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Comment by _jal | Hacker News Reader

Apple blesses a converged Mac/iOS approach, which in practice means you basically throw away a lot of what made the Mac excellent.

Not that Apple is even following their own guidelines...

https://mjtsai.com/blog/2022/06/08/system-settings/

The incoherent design, weirdly bipolar automation efforts, letting the command line rot, and a new-feature focus on lock-in are making the platform increasingly something I just don't care about anymore.

Not to mention every time I get another Buy Apple Music! nudge or deal with their bratty "not now" dismissal of the fucking credit card offer makes me actively dislike Apple a bit more.

I'm clearly not the customer Apple wants, and all good things come to an end. It just saddens me a bit - I've been using Macs for over 30 years now. Watching them become more annoying and arrogant than IBM sucks.

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Yea, the memetics of "apple get HCI" is long, long dead. Apple does whatever the hell it wants, and loyalists defend it. Your case of "re-validate to spend" is the classic example of gui gone wrong. The box has validated me time out of mind, and even to get to the door of the store I had to validate but no: it wants to ask again. And again. And again. Oh, and microsoft.app again. and again. Oh, and all those other things, except wierdly ssh in the keychain is just.. fine!

There are soooo many UI inconsistencies recently. It seems that makes it’s being developed by iOS developers who have no clue about keyboard shortcuts, common features, etc. It’s getting worse and worse with each component that’s being replaced.

And the atrocious disregard for performance over the last few years. My 2014 OSX 10.14 home Mac Mini is so much faster and more responsive than my 2021 OSX 12.4 work Mac mini (with no notable difference in features) it is difficult to conclude anything other than malice.

My M1 Mac blows away my 3 year old desktop outside or raw graphics output due to the desktop having a 1080. It's such a massive power leap, it's difficult for me to believe that you bought a M1 Mac. I suspect you have hardware, or PEBKAK issues.

Raw performance as measured in benchmarks, sure.

But the newer OSes do feel more bloated and indeed are sometimes slower. My 12-inch Macbook (low-powered dual-core i5) on Mojave feels much faster at opening built-in applications and simple tasks than my M1 running Monterey, and yet I can't think of any Monterey feature that I actually use over what Mojave already had - my workflow is exactly the same but now I seem to have to withstand a performance tax.

This isn't my experience at all. I'm feeling fortunate that we don't use the same stack. ;)

Latest versions of Mac OS connect to the Internet and gets apples permission before opening an app.

If you are on a high latency network, eg weak wifi signals, you'll be waiting 200-300ms.

Those on super fast internet don't notice, and think it's a problem with you, but no, it's Apple.

Is that only for the App Store? I'm not seeing that traffic.

I live in a rural area, city under 40k. We don't have amazing internet.

No, it's for all apps.

> Latest versions of Mac OS connect to the Internet and gets apples permission before opening an app.

Pretty sure this is only on first time launch to verify the notarisation.

It doesn't happen every time.

A tangential correction: it’s PEBKAC, not PEBKAK, as written in your comment. The last letter stands for “chair”.

There is probably something wrong with the machine. If it's M1 it really shouldn't be slow unless it's under serious memory pressure. If it's Intel, it's more possible, but could still be dust in the fans or low disk space or such things.

Since recent versions, macOS now phones home and gets apple's permission over the internet before allowing you to open a binary. This is a synchronous blocking operation.

If your ping is 30ms, you don't notice it.

If your ping is 300ms due to say weak wifi, you do notice a 300ms wait when you open an app.

Above post didn't say anything about app launches. There was a popular blog post about that, but it doesn't mean it applies to every issue.

It doesn't need to apply to above post, it can apply just as well to your statement that it means there's something wrong with the machine if it's an M1. If a slow or laggy connection affects responsiveness in launching desktop apps, that's definitely a reason it could feel slower that doesn't mean there's something wrong, as it would be completely by design.

