I typically jump on the latest macOS with enthusiasm. I once made the mistake to install the beta version of the next os, and well, that didn't go well for me. But typically, within X.1, I'm there.
However something shifted since this "visionOS" melted version of macOS (Tahoe); where I have absolutely no intension to upgrade from Sequoia. I hope they will fix it by the time I'll be forced to upgrade (post support deadline).
It started with the macOS that brought the iOS settings panel. We went from a logical structure of easily findable stuff to a complete mess. Just open the "Keyboard" settings on macOS today and it's bewildering how they could ship this and think this is fine. Steve would roll in his grave.
The process to allow running applications that are unsigned is just a horrible hack. It feels like a last minute "shove it and move on!".
By 2035 I wonder if we'll be all running KDE or WindowMaker and the hell with modern OS GUI.
From a Gestalt standpoint, human relations with desktop computers are not the same as with thumb driven mobile OS or air-pinch driven vision OS, period. The hell with "glass" or "flat" design. Desktop OS should be as forgettable as possible, as it's about having long stints of flow, not giving a feeling of "air" or "play".
> It started with the macOS that brought the iOS settings panel. We went from a logical structure of easily findable stuff to a complete mess.
It’s difficult to pinpoint when exactly the decline started. But one key event before the Settings app was the Catalyst apps that were straight out and dismal ports from their iOS versions. Till date, none of those work well and cannot be navigated properly using the keyboard. Reminders, Messages, Notes and more.
Craig Federighi seems to be increasingly taking on so much authority without having a trusted set of people under him and his leadership (or lack of it) has resulted in neglecting software across device platforms. Some of the Apple apps on tvOS with paid subscriptions are worse, because the bugs in them don’t get any attention at all.
If you cut text in a "separate window" note, it will delete the text, but it won't actually copy it unless you issued the command for a note in the main window. So when you go to paste it elsewhere, you find it's gone, and then you often find Notes has lost the undo history too.
I'm curious if this is a bug that other people deal with, but I have to screenshot stuff to send folks all the time.
Screenshot, right click, and "copy" doesn't appear. Sometimes moving the app to another screen makes it appear, sometimes just switching to another app and back will help, sometimes I can't get it to be an option at all and I have to close screenshot and retry.
Really awful. Just make it an option all the time.
When Microsoft decided to rewrite the screenshot app from Win32 to WinUI, it had plenty of bugs, to the point I kept the old exe around for about one year.
The one that mostly bothered me, was not being able to select desktop regions if using multiple monitors, the rectangle region went nuts on what was possible to select.
I just want to be able to save the image to a folder and copy it to my clipboard when taking a screenshot. iirc in KDE Plasma's Spectacle, these options are checkboxes, you can enable as many at once as you like.
I actually have a simple shortcut created just to turn off Bluetooth entirely (helps speed up watchOS updates by forcing it to download directly over WiFi). I also have shortcuts to turn off WiFi completely and to turn off both WiFi and cellular data without putting it in airplane mode.
I’ve always felt the decline in Mac OS started on the day of the ‘Back To The Mac’ event in 2010. And has continued since. Symbolically this event made clear the iOS first focus of the company. And since then Mac OS updates have continued to be secondary/lesser to iOS.
Mac OS is still my system of choice, but I don’t have as much confidence in it as I would like.
The big thing from around fifteen years ago is the mixed modes for autosave, where they sort of half heartedly changed the language around save/save as and just sort of… left it. Some apps use their new (for the 2010s) auto save system and some don’t. And it’s up the the user to muddle through. Weird. And there are many half baked things like this in the OS now.
Mac hardware, on the other hand, has never been better than it is right now!
> The big thing from around fifteen years ago is the mixed modes for autosave, where they sort of half heartedly changed the language around save/save as and just sort of… left it. Some apps use their new (for the 2010s) auto save system and some don’t.
I may be mistaken, but AFAIK, all Apple’s apps auto-save on quit and restore state on open. If so, what do you suggest they do about making third party applications do that as well?
I've had the preferences "close windows when quitting an application" and "ask to keep changes when closing documents" checked since the day they appeared in System Preferences.
With these two, most applications behave as they did in the pre-Lion document model.
> Mac hardware, on the other hand, has never been better than it is right now!
I thought the same until trying a framework laptop with Ubuntu. Mac is the “IBM” choice, no one gets fired for choosing it, but quite frankly there’s better options these days.
A framework laptop is very nice, and definitely has a lot of upsides, but it can't match screen, keyboard, trackpad, camera, or speaker quality with a MacBook Pro, not to mention the battery life.
Those may be nice for people who need them, and are ok with the software side.
for me, the screen on the framework is ok. I think there's little to gain with LCDs at this point. The trackpad on the framework is smaller, so it's better. A nicer camera requires a nicer piece of tape to cover it, I guess. Notification beeps do not require Atmos or whatever. I can pack a powerbank for trans-oceanic flights, but I'm usually at a desk if I work long stretches.
Having nicer stuff would be nice, but the value proposition does not work for me in light of the software situation.
1 - compromised hardware over better software is a trade-off you're willing to make and
2 - you believe that the Framework software experience is better than macOS
i can concede 2 (if true, I've not used a Framework laptop) but I don't understand point 1. packing a powerbank for example just feels ancient if you've used the arm chip macs. then again, I'm now pushing my trade-off
It's going to be a different experience for everyone. For example I never get why people care about the laptop weight. You put it in your backpack anyway, (unless it's a small handbag sized laptop situation then fair enough) it's not like anything below 5kg will be noticeable in reality. Yet for others is a big deal. Personal preferences...
"Packing a powerbank" was more of a hypothetical, as I've never actually had to.
My point was that it's a tradeoff between software preference, tech politics, price, and hardware features. I think it's pretty easy to understand. It's not like Apple has an insurmountable lead; there are some benefits for some use cases.
I concur. I have a Framework 13 I use as my personal laptop and a work-issued M3 MacBook Pro. While I love the freedom that my Framework 13 provides in terms of user serviceability and operating system choice, the MacBook Pro feels more premium, and it has absolutely amazing battery life.
What do people like about MacBook trackpads? I can't stand them because you can only do a "click" action at the bottom of the thing, but there's nothing tactile that would help you to find it.
By 2035, I'm not even sure I'll have a computer. (Sort of a joke, but like, at this rate...)
My current OS X update strategy is: I don't, mostly. I'm a few versions behind, and at this point, I'd rather keep an OS that sort of works and just deal with the script kiddies, then upgrade to an OS that doesn't work and have to deal with my OS vendor.
The majority of users are content with chromebooks, what does that tell you about the requirements of desktop computers today? It tells me that they are just niche professional tools; and professional tools largely suck for UX..
I had an interesting realisation the other day (that's tangentially related): on my iPhone and iPad: I can't access my work emails or chats at all. Yet on my significantly more difficult to secure laptops: no problem.
The mobile platforms have built-in mechanisms for remote attestation. Desktop operating systems do not.
I think as soon as companies realise that an iPad is "good enough" for email/excel/word workers, we'll see an even more precipitous decline of the desktop operating system experience.
Professional software is aimed at people who use it day in day out so they’re optimising for a different problem than software that’s aimed at the casual user.
Intuitiveness is often seen as a outright positive by most people but actually it’s more of a trade off. Often the greatest efficiency is achieved by interfaces that require a bit of learning by the user. The ultimate example of that is command line interfaces which are very powerful and efficient but require you to know what you’re doing and give you relatively little help.
You’re on the other side of a steep learning curve for a lot of professional software you use. A steep learning curve is bad UX.
"I think as soon as companies realise that an iPad is "good enough" for email/excel/word workers, we'll see an even more precipitous decline of the desktop operating system experience."
This has a ring of SurfacePro as a corporate EUC choice. Quite common these days.
I regularly wait almost a year after a given version of MacOS has been released before upgrading. I don't care about new features, and I already spend all day fixing bugs of my own creation. That leaves very little time for debugging other people's software.
about 5 months ago i jumped ship to kde plasma and it's been great. took a month or two to get the most prized things working the way i wanted but kde is so configurable that you can get it to work pretty much identical to a mac. toshy gives you all the familiar mac keyboard shortcuts and lets you do per application configs. I can't see going back to a mac unless an employer mandated it. the freedom you have is refreshing. if something doesn't work the way you want it you can change it.
> if something doesn't work the way you want it you can change it.
This sentence here is my biggest heartbreak with modern “computing.” I came up in the Windows 98/XP days and over about 7 years from 98-05 basically gained full mastery of basically every aspect of Windows and how to change it, and also from 03 on started using Mac OS X daily and found it to be just as customizable or more, in most ways that mattered. I felt that my computer was my own and loved having full control, making it perfect for me.
None of that is possible now. You cannot even select your own notification sound for Messages on MacOS anymore. Only the 20 sounds packaged with the OS. What. The. F%$k.
This is because in any monopoly/duopoly/oligopoly, the product inevitably stops being about what the user wants, and becomes about what the monopolist wants. They're removing features like this because simplifying configurations translates to reduced support costs, and reducing their costs and padding their margin is the name of the game for a monopolist, they believe there's nowhere else for you to go, so they can and will hose you over and over again.
We're now paying the piper for many years of accrued monopoly effects, it turns out the way our IP law is structured, the rights we've granted corporations to sue people who attempt any kind of reverse engineering etc. all privilege the monopolist and encourage the formation of the monopoly, because the entire legal and regulatory system is designed to juice corporate profits and pesky old laws like the Sherman Act which got in the way have essentially been ignored for decades.
One really important thing for people to understand is that until there's a serious change to these dynamics, IT WILL GET WORSE. Mac OS will get worse, FOREVER. So will Windows and all other monopolist products. This is why you really need to switch away from them as soon as you can; life will be an order of magnitude more miserable for whoever's still using these products a decade from now. They will just keep on squeezing whoever's left, harder and harder until the heat death of the universe.
> They're removing features like this because simplifying configurations translates to reduced support costs, and reducing their costs and padding their margin is the name of the game for a monopolist, they believe there's nowhere else for you to go, so they can and will hose you over and over again.
There may be some truth to that, but I really don't think it's the whole story. Otherwise how do you explain spending so much effort on eye candy like MacOS "liquid glass", or the redesigned settings app? For that matter, why bother with an annual release at all?
To me, I think it's a pretty obvious case of prioritizing style over substance. For whatever reason, but not to save money. If they really wanted to save money they'd stop with the gratuitous change.
> You cannot even select your own notification sound for Messages on MacOS anymore
I don’t see a UI for it, but when I drop a sound in ~/Library/Sounds (tested with .aif an .m4r; .aiff likely will work, too, looking at ~/System/Library/Sounds) it shows up in the “Sound Effects/Alert sound” pop-up for me.
Yes, that's the alert sound. I have 100 sounds in there and can use them for the System alert sound. However, when you receive a message in "Messages" that plays the sound chosen in Messages app's Settings window -> Message received sound. That one only shows the builtin sounds that are on the sealed, signed, tamper-proof volume.
To be fair, Windows 8 only came out in 2012, so they haven't had that much time to finish the settings migration. But they're making good progress. If they keep up this pace of moving 2 settings per month, they should be able to finish by 2053.
If the goal was to move everything to Settings, sure. But Settings seems to be for the most common settings the average user will want to look at whereas more detailed options are elsewhere. It's a way to easily funnel users away from more impactful settings to system stability. In this view Windows 11 release solidified that pretty well.
The character repeat and cursor blink rate settings were already in Settings but it just opened up the older windows forms. This just gives them a new coat of paint by putting them in the Settings app.
Windows went through a pendulum swing of integrating touch (I think they ended up in a place where they expect users to use more of a multi-modal approach instead of touch-only).
I suspect Mac is going through the same thing right now as ipad is "growing up" and they're trying to reconcile all their UI. I'm a little surprised that Macs have never introduced touch.
Just a data point, in case it’s useful to anyone: I saw the screenshots and blog posts about Liquid Glass and thought it looked miserable. But then I had a hardware issue and had to upgrade.
I swear after the first 3 days, I’ve only even noticed the new UI maybe a dozen times. If I stop and really pay attention to it, I think the old UI was a bit better, but strangely I don’t really seem to notice the new UI. If it’s worse, I rarely notice.
Then again I spend most of my time in jetbrains IDEs, iterm2, and Firefox (none of which have changed much). So I might be a special case.
> The process to allow running applications that are unsigned is just a horrible hack. It feels like a last minute "shove it and move on!".
If you're talking about the process that just says "Foo.app is damaged and can’t be opened." and the only way around that is to manually remove the com.apple.quarantine extended attribute, that's arguably working as intended. Apple doesn't want users to run untrusted apps period. They want only apps approved by them.
As a dev and open source dev I don't like it. But, I can't totally be against it I think. It is safer for some users and experts can learn how to remove the attribute with `xattr -d com.apple.quarantine filename`
Saying "Foo.app is damaged" is lying to the user though, which is not nice, and not a good sign, in general, for the health of a company / its culture.
Saying it's damage is by design. Apple wants to scare you aware. I agree it feels bad from one POV. That was my initial reaction. I also agree though that steering grandma away from evil apps is good too.
Part of the reason computer users like your grandma are so helpless is because OS' have devolved to be completely untrustworthy. Everything lies, and error messages now look like "oopsy windows made a fucky! >_<"
It's no wonder granny has zero confidence in the computer and is always behind.
Yeah, by design, of course, but I still think it's bad (& there are plenty of ways to scare grandma without lying to her, if you really need to do that).
In general I'd contend that the mindest which leads you to believe "we need to lie to our users because they are dumb" isn't conducive to making good software.
> By 2035 I wonder if we'll be all running KDE or WindowMaker and the hell with modern OS GUI
I love Linux, but I doubt that will happen. If anything, by then Linux will be a feature of a workstation OS running in a hypervisor, just like it is with Windows and ChromeOS today.
> The hell with "glass" or "flat" design. Desktop OS should be as forgettable as possible, as it's about having long stints of flow, not giving a feeling of "air" or "play".
There's nothing stopping you from running a Linux desktop with a minimalist tiling window manager - I have for years and found it does exactly what you say.
But it sounds like it's more that you don't like that there aren't many product offerings like that. That is true. Even computers with Linux pre installed use "bouncy" desktop environments like Gnome/KDE by default.
My preference - ChromeOS - comes the closest but is still nowhere near as stripped down as i3 tiling window manager (which I also think is great).
> Do you run ChromeOS Flex on some thinkpads or do you work on a Chromebook?
Chromebook.
> What are the pros/cons vs running a debian if you can elaborate?
I like minimalist desktop environments. I like full screen window tiling using keyboard shortcuts, power management, fingerprint readers, accelerated displays, phone tethering, touch screen, passkey support for auth, and verified boot, and preferences synced across devices.
And I like all that to work out of the box with no fiddling,
Thanks for opening my mind to this. I actually threw the ChromeOS Flex version onto a Thinkpad I had laying around and I was really surprised by how "ready" the setup is.
I feel the same about a good setup that works out of the box. Everything works, from sleep, to cameras, Bluetooth, and shutdown actually shuts down, which I can't get with debian, arch or bsd!
I will trial it further, the Linux WSL type enclosure feels right. I'm trying to understand if Penguin is actually a web rendered terminal or native. I only really know Ghostty which I can't get to run as it's missing some gnome libs I think. I will see if alacrity is better.
Yea im even worse, i was on mojave until last year.
Update frustration has long set in.
Im gonna buy the new macbook pro with the M5 max when it comes out in a couple of months (from an intel 2019) and this will probably be my last mac, im giving them one last chance before i move to Linux.
I'm still on Monterey, on a 2021 M1 that works just fine. I'm not buying a new Mac this year specifically to avoid having to spend days dealing with all the potential headaches of updating my dev environments. I hate upgrading. I don't want any of the new stuff. I just want something that works. The first thing I do when I get a new Mac is uninstall every piece of Apple software that can be uninstalled, then use Little Snitch to block all their IP addresses.
That being said, now AWS is forcing all my RDS instances to upgrade to mysql 9 (also: Why???), so I need to get 9 working on my dev box, and tonight I'm up against a wall trying to work through Homebrew issues. There's no way to win.
Aaaannnnd.... I figured out last night that I don't need to go to 9, only to 8.4. Strangely, what version I needed to upgrade to from 8.0 was not stated anywhere in the mass of emails Amazon sent me. I hadn't yet gone on RDS and noticed that 9 is not on the list of options, I was just trying to build 9 on my Mac.
8.4 won't build in homebrew under Monterey, though, so I'm stuck with 8.3 for my dev stack. I guess I can live with that. I'm dreading the next forced upgrade.
"macOS encounters an error or fault, but doesn’t report that to the user, instead just burying it deep in the log."
This is another huge facet of the problem. Not only does it hide glaring problems from the user and prevent him from taking action, but it prevents him from reporting it to Apple for potential redress.
Apple loves to hide information, with the excuse that it's "too scary" for the "average user." This has always been bullshit. If "the average user" is put off by information he receives, he can at least use it to consult someone who isn't.
iOS Mail is a great example. It can utterly fail to access your mail server because of wrong credentials or whatever, but it won't tell you. In fact, it'll claim, "Updated just now." So a day or two goes by and you've missed important work or personal E-mails before you even decide to investigate. This is obviously offensive, because Apple has decided that your work and your communications are less important than hiding their defects... which might not even have been to blame!
When you combine the glaring QA failures piling up with the obnoxious douchebaggery and law-flouting that Apple has engaged in with its app store, it's pretty clear that the company needs a major management housecleaning.
Apple loves to coddle and promote certain pets, who are often incompetent but for some reason curry favor with management. Look at the "Liquid Glass" fiasco and hideous UI regressions in Mac OS and iOS. This is what happens when you put an unqualified packaging designer in charge of UI at a company that's held out as the paragon of "elegant" design. Jony Ive was a pompous hack with one idea... or actually two: 1. "Thinner" 2. Less useful
We had a brief respite with his departure, but now... things might be even worse. And at a time when Windows has been degraded into unredeemable garbage... it's a grim outlook for popular computing.
I disagree with your take on that we should show all information to all users. It’s not always the case that they have someone on hand to help, and users do get anxiety when they do not understand or are presented with too many options. But what macOS should be giving is the full-fat answers and UI is asked for.
The rest of your comment I can’t argue against at all.
On the other hand, presumably Steve was happy with the insanity of the iOS settings app, where applications had their settings only accessible in another application.
I mean when the apps are small and have just a couple settings, you save having every app having a settings widget that takes you to another panel, etc.
(But a "Good" iOS app in my mind would still have a widget in the app to take you straight to the correct pane in Settings where you configure it.)
I kind of like the iOS settings application. If I want to change some settings for an application, I have one place I have to go to find it. I don't need to launch the app and try to guess where their designer decided to stick settings (probably buried deep in a hamburger menu). I don't have to guess whether a dark gray switch on a light gray background is "on" or whether a light gray switch on a dark gray background is "on" because the app's designer thought it would be cool to not use native controls.
I honestly wish this "central settings" app idea would spread to desktop operating systems.
KDE is so good. Every release they make tangible UX improvements to the point where now most subsystems are almost perfect. There's always been things where I think "oh well that could be better". The notification center, the kickoff menu, krunner, the desktop overview. And then it just got better and better.
Tahoe is SOOOO ugly! The huge rounded corners are atrocious. The fonts look terrible. The windows keep snapping, expanding and contracting with no obvious pattern. Yuck.
And iOS's transparencies are disastrous. They make so much of the test illegible.
I have updated as soon as possible and I if you asked me, I couldn't tell you what is different now. Everything I do on a daily basis still works exactly the same. If there are some weird more rounded corners somewhere now, I don't consciously notice them. The glassy effects look cool but after a week you don't even think about them any more.
> By 2035 I wonder if we'll be all running KDE or WindowMaker and the hell with modern OS GUI.
That is what I wished for back in the 2000's, eventually I went back to Windows starting with Windows 7, because I got fed up with laptop support.
