Comment by jillesvangurp | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jillesvangurp | Hacker News Reader

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I use macs but don't use iphones/ipads and instead prefer Android. In general, I don't really use a lot of the services and apps that come with macs. I don't use iCloud. I don't use iMail. I don't use Safari. I don't use Facetime. I don't use keynote, pages, iMovie, Garageband, etc. So, like with most OS X / Mac OS releases of the last half decade, there's actually very little (if anything) I can point at that actually genuinely is an improvement for me.

The base OS has mostly gotten worse actually. It's gotten a lot more anal about requiring signed binaries and micromanaging permissions. Dropping 32 bit means my steam library is now full of stuff that no longer works. OpenGL support is a deprecated afterthought meaning that a lot of OSS stuff either won't work or barely works. I recently updated my macbook pro but aside from some minor icon rearranging in the menu bar, I can't really tell the difference with last year's edition. Most of this review is about applications that Apple bundles with the OS that compete with third party stuff that I use and prefer. Couldn't care less about any of that. But I appreciate that it's nice for people buying into the whole Apple everything experience.

The reason I use macs is mainly because it's nice hardware with a unix like OS. Most of the tools I use are open source. I user Firefox for browsing, homebrew, docker, Intellij, VS Code, Darktable for photos, etc. I could easily switch to Linux or Windows and use the same tools. But macs are convenient. For now. It seems MS is much more on top of making Windows developer friendly than Apple is currently. It wouldn't be hard to do for Apple but for some reason they are not interested in that anymore.

I also use Mac as a glorified unix OS with an WiFi that works, printing that works, laptop sleep and awake that works, and UI that works across external monitors with various DPI settings seamlessly.

I know many of the aforementioned issues have been fixed (to some extent) for linux. I'd be willing to give the Linux desktop another try but:

1. I really love my LG 5k external monitor. It's still hard to find hardware for linux that can drive it (especially laptops)

2. I got used to how fonts are rendered on macos

3. Keyboard shortcuts systematically different (CMD/meta vs Ctrl) make it harder to occasionally switch between the two systems. I know it sounds silly. But it's hard to remap those modifiers in a way that keeps everything else working the same.

I wish I could say the same. I have tasted the dark side(seamless integration between iPhone and Mac) and can’t imagine moving away from it without a significant irritation of reduced productivity.

Some examples of perks to be had because of giving in to the ecosystem..

1. Copy something on phone, and paste it on any application on Mac (and vice versa)

2. Instantly access all photos taken on iPhone for quick edits on Mac, or even to upload somewhere on a website(passport, dr.license and such).

3. Notes.app that is the same on iPhone and Mac because of iCloud. Notes has become my knowledge base.

4. I also have an iPad. Need to sign a PDF document? Right click and send to iPad where I can use my Apple Pencil. Save the document and it is instantly on my iCloud Desktop.

I can’t imagine the independent way of doing things again :-(

Back when I used android there were ways to do all of these. I can’t recall the clipboard app, but 2 and 3 are just Google photos and Google keep. #4 doesn’t even require an extra device. You can import a signature from a signed piece of paper into Preview directly.

As someone leaving Googles Prison, I'm currently looking for new ways to do this.

It definitely cost me a weekend for the photos thing, but at least I'm not locked in.

At least Google Photos works on android and iOS. Apple Photos only works on iOS/macOS.

KDEConnect covers a lot of this, including clipboard sync across multiple devices running the daemon.

It's nowhere as polished and Just Works® as Apple's Continuity, but it's great for me with a desktop and laptop running Fedora, and mobile devices running LineageOS.

> I also have an iPad. Need to sign a PDF document? Right click and send to iPad where I can use my Apple Pencil. Save the document and it is instantly on my iCloud Desktop.

Similarly, you can right click on the Mac desktop and scan a document with your iPhone. Massive productivity booster for anyone shuffling lots of papers.

I love reading threads like this.

> right click on the Mac desktop and scan a document with your iPhone

Had no idea that was an option, until you mentioned it. Hiding right under my nose. Handy feature.

I did not know either. The I decided to check if I could do the same anywhere on the finder and guess what it is possible. I does not work on my network drive, but this is cool. :)

alternative for 4. open Preview, and use Annotate->Signature to configure a signature to drop in straight on your Mac.

That does not seems to be unique. You can do all that on linux (or windows) with android as well either out of the box or after installing kdeconnect. Also then you are not tied to icloud but can use google drive/one drive/dropbox/... .