I don't know how a 300ms delay for a first-time app launch would render a machine unusable and requiring regular restarts.

My home Mac mini (2018 Core i5) running 12.4 runs dramatically faster than my work MacBook Pro (2019 Core i9) running 12.4-ish. It's malice, but not by Apple. It's from my company installing so many agents that typing becomes problematic. Some days it is down right unusable and I have to reboot every 2 days just to try and make it better.

I refuse to install software on macOS that requires root. (With the current single exception of the Creative Cloud, for which I am actively seeking replacements.)

Have you found? Affinity Photo and Designer? Krita?

Unfortunately I don't have a choice. They silently push all kinds of things to the system. Every week my fans spin up and I look at the Activity Monitor to find a new agent using all my CPU.

Have you tried comparing your i5 Mac mini to an M1 Mac?

My M1 Mac Mini keeps up (and beats) my 2018 RYZEN with a dedicated graphics card.

I have a MBP with M1 Pro, but that doesn't have any work junk on it so I haven't had the need to do any real comparisons. The only thing I could really do is check my FPS on Minecraft, but I don't play it enough or obsess about FPS enough to bother.

I'm guessing you're running Intel versions of apps, and the emulation us slowing things down.

Oddly, the settings panel in Ventura looks closer to what Gnome Settings looks like. Just without the "Buy Apple Music! nudge" or "credit card offer" elements.

The last redesign of Apple Mail made it look a lot more like Gnome too

It also looks like the original Mac Control Panel from 1987:

https://apple.fandom.com/wiki/System_4.1?file=System_4.1

Advertising in Settings is pure evil and needs to go away.

Same for pushing ads through Notifications.

Apple's road to hell is paved with OS-embedded advertising and user manipulation in the name of service and subscription revenue.

> The incoherent design, weirdly bipolar automation efforts, letting the command line rot

Which is a real shame because their hardware had started to be excellent again. What's the point of having a cool machine like a M1 Macbook Air if, in the future, you'll feel as an alien on it? (I mean, from the pov of a programmer)

Are we moving towards a tablet-laptop hybrid Apple device in the next few years I wonder? (similar to MS Surface).. I know there's the issue of cannibalisation but I think such a device could be awesome (but hard to do right)

As long as it comes with 16” screen and can run kubernetes, I’m okay with that.

It’s been obviously on the radar for years but it’s moving very slowly - the macbook is now arguably a iPad with a keyboard now so the main thing left is the software unification.

I will not be happy until my Surface Book 2 is a pile of slag.

But it might be the best effort yet of unifying mobile device and desktop experiences.

The industry just needs to keep trying is all. Eventually someone is going to get it right. It's anyone's game, and all the major players thus far have fucked it up multiple times.

This comes up every year and people still don't listen to the original justification for why Apple used iOS instead of OSX given they had a choice.

OSX is designed for a keyboard and mouse. iOS is designed for a finger.

They have wildly different semantics e.g. precision, gestures that you can't abstract without ending up with a horribly compromised experience e.g. Windows tablet mode. And that's just not in Apple's DNA.

> OSX is designed for a keyboard and mouse. iOS is designed for a finger.

That line has been becoming blurrier for years now. iPadOS supports keyboard and mouse inputs, and the UI is moving closer to replicating a desktop experience on every release. macOS has supported touch gestures for a long time, and the UI is moving closer to resembling a mobile experience.

It's not hard to imagine full convergence of both OSs and the devices that run them. As usual, Apple can claim to be the innovator in this change, even though competitors have been doing it, admittedly worse, much earlier.

iOS is a much more modern OS with secure basis. Keyboard and mouse vs touch is mostly just a “userspace” decision, but from Apple’s point of view, OSX has quite a bit of technical debt in several areas that are possibly impossible to fix, like security.

I mean the new iPad supports a trackpad and windowed displays, so I think we're already there.

> letting the command line rot

how so?

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