Hacker News Reader

Comment by gcatalfamo | Hacker News Reader

No useful new features for power users...I am a bit disappointed.

What would they look like? The main things I'm interested in is stability and compatibility, anything else is a bonus.

I have to admit, I hate the expression "power user", it so smug and self righteous.

Much better PDF search. Swift 3. Clipboard sharing for people for whom iOS is a productivity system. PiP for entertaining the kid in the lap of the power user.

I guess you won't be buying it then.

The update is free?

Is that a statement or a question? Yes, it is free.

I don't know why he asked, but I was confused about your statement. I wasn't sure of your intent. Were you asking if the user "did not buy it" metaphorically? Or were you suggesting that because the update is free (therefore impossible to buy), users should restrain (or properly frame) their criticism?

1) It's free. It's not like they took something from you.

2) You don't have to install it.

3) If you don't like it, move on and quit bitching about it.

The latter - and you expressed it a lot better than I did.

I don't get your sarcasm. It's free, what is there to buy?! I have been using it for roughly 12 hours and, as I said, it's kind of underwhelming in terms of new features. It's not "bad" in any way, it just doesn't feel fresh or more powerful unless you are longing for iOS features on a desktop OS.

> It's free, what is there to buy?!

Yes, that was my point. The idea was to poke fun at your expressed disappointment at this free update. However, I forgot that to attempt sarcasm on the internet is never a good idea. And that also my comment was poor contribution either way. Sorry.

As a fellow Apple power user, I share your sentiment regarding the sarcasm. It seems like a change happened in the past few years that to love something, means to love it unconditionally, to the point that you must be blind to it's weaknesses and flaws. Blind to the point that to acknowledge them or, gasp, speak of them, is sacrilege. That's a movement I simply can't buy into. How can anything improve if it can't even acknowledge and be honest with itself about what it's weaknesses and failings are?

Introspection isn't always pleasant, but it's quite often the path toward becoming something better.

The irony is that if Apple had simply said "there will be no update this year", people would probably say "fine, the current OS is good enough for now". But when they do make an fairly small update, it is "disappointing" because it didn't add much. It's neophilia - always wanting "new stuff" for its own sake, even though what we have is pretty good.

A useful criticism would point out exactly what desired additions or changes were missing from the update. However, I'm mainly seeing a lot of general disappointment vaguely around "lack of newness".

No, I wouldn't say it's fine and haven't been - my HN comment history will attest to that. OSX is showing it's age more and more every year. Yosemite. El Capitan. Sierra. You may as well have labeled them iOS integration package 1.0, 1.1, and 1.2.

I have to install at minimum 10+ 3rd-party apps on a clean OSX install just to reach baseline feature parity with other modern operating systems these days.

Which 10 apps would that be, if I may ask??

This is the entire list from my last install: http://pastebin.com/raw/hrYYMJPi

The base apps I almost always start with are:

- Moom (advanced window management)

- Hyperdock (window previews when hovering over dock apps)

- Amphetamine (stop mac from sleeping)

- Alfred (app launcher on steroids)

- FormatMatch (fast toggle copy/paste behavior to include or not text formatting)

- TotalTerminal (drop-down terminal like Quake's console)

- TotalFinder (dual-pane functionality in Finder)

- Radio Silence (simple outgoing app firewall, less annoying than Little Snitch)

- 1Password (everything OSX's keychain should be)

- Parallels (virtualization, it's still a Windows world)

I install Chrome, Keepingyouawake, spectacle, f/Lux, littlesnitch, MSOffice, atom, iterm2, Xcode and a few others. Many are either done via homebrew or the App Store. Be cool to have a new thread for people's "must have" apps.

Sure, here's the entire list from my last clean install:

http://pastebin.com/raw/hrYYMJPi

Curious as to what other operating systems come with that bevy of tools, since you said "I have to install at minimum 10+ 3rd-party apps on a clean OSX install just to reach baseline feature parity with other modern operating systems these days."

Oh, no, definitely not. You're right, that would be absolutely ridiculous. The base 10+ apps or so I mentioned earlier are listed a bit further down in this thread here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12555847

That said, Linux is looking more and more appealing every OSX release and with how much I use it already via docker containers, virtual machines and the like, that will probably be my next move if Apple continues removing power user features from OSX while letting software release quality continue it's decline. There are some amazing open source alternatives available for the vast majority of apps on that list that I've been testing for months now as I honestly don't believe Apple really wants to change to meet the needs of yesterdays power users anymore.

And thank goodness for that. Who says I want those 10 things handled the same way you do?

If Apple hadn't released an upgrade, we wouldn't all have to go through the time of upgrading, fixing apps that are broken (or finding new versions, etc). There is a cost to all of Apple's users from OS upgrades, and we can be annoyed that we are spending that time / energy and getting nothing of value back.

Fair point that.

I started the upgrade this morning, took a shower and when I came back it was done. Logged in and clicked a couple of buttons (activate Siri etc) and everything was just like I left it when I started the upgrade. I could jump right back in. Perfect.

> It's free, what is there to buy?

A new Mac for those on an unsupported one.

No I won't, I spend the day downgrading my machine back to El Capitan (first time I've ever done an OS downgrade).

Also, unless things improve rapidly, my next machine won't be a mac.

You were so offended by lack of new features that you actually downgraded?

I suspect there must be more to it than that.

No, I downgraded because cocoa builds of emacs randomly crash (fixed in git head), as does TeXShop (not obviously fixed yet). Also some other apps weren't running because of gatekeeper changes I didn't bother to investigate seriously.

The lack of new features meant that I had no motivation to try to fix my problems / run git heads of software / figure out gatekeeper.

My El Capitan upgrade failed, and I wound up having to do a clean wipe and install... Which wasn't too bad, except I happened to be on vacation, and the wireless where I was staying went out and did the install tethered to my phone (that was an expensive phone bill).

Ever since an upgrade to yosemite corrupted my partition, I never ever do upgrades on vacations (nor do I upgrade when it's just out)... I don't trust Apple's QA enough

I'm also seriously considering moving away from macOS after a decade.

The hardware situation is ridiculous and macOS isn't as stable and streamlined as it used to be.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com