If Apple keeps letting its software slip, the next big thing won’t matter | Hacker News Reader

If Apple keeps letting its software slip, the next big thing won’t matter

macworld.com

While this article focused primarily on things being left unmaintained, etc. there is also a huge problem with things being touched for no reason and making them worse.

When handed what must be a mountain of bugs and unfinished items, why the hell did they prioritize things like breaking notifications and Safari tabs, for instance? They’re in a position where engineering resources desperately need to be closing gaps, not creating huge new ones.

There seems to be a prioritization problem at the very least. Which I get, on some level who wants to work on the broken things? But if they threw some money at this they could fix it.

Because someone needs to able to point at Thing and say they took iniative in implementing it, for career reasons

I worked with a developer at <household ecommerce company> whose main claim to fame was that she'd deleted more features than she'd added. We need more people like her.

eBay has deleted a lot of features that made my life better. There was no replacement -- things just suck more, now.

Delete code yes, features only if obnoxious.

What? No. Not if people used those features and found them valuable.

You're right. Dead or dying features that were bloating up the rest of the codebase, I should say.

I made a career of fixing broken things.

The current UX of notifications is terrible. After months of using it I still don't understand the mental model. A notification comes up, I hover and wait for the cross to appear and click it. But then some time later I unlock my machine or something happens and apparantly all my notifications are still there for some reason and I have to clear them again, only this time they are in groups and I have to clear multiple groups.

Somehow Apple took a UX flow that was fine and made something that regularly makes me feel stupid because I don't understand what I'm supposed to do to make it behave in a way that makes sense.

Notifications are such a simple thing, but they somehow made them complex.

For me the issue is notifications that appear, then disappear, and I can’t find them again, or what they refer to. If it’s important enough to do a notification, it’s important enough to keep in a notification log that I can go through chronologically, search, group, sort, etc. I will high five the person who tells me how that feature exists and I’ve just missed it.

This happens to me a lot. Somehow I miss the initial notification but catch it as it animates away and I don't know how to find out what it was or what app caused it.

The notification history feature does exist, on Android (11 I'm using). It can show you both the recently dismissed notifications and the ones in the last 24 hours, grouping by apps.

> I will high five the person who tells me how that feature exists and I’ve just missed it.

Yeah, same here.

I'm probably missing context (skimmed comments quickly on phone after a long day), but just in case it helps: on iOS, swipe straight down from the very top to access Notification Center. IME, on iOS, it's a reliable way to access them.

Thanks --- I did know about that. For whatever reason, though, that doesn't appear to reliably bring back all notifications, only some of them. While I definitely could be wrong, I'm just about 100% certain that I've had notifications come and go that aren't to be found in the Notification Center afterward.

In the notifications settings/preferences, on a per-app basis, you can set whether notifications are displayed to allow banners, badges, and sounds. And you can turn on/off whether the notification posts to the lock screen, or stay in the notification center (swipe down on iOS, click the clock in the menu bar on OSX)

I'll have to look into this, but my experience has been that Notification Center: doesn't display everything; loses things on a whim; gives no way of recovering things, or displaying all things.

It definitely does. One reliable way I've noticed for this to happen is if you have the app that caused the notification open on another device. Presumably that app is then saying to the notifications system "don't worry, I've got this", but then that notification disappears on all devices.

> important enough to do a notification, it’s important enough to keep in a notification log that I can go through chronologically, search, group, sort, etc.

In light of a grandchild comment to this one about notification center on iPhone, I'll offer that on Mac you can do a two-finger swipe from the right side of the touch pad to get notification center. It doesn't have search, but they are grouped in stacks chronologically. There is no default hotkey, but you can set one in system settings.

> on Mac you can do a two-finger swipe from the right side of the touch pad to get notification center.

Or click the clock.

Which kind of goes back to the earlier point:

> I don't understand what I'm supposed to do to make it behave in a way that makes sense.

There used to be an actual icon for it to the right of the clock. Why would someone think to click on the clock to access their notifications? This apparently also led to the clock becoming mandatory instead of being able to hide it if you wanted to use different options.

As a new iOS user, this is the #1 thing that makes me want to sell my 12 Mini and go back to vanilla Android. Notifications are a total mess in iOS.

Unquestionably it's the biggest gap. Having also switched recently, notifications on iOS feel like stepping literally 10 years into the past.

I think it’s worse than that. IIRC I had the second model of Android phone ever released in the UK, and even that phone’s notification system was superior to iOS of 2021.

I’ve always assumed patents are to blame - I mean, surely no one at Apple uses their iOS notifications and thinks “yes, that system is perfect in every way”? There must be other factors at work?

Can you elaborate? I have an iPhone and notifications seem fine. But I’m probably missing something. I haven’t had an android phone in nearly a decade. What do android notifications do differently and better?

From memory (my last use of Android it was a long time ago!) it was a combination of two factors:

1) Android's system relied on icons appearing on the bar at the top of the screen (e.g. a mail icon for mail, or a message icon for a text, etc.) - which was both unintrusive, and very quick and practical to check. To check a message, you'd just pull down the menu from that bar, and you'd see your different notifications in more detail, most recent first, and a tap would take you to the app. It was a lovely holistic concept. In contrast, iOS has some aspects of this, but it's not holistic:

* Red dots on icons indicate waiting content, but don't reflect when the content is from (unless you're obsessed with clearing all of your red dots - which would be a problem in itself)

* The notification center offers a list of notifications, but it's not linked to a visual reminder - you have to remember to check it.

* The notification center is shown on the lock screen, but IME it's buggy, not always responsive, and sometimes disappears confusingly.

* There are also banners which pop up (and there used to be alerts?) but these aren't connected with the other approaches.

TL;DR: Android had a single holistic approach; iOS has a variety of apparently unrelated approaches.

2) When you're using your phone or computer (it happens on MacOS too) many of Apple's notifications distract you and demand your attention or action. This would include banners which hang around obstructing part of your screen and need a swipe to remove them, or alerts which must be interacted with before you can do anything else. I find this a fundamentally user-unfriendly paradigm.

i think lack of application open selection is worse. like there’s no way to get a 3rd party reddit app to open on a browser link

Apollo has a safari extension that will auto open Reddit links in Apollo.

oh interesting.. new in iOS 15

I wish there was some way to look at the last N notifications, see what apps generated them, etc.

My biggest pet peeve right now is that my iPhone bongs when charging. Not when the charger is plugged or unplugged (its a different sound). It seems to happen when the charge passes 20% and then again when it passes 80%. But there is never a notification on screen, just a sound. Googling for this is impossible, since you wind up with a million questions about the sound the phone makes when a charger is plugged in.

I feel like users don't actually want notifications; they want Kafka with a nice UI.

On the other hand, developers (and specifically, ones with engagement KPIs) want as disposable notifications as possible.

At 20% iOS deactivates the powersaving mode, I think.

At 80% iOS notifies that it is charged enough, so you can unplug if you want to avoid supercharging it.

Sure, but do you know how can I disable these bings? Or even where to find them in the settings? This is what's impossible to google for...

They're incredibly annoying and prevent me from charging my phone when I sleep.

As far as I'm aware there's nothing in the OS that should do that, at least by default. Perhaps an accessibility option. Or your charger is finnicky and somehow disconnects during charging a few times, but you say the sound is different. If you record it, and post it on reddit, they might be able to identify it.

The silent mode switch? I’ve never heard them.

Don't get me started on the new iOS podcast app. I used to know how to use it. Now I need to click five times at random to get anywhere, and still don't understand where I am. All the views look similar, but different. I just want to hear the oldest first and see if episodes are downloaded, that's it. Cue… "you had one job!"

Yes, been about six months.

Hmmm....I was just cursing out Amazon Music for the same podcast flaws. These people.

If there only were any other podcast apps out there, maintained by independent, non-apple developers...

I'm still trying to figure out how to tell Podcasts not to play episodes I've heard before.

Play #27 of Show, then #26, and after playing #26, it will automatically choose to go on with #27 again.

Try Overcast. It’s one of the best pieces of software on my iPhone. Simple, well thought through and reliable. And the speed controls are the best I’ve seen in any program.

It’s the sort of software apple makes when they’re at their best. Much better than the built in podcast app.

I like Overcast. Though neither it nor anything else really comes close to letting me play podcasts with some degree of reasonable selection when I'm driving. Maybe too difficult a problem and reflecting that voice assistants are pretty limited.

The audio controls in Overcast are what made it must-have software for me. I had a few podcasts with audio so bad they were barely listenable that the voice boost function in Overcast was able to make them actually listenable. That and the shorten silence feature combined with the excellent audio processing if you listen at higher speed have allowed me to really optimize my podcast consumption. Highly recommended!

I haven’t used it in a while but when I did, it was pretty bad.

One annoying bug: if you switch to a different podcast sometimes, even when the new podcast starts playing, it continues to show the cover art of the previous podcast for a while. Super annoying.

What’s even more frustrating is how buggy streaming music to a HomePod mini is.

Even though I’m the only person in my household using it, I frequently get errors that I can’t play something because someone else is playing something, which turns out to be something I played a while ago.

Things seemed better before the latest HomePod software upgrade…

The new generation (some young employees/interns) are awesome about notifications. I arrive on their screen and tell them they have a notification pending. And then they showed me:

They ignore them. Red dot? Ignore. Blinking red dot jumping in the docker? They live with it. They say macOS is terrible because it has red dots, sometimes worse than Windows. One is colorblind which helps, but really, they got used to Windows nagging them, Youtube nagging them, websites where the cookie banner and the consent form. They try to deactivate as many notifications as they can, but they tend to avoid the cross itself, or they avoid clicking on the Slack icon to remove the dot. They just let it jump on the sidebar.

A whole generation damaged by data-abuse-consent banners.

Also, while this isn't so much a macOS as an iOS thing, there are a huge number of apps that take advantage of wanting functional notifications turned on ("your food has arrived") to constantly spam the user with marketing notifications ("sign up for FoodPass, 50% off!").

I hate that! iOS 15 has a way to filter that — you can have a special “focus” that allows notifications for all those abusive companies, which you can enable when expecting a delivery or have made a restaurant reso.

It's even better that in some cases (calendar invites?) you have to mouse over the notification "x" to see the dropdown to "accept" but if you move your mouse off the "x" then the dropdown disappears!

Same for me. Notifications on macOS weren’t great before but they are way worse now.

Before they were an annoyance; but now they’re just utterly baffling to me. I have no idea what I’m supposed to click half the time and they seem to come back randomly for me too.

The notifications come back in just about the same way the Algorithm scrambles timelines on the social media apps--its just like they're trying to keep you engaged in using the phone.

Ideally, the notifications should have two very simple views: a linear list by time, a grouped-by-application list and the ability to mark and sweep them away.

Or maybe at the most, an archive all notifications sweep that you can re-open if you remember that you wanted to see an old notification.

Facepalm. I noticed that too and ranted about it: https://neil.computer/notes/apple-ux-ui-is-regressing/

You’ve nailed it. I upgraded from Mojave to Monterey, so I didn’t know when this change kicked in (or if there had been multiple iterations that made the new process more intuitive for users who had upgraded each year).

The only thing I’ve learned about dealing with these new notification types is that you can hover over them and swipe left to right to dismiss them. Unfortunately the notification will reappear sometimes. It seems like this happens for calendar notifications but not Messages notifications.

Anyone else have tips for how to deal with this? In ready to turn off notifications completely, which is unfortunate because I like to have calendar notifications (but only once).

I know it's minor, but managing virtual desktops is infuriating. There after I take the two steps necessary to manage virtual desktops (swipe four fingers up and move the mouse to the top of the screen). There are exactly 4 actions I want to take:

* Select a desktop (even this is questionable as an action) * Re-arrange a desktop * Add a desktop * Remove a desktop

----

Nearly all of the time, I want to remove a desktop because I have too many of them.

I would expect a sane UI where the X button is always shown _and_ deleting a desktop results in a new X in the exact same spot (so I can quickly close multiple desktops).

Instead, I have to hover to reveal the x, click it. Everything then shifts to a magic new location where I have to repeat hover, find X, click it.

Drives me up the wall.

Possibly this is the "Automatically rearrange Spaces..." setting in the Mission Control prefPane?

> I hover and wait for the cross to appear and click it.

If you’re manually dismissing every notification, consider going to your System Preferences and changing the notification type for those apps.

> all my notifications are still there for some reason and I have to clear them again, only this time they are in groups and I have to clear multiple groups.

Last I checked notifications over a week old are auto-cleared, so ignore the cleanup and only open Notification Centre when you need to check on a previous notification.

As much as i am with you on this, i must say it‘s pretty good for someone like me.

I usually swipe notifications away. Then forget about them. Lock the screen and go „ah, damn.“

But obviously, this shouldn‘t be forced on normal people.

Apple has lost what they had.

This seems the problem of every big company. Eventually they become slow and their priority becomes puzzling to people outside of the companies. Complexity aside, my theory is that as a company grows, the headcount always grows faster than the quantity of work, and more people become obsessed with visibility and promotion, which leads to promotion-oriented and visibility-oriented project planning. Consequently, product quality deteriorates over time, first slowly and then suddenly.

As soon as the company starts collecting metrics and sets up A/B testing infrastructure people can just implement whatever they want, as long as they keep improving these metrics. Very often there's no one who can take a look at the resulting mess and decide enough is enough. It's all just self-congratulatory meetings with extremely optimistic charts and an occassional employee complaining about the product being utterly broken and unusable.

I'm convinced A/B testing done wrong is what brought us step sisters stuck in washing machines.

This is something so many big companies do, and I hate it. Every 6 months it seems Spotify has to change their UI and make it harder to find what I want. Just make a decent UI and stick to it. I don't understand why there are redesigns over and over and over. My assumption is that it keeps people employed, even if they aren't necessarily needed. It at least takes away from more important issues being taken care of.

Twitter has been so bad with this lately. It feels like the app is different in some irritating and pointless way every time I open it.

Yet every time the UI is still horrific. It’s like they’re trying the Edison way and trying to find the 99 ways not to do it.

This is why I only browse twitter from my notifications panel.

Twitter is great when it serves its purpose of being a 140 char log of people that matter.

When I did use twitter the only way that was even remotely tolerable was with a third party client (tweetbot was my client of choice; twitteriffic is quite good too).

The biggest benefit is you get a literal timeline that's unmanipulated by promoted tweets. I have no idea how anyone does anything remotely useful with the native twitter UI.

> why there are redesigns over and over and over

Because they aren't building UIs to be useful for pleasant for users anymore. Once these data-driven companies have enough users locked in, they begin optimizing the user interface to manipulate user behavior for profit. They shift from helping you do what you want to manipulating you into doing what they want you to do.

It's actually gotten so bad that open source software with it's notoriously unpolished interfaces is actually starting to be the better, more useful and more aesthetic option, without having improved much at all.

Spotify is an ever-evolving trash fire. It's become very difficult or impossible to get it to display a list of albums created by a given artist, and then play album X. "Oh no" Spotify says. "I think what you really want to do is play <random popular song Y by that artist> and then a whole bunch of random songs by other artists you've never heard of, right? That's what I'm going to do for you."

I realize it's still actually possible to get Spotify to do what I want, but that stuff is increasingly buried beneath dark patterns.

My wife has been complaining about the random feature playing the same songs over and over again. It's been about ten years now. I stopped using the trash fire because of it.

Yeah it’s weird to me - spotify has basically all of the world’s music. Why does it insist on playing the same 12 songs on repeat when I listen to anything? I enjoyed those songs the first hundred times they were played. How do I get out of this recommendation engine jail and get some variety? Here’s a feature I’d love in spotify: no repeat workday. Once activated, unless I explicitly play a song again, spotify is banned from repeating any song within a 24 hour - 2 week period. You know what has this feature? The radio.

Is Apple Music any better?

YouTube has the same problem. It seems to insist on recommending the same 3 rabbit holes every time I visit the site. I know there’s more stuff out there I’d love that I’m not seeing, that I don’t think to search for. But I have no idea how to get YouTube to show me any of it.

Spotify pays a discounted royalty rate when they can kick you over to random plays. Business over user experience, for sure, although they might say you wouldn't pay them a higher monthly subscription to compensate if they didn't do this.

Can't say why or how they arrive at such a tight list of random options; perhaps it's an attempt to give you something predictable while fulfilling royalty obligations. Maybe it's just broken.

My guess is that attempting to diversify what they play for you leads to much worse results, at least for the modal user. I don't think that music recommendation services actually work that well except by identifying very popular stuff.

"Jeannie Becomes a Mom" by Caroline Rose plays first every single time Spotify tries to generate radio for my Indie Mix playlist. This has been happening for months. You can click "Don't play this again", but since the contents of the *Mix playlists change every day, the don't play list is wiped every day.

