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Comment by neilpanchal | Hacker News Reader

I just got one. I’m blown away by the speed as well. Chrome runs insanely fast! Alas, it’s not developer ready yet. Brew is a mess. Docker doesn’t work. PyCharm is WIP although can use x86 version. I was skeptical of the hype but this little laptop has made me realize how slow everything else is.

Unfortunately, while the hardware has accelerated far beyond expectations, the software - specifically MacOS BigSur is a major step backward. So many fucking animations. Everything feels fluid like operating in molasses. The UI changes seem to be shoe horned into a desktop that doesn’t need giant white space for fat fingers. Menu bars are twice as tall taking up precious space. Top bar was already crammed with a lot of icons. Now, they’ve made them sparsely spaced by adding padding between the icons. Everything is baby-like with rounded corners and without borders. Segmentation UI elements are no more. I want to ask Apple’s UI team: WHY!? What is currently wrong with macOS Catalina UI? Until you can satisfactorily answer that, there shouldn’t be any change. Stop changing the UI like you’re working at Hermès. It’s not fashion. If the reason is to unify everything, all screen sizes, then you’re sacrificing all three. Perhaps making it easy to develop apps for all 3 platforms is a plus, but as a user, this all feels like a regression. I’ve lost hope in modern UI engineering. It’s not engineering anymore.

I want macOS that has a UI of Windows 95. That would be totally insane on Apple Silicon.

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> Stop changing the UI like you’re working at Hermès. It’s not fashion.

Of course it is. Our phones are intimately close to us. Physically, cognitively, socially and even emotionally. They may be the most widely-owned intimately-connected object humans have ever invented outside religion.

Our computers don't occupy as close of a niche. But they're in a similar space.

I agree with your observation that the new OS feels like molasses. I wish they went for a "snappy" feel. (Though keyboard shortcuts get around that.) But ignoring that Macs and iPhones are objects of fashion as well as computing devices misses a deep part of what Jobs saw that technologists missed.

Well said.

I think the beauty of the iPhone lies in its elegance, but I suspect I'll always code on my Linux computer.

But one can choose to ignore fashion and wear comfortable clothes.

Apple has chosen to make everyone live in its crazy world. Letting users skin the OS would be a better choice.

Usual answer is: go buy other vendor product.

Judging from HN posts that's what a lot of people are doing

Judging from news about sales and profits that’s what a lot more people are not doing.

Letting users skin the OS would be a better choice.

There's a huge amount of skinning going on with iOS 14 now [1].

[1]: https://mashable.com/article/how-to-customize-ios14-home-scr...

I'm surprised they're getting rid of long held keyboard shortcut conventions though. Previously, modal popup options (i.e. for saving docs) could be selected via Option-letter, i.e. "Save _a_ll" could be selected with Option-a. Their new popups which may or may not be prettier force you to either use the mouse or turn on "Use keyboard navigation to move focus between controls" globally and tab around. Neither of these options is as elegant as being able to select what you want with a single command.

In Apple's defence, I've been exclusively a mac user (work and personal) for going-on eight years now and I had no idea about the Option-letter shortcut. I've always found keyboard nav within modal popups confusing. I consider myself lucky if hitting Space selects the primary button. Doesn't sound like the change is necessarily an improvement, though.

Wow, I didn’t know about that either. And yet Windows 95 had this solved: just show the shortcut letter underlined and/or bolder.

Even Windows 3.11, NT 3.51 did this... and my Atari ST... probably windows 1.0 even because a mouse was not always guaranteed to be attached and/or working on early PC's. In my case in the mid 90's I remember I sacrificed the serial port the mouse was attached to run another modem for dial-in access to our officer on NT 3.51 server... THAT tought me fast how to get around a windows desktop with the keyboard - and it impressed me you could access everything - switching windows, menus, etc without getting "stuck" . With a mac, your computer would be useless, or at best infuriating (ie using some plug in to slowly nudge the pointer around the screen with arrow keys....)

Apple never did a good job with this. Probably because their GUI machines always came with a mouse. Microsoft Windows was always mouse optional; the 'settings' panels are a lot harder to use with a keyboard than the 'control panel' settings were though.