Yes. You can jump through a bunch of hoops to get a similar desktop / phone integration with Linux (or Windows) and Android using a variety of different apps...or you could just use it out-of-the-box since it's all baked in to macOS and iOS. You can tell yourself that it's 'all the same' all you want, but I've tried, and it's not the same.

> using a variety of different apps

One is hardly a "variety of different apps".

I took a photo signature many years ago and have been pasting into pdfs rasterized by gimp since then.

The whole concept is kinda ridiculous, but I never would have thought that it takes a Mac and iphone to do it.

There are also privacy implications to all that integration that honestly have me a bit wary of sharing any personal information with my work Mac.

Just to pick on another, the idea that anyone would be uploading photos of their passport and drivers license is a bit crazy. That said, I could easily with Ubuntu.

Do you hear yourself? “ I paste my signature into a PDF and then rasterize with gimp”

Is any normal user going to do that? Why the hell should I have to open a image editing app to sign a PDF?!

Why has no Linux PDF viewer added signatures as an option so far?

This is why I left Linux for MacOS

Is cutting and pasting a tough one? Maybe the big word scared ya? I could have written open, with no change in meaning.

If it's not clear I didn't sign it in the technical sense, no one would know what to do with it, there's not a widely supported standard for that. These were business folks who wanted a png/jpeg image of the form with my scribble on it.

An image editor is perfect for that it turns out, and it takes two steps, three if you count save.

> Need to sign a PDF document? Right click and send to iPad where I can use my Apple Pencil.

You can save your signature in the Preview app and then it's available to paste into any PDF.

https://support.apple.com/guide/preview/fill-out-and-sign-pd...

I'm in the same boat. Mac-as-a-developer-workstation, not Mac-as-a-consumer-dvice. Apple seems entirely disinterested in the former market segment. Perhaps it never was: the mass adoption of macs in the early-mid 2000s might just have been a fortuitous accident, not somethgin Apple ever courted.

Either way:

> It seems MS is much more on top of making Windows developer friendly than Apple is currently.

I see that too and it worries me. Not because I'm avidly anti-Microsoft, but because all the portents are we're heading back to the place where Microsoft dominates the desktop, with no practical alternatives. That wasn't good first time around and I don't see it being any better if repeated.

Microsoft is being very smart - and successful - in their strategy. Whereas the original Windows commoditised the underlying hardware, current "Windows" is commoditising operating systems. Hence subsuming Android and Linux into the platform.

"Windows", though, is really not the way to think about the platform. The deep integration of Teams into W11 is a pivotal step. Teams - with office365 - is the new "Windows" - the platform that Microsoft wants to dominate end-user computing with on the front end. With Azure on the back.

As a developer, I don't want to only have a single choice. But I don't see anyone meaningfully challenging Microsoft. Apple seems only interested in consumers. I wouldn't personally touch a Chromebook given Google's insatiable desire to monetise my every keystroke. Amazon seems only interested in the back end and, actually, that seems like strategic myopia. Microsoft really understands that owning the end-user experience is key. What future for AWS if all developers are using Windows, and it already "just works" with Azure?

So I'm not optimistic for the future. On the plus side, it's why I bought a laptop from System76, and paid ElementaryOS to use their distro. It's noise level compared to Windows/Mac, but that might just be what ensures there's a tiny crack of hope for desktop diversity.

>> we're heading back to the place where Microsoft dominates the desktop,

Total side note to this, but there are apps that only work on Windows like Adobe Creative Cloud. If some of these companies were to support Linux, you would see a huge migration off of Windows to Linux.

Adobe has steadfastly refused to support Linux. Even after years of Linux users saying they would gladly pay to use Adobe products on virtually ANY Linux OS. All to no avail. So here I sit, stuck between two operating systems. One I love, and needing the other strictly out of necessity to run a specific set of software.

Adobe creative cloud works on macOS as well. In fact Photoshop and I think Illustrator were originally Mac only back in the 90's.

Unrelated, but there was a time when I vastly preferred Microsoft Entourage and Microsoft Word on a Mac to the Windows versions. They both had features that their windows counterparts didn't for quite a while!

Then they unified the teams that made their products for the different platforms and we ended up with the ribbon toolbar UI, which was a pure example of "good looking UI over functionality". I remember using excel with the ribbon toolbar, and it was really easy to put a funky pattern on my bar charts, but annoyingly fiddly to extrapolate data - ie. to actually use excel for science...