I wish I could universally blacklist a song (at least for a couple of months), but that only works for entire artists. I've seen the exact same complaint for the exact same song on reddit, which makes me wonder if it has something to do with their program that lets artists jump ahead in the algorithm (https://newsroom.spotify.com/2020-11-02/amplifying-artist-in...).

Reading your comment reminded me of the blog by Jeff Atwood https://blog.codinghorror.com/our-programs-are-fun-to-use/

Surely if some company focussed on making software that puts the user at the centre they'd be able to carve out a pretty decent niche for them.

Sadly if they we're a public company their investors would probably be unhappy because they'd be sacrificing the all important "growth", but a private company might be able to get away with it.

GNOME begs to differ though.

Is GNOME a data-driven, for-profit company?

> My assumption is that it keeps people employed, even if they aren't necessarily needed.

I'd say more that they keep people relevant, particularly architects and CTOs. You can't go in front of the board and say "Everything is great and we're keeping it just the same!" You can't say that in front of the CEO, you can't say that in front of the investors. You have to keep selling the idea that Big Changes Are Coming and Our Userbase Will Increase.

So you add bloat that nobody wanted and credit anything good that happens to it.

I work for a company based in a foreign land and while there are downsides, one of my biggest reliefs was to find that there is very little interest in 'change for the sake of change'.

> Just make a decent UI and stick to it. I don't understand why there are redesigns over and over and over.

It gets people (in your example, designers, but the same organizational disease affects engineers and product managers too) promoted. Perhaps somebody got promoted this cycle for "making a decent UI", but you're not gonna get promoted next cycle for "sticking to it".

And managers get promoted by "growing" teams to build stuff.

When performance and promotion criteria incentivize "having impact", which is understood to mean "launching stuff", this is what results. It's a analog of "teaching to the test" [0], or a special case of "gaming the metrics" [1] or "you are what you measure" [2]. I don't know if there's a term for the general phenomenon.

I agree it sucks, but while I'm invoking cliches, I should remind myself: don't hate the player(s), hate the game.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teaching_to_the_test

[1] https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/gaming-metrics

[2] https://hbr.org/2010/06/column-you-are-what-you-measure

Compensation driven development

Maybe making it harder to find what you want makes you more likely to find what they want.

They're running A/B tests... You like variant A, the majority picked variant B. Otherwise, someone new was hired and needed a project.

Nobody liked A or B, just some weird engagement metric chose B.

I used to enjoy using Spotify before they added podcasts; now it’s kinda a UX/UI mess.

> there is also a huge problem with things being touched for no reason and making them worse.

I have never been a big fan of Apple's software, but I must say that this is not just an Apple problem, it's a software industry problem.

The amount of software I use daily that has actually improved in the last 5 years as opposed to getting worse is getting frustratingly low as the years go on.

I have just upgraded to the latest version of Android and pretty much every UX change is worse than what it used to be, and I've felt the same way since 3 or 4 versions ago. Same with Windows, Spotify, YouTube, FB, Twitter, even Google search has gone downhill (not being able to get to the source image from an image search; although apparently that was due to a legal compliance reason).

We have come to a point where we have large companies employing thousands of people who need a purpose. Engineers re-writing the app in the most fashionable language/framework, designers deciding the UI isn't "fresh" anymore, PMs on a crusade to "simplify" the experience by removing features. These changes happen so frequently that the software barely has a chance to live up to its prior version before the next change happens.

We have come to a point where we have large companies employing thousands of people who need a purpose.

Fix your bugs. There are plenty. It’s not that they have no purpose. They want to add things to their resume so the next place will give them a pay bump or get that promotion.

If your strategy was to hop around between jobs every 12+ months or climb the ladder, would you bother making things better? You’ll be gone soon and it will be the next persons problem.

Sadly there is much truth to this.

It's a good point, management and execs always take the blame for that kind of behavior but engineers are guilty too.

The problem is that engineers don’t get promotions based on bug fixes or refactors, and they get rewarded for building features, even if they introduce lots of new bugs.

Also, if getting a promotion was just as easy as a pay bump for transferring jobs, maybe engineers would stay longer. These are all ultimately management problems.

I can understand Safari tabs. I assume that it all came about because they decided to change the location bar on iOS Safari, moving it to the bottom of the screen.

This is a good change -- it makes Safari much easier to use on iPhones with current screen sizes. But then they said "okay, we're making one big change to Safari... let's see if there's any other changes we can roll in, since we're making people learn new UI anyway". So they made all those other changes to how tabs behave in iOS Safari. And then kept on going and updated iPadOS Safari and MacOS Safari -- gets them a whole "we're improving Safari this year" slide in the keynote, etc etc etc.

...and then, to their credit, they listened to beta feedback and rolled back most of the poorly considered UI changes.

> who wants to work on the broken things?

So much of whats wrong with modern SWE right here in this sentence

I LOVE fixing bugs and improving existing software...hence, everyone thinks I'm a douche and I never get to do what I love.

I don't use my iphone for email because I get 200-300 emails per day, and there's no way to mass delete the inbox. I have to select-delete for every email.

In the Mail app, tap Edit, then select the empty checkbox to the left of the top email, then drag from the second email down to the bottom of the view (it'll autoscroll.) Then you can move or trash the emails all at once.

I tried this many times, it scrolls the whole screen down but does not select the emails.

Are you tapping and swiping down on the unchecked circles on the left? It scrolls the screen down if you swipe on the preview of the emails, but not the circles you see after you tap Edit int he upper right.

I tried that, too. It just scrolls the screen down, whether in the Edit mode or not.

You can drag down with two fingers held apart to select the messages. I use that fairly often, especially with search results. It's still not as fast as having a select-all button but does give you a chance to notice that not all of the messages are the same.

Well now I feel like an idiot because I have had an iPhone since the 4S and never knew this

How am I supposed to learn "tricks" like this? They seem to be basic stuff.

It doesn't work when I try it. It just scrolls the screen.

It might be the tap-then-drag delay — I've been using this process for a few years so I know it works but I haven't seen it documented anywhere by Apple so I'm probably using different terminology.

https://www.idownloadblog.com/2019/12/02/two-finger-tap-ipho...

That didn't work, either :-(

The whole screen just scrolls.

What works for me is to not attempt to time it at all. Simply place two fingers directly on a message. Leave them there. Wait a second, then start sliding down. The message list should immediately shift to the right, exposing selection "circles" at the left edge of each message. As you continue sliding downward, each circle you "pass" will become selected. You can continue holding as you reach the bottom of the screen to keep the selection going. If you overshoot the end of the area you want to delete, you can slide back up to unselect a few rows before releasing. This works in both Mail and Messages.

I put two fingers on a message. The message shades slightly. I slide down. The shading goes away, and the screen slides down. It does not slide right, it does not collect $200.

When I put two fingers at the same time on a message, the checkboxes immediately appear. If I'm even slightly off, the checkboxes never appear and instead I get to see the contents of the message when I let go.

I tried this again and again.

Ha - on the iPad there is an edit button that exposes the selection circles; never occurred to me there would be a way to do the same thing on the iPhone. Nice!

Wow. I didn’t know this. Thank you for sharing!

You’re welcome — I had the same reaction seeing a video a couple of years ago. Best kept secret…

Neat! I was in the other sub-thread suggesting the slow one-finger version. Hopefully a few other apps use the same paradigm.

Walter Bright, is it possible you run an older version of iOS or that you use a different app than Mail? I completely believe what you’re experiencing; just trying to think why it’s happening to you…

Why would you delete emails? I still do not get people's email habits. I used to maintain my inbox back in the days before all the normies came online. Now I just scan, read the things that interest me, and move on. Same for every email...work, school, and personal.

Why would you use a phone for email. Plenty of desktop web clients work excellent and support the click1, shift-click2 or click1, shift-downArrow selection flows that are way faster than what the phone UIs can pull off.

10GB mailbox for work

When a product is good enough the UI/UX folks don't have anything left to do, so UI's keep being rebooted due to job safety.

> Which I get, on some level who wants to work on the broken things?

I love working on broken things just as much as working on new things. Sometimes the reason something is broken is because it was a difficult problem. I love those difficult problems.

As an anecdotal example that may be relevant, I wanted to upgrade to Monterey and my Mac Mini said there wasn't enough room.

Hooked up a Western Digital external drive that I had used on previous Macs and launched Time Machine. And that's when it started. Time Machine presented what seemed like a stack of Finder windows in the middle, a timeline with hash marks on the right-side and the only button highlighted was the "Cancel".

No menu, no other actionable buttons, no right-click menu. Nothing. So after hitting various key combos and mouse buttons, I decided that my 30+ minutes trying to use Apple's built-in backup software to backup a few folders was better spent finding 3rd party software.

And that was another user experience fail in my opinion for Apple and any "total quality" experience.

And that's not even talking about Safari or XCode or Pages or Numbers or iBooks not syncing and so many others.

Time Machine has been neglected for so long. The UI was never great for power users, but at least it worked. For a novice computer user it was a pretty good "set it and forget it" experience. In the last 3 years it has become so unreliable (every time it tries to backup it claims the backup is corrupted and needs to be re-created) that I've given up and switched to Carbon Copy Cloner.

Keyword here: Neglected.

At this point, my decision to use a particular piece of software or a specific feature within an OS/App/Website/etc based on perceived risk of that software being neglected.

Usually you can make this call based on features being added, but most of the time it's a gamble.

It's too bad, because it could be a set-it-and-forget-it solution if it were more reliable.

I gave up and wrote a Python script that calls Borg Backup. At least it's more customisable.

Ever since they stopped building wireless routers, Apple has forgotten Time Machine in favor of pushing iCloud backups for separate services.

But there’s still no good alternative to Apple’s old routers. I tried to buy a new router for gigabit internet last year, and the interfaces are so piss-poor and the performance so pathetic across the board that I ended up getting the last generation of Airport Extreme instead. I get 800ish down, 500ish up on wifi, so as far as I can tell I’m not missing out on anything aside from 6E, which my devices don’t support anyway.

I really hope Apple starts making routers with Apple Silicon soon. With incorporated Time Capsule backups, too. That’s the only way that they’ll stop neglecting the software.

The home networking scene is so bad. I had a Time Machine and and Airport Extreme, but it was not capable of PPPoE login to Centurylink's network, and I wanted to get rid of the Zyxel router that Centurylink provided.

I ended up getting a Linksys Velop MX8400C 2 pack from Costco for $230, since that was the lowest price I could find for something that did PPPoE login and could be hardwired together. I wanted the ability to do multiple VLANs via wireless like Meraki, but I could not find anything. Even the Meraki Go stuff does not do it.

Most people will just bridge mode the modem from the ISP to their router so that the router itself doesn't have to authenticate, which is probably why most home routers don't have PPPoE.

Actually, I miswrote, it is PPPoE login with VLAN tagging that you need to login to Centurylink’s fiber network.

I guess the apple time capsule and airports were too old to get that VLAN capability, since they stopped being made 5+ years ago.

A lot of the new home routers have the ability to PPPoE with VLAN tagging though.

I can highly recommend Eero. They Just Work, and they work much better than Apple's networking ever equipment did.

I just replaced the previous generation of equipment in my partner's house (1920's plaster and lath construction) with a set of eero6s. A set of four gives full strength signal throughout the entire place (including the basement)s and all of the outside areas. (Not really that impressive though because it's a small lot.)

There's no drop at all as you wander from zone to zone.

Many years ago I worked at a place where we all had external drives plugged into cinema displays that acted as Time Machine drives for our laptops. The backups regularly failed, OSX would suddenly decide it didn't like it and you'd have to clear it and start again. I don't believe Time Machine could reliably cope with drives that were periodically disconnected perhaps. I had the same problem with a NAS device and my personal mac, it would periodically just decide the backups were screwed.

> In the last 3 years it has become so unreliable (every time it tries to backup it claims the backup is corrupted and needs to be re-created)

This bit me and I've not fully recovered yet. I had some stuff backed up manually, but some stuff I just trusted to the time machine backups. Now that some of the backups are unrecoverable I only have easy access to the stuff I backed up manually. I'm interested in trying CCC, but part of the reason things went south for me was apparently due to closing my laptop mid backup to a network TM volume and I'm curious if CCC can handle that any better. Do you use CCC for network backups and have you ever had issues with it?

My condolences. It is an absolute nightmare trying to find any documentation for dealing with time machine issues. I ran into that once and will never do it again if I can avoid it.

I have been super happy with CCC. I use it to back up my Macbooks to my NAS. Sometimes wired, sometimes wireless. And yes, it doesn't break when it gets interrupted. And their documentation is amazing. All the use cases and error cases are documented with solutions and everything.

I think I had two or three recoveries so far and have been happy with it. Even when it didn't work for some reason their documentation had workarounds.

Same here. CCC is several orders of magnitude faster than Time Machine and it just works.

I stopped using Time Machine years ago when they started using hidden permissions on Time Machine backups that made it impossible to "garden" my family's backups on the network backup drive. Even as root, you couldn't delete old backups -- you had to log in to the particular user's computer to delete old backups.

And then they came out with APFS which didn't support the directory hardlinks which Apple invented and Time Machine depended on. WTF Apple?

> I stopped using Time Machine years ago when they started using hidden permissions on Time Machine backups that made it impossible to "garden" my family's backups on the network backup drive. Even as root, you couldn't delete old backups -- you had to log in to the particular user's computer to delete old backups.

You can no longer do that, AFAIK. Not even from the same user account or from root, since TM volumes are set by APFS as read-only except to Time Machine itself.

> every time it tries to backup it claims the backup is corrupted and needs to be re-created

I had that problem repeatedly, but used the same backup drive with Monterey and it worked flawlessly, with better feedback (TM's menu gave a percentage on the pre-copy, "counting file changes" stage), so I was pleasantly surprised.

Time Machine's insane UI isn't an example of Apple's software quality slipping; it's basically unchanged since it first shipped 14 years ago. It's more of just an example of how Apple's software never was as good as some people would like to pretend.

When I was at apple, we did this thing people called "keybote-driven development" where everything was made to look great in and keynote presentation to an exec. If it looked great you got the go ahead to finish it and ship it, and if not it got skipped. There are a lot of things to like about this approach. However, Time machine's UI to me feels like a quintessential blind spot of this incentive structure, where it looks visually striking and cool but actually using it for real use cases it often falls flat quickly. To update it you would need to fit the motivation and payoff in a keynote presentation and it's hard to do so.

Big yikes.

Remember that the 2007 iPhone demo had showed AT&T reception at full strength? That was hardcoded for the purpose of the Keynote. I recall iPhones having iffy phone reception for at least the first couple of years.

> Remember that the 2007 iPhone demo had showed AT&T reception at full strength?

With the help of therapy and psilocybin I got over that in 2016.

Not AT&T, but Cingular. Although I believe that Cingular was gone by the time the iPhone actually launched.

> Although I believe that Cingular was gone by the time the iPhone actually launched.

It was “gone” in the sense that it was renamed “AT&T Mobility”. (Cingular Wireless bought AT&T Wireless before the iPhone deal, but its parent company [SBC] later bought AT&T, adopted the AT&T name, and rebranded Cingular as AT&T Mobility.)

> When I was at apple, we did this thing people called "key[n]ote-driven development"...

> Big yikes.

If Apple's products are essentially sold via a "keynote", it makes sense to have a keynote presentation as the internal hurdle as well. If it can't be presented in way that looks like something people want to buy, there's no point in moving forward with the project.

Yeah but this is the classic type of bureaucratic effort-justification hurdle that leads to tech debt or just general crappiness never getting improved.

What do you hate about Time Machine?

I've used it since 2013. Every time I've bought a new MBP, I simply use time machine to restore and my new one looks exactly like my old one. Never had an issue.

I find it far easier to use than Duplicity, Iron Mountain ConnectedBackup, or Carbonite, all of which I've used at other jobs. (All of those require fine-grained backup tweaking that requires a lot of diligence to check boxes and set policies, and then fuss with awkward dialogs when trying to recover... duplicity is so effing weird... Time Machine just works and the time scroll seems very clever compared to the other three.)

I'd be interested to hear your problem(s) with it?

The specific complaint was "the insane UI," if I read the comment correctly. Time Machine's UI is possibly the last holdover from Apple's peak sizzle-and-flash design days, the era of brushed metal and skeuomorph-all-the-things even when there isn't exactly a real-world analogue to emulate.