MacOS used to show the keys when you held down the command key, but they foolishly removed that a while ago.

I agree: this kind of thing is infuriating because it's such a slowdown to have to go touch the mouse and find the pointer on the screen. Really interrupts the workflow.

The stopwatch consistently proves it takes less time than using the keyboard. Apple's HCI research showed that people "lose" the time it takes to hunt and acquire the keyboard shortcuts.

So don't use it? Why prevent people from using their computer how they would like.

assuming you're referring to https://www.asktog.com/TOI/toi06KeyboardVMouse1.html, I find this dubious for a number of reasons and would like to see Tog's methods and data. for example if I want to cycle through undo, I can hold down command and hit Z and shift-Z as many times as I want, as quickly as my fingers can press the keys. acquiring the menu item for this over and over would get tiresome quickly. similarly with opening new tabs and switching between them. I suspect his data only holds for inexperienced users using typical shortcuts in typical applications, not for expert typists who spend all day with their hands on the keyboard. the amount of complicated text manipulation I can do at speed with keys in emacs and vim would be absolutely infeasible if I were clicking through some massive menu.

> Apple's HCI research showed that people "lose" the time it takes to hunt and acquire the keyboard shortcuts.

This may be the case for "casual" computer users, but not for "power" users.

I always found that study unconvincing. I am sure there are people who need to look at the keyboard but surely anyone who leaves their hands on the keyboard all the time and never looks down finds the keys instinctively.

> It’s not fashion.

For the most part, you are correct. Yes there are design trends, but that isn't the primary factor here. Staff designers have to justify their existence by making changes to established design patterns. They don't have to be good, just different.

Bonus points for following a public design trend, but so long as the visual diff is big enough, you get your pay check.

> Staff designers have to justify their existence by making changes to established design patterns.

Yet another example of the bullshit jobs David Graeber warned us about.

I think Apple continues to push the manufacturing precision of their devices. Some of the bezel gaps and tolerances are impossibly precise and tight. That's a positive change on the axis of luxury.

There is an orthogonal axis - which is functionalism. You can continue to make products that are both luxurious and functional. See Olivetti (Sottsass), Braun (Rams), Herman Miller, Vitra, USM, etc. I think they are pretty fashionable products if we considered their popularity and some of them are in MoMA as iconic designs. Apple seems to be going negative on the axis of functionlism past few years. What if I told you that you don't need to make something look ugly to make it functional, utilitarian and usable?

I think they can make UI very marketable + functional if they hired the right folks. In fact, Apple is going back to skeumorphism (hey, its called neuomorphic UI now). Have you seen the battery icon? This kind of trend chasing without any purpose is my main gripe. Also, the windows 95 comment was sort of tongue-in-cheek to exemplify how bloated modern operating systems have become.

Agreed. I wrote a whole post on Apple and fashion. I'm sympathetic to the complaints about Apple's obsession with aesthetics, but the obsession is certainly motivated by what people want.

https://horriblyunderqualified.com/posts/apple-and-fashion/

> but the obsession is certainly motivated by what people want.

that may be true, but businesses would be keen to also give us what we need more than just what we want... thats how you get "faster horses" vs the automobile

The proximity is exactly why I don’t want it to change.

>> Stop changing the UI like you’re working at Hermès. It’s not fashion.

> Of course it is. Our phones are intimately close to us. Physically, cognitively, socially and even emotionally. They may be the most widely-owned intimately-connected object humans have ever invented outside religion.

"Phone" =/= "UI"

but that said, I'm actually puzzled as to how "fashion" plays such a central role in your model of human society. Even if UI was the fetish object (which it is not) in what sort of cultural matrix does the core fetish object mutate constantly "like fashion"?

Brew is only slightly a mess, in my experience.

I've installed brew both in the historical /usr/local location as well as the future home of /opt/homebrew. I then created these two aliases:

  alias armbrew="/opt/homebrew/bin/brew"
  alias intbrew="arch -x86_64 /usr/local/bin/brew"

My PATH selects for programs installed in the /opt/homebrew location first and then /usr/local. I try to install with the ARM version first with `armbrew install -s <PKG>` and if it fails, I move to using the `intbrew` alias as normal. I haven't really had any issues.