It's got to be said that if it was my company I would still have unified the teams. I probably would have ok'd the ribbon toolbar too, as I imagine that if I was running Microsoft I probably wasn't doing a lot of data analysis myself and I wouldn't know any better.

> all the portents are we're heading back to the place where Microsoft dominates the desktop

Is this the same Microsoft that just decided to get rid of Local user accounts on Windows 11 Home?

>-mid 2000s might just have been a fortuitous accident, not somethgin Apple ever courted.

yea, I think you are probably right. I was a linux user from 95-05 then switched to mac from 05-13 now back to linux. I'm well aware of the "this is the year of the linux desktop" joke, but honestly over past 4-5 years I think linux has reached the point that its fairly painless for 95% of common desktop usecases.

“Mac-as-a-consumer-device”

This has been Apple’s primary focus for the last decade, increasingly so each year. Apple has paid lip service to the education sector and business sector with managed accounts and profile based management but it is severely lacking and in many ways needlessly crippled. Apple is focused on the most profitable sector home / consumer market. They have exited the server market, exited itunes university, exited iweb, really excited anything self-creation or self-managed or self-hosted … in favor of ad friendly click to subscribe model and a locked down primarily content consumption device.

I was pretty much with you up to this point:

>Microsoft really understands that owning the end-user experience is key.

Since upgrading to Catalina, I repartitioned my Mac to have a 1GB Windows partition for games, particularly 32-bit retro stuff. Other than my locked down work VDI, this is my first experience of seriously using Windows as a desktop OS in over a decade.

OMG is this thing horrible. Gah, my heart sinks every time I boot into it. Two Start Menus? A horrible, kafka-esque maze of settings and config in half a dozen different UI interfaces, all of them ugly as sin. One of my kids used it for a few days, and now I've already got some invasive search toolbar crap I can't get rid of, and I've shared a Mac with my kids almost all their lives (17 and 16). Ads built into the OS. The user experience on Windows is as godawful as it's ever been.

They've definitely upped their game on technology, WSL2 looks really nice. Power Shell looks pretty decent. They're making interesting moves with making .NET truly cross-platform. I can see the dev argument for sure, but the user experience on Windows is as much, if not more of an inconsiderate, abusive relationship as it's ever been.

that's fair. Though I didn't say it was good (or otherwise), just that MS understands the importance of owning it.

Mac-as-a-developer-workstation has always worked quite well for those of us that don't really care about UNIX, there are other developer platforms out there to care about.

> I don't use Safari

I really want to like Safari and I try every release, but I can't use it for more than a few minutes because the adverts that get through are just so unbelievably bad (to someone that isn't used to seeing any). The Apple-recommended strategy of using simple OS-level Content Blockers just doesn't cut it unfortunately. It's such a shame (to me) that all that developer effort on Safari is effectively wasted because of the relentless scurge of ads.

I understand why Apple decided to prevent the install of integrated Ad blockers directly in the browser because it's a security risk, but the reality is that the web is unusable without them. I really hope that there is an Apple Engineer reading this, and that some day Apple will find a solution :-)

Perhaps the solution is as simple as Apple curating their own approved blocking database similar to that used by popular adblockers and baking it into Safari in a secure fashion. Then again, that might open them to legal challenges.

I use Safari as my daily browser, with AdGuard as my adblocker. (It's the second result on the Mac App Store for "ad blocker"—the first after AdBlock Pro, which I won't use because it sells whitelist space, AIUI.)

I...don't see ads.

It's not as hyper-configurable as uMatrix, and there are certainly annoyances that don't get filtered out (first-party videos, "subscribe to our newsletter" overlays, etc), but it's got some decent user input, such that I could probably block more of those if I cared to spend some effort, and...well, I just don't see ads in my common usage.

Ooh. Thanks danaris! I thought I'd already tried AdGuard in the past... but I may be mistaken. Will install today and give it a spin.

Ah cool: The Adguard website says that they've just added M1 support. I think M1 support was probably part of the issue when I was last trying the available blockers.

Hmmm... just tried AdGuard on a couple of high profile web sites using Safari. Sure, Adguard is working to some extent.

On the first site - no ads. Whitespace where the ads would have been because content blockers can't interfere with the DOM and remove fragments.... but not bad.