To be fair, it's less insane in Monterey than it used to be. No wooshy space background, faster to launch, easier to scroll. But do we really need the "stacked window" view, for instance? Was that chosen originally because it's clearer than choosing a backup date from a dropdown menu, or was it chosen originally because we wanna look like we're using a sci-fi machine to GO BACK IN TIME woooo? I mean, we know the answer here, right?

If you rotate your wallpaper every week or so it actually ends up being a pretty cool visual indicator that's probably more memorable for some people than a drop-down menu would be.

Ideally we'd have both obviously. The big issue with it for me is that it has a timeline on the right with each backup by date so you don't have to do the stacked windows, but there's no labels to indicate the span of dates. It only has a label on dates when you had backups but there are no labels to orient yourself in time when you start rolling back.

Ah that's fair. The "Space Rolodex" theme is a bit motion-sickness inducing.

I find that useful because I can navigate to a folder where it used to live, and then flip back until the file I was looking for appears.

Compared to the alternatives: Connected Backup and Carbonite require me to manually enter dates until I find the file, and for a while Carbonite would keep closing the folder tree requiring me to re-expand every branch each time the date changed. However, duplicity requires me to dump the entire log and grep, which is a power user solution one could argue.

I think duplicity wins here because I can grep for the filename. But barfing Mac Rolodex can be helpful if I don't know the filename.

I think your difficulties may stem from thinking of Time Machine as a backup application, when the UI is designed around treating it as a core system component. The configuration is all handled through System Preferences, and the UI you entered was solely for viewing and restoring files from your backup archive. You probably also missed a prompt to use the drive for Time Machine backups when you first plugged it in.

Also, Time Machine is intended for full system backups, and using it for just a handful of folders not as easy as using it for everything.

Yea, the mistake encountered by the OP is that they were approaching the Time Machine UI with the intent of "I want to back up some folders".

The TM UI is solely about recovery. It backs up "everything" not on the "skip list". And out of the box it defaults to just the system drive (vs the system and external drives).

And that's an interesting facet here. This is a case of going in to a bookstore and scanning up and down the shelves and not finding what you want, and being frustrated, because you don't realize that you're simply in the wrong section. The TM UI in this case was frustrating because it had no options to do what the person wanted to do. And by design, it would not do what they wanted to do.

It's not a UI fault of TM per se, specifically this aspect of the TM experience. TM excels at full drive recovery, and recovering "a few, select" files. In the middle, it's not so good.

It's worked great for me. I've recovered from it several times, both entire systems and a few files. I use it solely on my main drive, and I use BackBlaze for the entirety of it all as a hat tip to offsite DR.

Over the years, I've lost a couple of TM volumes to strange corruption. Not that much of a crisis, I just reset it and start over.

Yesterday I prepared a few years old Windows laptop for my daughter to use in school.

It took me a few hours just to install updates, remove bloatware (my oh my, the amount is staggering!) and fix privacy settings. And this was for Windows 10 which I hear is a mild version of a mess that Windows 11 is.

I was instantly reminded why I appreciate Apple software more.

Windows is horrible in this regard. And what's worse is that the users seem not to care such that this behavior proliferates. I have a windows machine that I take it offline and want it running at all times. No updates possible, Wi-Fi is turned of right? Wrong, windows does restart machine and enables Wi-Fi. It pisses me to no end how little control I have of this machine

Sounds like you're just using the basic toggle switch to "disable" Wi-Fi when that's not really the purpose of the switch. If you actually want the Wi-Fi disabled, you have to do it right. Do it in the UEFI menu, or disable it in Device Manager if that option isn't available. It won't get re-enabled if you do it right.

You're absolutely right if I wanted to disable Wi-Fi permanently. The problem is that I want it enabled at times without rebooting the system.

So that rules out the UEFI method, but you can enable and disable in Device Manager without a reboot.

In reality, you just don't realise how much bloatware osx has. Install a firewall and watch as studentd or 100 other services you never use contacts apple.

Edit: List of most recent and trying not to include things that may be useful to me syncdefaultsd, nsurlsessiond, apsd, cloudd, transparencyd, mapspushd, cloudphotod, akd, parsec-fbf, appstoreagent, AddressBookSourceSync, com.apple.iCloudHelper.xpc, familycircled, trustd, AssetCacheLocatorService.xpc, imagent, indentyservicesd, com.apple.sbd, studentd, airportd, configd, parsecd, com.apple.geod.xpc, com.apple.geod.xpc, avconferenced, rapportd, trustd, remindd, helpd, syspolicyd

Long list right.... that's from the previous 3 hours.

But that's 1st party vs. 3rd party, big difference!

I can't tell if this is a defense or outrage? 1st party seems worse as, depending on the purpose, it might be harder to remove.

I agree with the previous person that Windows has more bloat. I don't want the 3-5 3rd party games it pre-installs and several other things. I also agree with you though. For me, All the Apple software is stuff I don't use so when I get a new Mac the first thing is removing Mail, Maps, Contacts, Pages, Photos, Calendar, Facetime, Reminders, AppleTV, Music, Keynote, and more and then removing the bloat widgets like News, Stocks, etc...

> removing Mail, Maps, Contacts, Pages, Photos, Calendar, Facetime, Reminders, AppleTV, Music, Keynote, and more and then removing the bloat widgets like News, Stocks, etc

All of the things in your list are just apps that can be removed with one click. My partner’s PC comes pre-installed with masses of hidden spyware. I know the kneejerk reaction is to bash Apple for everything - but the two are totally not comparable.

Hey so I’ll be getting my first MacBook Pro in a couple weeks, so I’m still learning the details about OS X. I’m coming from a windows / Linux background.

I thought the OS shipped with its own firewall? Would you recommend using a third party firewall despite having its own?

Little Snitch https://www.obdev.at/products/littlesnitch/index.html

Windows and Linux user for 25 years [EDIT Windows for 25, Linux for 20, to be more precise], heavy macOS user (in addition to those) for the last 10 or so.

If it has a firewall of any kind, I've never noticed nor interacted with it. I've also never installed a third party firewall.

Firewalls can do two things, mainly. Block inbound connections, block outbound connections. The macOS firewall is mainly intended for the former. Many folks want to prevent the latter (e.g. blocking phone home connections).

Get little snitch. This is a firewall that dosen't care what apple thinks is useful.

There was some controversy in the previous year because apple tried to deprecate the firewall hooks and allow their junk passed the replacement they offered.

I'm leaving apple for linux as we speak for two reasons, privacy and they can't help but mess with shit every time they release an update.

The most recent, this week they released an update and now their airport service listens on port 5000 making a conflict with running a dev flask service locally.

s/airport/airplay

> I'm leaving apple for linux as we speak for two reasons, privacy and they can't help but mess with shit every time they release an update.

"Mess with shit" was what drove me to Linux by around 2015. It seemed like every major MacOS upgrade torched my Eclipse-based Java dev environment, generally requiring a reinstall.

I mean, you can turn that off. Is changing a port such a showstopper?

I’ve flip flopped for years, (I was using freebsd more than 20 years ago, genuinely ran Solaris 10 with my own build of kde4 on a hp probook, etc) but last time I tried to use Linux for work I got defeated by a conference suite projector at a client and it cost us a big contract. The happy path (for me anyway) is doing all actual dev work on Linux vms and using macOS as your browser/im/terminal client — which it’s great at.

And it works with those stupid little projector dongles at clients when you’re trying to pitch them 6 figures of consulting ;)

> I’ve flip flopped for years, (I was using freebsd more than 20 years ago, genuinely ran Solaris 10 with my own build of kde4 on a hp probook, etc) but last time I tried to use Linux for work I got defeated by a conference suite projector at a client and it cost us a big contract. The happy path (for me anyway) is doing all actual dev work on Linux vms and using macOS as your browser/im/terminal client — which it’s great at.

It takes about one time of "this didn't work and it's your fault for using Linux" in a business context to break one of using Desktop Linux (or BSD, et c.), I think. I doubt similar stories are uncommon. I've got one, certainly.

At least if MacOS or Windows breaks, you're not the asshole. And it doesn't hurt that they in fact do break less often (well, Win10 with its abrupt, unexpected, and slow forced updates was a real problem for a while, but otherwise)

>There was some controversy in the previous year because apple tried to deprecate the firewall hooks and allow their junk passed the replacement they offered.

Funny how framing something that's true (allowing apple software to bypass firewalls) is seen as a controversy. See previous discussion on hn: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24838816

Lulu is as good as Little Snitch and free. It's by Objective-See. https://objective-see.com/products/lulu.html

There are multiple firewall options, but it's worth noting that Apple can circumvent them at a kernel-level if they want to phone home. You should think long and hard about how much you trust Apple before switching everything over.

The pf firewall is unaffected and can stop any calls to Apple.

Apple ships the pf fireball by default. It's a powerful firewall (same as OpenBSD AFAIK) but the way Apple configures it is very permissive. You can use a utility like Murus to configure it to your liking, although the configuration is rather complicated. It's also a network-level firewall, not an application-level firewall.

If you'd like an application-level firewall, you can check out Lulu or Little Snitch. Back when Little Snitch still(?) installed kernel extensions, it was found to be quite insecure—there were talks at DEFCON about it. Lulu is a lesser-known alternative.

s/fireball/firewall/

The OS firewall can only block incoming traffic (but not Apple's I believe) and has almost no configuration options.

Some popular third party solutions that are actually useful are Little Snitch [0], LuLu [1], and AdGuard [2].

[0] https://www.obdev.at/products/littlesnitch/index.html

[1] https://objective-see.com/products/lulu.html

[2] https://adguard.com/en/adguard-mac/overview.html

Mac OS comes with pf installed. This can block inbound and outbound traffic. There is a utility called Murus that manages this with a GUI, https://www.murusfirewall.com

Thanks, forgot about pf! Murus seems the perfect middle-ground for when day-to-day management through commandline tools is too much (I lasted for about a week!), but GUI tools sometimes too restrictive.

So basically in that list you’re suggesting disabling the ability to download web content, syncing of address books, getting updated security signatures, connecting to iCloud, downloading dynamic assets that many apps use to reduce initial size and provide non-binary updates, Siri keyword suggestions in Safari, Airdrop, Maps integration, push notifications for Messages, etc.

Most Apple users will definitively want those on, and will break your system in subtle ways if you disable them. I wouldn’t make such assumptions about whatever you use the service or not. If you don’t use a service, it typically will have very little traffic if any at all.

> Most Apple users will definitively want those on, and will break your system in subtle ways if you disable them.

What happened to the good old days of "ask for user consent before phoning home"?

I mean, Apple is miles ahead of Windows in that regard, but your average Linux or BSD setup won't phone home outside of repository downloads unless requested.

I think you have your target demographics mixed up for MacOS and Linux. Once you reframe it in that light, you've answered your question. One is a poweruser who wants complete control of their environment, the other is a much broader user who wants a convenience of experience and safe environment. Trade offs to both of them.

The only happy medium I would consider to your approach is that if MacOS had two set up routes, one defaulting as a power user turning everything off and then initiating things are you want and another as a general user. Maybe that would solve it (though would be a heavy lift I am sure).

This is the Little Snitch[0] problem. If you have ever used Little Snitch, you will soon realize that 1) there is so much crap phoning home and 2) most people do not want to deal with giving permission to each and every one of these services.

I have tried giving permission and at the end of the day, it's just not worth the time. For me, Little Snitch is great as a reporting tool but it's just too much work as a firewall.

[0]https://www.obdev.at/products/littlesnitch/index.html

> most people do not want to deal with giving permission to each and every one of these services.

It’s far worse than just annoying: if people have to give permission to a bunch of things they don’t understand, they will absolutely give permission to something they shouldn’t.

You want the user to make a few decisions as possible, and every single one should be an actual decision: where the user knows what the options are, has an actual stake, and might legitimately choose either option depending on their preferences and circumstance.

The more times they have to click “yes” without thinking, the more susceptible to malware they become.

I think this is a bit of an odd take, given that the alternative is that the computer just silently allows you to download content from anywhere. I don't think this makes someone any more susceptible to malware than they already were. Little Snitch is the sort of software that the average person wouldn't install, anyway.

I understand the point, though. Going to just about any major website you will be pummeled with prompts to allow for a dozen different domains just to view one page, and it doesn't really give any indication of what those are used for. They have a what seems to be infinitesimally small list of connections that they do recognize and explain their use, but ultimately it's pretty useless for the vast majority of prompts.

I'd like there to be a better way to deal with this, but I'm not really sure what the solution to it would look like. You can download blocklists and just silently allow other connections, but I don't think that's significantly better than just using a hosts file.

The most useful thing Little Snitch does is alert me when individual applications try to phone home. For browsing the web it feels more like a chore.

> the computer just silently allows you to download content from anywhere

How many times have you been asked to approve a download? How many of those times have you said "no"?

If the answer is "hundreds" and "zero," what's the point? If the answer "hundreds" and "ten just in the past week," then that's exactly the point, and it serves a valuable purpose.

My response was mostly to your last sentence, "The more times they have to click 'yes' without thinking, the more susceptible to malware they become." There exists a dichotomy of you click on a link, it loads the page or begins the download or alternatively, you click the link, Little Snitch checks its filters and if it doesn't have a rule set, it'll prompt you to set one. In no case is the second one going to make someone more susceptible to malware, because the worst case scenario, where someone approves every single download, results in exactly identical outcomes as the person who does not have Little Snitch installed.

I agree broadly with your point that prompt fatigue or decision fatigue is problematic and should be avoided when possible. I think this is a problem in particular with Little Snitch even, which doesn't do enough to provide. However, the point of Little Snitch is to allow someone to monitor and control the traffic at a granular level and the consequence of providing that utility is the frequent prompts whenever you're visiting a new site. To Obdev's credit, silent mode exists and you can set it to deny or allow all traffic without a prompt (and evaluate the traffic at your leisure).

Yep. I have a system tray CPU monitor running on both my Linux mint and mac computers. On mint when I don’t touch the computer it just sits at 0% basically all the time. On macos there’s always some junk flitting around doing who knows what. photoanalysisd, or sending telemetry for 3rd party apps, or iCloud syncing or something. It’s like the 2 E cores are there just to run apple’s bloaty crap. Shame those processes don’t limit themselves to E cores.

Is there any way to turn all this stuff off?

>If you don’t use a service, it typically will have very little traffic if any at all.

Like I said this was all from the last 3 hours and I haven't used any of those services listed. It's also missing the point a bit, I'm not bandwidth poor on a 3G connection trying to save my datacap.

I don't want apple turning my laptop into a thinclient for their cloud systems. I don't want telemetry and meta data going to them every ~30 seconds (the little snitch icon flashes a red X every time something is blocked, it's on a per minute basis).

Of all those services I use calendarsync. I miss having airdrop a little bit but everything else I don't need.

Also, the way you've phrased some of those, especially the notarisation

> getting updated security signatures

is a bit disingenuous when there's a massive privacy implication in that it allows apple to know every single application I run on my computer.

Most Apple users wouldn't agree to that if you stuck it in their face and the fact that it breaks the OS in subtle ways is a user hostile position to argue from. Hence why I'm giving up my Apple addicition.

> getting updated security signatures

AKA phoning-home to Apple what apps you launch in realtime, in an unencrypted manner visible to your ISP/hotel/government too.

It also connects to all of that crap even if you have LS off, analytics off, iCloud/FaceTime/iMessage/AppStore off, et c.

Press F8 and your serial number gets transmitted to Apple.

I guarantee you there are no unencrypted communications going to Apple.

Wanna bet? Apple still hasn't yet made good on their promise of encrypting OCSP (the making of which I would like to believe is my fault).

the making of which I would like to believe is my fault

How so?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25078034

Hostname: ocsp.apple.com

IP Addresses: 2600:1402:e::b833:965b

  2600:1402:e::b833:9661

  2600:1402:e::b833:9669

  2600:1402:e::b833:966a

  + 17  more

TCP Port: http (80)

Protocol: TCP

Connected: no

Connects: 0 allowed, 7,359 denied

First Activity: 2/11/21, 22:20

Last Activity: 5h 29m ago

Yea sorry, sneak's right, it's still going port 80.

Perhaps I'm wrong. I thought encrypted checks came out with Monterey?

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202491 (bottom)

What data is actually going over OCSP? I thought it was only ever checking for revocation and not actually sending app data, and I believe only ever happens when you want to take an app out of quarantine versus every app launch. You can always disable gatekeeper if you so please.

It does check for revocation. Using the developer's unique certificate ID, which, for the vast majority of developers, uniquely identifies an app. Over unencrypted HTTP.

OCSP over unencrypted http has not yet been replaced. I believe that the constellation of apps (identified by proxy by their developer IDs which are transmitted) can in a lot of cases uniquely identify a system, given a sufficient number of apps installed/used.