It's obviously still messy but not in a way that is too bad!

Running iTerm/Terminal in Rosetta allows it to work without issue, it's the best solution until more packages work natively under ARM.

Duplicate iTerm.app, right click & "Get Info", check "Open in Rosetta". Now install homebrew how you would on an Intel Mac and everything will work.

This certainly works but then everything I install runs in Rosetta2. I'd prefer to run as much native as possible which is what my "two brew" solution gives me.

I've been using MacPorts instead of Homebrew. It seems further ahead on the Darwin AArch64 transition. About 80% of things that I've tried have worked without trouble. Unfortunately, ffmpeg wasn't one of them. I got that working yesterday with libx264 and libx265 integration. Oddly, libx265 installs fine under MacPorts but libx264 doesn't. But I was able to download the latest from git and build it and copy it manually to /opt/local.

It’s pretty trivial to disable most animations (and more importantly transparency!). I’ve been doing that on new MacOS installs since Jaguar and it only takes a few minutes. If you want to move quickly you’re probably already using keyboard shortcuts and ignoring the dock and toolbars.

For less technically adept users (ie. most users) the animations and spacings mostly seem to help them understand what’s going on. I know everyone has their preferences, but I don’t really get the level of griping that accompanies every release.

The animations on the iPhone are what made me return to Android.

On iPhones, you can only "reduce motion", which still has the "moving through molasses" feeling, replacing them with a fade in/out. Can you truly disable most animations in MacOS, or are they simply replaced with fade in/out animations?

Counter point: I only just noticed my iPhone animates things after I read this comment and went to find some.

Animations used to be ~2x slower, /that/ was painful. It's much better now, though I could go with another 2x speedup personally.

Wasn't it the case that they used to prevent touch interactions until the animation finished? I remember moving to iOS from android in 2017 and being really annoyed at that, but they fixed it in like iOS 11 or 12.

They used animations as loading times, not bad UX to prevent you from staring at a blank screen, or waiting for an app to open, thinking the phone didn't register your action.

AFAIK the workspace switching animation can't be disabled.

You can pick between a “swipe” animation and a “fade” animation.

While I won’t go that far, arguing that macOS with a Windows 95 UI is a good idea, I do agree that Big Sur’s current UI is a mess.

Traditional macOS users valued the Mac user interface deeply, and IMO that was why while iOS 7 got a big refresh, macOS got a much smaller one, only with flatness refinements. Big Sur feels like the iOS 7 for the Mac, and I’m very sad that I’ll have to wait at least 4~5 years to see the new interface improve in a better state.

Some of my key annoyances (except for bugs):

* The new control center now requires more clicks, but due to the padding getting bigger, I can’t put all of the shortcut icons in the menu bar

* The new control center and notification center’s UI is so foreign from other parts of the macOS. It’s just… so custom.

* There are now multiple variants of the title bar thickness, and all of the Apple apps now use all four. It just feels ugly. The title ban of the Photos app and the Calendar app are almost the same — why does one use a .unified one and one uses a .unifiedCompact one? And why does Safari uses a .unified one when it doesn’t really have any information to convey?

* This is from Catalina, but the NSSwitch stuff collides with checkboxes… but well I’m guessing that’s for Catalyst trying to look native

I can go on and on… but my general feeling of Big Sur’s UI is that it would take multiple years to make this better.

I don't even care about the UI flourishes and whatnot, I just want them to observe their own HIG and preventing 3rd parties from abuses, and that would be a huge win.

It used to be that focus stealing on OS X was a cardinal sin and now no one cares. If they only fix a single thing in the entire OS, it should be this.

> The new control center and notification center’s UI is so foreign from other parts of the macOS. It’s just… so custom.

Apparently it’s all SwiftUI, which makes it look strange and animate weirdly.

This is actually how I feel about modern iOS too. Why is it a swipe there, a modal there...none of it has a rhyme or reason that makes sense to me. Ok, to get what I want here, do I need to force push, swipe, or tap some icon somewhere? There’s no consistency, everything is hidden, and each little thing to use the OS better is a “trick.”