As the main laptop OS, I never stopped having UNIX based systems on servers across many customer projects, or trying out the flavour of the month via local VMs, since hardware virtualization became a commodity.
> Desktop OS should be as forgettable as possible, as it's about having long stints of flow, not giving a feeling of "air" or "play".
100% agree, though i wonder how much an influence casual users are having on apple's marketing of macos...
its almost as if apple doesnt want to sell "trucks" anymore (as steve would say) and would prefer to morph macos slowly into a sedan like the ipad (cause that is where the money is)
> By 2035 I wonder if we'll be all running KDE or WindowMaker and the hell with modern OS GUI.
tbh this is probably me in 2026 or 2027 i think...
I think peak KDE was version 3. A project called Trinity Desktop Environment aim to maintain it but I never really tried it for fear of realising those glasses are indeed rose tinted.
It's basically a "when to rip the band-aid off" type of situation.
Briefly poked around w/ linux again for the first time in years (Omarchy, DHH's tune of Arch + hyprland), and hoo boy, it's come a long way! Nothing like the KDE/Gnome+X jankery of the olden times. Very polished, very slick, very nice.
I did try Omarchy on an old laptop and it was fairly painless to get started. I did develop an unease the more I read about DHH unfortunately and decided to bail.
If anything though, Omarchy shows it's not impossible to get a nice working environment on linux.
Steve understood better than anyone that having a finite amount of time to build means you can't please everyone. The vast majority of Apple's customers just do not care about the Keyboard settings UI or the clarity of unusual error messages.
Users do care they just don't have the words to explain what it is thats frustrating them. Just a silent "I find myself using this less" sort of thing.
Not for everything, but the excuse of "normies don't give a shit" is a bullshit one.
I wonder how many care that messages lights up like a Christmas tree on speed on iPadOS, battery life dropped 90%, calculator requires 32 GB of ram, offline maps stranded them in the woods, iOS can no longer keep two apps loaded at once, ocr screenshots broke, the magnifier “flashlight” button no longer fits on the screen, or the ai text suggestions in notes are simultaneously garbage and undeletable.
Those are just some of the bugs I hit. I’d guess most normal users hit 4-5 problems this upgrade cycle.
For my side gig I need to quickly take multiple pictures (with my iphone) of subjects that aren’t still or cooperative. This used to work fine. Now the camera just quits with no crash or notice so I think I’m taking pictures but I’m not. Closing the camera app doesn’t disable or stop the camera, I have to wait or reboot. But hey, I can take really cool photos I can view in the Apple Vision I don’t own.
In my experience Apple's software has been accumulating small annoying bugs for a couple years.
For a couple years I have been noticing regular new glitches in the Apple TV interface accumulating faster than old ones disappear.
Lately the glitch accumulation syndrome seems to have hit macOS. Notes has started doing random bolding, unbolding, changing text size on only one line, etc. After a restart, a finder window with tabs springs to different screen spaces, depending on which tab is open when I try to drop a file on it. Message sometimes draws a few lines of a message with a few pixels vertical and horizontally offset, so there is actual overlap of message parts.
Then there are chronic ones. Safari's save or print to PDF are notorious for not saving pictures you can see, even from reading mode. How are basic functions in Safari not worth fixing, for years?
Apple's HomePods ... for many years. I could write a blog of interesting Pod behavior. I thought having one or a pair in each room would be nice. No, more of them is not nice. Constant bizarreness.
> In my experience Apple's software has been accumulating small annoying bugs for a couple years.
They’ve never not been like this. They don’t know how to write software sustainably and don’t seem interested to learn. They add features faster than they fix bugs. Early on, it was masked by less frequent releases, but switching to an annual cadence made it more obvious. They worked around the problem once by focusing Snow Leopard on bug fixing, but they are just letting the bugs accumulate again now.
Seems like bad software design to make release versions an extension of betas. The "we'll fix it after release" attitude works in some cases, this is not one of them. At some point OS teams need to hold back releases to ensure stable releases and not just hope everyone will get the message to not update until a few versions later.
There were a couple Apple OS releases in the ‘10s where they were like “hey, not many new features and no big redesign, we mostly increased performance and squashed bugs”
It feels like we’re waaaay over due for one or two of those.
What’s really out of touch is how they don’t seem to think users would be excited for that. Literally nobody is enthusiastic for more complexity. Literally everyone hates the buggy, flaky mess on iOS, iPadOS, macOS. Maybe a working magical Siri would make an impact but Apple has prove definitively that they can’t build that ever. So, rather than ruining all the OSs further, just fire all the PMs and designers and let the engineers fix the bugs for a couple of years.
Actually, I think it's you who's out of touch here.
There's two awful colliding factors here.
1) People absolutely buy features.
I am in the Apple ecosystem, why? Because iMessage on my laptop, seamless copy/paste and the fact that it supports every bit of software I want to run.
2) MBA thinkers value features, for the previous reason. They can show that features move the needle of units sold. It's easier to quantify.
What you and I implicitly understand is that Apple has a captive audience, people will continue to buy MacOS (by virtue of Apple Hardware) for the coming few years at least.
The higher quality the software, the more performant and less buggy: the more likely we stay in the ecosystem longer. This will sell units in the 4-7 year timeframe for sure.
The more Apple focus on this, the larger their moat.
MBA's barely understand how to build a moat, other than monopolising a market by M&A.
> Because iMessage on my laptop, seamless copy/paste and the fact that it supports every bit of software I want to run.
This is a good example of a feature that is actually useful. But it is also one that has been around for a long time. Can you think of something more recent?
- Transparent text selection in images a few years back was the kind of magical thing I didn’t know I need, but now that I have it any platform without it feels broken.
- I haven’t had a chance to use it yet but Preview was just about the only thing keeping me on macOS for my personal computing, rather than going all iPad/phone. Now it’s on iOS, as of the (otherwise terrible, maybe my least-favorite iOS release yet and I hated 7) version. Provided it’s close on features, that’s one of the only things I’d have missed going iOS-only, gone.
> Apple's HomePods ... for many years. I could write a blog of interesting Pod behavior. I thought having one or a pair in each room would be nice. No, more of them is not nice. Constant bizarreness.
Yeah, these have quite the DIY / Jailbreak following I've noticed. They look like neat little devices for music and HA stuff, but I've read similar stuff to your comment.
Interesting. I have one HomePod and four minis scattered about. I can’t remember having problems with the hardware or setup. Siri, on the other hand, is a pain in the ass.
No idea if 26 fixed any of this, I've avoided updating because of how poorly received Glass is in all the UI discussions.
I could also add to this that occasionally the status bar gets two not-quite-aligned-with-each-other copies of the time, connectivity icons, and battery percentage.
My current "favorite" bug is how contacts get randomly merged on iOS. I've called the wrong friend multiple times and it's completely unacceptable for such a basic and core function of iOS.
I have the opposite problem. Apple's respect for user privacy is great and the iMessage integration between devices is also great, so when I change device mid-conversation, the recipient now has messages coming from two places. My phone number, and my icloud email address. Thankfully the icloud email address I used has my name in it, so people don't totally get confused when that happens, but figuring that out was definitely a "broke the magic" moment for me.
Contact management is so painful still. Separate fields for first and last name? Also, I'm not really going to fill out each individual field for somebody's address on my phone! Let me just paste a blob into the card and the software should figure it out. But what's worse is that the contact sync between my mac laptop and my phone is all brokeney.
> I could write a blog of interesting Pod behavior. I thought having one or a pair in each room would be nice. No, more of them is not nice. Constant bizarreness.
Oh my fucking god, thank you. I have one in my kitchen and one in the living room, and every few weeks they decide it would be the bees knees to have a 3AM conversation with one another.
To Apple: People are complaining because they'd rather you fix it, than them having to leave the platform (moving OSes is annoying, because operating systems have a lot of lock in - data you'd have to move, apps you need to find alternatives for and re-learn).
The iOS / macOS 26 frustration I think is particularly felt by the HN type crowd. Don't want something that looks cool but is less effective/performant/usable. "We" can feel Apple's priorities drifting away from ours.
Side note: I wonder how much easier AI will make it to migrate between operating systems? Perhaps future AI systems that are good at computer-usage could manage migrations/installs well.
I coincidentally watched BasicallyHomeless's video on his 100+ day Linux experiment and he made a really good point: because everything on Linux can be done with the CLI, it also has a working natural language interface (Claude Code). He ran into several issues, such as sound (allegedly that's no surprise, but not my experience), and Claude fixed them all.
Yeah, setting up my router with VLANs/Firewall/NAT etc was so damn frustrating with Ubiquiti compared to the Mikrotik router I had before.
While I could just export my config file with Mikrotik and ask ChatGPT to make whatever changes I wanted in seconds ("here's my config, make a vlan 20 with all my iot devices") and get a fully working config back, with Ubiquiti you just get a bunch of inaccurate "click here and there" instructions back instead since the UI changes slightly all the time.
The switchover was still worth it, as the Ubiquity UI is nicer in daily use (and Mikrotik wifi sucks ass, so I had to use other APs). However, every time I want to change something I wish I had an easily ediable config file to edit, and get LLM help with, instead of a confusing UI to click around in.
Indeed, large language models have much easier time working with a real written language.
I wonder if the modern GUI conventions could be reliably translated to machine-understandable text representation, operated on, and then mapped back to the GUI picture.
Response from Apple: We know you have a lot of vendor lock-in, which is why we're doing this. We want shiny features to talk about to get people to buy their first Mac, and don't give a shit about providing a great experience for existing users because we know they won't leave anyway.
The current state does not feel malicious in this way to me at all. It feels bumbling and amateurish. It gives the feeling that the people who kept the product cohesive have left or retired, and that a new generation of overly ambitious careerists have entered positions of leadership.
I’m convinced leadership at Apple are not power users. They’ve never put MacOS through their paces, or did any development themselves it seems. If they did they would have found all of the bugs and irregularities and huge performance problems themselves.
What do you mean by "largely the mindset they have"? I think the comment you're replying to is right, most Apple execs probably have jobs that can be done entirely on iPads, so none of the complaints by power users about macOS resonate at all (and this group is sadly far too small of a minority to have any financial impact).
I think any organization at Apple's scale has no shortage of skilled workers and ambitious careerists. But at the product level, I do believe that the result you see is generally an honest reflection of the organization's priorities.
If Apple wanted to ship a rock-solid OS, they could. They're just choosing to put those resources elsewhere.
The current environment is in some ways indistinguishable from COVID. The uncertainty of AI, forced RTO, and processions of layoffs have produced a terrible environment for retaining people who have the means to do literally anything else.
I feel like it says a lot, when intelligent amorality seems genuinely preferable to blundering incompetence. Many such cases. One wonders how much "enshittification" is intrinsic to networked software and our late-stage-whatever political economy, versus how much is a farcical byproduct of office politics and org chart turf wars.
The alternative for most people is Windows, which Microsoft seems hellbent into making worse and worse (I didn’t think that was possible but hey, here we are). macOS definitely sounds like the least of two evils anyway.
But what do I know - the year of the Linux desktop for me was 1996.
Ubuntu Pro is still free for personal use on up to 5 physical machines, which covers my small home network just fine. It is annoying that they withhold security updates unless you fork over your email address, but I don’t recall them trying to sell me anything since I made an account
there's some ubuntu/gnome thing that replicates the worst features of the mac.
but here's the real question: why? the global menu bar is literally the most dated and outmoded element in macos. it isn't 1993 anymore. your computer can run more than one program at a time. a globally modal application focus is completely ridiculous. the only thing more ridiculous than a global menu bar is a global spinning beach ball mouse cursor. these are relics of the past and have no place in a modern, multitasking, multiprocessing, multiprocessor, multiscreen computing environment.
moreover, the things that matter, browsers and terminals, don't even have normal menus anyway.
kde plasma is superior in all ways. stop wasting time with weird outmoded 1993 era computer interfaces.
Browsers and terminals have "normal menus". Some examples would include Vivaldi and iTerm.
I agree though that placing it on top of the screen (as opposed to the window to which it applies) doesn't make any sense. Windows actually got that right with MDI way back in the day, if you remember how menu merging worked there.
However, there is an unexpected upside to having the menubar there even so. Because macOS apps can't not have a menu bar, they are forced to expose their commands there. Which usually ends up being a more stable UX compared to all the moving around of buttons in the window itself, plus you can search the menus.
> However, there is an unexpected upside to having the menubar there even so. Because macOS apps can't not have a menu bar, they are forced to expose their commands there. Which usually ends up being a more stable UX compared to all the moving around of buttons in the window itself, plus you can search the menus.
that is not nothing- but maybe a vestigial training wheel for onboarding a generation onto single application guis. maintaining separate stacks of applications and then document windows within applications (as is done with the global macos window switching keyboard shortcuts) also feels clunky and more suited to an outmoded (har) ui paradigm.
Can AI vibe code a way to get a macOS keyboard layout, basic shortcuts, and macOS-style emacs navigation in gui text boxes across the OS, on Linux? Last I checked all of that is pretty much impossible to achieve without accepting a ton of jank and some parts of the system where it doesn’t work (even the keyboard layout thing!)
Yeah you can, there's packages like xremap and input-remapper where you can define custom keyboard re-mappings. To replicate the Emacs key bindings from macOS, you can bind Ctrl+F to right arrow, Ctrl+E to End, etc. I even re-binded Cmd+C to Ctrl+C so I didn't lose any muscle memory from years of macOS shortcuts. Obviously requires some upfront time but once you get it working it works very well in my experience (and the keyboard re-mappings work at the input event level, so it works across all applications automatically).
While I love their hardware, this is why I will always chose a Linux distribution over anything closed source. Being able to retrieve logs of pretty much anything and change pieces of the OS as time goes on is extraordinarily resilient.
Sure it's sometimes not as shiny as MacOS, and it will most likely never be polished enough for the mainstream market share, but there's something really awesome about not being reliant on a support engineer that does not have the financial incentive to spend the correct amount of time solving a one off problem.
The Arch Wiki is an amazing resource! A hat tip to anyone who edits that. In fact, I think it's worth kicking a few bucks their way this holiday season: https://archlinux.org/donate/
MSDN used to have some excellent guides for doing all kinds of debugging, configuration, and tweaking of Windows. Somewhere around Windows 8.1 the website got updated and now most resources are either gone or unfindable. I do occasionally come upon some (badly auto-translated) version of those old guides, but download links and links to more information are all 404.
> rush to get the next version of macOS out of the door
That’s the key I think. Apple these days never releases when products are ready, but on a predefined schedule. Point releases that should fix things, are actually delivering more features that were shown on the keynote, but didn’t quite make the main release date.
As a result the systems accumulated some bugs that might never get fixed, unless the code happens to be completely rewritten. The desktop switching animation is hopelessly long when using keyboard shortcuts with ProMotion enabled. On both iOS and macOS the Music app will have an audible click couple of seconds into the first played song when using lossless quality. Stuff like these is known and reported, there’s just seemingly zero bandwidth to handle it.
20 years ago, I was excited to get OS X updates and each one made the system better. When Software Update showed something new, it was always going to be good.
At the same time, Windows Update was an anxiety engine.
Now Software Update has mostly become what Windows Update was. Uninteresting security patches. Each new major update makes the interface worse and adds new bugs or drops old hardware.
Actually Windows would be much more lovely if MSFT keeps the Windows 7 core and just release security fixes and bug fixes. In the forseeable future, 64-bit should be enough. And I already had everything I need on Windows 7.
Windows audience will always be split between the people that loved it for what it is (Win7), and those who tolerate it as long as it plays nice with everything else (*nix subsystem, latest hardware etc)
The win7 audience is IMHO shrinking the fastest, while the other camp has nowhere to go and is less demanding, making it an easier customer base.
<rant>I've never had confidence in MacOS or Apple software in general, and especially not in Apple Photos. Photos beachballs constantly, even when I do simple things like creating a new folder or naming a photo. It loses keystrokes almost every time I type a folder or photo name. No other program does this on the same Mac, which is an M4 Pro with 64GB RAM and terabytes of SSD. I know that it's not a problem with the hardware because the previous Mac Mini, which was well equipped, had the same problem for years. Reconstructing the Photos database didn't help.
Don't get me started about how Time Machine drops files — important files like the Photos Sqlite3 database — from backups.
Yes, I should switch from Photos to something else, e.g. Immich.
I barely use the software included with the Mac, and would only use Linux except that there are still just a few programs or bits of hardware that insist on there being a Mac or Windows machine somewhere.
How Apple every got a reputation for high-quality, user-friendly software is beyond me.
Apple’s reputation for user-friendly software comes from the 1980s, when Windows was very primitive and when the Mac’s biggest competitor was MS-DOS, which was never known for user-friendliness. To be fair to Apple, Apple worked very hard to establish well-conceived UI guidelines and to ship representative software such as MacWrite and MacPaint to show how Mac software should behave.
In the 1990s Windows gradually improved, and Windows 95 was on par with Macintosh System 7.5 in terms of features and ease of use. It even had its own UI guidelines. Windows 95 was one of the factors that led to Apple’s troubles in the mid-1990s.
Even though it took over four years for the purchase of NeXT to lead to the first client release of Mac OS X in 2001, Apple distinguished itself from Windows PC vendors in other ways, such as ease of installation and Apple’s pursuit of the “digital hub” where the Mac was the center of a digital lifestyle involving music, digital cameras, and digital camcorders. This was the era of the iPod, iPhoto, iMovie, GarageBand, and related software.
Of course, Mac OS X solved the Mac’s long-standing stability issues, and Mac OS X also came of age when the Windows world was suffering with malware and security issues.
In my opinion, the Mac peaked in the mid-to-late 2000s, where Mac OS X provided users a solid operating system that was easy to use, and where Macs came bundled with a variety of apps from Apple that made it easy to do a lot of tasks many computer users care about, such as organizing music and photos, as well as editing music and videos.
Then came the iPhone and the tremendous profits that came from the iOS ecosystem, and with it came Apple’s shift in strategy, from the Mac being the digital hub to a hub focused increasingly on iOS and Apple’s cloud services. The Mac hasn’t been the main focus, and in my opinion the decline of Mac software is a reflection of Apple’s focus shift.
This is a really nice summary of the history of Mac OS (in both its incarnations).
While Mac OS X in the mid-late 2000s may have been a technologically superior operating system to Classic Mac OS, it was never as easy to use. The loss of the spatial Finder [1] along with the very strong UI consistency of Classic Mac OS apps (including 3rd party apps) left non-power-users behind forever. However, like everyone else in the operating system space, Apple didn't have to care about that because the browser took over and these users stopped doing things in native apps.
Classic Mac OS still can't be beat for working on projects in visual media. The persistence of the spatial Finder is so rock-solid that you can develop muscle memory for where icons will appear on the screen when you open a folder. This allows you to anticipate where they will be and move the mouse toward them before you can even see them (the zooming rectangles animation helps with this).
This method of working exemplifies the core philosophy of what the "desktop metaphor" was all about: having a spatial relationship with documents and tools on a physical desk lets you move your hands and eyes independently, grabbing and interacting with things without having to look at them. Apple worked extremely hard to bring this "illusion" to the Mac OS and no other operating system (including Mac OS X in all its versions up to the present day) has achieved this.
That's because the spatial illusion is very fragile and must be maintained with extreme care. Any loss of persistence (a window opening in a different place, an icon that moved or changed colour) shatters the illusion and puts the user into a defensive, "hunt and click" mode. Imagine cooking or working in a workshop and having someone re-arrange all your utensils or tools while you're away. Your entire workflow gets disrupted and your performance suffers.
Power users survived this disruption (in Mac OS X onwards) by moving to the keyboard and the Terminal, which have the rock-solid physical persistence of the keyboard itself to back them. Any time Apple tried to mess with the keyboard they got a ton of pushback from power users (see the touchbar on older MacBook Pros).