Many of those are useful to me even if you don’t care about them…which proves your point: there’s no reasonable (and sometimes none at all) way to pick and choose.

Opt-in is no longer seen as a reasonable solution?

You’re automatically “opting in” whether you want to or not, so it’s hard to see what’s optional here.

Jesus Christ, thank you. People act as if bullshit like TV and FaceTime are perfectly innocuous binaries without 6478 daemons molesting your memory irrespective of deliberate use & permissions.

Does it make a difference if you disable all of the iCloud stuff in settings? I let it sync most of my stuff so it moves between platforms, but I always assumed it wouldn't phone home for services where syncing is disabled. If it does this anyway, seems like a mistake.

Yeah that sucks, but on OSX side I have to restart my computer every week or so because of forced updates.

Restarting really is a big deal for me as my workspace consists of several dozen open windows, some of them I have to login, navigate to a particular place, etc... also you lose your train of thought. It has gotten that bad for me, that I have to take screenshots before restarting every time, so I don't lose track of where I was.

I understand not everybody has my same use case but for me it truly is a PITA.

Of course, the alternative is to just click on "Install Later" every 8 hours for the rest of your life, and then the one time you miss that button for a few pixels and click on "Install Now" everything gets closed and obliterated in an instant. But yeah, at least now I have the latest version of Safari which I haven't used in 10 years.

MacOS Monterey added an option to disable automatic updates. It's been the biggest annoyance for years, now it's just a checkbox in settings.

Thank you, I didn't know that. That's actually a big incentive for me to update.

> MacOS Monterey added an option to disable automatic updates. It's been the biggest annoyance for years, now it's just a checkbox in settings

The ability to disable automatic updates goes back far more years than I can remember - possibly even a decade.

You could disable the auto install, but not the nag.

Of course its better to have a system which will not install the updates automatically and will just be stuck at restart (windows 10 wink).

If i disable apple updates on a macbook, it will show the notification but will never update without my permission, good luck doing that on windows.

You are not forced to update on windows pro, only in the home edition

> Yeah that sucks, but on OSX side I have to restart my computer every week or so because of forced updates.

Huh? I think I restart my Mac for updates perhaps quarterly, and I can't recall it ever being forced.

Perhaps we live in different realities that happen to be connected through Hacker News.

In my timeline, Apple users have to deal with this -> https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201222

But you don't have to update. The consequence is that every day you have to choose "Ask me later" on the notification that pops up once a day, but that's a lot easier than restoring everything I have open. I only update when I have to reboot for some reason.

Sure, read the last paragraph of my original comment.

This nagging is currently my #1 reason for considering switching away from OS X.

The really weird thing is that I have an older iMac that seems to be powered on constantly (albeit with the screen off - I don't understand why) and also an M1 Macbook Air which does genuinely go to sleep with the lid closed. I seldom use either of them more than once every week or two. The iMac sporadically reboots itself without my consent, presumably to install updates. The Macbook Air has been running since the day it was delivered to my door without ever rebooting (100+ days uptime).

I get updates every two weeks, and I’m on the developer builds of macOS. There’s no way you’re getting weekly, mandatory macOS updates.

Definitely not defending windows here, but don't you find that macs come with bloatware as well? Safari, apple music, maps, etc - some of which you cannot uninstall as well.

Definitely a difference between first and third party bloatware though

Sure, but Win 10/11 have had stuff like candy crush and other 3rd party apps installed by default for a bit. MacOS only has 1st party bloat, which may be a big difference for some.

Fair point, I agree there's a difference.

First party bloat is arguably worse.

The difference is that none of that stuff is running in the background when you aren't using it. Maps doesn't take up a global menu slot. Apple Music doesn't open unless you explicitly open it (unless you happen to hit an Apple Music URL on the web). You can ignore it and it doesn't bother you. Whereas on Windows, bloatware tends to add a Start menu icon, tray icon, background process, startup item, etc.

And Apple's built-in apps aren't harmful, they're just unnecessary. In the early 2000s, my parents got me a Mac that came with Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2. :-)

I never found a way of disabling the automatic starting of iTunes when you press the play/pause button on the keyboard. How do I choose my own music player app?

And my new Mac has things like (can't remember exactly) 'musiccreationd'.

These count as 'startup items' to me.

You can use software like this to customize media keys: http://beardedspice.github.io/

If you're running a non-iTunes music app (including web pages, on newer versions of macOS), the play/pause button goes to whichever one last grabbed the audio. So if you start VLC (or whatever) first thing (or add it to the auto-start items), then the play/pause button will always go there.

It always worked as a pause/play for already playing media, my complaint was about its use as a launcher. Made muscle memory tricky as its behaviour depended on what was running at the time.

There's a great little utility called BetterTouchTool that will customize the default play button app. It can do a bunch of other little things, too. https://folivora.ai

I believe it’s just in System Preferences -> Keyboard, but may be mistaken.

I had a another look in "Keyboard Shortcuts". Lots of shortcuts, including a category called 'App shortcuts'. No mention of iTunes / Apple Music. I think it's just hard-coded in the OS.

Last time I got a fresh Mac, the bloatware all had an icon on the dock - so that is a combination of a start menu entry AND a tray icon.

Grab it with your mouse, drag it off the dock, done.

I guess I’m not really seeing what I’m supposed to be outraged about, here. Modifying the stuff in the dock on OSX isn’t difficult or unintuitive at all? Just grab the stuff you don’t want on there and drag it out, and grab the stuff you do want on there and drag it in? It’s just using the standard desktop metaphor and interface, and you’re in no danger of breaking fragile uninstall scripts like you would be if you manually removed a program’s entry from the start menu on Windows. It really isn’t comparable at all.

> Grab it with your mouse, drag it off the dock, done.

Same thing with Windows too.

Really? That doesn't seem to work for system tray icons for me. Are you certain?

Little Snitch says otherwise.

Sounds like your PC vendor installed a whole bunch of crap. I put W10 on a fresh PC just a couple of months back and it was a painless process. It was a W10 Pro ISO from Microsoft.

This is the way.

The last time I looked at Windows computers at Best Buy a year ago, anything mid-level and below was almost unusable because McAfee was using all the CPU.

I bought a Windows laptop (wanted to game with a modern-ish GPU). Step 1 was uninstall McAfee, and turn on Windows Defender for some modicum of protection. There are error popups for software I haven't installed when it boots. My parents have a new Windows computer which was showing popups advertising an extended warranty when I visited this weekend.

A fresh install of Win10 from the Microsoft ISO is very different from the typical factory configuration found on new hardware.

I deploy windows 10 pro.

Loaded down with crap.

What businesses want Xbox companion and xbox game bar running on all their work computers - seriously -> if you are on Microsoft search for xbox on your work computer.

Does Candy Crush Saga still come on the business pro ISO installs? That used to make the office laugh - who is paying $200/machine to get candy crush saga pre-installed.

In fact, the trick was they also had a separate app called app updater that would reload these things even if you uninstalled Candy Crush.

Too funny! The only way to get candy crush to go away was to uninstall it, then uninstall app updater - though people didn't date do that biz side because they didn't know what else app updater supported.

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/candy-...

Every business should enable & demo Xbox Game bar. The video capture is awesome for helping debug things. Just record what's happening & send it over with your Help Desk ticket.

It's free, easy to use & comes with Windows.

Microsoft could & should also just load that as a stand alone tool like the snipping tool. But they haven't, so I encourage Xbox Game bar.

yeah, the xbox game bar was useful to do some video capture as a one-off.

I don't have the same experience as you, sorry I am not sure why you're facing so many issues with an OS install. What does your IT department say? Any troubleshooting steps?

Installed W10 Pro last summer, no candy crush in sight, no tricks done.

LTSC

I did the same. I disagree. It required two rounds of reboots even though it was the latest iso and the Ethernet didn’t work (i219). Then whenever the thing goes to sleep all the windows move to the top left of the screen when it wakes up.

Sorry to hear you're facing issues with the install! I simply presented my own experience, I'm not saying anyone is right or wrong, so I am not sure what you're disagreeing with!

Just that it represents a roll of the dice and hardware configuration.

1. Yes first thing I run if I ever have to use a Windows PC is this little gem called Shutup 10 (1).

2. Then there is another software called 10AppsManager (2) to remove further bloatware like Onedrive, Skype, etc.

3. After that I visit ninite.com (3) to get the usual software without toolbars and spyware.

4. For other software like ffmpeg I use choco or chocolatey (4).

I am now a full time linux user but this was the least painful way to get my PC running before that. I'm sure things have changed or improved since, but this really worked for me 2 years ago.. hope this helps someone.

(1) https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10

(2) https://www.thewindowsclub.com/10appsmanager-windows-10

(3) https://www.ninite.com

(4) https://chocolatey.org/

They haven't changed. That's nearly the exact process I still use for for work and home PCs.

This is some great stuff. Thank you! I'm definitely going to lean into chocolatey. My daily driver is Linux but I still need a Windows machine around.

This is great! Thanks!

I am forced to use a Windows machine sometimes for work, and to me the unpardonable sin is that Windows seems to randomly reboot _without asking me_! I come to my office and all my open sessions are gone. How do you turn this off?! I try turning off the setting but it randomly turns itself back on.

Also, how do people set up a reasonable dev environment not built around Visual Studio? On my Mac I just use Terminal + MacVim (with my plugins), so I don't have particularly demanding needs. I tried WSL, but its just Linux side-by-side with Windows, not integrated with windows. If that's what I wanted I would just use Linux, but I need a command-line where I can still build Windows apps. Currently I use bash-for-git (so I can run `cmake --build ...`) but its so non-standard in lots of ways that it drives me a little nutty.

> I am forced to use a Windows machine sometimes for work, and to me the unpardonable sin is that Windows seems to randomly reboot _without asking me_! I come to my office and all my open sessions are gone. How do you turn this off?!

That's the neat part, you don't! Windows loves to revert those settings after every major update, even if you dig into the registry and scheduler and change the settings at the source. It is one of my biggest gripes.

Tell your browser to reopen the tabs it had when it exits. Try looking into these settings as well: https://www.windowsdigitals.com/windows-10-reopen-applicatio...

One of the best things Apple added to macOS a while back was the reopen all windows on startup. I don't even think twice about rebooting my Mac any more. Windows could sorely use the equivalent.

One way I dramatically reduce the amount of random reboots is I have a thing that looks like a USB flash drive but it has a few switches on the side - one of them, when activated, randomly moves the mouse every 1-5 minutes (there is also a hardware wheel knob that lets you customize the duration). It was meant to be a practical joke thing - slip it onto the back of a friends PC and drive them nuts, but it works great at tricking Windows to think the computer is being actively used. It doesn't stop all reboots caused by Windows updates, but it dramatically reduces them.

I also use it to keep my work PC awake when attending online meetings, or especially when I'm presenting. We have mandatory screen saver timeouts and for some reason I can't convince the IT overlords to tweak group policy to allow non-admins the ability to enable presentation mode. Oh well. At least they haven't resorted to only allowing whitelisted USB devices to run so my little joke USB fob still does its thing. I got it from Think Geek in their heyday but there are tons of similar devices on Amazon.

I moved from Linux to Windows for less hassle with hardware and sleep. I stopped using windows because of the reboot issue (and hassle with sleep...laptops kept waking and burning out in my bag). I went to ridiculous lengths to avoid it rebooting when I had a bunch of VMs running doing long-running computations and it just kept biting me. Sometimes the VM disk would get corrupted from this.

Eventually I realized it hated me and wanted me to fail in life, or perhaps click on all the crappy games or whatever it insisted on installing from time to time.

I don't love everything about macOS, but it's the least bad option and to my mind and for my needs, it's not even close.

Reboots should be configurable via Windows Update settings if these aren't taken over by a group policy. Last time I've dealt with random reboots turned out to be a hardware issue (bluescreen->autoreboot).

I used the debugger method[0] to control Windows Update. It redirects the call to the reboot scheduler that is called by Windows Update.

This has worked flawlessly for almost two years and multiple Windows feature updates.

0: https://lazyadmin.nl/it/how-to-stop-automatic-restart-win-10...

> Windows seems to randomly reboot _without asking me_! I come to my office and all my open sessions are gone.

You’re not safe from reboots even if you’re actively using the machine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ReHafyiDTR0

The idea to regularly update "Active Hours", so that Windows can never update, implemented as a simple script https://github.com/marcosbozzani/Win10ActiveHours still works for me to this day.

From (1)

> Some services … share your WLAN access data with your facebook contacts

Is that true? There’s no citation but seems a lot more flagrant a violation than I’d expected from Windows.

Note that Windows now has an official package manager called WinGet (https://github.com/microsoft/winget-cli), which worked very well when I tried it a few months ago; Skype and OneDrive can now be uninstalled without an external tool; and disabling all telemetry also seems to weaken antivirus protection.

Is it named after apt-get ? (loved Debian and always will)

I guess? :) There’s also NuGet in Visual Studio.

Why use ninite instead of chocolatey ? what's the difference?

Late, but in looking at things it looks like there are a significant number of things that Ninite will install and Chocolatey does not. While one can re-run the Ninite installer later for updates I do prefer the less all-or-nothing model of Chocolatey.

https://wpd.app

Just a quick shoutout to Ruckzuck (https://ruckzuck.tools/)

I like it far more than Ninite and it is a good way to find some open source software that you may not have heard about or used before, quickly install the programs, and keep them up to date with only a few clicks.

Omg...Skype for business has been dead forever but the app lives on. Can't be removed...I have deleted it manually and it still starts up. Wtf?

Perhaps I should spend more time figuring this out. Meh.

Windows in the Ballmer Era, Vista to Windows 8, was a disaster. Windows 10 was released a year after Satya Nadella took over and was an improvement. Windows 11 of the Nadella era is a big improvement. It seems like Microsoft decided to spend the money to get it right to create something stable and pleasing. I've been running it for a month and highly recommend it. I think a big attraction to Mac OS is that the UI hasn't changed much over the years. Time will tell if Microsoft is on board with that. I don't listen to the Microsoft or Apple haters who are always on here telling me one or the other sucks.

Common refrain from the fanboys: You’re enjoying the things you like wrong.

Seriously, I am using Windows 11 since official release and I am getting to a point where things are just the way I like them. I was lucky enough to have a machine that just met the TPM/processor requirements cutoff.

There are a few annoyances: I would like to use the dashboard/widgets for weather, etc but they force their newsfeed on you.

Win11 UI is noticeably bad. Harder to read, harder to notice buttons. Useful functionality is hidden behind more clicks, etc...

It might have some aesthetic value, but it's not necessarily nicer, just different and more trendy. Which quickly wears off.

I believe Windows 11 is that last desktop machine UI we'll see for awhile from Microsoft as they intend to refine and improve this one and stop irritating people with changes. I'm happy finding work arounds for things that don't work for me. For example, I can no longer read the time from the task bar from a distance, so I have a browser tab loaded with a time service that I like better. https://www.clocktab.com/

> I believe Windows 11 is that last desktop machine UI we'll see for awhile from Microsoft as they intend to refine and improve this one and stop irritating people with changes.

Wasn't Windows 10 supposed to be that?

Yes, I believe that was their intent, but they said it too soon. 10 still had a lot of ugly artifacts that appear to be cleaned up in 11. Well, I'm keeping my fingers crossed that I'm right. I think it's what they should do.

Windows 7 was a disaster?! macOS UI doesn't change over the years?! I feel you are living in some alternative universe compared to me.

why do you people bother with windows? just use linux

Windows and linux don't overlap much in use cases. I think macos and linux are more interchangeable

Linux Mint looks and feels exactly like Windows 7

What are the Windows use cases that Linux doesn’t do?

General web browsing type tasks are solid, text editing/note taking works. Videos and audio (including Spotify) work. Steam and games generally work (even most windows games through Proton).

What else does ones daughter need for school? She’s not video editing or creating music (two use cases where you may need windows or OSX; art is more or less covered through blender/Inkscape/krita)

Mint or Manjaro are easy to install and setup and come with good defaults that should be pretty easy to navigate for someone new to Linux.

> She’s not video editing or creating music

In my experience, kids do these things all the time for school projects.

Gaming; general office stuff ; peripherals

Dunno what you mean by peripherals, at least ones that don't work on Linux, but the other two categories work just fine. Gaming has come a long way thanks to Valve and their work on Proton.

I'm guessing you're not someone who would describe themselves as a "gamer"?

EDIT: (I don't mean this in a mean way, just to say that people who care a lot about being able to play specific games probably still won't be satisfied without a Windows box).