On my personal iPhone, you swipe from the bottom to get Control Center, and on my work iPhone, you swipe from the top corner. If you want to send the output of one program to the input of another, you click share, move past a bunch of Contacts and Airdrop etc that I don’t think I’ve ever used in this way, swipe left/right to find an app, don’t find it, and either need to click an “Add” or “Other” button OR you need to swipe further down to click More..., until you can select thing you actually want.

I have so many gripes with the whole system. I almost believe that they are trying to make the thing harder to use so that they can create a dark-pattern around feeling a sense of mastery...but when I was trying to walk an elderly relative through the menus over the phone, it became especially obvious just much specialized knowledge the iPhone requires in order to do the very most basic of things, and almost NONE of it is discoverable.

> Traditional macOS users valued the Mac user interface deeply

I'm on the developer side and I don't know if I count as traditional macOS user but I've personally bought 3 macs (including the current M1 one) and use another mac from my company to work.

IMO I have almost 0 interaction with mac user interface. My time are either spent in terminal or in a browser. There's little need to 'interface' with whatever UI mac comes with.

I love mac mostly because of its hardware form factor and its shell. I can't tell you any GUI gimmick despite using it as my main driver for years.

I do agree that Big Sur’s current UI is a mess.

When I installed a beta of Big Sur this summer, at first I was taken aback by the interface… and some of the application icons were pretty bad.

Now that Big Sur is my daily driver and it's more polished, I've grown to like the new interface—and I didn't think I necessarily would.

I can't understand why a company obsessed about thin minimalism can't apply the same thing to their OS.

The thing is, I just don’t see the problem. I upgraded from Mojave last week, noted that the UI is slightly different, and… that’s it. Everything still works fine, the UI looks a little more similar to the iPad, and I figured that was probably the main reason - since people will be running iOS apps on Macs going forward, there’s been an effort to introduce some more consistency. I find it incredibly hard to get worked up about it.

Have been on big sur for a week now and I don't see the issue either. Things like the control center are a huge addition and mostly the ipad like changes were to border radii and colors unlike the windows 8 disaster.

> I want macOS that has a UI of Windows 95. That would be totally insane on Apple Silicon.

So much this. I used to run Windows 7 in classic mode and really liked the low footprint, no nonsense appearance. Windows 10 has no such mode.

I wonder if we will see Linux support

Linus on the topic: https://i.redd.it/0c7c4h2t9u061.png

That's not really on this topic. What linus wants to use personally has little bearing on what architectures linux will (eventually) support.

Edit To clarify: i mean, linus is saying he wouldnt go to the trouble personally, not that he would reject a patch adding support. Those are two very different things.

How is "Apple may run Linux in their cloud, but their laptops don't ;(" not on topic?

Edit: It's not like Apple has any (commercial) interest in working with the Linux kernel developers to ensure support/compatibility even if the M1 is ARM based.

Edit 2: Don't get me wrong, if Apple announces they will support Linux I'll run out the door and buy one now, as a MacOS user.

Edit 3: And this is a criticism against Apple running Intel x86 chips. Do you really think the M1 future is looking rosy for Linux?

That didn’t have anything to do with the UI which was the topicp

Scroll up, I responded directly to this:

> I wonder if we will see Linux support

Do you really think the M1 future is looking rosy for Linux?

I think fairly soon, we'll have Linux running nicely on Apple Silicon Macs, using the hypervisor built into macOS. And it will run faster than comparable Intel machines.

Apple gets the importance of Linux and Docker for developers; I'm pretty sure it'll get worked out.

I hope that hypervisor eventually "becomes the os" -- such that macOS or linux or whatever "collected set of software that needs to think it has an ownership relationship to hardware state" can all run on top of essentially the same hypervisor provided hardware abstractions ...

Sounds like he's up for using an an M1 MacBook the moment it can run linux.

Ugh. Back in the 90s our supercomputers were way less powerful than today's laptops. I want to feel that. Never mind animations, just make everything happen instantly.

I agree 100% animations are out of control. There are a few situations where the animations hide loading. Instead of the ui freezing temporarily there's a fancy animation. Outside of situations like that I just want an instant action.

