jailbreaking scene taught me more about my phone than anything else.
In the other hand, it’s one of the most toxic communities I’ve ever been a part of and the reason I don’t jailbreak anymore. So much drama interfered with the software development and caused so much noise in the subreddit. Shame really!
Problem with Apple is that they’re trying very hard to control use of their stuff - so working with their stuff is very annoying. I only recently looked into it again as it was required for work projects where acquiring relevant hardware wasn’t a problem - and even then it still is very annoying to manage, compared to Linux and even Windows.
I used to run cross compile setups for a bunch of open source projects 10-15 years ago, including MacOS. Back then they were using a gcc based toolchain, and thanks to GPL had to publish the base toolchain - yet they still tried very hard to break things between releases, which eventually got so bad that we decided to first drop MacOS builds, and later just completely drop MacOS support as you can’t really do that without proper hardware access.
The situation has gotten a lot worse since LLVM - which Apple was pushing in big part as it allowed them to publish their SDKs under their licenses only. So nowadays you still can download their SDK - but using it on non-Apple-silicon is against their TOS.