I play plenty of games and have a Steam library of ~400 or so games. I haven't had a Windows install in a few years. The only issues I've had with Windows games on Linux, using Proton on Steam, is that it doesn't work in Wayland (but every game I've tried works fine under X, of course I do check ProtonDB.com before buying games that don't have official Linux support).

Oh nice, I clearly need to read up on Proton, there’re some Windows-only games I’ve been missing.

Would you say it’d satisfy for twitch shooters?

I personally don’t play many, but generally you won’t see any performance difference. Do check ProtonDB to see if the ones you have in mind work as expected. Typically games that are rated platinum work as well as on Windows, Gold typically works well but some people had some issues (Check the comments, sometimes the issues are unrelated things like the launcher not working but the game works fine) while anything else expect headaches. Some multiplayer shooters have issues with anti cheat for example.

Yeah, I don't either, mostly just curious since that seems like it'd be the most demanding category. I've actually mostly been missing Battle Brothers which is... not latency sensitive. And it looks like ProtonDB gives it a platinum! Thanks for the pointer to that.

Sadly looks like a lot of the top 10 are in "Borked" status, though.

> Sadly looks like a lot of the top 10 are in "Borked" status, though.

50% of them, but 2 of the 5 broken games are known to be buggy in general (New Worlds anyway, PUBG was years ago, no idea how it fares nowadays so maybe I'm wrong) so dunno how much of that is Proton's fault. The two gold ones seem hit or miss: many people report they work, but some people have issues.

Still, a lot of AAA games work perfectly (eg Sekiro) and many games I play even have native Linux versions (Crusader Kings 3 being the main one, I'm hoping with the steam deck more devs will release Linux versions but maybe that's too optimistic) and most of the indie games I play work well, so for me, I've been pretty happy and haven't looked back.

Most people pick the operating system that best runs the software they need.

Not only that but a huge portion of people will simply not swap away from the OS they know under any circumstances.

Windows 12 could require all users to get punched in the face to log in and most people would say, "Yeah, it sucks but it's better than spending $1,800 on a Mac. Plus my video games..."

There are lots of hardware configs that don't fully work, or are very unstable, under Linux.

I feel like running linux is like voting for a 3rd party candidate in the US. FWIW linux is great I just can't convert all the people who aren't developers to linux without an unnecessarily steep learning curve.

I wish we had more options though. Between Windows and Apple there's no other real competition. Linux is cool and all... but not user friendly (not even Ubuntu)

I don't understand this attitude. I spend countless hours trying to keep my wife's work computers working. Getting windows to connect to a printer is a frequent ordeal and fixes seem to always be ephemeral, things soon breaking again. Her Macs are not as bad but still have lots of hiccups.

Meanwhile I've been on Ubuntu for more than a decade and as far as I can remember, for example, printing consists of printer just magically appearing in my apps without me ever having to install anything and I press print and it prints. That's user friendliness to me. At least for my workflows (mostly web browsing, software dev and office stuff), there is vastly less fiddling and head scratching to keep things working on Ubuntu.

Frankly if the drivers didn’t suck hot shit I think many of us would.

My work Linux laptop frequently (several times daily) breaks Bluetooth, breaks audio, does not wake from sleep, wakes from sleep but only shows the mouse pointer on a black screen, stops throttling the CPU down, resets the DHCP-specified DNS server to 0.0.0.0, sends stuff to printers that cause them to just spit out endless blank sheets of paper. The "solutions" to all of these are multi-step manual disasters... uninstall pulse audio, restart cinnamon, reinstall blueman, upgrade Jack, manually create config files from copying some file on a GitHub repo, downgrade to some specific version of CUPS, mess about with apt-get repos to not get the latest version of whatever...wtf?! That is not user friendly.

My personal Windows laptop has never had a single one of those problems. It has been faultless from day 1 without a single issue.

Sounds like a truly broken install. What's the maintenance history of the machine? Have you been patching it from third party repos? Why are you running Jack on a work computer anyway?

Back up your documents and do a fresh install. It'll take you an hour and you'll regain stability.

I mean, I admit you do have to start with known supported hardware. I have no patience for having to install drivers but like I said, for the last decade, it has been easy to find a computer where most everything worked out of the box (Bluetooth maybe the exception but it doesn't seem to work half of the time on any pair of devices/cars regardless or software being open source or not). System76 laptops are great when you want something specifically designed and tested for Linux. Before that, I used to bring a live Ubuntu CD to Bestbuy, pop it in computers to see which one would run everything out of the box. I would say success rate was higher than 50%.

Corporate centrally managed install. Dell hardware.

Jack is apparently needed to get Bluetooth to emit audio reliably... but I would not put much trust in that since it didn't fix Bluetooth not working.

That's annoying. Honestly it sounds like your IT dept is missing some expertise, and maybe tried to be too clever by installing some hacky add-ons, which destabilized things. It seems like something of a ridiculous stretch on their part, for example, to think that Jack would be required for bluetooth.

That said, as long as they're willing to be hacky: bluetooth audio worked reasonably well for me _until_ I got a headset with its own dongle. At that point the original bluetooth dongle stopped pairing reliably with the speakers I was using. That prompted me to switch to pipewire and it's been rock solid since. You might suggest to IT that they experiment with pipewire (since it's the new hotness, they may actually take you up on it.)

I too have had quite an awesome experience with Linux on older devices, everything just works, Many things are actually better than Windows, Unfortunately I feel like there is still a lack of software available on linux. Yes there are alternatives for everything usually, but things like microsoft office would make a great addition.

I would say in some instances driver support is actually better, I had this old logitech wireless keyboard and mouse lying around which worked quite well, unfortunately they came with this older version of unifying receiver which the current version of their official software refused to recognize (on windows, no official linux support). I was having trouble finding a older version of the software too. Somehow I ended up trying to use Solarr [1] (which is made for Linux) and it worked first try.

[1] https://github.com/pwr-Solaar/Solaar

It's been 4-5 years since i last used it.

I remember feeling like it was a full time job - always some issue or inconvenience. Struggled with basic multimedia stuff and of course the biggest issue, almost no apps.

You could say the real issue is not Ubuntu itself but the ecosystem.

I set up Ubuntu with KDE (Kubuntu?) on an old laptop for my wife. Win 10 on the laptop was so slow that the machine was unusable. She uses Firefox, Google Docs, and she uses a printer. She's had zero problems in two years and I've updated the machine twice for her. Of course how usable the machine is will be dependent on what software you need.

You should probably just toss Fedora on it if she only intends to browse the web and edit documents.

At least one can remove the bloatware from Windows!

I put the boy on an old Dell Vostro running Fedora.

Installation and updates took about 30 minutes.

Updating the machine is a `sudo dnf update` and done.

Though I did get in trouble when I shelled into his machine did and update and rebooted without checking he was using it first - killing his call to his (not)girlfriend in the process.

He's just start secondary (high) school and they are using Google Classroom so all he really needs is a browser and a webcam/mic.

I am thinking of starting the young man with Ubuntu, rather than Windows or OSX. Since his (not) gf only uses iPhone tech, I won't be able to accidentally interrupt any calls.

Take a look at neon. Probably a good distribution for a kid. I still run my kids computers so they run arch.

I wonder if FaceTime web [1] actually will work on Firefox or Chromium on Linux.

[1]: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212619

Was that a few year old installation of Fedora?

Is this not true on Mac? Updates in particular take forever on MacOS. I find Windows updates take like 5 minutes usually. MacOS has been a half hour or more for some of the point updates I've done.

Bloatware is still there, iMovie, Garageband, iWork is IMO bloat. Slightly more quality bloat maybe but I don't need 20GB taken up by stuff I'll literally never use.

IMovie, GarageBand and iWork are not installed by default and you can remove them at any time.

Recent Mac OS updates are monolithic signed binaries that load into the protected disk partitions reserved for the OS. This is security feature to limit which processes can modify the OS. The downside is that it can’t do differential updates. I hope that, at some point, Apple will work out how to securely do differential updates and speed this up, but I’m satisfied with slower updates if it maintains security.

When did they stop including them because they were absolutely included on both the Macs I bought a few years ago...

The are still included and installed by default.

I just got a brand new Macbook Air M1 a few days ago. It probably took an hour to update to Monterey out of the box. It failed and I had to reboot a few times and re-install again.

Pages, Numbers, Keynote, Garage Band, and iMovie are pre-installed. I don't use these apps and they are easy to uninstall, but they definitely came pre-loaded.

I'm no fan of Microsoft, but a vanilla Windows 10 install isn't very bloated imo. Did you perhaps start with an image provided by the laptop vendor? It's not Microsoft's fault that they're usually full of trash.

I think perhaps you are in the EU and were using the "N" version of windows 10. I realized that the normal windows 10 installs a LOT of bloatware (Like I don't need candy crush), while the N version did not do that.

Oh that's a good point.

I'm in the US, but yes whenever I select the image to download I do pick the N version.

Unfortunately it doesn’t really matter who’s fault it is from the perspective of the user.

All the windows computers at the computer shop ship with bloated 3rd party crap. Except the apple computers. It’s also not Google’s fault that most android vendors don’t support old devices for long. Or Linux’s fault that hardware vendors make linux drivers an afterthought.

As a consumer, I don’t care why any of this happens. I just want the things I buy to work properly.

Who decides what's bloat? macOS ships with Apple News, Podcasts, the App Store, Books, Garageband, Stocks, iMovie, Keynote, etc. A lot of their stuff is even pinned to the taskbar by default. Should be consider that bloat? I don't need any of those programs (or prefer alternatives), so it seems like it's bloat for me.

I’m not sure. The bloat meter in my mind certainly goes up when these programs start phoning home to update stocks or whatever. (Despite me never even opening that program).

I should definitely have the option to turn this crap off if I want to - without needing a 3rd party program like little snitch to do so.

Yes it is bloat. But there is a difference in easy to get rid bloat (just delete them in Apple) vs needing to change registry settings, etc and jump over several hoops to remove the bloat that comes with windows

For a fair comparison you have to use an equivalent priced device sold by Microsoft itself (so a premium Surface), and that has none of the problems you described.

Yesterday I finally made the decision to ditch Windows 10 and move to Elementary OS on my desktop computer (my laptop is a Pixelbook).

I was attempting to edit videos. I plug in an external hard drive with my footage, and... nothing. Well, not nothing. It's there in Devices & Printers. It's able to be ejected safely. Troubleshooter has no problems.

But nothing in Explorer or any other obvious place you'd think. Panicking, I plugged the same drive into Chrome OS. Literally three seconds later I was browsing my footage.

That's the point I got up from my desk and said, "I'm done." I'm so over Windows.

They spend how much time and effort shoving a Linux environment into things when they apparently can't even support widely-used filesystems. The fact my external drive is mountable by both Chrome OS (where the code for mounting is open source) and macOS (a closed-source OS used by a minority of the populace) but not Windows is an utter joke. I shouldn't have to spend all this time trying to access my files in 2021. This is something that should Just Work.

This was just the straw that broke the camel's back. I've had several minor and major annoyances with Microsoft's treatment of Windows ever since Windows 8, and none of them have gotten better.

- WTF is "3D Objects" and why does it always bubble up from the pits of hell even when I delete it? Microsoft is very opinionated about the User folder in general, while I think they should be as hands-off as possible. Stop adding folders I didn't ask for and stop resurrecting them after they're deleted. Why is this so hard?

- Ditto the last point for OneDrive.

- Windows 11-specific, but adding ads to the taskbar? In a paid OS that the OEMs are already footing the bill for and bundling whatever extra crapware they want? https://betanews.com/2021/09/04/microsoft-crowbars-ads-into-...

- Obscuring local account creation to a ridiculous degree in Windows 10 (you need to literally disable Wi-Fi or unplug Ethernet to even see the option) has gotten even WORSE in Windows 11. Now you can't even set up a local account at all unless you shell out extra for Windows 11 Pro! They've learned nothing from the Xbox One always-online debacle, and honestly looking back, this should have been the dealbreaker. But I thought, "hey, I don't create accounts that often, this is something I can live with." No longer.

- The amount of analytics and data-gathering in Windows is the worst it's ever been, and worse than any comparable OS. "You can turn it off though." Well, maybe. Until Windows Update decides it knows better and turns it back on.

- This is purely aesthetic, but Windows 8 and 10 looked utterly horrible if you did anything more than look at the desktop and open the Start Menu. Clashing styles and UX edicts from decades of past releases, in very visible places. It gives the impression Microsoft just doesn't give a shit. And don't tell me "it's too hard to update everything in time for release." It's not everything, and Microsoft is a big boy with lots of money and developers. They decided they just don't care.

And today, I read this:

"Microsoft to Block Windows 11 Browser Workarounds" https://www.thurrott.com/windows/windows-11/259208/windows-1...

It's not getting better or even staying the same. Microsoft is actively making Windows worse for their own ends. Thankfully I have the choice and ability to install an alternative, but my heart goes out to those with no choice. It's Orwellian.

There was a time when a fresh install of Windows required over a day to bring up to current, if you didn't have install media with the latest service pack already applied.

MacOS updates are fairly slow, though, so I don't know if it's a clear win. But I also don't think anything has gotten significantly worse in recent years; there have always been good parts & bad parts.

Apple needs to re-hash their ancient process for handling bugs and remove the entrenchment around Radar, internally and externally. Stop outsourcing your internal tools overseas and telling product engineers ‘it is like it is’. That clearly didn’t work with customers (re: MacBook feature reversals), it also doesn’t work with engineers. Allow engineers to scratch their own itch, and solve these complexity problems in the stack. Fix the back-office mechanisms and SIMPLIFY. Stop building features on sandcastles to pretend they’re concrete.

Ex-Apple employee here. You have it exactly.

Radar has a dedicated team with full-time, US-based Apple employees working on it.

It's also kinda a pile of garbage. But so is everything else... (actually in many ways it was a lot better than some others, but that's beside the point here). Part of my job at Apple was simply to cache and organize things locally for our team in a way that made sense to us.

Every team is going to want to do this differently. Find good abstractions that are generic enough to let people do with them as they please. Don't force your model down my throat, I'll probably just gag it up and come after you instead.

The issues at Apple stem from the top. Replacing Radar alone solves nothing.

Apple's new Music app absolutely ruined my entire local music collection one day, when updating from macOS 11.4 to 11.5 (I think).

My music collection traveled with me from OS update to OS update for about 13 years with no problem. And now pretty much everything is broken, some files can not be played even though they are on disk, half of the album covers are gone, syncing with the phone gives a ton of errors. What happened to this app and why - I have no idea. It was my worst day as a long-time Apple user and needless to say how maddening it was. Oh, the backups don't help, the new app does the same thing to the backup copy too.

Seems like Apple doesn't care about your local music collection anymore, nobody even bothered to test.

Music on macOS is a complete mess, even without a local music collection.

seems like a major win for Apple though.. in their ever effort to coerce people to spend more through subscription, it might not work on you, but I can easily see my less techy friends and family succumb to this catastrophe and sign up to some music service...

This is so upsetting to me, especially considering that my intro to the Apple ecosystem ~15 years ago was an iPod and how glorious that thing was.

Listening to my own local library has been a continually worse experience over the last 2 years. Not to mention, I use wired headphones with a lightning adapter 70% of the time, which somehow causes even more issues. Disconnects. Will refuse to play unless I unplug/replug or restart my phone altogether, increasing/decreasing the sound now has occasional lag that can take upwards of 5 seconds (and you have to unplug or restart to fix).

If I thought I had a shot of whatever job is in charge of this, I’d apply in a heart-beat just to fix all of this for my own needs.

It's definitely an app-level thing. About album art specifically I tried hacking around a bit, but when the software itself is buggy you're a bit limited in what you can do https://www.blisshq.com/music-library-management-blog/2021/0...

I find anything that involves the cloud with Apple is suspect to just not work without explanation, but overall I think iOS is pretty solid still. I just avoid their cloud services and use something else.

MacOS, on the other hand, I feel is increasingly a pain to use these days. It is not so much that the OS has gotten worse, but that there have been weird UX decisions along the way compared to Windows. I don’t like how MacOS manages windows or full-screen apps; I don’t really like the finder still; and I think the dock is a big waste of space on high resolution displays and never quite hides reliably the way I think it should when set to hide when not in use.

I should say, I loved the dock back in the OSX days, I just think The Windows taskbar is better these days.

It is a shame because I think Apple is at an all time high with their hardware design and build quality. Their laptops are second to none. The OS just feels like a chore to use half the time.