Yeah. There is this system wide bug on iOS where the animations actually BLOCK user input / state changes. You can see this if you type in your pass code fast enough on the lock screen, such that you are interrupting the animated fade in of the dot for the previous digit. You’ll often lose a digit and have to start again from scratch. Infuriating! It’s the most fundamental relationship to betray, the relationship between touch and input. It registered my touch, but decided to ignore it because it wasn’t done with its pointless animation that some manager thought would look neat. Same thing happened with calculator and they fixed that one case, whereas it’s clearly a fundamental issue with UIKit.

Ugh yes, this is infuriating and happens all over the place. And combine it with sinusoidally tweened animations where it often looks like the tail end of the animation has finished before it really has, making it easy to mistime your inputs so they they’re dropped.

"it’s not developer ready yet."

Hey, what if we just... kept it that way?

Kiss all that speed goodbye once software developers get their hands on this. And then the low end current-gen models will be even slower when running "the code that runs ok on the M1 hardware, I guess, ship it."

For cross-platform software like Chrome and Electron apps, this will never happen, as the main target and market will still be Windows and x86-64.

It’s unclear to me how reduced availability of developer tooling will result in a faster software experience for M1 owners.

If developers are forced to use slow machines to develop, then they’re less likely to build bloaty slow software that depends on fast machines

Maybe, but also If developers are forced to use slow machines to develop, then they’re less likely to build. Full stop.

I'm actually in this situation right now. I develop a web application for event management. In some cases it's being used on older Chromebooks, where speed is, well, not there. While I'm testing on Chromebooks, I'm definitely not building my front end bundle on one. The faster machine I'm on, the faster I can iterate on building fast data tables, making intelligent choices about asset loading, etc.

So yeah, I think something like the Network Conditioner prefpane should exist to simulate a slow CPU for testing (does something like this exist?). But I very much enjoy my fast dev machine and I think it'll have the best overall outcome.

Give the executives slow ass old computers imo. Problem solved. Or just tell the devs the ceo has a core 2 duo.

Seems pretty obvious that some future Macs will have touch screens or larger iPads will run MacOS.

I’d buy a Surface Studio style iMac in a heartbeat.

This was my thought too.

Sounds like you are speaking about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_convergence.

I was really hoping they'd announce a $500 touchscreen lapdock for iPhones with a mounting arm that used MagSafe. Turn iPhones into Macs. It'd be the slickest lapdock I can think of.

Not expecting them to, but maybe one day.

Seems pretty obvious that some future Macs will have touch screens or larger iPads will run MacOS.

Probably not. Apple has said they've prototyped touch screen Macs and from a UI/UX perspective, it doesn't really work. They've recently downplayed touchscreen Mac talk recently [1].

What Apple has shown is iPadOS becoming more like macOS, supporting a keyboard and a mouse instead of the other way around.

I have a 2-in-1 Surface on loan and it's not particularly good at being a laptop or a tablet because of the design tradeoffs that have to be made. Apple is unlikely to make such a device unless there's some kind of UI/UX breakthrough.

[1]: https://9to5mac.com/2020/11/12/apple-touchscreen-mac-intervi...

Apple also said they weren't going to make a phone while they were working on a phone. A denial by Apple doesn't mean much (in either direction).

That was the gamesmanship of Steve Jobs nearly 15 years ago. He didn't say we prototyped phones and there's nothing we can add to them.

Again, not to rule anything out but I wouldn't hold my breath.

I honestly feel like they won't do this for one simple reason: Why sell one devices when you can force consumers to buy two? Apple is keen on somehow making customers buy more things, more accessories, etc. They aren't the biggest company in the world for nothing.

They say it's some fridge and microwave whatever excuse, but the real reason is money. The M1 chip itself lowers their costs by almost $3B.

I don't mind an upgrade to better looking UIs on regular intervals, but functionality and ease of use should come first. And here there is pandering to the iOS crowd when a touch based interface makes no sense for an OS operated with a mouse and a keyboard.

But I suspect it is a consequence of the incessant screaming by all the hipsters and clueless morons that think iOS and macOS should be merged for no other reason than their belief in MORE is MORE. No LESS is MORE, and that is what Apple was built on.

So yeah I feel your pain even if I have a slightly different take on this. macOS should be primarily designed to be the ultimate OS for somebody using a mouse and keyboard. iOS should be optimized for touch. We don't need to merge these two world. That is what clueless MBA types of people think. Because all they can think of is things like "synergy effects"...