As much as I love Jobs-era Mac OS X, particularly Tiger, Leopard, and Snow Leopard, I wholeheartedly agree with you: there’s something about the classic Mac OS and its ecosystem of applications that felt truly like “a computer for the rest of us,” one with very well-considered user interface guidelines and principles. While Mac OS X was undoubtedly a major improvement in terms of stability and infrastructure, it is not as easy to use as the classic Mac OS. Once again, this is from a lover of Tiger, Leopard, and Snow Leopard.
Photos is definitely not great, though I still try and deal with it for the easy iCloud syncing.
Some examples off top of my head for Photos crappiness, all on my top of the range 128GB macbook m4 max
- doing 'cmd-R' (rotate) on a standard few-megabyte image might beachball the app for a few seconds. Rotating a small image file...
- Rotating a video seems to re-encode the whole video, instead of setting some metadata flags. Imagine you have, say, a 20GB video recording, and rotate it. That will now be a separate new 20GB file on your mac drive.
- If i view the album of some specific person that has many pictures with location metadata, and I scroll to the bottom where the map is, it almost immediately starts allocating >100GB memory, beachballs, starts gigabytes of memory paging, and you gotta kill the app asap.
Easy syncing? Kinda. It works, generally, eventually.
No progress, no indicators. And what little status you get has no connection to reality.
Will it sync? When? Who knows? You’re on WiFi with a full battery and charging? So? Might be a minute, might be an hour. Oh, you restarted Photos? Who cares? Not Photos.
Storing photos in a database was the first design mistake. These should be files in a folder. I know why they did it, to fuck over iPhone users who don't have a mac, but the added complexity of that is just absolutely not worth it.
Photos does store pictures as files in the folder. The .photoslibrary is a package (which is just a directory) you can open and pictures are stored in originals/.
It's possible to look at the behavior of a company over time and infer their internal incentive structure. It's been clear for several versions of MacOS recently that Apple spends much more energy adding features than fixing bugs. It seems obvious that there is no incentive within Apple to fix bugs; the only thing that gets one promoted at Apple must be adding new features -- so bugs (at least in MacOS) don't get fixed.
We already know that Apple makes about 51% of its revenue from iPhone sales. Therefore it's reasonable to assume promotion opportunities are mostly centered around iPhone hardware and hardware, rather than MacOS. Those of us who depend on MacOS are likely screwed unless something at Apple changes.
Once having validated that it was not the product manager, or whatnot manager that decided that it was good enough to go, yes, sure, but are developers given the time to root out bugs?
Apple has completely lost the high ground it earned during the OS X high times, paired with the relentless innovation of the iPod and iPhone. If they were smart they would focus on refinement in this era of gradual and boring innovation, so when the next thing is ready, they have a solid and trusted platform to support it. As things stand, if the next thing comes tomorrow, the next generation could easily jump ship. They may have the people who are too lazy to learn something new and will survive like Microsoft has. But at this point there's nothing substantially different about the company that told us to "think different".
I dual boot my M1 Mac Studio with Fedora Asahi Remix (native Linux for Apple Silicon for those unfamiliar). I'm far more comfortable and productive in Linux for development, but wanted to keep macOS there for times when I needed it.
It turns out I haven't needed it, and I honestly don't remember the last time I've booted into macOS on that system.
I like Apple hardware, but the last time I enjoyed using macOS was pre-2010.
Would love to see them do another OSX 10.6 and just release a version with lots bug fixes and no new features. But instead it'll be a new half-baked LLM tool to help you make new half-baked LLM tools.
“People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.” — Alan Kay
It's ironic after fighting the good fight for so long and finally making their own hardware that Apple should fall on their own sword with software now.
I've been loving Apple since Tiger, I'm still on Sequoia and iOS 18.
Pepe prayge for the 27-releases to be another Snow Leopard as rumored.
This isn’t the first time Apple’s been in this situation. The first PowerPC Mac was released in 1994, but core elements of the classic Mac OS remained written for the Motorola 68000. Pink/Taligent and Copland never panned out. It took until Mac OS X to be released in 2001 for PowerPC Macs to receive an operating system that was fully made for it, and even then Mac OS X undergone successive performance improvements. By then, it was time for the Intel switch. Snow Leopard’s was Intel-only, so PowerPC Macs cannot go beyond Leopard.
What’s interesting is that I recently got a MB Air after being away from Mac since ~2019. The touchbar on the keyboard and awful keyboard quality drove me away.
Now I return from having spent the intervening years with an Ubuntu laptop and Windows 10 desktop as my daily drivers at home and Windows 11 at work for the last year.
MacOS is so much better than any of the alternatives. Maybe the bar really is just too low but that’s my experience.
Yeah I don’t recall ever seeing this on Windows in fact I can still run Win 95 games (yes, those exist) on Windows 11. Mostly[0] works. I can go and install games from my original CDs which shouldn’t be possible but a bit of toothpaste on them does the trick.
Things just work for the most part because backwards compat is hardwired into the folks at Microsoft. Someone did a YouTube video not too long ago installing MS-DOS all the way through Windows 11, upgrading version by version.
I love how both MacOS and Windows users are reaching a point of no return.
Last week I finally decided to jump to Linux. While I realize that I have a few nits and annoying bugs I run in to, its hard to say if linux has any more than the mainstream offerings.
As much as I have endless, white-hot disdain for the web-appification of everything, it does end up working out when Linux runs every popular web browser just as well as the two main commercial operating systems. (I forget if DRM works on Linux, but eh. DVDs exist.)
DRM kind of works, but you don't get full DRM. But then again, I'm not sure you get that even on Windows. I believe full resolution streaming typically requires a smart TV or equivalent box.
Linux is not monolithic, if you have a buggy component you can replace it. With the exception of the kernel of course.
I think we're entering the era of personal desktops.
I've been using Macs in various forms since the 80s and I've carried a Mac laptop with me nearly full time since the early 2000s. While I don't think quality is necessarily overall worse than a decade or two ago I have run out of patience for rewrites with major regressions of most of the apps I care about. For the first time in a lot of years I have a Linux laptop along side my Mac and, if all works out, I'm planning to shift all my important workflows over.
I totally agree with most of the article, but the hallucinations bit puzzles me. If it’s genuinely an unchangeable limitation of the product (as hallucinations are with LLMs) it’s good to set the right expectation rather than making promises you can’t deliver on.
It doesn't matter to the end user if hallucinations are an unchangeable limitation, the fact that they happen undermines the confidence that people have in them as a tool.
I've wondered the same thing as the author about why we even call them "hallucinations." They're errors, the LLM generated an erroneous output.
The LLM doesn't produce erroneous output, its generated tokens fall within the statistical limits of the preset configuration, unless some kind of bitflip messed up the model in memory somehow. An LLM doesn't tell the truth or answer a question, it just spits out tokens. Its training doesn't involve validating whether or not the output forms a true fact or statement, but rather if the output looks like one. For the same reason, an LLM cannot lie, because an LLM doesn't have any intention, nor can it tell the truth. That level of thinking is beyond the capability of an LLM.
The term "hallucinations" are an anthropomorphised interpretation of valid output that's factually incorrect. It happens to people all the time (the human brain will make up any missing memories and subconsciously explain away inconsistencies, which only becomes obvious once you're dealing with someone with memory problems), so it feels like a decent term to use for garbage information produced without any ill intent.
The problem lies with the AI companies convincing their customers that the output generated by their tools is probable to mean anything. Probability engines are sold as some kind of chat program or even as some kind of autonomous agent because the output comes close enough to pass the Turing test to most people. LLMs can only mimic intelligence, interactivity, or any other kind of behavior, they cannot actually think or reason.
If people knew what they were operating, the "hallucinations" wouldn't be a problem. Unfortunately, that would take out most of the confidence people have in these tools, so you won't see the AI salesmen provide their customers with reasonable expectations.
If I write JavaScript that outputs “5+5=55” we would rightfully call that an error regardless of the implementation details. But when an LLM does it, you’re saying it’s not an error, it’s “generated tokens that fall within the statistical limits of the present configuration.”
My point was that, from the perspective of the end user, this is an error. If ChatGPT was described as a “random text generator” then sure maybe this wouldn’t be considered an error because “5+5=55” is random text. But that’s not what 90% or ChatGPT users expect nor how the app is marketed, it’s marketed as an Artificial Intelligence Assistant.
Exactly, it’s like getting mad at Isaac Newton because the root finding algorithm doesn’t work on particular functions or something. Like, the issue is not the algorithm, it’s that your expectations were incorrect. This is not an all-knowing machine, it’s a “what would a human say” estimation function.
Similarly, anyone who claims that LLMs in their current form are going to achieve AGI sounds like Newton bragging that he had solved all of math.
> It doesn't matter to the end user if hallucinations are an unchangeable limitation
Of course it does. I don’t go around complaining that my stove burns me when I touch it. Anyone who knows anything about LLMs at this point knows not to do anything mission critical with them and that’s a good thing.
You are not allowed to tell the truth about LLMs, it is simply outside of the current Overton window. In a year or two, this will be retconned. I guarantee it.
You are allowed, it just won’t get you VC money. Hell, Ilya Sutskever went on a podcast like a week ago and said transformers were coming to a dead end and he still has a multi-billion dollar AI company.
With the AI vision tools we have these days, I just export to PDF. At least within the Notes app, the search feature also searches the contents of PDFs.
My least favorite thing on the Mac is when they have one of their infamous negative number “error codes” in the alert box, and I get my hopes up that at least it must represent a common thread of errors others have had that may be solved in a forum or subreddit somewhere, then when googling that you discover that all forms of failure from disk full to malware result in the exact same oddly-specific error code and that everyone is talking to each other about it and slowly realizing they have nothing in common but being cursed by Tim Cook.
> Silent failures like these are least likely to be reported to Apple.
They might be, but unfortunately Apple's MetricKit reporting system is extremely primitive when it comes to crashes. It can't even handle C++ exceptions, and important information like thread/queue names, CPU registers, stack area and app state are strangely absent.
The ridiculously bad crash reporting on Apple products is why I wrote KSCrash.
My first hand experience with the deterioration of quality in MacOS: I bought a Mac Studio to run some traditional ML neural network type stuff with PyTorch. Unfortunately the GPU / MPS kept crashing (?!) and would require a full reboot of the computer to get working again. Without a reboot, PyTorch would not find a GPU / MPS device and random other apps would glitch. After finding nothing in logs and no information about how to debug anything related to MPS, I contacted Apple Support. Apple support was completely unhelpful and a very frustrating experience. It felt like they were laundering responsibility through the veneer of some engineer having glanced at whatever internal second hand report the support staff transcribed from me. The situation improved a bit after upgrading to Metal 4, but in the end I moved back to Tensorflow. It's very disappointing to spend $6k on a machine and the software doesn't work as expected.
The irony is that we all independently decided QA was a “process smell” around the same time. The logic seemed airtight: developers should own quality, shift left, test in prod with feature flags, move fast. Every tech blog and conference talk said the same thing.
What nobody mentioned is that QA teams weren’t just finding bugs—they were the institutional memory of how things break.
When you dissolve QA and tell developers “you own quality now,” that knowledge just evaporates. Each developer tests the happy path for their feature and calls it done. The edge cases? The interaction effects? The weird state machines? Those all ship to prod.
The really insidious part is the metrics looked great. Velocity up, deployment frequency up, cycle time down. We were measuring output, not outcomes. Exec dashboards showed green across the board while user experience quietly degraded.
Now we’re in the equilibrium state: software ships fast and breaks often, every deploy is a dice roll, and we’ve normalized “hotfix Friday” as just how things work. The velocity gains were real, but we were measuring distance traveled, not value delivered.
Turns out “everyone owns quality” means nobody owns quality. Who knew.
It’s interesting because Apple actually has a ton of QA people, and they do their job more than well enough. Any bug you file is nearly guaranteed to be a known issue in someone’s backlog or another.
But Apple ships on a schedule. A project’s code is either on the train when it departs, or it’s not. Promo packets depend on shipping, so you take the bugs, and you assign them to next release.
Bugs don’t stop releases, features just occasionally get punted. For every public feature you saw at WWDC that gets delayed because it’s not ready yet, probably 3-4 things shipped with known bugs that just weren’t important enough to punt the feature, so they just ship with the bugs.
QA is not the problem at Apple, because they know about the bugs. The culture of “we ship in September no matter what, nothing holds up the release” is the cause.
A trillion dollar company is never going to “hold up a release”. That culture is never going away.
Your point should probably culminate in “they need to stop promo’ing for features and start promo’ing for performance and stability”. It’s the only way to satisfy the competing constraints at play.
During my army days, the sergeant major always seem to know where we would fail to clean during inspection standbys, eg the top rim of doors. Part of it is a hazing ritual, but it also means if you know where to look, you know where people will consistently fail.
As an SRE who previously had to manually inspect changes and releases, I quickly learn what to check for, and saved many production issues from happening, but I guess nobody will know about the failures that didnt happen, but they will notice the delay I introduced and the inspection process was automated together with the CD system and I am cut out. Fingers crossed the automation is as thorough or can learn common failure modes.
I've been in your position before, and it is indeed thankless. So, for what it's worth, thank you for all of the disasters you prevented. I believe you, and I appreciate it.
This also leads to devs burning out, because you’ve listed a bunch of jobs most programmers hate, whether or not they happen to be able to do them well.
That causes churn, which further erodes expertise.
But Apple still has a separate Q&A team, and didn't fold them into the main dev roles like Microsoft. There's job openings listed on their website right now.
We didn't decide it was a process smell; management saw a lot of expensive mouths to pay, and decided they could get away with cutting those people by making up some nonsense and then making the remaining staff do more work for the same pay. This happens over and over and over again, and every time, people fall for it.
Bring back specialization. Bring back paying experts for their expertise. Bring back one person having one job.
It's a case of high trust, high skill structures not being maintained while trying to introduce outsourcing and minimum viable skill lower cost employees.
The idea of owning your own quality only works if you can trust the dev to understand quality, and want to implement it. Independent almost adversarial QA is required when you can't trust the devs.
I think the move to more test-driven development has made everyone a little bit overconfident. I've seen pull requests merged that pass all tests, but still end up bug-ridden. There's just no substitute for human eyes looking over the changes.
The Devs that 'know how to pass a good QA' are rare. I was lucky in that my first shop involved 'Make it easy enough for a person who thinks Internet Explorer might mean the AOL Icon to them' and my second shop involved a glorious QA that used to do QA for USAF [0]
If anything I'd argue that the 'Shift of QA into Dev' was a first step to the role consolidation and job enshittification we see today.
[0] - I still recall the time where I had a 'bad' bug and he told me "look, nobody died". It was a good benchmark set for understanding "I need to know how dangerous this -could- be."
Does it? Interesting, I thought it was a pretty robust take with specific parts I hadn't seen before. Perhaps the phrasing/sentence construction is a little stilted, but conclusions-drawn wise it seemed good to me. Maybe AIs are getting more incisive, maybe you just don't like GP's writing style. Who knows?
It’s possible for a woodworker to build a table which reliably does not collapse, even without having a third party test it.
It’s equally possible for a different woodworker to build a table which will collapse when deployed in a customer’s dining room.
The difference comes down to which woodworker I’ve hired, and how they’ve been trained.
If you can’t trust a woodworker to ship a table that stands under its own weight, layering on third-party QA isn’t really going to fix the underlying problem.
That said, cargo culting the “no QA” model is ill-advised. If a particular dev shop needs QA today, they’ll probably need it tomorrow.
A table is a table. It has one core function. An argument can be made that it could be built in a way that a chair can't be pushed against it for example. But the number of such cases for a table are infinitely smaller than the number of edge cases and unexpected interactions a software system can have.
QA is a way to catch those edge cases that a single developer cannot find because of various reasons. One such reason is that devs are very close to their work and they might subconsciously not trigger the unhappy path in their code.
Testing if a table works is vastly different from testing a software system.
The analogy conveys that QA is not inherently necessary to build and ship things that work.
It also paints a picture of a scenario where requiring QA would be more of a red flag than a best practice. It seems a tad silly to imagine a woodworker nailing boards together so they look like a table, then passing to QA to determine if the table is “good enough”, then having QA ship it back with defect reports. But this is exactly what many less-mature teams end up looking like.
You make a good point about unexpected interactions.
I’d argue the question for software isn’t whether QA Bad or QA Good. It’s at what level of complexity does QA become necessary. Most software teams aren’t dealing with all that much complexity (or, more specifically, inherent complexity that can’t be designed away.)
> It’s at what level of complexity does QA become necessary.
This is a good point. My answer would be that it depends on how many depend on the software and what is the tolerance for unintended interactions that users discover?
Based on which domain the software is written/deployed in, this answer will be different.
Third party QA should be able to simulate the customer's dining room. If the table collapses during testing, they will file a bug. It's up to management whether to ship anyway.
Tahoe has been giving spinning wheel on Firefox browser since updating it. You switch from spotlight to Firefox, there's the wheel; leave computer alone for sometime and comeback there's the wheel. I want this mess fixed.
Similarly on iOS, Safari bookmarks don't expose all folder names but only "Bookmarks" and "Favourites" as default. Why do I have to do another extra tap to expose a single folder that I have to save bookmark in? Why cannot at least five folder names be exposed? Another absurdity is while saving a fullpage screenshot after cropping it, you have to click the checkmark "emoji" which is otherwise blank with no description, and then comes a sub-menu to save as pdf or photo; why cannot those four options be presented as is on the main menu?
While there are a few overlapping/similar issues being alluded to in those threads, it definitely seems like something is going on re: task switching. There are also a couple of tricks mentioned that might fix some specific issues related to bookmarks or graphics acceleration, but no silver bullets so far.
I have similar issues with Firefox on Linux, I don't think it's a macOS exclusive problem. Unfortunately it's hard to tell which problems are caused by which component when all of them are unreliable enough that they could be the culprit.
> Over the last few weeks I’ve been discovering problems that have been eroding confidence in macOS.
As we move forward, we're probably going to discover more hidden gems in the Apple’s ecosystem because, apparently, it's a serious crisis that is not going anywhere anytime soon.
You might be also interested in these related submissions:
I moved back to Arch Linux after my 11 months old MBP died and took over a month to get it fixed. Not really looking at going back to macOS.
There are no aspect of the Apple OS that I miss and Linux desktop just works nowadays.
I'm hearing this sentiment EVERYWHERE. This latest version of the OS on desktop and mobile, is aesthetically a disaster. Users requested none of this glass stupidity, they hate it, and there is no way to turn it off. Between that and the CEO gifting a participation trophy to our authoritarian felon "adjudicated s-assaulter" president, most people I know with a conscience are pretty much done with the platform and looking forward to the next opportunity to bail.
> You’re eventually advised to reinstall macOS or, in the worst case, to wipe a fairly new Apple silicon Mac and restore it in DFU mode, but have no reason to believe that will stop the problem from recurring.
This isn't new. Back in GPU-gate days, I had a MBP that I could very reliably kernel panic due to that issue. But it'd pass Diagnostics so "no fix for you!"
Even when I was there with a Genius, we did this, and on a brand new install - look, here, can replicate this KP (which was basically some of the same steps people had for identifying the GPU (and everything else matched up).
I picked the same strategy for Windows. I remember I was still on 2000 when XP is hot, and still on XP when 8 is available, and now I use 10 and this is going to be my last Windows as 11 is too shitty and I suspect 12 and beyond are going to be worse.
If the error message happens to include a numeric code, OSStatus.com is sometimes helpful if the issue if they didn't bother with a localizable string for it.
Not 100% related, but I remember when OS...8? came out with balloon help, and one of the guidelines for it was that it should provide specific messages for when a menu item or control is disabled, to explain why the feature was disabled. e.g. on the Copy menu, "Not available because nothing is selected"
Apple hardware is absurdly good. Airpods, amazing, redefined what wireless headphones are. M-series macbooks, amazing, new benchmark in performance per core and battery life. Plenty of older products too that either created the category or completely dominate it.