Right click on the dock → Turn hiding on

I also prefer: ... → Position on screen → Left

This morning I plugged in my macbook and tried to turn it on. No dice. Hammered the external mouse and keyboard. No luck. Opened up the clamshell, started testing USB-C ports to figure out which one wants to charge today. Hammered the "on" button. It started asking out loud in what to me sounded like an old school macintalk voice for a username... I have to assume I provoked some sort of accessibility feature. Hammered some more buttons in frustration, switched USB ports again, got an apple logo. Then a "reset password" screen. Reconnected to power and it finally booted up, telling me that there was a problem. This is not an unusual experience.

So you clearly have a hardware problem since your USB-C ports aren't charging.

And rather than go to Apple you instead randomly press buttons and then are surprised when random things happen.

Okay.

> go to Apple

Is there an easy way to do that in the moment? Genuine question.

I (we) have many Apple devices and in my experience ‘it just works’ until it does not. And if not you are out of luck. No errors, no warnings, nothing. It ‘just does not work’. Googling mostly does nog give any usable solutions.

I would love to gave an instant phone or chat service. For free, because I feel like like really paying a lot already.

It’s not instant, but Apple phone support/chat support is free and the wait times are usually <5 minutes in my experience.

Interesting. Also in Europe? I will try this week. I often have problems and am pretty sure a new one will turn up soon.

AirDrop is a notoriously returning problem. Sometimes it works, sometimes it does not. I consider myself tech savvy and understand how it works, but AirDrop is often useless.

Not sure where you are. In the US Apple stores are open and doing support. You just need to schedule a session.

By 'at the moment' I mean now. Because the problem is now. Scheduling a visit to an Apple Store is not a good option to deal with my frustration at that moment. Besides, I am in Europe, where the prices are higher while having far less Apple Stores (pretty sure there is none in the country where I live).

which... may be days or a week away, if there's anything remotely close to you. FWIW, I've usually been able to get something 'same day', but not always, and often it's "hey, there's a slot in 2 hours, and the next one is in 6 days".

> may be days or a week away, if there's anything remotely close to you

That's the cost of not living in a big city. Life is full of choices.

“randomly press buttons” is absolutely step 1, this is not a nuclear power plant we’re dealing with… they got it to work didn’t they?

I am not aware of any other way to wake up a MacBook with the clamshell closed. Step 1: plug it in. If it doesn't turn on step 2 is to hit keys, right?

Did you use the wrong charging block? My MBP did that when I used the charging block meant for a macbook. It took a lot longer to get a charge to start the computer. Sounds a lot like my experience. I now make sure I only use the appropriate block

Yes, that is an unusual experience. Something is wrong, probably hardware, and causing this instability.

Maybe don't hammer it so hard?

The good news is that for once we have a precedent of Apple listening to what people actually want with the new MBP lineup. Whether they'll be able to replicate that magic with their software teams remains to be seen, but at least now it feels within the realm of possible.

I'm sure plenty of people will disagree with me, but I don't think this is a good precedent. Apple has always been opinionated, and that's a lot of what made Apple different. Admittedly, sometimes their opinionated takes weren't great, but a lot of times they really were great, even when some people didn't realize it. That's what allowed Apple to grow and soar to the heights it did. I worry that the new MBP line is a sign of Apple beginning to loose that quality that made them different from so many other companies... I worry that it's the start of a fall into mediocrity.

I agree that Apple's hot headedness in the past has helped the industry in the long run. For example, eliminating the floppy drive with the original iMac, or pushing for open alternatives to Flash by not allowing it on iPhones. It is concerning that they included a full size sd card reader (22 year old technology at this point).

The full size SD card slot is awesome for photography.

The SD form factor is over two decades old, but the technology inside the cards and readers has advanced significantly, so you're effectively complaining that nobody has broken backwards compatibility by switching form factors.

It taking up space instead of being perhaps a USB type-A is a bummer. USB-C docks that take the SD form factor still exist, of course.

I love SD cards, theyre like miniature floppy disks, but not too miniature - microSD feels very fragile and more difficult to handle - what do you have against full size SD?

I'm sure plenty of people will disagree with me, but I don't think this is a good precedent. Apple has always been opinionated, and that's a lot of what made Apple different.

I agree in principle but in practice Apple made a lot of bad bets with the previous generation across the entire product line.

Intel failed to meet its targets time and time again, which hit Apple's production schedules especially hard since they tend to make big updates infrequently rather than continuously updating internals to be as fast as possible.

The USB-C ecosystem never got as convenient or extensible as they had hoped. Only now do I see a lot of good USB-C docks and peripherals coming out and it's still not as robust as you would want if you're building your entire product suite around it.

Some stuff there just was no good alternative, particularly SD cards.

The TouchBar was a dud.

The low-profile switches on their keyboards had big reliability issues.

And many more! Part of being a bold innovator is knowing when an idea didn't work out. The latest generation shows that they're willing to defer to practical needs rather than doubling-down on failed ideas.

I’m startled by this. Apple got too good at believing it knew best when the industry told it that it was wrong. This created false confidence for bad ideas. Note that I’m a hardcore Apple fan saying this. The previous design was bad. Recent UI changes in the OS are bad. I criticize because I want the thing that I love to kick ass. On HW, they’ve got it. On SW, not so much.

I recently moved from Mojave to Big Sur and I sure am feeling this. My Wacom tablet keeps on not being recognized when I wake from sleep. Safari's constantly using a huge chunk of my CPU and typing stuff into a text box in it is often painfully slow. There's a bunch of little constant aggravations and really nothing that's improved my life beyond "the latest version of Illustrator wouldn't work on Mojave". Which I haven't even upgraded to because I'm waiting for the .1 release of that.

Apple keeps on moving shit around on OSX for no good reason and it's just annoying.

The latest Safari is by far the buggiest thing I've seen out of Apple in some time. It fucking crashed on me the other day! That in addition to multiple bad behaviors and glitches.

But then, I don't do betas and usually wait until the first big patch to update the OS.

Today Apple Mail crashed on me while sending ab E-Mail. And I‘m still on Big Sur.

I dug around and found a fix for the "constantly eats all my CPU" issue: Turn on "compact" tab layout.

Which then creates the problem that now I'm using the "compact" tab layout that everyone in the betas screamed bloody murder about until they added that switch, god this layout is really annoying if you have any extensions up in the toolbar and/or more than about four tabs. But at least I don't have to deal with using fucking Chrome or losing all my text expansion shortcuts because Firefox refuses to support those.

My inner paranoid wonders if this is a deliberate tactic to boost the numbers of people using the "compact" layout by someone whose next performance review is riding on that layout: "see, boss, look at what the telemetry says - everyone's switching to Compact! We should just drop the old look and give me a major bonus!".

The new Safari design looks 100x worse than the fake leather ever did. The UI team should be ashamed of themselves.

It wouldn't have happened under Joni.

Apple's software quality has certainly slipped. I'm not sure if I'm just getting old but I find software quality in general seems to have slipped. Or is it just because there's more software around?

I think that the slip in quality we are seeing is a result of increased complexity more than anything else.

I think this is hard to recognize but almost certainly true. I have the Airpod Pro and was recently annoyed at how it wasn't quite doing the audio source switching like I wanted. Clearly some sort of software issue. Yet, if I honestly take a step back, the fact that I can put these in my ear and be using one of 3 devices that are right next to me and it seamlessly and correctly switches the audio based on what I am doing is quite magical. It's easy to be annoyed at the few times it doesn't when magic becomes the norm.

This sort of story always reminds me from a bit in Seinfeld where Kramer's phone number is one digit off from the Movie Phone number. He would say something like "press 1 for Total Recall, Press 2 for...". Of course he would not be able to determine which button was pressed, and would say "why don't you just tell me the name of the movie you want to see?"

I feel like we are creating really unpredictable, and hard to implement UIs in the name of "magic". Would a button in the UI been better? I think it would have been, at least for me.

I'd expand your reasoning to include organizational complexity, which sometimes overrides technical factors.

That's a good point. I've observed in my own work that complex organizations have a way of driving out expertise. I don't mean that experts quit, as that is an unavoidable fact of doing business. Rather the organization is structured in such a way it is difficult to build expertise in the first place, and many of the experts are the people that were around before the organizational complexity arose.

I'm not so sure, at least in the context of Apple because they have slipped far more than their competitors. Android is way more stable and has far fewer bugs than iOS as a simple example.

Yeah, I agree. Apple has slipped while competitors have improved. Android today (especially the Google-only flavor) is pretty impressively stable. Even worse is that iOS is supposedly more "simple" than Android.

Mostly, my comment was projecting my own experiences with complexity on the projects I have been involved with. You are right, in this case other factors probably dominate.

Computers really are not doing much more today than they were in the early 2000s. Despite the massive increases in home computational power, the only thing that is really visibly improved is the graphical fidelity of video games. All other software is doing the same stuff it did 20 years ago...just worse.

Bad software is more due to needing to ship stuff ASAP for marketing, the board of directors, and for the investors. This decline in software can really be matched up with the increase of startup culture.

I would also argue that complexity is developers own doing, trying to strap every new fangled library, engine, tool, API ,buzzword of the day, etc. to their program...when there is zero reason to. Nothing about what modern software does is more complex than it was in the 2000s

I can Cmd-C on one device and Cmd-V on another. It works wirelessly and securely without explicit network configurarion and even without network access. The amount of complexity that enables this simple feature is staggering if you look into the implementation.

There is probably more software written this year than existed a couple decades ago and each new app is orders of magnitude more complex.

I think that it has to do mainly with two things: 1. The overall complexity of what's possible is growing, so software is just becoming much more complex.

The other is the fact that server based software has an almost zero time deployment cycle, and even native code for desktop/mobile can be shipped really quickly. This makes software mostly an iterative process. If fixing bugs on a weekly basis in a major mobile app is no biggie, and almost nothing gets blocked because of a bug that can be just fixed next week, you just get a lot more bugs shipped to users.

> Or is it just because there's more software around?

I think there's _less software around_, insofar as there's fewer discrete software titles around, but each title has far, far more software code behind it.

I remember as a sprog, running my cracked copy of Adobe Photoshop 6.0 - that in order to do anything "cool" in PS (especially when you just can't grok how to paint, even with a Wacom) you needed a huge smattering of third-party Photoshop plug-ins: Alienskin, Kai's Power Tools, Flaming Pear, FilterFactory, etc - but nowadays while plug-ins are still a thing I find myself getting-by with only Photoshop's stock functionality. It certainly doesn't help that Apple continues toward completely locking-down their platforms: in-proc and binary plug-ins for Photoshop on iOS will never be a thing.

It feels industry-wide to me. Quality was never a high priority, but in the past decade it’s fallen that much further. Everything has become centered around shoveling as much code as possible as quickly as possible, with little to no regard for how well it works. Nobody cares if it requires obscene amounts of memory, turns laptops into furnaces, and functions correctly only half the time so long as it’s getting shipped quickly.

It is industry wide, but I don’t think this gets Apple off the hook. They sell a premium product so it’s not unreasonable to expect something a little better.

> Apple's software quality has certainly slipped.

I've been using and supporting Apple software since the 90s and I think this is more an artifact of most bugs not being especially memorable than anything else. People have complained about bugs after every release, a fair fraction of the complaints circulating online will be attribution error or overly-generalizing a niche condition as global, etc. and that seems to have been basically constant since OS X 10.2 or so.

There is one more interesting discussion, however, which I think is probably a legitimate trade-off: the entire industry has been moving to faster releases since it's easy to ship updates over the internet to huge audiences. When that wasn't possible and update cycles were measured in years, teams did spend more time on QA so you probably did have a somewhat lower chance of seeing bugs of the sort which were caught by that kind of process but at the expense of taking much longer to see new features or get fixes for bugs which slipped through either due to complexity or limited trigger conditions. Since the amount and complexity of software has generally been increasing, I think that this is generally the right trend with the addition of telemetry to collect crash reports, but it does seem like this could increase the perceived number of bugs even if the duration of time where you're exposed to a particular bug decreases.

I wasn't a dev when I used it but I remember OS 9 being very very crappy most of the time and OSX feeling like a massive leap forward

My favorite example of this was how, just after quitting my job on the iPhone hardware team, I needed to buy a new phone. So I went to the local Apple store back home in Colorado and got myself a shiny new iPhone X. It didn't take long for the winter to start rolling in and the outside temperature to start to drop. I suddenly began to notice that my fingers weren't registering on the touchscreen anymore, even with warm hands.

A few days went by and more and more people were reporting the same issue. It took a quick update to fix, but I still find it hilarious to think about all my ex-colleagues walking around in 65 degree weather all the time, never even thinking about this issue.

I felt this way about purchasing Airpod Pros in Minnesota. Clearly, no one ever thought to try these with gloves on.

Look at the mess that is Apple Home. They added it because Google and Amazon were doing it - and, that's about it. Hey, I can add some lights that I can change color to any color I want! Too bad if I want a thermostat, a doorbell, or...

Okay, what about Apple Wallet? It'd be really nice to add my digital driver's license, health insurance cards, auto insurance card, frequent shopping cards - basically make it so I don't have to carry my phone and wallet. Can I do that? Not really.

Alright, so what about their iWork suite? On second thought, forget about it. People are using Google Docs or Office 365. Next...

That's the problem with Apple software. It all feels kind of half baked and neglected. Apple built their reputation on It Just Works and now it feels like it sorta kinda works, I guess.

If Apple's software were a tenth as dazzling as their new hardware then it would be awesome. It's not even close. Their software division needs help.

> Alright, so what about their iWork suite? On second thought, forget about it. People are using Google Docs or Office 365. Next...

I'm only able to get away with it because I don't have to send anything other than PDFs to other people very often, but Apple's office-type apps are the only ones of their sort that I don't hate, aside from a few less-integrated and less-stable open source alternatives (Abiword, Gnumeric, that kind of thing—and I'm not even 100% sure those are still around). Google docs and Office 365 are terrible and I pity people who have to use them.

You're wrong. You can definitely add thermostats, doorbells, cameras etc. to Home (I've done it). And you can definitely add health insurance cards, frequent shopping cards, etc. to Wallet (I've done that too). Please don't state things that are just factually incorrect.

> Alright, so what about their iWork suite? On second thought, forget about it. People are using Google Docs or Office 365. Next...

For collaboration, yeah, you're stuck with what everyone uses. But considering the actual software itself, iWork is very nice in my experience. Fast, reliable, and the interface isn't a total shitshow like every other office app out there.

> I've done it

Same. I currently have a HomeKit thermostat, doorbell, and cameras in my house. Not really sure where GP is getting his info. They all work really well.

> Okay, what about Apple Wallet? It'd be really nice to add my digital driver's license, health insurance cards, auto insurance card, frequent shopping cards - basically make it so I don't have to carry my phone and wallet. Can I do that? Not really.

As far as I know, things like driving license need user adoption. It's getting there - https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2021/09/apple-announces-first...

I thought the software division had help. In the form of many many developers making apps for the platform. What happened to them?

Your comments on Apple Home are factually incorrect. I have lights, cameras, smart blinds, thermostats, temperature/humidity/air quality sensors, my eero6 router and even my Roku added into Home.

Apple Wallet also supports some forms of ID, transit cards and even vaccine certificates.

I use Apple home and want to like it, but it mostly sucks.

I think the main cause of this isn't so much Home, but the available third party hardware. I wish Apple would make a smart switch (I know that's fairly out of scope for them), but one high quality smart switch that actually worked reliably would resolve 90% of home tech issues.

Homepods are similarly bad with basic actions. I have five of them in multiple rooms. If you want to adjust the volume on all of them and say "make volume 50% everywhere" it fails. I have to whisper the command to my phone so the homepods don't hear me and then it can adjust volume on all of them.

Volume and playing on homepods generally from the phone is a shitty experience. Often the homepods lose the phone connection and then I can no longer control them from the device. Really it feels like nobody at Apple actually uses these things in their personal life.

I also have a gigabit network connection with a stupidly fast access point in a two bedroom apartment so it's not an issue of network speeds or signal.

In my experience, it's been pretty okay. Not amazing, but I can't really complain.

I've got 2 HomePods in a small apartment, and they typically work okay in what I need them to do, and automatons always work.

I sometimes have to close the app and open it again to get devices to respond IF I'm in not on my home network. Kind of annoying.

What's funny is that I've noticed that it's been better since I bought an eero 6 and added into into Home.

Most importantly, it works for my girlfriend who isn't the most keen on new technology. That's the most important part for me, rather than what I want.

I have two smart switches attached to lights (since our apartment has no overhead lighting) and after a nightmare of setting them up (probably the hardware's fault, but homekit couldn't recognize them via normal pairing method) they worked for a few months.

Randomly though they fail to work in Home and I have to manually reset them by holding in the button on the device and redo the entire process. This isn't workable at any scale (it's even annoying with just the two that I have).

It's the dearth of 3rd party hardware that I find frustrating. It's not apparent that Apple has done much to flesh out that ecosystem.