Imagine 2-in-1 where iOS and OSX lived alongside each other and you could switch between them like tablet mode on a surface pro. Just let them be independent of each other imo.

I’d be up for that since I currently use an iPad and a win10 laptop.

I've had "reduce motion" turned off on my iOS devices since it was an options... The animations in the latest Messages.app have been driving me crazy, but sure enough "Reduce Motion" is available in the `Accessibility` preference panel under display.

FWIW, I am blown away by my M1 Mac, but my x86 Mac feels about 5-10% snappier on Big Sur.

>I am blown away by my M1 Mac, but my x86 Mac feels about 5-10% snappier on Big Sur.

For clarification, do you mean your x86 with Big Sur is faster 5-10% faster than you M1 with Big Sur, or is it compared with the same machine running what I'm going to guess is Catalina?

Sorry, I mean my x86 machine has improved in performance with the upgrade to Big Sur.

The M1 MBA (16gb RAM) feels snappier and more responsive in almost every way to my Mac Mini w/64gb of RAM. RAM usage is also noticeably lower on the M1 when I migrated my browser tabs over (500+ between Firefox and Safari).

Very interesting. Thanks for the clarification.

second this. The roll-out was a mess, but Big Sur does appear to have some serious optimizations under the hood. Time Machine is also, finally, vastly improved.

(The changes to menu bar icon behavior, and shortcut keys on modal buttons, are infuriating)

> I want macOS that has a UI of Windows 95. That would be totally insane on Apple Silicon.

You don't even need to go as far as Windows. Classic Mac OS would be just fine.

Yes, can I please have System 7.1 or 7.5.3 back? I recently installed MAE on my SunBlade 2500 and it has been an amazing experience. A Classic Mac, without all the issues of HFS corruption from crashing out. Running 68k software at G4 speeds. Haha. For a lot of tasks it certainly works better than the Classic environment did under 10.1-4 since it's not targeting the System 9.2.

Well, that was the beginning of Classic.

With so many projects in need of changes to work on the M1, it sounds like it's more than ready for developers.

Ready for developers to port developer tools =/= ready for all developers. Systems dev is actually a fairly niche role in the industry, M1 will be a boon to them but for the vast majority of devs who either aren't interested in that kind of work or not trained in it, M1 is a huge monkey wrench.

I buy a new MPB every two years, and you bet your ass my next one will be an M1. But that'll be in 2022, I'll be quite happy to stay on my x86 machine until then :)

Ready for macos app devs. Not ready for web devs / dev ops / etc

I actually really want to run native Linux on these new chips. Don't know why but the thought of modern "big sur" macOS on such beautiful hardware seems a bit sad to me. KDE/Manjaro has made me pretty happy lately and the battery life could make an amazing linux laptop. Of course you could run CDE or XFCE to get your Win95 DE. ;) Well in a few years when hopefully Linux supports M1 devices. Till then probably have to play with a PineBook or something.

The increased padding, spread out buttons, big icons. Do you see the pattern?

They're gonna make a touch screen Mac, whether it be in the form of a laptop, iMac, or an iPad running macOS.

> I want macOS that has a UI of Windows 95. That would be totally insane on Apple Silicon.

You'd have to redesign it somewhat for the higher resolution screen, and so there are many improvements in typographical rendering you would also want to include, plus Win95 was in some respects still inferior to System 7, but overall, yes, there is a certain directness to that era of OS UIs (see also Motif & BeOS).

Yeah, a lot of spacing... except of dismissing notifications! The small X icons are so hard to click on Big Sur!!! I miss the old notifications! The grouping makes my work even harder! It's a notifications disaster!

> I want macOS that has a UI of Windows 95. That would be totally insane on Apple Silicon.

WTF?

I mean I get most of what you said until that. I vastly prefer the Catalina and every version of MacOS over the past 15 years versus anything out of Redmond, and particularly not W95. (Heck I used Window Maker prior to MacOS, my love for Next ancestors goes back some time)

I hear a lot of people are frustrated with Big Sur. Hopefully Apple will dial back a lot of the egregious UI updates. They frequently go big on new redesigns, then dial things back. Hopefully.