Apple software, on the other hand, feels like a totally different company. Stuff like Siri is miles behind the ball, things like Airplay (IME) are flaky with little recourse when they don't work, Liquid glass is slower feeling and a noticeable battery hog. Apple music still has more hiccups and random play stoppage than Spotify.
I really, really like the hardware, but apple software needs some competition. Half of the features in the last 2-3 iOS releases were in Cydia over a decade ago.
> Airpods, amazing, redefined what wireless headphones are.
Airpods are a cash grab solution to a problem that Apple created, and nobody actually had before. They are the exact opposite of a good product; they are Apple squeezing money from its captive audience. If the iPhone hadn't dropped the headphone jack nobody would've bought Airpods, thus the jack was killed.
To be fair though the switch to wireless earbuds and headphones helped advance that market quickly. That applies to all of the companies in the space. It's also been so nice to not have to deal with tangled wired earbuds or headphones. Removing the jack was a band aid that needed to be ripped eventually, and Apple just happened to be the ones to do it. There is a reason the industry followed. Even when they didn't have their own product to offer.
> If the iPhone hadn't dropped the headphone jack nobody would've bought Airpods, thus the jack was killed.
My understanding was Apple wanted to get rid of cables entirely if they could. It's one of the major pieces of waste and the reason EU forced USB-C on everyone.
Personally I find the airpods great. I use the noise cancellation to sleep.
> Half of the features in the last 2-3 iOS releases were in Cydia over a decade ago.
And I don’t even care about the features. Just give me stability and reliability. Don’t bluntly break what was working before. Spend some time on bug fixing. Please, Apple.
Who are these people making all of these garbage UX decisions? Surely many lurk in HN. Don’t they ever push back against ridiculous design changes for changes sake?
I have. There is a whole power-mod clique over there that just turned me off using the site.
I posted about how to get Launchpad back as the spotlight feature is frustrating to use.
One of the mods posted suicide watch to my response. Asked if they were bot or what were they on about. My post got deleted and their post got edited.
Then I had another mod telling me to "suck it up" and it wasn't just a response directed at myself. When I said it wasn't constructive they responded with insults and deleted my post.
It was all surreal and totally messing with Apples brand.
It must be exhausting and stressful being an OS dev or dev team. I haven't experienced any of the troubles that are referenced here; and, the one complaint I've had over the years was resolved, like, on the very next update.
I use my mac for IntelliJ and Firefox. I guess maybe my usage surface is just really, really small; but I basically never have any problems ... and then others come along and say they're having huge issues.
I see the various updates as they happen and like ... all of them are neutral or minor inconveniences that are resolved next patch, for me.
They might have been fewer, sure. I haven't followed Mac issues as, again, I haven't really seen them, outside of the huge ones that get fixed quickly and are whole events.
But, operating systems can be interacting with thousands of different types of components, monitors, external graphics cards, keyboards, mice, printers, etc, in a whole array of different configurations. Nothing like Windows or Linux experience, of course; but not a small number of different situations, each of which can impact the machines in strange ways. And I imagine that's quite hard to track down. You can minimize it, of course, but it's not nothing.
It's pretty depressing as well as frustrating, watching something pretty solid get flushed in real time. This post puts words on it I hadn't really, but fading "confidence" is a really succinct foundation. There's no single massive thing just completely fubar'd, but the cumulative effect of hundreds to thousands of mysterious cuts combined with that now familiar sinking feeling of watching GUI bikeshedding accelerate with each new version, every more miserable, less useful, no more Feelings Of Delight at seeing some cool little attention to detail or nice new thing that clearly had some real thought and testing behind it. It all really eats away at one's day. I'm seeing this HN post and article literally right as I'm watching Activity Monitor and trying to figure out WTF is going on with mysterious ApplicationsStorageExtension (a plugin buried in the StorageManagement.framework) tasks spawning 4x on a Sequoia Mini M4 Pro and doing constant disk churn to no discernable purpose and introducing massive latency to certain file system access patterns. This started up out of nowhere in the last few weeks, almost exactly 1 year after getting this machine and with no major system upgrades. Why!? Who knows! Force quit them all and other stuff like MailStorageManagement goes nuts for a bit and then it settles down for an indeterminate period of time. Restart the computer and it goes away for awhile. No FS corruption issues found, seem to be no issues with spotlight. Sigh.
After decades using macOS and significant investment the barrier to change is significant too, even if there was some ideal thing to jump to which there is not. But like others I am chipping away at it where I can, slowly divorcing from the Apple ecosystem, going ever more heterodox. I can see people reaching tipping points at various places, might take quite awhile but the thing is once someone jumps ship you're probably never getting them back and eventually that can add up to them taking others with them. It's just such a damned waste too.
I have an on-again-off-again relationship with macOS - the deep integration with Apple hardware is stellar and IMO the new MacBook Airs are tremendous value for money, but otherwise the OS seems to be suffering from some deep technical debt and MBA-brained decision-making.
I'm currently on the "meh hardware but solid OS" phase of the cycle - the battery life isn't as good and waking from suspend still (somehow) isn't as seamless, but my Linux of choice (Silverblue) is predictable and transparent - and ultimately if there's a problem it's in my gift to fix it, which is much more comforting to me.
I wonder what they'll do to woo me back next time..
Last weekend I was writing some quick notes in the Notes app, and I could not get it to stop performing nonsensical completions in blinking yellow text. Apple Intelligence disabled, predictive text disabled, various combinations of backspace escape etc. Nothing worked. How hard is it to code a Notes app that doesn't mess with you?
I had to factory reset my Mac because inexplicably Siri, Spell Check, and Apple Intelligence were "disabled by my admin." I have no MDM. I am my admin. I spent roughly a month delving through logs trying to resolve it.
"Mr. Jobs reportedly asked the assembled engineers and other MobileMe team members, “Can anyone tell me what MobileMe is supposed to do?” When one of those employees then volunteered a satisfactory answer, Mr. Jobs followed up with, “So why the fuck doesn’t it do that?”
I feel his pain. Some of those error alerts make me want to sob.
Reporting problems to Apple is downright demoralizing. Most of the time, the bugs remain unassigned, unread, and unsolved. The few that do earn a response, are usually gaslighting.
I suspect that Apple may have hired a whole bunch of less-than-stellar people, and it’s showing. That’s depressing, because I always considered them to be the gold standard.
I couple of months ago, I wasted about 4 hours debugging issues with my app. Command-line scripts didn't work properly for some reason, while my IDE worked fine.
Turned out that I either missed or accidentally denied the permission to access local networks for iTerm. So the `curl` utility installed from Homebrew was silently failing, while the system-provided `/usr/bin/curl` worked fine. Because it has special permission from Apple.
Can I just give the same permission to iTerm? Nope. We are not worthy of that power, and must re-affirm permissions every 30 days for all non-Apple software.
Oh, and these permission popups happen at random moments, including during presentations or meetings. And if you don't accept them, they are silently denied.
> Can I just give the same permission to iTerm? Nope. We are not worthy of that power, and must re-affirm permissions every 30 days for all non-Apple software.
Not sure what permission you're referring to or what your curl script is trying to do but `/opt/homebrew/opt/curl/bin/curl http://www.google.com` works just fine on Tahoe from both iTerm2 and ghostty. Looking through the various permission grants, the only one they both have in common is "App Management". They share some file permission grants, but where as iTerm has full disk access, ghostty only has Downloads and removable media. In the past I've found I've needed to add terminals like iTerm to the Developer Tools permission, but ghostty isn't in there currently and curl is still working just fine. And in none of these cases have I ever needed to re-affirm the permission every 30 days.
Any chance you have "disclaim ownership of children" setting enabled in iTerm? Maybe if iTerm is not allowing child processes to use its own permissions, you're having to re-authorize curl specifically (and it's getting updated about once every 30 days?)
> And if you don't accept them, they are silently denied.
This is IMO the correct behavior. If something asks for permission and it's not explicitly granted, then the default should always be denied.
> Not sure what permission you're referring to or what your curl script is trying to do but `/opt/homebrew/opt/curl/bin/curl http://www.google.com` works just fine on Tahoe from both iTerm2 and ghostty.
Mwwahahaha. Yep. Curling something neutral like google.com worked fine for me as well. That's how I was verifying that everything was OK.
So I thought that might be the dialog you're talking about which is why I thought it was weird that ghostty didn't have it and curl seemed to work just fine. I also could swear that it did show you rejected apps in the list just with the permission turned off.
After experimenting a bit, it seems like:
1) You're right that it doesn't show the rejected apps in the list. Seems like the only way to find that is to query the tcc sqlite db.
2) The permission does apply equally to the built in `curl` as it does to the homebrew installed curl.
3) What it doesn't apply to apparently is the gateway address on your network, regardless of which app you use.
4) It also doesn't apply to all "private" IP space addresses, just ones that are on your subnet. So for example, I have an IOT subnet on my network on its own VPN with a route in the gateway for accessing it from some specific devices on the primary LAN. Without the permission, I can ping and curl (with both the built in and homebrew versions) all of the devices on the IOT subnet. But I can't ping or curl (again with either version) any of the devices on the LAN subnet. Turn the permission on and I can hit everything on the local subnet fine from all the devices.
5) I also validate that the above rules are true even for an application (alacritty in this case) that had never been given permission (in case setting and then removing the permission did something odd)
> The keyword is SILENTLY. The permission requests should be logged and made available in a central location, where they can be reviewed.
This I agree on, the rejected apps should show in the privacy permissions, even if in a collapsed tab/pane so that you can review later. I could swear it used to do this, but maybe I'm thinking of iOS which does do that.
> 2) The permission does apply equally to the built in `curl` as it does to the homebrew installed curl.
I think this might have been fixed? `codesign -dvvv /usr/bin/curl` no longer prints anything about permissions. I definitely remember investigating this particular point.
> 3) What it doesn't apply to apparently is the gateway address on your network, regardless of which app you use.
Doesn't work for me. I can't ping or HTTP into my gateway from a terminal app that doesn't have this permission.
Edit: apparently pinging the gateway works if you're on WiFi. But not with wired Ethernet. Wow.
This permission is so weirdly named and scary, and the applications never tell you why they're requesting it... on iOS it would be against the developer guidelines...
Darwin uses launchd/libxpc. journalctl's job is handled by the `log` command, with appropriate predicate filters to winnow out the relevant stuff from the chaff.
My first exposure to Macs was a Macintosh LC II, with System 6.5. It felt unusual, and the one-button mouse felt very limiting, but the interface felt logical. Even if I would not agree with certain design decisions, I could not fail to notice that somebody had thought them through, and made things coherent. Window management was clunky, but at the time it was clunky basically everywhere. (I missed some niceties of TurboVision UIs though.)
Another time I had to work on (and even develop for) a Mac exposed me to System 9. Again, the interface felt unusual (in a different way), but it was very obvious that somebody had thought it through, and made things consistent and discoverable. Drag everything onto everything and see what happens! Sometimes very neat, and much richer than Windows 3.x or CDE.
I loved the first releases of OS X, it was a real Unix at the foundation, and also a really nice, beautiful GUI on top, snappy even on the translucent triangular Macs. I adopted WindowMaker on my Linux machines, and kept to it for some years. I even hoped that OpenStep would help build some semblance of a new common GUI language across the platforms. Sadly, nicer window management I was used to under Linux did not materialize on Macs yet.
Over about two decades since, I was periodically issued a Mac at work, and grew less and less happy with the direction the UI was taking. It became more and more showy and bulky, even though it kept enviable consistency and polish for quite some time. I wished that the UI could do its job and fade away, but it insisted in taking more and more screen space, larger graphics, etc. It rather stubbornly refused most customizations, like selecting a different color instead of the signature silver / platinum / gray, and the Apple's signature blue accents. Only in 2018 the bastion of gray finally fell.
Last few years made things so much... less ideal that it was finally not only me who complained, but even die-hard Mac fans. The prized consistency, coherence, and, well, integral vision started to deteriorate openly. As if there's no single person who oversees the whole GUI experience and keeps it aligned any more. Not as bad as Windows, but... And, well, still no good window management, not even window snapping (except to screen edges, since quite recently). Still no "Alt-Tab"-like switching between windows (not apps). I bet that that feature has been requested by users countless times. No, go use Showtime, or whatnot.
And, yes, the whole signed binaries thing. I understand why it may be beneficial for quite some users. But for a developer, and in general for a user of software not from App Store, it's increasingly annoying. Well, it incentivizes building stuff locally from source. Publishing binaries is effectively $99/year though, AFAICT.
Compared to that, I'm pretty happy with my Linux Xfce setup. It allows me to customize the UI to my heart's content, and it adjusts to my workflows, not the other way around. Yes, I spent some noticeable time on these customizations, but that expense is amortized over at least 20 years (yes, my configs evolved mostly uninterrupted since 2006 or so). When I have to use a Mac, I sometimes try to find equivalents to some of the niceties I have under Xfce (not the most elaborate DE), and mostly find explanations saying that it's not possible on vanilla macOS and I should not want that. Third-party or open-source software sometimes helps quite a bit though; I'm very grateful to the authors of Hammerspoon and Rectangle.
In short, I'm only a sporadic and involuntary user of macOS, and my lack of desire to switch to it only grows with time, despite the superb hardware Apple offers.
I wish that could happen, but sadly Tim Cook’s ego wouldn’t allow that and I don’t think Craig Federighi would want his kingdom to be torn apart (I presume he had a big role in getting John Giannandrea to be pushed out of Siri and retire).
Scott Forstall was fired for a lot less compared to the mess that Apple’s software is now.
I typically jump on the latest macOS with enthusiasm. I once made the mistake to install the beta version of the next os, and well, that didn't go well for me. But typically, within X.1, I'm there.
However something shifted since this "visionOS" melted version of macOS (Tahoe); where I have absolutely no intension to upgrade from Sequoia. I hope they will fix it by the time I'll be forced to upgrade (post support deadline).
It started with the macOS that brought the iOS settings panel. We went from a logical structure of easily findable stuff to a complete mess. Just open the "Keyboard" settings on macOS today and it's bewildering how they could ship this and think this is fine. Steve would roll in his grave.
The process to allow running applications that are unsigned is just a horrible hack. It feels like a last minute "shove it and move on!".
By 2035 I wonder if we'll be all running KDE or WindowMaker and the hell with modern OS GUI.
From a Gestalt standpoint, human relations with desktop computers are not the same as with thumb driven mobile OS or air-pinch driven vision OS, period. The hell with "glass" or "flat" design. Desktop OS should be as forgettable as possible, as it's about having long stints of flow, not giving a feeling of "air" or "play".
> It started with the macOS that brought the iOS settings panel. We went from a logical structure of easily findable stuff to a complete mess.
It’s difficult to pinpoint when exactly the decline started. But one key event before the Settings app was the Catalyst apps that were straight out and dismal ports from their iOS versions. Till date, none of those work well and cannot be navigated properly using the keyboard. Reminders, Messages, Notes and more.
Craig Federighi seems to be increasingly taking on so much authority without having a trusted set of people under him and his leadership (or lack of it) has resulted in neglecting software across device platforms. Some of the Apple apps on tvOS with paid subscriptions are worse, because the bugs in them don’t get any attention at all.
Notes straight up crashes if you "open this note in a separate window" and edit from there for prolonged periods of time (minutes, not days)
I think if you minimize the main window it gets even worse
It's completely unacceptable
If you cut text in a "separate window" note, it will delete the text, but it won't actually copy it unless you issued the command for a note in the main window. So when you go to paste it elsewhere, you find it's gone, and then you often find Notes has lost the undo history too.
Jesus
I'm curious if this is a bug that other people deal with, but I have to screenshot stuff to send folks all the time.
Screenshot, right click, and "copy" doesn't appear. Sometimes moving the app to another screen makes it appear, sometimes just switching to another app and back will help, sometimes I can't get it to be an option at all and I have to close screenshot and retry.
Really awful. Just make it an option all the time.
When Microsoft decided to rewrite the screenshot app from Win32 to WinUI, it had plenty of bugs, to the point I kept the old exe around for about one year.
The one that mostly bothered me, was not being able to select desktop regions if using multiple monitors, the rectangle region went nuts on what was possible to select.
https://shottr.cc/
Unfortunately its a work Mac, and they don't permit "unauthorized software".
I also don't need 99% of all of that, I just want the screenshot tool to not suck.
I just want to grab a bit of the screen to paste it into chats so I can tell people what problems I see.
I just want to be able to save the image to a folder and copy it to my clipboard when taking a screenshot. iirc in KDE Plasma's Spectacle, these options are checkboxes, you can enable as many at once as you like.
Have it set to the clipboard always, and then to save somewhere cmd+space open preview and hit cmd+N
> It’s difficult to pinpoint when exactly the decline started.
My turning point was the passwordless root bug: https://x.com/lemiorhan/status/935578694541770752
> It’s difficult to pinpoint when exactly the decline started.
October 5, 2011?
my beef is with the new iOS having to take like 3 clicks to disable bluetooth now
I actually have a simple shortcut created just to turn off Bluetooth entirely (helps speed up watchOS updates by forcing it to download directly over WiFi). I also have shortcuts to turn off WiFi completely and to turn off both WiFi and cellular data without putting it in airplane mode.
And no easy way to block phone numbers from the caller list (among other things). iOS 26 is the first upgrade I really regretted.
I’ve always felt the decline in Mac OS started on the day of the ‘Back To The Mac’ event in 2010. And has continued since. Symbolically this event made clear the iOS first focus of the company. And since then Mac OS updates have continued to be secondary/lesser to iOS.
Mac OS is still my system of choice, but I don’t have as much confidence in it as I would like.
The big thing from around fifteen years ago is the mixed modes for autosave, where they sort of half heartedly changed the language around save/save as and just sort of… left it. Some apps use their new (for the 2010s) auto save system and some don’t. And it’s up the the user to muddle through. Weird. And there are many half baked things like this in the OS now.
Mac hardware, on the other hand, has never been better than it is right now!
> The big thing from around fifteen years ago is the mixed modes for autosave, where they sort of half heartedly changed the language around save/save as and just sort of… left it. Some apps use their new (for the 2010s) auto save system and some don’t.
I may be mistaken, but AFAIK, all Apple’s apps auto-save on quit and restore state on open. If so, what do you suggest they do about making third party applications do that as well?
I've had the preferences "close windows when quitting an application" and "ask to keep changes when closing documents" checked since the day they appeared in System Preferences.
With these two, most applications behave as they did in the pre-Lion document model.
> Mac hardware, on the other hand, has never been better than it is right now!
I thought the same until trying a framework laptop with Ubuntu. Mac is the “IBM” choice, no one gets fired for choosing it, but quite frankly there’s better options these days.
A framework laptop is very nice, and definitely has a lot of upsides, but it can't match screen, keyboard, trackpad, camera, or speaker quality with a MacBook Pro, not to mention the battery life.
Those may be nice for people who need them, and are ok with the software side.
for me, the screen on the framework is ok. I think there's little to gain with LCDs at this point. The trackpad on the framework is smaller, so it's better. A nicer camera requires a nicer piece of tape to cover it, I guess. Notification beeps do not require Atmos or whatever. I can pack a powerbank for trans-oceanic flights, but I'm usually at a desk if I work long stretches.
Having nicer stuff would be nice, but the value proposition does not work for me in light of the software situation.
so
1 - compromised hardware over better software is a trade-off you're willing to make and 2 - you believe that the Framework software experience is better than macOS
i can concede 2 (if true, I've not used a Framework laptop) but I don't understand point 1. packing a powerbank for example just feels ancient if you've used the arm chip macs. then again, I'm now pushing my trade-off
It's going to be a different experience for everyone. For example I never get why people care about the laptop weight. You put it in your backpack anyway, (unless it's a small handbag sized laptop situation then fair enough) it's not like anything below 5kg will be noticeable in reality. Yet for others is a big deal. Personal preferences...
that's fair. i do think it's personal preferences in the end.
