The line between user and advertiser is getting blurrier. They’re rolling out a feature where users can pay to “boost” their posts.

Meta’s boosts are a type of paid advertising that shows a Facebook or Instagram account’s posts to a wider audience. Meta frames boosts as a tool that many “small businesses” use, but it’s also being used by celebrities, brands, and individuals looking for more eyes on their content.

Paid boosts are a quick way to pay-to-play for engagement on Instagram and Facebook. They’re different from full ad campaigns, which can be purchased through Meta’s Ads Manager feature.

Buying anything on Amazon hardly seems viable anymore. There’s so much counterfeit crap there, and a million low-effort rebrandings of the same stuff you can get on AliExpress for cheaper.

Shop local when you can, and at least shop not-Amazon for the rest.

android can do this

How so? You mean running a full Linux VM or something? Android doesn’t run any desktop apps natively.

if you mean the tablet UI mode, yeah, that’s an easy thing for Apple to implement. I think they already have, more or less. iPadOS already has mouse support.

Apple’s been moving toward unifying their OSes for over a decade now. They’re playing the long game. They probably still have another decade (or two) to go.

Apple’s stance now is clear: developers need to make universal apps if they want them to run on both platforms, using tools and frameworks that are common to both. It’s much easier to make an iPad app run well on a Mac than vice-versa. I use some Mac apps that were ported from iPad, and the experience ranges from “okay” to “perfect”, depending on how much care the devs put into it. This is obviously the future of Mac software development, but it would require rewriting many apps almost from scratch. Apple’s not going to pull that rug out from under us anytime soon.

The next natural step would be to allow iPads to use the “desktop” UI of universal apps when connected to a keyboard and mouse. But I don’t think we’ll ever see iPads running arbitrary Mac apps. When I think of the Mac-only apps I use, I just don’t see how they’d run on iPad. How am I gonna run BBEdit on an iPad when there are hundreds of menu items, and a ton of UI elements that are like 8 pixels square? Never mind the lack of a real file system.

Microsoft tried this with Windows 8. It went poorly. The experience of using desktop apps with a touch screen sucks, and trying to make desktop UIs touchscreen-friendly across the board just handicapped desktop users. Apple has a better strategy here. They’re slowly molding the software ecosystem to make this Not Suck.