Not too many people seem to be commenting on the UI but the Big Sur "improvements" were one of the main things that made me look into going back to Linux, researching how to replace my current MacOS workflow.

The UI changes are just completely nonsensical to me, and despite the initial announcements of the speed benefits of the M1 I was set on trying to go back to Linux. But now with articles like these I have to admit it feels tempting...

>Chrome runs insanely fast! Alas, What hardware you were using before? I am using MBP retina 2013 and chrome loads and run fast. Browsing was never a bottleneck except few heavily bloated (ads and stuff) pages. I have noticed chrome can slow down on few windows machine with poorer hardware(which is the case of 90% of windows laptops).

>I just got one. I’m blown away by the speed as well. Chrome runs insanely fast!

I've got a 5ish year old desktop and Chrome runs, afaict, pretty much instantaneously. At least I don't notice a perceptible delay. I'd be interested to see a side by side comparison of page renders on M1 vs an older laptop.

You can start terminal in rosetta mode and most brew packages will work.

Cmd + i on terminal.app, rosetta mode.

Let's make a new computing law: The likelihood of an opinion on UI changes to be an overreaction is inversely proportional to the length of time that has passed since their release.

> Docker doesn’t work

"Docker" on macOS runs in a Linux VM under Xhyve iirc.

I imagine they will make an ARM version but your x86 images are probably toast unless you can emulate them somehow.

Apple should buy Docker. Only a partial /s on that one. I’m shocked Microsoft hasn’t bought Docker yet. Docker has so much mindshare it’s crazy. They’re the most valuable company that isn’t worth anything in the whole tech sector imo.

It’s not fashion.

Unfortunately you are wrong. Everything we call tech is in fact driven by fashion.

My older version Mac is badgering me to upgrade to Bug Sur. Top feature: 100 new emojis. That is what Apple prioritised. Why the hell are emojis even part of the OS let alone its top feature!

Truth is GUIs are done, were a decade or more ago. All there is left now is change for the sake of change. And Apple can’t think of anything more to do in the real OS either!

https://www.apple.com/macos/big-sur/ says it's the new design.

I think you're getting downvoted just because you said "you are wrong", when the rest of your comment, though a little grumpy, isn't that far from the truth.

UIs are definitely fashion. We're going round and round in circles and things aren't getting better, IMHO.

Emoji are part of the OS because they’re frequently displayed on websites and in applications, so the system font needs to support them to render them correctly.

So does MacOS require an operating system update to get a new font?

Fonts are software.

No you can load your own fonts if you want but the default ones are distributed in OS updates like every other OS.

Because Apple controls the end devices an OS update is very simple and goes out to basically all users so they don't have to rely on weird slide loading hacks that are typical for platforms like Android.

Emoji is part of font support, and Apple takes that stuff seriously. It would be embarrassing for them if messages sent from iOS didn't show up properly in the Messages app.

Emoji is part of font support, and Apple takes that stuff seriously. It would be embarrassing for them if messages sent from iOS didn't show up properly in the Messages app.

Rendering a font, and a font, are two different things no? It should need an OS update to add some more characters.

I've read here and there, don't know how credible it is, that Apple uses emojis as a carrot to encourage people to take the update.

It is a cheap and immediately gratifying feature whereas users might not care about or understand the more substantive parts of an update.

I mean why should most users even care about the details of any update? It’s a box that runs the software they actually care about. It’s primary purpose is to get out of your way and feel invisible. I feel like people on HN overestimate how much people care about operating systems.

GUIs are in a state of hysteresis at this point. A little more saturation in the UI elements, a little more purple on the background next release and more monochrome and more blue the release after.

I’m saying this like an old man (even though I’m not even close), but we’ve seen it before and we’ll see it again.

Run an open source OS if you don't want stuff ripped out from underneath you.

Preferably one like gentoo or alpine.

All my PCs run open source OSs and this really isn’t true. The GNU/Linux landscape has changed wildly in the last 5 or so years. You’re only slightly less beholden to the people that maintain your OS than with proprietary systems because you still have to update eventually. A lot of BSDs are still roughly the same but being OSS doesn’t necessarily imply you’re free of change.