"Packing a powerbank" was more of a hypothetical, as I've never actually had to.
My point was that it's a tradeoff between software preference, tech politics, price, and hardware features. I think it's pretty easy to understand. It's not like Apple has an insurmountable lead; there are some benefits for some use cases.
I concur. I have a Framework 13 I use as my personal laptop and a work-issued M3 MacBook Pro. While I love the freedom that my Framework 13 provides in terms of user serviceability and operating system choice, the MacBook Pro feels more premium, and it has absolutely amazing battery life.
What do people like about MacBook trackpads? I can't stand them because you can only do a "click" action at the bottom of the thing, but there's nothing tactile that would help you to find it.
And other laptops that imitate this are even worse. Like, where does the left button end, and right button start?
That's rarely a problem: bottom right corner is right and almost all the rest is left
I enabled the tap (System Settings) so I can "click" everywhere.
By 2035, I'm not even sure I'll have a computer. (Sort of a joke, but like, at this rate...)
My current OS X update strategy is: I don't, mostly. I'm a few versions behind, and at this point, I'd rather keep an OS that sort of works and just deal with the script kiddies, then upgrade to an OS that doesn't work and have to deal with my OS vendor.
You kid, but you might be onto something.
The majority of users are content with chromebooks, what does that tell you about the requirements of desktop computers today? It tells me that they are just niche professional tools; and professional tools largely suck for UX..
I had an interesting realisation the other day (that's tangentially related): on my iPhone and iPad: I can't access my work emails or chats at all. Yet on my significantly more difficult to secure laptops: no problem.
The mobile platforms have built-in mechanisms for remote attestation. Desktop operating systems do not.
I think as soon as companies realise that an iPad is "good enough" for email/excel/word workers, we'll see an even more precipitous decline of the desktop operating system experience.
Maybe my definition of UX is behind the times, but I think professional tools have great UX for their intended users... Professionals.
Fine grained control, informative error messages, thought out keybinds, all make the system easier to use for experts
Professional software is aimed at people who use it day in day out so they’re optimising for a different problem than software that’s aimed at the casual user.
Intuitiveness is often seen as a outright positive by most people but actually it’s more of a trade off. Often the greatest efficiency is achieved by interfaces that require a bit of learning by the user. The ultimate example of that is command line interfaces which are very powerful and efficient but require you to know what you’re doing and give you relatively little help.
You’re on the other side of a steep learning curve for a lot of professional software you use. A steep learning curve is bad UX.
"I think as soon as companies realise that an iPad is "good enough" for email/excel/word workers, we'll see an even more precipitous decline of the desktop operating system experience."
This has a ring of SurfacePro as a corporate EUC choice. Quite common these days.
I regularly wait almost a year after a given version of MacOS has been released before upgrading. I don't care about new features, and I already spend all day fixing bugs of my own creation. That leaves very little time for debugging other people's software.
Meanwhile in Windows world, Win11 has been out for what, 4 years?, and we’re still clinging to Win10
about 5 months ago i jumped ship to kde plasma and it's been great. took a month or two to get the most prized things working the way i wanted but kde is so configurable that you can get it to work pretty much identical to a mac. toshy gives you all the familiar mac keyboard shortcuts and lets you do per application configs. I can't see going back to a mac unless an employer mandated it. the freedom you have is refreshing. if something doesn't work the way you want it you can change it.
> if something doesn't work the way you want it you can change it.
This sentence here is my biggest heartbreak with modern “computing.” I came up in the Windows 98/XP days and over about 7 years from 98-05 basically gained full mastery of basically every aspect of Windows and how to change it, and also from 03 on started using Mac OS X daily and found it to be just as customizable or more, in most ways that mattered. I felt that my computer was my own and loved having full control, making it perfect for me.
None of that is possible now. You cannot even select your own notification sound for Messages on MacOS anymore. Only the 20 sounds packaged with the OS. What. The. F%$k.
This is because in any monopoly/duopoly/oligopoly, the product inevitably stops being about what the user wants, and becomes about what the monopolist wants. They're removing features like this because simplifying configurations translates to reduced support costs, and reducing their costs and padding their margin is the name of the game for a monopolist, they believe there's nowhere else for you to go, so they can and will hose you over and over again.
We're now paying the piper for many years of accrued monopoly effects, it turns out the way our IP law is structured, the rights we've granted corporations to sue people who attempt any kind of reverse engineering etc. all privilege the monopolist and encourage the formation of the monopoly, because the entire legal and regulatory system is designed to juice corporate profits and pesky old laws like the Sherman Act which got in the way have essentially been ignored for decades.
One really important thing for people to understand is that until there's a serious change to these dynamics, IT WILL GET WORSE. Mac OS will get worse, FOREVER. So will Windows and all other monopolist products. This is why you really need to switch away from them as soon as you can; life will be an order of magnitude more miserable for whoever's still using these products a decade from now. They will just keep on squeezing whoever's left, harder and harder until the heat death of the universe.
> They're removing features like this because simplifying configurations translates to reduced support costs, and reducing their costs and padding their margin is the name of the game for a monopolist, they believe there's nowhere else for you to go, so they can and will hose you over and over again.
There may be some truth to that, but I really don't think it's the whole story. Otherwise how do you explain spending so much effort on eye candy like MacOS "liquid glass", or the redesigned settings app? For that matter, why bother with an annual release at all?
To me, I think it's a pretty obvious case of prioritizing style over substance. For whatever reason, but not to save money. If they really wanted to save money they'd stop with the gratuitous change.
> You cannot even select your own notification sound for Messages on MacOS anymore
I don’t see a UI for it, but when I drop a sound in ~/Library/Sounds (tested with .aif an .m4r; .aiff likely will work, too, looking at ~/System/Library/Sounds) it shows up in the “Sound Effects/Alert sound” pop-up for me.
Yes, that's the alert sound. I have 100 sounds in there and can use them for the System alert sound. However, when you receive a message in "Messages" that plays the sound chosen in Messages app's Settings window -> Message received sound. That one only shows the builtin sounds that are on the sealed, signed, tamper-proof volume.
> It started with the macOS that brought the iOS settings panel.
The ridiculous thing is that Microsoft already made approximately this mistake with the Windows 8 “PC Settings” disaster.
It's still in process. Today's update (KB5070311) added the following:
> Keyboard settings for "character repeat delay and rate", and "cursor blink rate", have moved from Control Panel to Settings.
To be fair, Windows 8 only came out in 2012, so they haven't had that much time to finish the settings migration. But they're making good progress. If they keep up this pace of moving 2 settings per month, they should be able to finish by 2053.
Given how bad Project Reunion went, that is being too positive.
If the goal was to move everything to Settings, sure. But Settings seems to be for the most common settings the average user will want to look at whereas more detailed options are elsewhere. It's a way to easily funnel users away from more impactful settings to system stability. In this view Windows 11 release solidified that pretty well.
The character repeat and cursor blink rate settings were already in Settings but it just opened up the older windows forms. This just gives them a new coat of paint by putting them in the Settings app.
Even more ridiculous that the same mistake continues in Windows 11 today!
The fact that neither desktop OS seems to be capable of doing settings right is a damning indictment of the general state of UX across the board.
Worse, it shows how badly staffed the companies are, with a management that doesn't care about their staff skills.
From experience, I bet Apple and Microsoft have offshored all their desktop teams.
Windows went through a pendulum swing of integrating touch (I think they ended up in a place where they expect users to use more of a multi-modal approach instead of touch-only).
I suspect Mac is going through the same thing right now as ipad is "growing up" and they're trying to reconcile all their UI. I'm a little surprised that Macs have never introduced touch.
Just a data point, in case it’s useful to anyone: I saw the screenshots and blog posts about Liquid Glass and thought it looked miserable. But then I had a hardware issue and had to upgrade.
I swear after the first 3 days, I’ve only even noticed the new UI maybe a dozen times. If I stop and really pay attention to it, I think the old UI was a bit better, but strangely I don’t really seem to notice the new UI. If it’s worse, I rarely notice.
Then again I spend most of my time in jetbrains IDEs, iterm2, and Firefox (none of which have changed much). So I might be a special case.
> The process to allow running applications that are unsigned is just a horrible hack. It feels like a last minute "shove it and move on!".
If you're talking about the process that just says "Foo.app is damaged and can’t be opened." and the only way around that is to manually remove the com.apple.quarantine extended attribute, that's arguably working as intended. Apple doesn't want users to run untrusted apps period. They want only apps approved by them.
As a dev and open source dev I don't like it. But, I can't totally be against it I think. It is safer for some users and experts can learn how to remove the attribute with `xattr -d com.apple.quarantine filename`
Saying "Foo.app is damaged" is lying to the user though, which is not nice, and not a good sign, in general, for the health of a company / its culture.
Saying it's damage is by design. Apple wants to scare you aware. I agree it feels bad from one POV. That was my initial reaction. I also agree though that steering grandma away from evil apps is good too.
Part of the reason computer users like your grandma are so helpless is because OS' have devolved to be completely untrustworthy. Everything lies, and error messages now look like "oopsy windows made a fucky! >_<"
It's no wonder granny has zero confidence in the computer and is always behind.
Yeah, by design, of course, but I still think it's bad (& there are plenty of ways to scare grandma without lying to her, if you really need to do that).
In general I'd contend that the mindest which leads you to believe "we need to lie to our users because they are dumb" isn't conducive to making good software.
Lying to people is usually bad because they will stop trusting your warnings.
> It started with the macOS that brought the iOS settings panel.
I get that Apple would want to unify the user experience across the two devices. But, seriously, iOS settings have been shit since iPhone 1.
They should have fixed iOS instead.
> By 2035 I wonder if we'll be all running KDE or WindowMaker and the hell with modern OS GUI
I love Linux, but I doubt that will happen. If anything, by then Linux will be a feature of a workstation OS running in a hypervisor, just like it is with Windows and ChromeOS today.
> The hell with "glass" or "flat" design. Desktop OS should be as forgettable as possible, as it's about having long stints of flow, not giving a feeling of "air" or "play".
There's nothing stopping you from running a Linux desktop with a minimalist tiling window manager - I have for years and found it does exactly what you say.
But it sounds like it's more that you don't like that there aren't many product offerings like that. That is true. Even computers with Linux pre installed use "bouncy" desktop environments like Gnome/KDE by default.
My preference - ChromeOS - comes the closest but is still nowhere near as stripped down as i3 tiling window manager (which I also think is great).
This raised my curiosity. Until now I didn't know you could run ChromeOS other than on Chromebooks.
Do you run ChromeOS Flex on some thinkpads or do you work on a Chromebook?
What are the pros/cons vs running a debian if you can elaborate?
> Do you run ChromeOS Flex on some thinkpads or do you work on a Chromebook?
Chromebook.
> What are the pros/cons vs running a debian if you can elaborate?
I like minimalist desktop environments. I like full screen window tiling using keyboard shortcuts, power management, fingerprint readers, accelerated displays, phone tethering, touch screen, passkey support for auth, and verified boot, and preferences synced across devices.
And I like all that to work out of the box with no fiddling,
Thanks for opening my mind to this. I actually threw the ChromeOS Flex version onto a Thinkpad I had laying around and I was really surprised by how "ready" the setup is.
I feel the same about a good setup that works out of the box. Everything works, from sleep, to cameras, Bluetooth, and shutdown actually shuts down, which I can't get with debian, arch or bsd!
I will trial it further, the Linux WSL type enclosure feels right. I'm trying to understand if Penguin is actually a web rendered terminal or native. I only really know Ghostty which I can't get to run as it's missing some gnome libs I think. I will see if alacrity is better.
Thanks!
Yea im even worse, i was on mojave until last year.
Update frustration has long set in.
Im gonna buy the new macbook pro with the M5 max when it comes out in a couple of months (from an intel 2019) and this will probably be my last mac, im giving them one last chance before i move to Linux.
I dont have big hopes though…
I'm still on Monterey, on a 2021 M1 that works just fine. I'm not buying a new Mac this year specifically to avoid having to spend days dealing with all the potential headaches of updating my dev environments. I hate upgrading. I don't want any of the new stuff. I just want something that works. The first thing I do when I get a new Mac is uninstall every piece of Apple software that can be uninstalled, then use Little Snitch to block all their IP addresses.
That being said, now AWS is forcing all my RDS instances to upgrade to mysql 9 (also: Why???), so I need to get 9 working on my dev box, and tonight I'm up against a wall trying to work through Homebrew issues. There's no way to win.
Huh..? MySQL 9 is not even GA in AWS RDS yet, only in preview: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/UserGuide/MySQL...
And latest 8.0 and 8.4 is supported at least a year from now.
Aaaannnnd.... I figured out last night that I don't need to go to 9, only to 8.4. Strangely, what version I needed to upgrade to from 8.0 was not stated anywhere in the mass of emails Amazon sent me. I hadn't yet gone on RDS and noticed that 9 is not on the list of options, I was just trying to build 9 on my Mac.
8.4 won't build in homebrew under Monterey, though, so I'm stuck with 8.3 for my dev stack. I guess I can live with that. I'm dreading the next forced upgrade.
I think it would be better to just use Docker/Podman at this point?
I was considering that route but was surprised that I couldn't find a version of Docker Desktop that'll run on Monterey anymore.
"macOS encounters an error or fault, but doesn’t report that to the user, instead just burying it deep in the log."
This is another huge facet of the problem. Not only does it hide glaring problems from the user and prevent him from taking action, but it prevents him from reporting it to Apple for potential redress.
Apple loves to hide information, with the excuse that it's "too scary" for the "average user." This has always been bullshit. If "the average user" is put off by information he receives, he can at least use it to consult someone who isn't.
iOS Mail is a great example. It can utterly fail to access your mail server because of wrong credentials or whatever, but it won't tell you. In fact, it'll claim, "Updated just now." So a day or two goes by and you've missed important work or personal E-mails before you even decide to investigate. This is obviously offensive, because Apple has decided that your work and your communications are less important than hiding their defects... which might not even have been to blame!
When you combine the glaring QA failures piling up with the obnoxious douchebaggery and law-flouting that Apple has engaged in with its app store, it's pretty clear that the company needs a major management housecleaning.
Apple loves to coddle and promote certain pets, who are often incompetent but for some reason curry favor with management. Look at the "Liquid Glass" fiasco and hideous UI regressions in Mac OS and iOS. This is what happens when you put an unqualified packaging designer in charge of UI at a company that's held out as the paragon of "elegant" design. Jony Ive was a pompous hack with one idea... or actually two: 1. "Thinner" 2. Less useful
We had a brief respite with his departure, but now... things might be even worse. And at a time when Windows has been degraded into unredeemable garbage... it's a grim outlook for popular computing.
I disagree with your take on that we should show all information to all users. It’s not always the case that they have someone on hand to help, and users do get anxiety when they do not understand or are presented with too many options. But what macOS should be giving is the full-fat answers and UI is asked for.
The rest of your comment I can’t argue against at all.
I'm not saying all information all the time. But when something fails, tell the user. Don't lie to them, saying "Everything's working fine!"
And if you don't show further details up front, provide the user a means to dig them up if he desires to do so. Otherwise, what is he supposed to do?
On the other hand, presumably Steve was happy with the insanity of the iOS settings app, where applications had their settings only accessible in another application.
Yeah, it half-ass made sense? Maybe?
I mean when the apps are small and have just a couple settings, you save having every app having a settings widget that takes you to another panel, etc.
(But a "Good" iOS app in my mind would still have a widget in the app to take you straight to the correct pane in Settings where you configure it.)
I kind of like the iOS settings application. If I want to change some settings for an application, I have one place I have to go to find it. I don't need to launch the app and try to guess where their designer decided to stick settings (probably buried deep in a hamburger menu). I don't have to guess whether a dark gray switch on a light gray background is "on" or whether a light gray switch on a dark gray background is "on" because the app's designer thought it would be cool to not use native controls.
I honestly wish this "central settings" app idea would spread to desktop operating systems.
> where I have absolutely no intension to upgrade from Sequoia
Beware of not upgrading accidentally, like i did... (dark pattern):
"The Software Update UI for Upgrading to MacOS 26 Tahoe Is Needlessly Confusing" : https://daringfireball.net/2025/11/software_update_tahoe_con...
KDE is so good. Every release they make tangible UX improvements to the point where now most subsystems are almost perfect. There's always been things where I think "oh well that could be better". The notification center, the kickoff menu, krunner, the desktop overview. And then it just got better and better.
The joy of opening a folder and type / to search a file inside.
Tahoe is SOOOO ugly! The huge rounded corners are atrocious. The fonts look terrible. The windows keep snapping, expanding and contracting with no obvious pattern. Yuck.
And iOS's transparencies are disastrous. They make so much of the test illegible.
I have updated as soon as possible and I if you asked me, I couldn't tell you what is different now. Everything I do on a daily basis still works exactly the same. If there are some weird more rounded corners somewhere now, I don't consciously notice them. The glassy effects look cool but after a week you don't even think about them any more.
> By 2035 I wonder if we'll be all running KDE or WindowMaker and the hell with modern OS GUI.
That is what I wished for back in the 2000's, eventually I went back to Windows starting with Windows 7, because I got fed up with laptop support.
As the main laptop OS, I never stopped having UNIX based systems on servers across many customer projects, or trying out the flavour of the month via local VMs, since hardware virtualization became a commodity.
its almost as if apple doesnt want to sell "trucks" anymore (as steve would say) and would prefer to morph macos slowly into a sedan like the ipad (cause that is where the money is)
tbh this is probably me in 2026 or 2027 i think...Windows IS also suffering from macosification
I call this "touchscreenification"
no, Windows is suffering from profiteering and corporate malignancy.
In modern parlance, iosification.
I like “intension” it’s like “intention” + “tension.” The act of planning something, but anxiously.
> By 2035 I wonder if we'll be all running KDE or WindowMaker and the hell with modern OS GUI.
Ironically, it was all downhill since KDE2.
I think peak KDE was version 3. A project called Trinity Desktop Environment aim to maintain it but I never really tried it for fear of realising those glasses are indeed rose tinted.
https://www.trinitydesktop.org/
Current Plasma is, in my opinion, the best desktop UX ever made - except maybe for windows 95/98, which is hard to compare on feature set basis.
It's basically a "when to rip the band-aid off" type of situation.
Briefly poked around w/ linux again for the first time in years (Omarchy, DHH's tune of Arch + hyprland), and hoo boy, it's come a long way! Nothing like the KDE/Gnome+X jankery of the olden times. Very polished, very slick, very nice.
I did try Omarchy on an old laptop and it was fairly painless to get started. I did develop an unease the more I read about DHH unfortunately and decided to bail.
If anything though, Omarchy shows it's not impossible to get a nice working environment on linux.
[dead]
> Steve would roll in his grave.
Steve understood better than anyone that having a finite amount of time to build means you can't please everyone. The vast majority of Apple's customers just do not care about the Keyboard settings UI or the clarity of unusual error messages.
Users do care they just don't have the words to explain what it is thats frustrating them. Just a silent "I find myself using this less" sort of thing.
Not for everything, but the excuse of "normies don't give a shit" is a bullshit one.
I wonder how many care that messages lights up like a Christmas tree on speed on iPadOS, battery life dropped 90%, calculator requires 32 GB of ram, offline maps stranded them in the woods, iOS can no longer keep two apps loaded at once, ocr screenshots broke, the magnifier “flashlight” button no longer fits on the screen, or the ai text suggestions in notes are simultaneously garbage and undeletable.
Those are just some of the bugs I hit. I’d guess most normal users hit 4-5 problems this upgrade cycle.
For my side gig I need to quickly take multiple pictures (with my iphone) of subjects that aren’t still or cooperative. This used to work fine. Now the camera just quits with no crash or notice so I think I’m taking pictures but I’m not. Closing the camera app doesn’t disable or stop the camera, I have to wait or reboot. But hey, I can take really cool photos I can view in the Apple Vision I don’t own.