Then I went to the NYT. Absolutely massive banner ad, full width of the screen taking up 25% of my screen real estate.. and then repeated again further down below the content. Looks utterly gross.

Now of course I don't have to use the NYT and could choose never to go to that site ever again, but this is the problem with Content Blockers that I'm talking about - they aren't enough on their own. So again, Safari is not usable with this approach.

Do you really see no ads, danaris? Perhaps you just don't go to these sorts of websites. Go and look at nytimes.com, using only AdGuard and Safari under macos and tell me what to see.

The claims on the AdGuard website are misleading... get this:

"No ads on YouTube - We'd wager you like watching YouTube and you don't like ads. The same for us! Luckily, AdGuard remover knows how to get rid of ads on Mac (even video ads)".

So I go to YT ... click on the first video on the homepage and there you go: advert... straight in. I mean I expected this, but again, the claims are just misleading. I mean perhaps that works on other OSes.

Whereas, with a browser-integrated blocking solution in Firefox - no video ads. I don't see how macos / iOS Content Blockers can't really be good enough when only inspecting traffic to the browser.

Like I said, I don't see ads in my common usage. I don't regularly go to the NYT, so it's possible they don't cover that as well—but I don't see ads on YouTube in Safari, so I'm not sure what's missing on your end.

Fair enough. I just checked the AdGuard support forums. They agree that this feature can't work with the Content Blocker approach on macos. There's no way they can get any hooks into the browser, so interstitial ads will remain just that: interstitial.

I can see that AdGuard is probably a decent product for most other current browsers, though. Thanks for suggesting it anyway.

I use 1Blocker with Safari and I see no ads on NYT.

Another solution would be to boycott all websites where you encounter obtrusive ads. This leads to me getting sucked back into the parts of the internet that got me hooked originally in the 90's like underground cultures.

Yeah, I'm in a similar boat to you. Unfortunately we're not the majority of the users in the Apple ecosystem, so our use cases aren't really what the design changes focus on.

The only changes I've noticed in the last few years are telnet, emacs, and ftp aren't included anymore and I have to install them manually. Changing to zsh was good though.

I wouldn't be surprised if they continue and eventually I find out that things like grep, awk, sed, uniq, etc are all slowly taken out.

You will always be abused by Apple. They don't need you and they know it.

It's best to either enjoy the walled Prison or escape. You can't really enjoy freedom and Apple.

Do I believe that I'm Apple's target market? No. Do I believe they care about me as an individual? No, not really.

However...

I'm not seeing how your comment is relevant to my statement that I don't want to use Apple's browser in its current state, when I can easily use many other browsers in what you've described as their "walled prison", and I do use them.

Whilst the situation may change for the worse in the future (resulting in a true walled garden), I can currently install anything I like on macos - you don't have to use the app store. This isn't iOS.

I don't feel abused by Apple at all. Conversely, I have been relentlessly abused by Microsoft in the past, however; (no choice in some old jobs)... and recent news stories concerning Windows 11 suggest that they're still at it. My experience suggests that things really aren't as bad as you're implying.

On IOS you actually in effect can't use any browser except Safari or Safari with a firefox or chrome skin because you aren't allowed to distribute anything else and you aren't allowed to manually install anything outside the store.

There is no particular reason to believe this wont eventually be the case on Mac

Why are you even bothering to type such things? I'm not talking about iOS in this sub-thread. The discussion here is about Safari on macos in the present day, not the effed up macos of the future. Can we just have a discussion about the present day please?

Seriously, you guys are relentless and exhausting! It might be time for me to bow out of Hacker News for good, if this sort of nonsense keeps up in the comments. Getting to be as bad for discourse as Reddit.

All I'm saying is that the browser-external Content Blocking approach Apple has chosen doesn't work very well and is disappointing in practice, even if it's a better proposition in terms of browser security. This currently has nothing to do with walled gardens on macos, whilst one can choose to use other browsers and add in-browser extensions that filter ads more effectively (as well as being able to remove DOM elements).

If you've got a helpful suggestion about Safari and the advertising situation, then please comment about that. As it happens, I'm not using Safari, but I remain interested in trying it again under macos, if Apple or someone else can offer proper ad blocking / ad removal.

Chrome is going that way too (it is proposed to remove permissions for integrated blocker extensions), but that _does_ have more to do with Google's nefarious ambitions with respect to advertising income, just as much as it is to do with security, I suspect.

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