Is it Apple's job to flesh it out, or is it better if they come up with a spec for HomeKit and have third parties create devices?

It's not their job, but third parties have failed.

It'd be nice for them to make one base level device (like a smart switch) which supports most of the use cases.

I was really excited for a stereo pair of homepods but have similar issues and worse - even tho they still appear as grouped, music will often only happen on one or the other. If I was playing music from the phone, and then later ask siri to play something, it will play different music on each speaker - in a stereo pair! plus I have to shout for them to hear my command over the music, very bad experience, back to ebay they go…

Another annoying issue is with timers.

When cooking we'll tell the one in the kitchen to set a timer. Then we'll ask what time is left. If another one hears the question it yells "there are no timers set" so we have to whisper to the closer one.

Another thing that to me suggests nobody at Apple is really using these things.

what was simultaneously aggravating and hilarious was when trying to set up a stereo pair of Alexas, trying to whisper to one, and Alexa whispered right back!

I remember a funny story of a dad putting his very young kid to bed and whispering “play classical music” in order to use that feature and the Alexa screamed back at full volume “ALEXA IS HAVING TROUBLE CONNECTING TO THE INTERNET RIGHT NOW”.

And the worst part is that their software division used to be great. Aperture was really good when it came out, Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro were great. Eveh talking about iwork suite, numbers and page used to be better than they are now. Even Quicktime regressed.

It's frankly both puzzling and saddening how much Apple has lost in term of QA, user interface and vision in the last 10 years. I always feel that Tim Cook doesn't have a clue about what made Apple special and is slowly destroying it by not making sure to keep those qualities

EDIT: I do recognize Tim Cook's qualities, he is amazing at managing supply chain and apple does this better than anybody with very little impact in terms of chip shortage. He's original decision to target privacy as a marketing argument was on point (unfortunately the csam controversy kind of destroyed this) and under his tenure Apple has done tremendously well financially.

But the issue, is that Apple also benefits from its reputation and in the last few years, they've destroyed it by producing shoddy software, by having major hardware issues over multiple revisions (keyboards, staining screens)...

>Tim Cook doesn't have a clue about what made Apple special and is slowly destroying it by not making sure to keep those qualities

Well their shares have never been higher so as long as that's the metric by which a CEO's performance is judged then you can forget about Apple caring about SW QA and other such "nonsense".

Also, before Jobs passed away, Cook was Apple's supply chain mastermind so it makes sense his strengths are with the HW side of things, which, during the current silicon shortage, is an absolutely killer skillset to have, as proven by how little Apple was affected by it in comparison to other companies.

When it comes to quality SW, Cook might not be the ideal CEO for the job (like notifications on the new MBP can get hidden behind the notch; WTF, how did this pass QA?! Pretty sure Jobs would have sent them back to the drawing board) but Apple can always rely on the faithful developer base building great quality SW instead of them and then taking a 30% cut on their sales on the Apple store. Basically another win for Apple.

Oh I don't disagree with you that he is great at managing the supply chain. World class even.

The thing is, there's inertia, Apple made great products and still have a great reputation, Amazon was a great place to buy online and while it has a counterfeit problem, it's still doing great, I'm sure it's possible to find a few examples of companies that have been doing great stock wise but that are slowly eroding their reputation. It doesn't show yet in the sales, but the narrative has changed.

The thing is, look at the threads in HN, they used to be very very positive of apple and now they're much more critical. Things no longer just work. People complaining about stability issues on a mac are common. Macworld which has always tended to be extremely positive about Apple complains, Ars Tecnica too, even Daring Fireball is less overwhelmingly positive than it used to be.

Apple relies on those power users to recommend their friends to buy their stuff and I no longer recommend buying an iphone to my friends and I know I'm not the only one.

> look at the threads in HN, they used to be very very positive of apple and now they're much more critical.

Agree, but the thing is, the HN userbase is only a tiny fraction, and not representative of the entire more lucrative consumer base that Apple is targeting. I think Apple will be fine, even if it looses the super picky stickler developer HN userbase that is proficient in linux anyway.

Apple kinda stopped caring about the Mac SW quality as that's not its main cashcow anymore for a long time. iOS and app store subscriptions and fees are where the real money's at.

> notifications on the new MBP can get hidden behind the notch; WTF, how did this pass QA?!

Developer and QA team tester were using older MBPs? So it worked on their machines?

Rendered fine in the automated test?

Those all sound like terrible mistakes for a 2 trillion dollar company.

How can notifications, which appear in the upper right corner, end up behind a notch in the middle of the screen?

the things you complain about, in your comment, work here fine.

Are you posting from 2014 or something?

When an Apple feature doesn't work I give up on it for the remainder of the software version.

Trying to fix broken Apple bits is always time-consuming and almost always fruitless. They have trained me to believe "it just works" or it just doesn't and I am just hopeless.

Upvoted for "fruitless". Subtle, perhaps-unintended puns are the best puns.

Everyone posting on the failures of Apple should seriously try Linux Mint (in a VM if nothing else). It's a wonderful experience.

One important thing not mentioned here: Apple should make sure to keep up Safari Development. It's by far the worst browser available and the web platform is only growing.

Care to elaborate?

You cannot use anything outside of Safari on iOS [0]. FireFox/Chrome aren't allowed to have extensions on iOS for that reason (Regular Safari can because antitrust is MS-only).

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25850091

Let's not forget their hold back on push notifications so a lot of us can get out of their walled garden.

Google forked WebKit in 2013 and stopped upstreaming changes. Now Google's fork is the one that everyone uses.

Apple launched the WebKit revolution, but Google grabbed the ball and ran with it, Apple didn't give chase, and now they are behind. A pity.

It is always behind on web technologies and hasn't implemented may features that have been around for a while.

It only gets updated once a year, so any updates they do make are slow to hit users. This wouldn't be so bad if they were more up to date with Firefox and Chrome.

Is it behind web technologies or is it behind Google Chrome Features ?

Chrome, Firefox, Brave, etc.

Answer is both

Safari is famously behind on supporting PWAs, most notably their implementation is missing web push notifications.

Not having web push is a feature. They're the 3rd party toolbar or BonziBuddy of the modern web—often enabled, but rarely wanted—however nice an idea they were in theory.

Firefox lets me simply deny a web page the ability to send a notification when it attempts to do so, allowing me to only let the apps I want do so, while not bothering me about the majority of web sites that don't use it.

Why should apple make this choice for me?

I'd love some data on what percentage of web-push notifications going out are to users who want them, versus to users who didn't realize browsers had added a feature to let websites shit up their desktop, and, like most folks, just click "allow" on everything that pops up on a site (as there's rarely any reason, for normal people, not to) and don't know why or how some site they visited once is sending them stuff.

My experience from my immediate friends and family support circle is "0%" and "100%", respectively, but I'd be open to data showing that the first number is slightly higher than 0%. The "UX" for this feature for normal users is, as far as I can tell, exactly like the bad old days when people'd accidentally install 3rd party "search bars", then not know how to get rid of them.

Historically, browsers have worked to keep web sites from doing things that affect the machine outside that site's browser pane, that normal users don't want or expect them to be able to do.

The push API is supported by every major browser except Safari. Just because you find them annoying is no excuse for not supporting them.

If by chance Apple agrees with your stance, a Safari config that disables them is the proper solution, not dragging their feet.

It's a pure loss for non-geek users. It should be disabled—no dialog allowed, even—by default, if the feature's gonna exist. That hitting "allow" on a pane that pops up on a site—something users are conditioned to do without thinking by all kinds of shitty but extremely common web patterns—affects something outside the current site's browser window is unexpected and unwanted by normal users. Cases where it's easy for sites to affect the behavior of a machine, or of the browser, outside the current session on that site, have historically been a big problem for non-geeks, and this is no exception.

That sounds pretty reasonable to me. But that still doesn't excuse Apple not implementing it. Apple doesn't implement features like this because they want to maintain app store sales. They do this for them, not their customers.

I think if Apple really really wanted to implement it if not for the risk to app sales, they'd have it on desktop Safari, at least. As it is, I just think they don't want to implement it, App Store or no.

From observing non-geeks use the "feature", I think that's the right call regardless. It needs to go back to the drawing board, or be scrapped. In general, anything that expands the reach & capabilities of websites should be treated with a ton of suspicion, as a likely vulnerability vector (leaking tracking info; social engineering/phishing vector; straight-up exploitable bugs) or simply a net-negative annoyance for most users.

You must feel that way about push notifications from apps too then? You seem strongly against push. If you only dislike push on websites, why?

If Apple thinks push notifications are annoying, why does iOS have them? Again, Apple is protecting their walled garden. That's all this is. There really is no other good faith argument for this.

People don't switch between ten just-installed apps in under a minute. They do that all the time on the Web. There's more focus on what you're doing when you open an app for the first time, and installing the app in the first place is a strong signal that you're open to entertaining requests to expand permissions, like to receive push notifications. Browsing to a website is something people do on a whim while barely paying attention, which they don't consider any kind of commitment at all, and they're used to sites going away entirely when they close the tab, not sticking around because they clicked "allow" on a dialog that they don't even remember because the action didn't rise to the level of conscious thought, since the web bombards them with "allow/deny" boxes all day long, where "allow" is just the thing that consistently makes the dialog go away the fastest so they can get on with looking at the site.

Web notifications are not comparable to app push.

they sort of do, albeit with a custom api and requiring you to register as a developer: https://developer.apple.com/notifications/safari-push-notifi...

For iPad oh boy they sure added new niceties such as:

- Not being able to click a tab unless you drag it to the center of the tab bar

- Make a "drag a link/anchor into a new window" feature; except it triggers way too easily from ordinary scrolling, forcing you to spend the next 15-30 seconds figuring out how the FUCK do you close it with an non-obvious swipe gesture. Apparently buttons with "Close" or a big X are too complicated.

Oh my god the inadvertent link drag to new window (or just overwrite current window) has been killing me, glad I’m not the only one, means there’s a chance it gets addressed.

Same experience. The amount of css "quirks" I have to work around trying to get a site "mobile friendly" is absurd. The navbar issue, and the scrolling still not being disabled with overflow:hidden makes me bang my head against the wall.

On a Mac, Safari is the best browser (as defined by being fast, battery efficient and native app) by a far margin compared to other mainstream choices, only matched by the Orion browser (but I may be biased).

Since Internet Explorer is not supported anymore by most websites Safari has become the new worst browser in regards to having really bad CSS and Web API Support.

...and bad PWA support, shaky VOIP/WebRTC support, the worst codec compatibility in the game, a lack of desktop notification options, need we go on?

Yeah maybe you as a developer want some fancy CSS and bleeding fresh Web API but I as a user don't.

The web is too bloated as it is, I feel that Apple is on my side putting a damper on that.

Safari is powerful enough as it is. You want voip, notifications, codecs and so on - do the work and learn to write a native app. I'd rather pay for that than paying with my attention to ads in your "free" web app.

Well I as a developer just want a browser which doesn't break existing features: localstorage, indexeddb were completely broken for months this year.

Like CSS containment is feature that was shipped in Chrome in 2016, Firefox 2019 so how many years have to pass for Safari to implement it so it isn't just 'some new shiny' feature anymore?

> The web is too bloated as it is, I feel that Apple is on my side putting a damper on that.

Like how Safari doesn't support WebP?

Safari/WebKit does support WebP (since June 2020).

Yeah, this is the kind of entitled mentality that is going to sink the MacOS ship. I'm not writing a native app just for basic web browser functionality. If the choice comes down to re-writing everything for MacOS or dropping support altogether, I have no qualms cutting out less than 20% of the desktop market share.

I sincerely hope you do. It would open the market for some dedicated, more talented macOS native companies.

I was a web developer in a previous life. You can write basic standard code and Firefox/Chrome/even old Edge works fine, but Safari has a million little things that are buggy or don't work, or break at random in new versions. I wasted so much time hacking random bits of code to support iPhone. In 2021 now that IE is finally dead, I'm sure Apple is singlehandedly keeping BrowserStack in business.

The first one that comes to mind is the <input> select method doesn't work[1], although MDN claims it does. It works _sometimes_, for reasons I couldn't discern. I'm not sure about you, but I wouldn't call selecting text a fancy or bleeding edge feature.

[1]: https://stackoverflow.com/q/3272089 Don't miss the comment about an infinite loop hanging the browser

> do the work and learn to write a native app

Why? I want it to run on all platforms. That's one of the best things about the web. I'd rather just not support Safari than write and deploy separate MacOS, Windows, and Mobile applications.

My and most user-bases agree.

+ I don't want my users to download to have download a native binary that has unrestricted access to filesystem and I need a Apple Device to develop even if it's the smallest thing in the world.

Web browsers are the best of both worlds, secure enclaved sandboxes, easily reachable by just a link, and powerful enough to do many basic tasks, and cross compatible.

Web browsers are also huge, complexity-ridden, resource-hungry monsters long past their original mandate and currently well on their way to become a gigantic mess that include everything and the kitchen sink.

As an user, I do not mind downloading and installing slim and fast native application which take advantage of the hardware my devices provide and integrate nicely with my OS.

I personally do not mind the state of web browsers anymore, to be a web browser today is quite akin to the operating itself now (Let's not talk about Chromebooks), It's a very complex, resource heavy monster that abstracts away hardware differences from the software, and I love it. Web today is a mess, What we thought a browser will do, read HTML and render it on the screen, has been well offloaded to well, "web apps", and web browser just is a tool that runs them, quite similar to what the OS does.

What I like about web is how "safer" it is compared to well running binaries on the OS, me visiting a site would not give it access to all my private photos, and potentially allow it to add itself to startup everytime I open the OS without my permission.

As an end user, I felt like Safari should have done better. And extension for Safari are gated behind app store only (no sideloading the extension).

Also I came across a few sites that Safari couldn't render it correctly whereas Firefox and Vivaldi show the site just fine. I only use Safari as a last resort and only used it for Zoom/Doxy/Whereby/etc.

That is a common misconception, CSS support in Safari is as good as Firefox, and just a hair worser than Chrome's.

(latest webcompat test results were 96/92/92 for Chrome/Firefox/Safari https://paul.kinlan.me/sorry-safari-team/ )

It's interesting that your list defining the "best browser" doesn't actually include properly rendering web pages and the general issues that safari has as a web browser outside what you mentioned. "Fast" is interesting, as if something doesn't work, is it really fast? I routinely see how Safari fakes speed. Being able to read a web page before someone else doesn't make it faster if you can't also interact with that web page. And while battery efficiency is critical, rarely do I know someone who is only using safari. And while being "native" is nice, it also means its use is limited to just the Apple ecosystem.

Best means different thing to different people. I have opted to define exactly what best means to me, so that we can get comments like yours to further the discussion.

By your standards Lynx is the best browser.

On Linux it may be for some, but I was talking about Mac, and on macOS I want a browser app that works and looks in a native way.

Safari is probably the least secure mainstream browser, as things go.

Does a non-native browser exist?

Yes - Chrome, Brave, Edge, Firefox... all use non-native UI components in their macOS apps (even iOS), which makes them look and feel out of place on a Mac.

> It's by far the worst browser available

It's not

It’s interesting to witness basic things that don’t work well on Macs due to software issues:

- I have a Logitech trackball mouse and occasionally it’s unresponsive. On Ubuntu and windows no issue. I checked several places and it’s a known issue

- MST doesn’t work. Works on literally every other operating system. This isn’t a big deal until you want dual monitors with a single cable without daisy chaining the monitors, e.g using a thunderbolt dock

I have a few issues with Apple software, but with AirPods Pro they recently added an AI-driven voice isolation mode which was an incredible change. Went from the other side barely being able to hear you when you were speaking in a noisy environment to feeling like you were in a quiet room together. Massive quality of life improvement and increased competitive moat from better software.

My AirPods almost never connect automatically to my phone when trying to take a call. I've since just reverted to the wired set when talking on the phone. Awful.

You're probably in the minority there, I've seen complaints few and far between about AirPods connectivity, but lots of glowing praise for. Personally, AirPods UX is better than any other Bluetooth product I've used.

I've had similar problems with the UX on AirPods. Here are the choices in Bluetooth for AirPods to connect to my Mac: 1. Automatically 2. When Last Connected to this Mac

What does #2 even mean? I want my AirPods to connect when I last connected?

It's been common for me using my AirPods to take a pause in talking and while using my PC for the AirPods to detect sound on my PC and then switch.

Yes, definitely better than many other Bluetooth earbuds but I think people were hoping Apple's control of the OS and hardware would've produced a better, consistent experience.

“connect automatically unless the airpods were recently paired to a different device”

was that in software or only the new Pros?