In my experience Apple's software has been accumulating small annoying bugs for a couple years.
For a couple years I have been noticing regular new glitches in the Apple TV interface accumulating faster than old ones disappear.
Lately the glitch accumulation syndrome seems to have hit macOS. Notes has started doing random bolding, unbolding, changing text size on only one line, etc. After a restart, a finder window with tabs springs to different screen spaces, depending on which tab is open when I try to drop a file on it. Message sometimes draws a few lines of a message with a few pixels vertical and horizontally offset, so there is actual overlap of message parts.
Then there are chronic ones. Safari's save or print to PDF are notorious for not saving pictures you can see, even from reading mode. How are basic functions in Safari not worth fixing, for years?
Apple's HomePods ... for many years. I could write a blog of interesting Pod behavior. I thought having one or a pair in each room would be nice. No, more of them is not nice. Constant bizarreness.
The noticeable acceleration isn't encouraging.
> In my experience Apple's software has been accumulating small annoying bugs for a couple years.
They’ve never not been like this. They don’t know how to write software sustainably and don’t seem interested to learn. They add features faster than they fix bugs. Early on, it was masked by less frequent releases, but switching to an annual cadence made it more obvious. They worked around the problem once by focusing Snow Leopard on bug fixing, but they are just letting the bugs accumulate again now.
> They’ve never not been like this.
If you only look at their earlier 10.x.0 releases this is true.
But it was well known that you don’t upgrade to a new macOS on any non experimental system until the 10.x.1 release.
In the past (until the mid 2010s I think), if you upgraded to 10.x.1 you’d have a very smooth experience.
Seems like bad software design to make release versions an extension of betas. The "we'll fix it after release" attitude works in some cases, this is not one of them. At some point OS teams need to hold back releases to ensure stable releases and not just hope everyone will get the message to not update until a few versions later.
Outsourcing testing to customers feels like a pattern these days. Apple is not alone in this game.
You mean when they returned to annual releases. They only switched away from those for the span of a few years around the first iPhone release.
There were a couple Apple OS releases in the ‘10s where they were like “hey, not many new features and no big redesign, we mostly increased performance and squashed bugs”
It feels like we’re waaaay over due for one or two of those.
What’s really out of touch is how they don’t seem to think users would be excited for that. Literally nobody is enthusiastic for more complexity. Literally everyone hates the buggy, flaky mess on iOS, iPadOS, macOS. Maybe a working magical Siri would make an impact but Apple has prove definitively that they can’t build that ever. So, rather than ruining all the OSs further, just fire all the PMs and designers and let the engineers fix the bugs for a couple of years.
Actually, I think it's you who's out of touch here.
There's two awful colliding factors here.
1) People absolutely buy features.
I am in the Apple ecosystem, why? Because iMessage on my laptop, seamless copy/paste and the fact that it supports every bit of software I want to run.
2) MBA thinkers value features, for the previous reason. They can show that features move the needle of units sold. It's easier to quantify.
What you and I implicitly understand is that Apple has a captive audience, people will continue to buy MacOS (by virtue of Apple Hardware) for the coming few years at least.
The higher quality the software, the more performant and less buggy: the more likely we stay in the ecosystem longer. This will sell units in the 4-7 year timeframe for sure.
The more Apple focus on this, the larger their moat.
MBA's barely understand how to build a moat, other than monopolising a market by M&A.
> Because iMessage on my laptop, seamless copy/paste and the fact that it supports every bit of software I want to run.
This is a good example of a feature that is actually useful. But it is also one that has been around for a long time. Can you think of something more recent?
- Transparent text selection in images a few years back was the kind of magical thing I didn’t know I need, but now that I have it any platform without it feels broken.
- I haven’t had a chance to use it yet but Preview was just about the only thing keeping me on macOS for my personal computing, rather than going all iPad/phone. Now it’s on iOS, as of the (otherwise terrible, maybe my least-favorite iOS release yet and I hated 7) version. Provided it’s close on features, that’s one of the only things I’d have missed going iOS-only, gone.
But I can’t think of anything between those two.
iPhone Mirroring
Universal Control
> In my experience Apple's software has been accumulating small annoying bugs for a couple years.
A couple? That's the understatement of the last couple years.
> Apple's HomePods ... for many years. I could write a blog of interesting Pod behavior. I thought having one or a pair in each room would be nice. No, more of them is not nice. Constant bizarreness.
Yeah, these have quite the DIY / Jailbreak following I've noticed. They look like neat little devices for music and HA stuff, but I've read similar stuff to your comment.
Interesting. I have one HomePod and four minis scattered about. I can’t remember having problems with the hardware or setup. Siri, on the other hand, is a pain in the ass.
Mm. Here's my list from earlier in the year: https://benwheatley.github.io/blog/2025/06/19-15.56.44.html
No idea if 26 fixed any of this, I've avoided updating because of how poorly received Glass is in all the UI discussions.
I could also add to this that occasionally the status bar gets two not-quite-aligned-with-each-other copies of the time, connectivity icons, and battery percentage.
My current "favorite" bug is how contacts get randomly merged on iOS. I've called the wrong friend multiple times and it's completely unacceptable for such a basic and core function of iOS.
I have the opposite problem. Apple's respect for user privacy is great and the iMessage integration between devices is also great, so when I change device mid-conversation, the recipient now has messages coming from two places. My phone number, and my icloud email address. Thankfully the icloud email address I used has my name in it, so people don't totally get confused when that happens, but figuring that out was definitely a "broke the magic" moment for me.
Contact management is so painful still. Separate fields for first and last name? Also, I'm not really going to fill out each individual field for somebody's address on my phone! Let me just paste a blob into the card and the software should figure it out. But what's worse is that the contact sync between my mac laptop and my phone is all brokeney.
> I could write a blog of interesting Pod behavior. I thought having one or a pair in each room would be nice. No, more of them is not nice. Constant bizarreness.
Oh my fucking god, thank you. I have one in my kitchen and one in the living room, and every few weeks they decide it would be the bees knees to have a 3AM conversation with one another.
To Apple: People are complaining because they'd rather you fix it, than them having to leave the platform (moving OSes is annoying, because operating systems have a lot of lock in - data you'd have to move, apps you need to find alternatives for and re-learn).
The iOS / macOS 26 frustration I think is particularly felt by the HN type crowd. Don't want something that looks cool but is less effective/performant/usable. "We" can feel Apple's priorities drifting away from ours.
Side note: I wonder how much easier AI will make it to migrate between operating systems? Perhaps future AI systems that are good at computer-usage could manage migrations/installs well.
I coincidentally watched BasicallyHomeless's video on his 100+ day Linux experiment and he made a really good point: because everything on Linux can be done with the CLI, it also has a working natural language interface (Claude Code). He ran into several issues, such as sound (allegedly that's no surprise, but not my experience), and Claude fixed them all.
If it doesn't wipe your drive.
Still, interesting thought.
Yeah, setting up my router with VLANs/Firewall/NAT etc was so damn frustrating with Ubiquiti compared to the Mikrotik router I had before.
While I could just export my config file with Mikrotik and ask ChatGPT to make whatever changes I wanted in seconds ("here's my config, make a vlan 20 with all my iot devices") and get a fully working config back, with Ubiquiti you just get a bunch of inaccurate "click here and there" instructions back instead since the UI changes slightly all the time.
The switchover was still worth it, as the Ubiquity UI is nicer in daily use (and Mikrotik wifi sucks ass, so I had to use other APs). However, every time I want to change something I wish I had an easily ediable config file to edit, and get LLM help with, instead of a confusing UI to click around in.
With OpenWRT, it's likely even easier :)
Indeed, large language models have much easier time working with a real written language.
I wonder if the modern GUI conventions could be reliably translated to machine-understandable text representation, operated on, and then mapped back to the GUI picture.
Response from Apple: We know you have a lot of vendor lock-in, which is why we're doing this. We want shiny features to talk about to get people to buy their first Mac, and don't give a shit about providing a great experience for existing users because we know they won't leave anyway.
The current state does not feel malicious in this way to me at all. It feels bumbling and amateurish. It gives the feeling that the people who kept the product cohesive have left or retired, and that a new generation of overly ambitious careerists have entered positions of leadership.
I’m convinced leadership at Apple are not power users. They’ve never put MacOS through their paces, or did any development themselves it seems. If they did they would have found all of the bugs and irregularities and huge performance problems themselves.
Not this simple, unfortunately. Actually this is largely the mindset they have
What do you mean by "largely the mindset they have"? I think the comment you're replying to is right, most Apple execs probably have jobs that can be done entirely on iPads, so none of the complaints by power users about macOS resonate at all (and this group is sadly far too small of a minority to have any financial impact).
Their software lead definitely uses a Mac.
Yeah true, just wish there were more who did though.
I think any organization at Apple's scale has no shortage of skilled workers and ambitious careerists. But at the product level, I do believe that the result you see is generally an honest reflection of the organization's priorities.
If Apple wanted to ship a rock-solid OS, they could. They're just choosing to put those resources elsewhere.
>the people who kept the product cohesive have left or retired
This is everything post-covid. The competent people that could left and retired early.
The current environment is in some ways indistinguishable from COVID. The uncertainty of AI, forced RTO, and processions of layoffs have produced a terrible environment for retaining people who have the means to do literally anything else.
I feel like it says a lot, when intelligent amorality seems genuinely preferable to blundering incompetence. Many such cases. One wonders how much "enshittification" is intrinsic to networked software and our late-stage-whatever political economy, versus how much is a farcical byproduct of office politics and org chart turf wars.
The alternative for most people is Windows, which Microsoft seems hellbent into making worse and worse (I didn’t think that was possible but hey, here we are). macOS definitely sounds like the least of two evils anyway.
But what do I know - the year of the Linux desktop for me was 1996.
Win11 and OSX, and to a limited extent Ubuntu feel like they want to just keep selling you stuff.
You see.
It's not enough.
Buy OneDrive, Gamepass, Copilot Pro. This is a big part of why Microsoft is fine with all the sites selling 10$ Windows keys.
Otherwise you might try Linux to save money.
Buy a Mac, you need Apple Plus Deluxe. You need iCloud, etc.
Ubuntu only tries to upsell you via Ubuntu Pro, I guess it's not as aggressive though.
Ubuntu Pro is still free for personal use on up to 5 physical machines, which covers my small home network just fine. It is annoying that they withhold security updates unless you fork over your email address, but I don’t recall them trying to sell me anything since I made an account
Until AI can vibe-code a stable, secure global menu bar for Wayland I'm stuck on macOS for a while.
there's some ubuntu/gnome thing that replicates the worst features of the mac.
but here's the real question: why? the global menu bar is literally the most dated and outmoded element in macos. it isn't 1993 anymore. your computer can run more than one program at a time. a globally modal application focus is completely ridiculous. the only thing more ridiculous than a global menu bar is a global spinning beach ball mouse cursor. these are relics of the past and have no place in a modern, multitasking, multiprocessing, multiprocessor, multiscreen computing environment.
moreover, the things that matter, browsers and terminals, don't even have normal menus anyway.
kde plasma is superior in all ways. stop wasting time with weird outmoded 1993 era computer interfaces.
Browsers and terminals have "normal menus". Some examples would include Vivaldi and iTerm.
I agree though that placing it on top of the screen (as opposed to the window to which it applies) doesn't make any sense. Windows actually got that right with MDI way back in the day, if you remember how menu merging worked there.
However, there is an unexpected upside to having the menubar there even so. Because macOS apps can't not have a menu bar, they are forced to expose their commands there. Which usually ends up being a more stable UX compared to all the moving around of buttons in the window itself, plus you can search the menus.
> However, there is an unexpected upside to having the menubar there even so. Because macOS apps can't not have a menu bar, they are forced to expose their commands there. Which usually ends up being a more stable UX compared to all the moving around of buttons in the window itself, plus you can search the menus.
that is not nothing- but maybe a vestigial training wheel for onboarding a generation onto single application guis. maintaining separate stacks of applications and then document windows within applications (as is done with the global macos window switching keyboard shortcuts) also feels clunky and more suited to an outmoded (har) ui paradigm.
I like it being in the same place
Sounds like the revived Unity/Unity7 still has a global menu bar, and there's a version called UnityX with Wayland support.
https://9to5linux.com/unity-7-7-desktop-environment-to-get-a...
https://unityd.org/unityx-7-7-testing/
https://gitlab.com/ubuntu-unity/unity-x/unityx#manual-instal...
Can AI vibe code a way to get a macOS keyboard layout, basic shortcuts, and macOS-style emacs navigation in gui text boxes across the OS, on Linux? Last I checked all of that is pretty much impossible to achieve without accepting a ton of jank and some parts of the system where it doesn’t work (even the keyboard layout thing!)
Yeah you can, there's packages like xremap and input-remapper where you can define custom keyboard re-mappings. To replicate the Emacs key bindings from macOS, you can bind Ctrl+F to right arrow, Ctrl+E to End, etc. I even re-binded Cmd+C to Ctrl+C so I didn't lose any muscle memory from years of macOS shortcuts. Obviously requires some upfront time but once you get it working it works very well in my experience (and the keyboard re-mappings work at the input event level, so it works across all applications automatically).
Are existing menu bars unsecure? Or unstable?
While I love their hardware, this is why I will always chose a Linux distribution over anything closed source. Being able to retrieve logs of pretty much anything and change pieces of the OS as time goes on is extraordinarily resilient.
Sure it's sometimes not as shiny as MacOS, and it will most likely never be polished enough for the mainstream market share, but there's something really awesome about not being reliant on a support engineer that does not have the financial incentive to spend the correct amount of time solving a one off problem.
Plus, resources like the Arch Wiki just don't have alternatives on macOS.
The Arch Wiki is an amazing resource! A hat tip to anyone who edits that. In fact, I think it's worth kicking a few bucks their way this holiday season: https://archlinux.org/donate/
MSDN used to have some excellent guides for doing all kinds of debugging, configuration, and tweaking of Windows. Somewhere around Windows 8.1 the website got updated and now most resources are either gone or unfindable. I do occasionally come upon some (badly auto-translated) version of those old guides, but download links and links to more information are all 404.
It's a real shame.
> rush to get the next version of macOS out of the door
That’s the key I think. Apple these days never releases when products are ready, but on a predefined schedule. Point releases that should fix things, are actually delivering more features that were shown on the keynote, but didn’t quite make the main release date.
As a result the systems accumulated some bugs that might never get fixed, unless the code happens to be completely rewritten. The desktop switching animation is hopelessly long when using keyboard shortcuts with ProMotion enabled. On both iOS and macOS the Music app will have an audible click couple of seconds into the first played song when using lossless quality. Stuff like these is known and reported, there’s just seemingly zero bandwidth to handle it.
20 years ago, I was excited to get OS X updates and each one made the system better. When Software Update showed something new, it was always going to be good.
At the same time, Windows Update was an anxiety engine.
Now Software Update has mostly become what Windows Update was. Uninteresting security patches. Each new major update makes the interface worse and adds new bugs or drops old hardware.
Actually Windows would be much more lovely if MSFT keeps the Windows 7 core and just release security fixes and bug fixes. In the forseeable future, 64-bit should be enough. And I already had everything I need on Windows 7.
Windows audience will always be split between the people that loved it for what it is (Win7), and those who tolerate it as long as it plays nice with everything else (*nix subsystem, latest hardware etc)
The win7 audience is IMHO shrinking the fastest, while the other camp has nowhere to go and is less demanding, making it an easier customer base.
<rant>I've never had confidence in MacOS or Apple software in general, and especially not in Apple Photos. Photos beachballs constantly, even when I do simple things like creating a new folder or naming a photo. It loses keystrokes almost every time I type a folder or photo name. No other program does this on the same Mac, which is an M4 Pro with 64GB RAM and terabytes of SSD. I know that it's not a problem with the hardware because the previous Mac Mini, which was well equipped, had the same problem for years. Reconstructing the Photos database didn't help.
Don't get me started about how Time Machine drops files — important files like the Photos Sqlite3 database — from backups.
Yes, I should switch from Photos to something else, e.g. Immich.
I barely use the software included with the Mac, and would only use Linux except that there are still just a few programs or bits of hardware that insist on there being a Mac or Windows machine somewhere.
How Apple every got a reputation for high-quality, user-friendly software is beyond me.
Not recommended.</rant>
Apple’s reputation for user-friendly software comes from the 1980s, when Windows was very primitive and when the Mac’s biggest competitor was MS-DOS, which was never known for user-friendliness. To be fair to Apple, Apple worked very hard to establish well-conceived UI guidelines and to ship representative software such as MacWrite and MacPaint to show how Mac software should behave.
In the 1990s Windows gradually improved, and Windows 95 was on par with Macintosh System 7.5 in terms of features and ease of use. It even had its own UI guidelines. Windows 95 was one of the factors that led to Apple’s troubles in the mid-1990s.
Even though it took over four years for the purchase of NeXT to lead to the first client release of Mac OS X in 2001, Apple distinguished itself from Windows PC vendors in other ways, such as ease of installation and Apple’s pursuit of the “digital hub” where the Mac was the center of a digital lifestyle involving music, digital cameras, and digital camcorders. This was the era of the iPod, iPhoto, iMovie, GarageBand, and related software.
Of course, Mac OS X solved the Mac’s long-standing stability issues, and Mac OS X also came of age when the Windows world was suffering with malware and security issues.
In my opinion, the Mac peaked in the mid-to-late 2000s, where Mac OS X provided users a solid operating system that was easy to use, and where Macs came bundled with a variety of apps from Apple that made it easy to do a lot of tasks many computer users care about, such as organizing music and photos, as well as editing music and videos.
Then came the iPhone and the tremendous profits that came from the iOS ecosystem, and with it came Apple’s shift in strategy, from the Mac being the digital hub to a hub focused increasingly on iOS and Apple’s cloud services. The Mac hasn’t been the main focus, and in my opinion the decline of Mac software is a reflection of Apple’s focus shift.
This is a really nice summary of the history of Mac OS (in both its incarnations).
While Mac OS X in the mid-late 2000s may have been a technologically superior operating system to Classic Mac OS, it was never as easy to use. The loss of the spatial Finder [1] along with the very strong UI consistency of Classic Mac OS apps (including 3rd party apps) left non-power-users behind forever. However, like everyone else in the operating system space, Apple didn't have to care about that because the browser took over and these users stopped doing things in native apps.
Classic Mac OS still can't be beat for working on projects in visual media. The persistence of the spatial Finder is so rock-solid that you can develop muscle memory for where icons will appear on the screen when you open a folder. This allows you to anticipate where they will be and move the mouse toward them before you can even see them (the zooming rectangles animation helps with this).
This method of working exemplifies the core philosophy of what the "desktop metaphor" was all about: having a spatial relationship with documents and tools on a physical desk lets you move your hands and eyes independently, grabbing and interacting with things without having to look at them. Apple worked extremely hard to bring this "illusion" to the Mac OS and no other operating system (including Mac OS X in all its versions up to the present day) has achieved this.
That's because the spatial illusion is very fragile and must be maintained with extreme care. Any loss of persistence (a window opening in a different place, an icon that moved or changed colour) shatters the illusion and puts the user into a defensive, "hunt and click" mode. Imagine cooking or working in a workshop and having someone re-arrange all your utensils or tools while you're away. Your entire workflow gets disrupted and your performance suffers.
Power users survived this disruption (in Mac OS X onwards) by moving to the keyboard and the Terminal, which have the rock-solid physical persistence of the keyboard itself to back them. Any time Apple tried to mess with the keyboard they got a ton of pushback from power users (see the touchbar on older MacBook Pros).