- you can update whenever you want (or not do it ever) - you can modify any part of the OS, no restrictions - you can run any program you like: signed, unsigned, app-store, not app-store, etc.

==> the differences are there between OSX and GNU/LINUX

Oh man, how I wish we could run linux on this puppy.

Edit: It looks like satire. My bad :)

Doesn't your article here go directly against what you're saying? https://neil.computer/notes/hacker-news-design-is-ugly/

Specifically, you redesigned HN to have more "pop" and have rounded corners and padding: https://neil.computer/content/images/size/w1600/2020/07/Scre... which is exactly what you were saying macOS looks like...

Isn't that hypocritical?

What the hell is going on here? Digging through someone's post history to figure out if there are contradictions in what someone says? Can we not just evaluate what people say on its own merit and instead of putting people under the lens for hypocrisy?

What is the point of putting links on your profile if you expect people won't visit them? It was on the index page. Anyway, it looks like satire. I definitely got fooled. My bad.

Even if it weren't satire, investigating someone for inconsistencies like that... well, it just kinda sucks, doesn't it? I don't think we should expect people to have a consistent viewpoint across everything they've ever posted online.

lol that was satire, I didn't write it well enough :-)

I absolutely adore HN's design. 100% serious!

On the other hand, Apple is fashion. They have always advertised and placed themselves as such.

If you want functionality, you need a non-Mac running Linux. I'm just hoping we have better silicon options soon, for those of us who don't want customization-unfriendly, upgrade-unfriendly Apple hardware.

While you're getting rightfully downvoted (although I won't join in), it's worth underlining how much "they have always advertised and placed themselves as such" is utter nonsense. Apple has always advertised functionality and performance of their products, even when the case was (charitably) pretty shaky. They advertised their PowerPC Macs that way, up until the point they couldn't, then advertised their Intel Macs that way. Now they're advertising their ARM Macs that way. They proudly advertised their moves to 64-bit CPUs. They proudly advertised to consumers how cool it was that OS X was "Unix certified." Repeat: to consumers.

Yes, Apple is super conscious of design, occasionally to an obvious fault, from "butterfly" keyboards back through the G4 Cube. But they've absolutely always been interested in aiming for seriously high-end machines, from all of the Mac Pro incarnations all the way back to oldies like the Mac IIfx.

I hope other people make competitive silicon, too. I want Linux around and high-performing, and it's still a bit of an open question what the future holds for development environments on ARM-based Macs. But it is just so wearying for people who are otherwise technically literate to still be trotting out "Apple has never cared about anything but looks" after literally decades of obvious counter-examples.

> Apple has always advertised functionality and performance of their products, even when the case was (charitably) pretty shaky.

"I'm a Mac." "And I'm a PC." was _absolutely_ designed to appeal to the fashionable, "hey, you're going to be far cooler than this stuffy nerd" than just "functionality and performance".

So, in among everything else, they absolutely do care about looks. I'll agree that they don't "[not care] about anything but looks", but it's a part of the brand.

You're not wrong, but Apple also does advertise themselves as fashion. Their products are highly visible. Not too long ago, their computers literally had a giant glowing logo on them. Now it's just shiny. You can spot someone wearing their Apple headphones from 300 meters away. Apple is a fashion statement. It's designed that way.

Yep, and to a great degree, Apple has mostly been behind the curve in technology advancements, just good with the marketing, build quality (necessity if you want to market yourself as fashion) and most importantly, timing.

I'll give them the Apple silicon, but remember the iPhone X's advertising? "We've always wanted a phone that was all screen." Guess what, Android has been that way all along. High-end Samsung, Xiaomi, HTC phones were always that way. Apple just marketed it.

Now that Pixel 5 got rid of the notch entirely, expect the iPhone 13 to have that too. Just that Pixel didn't care to actually market it. You bet Apple will.

Apple is definitely fashion-driven, but I think they also produce some hardware that is much better to work with.

The touchpads on Apple laptops are much better than what you can find on other laptops. The screens are much clearer. The weight isn't too much, and they're not huge; easy to move around with.

I'm very keen on getting back onto Ubuntu, but there's just no equivalent laptops in terms of hardware.

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