It was a recent software addition.

https://www.apple.com/hk/en/ios/ios-15/features/

Another neat new feature is screen sharing in FaceTime. But there’s a huge list of improvements, it’s clear they’re investing heavily in software.

It's all about the shiny.

I haven't been in the Mac ecosystem for that long (since 2015), but what I've noticed is that Apple, like most software companies, tend to accentuate the new and fancy features.

I would personally love a release that simply fixes/stabilizes/improves old existing issues, with zero new things. Optimally a combination of both, but I'd settle for solidifying the base.

I guess that kind of talk is not popular in the board room.

And I'm far from the target customer, not really using any of Apple's software. I like it as an Ubuntu-like platform where everything is supported.

I don't care about upgrades to their internal tools which I don't use anyways (Mail/Maps/Safari/whatever). But I presume to be a minority as well, so this is just a rant. I've seen zero reason to upgrade to Monterey, just as I have with the previous releases, and only running Big Sur[0] now because I bought an M1 which is fucking awesome.

[0] Which was a huge letdown in terms of various changes that seemed to be changes just for the sake of changes.

I've had more problems with Catalina than any earlier MacOS back going back past Lion.

Like many others have reported, Catalina drops my ethernet connection once or twice every day, regardless what adapter I use. (I've tried three different hardware devices so far. All fail in the same way.) Apple will not acknowledge the problem so there no hope of it being fixed.

If MacOS's services get any worse, I'll be left with a $2500 pumpkin.

Funny, just yesterday I was troubleshooting Carplay troubles. My Opel Ampera-E (Chevvy Bolt) would only recognize my phone as an iPod! For live I couldn't figure out the issue: I rebooted the infotainment system, I reset the infotainment system, I reset my iPhone - yet, on this particular iPhone, Carplay failed to launch.

Turns out that at one point "App & privacy limits" were enabled, and this _silently_ disabled Carplay!

Forget about new features, I just want all the old features to stop breaking. It sucks having to buy new software every X years. At least with Windows, I can run old business stuff with no problems. Good luck on Mac.

This kind of problem will continue to happen as long as corporate incentives continue to reward new features more than solidifying existing fetures. It's easier to get promoted for doing "new" stuff.

While I will agree that it takes a long time to reach everywhere with new features in Maps, I'd say the recent macOS Monterey update was a major improvement in performance/reliability, so the article doesn't really resonate for me.

I IMMEDIATELY noticed the improvement in application startup times after upgrading and have seen a big difference between my work laptop (macOS Catalina) and my personal laptop (macOS Monterey). Everything has been more stable in Monterey for me personally. I've noticed that the weird occasionally-crash-my-laptop-when-using-a-dock bug has been resolved. Connecting my AirPods has become more reliable and the connection doesn't flake out anymore.

The uneven distribution part is interesting, especially because it compares Apple Maps to Google Maps.

I think “unevenness” shows what’s in the main focus for a company: Google Maps are great almost everywhere, but you can’t buy a Google Pixel phone except in a handful of countries. Apple’s the opposite: iPhones are available everywhere in the world on the same day, but software is spotty.

I've definitely noticed this over the years with working professionally as a software dev with Apple products. The random freezes, app crashes, clicks stop working in apps until a restart, memory leaks bogging the entire system down, etc.

I'm on a 2020 16" MBP. The screen blinks black as frequently and randomly as a human eye. The speakers audio pop frequently requiring reboot. Certainly not as bad as my lemon MBP 15" from 2018. But whether these continued problems are the fault of software or hardware I don't know. And does it matter? One of the draw cards of the Mac ecosystem is that the limited number of hardware devices should equate to more reliable systems.

An example, Macbook Pro back around 2013 had hardware volume and mute switches that worked instantly. Useful when going to a cafe, hitting mute as upon opening the lid to avoid blasting the room with music. Now with toucbbar, I get to the cafe, open the lid, the computer starts playing music and it takes 10-30 seconds to respond to touchbar controls.

I moved from PC to Apple back around 2005 for improved reliability, quality and simplicity. My first 10 years where great but the quality has declined so significantly that I've started trying linux distros.

That's not a normal experience regardless of what's causing it -- you need to take that thing to your nearest Apple store.

I live in Indonesia. The authorized apple service here in Bali is so bad that over the last 5 years I've made at least one overseas trip a year for the sole purpose of getting a MBP fixed by an actual apple store.

On one case I flew to Sydney left it over the weekend. Picked laptop up on Monday. They had replaced logic board. Powered on, full charge, quick test, closed laptop went to airport flew home. Opened laptop in Bali, screen went black, laptop dead. Without ever plugging it in. There goes one return flight to Sydney. More or less same thing happened when repairing in Bangkok.

Such has been my adventure with Macbook pros since 2017, yet my 2007 27" iMac and 2005 Mac Mini work perfectly to this day.

The bugs in the Apple ecosystem drive me batty. Even in the latest version of iOS, when my phone changes between night and day mode, Safari only updates the background color of the URL bar but not the text, leaving me with white text on a white background. I can only fix it by force quitting Safari, and the problem doesn’t occur when I manually toggle between modes. Yay.

But you know, I installed Windows 10 via bootcamp recently and even simple stuff like mapping caps lock to control requires either changing a registry setting or installing power tools. Also, the ads. Similarly, I can’t stand the UI of Android TV compared to tvOS.

So as much as I find Apple products infuriating a times, the alternatives are even worse.

So I stick with Apple. But its products no longer bring me joy. They are just another slightly less shitty tech product I put up with.

There’s a slogan for you: less shitty than the other guys.

Sigh.

I don’t see any particular reason to believe the premise: that Apple is letting its software slip.

Anecdotes are fine as a place to start or to tell the story, but don’t tell us anything about the general state of Apple software.

I can see why they do it, though. Apple Doom always gets a lot of clicks.

I use MacOS for work - I think it's a fine OS. Biggest thing for me is that it's UNIX based.

I wouldn't use a MacBook myself though. They certainly are damn fine machines for the price (M1), but I really don't like MacOS having a bunch of stuff I don't need, like Garage Band. I know Windows has a ton of bloat as well, and MacOS's bloat is more useful, generally speaking. It's not for most people, but any popular user friendly Linux distro like Ubuntu has little bloat. Unfortunately, those aren't as user friendly as MacOS or Windows (I assume this will garner some opposing opinions).

I mean, you can uninstall Garageband. If you do a clean MacOS install, Garageband isn't even included (you have to download it separately).

This was a brand new machine sent to me by my company and it was preinstalled. Is it not bundled with a fresh install, but with a newly sold device?

Correct -- newly sold devices include a bunch of preinstalled software that's not on the OS image by default.

Apple's done that for ages; I remember their earlier computers even came with a bunch of random games, like Nanosaur™.

GarageBand doesn’t come pre installed with a Mac, hasn’t for years; and only came pre installed for a very brief couple years.

https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/built-in-apps-mchl1...

It's on this list from Apple, but the additional comment in the table row makes it sound like it had been gone for a bit and now it's default again? This was a store-new machine and it was installed on there - don't know why it would be there otherwise.

The major Desktop Environments have their own software suites that you'd reasonably call bloat (especially KDE Plasma), and then distributions frequently by default come installed with even more bloat.

Apple's software is full of race conditions. I have the newest phone and the newest update and I see them in the settings app, notifications pull down etc. unbelievable

Sad, but true.

I'm watching very closely at the issue, that with iTunes I was able to sync files to iphone/ipod/ipad and SEE THE PROGRESS BAR. Since iTunes was discontinued and we were forced to use Finder for the same task - you no longer see any progress bar when syncing files to one of the apps on your device.

From 0 to 10, what would HN rate this UX mistake?

Here is a thread on Apple forums: https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/130051

Here is Apple's official guidelines: https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...

"Don’t make people sit around staring at a static screen waiting for your app to load content or perform lengthy data processing operations. Use progress indicators to let people know your app hasn't stalled and to give them some idea of how long they’ll be waiting."

Go figure.

Today on HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29227450

TL;DR: Certain Accessibility features relating to the pointer can cause your Mac to run out of memory on certain apps.

I bring this up because something as simple as the MOUSE POINTER can bring the system to its knees if not implemented correctly, and they expect all this heavily integrated functionality (AR, Siri, iCloud scanning) to work flawlessly? I fear even if Apple stopped adding new features entirely, they'd have a decade of corner cases to clean up.

I work on Mac, Win and Ubuntu all day. Mac & Win are neck-and-neck for crazy weird bugs I encounter as an every day, non-super user that are un-googlable (or return SEO garbage).

My belief is that Apple is milking Mac OS X for the last bits before finally releasing Xcode (which is basically the only real way to make iPhone apps) as a cloud service or porting it to Windows. I can't think of anything that, technically speaking, couldn't be done on Linux or Windows.

once mac os x is gone, their OS surface is so tiny and locked down that they don't really have to worry ever again.

Highly unlikely. Apple never ever wants to be in the situation again that someone else controls their platform like Adobe and NXP did in the Mac OS 9 days.

I recently tried to block YouTube ads on an iPad and failed. Equally surprised to see OS updates bring new feature changes that simply cannot be disabled (tab/app groupings). I mean there aren't that many Safari/iOS config options to choose from to begin with! What an insanity.

Samsung still makes cheap tablets that are awesome in terms of hardware, right?

My wife's brand new M1 Macbook Air is constantly having issues sending email.. where the Mail app keeps flashing the email window... also Preview refuses to open new documents in their own window even though it is specified to do that both in Preview preferences AND the system preferences... really crappy experience.

Why does the desktop experience seem to diverge so much from the mobile experience? My Windows 11 laptop, iPhone, and iPad are all equally reliable: they rarely give me any trouble.

Meanwhile every piece of software Apple ever shipped for Windows was hot garbage. It sounds like whatever made their Windows stuff bad is afflicting OS X now.

Recently I talked to Genius bar about how my iPhone has problems setting up the wake up alarm (sometimes it doesn't set or clears itself) and how this issue has persisted across iPhones and iOS updates. Their answer was that I'd have to wipe and restart as new (essentially deleting my backup).

More insidious issues are the non-cloud alternatives to Apple features such as local sync and backup, which seem to be getting neglected as they try to push users to increasing expensive cloud storage and cloud offerings. Syncing photos and doing backups to a computer has been super buggy, but also severely lacking in basic functionality such as choosing an alternate disk for iPhone backups... Most people don't have 512 gb of free space on their primary computer drive and if they don't they cannot backup their iphone to an external storage.

This looks like an appropriate thread to post my safari rant. Here goes.

I've been trying to use safari on my laptop ever since I found out that it enables much better battery life compared to chrome (almost 2x).

But there are just so many stupid annoyances. The address bar is non-deterministic. I enter first three letters of a site I visit very often, and press enter. In chrome, it always takes me to my site. In safari it does that 9 times out of 10. But one time it will do a Google search for the entire web address of my website!? How is this even possible? I can't understand what abominable logic is running underneath that this can happen.

Another stupidity is that home and end keys either don't do anything, or they do something entirely unexpected.

I still use it because the battery usage is just so much better.

Is this on an M1 Mac? Is the difference in battery usage enough to shift to safari? I quit safari a while back cos it did some very weird things and I've been using Chrome but it is very heavy on memory and battery life.

No this is a 2020 Intel Macbook 13. In my experience the battery life is wayyyy worse with Chrome. I don't even use the browser that much. Most of the time it is open in the background with 10-12 tabs.

With Chrome, I was running out of juice in 2-3 hours. With Safari it is easily 5-6 hours before I need to reach for the charger.

I wish they would just put their drivers in the package repos and ship with Linux installed.

It's ok to just be a device company.

Then again, if they did this my device spending would increase by an order of magnitude, so maybe the status quo is for the best.

Using the Mail app (macOS) with a Gmail Account and pressing the refresh button, makes the app hang in "Checking for Mail..." for 20-30+ seconds. It is faster quitting and opening the Mail app to check for new mails.

There is a memory leak down the network stack (probably within security library/ TLS layer) that has been reported over 6 months ago but has yet to be fixed. Depending on the app's network usage this is leading to several GBs of leaked memory per day.

This is a management problem. I’ve worked in commercial niche-market software for a long time and it was VERY rare when management accepted a release with “nothing new in it”. Features and applications were sellable, but bug fixes were not. Or worse, they were an admission we screwed up. Also, seeing all those developers “doing nothing” really bothers many managers.

Is this good for user-helpful software? No, of course not, but the company’s goal is revenue.

I've come to accept that Apple applies an "Eye of Sauron" approach to software. Anything they deem newsworthy gets their full attention, particularly if it will sell hardware or subscriptions.

Everything else... gets supported. Kinda. Reminders has always been broken. The Music app works great for subscribers, but everything else in the app feels like it got handed off to offshore interns. Even Finder has problems, and it used to be solid.

Where's the data? This is all anecdote. Even in this comment thread it's all just individual anecdotes. Not sure what the value is in this post.

Sometimes I think people in the west are a little spoiled. I mean I bought an M1 Air with Big Sur in June and it's been basically flawless, but everyone is like Apple is doomed because there's some subtle UI imperfection somewhere. Meanwhile there's still war, dictatorship and hunger in many parts of the world.

It’s because everyone and their grandmother is focused on caking on new stuff on top of the old stuff. Features! Features! Features!

And it’s coming to every bit of software and technology you “own” or rent.

Imagine if you put some product managers in charge of a standard hard cover book. Within two years it would have a tanning attachment.

User behavior monitoring and data collection tech would need to be mass-deployed first, in order to gather metrics for product improvement purposes. Not a problem for a sufficiently innovative company, I guess.

“Much as I would like to be able to find routes that take advantage of my local bike lanes, I still have to turn to Google Maps for that.”

Kind of a weird sentence that both tries to pretend like Apple is the only way to do things and betrays that it’s inferior to products that already can.

I think about the Apple Watch (Series 3) and software and am pretty impressed. It's one of the few "heavy use" devices that I only restart between updates all these years. I'm looking for that kind of stability elsewhere...

> the next big thing won’t matter

What next big thing? The only thing I've seen so far is evolutionary updates, where the evolution goes really as slow as it sounds.

It’s not an Apple problem, it’s industry-wide. This talk [0] is a great warning about the general decline in software quality. I think we are at some sort of second software crisis. We need to get rid of the OOP and DRY mindset and build things with a focus on speed, stability, security and minimal dependencies.

[0]: https://youtu.be/ZSRHeXYDLko

Shouts to the ios marketing team for redirecting the feature availability link to the ios 15 announcement page.

I’m really hoping Home and the HomeKit system get some much-needed TLC, but I’m not holding my breath…

TL; DR the comments: everything is broken, just in different ways

Is it me or HN just upvotes any article critical of Apple without much thought? At times it feels like I'm on Reddit

FWIW, I really want Apple to fix this. I used to be a huge fan, yet now I use no Apple products at all. It's pretty damning when MacWorld says "It’s happened to pretty much any Apple device user: You go to use a feature and it just doesn’t work."

So I personally like the negative exposure. I really hope it lights a fire under Apple.

Are the bugs something you've personally experienced?

I worry it's too late. Once upon a time, Apple built pretty cool software with a fraction of the staff that Microsoft employed to maintain not-so-cool software.

There were some smart/motivated/creative people at Apple. And they did it with this FrankenLanguage called Objective-C.

Apple software doesn't make new/cool things anymore. They produce "catch up" features. I can't decide if Swift is causal or symptomatic, but I worry it's a little of both. Objective C made me groan and giggle in the space of 10 minutes, but I felt creatively empowered when I did things in that ecosystem. With Swift and newer libraries/frameworks from Apple, I often just feel like I'm in a computer language variant of the line at the DMV. Follow the rules, just try to figure out how to get the compiler to grant me a result that is close enough to what I want.

Apple is victim to Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy.

This is just a guy griping about his bugs. Apple’s software quality is by far the best among competitors (Facebook’s is better but not really an Apple competitor).

That OS bubble you are in isn't making you any favours.

I use Windows, Linux, MacOS, and iOS -- only major OS I don't use is Android.

Whether or not Apple software is better than that of its competitors it's getting worse relative to older Apple software - at least when it comes to macOS. I just had the experience of "upgrading" from Mojave to Big Sur and the number of new graphical glitches and bugs I'm seeing is pretty infuriating. And this isn't some new x.0 release, Big Sur is on 11.6 at this point.

It feels like the macOS desktop experience peaked with Snow Leopard and it's been slowly sliding downhill ever since.

Real time update: Now my Bluetooth is acting up in a way I've never seen before. Thanks Big Sur!

Would their competitors be Microsoft (Windows, Office, etc) and Android?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com