[1] https://archive.arstechnica.com/paedia/f/finder/finder-3.htm
As much as I love Jobs-era Mac OS X, particularly Tiger, Leopard, and Snow Leopard, I wholeheartedly agree with you: there’s something about the classic Mac OS and its ecosystem of applications that felt truly like “a computer for the rest of us,” one with very well-considered user interface guidelines and principles. While Mac OS X was undoubtedly a major improvement in terms of stability and infrastructure, it is not as easy to use as the classic Mac OS. Once again, this is from a lover of Tiger, Leopard, and Snow Leopard.
The good news is that recently Photos has stopped beachballing for me (≈170GB library). It now just crashes instead.
Photos is definitely not great, though I still try and deal with it for the easy iCloud syncing. Some examples off top of my head for Photos crappiness, all on my top of the range 128GB macbook m4 max
- doing 'cmd-R' (rotate) on a standard few-megabyte image might beachball the app for a few seconds. Rotating a small image file...
- Rotating a video seems to re-encode the whole video, instead of setting some metadata flags. Imagine you have, say, a 20GB video recording, and rotate it. That will now be a separate new 20GB file on your mac drive.
- If i view the album of some specific person that has many pictures with location metadata, and I scroll to the bottom where the map is, it almost immediately starts allocating >100GB memory, beachballs, starts gigabytes of memory paging, and you gotta kill the app asap.
Easy syncing? Kinda. It works, generally, eventually.
No progress, no indicators. And what little status you get has no connection to reality.
Will it sync? When? Who knows? You’re on WiFi with a full battery and charging? So? Might be a minute, might be an hour. Oh, you restarted Photos? Who cares? Not Photos.
They'll get there. Sometime.
Storing photos in a database was the first design mistake. These should be files in a folder. I know why they did it, to fuck over iPhone users who don't have a mac, but the added complexity of that is just absolutely not worth it.
Photos does store pictures as files in the folder. The .photoslibrary is a package (which is just a directory) you can open and pictures are stored in originals/.
It's possible to look at the behavior of a company over time and infer their internal incentive structure. It's been clear for several versions of MacOS recently that Apple spends much more energy adding features than fixing bugs. It seems obvious that there is no incentive within Apple to fix bugs; the only thing that gets one promoted at Apple must be adding new features -- so bugs (at least in MacOS) don't get fixed.
We already know that Apple makes about 51% of its revenue from iPhone sales. Therefore it's reasonable to assume promotion opportunities are mostly centered around iPhone hardware and hardware, rather than MacOS. Those of us who depend on MacOS are likely screwed unless something at Apple changes.
Having read Showstoppers a few times, I wish Apple had a David Cutler that mows on developers' asses if their code is too buggy.
Kinda all large system projects need someone similar to get things done properly.
Once having validated that it was not the product manager, or whatnot manager that decided that it was good enough to go, yes, sure, but are developers given the time to root out bugs?
Apple has completely lost the high ground it earned during the OS X high times, paired with the relentless innovation of the iPod and iPhone. If they were smart they would focus on refinement in this era of gradual and boring innovation, so when the next thing is ready, they have a solid and trusted platform to support it. As things stand, if the next thing comes tomorrow, the next generation could easily jump ship. They may have the people who are too lazy to learn something new and will survive like Microsoft has. But at this point there's nothing substantially different about the company that told us to "think different".
I dual boot my M1 Mac Studio with Fedora Asahi Remix (native Linux for Apple Silicon for those unfamiliar). I'm far more comfortable and productive in Linux for development, but wanted to keep macOS there for times when I needed it.
It turns out I haven't needed it, and I honestly don't remember the last time I've booted into macOS on that system.
I like Apple hardware, but the last time I enjoyed using macOS was pre-2010.
I do the same thing on my M2 Air. But it's still annoying that Asahi drains the battery so fast when the computer sleeps.
What does Asahi lack for M1 boxes? I bought a used M1 pro and is itchy to try it out!
The two big things missing for me are fingerprint scanning and 120 hz display.
Thanks, looks like fine for me at the moment.
Would love to see them do another OSX 10.6 and just release a version with lots bug fixes and no new features. But instead it'll be a new half-baked LLM tool to help you make new half-baked LLM tools.
“People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.” — Alan Kay
It's ironic after fighting the good fight for so long and finally making their own hardware that Apple should fall on their own sword with software now.
I've been loving Apple since Tiger, I'm still on Sequoia and iOS 18.
Pepe prayge for the 27-releases to be another Snow Leopard as rumored.
This isn’t the first time Apple’s been in this situation. The first PowerPC Mac was released in 1994, but core elements of the classic Mac OS remained written for the Motorola 68000. Pink/Taligent and Copland never panned out. It took until Mac OS X to be released in 2001 for PowerPC Macs to receive an operating system that was fully made for it, and even then Mac OS X undergone successive performance improvements. By then, it was time for the Intel switch. Snow Leopard’s was Intel-only, so PowerPC Macs cannot go beyond Leopard.
Is it true there is a rumor about the next release being mostly a bug/perf fix?
Apple iOS 27 to Be No-Frills ‘Snow Leopard’ Update, Other Than New AI
https://archive.is/puYFU
What’s interesting is that I recently got a MB Air after being away from Mac since ~2019. The touchbar on the keyboard and awful keyboard quality drove me away.
Now I return from having spent the intervening years with an Ubuntu laptop and Windows 10 desktop as my daily drivers at home and Windows 11 at work for the last year.
MacOS is so much better than any of the alternatives. Maybe the bar really is just too low but that’s my experience.
The grass is not greener on the other side.
> MacOS is so much better than any of the alternatives
> The grass is not greener on the other side.
Openbox does everything I need it to. I don’t want Mac or Windows, they both suck in ways I can’t change.
Sure, Linux can be rougher, but at least I’m not helpless here. I can make the changes I need, and the software is generally less broken IME.
> The grass is not greener on the other side.
One can still legitimately complain that the grass of their particular backyard is getting ungreener by the minute.
> touchbar on the keyboard
Didn't they get rid of it a couple of years ago?
That was one of the reasons I even considered getting a new MB Air yes; I certainly wouldn't if they'd still have those.
The Air never had the Touchbar. Only the Pro line had it.
Yeah I don’t recall ever seeing this on Windows in fact I can still run Win 95 games (yes, those exist) on Windows 11. Mostly[0] works. I can go and install games from my original CDs which shouldn’t be possible but a bit of toothpaste on them does the trick.
Things just work for the most part because backwards compat is hardwired into the folks at Microsoft. Someone did a YouTube video not too long ago installing MS-DOS all the way through Windows 11, upgrading version by version.
[0] Mostly.
I love how both MacOS and Windows users are reaching a point of no return.
Last week I finally decided to jump to Linux. While I realize that I have a few nits and annoying bugs I run in to, its hard to say if linux has any more than the mainstream offerings.
As much as I have endless, white-hot disdain for the web-appification of everything, it does end up working out when Linux runs every popular web browser just as well as the two main commercial operating systems. (I forget if DRM works on Linux, but eh. DVDs exist.)
DRM kind of works, but you don't get full DRM. But then again, I'm not sure you get that even on Windows. I believe full resolution streaming typically requires a smart TV or equivalent box.
Linux is not monolithic, if you have a buggy component you can replace it. With the exception of the kernel of course. I think we're entering the era of personal desktops.
My take on macos. It's the less bad of the three. It's not bloated as windows, not susceptible to break as Linux and the desktop is more coherent.
Sure it ain't perfect but it's quite better that the other 2.
I've been using Macs in various forms since the 80s and I've carried a Mac laptop with me nearly full time since the early 2000s. While I don't think quality is necessarily overall worse than a decade or two ago I have run out of patience for rewrites with major regressions of most of the apps I care about. For the first time in a lot of years I have a Linux laptop along side my Mac and, if all works out, I'm planning to shift all my important workflows over.
I started experiencing this several years ago with MacOS including file copies that failed with no notification from the finder.
I switched away from MacOS at that time.
My last job we were given MacOS machines, I didn't experience anything that made me want to reconsider my decision to ditch MacOS as my daily driver.
I totally agree with most of the article, but the hallucinations bit puzzles me. If it’s genuinely an unchangeable limitation of the product (as hallucinations are with LLMs) it’s good to set the right expectation rather than making promises you can’t deliver on.
It doesn't matter to the end user if hallucinations are an unchangeable limitation, the fact that they happen undermines the confidence that people have in them as a tool.
I've wondered the same thing as the author about why we even call them "hallucinations." They're errors, the LLM generated an erroneous output.
The LLM doesn't produce erroneous output, its generated tokens fall within the statistical limits of the preset configuration, unless some kind of bitflip messed up the model in memory somehow. An LLM doesn't tell the truth or answer a question, it just spits out tokens. Its training doesn't involve validating whether or not the output forms a true fact or statement, but rather if the output looks like one. For the same reason, an LLM cannot lie, because an LLM doesn't have any intention, nor can it tell the truth. That level of thinking is beyond the capability of an LLM.
The term "hallucinations" are an anthropomorphised interpretation of valid output that's factually incorrect. It happens to people all the time (the human brain will make up any missing memories and subconsciously explain away inconsistencies, which only becomes obvious once you're dealing with someone with memory problems), so it feels like a decent term to use for garbage information produced without any ill intent.
The problem lies with the AI companies convincing their customers that the output generated by their tools is probable to mean anything. Probability engines are sold as some kind of chat program or even as some kind of autonomous agent because the output comes close enough to pass the Turing test to most people. LLMs can only mimic intelligence, interactivity, or any other kind of behavior, they cannot actually think or reason.
If people knew what they were operating, the "hallucinations" wouldn't be a problem. Unfortunately, that would take out most of the confidence people have in these tools, so you won't see the AI salesmen provide their customers with reasonable expectations.
If I write JavaScript that outputs “5+5=55” we would rightfully call that an error regardless of the implementation details. But when an LLM does it, you’re saying it’s not an error, it’s “generated tokens that fall within the statistical limits of the present configuration.”
My point was that, from the perspective of the end user, this is an error. If ChatGPT was described as a “random text generator” then sure maybe this wouldn’t be considered an error because “5+5=55” is random text. But that’s not what 90% or ChatGPT users expect nor how the app is marketed, it’s marketed as an Artificial Intelligence Assistant.
Exactly, it’s like getting mad at Isaac Newton because the root finding algorithm doesn’t work on particular functions or something. Like, the issue is not the algorithm, it’s that your expectations were incorrect. This is not an all-knowing machine, it’s a “what would a human say” estimation function.
Similarly, anyone who claims that LLMs in their current form are going to achieve AGI sounds like Newton bragging that he had solved all of math.
> It doesn't matter to the end user if hallucinations are an unchangeable limitation
Of course it does. I don’t go around complaining that my stove burns me when I touch it. Anyone who knows anything about LLMs at this point knows not to do anything mission critical with them and that’s a good thing.
You are not allowed to tell the truth about LLMs, it is simply outside of the current Overton window. In a year or two, this will be retconned. I guarantee it.
You are allowed, it just won’t get you VC money. Hell, Ilya Sutskever went on a podcast like a week ago and said transformers were coming to a dead end and he still has a multi-billion dollar AI company.
There's actually a better format than Safari web archives hidden in the Safari Debug menu: Save Page Complete.
This saves the individual files of the site in standard format, html, js, css, etc., much like Chrome does with Webpage, Complete.
With the AI vision tools we have these days, I just export to PDF. At least within the Notes app, the search feature also searches the contents of PDFs.
Or just use SingleFile (https://www.getsinglefile.com)
This guy nailed exactly what’s wrong with macOS IMHO.
Yup, Eclectic Light is legit, probably one of the top power-users of macOS:
https://eclecticlight.co/mac-problem-solving/
Err…no. He’s often wrong and not great at fact-checking :(
My least favorite thing on the Mac is when they have one of their infamous negative number “error codes” in the alert box, and I get my hopes up that at least it must represent a common thread of errors others have had that may be solved in a forum or subreddit somewhere, then when googling that you discover that all forms of failure from disk full to malware result in the exact same oddly-specific error code and that everyone is talking to each other about it and slowly realizing they have nothing in common but being cursed by Tim Cook.
If I recall correctly, many of those are "Carbon-related" errors and mostly represent legacy baggage of Mac OS.
Not defending the design, but this website is sometimes useful for disambiguating OSStatus error codes: https://www.osstatus.com/
> Silent failures like these are least likely to be reported to Apple.
They might be, but unfortunately Apple's MetricKit reporting system is extremely primitive when it comes to crashes. It can't even handle C++ exceptions, and important information like thread/queue names, CPU registers, stack area and app state are strangely absent.
The ridiculously bad crash reporting on Apple products is why I wrote KSCrash.
Apple doesn’t use MetricKit themselves
My first hand experience with the deterioration of quality in MacOS: I bought a Mac Studio to run some traditional ML neural network type stuff with PyTorch. Unfortunately the GPU / MPS kept crashing (?!) and would require a full reboot of the computer to get working again. Without a reboot, PyTorch would not find a GPU / MPS device and random other apps would glitch. After finding nothing in logs and no information about how to debug anything related to MPS, I contacted Apple Support. Apple support was completely unhelpful and a very frustrating experience. It felt like they were laundering responsibility through the veneer of some engineer having glanced at whatever internal second hand report the support staff transcribed from me. The situation improved a bit after upgrading to Metal 4, but in the end I moved back to Tensorflow. It's very disappointing to spend $6k on a machine and the software doesn't work as expected.
System reboots should show up in logs, did you check the usual locations?
The irony is that we all independently decided QA was a “process smell” around the same time. The logic seemed airtight: developers should own quality, shift left, test in prod with feature flags, move fast. Every tech blog and conference talk said the same thing. What nobody mentioned is that QA teams weren’t just finding bugs—they were the institutional memory of how things break.
When you dissolve QA and tell developers “you own quality now,” that knowledge just evaporates. Each developer tests the happy path for their feature and calls it done. The edge cases? The interaction effects? The weird state machines? Those all ship to prod. The really insidious part is the metrics looked great. Velocity up, deployment frequency up, cycle time down. We were measuring output, not outcomes. Exec dashboards showed green across the board while user experience quietly degraded.
Now we’re in the equilibrium state: software ships fast and breaks often, every deploy is a dice roll, and we’ve normalized “hotfix Friday” as just how things work. The velocity gains were real, but we were measuring distance traveled, not value delivered. Turns out “everyone owns quality” means nobody owns quality. Who knew.
It’s interesting because Apple actually has a ton of QA people, and they do their job more than well enough. Any bug you file is nearly guaranteed to be a known issue in someone’s backlog or another.
But Apple ships on a schedule. A project’s code is either on the train when it departs, or it’s not. Promo packets depend on shipping, so you take the bugs, and you assign them to next release.
Bugs don’t stop releases, features just occasionally get punted. For every public feature you saw at WWDC that gets delayed because it’s not ready yet, probably 3-4 things shipped with known bugs that just weren’t important enough to punt the feature, so they just ship with the bugs.
QA is not the problem at Apple, because they know about the bugs. The culture of “we ship in September no matter what, nothing holds up the release” is the cause.
A trillion dollar company is never going to “hold up a release”. That culture is never going away.
Your point should probably culminate in “they need to stop promo’ing for features and start promo’ing for performance and stability”. It’s the only way to satisfy the competing constraints at play.
During my army days, the sergeant major always seem to know where we would fail to clean during inspection standbys, eg the top rim of doors. Part of it is a hazing ritual, but it also means if you know where to look, you know where people will consistently fail. As an SRE who previously had to manually inspect changes and releases, I quickly learn what to check for, and saved many production issues from happening, but I guess nobody will know about the failures that didnt happen, but they will notice the delay I introduced and the inspection process was automated together with the CD system and I am cut out. Fingers crossed the automation is as thorough or can learn common failure modes.
I've been in your position before, and it is indeed thankless. So, for what it's worth, thank you for all of the disasters you prevented. I believe you, and I appreciate it.
There was a trend of devs being their own QA.
Also devs being infra (devops).
Also devs being PMs (product developers).
Also devs being managers (flat orgs).
Also devs being facilitators (rotative scrum masters).
I wonder why expertise is being lost.
This also leads to devs burning out, because you’ve listed a bunch of jobs most programmers hate, whether or not they happen to be able to do them well.
That causes churn, which further erodes expertise.
Yup.
And dealing with the product of any of those topics half assed by a non expert colleague is cause for burnout too.
Pipelines that fail, poorly thought tests, badly written docs… Which reminds me I forgot to add technical writers to the list.
But Apple still has a separate Q&A team, and didn't fold them into the main dev roles like Microsoft. There's job openings listed on their website right now.
Was a trend?
We didn't decide it was a process smell; management saw a lot of expensive mouths to pay, and decided they could get away with cutting those people by making up some nonsense and then making the remaining staff do more work for the same pay. This happens over and over and over again, and every time, people fall for it.
Bring back specialization. Bring back paying experts for their expertise. Bring back one person having one job.
It's a case of high trust, high skill structures not being maintained while trying to introduce outsourcing and minimum viable skill lower cost employees.
The idea of owning your own quality only works if you can trust the dev to understand quality, and want to implement it. Independent almost adversarial QA is required when you can't trust the devs.
I think the move to more test-driven development has made everyone a little bit overconfident. I've seen pull requests merged that pass all tests, but still end up bug-ridden. There's just no substitute for human eyes looking over the changes.
The Devs that 'know how to pass a good QA' are rare. I was lucky in that my first shop involved 'Make it easy enough for a person who thinks Internet Explorer might mean the AOL Icon to them' and my second shop involved a glorious QA that used to do QA for USAF [0]
If anything I'd argue that the 'Shift of QA into Dev' was a first step to the role consolidation and job enshittification we see today.
[0] - I still recall the time where I had a 'bad' bug and he told me "look, nobody died". It was a good benchmark set for understanding "I need to know how dangerous this -could- be."
This comment smells like LLM
Does it? Interesting, I thought it was a pretty robust take with specific parts I hadn't seen before. Perhaps the phrasing/sentence construction is a little stilted, but conclusions-drawn wise it seemed good to me. Maybe AIs are getting more incisive, maybe you just don't like GP's writing style. Who knows?
I've been using Gemini 2.5 pro a lot, and it sounds a lot like it
It’s possible for a woodworker to build a table which reliably does not collapse, even without having a third party test it.
It’s equally possible for a different woodworker to build a table which will collapse when deployed in a customer’s dining room.
The difference comes down to which woodworker I’ve hired, and how they’ve been trained.
If you can’t trust a woodworker to ship a table that stands under its own weight, layering on third-party QA isn’t really going to fix the underlying problem.
That said, cargo culting the “no QA” model is ill-advised. If a particular dev shop needs QA today, they’ll probably need it tomorrow.
Bad analogy I think.
A table is a table. It has one core function. An argument can be made that it could be built in a way that a chair can't be pushed against it for example. But the number of such cases for a table are infinitely smaller than the number of edge cases and unexpected interactions a software system can have.
QA is a way to catch those edge cases that a single developer cannot find because of various reasons. One such reason is that devs are very close to their work and they might subconsciously not trigger the unhappy path in their code.
Testing if a table works is vastly different from testing a software system.
The analogy conveys that QA is not inherently necessary to build and ship things that work.
It also paints a picture of a scenario where requiring QA would be more of a red flag than a best practice. It seems a tad silly to imagine a woodworker nailing boards together so they look like a table, then passing to QA to determine if the table is “good enough”, then having QA ship it back with defect reports. But this is exactly what many less-mature teams end up looking like.
You make a good point about unexpected interactions.
I’d argue the question for software isn’t whether QA Bad or QA Good. It’s at what level of complexity does QA become necessary. Most software teams aren’t dealing with all that much complexity (or, more specifically, inherent complexity that can’t be designed away.)
> It’s at what level of complexity does QA become necessary.
This is a good point. My answer would be that it depends on how many depend on the software and what is the tolerance for unintended interactions that users discover?
Based on which domain the software is written/deployed in, this answer will be different.
Third party QA should be able to simulate the customer's dining room. If the table collapses during testing, they will file a bug. It's up to management whether to ship anyway.
Tahoe has been giving spinning wheel on Firefox browser since updating it. You switch from spotlight to Firefox, there's the wheel; leave computer alone for sometime and comeback there's the wheel. I want this mess fixed.
Similarly on iOS, Safari bookmarks don't expose all folder names but only "Bookmarks" and "Favourites" as default. Why do I have to do another extra tap to expose a single folder that I have to save bookmark in? Why cannot at least five folder names be exposed? Another absurdity is while saving a fullpage screenshot after cropping it, you have to click the checkmark "emoji" which is otherwise blank with no description, and then comes a sub-menu to save as pdf or photo; why cannot those four options be presented as is on the main menu?
> You switch from spotlight to Firefox, there's the wheel; leave computer alone for sometime and comeback there's the wheel.
You are definitely not alone:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1979283
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1982717
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2002102
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1995973
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/961898
While there are a few overlapping/similar issues being alluded to in those threads, it definitely seems like something is going on re: task switching. There are also a couple of tricks mentioned that might fix some specific issues related to bookmarks or graphics acceleration, but no silver bullets so far.
I have similar issues with Firefox on Linux, I don't think it's a macOS exclusive problem. Unfortunately it's hard to tell which problems are caused by which component when all of them are unreliable enough that they could be the culprit.
The Firefox issue sounds like a Mozilla issue, not an Apple one. It’s not like Apple doesn’t ship betas for developers to catch issues like that.
> Over the last few weeks I’ve been discovering problems that have been eroding confidence in macOS.
As we move forward, we're probably going to discover more hidden gems in the Apple’s ecosystem because, apparently, it's a serious crisis that is not going anywhere anytime soon.
You might be also interested in these related submissions:
Apple's Software Quality Crisis (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43243075)
What Happened to Apple's Legendary Attention to Detail?(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45685551)
I moved back to Arch Linux after my 11 months old MBP died and took over a month to get it fixed. Not really looking at going back to macOS. There are no aspect of the Apple OS that I miss and Linux desktop just works nowadays.
I'm hearing this sentiment EVERYWHERE. This latest version of the OS on desktop and mobile, is aesthetically a disaster. Users requested none of this glass stupidity, they hate it, and there is no way to turn it off. Between that and the CEO gifting a participation trophy to our authoritarian felon "adjudicated s-assaulter" president, most people I know with a conscience are pretty much done with the platform and looking forward to the next opportunity to bail.
> "MacSecurityBriefing.pdf" can't be opened because it is from an unidentified developer.
I think MacOS stopped you from executing unsigned code pretending to be a pdf, which would be a very good thing.
macOS doesn’t really know the difference between running something and opening it.
> You’re eventually advised to reinstall macOS or, in the worst case, to wipe a fairly new Apple silicon Mac and restore it in DFU mode, but have no reason to believe that will stop the problem from recurring.
This isn't new. Back in GPU-gate days, I had a MBP that I could very reliably kernel panic due to that issue. But it'd pass Diagnostics so "no fix for you!"
Even when I was there with a Genius, we did this, and on a brand new install - look, here, can replicate this KP (which was basically some of the same steps people had for identifying the GPU (and everything else matched up).
I've been on Apple since the 1980s. Apple IIc was my first Apple.
Since a few years ago, I've chosen to stay at least 1 full version behind the current version and I've never regretted that.
I picked the same strategy for Windows. I remember I was still on 2000 when XP is hot, and still on XP when 8 is available, and now I use 10 and this is going to be my last Windows as 11 is too shitty and I suspect 12 and beyond are going to be worse.
If the error message happens to include a numeric code, OSStatus.com is sometimes helpful if the issue if they didn't bother with a localizable string for it.
Why do so many blog posts have such involved exposition, and then suddenly end?
Seems like the author was building to a point and simply decided to end it early.
Not 100% related, but I remember when OS...8? came out with balloon help, and one of the guidelines for it was that it should provide specific messages for when a menu item or control is disabled, to explain why the feature was disabled. e.g. on the Copy menu, "Not available because nothing is selected"
Reporting an error is a good thing.
Latest MacOS made my laptop speakers unusable
Apple hardware is absurdly good. Airpods, amazing, redefined what wireless headphones are. M-series macbooks, amazing, new benchmark in performance per core and battery life. Plenty of older products too that either created the category or completely dominate it.
Apple software, on the other hand, feels like a totally different company. Stuff like Siri is miles behind the ball, things like Airplay (IME) are flaky with little recourse when they don't work, Liquid glass is slower feeling and a noticeable battery hog. Apple music still has more hiccups and random play stoppage than Spotify.
I really, really like the hardware, but apple software needs some competition. Half of the features in the last 2-3 iOS releases were in Cydia over a decade ago.
> Airpods, amazing, redefined what wireless headphones are.
Airpods are a cash grab solution to a problem that Apple created, and nobody actually had before. They are the exact opposite of a good product; they are Apple squeezing money from its captive audience. If the iPhone hadn't dropped the headphone jack nobody would've bought Airpods, thus the jack was killed.
To be fair though the switch to wireless earbuds and headphones helped advance that market quickly. That applies to all of the companies in the space. It's also been so nice to not have to deal with tangled wired earbuds or headphones. Removing the jack was a band aid that needed to be ripped eventually, and Apple just happened to be the ones to do it. There is a reason the industry followed. Even when they didn't have their own product to offer.
> If the iPhone hadn't dropped the headphone jack nobody would've bought Airpods, thus the jack was killed.
My understanding was Apple wanted to get rid of cables entirely if they could. It's one of the major pieces of waste and the reason EU forced USB-C on everyone.
Personally I find the airpods great. I use the noise cancellation to sleep.
Yeah, I’m not going back to wired headphones, like, ever.
Totally agree.
> Half of the features in the last 2-3 iOS releases were in Cydia over a decade ago.
And I don’t even care about the features. Just give me stability and reliability. Don’t bluntly break what was working before. Spend some time on bug fixing. Please, Apple.
Who are these people making all of these garbage UX decisions? Surely many lurk in HN. Don’t they ever push back against ridiculous design changes for changes sake?
Or do they just not care?
>> the next step is to contact Apple Support
Did you ever check Apple support forums? The issue reports just go into blackhole without response or with useless robotic replies.
> Did you ever check Apple support forums?
I have. There is a whole power-mod clique over there that just turned me off using the site.
I posted about how to get Launchpad back as the spotlight feature is frustrating to use.
One of the mods posted suicide watch to my response. Asked if they were bot or what were they on about. My post got deleted and their post got edited.
Then I had another mod telling me to "suck it up" and it wasn't just a response directed at myself. When I said it wasn't constructive they responded with insults and deleted my post.
It was all surreal and totally messing with Apples brand.
It must be exhausting and stressful being an OS dev or dev team. I haven't experienced any of the troubles that are referenced here; and, the one complaint I've had over the years was resolved, like, on the very next update.
I use my mac for IntelliJ and Firefox. I guess maybe my usage surface is just really, really small; but I basically never have any problems ... and then others come along and say they're having huge issues.
I see the various updates as they happen and like ... all of them are neutral or minor inconveniences that are resolved next patch, for me.
Must it?
Very few of these complaints existed when Apple had a more reasonable update schedule for the Mac releasing a new update every 2 years or so.
The Mac’s current update schedule isn’t being driven by the needs of the OS or its customers but by the need to align with iOS.
They might have been fewer, sure. I haven't followed Mac issues as, again, I haven't really seen them, outside of the huge ones that get fixed quickly and are whole events.
But, operating systems can be interacting with thousands of different types of components, monitors, external graphics cards, keyboards, mice, printers, etc, in a whole array of different configurations. Nothing like Windows or Linux experience, of course; but not a small number of different situations, each of which can impact the machines in strange ways. And I imagine that's quite hard to track down. You can minimize it, of course, but it's not nothing.
It's pretty depressing as well as frustrating, watching something pretty solid get flushed in real time. This post puts words on it I hadn't really, but fading "confidence" is a really succinct foundation. There's no single massive thing just completely fubar'd, but the cumulative effect of hundreds to thousands of mysterious cuts combined with that now familiar sinking feeling of watching GUI bikeshedding accelerate with each new version, every more miserable, less useful, no more Feelings Of Delight at seeing some cool little attention to detail or nice new thing that clearly had some real thought and testing behind it. It all really eats away at one's day. I'm seeing this HN post and article literally right as I'm watching Activity Monitor and trying to figure out WTF is going on with mysterious ApplicationsStorageExtension (a plugin buried in the StorageManagement.framework) tasks spawning 4x on a Sequoia Mini M4 Pro and doing constant disk churn to no discernable purpose and introducing massive latency to certain file system access patterns. This started up out of nowhere in the last few weeks, almost exactly 1 year after getting this machine and with no major system upgrades. Why!? Who knows! Force quit them all and other stuff like MailStorageManagement goes nuts for a bit and then it settles down for an indeterminate period of time. Restart the computer and it goes away for awhile. No FS corruption issues found, seem to be no issues with spotlight. Sigh.
After decades using macOS and significant investment the barrier to change is significant too, even if there was some ideal thing to jump to which there is not. But like others I am chipping away at it where I can, slowly divorcing from the Apple ecosystem, going ever more heterodox. I can see people reaching tipping points at various places, might take quite awhile but the thing is once someone jumps ship you're probably never getting them back and eventually that can add up to them taking others with them. It's just such a damned waste too.
Isn't there a rumor that the next MacOS/iOS update are going to focus on reliablilty and fixing bugs? I think everyone would like that.
I hear Linux is hot these days.
I have an on-again-off-again relationship with macOS - the deep integration with Apple hardware is stellar and IMO the new MacBook Airs are tremendous value for money, but otherwise the OS seems to be suffering from some deep technical debt and MBA-brained decision-making.
I'm currently on the "meh hardware but solid OS" phase of the cycle - the battery life isn't as good and waking from suspend still (somehow) isn't as seamless, but my Linux of choice (Silverblue) is predictable and transparent - and ultimately if there's a problem it's in my gift to fix it, which is much more comforting to me.
I wonder what they'll do to woo me back next time..
Last weekend I was writing some quick notes in the Notes app, and I could not get it to stop performing nonsensical completions in blinking yellow text. Apple Intelligence disabled, predictive text disabled, various combinations of backspace escape etc. Nothing worked. How hard is it to code a Notes app that doesn't mess with you?
I had to factory reset my Mac because inexplicably Siri, Spell Check, and Apple Intelligence were "disabled by my admin." I have no MDM. I am my admin. I spent roughly a month delving through logs trying to resolve it.
"Mr. Jobs reportedly asked the assembled engineers and other MobileMe team members, “Can anyone tell me what MobileMe is supposed to do?” When one of those employees then volunteered a satisfactory answer, Mr. Jobs followed up with, “So why the fuck doesn’t it do that?”
(source - https://www.businessinsider.com/steve-jobs-mobileme-failure-...)
I feel his pain. Some of those error alerts make me want to sob.
Reporting problems to Apple is downright demoralizing. Most of the time, the bugs remain unassigned, unread, and unsolved. The few that do earn a response, are usually gaslighting.
I suspect that Apple may have hired a whole bunch of less-than-stellar people, and it’s showing. That’s depressing, because I always considered them to be the gold standard.
macos feels dated these days to me.
it's time for a clean slate.
I couple of months ago, I wasted about 4 hours debugging issues with my app. Command-line scripts didn't work properly for some reason, while my IDE worked fine.
Turned out that I either missed or accidentally denied the permission to access local networks for iTerm. So the `curl` utility installed from Homebrew was silently failing, while the system-provided `/usr/bin/curl` worked fine. Because it has special permission from Apple.
Can I just give the same permission to iTerm? Nope. We are not worthy of that power, and must re-affirm permissions every 30 days for all non-Apple software.
Oh, and these permission popups happen at random moments, including during presentations or meetings. And if you don't accept them, they are silently denied.
> Can I just give the same permission to iTerm? Nope. We are not worthy of that power, and must re-affirm permissions every 30 days for all non-Apple software.
Not sure what permission you're referring to or what your curl script is trying to do but `/opt/homebrew/opt/curl/bin/curl http://www.google.com` works just fine on Tahoe from both iTerm2 and ghostty. Looking through the various permission grants, the only one they both have in common is "App Management". They share some file permission grants, but where as iTerm has full disk access, ghostty only has Downloads and removable media. In the past I've found I've needed to add terminals like iTerm to the Developer Tools permission, but ghostty isn't in there currently and curl is still working just fine. And in none of these cases have I ever needed to re-affirm the permission every 30 days.
Any chance you have "disclaim ownership of children" setting enabled in iTerm? Maybe if iTerm is not allowing child processes to use its own permissions, you're having to re-authorize curl specifically (and it's getting updated about once every 30 days?)
> And if you don't accept them, they are silently denied.
This is IMO the correct behavior. If something asks for permission and it's not explicitly granted, then the default should always be denied.
> Not sure what permission you're referring to or what your curl script is trying to do but `/opt/homebrew/opt/curl/bin/curl http://www.google.com` works just fine on Tahoe from both iTerm2 and ghostty.
Mwwahahaha. Yep. Curling something neutral like google.com worked fine for me as well. That's how I was verifying that everything was OK.
Now try to do "curl https://192.168.0.1" (or whatever is your local router's IP). It will trigger this request: https://imgur.com/a/tMAApfB
The permission in question is called "Local Network", you can find it in the "Security" section in the control panel. Yeah, their names don't match.
Oh, and negative entries are NOT listed in that panel. So if you deny the request, there is NO indication of that. Anywhere. Logs will also be empty.
> This is IMO the correct behavior. If something asks for permission and it's not explicitly granted, then the default should always be denied.
The keyword is SILENTLY. The permission requests should be logged and made available in a central location, where they can be reviewed.
It's literal recursive WTF. When you start looking at it, it gets worse and worse.
So I thought that might be the dialog you're talking about which is why I thought it was weird that ghostty didn't have it and curl seemed to work just fine. I also could swear that it did show you rejected apps in the list just with the permission turned off.
After experimenting a bit, it seems like:
1) You're right that it doesn't show the rejected apps in the list. Seems like the only way to find that is to query the tcc sqlite db.
2) The permission does apply equally to the built in `curl` as it does to the homebrew installed curl.
3) What it doesn't apply to apparently is the gateway address on your network, regardless of which app you use.
4) It also doesn't apply to all "private" IP space addresses, just ones that are on your subnet. So for example, I have an IOT subnet on my network on its own VPN with a route in the gateway for accessing it from some specific devices on the primary LAN. Without the permission, I can ping and curl (with both the built in and homebrew versions) all of the devices on the IOT subnet. But I can't ping or curl (again with either version) any of the devices on the LAN subnet. Turn the permission on and I can hit everything on the local subnet fine from all the devices.
5) I also validate that the above rules are true even for an application (alacritty in this case) that had never been given permission (in case setting and then removing the permission did something odd)
> The keyword is SILENTLY. The permission requests should be logged and made available in a central location, where they can be reviewed.
This I agree on, the rejected apps should show in the privacy permissions, even if in a collapsed tab/pane so that you can review later. I could swear it used to do this, but maybe I'm thinking of iOS which does do that.
> 2) The permission does apply equally to the built in `curl` as it does to the homebrew installed curl.
I think this might have been fixed? `codesign -dvvv /usr/bin/curl` no longer prints anything about permissions. I definitely remember investigating this particular point.
> 3) What it doesn't apply to apparently is the gateway address on your network, regardless of which app you use.
Doesn't work for me. I can't ping or HTTP into my gateway from a terminal app that doesn't have this permission.
Edit: apparently pinging the gateway works if you're on WiFi. But not with wired Ethernet. Wow.
This permission is so weirdly named and scary, and the applications never tell you why they're requesting it... on iOS it would be against the developer guidelines...
Yep. MacOS is against the iOS guidelines.
Because it's a macOS dialog, not something that is controlled by applications.
BTW, what's even worse is that this permission is utterly useless. A malicious app can just use the system `curl` to bypass it.
Meanwhile, the genuinely scary "Accessibility" permissions that allow spying over the entire system are granted once and never need to be re-approved.
I know this might seem stupid as I don't own a Mac, but does Darwin use systemd? Can the author use journalctl, syslog or check /var/log?
It has the thing that systemd and journalctl are poor clones of.
Their ergonomics (especially the log viewer) are much worse than sysvinit/syslog, but they mostly work.
I say “mostly”, because, like systemd, sometimes force disabling a broken service silently fails, even after reboot.
Darwin uses launchd/libxpc. journalctl's job is handled by the `log` command, with appropriate predicate filters to winnow out the relevant stuff from the chaff.
> does Darwin use systemd?
No.
My first exposure to Macs was a Macintosh LC II, with System 6.5. It felt unusual, and the one-button mouse felt very limiting, but the interface felt logical. Even if I would not agree with certain design decisions, I could not fail to notice that somebody had thought them through, and made things coherent. Window management was clunky, but at the time it was clunky basically everywhere. (I missed some niceties of TurboVision UIs though.)
Another time I had to work on (and even develop for) a Mac exposed me to System 9. Again, the interface felt unusual (in a different way), but it was very obvious that somebody had thought it through, and made things consistent and discoverable. Drag everything onto everything and see what happens! Sometimes very neat, and much richer than Windows 3.x or CDE.
I loved the first releases of OS X, it was a real Unix at the foundation, and also a really nice, beautiful GUI on top, snappy even on the translucent triangular Macs. I adopted WindowMaker on my Linux machines, and kept to it for some years. I even hoped that OpenStep would help build some semblance of a new common GUI language across the platforms. Sadly, nicer window management I was used to under Linux did not materialize on Macs yet.
Over about two decades since, I was periodically issued a Mac at work, and grew less and less happy with the direction the UI was taking. It became more and more showy and bulky, even though it kept enviable consistency and polish for quite some time. I wished that the UI could do its job and fade away, but it insisted in taking more and more screen space, larger graphics, etc. It rather stubbornly refused most customizations, like selecting a different color instead of the signature silver / platinum / gray, and the Apple's signature blue accents. Only in 2018 the bastion of gray finally fell.
Last few years made things so much... less ideal that it was finally not only me who complained, but even die-hard Mac fans. The prized consistency, coherence, and, well, integral vision started to deteriorate openly. As if there's no single person who oversees the whole GUI experience and keeps it aligned any more. Not as bad as Windows, but... And, well, still no good window management, not even window snapping (except to screen edges, since quite recently). Still no "Alt-Tab"-like switching between windows (not apps). I bet that that feature has been requested by users countless times. No, go use Showtime, or whatnot.
And, yes, the whole signed binaries thing. I understand why it may be beneficial for quite some users. But for a developer, and in general for a user of software not from App Store, it's increasingly annoying. Well, it incentivizes building stuff locally from source. Publishing binaries is effectively $99/year though, AFAICT.
Compared to that, I'm pretty happy with my Linux Xfce setup. It allows me to customize the UI to my heart's content, and it adjusts to my workflows, not the other way around. Yes, I spent some noticeable time on these customizations, but that expense is amortized over at least 20 years (yes, my configs evolved mostly uninterrupted since 2006 or so). When I have to use a Mac, I sometimes try to find equivalents to some of the niceties I have under Xfce (not the most elaborate DE), and mostly find explanations saying that it's not possible on vanilla macOS and I should not want that. Third-party or open-source software sometimes helps quite a bit though; I'm very grateful to the authors of Hammerspoon and Rectangle.
In short, I'm only a sporadic and involuntary user of macOS, and my lack of desire to switch to it only grows with time, despite the superb hardware Apple offers.
(Thank you for reading my rant.)
Can we have Scott Forstall back now.
I wish that could happen, but sadly Tim Cook’s ego wouldn’t allow that and I don’t think Craig Federighi would want his kingdom to be torn apart (I presume he had a big role in getting John Giannandrea to be pushed out of Siri and retire).
Scott Forstall was fired for a lot less compared to the mess that Apple’s software is now.
[dead]