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Comment by plufz | Hacker News Reader

Enormous regressions? I could agree on “not great” but that was strong words. Haven’t really had a lot of trouble with the updates. I would say that macos 2014 and 2022 have a lot more in common than 2014 macos and current linux.

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Messages basically doesn’t work anymore. I had to disable Time Machine because of the thrash of indexing itself. The UI makes no sense anymore. They removed established shortcuts for… no reason? There’s some kind of pseudo-touch style going on. Like they plan to add a touch screen but didn’t. The iOS-ification continues.

MacOS is a clear second class citizen at Apple. Each of the least three releases has been worse than the one before. I hoped it was the last gasp of Ive but it’s apparently intentional. Or maybe nobody is in charge, which would make more sense.

At this point Linux looks like a better option.

What's even more frustrating was the removal of 32-bit apps in Catalina and the continued deprecation of OpenGL. So many functional apps where the developers have lost interest are now non-functional. Not to even start on the irritating, vista-like security prompts for apps that are not signed (which in development is a lot...).

MacOS has become less and less pleasant to use in that last 3 to 5 years for me as a developer, because of this. Which is such a shame, because the new Macbook Pro's are really amazing machines, hardware-wise. Great keyboard, Magsafe, no Touchbar, amazing screen and great battery life.

I will be requesting a Linux (or Windows.. whatever) laptop at work if this one dies.

What are some of these interesting, unmaintained 32-bit apps you speak of?

If you're asking this question and not a Mac user I'll eat my Macbook.

start eating

They're an Objective C developer, so no, I won't. It's a very typical Apple device user response of 'why would you want to do that?' epitomised by Jobs' 'you're holding it wrong' advice.

The most painful one for me: https://wxtoimgrestored.xyz

Samsung Easy Document Creator scanner app.

With it, I could at least scan. Image Capture/Preview just produce invalid files. (Samsung M2070w). Now to scan I have to use Linux or Windows machine.

What do you mean by invalid files? I never had a problem with Preview scanner.

You can also try VueScan, which is a spartan UI, but works great.

Invalid files as in it creates PDF, but it is not valid PDF and it will fail to open. When trying to scan into TIFF, it will crash.

It is pretty much device specific; an HP MFP at home works fine. The Samsung app was an workaround, but it was pretty obvious that nobody is going to fix Image Capture.

The only Steam game in my library that still works now is Myst.

The list of Steam games that even supported macOS at all was already quite short, but now Portal, Portal 2, Team Fortress, the entire Half-Life series, and quite a few others will no longer run.

The switch to Apple silicon machines also makes running them in a VM tricky. Even though Windows supports running x86 code on Arm hardware, the mix of architectures inside the VM creates new problems, particularly for Steam.

Nomenclature wise, those are games, not exactly apps. What are some applications that are missing?

Tascam us-122mkII support was dropped. It is ancient, but it still works and there was a Windows 10 driver. I just got a cheaper Behringer uphoria that uses standard USB audio (or whatever) but loosing the Tascam was annoying.

I will take Metal over Khronos APIs any day of the week, if Khronos would be doing the Internet, all we would have as standard would be IP protocol, with everything else as custom extensions.

The Khronos APIs are the ones I have more experience with, and it pains me that all these years it stays as kind of initialiation ritual to go through all the things they miss versus proprietary APIs.

Everyone has to write their own mini-engine with their APIs.

new mbp has touchbar.

Not really. The last hold out is the 13”, but that design has not changed since it was Intel based. The 14 and 16” versions have no touchbar and I would guess the 13” won’t either on the next redesign.

i hadn't noticed that, good eye.

There is literally no hardware support for 32 bit apps in the latest ARM processors. The die space was used for something more useful.

If not for the removal of 32-bit apps, we would not have ARM chips in our computers. What do you think of Microsoft's depreciation of 32-bit?

> Messages basically doesn’t work anymore.

What do you mean?

Huge CPU hog. Features that exist on mobile are missing on desktop. There’s no timestamps on messages. I’m not sure search even exists. Sync with iCloud only mostly works.

> There’s no timestamps on messages

Right click in the message pane and select "Show Times"

> I’m not sure search even exists

Search exists and seems to work pretty well

Right click a message window -> show times.

Search works great. My CPU is idle. Sync iCloud works perfectly if you toggle your iPhone to also share SMS with your Mac.

hover over the message window and swipe left with two fingers to see all of the times

The messages rewrite that happened a version of two ago was the bring it inline with the mobile features - it is much closer now. It seems to still have some bugs though. But, I have timestamps on every group of messages and if I slide to the left I see each message timestamp.

But at least search finally works.

You can see timestamps if you do a two-finger swipe to the right on a trackpad. Not sure how you'd do it with a non-Apple mouse.

This has not been my experience. No cpu issues, I can see time stamps on messages if I choose, I can search messages, if there are feature differences between mobile and desktop they are not features I am using, and between my Apple Watch, iPad, iPhone and Mac, all my messages are sync’d just fine.

To be honest, the apple ecosystem stuff and how well it works, for me, is one of the biggest benefits of Apple. I walk up to my computer and my watch unlocks it. I can take a call or respond to a message literally on whatever device I happen to be on. For me, I can put up with UI/UX quirks in features like system preferences that I use maybe one or twice a month.

Its the holistic experience that matters to me.

If you are legitimately using an 8 year old laptop I can imagine the experience is pretty awful. That has practically nothing to do with the OS.

I have a 2015 MacBook Pro. I'm typing on it now. I admittedly do mostly fairly lightweight stuff on it--I do photo/video editing elsewhere although until recently that was a 2015 iMac--but it works fine for that. Certainly not an awful experience.

Why? It’s got 16g of RAM and a blazing fast SSD. I had to get the heatsinks cleaned out once. There’s definitely slowdowns but they’re resolved by reboots which makes me think it’s more to do with software than hardware.

Have you heard of this thing called a CPU? The ones Apple puts in its machines have gotten much faster since 2015. All kidding aside, you have a CPU from the nadir of Intel's slow march into irrelevance. I went from a 2013 Air to an M1.

It wasn't the software.

> Enormous regressions?

Well I would consider hiding system traffic from firewalls to prevent tracing to be an enormous one, wouldn't you?

https://www.obdev.at/support/littlesnitch/245914647368270

Oh I almost forgot about the image scanning regression:

https://techcrunch.com/2021/12/15/apple-removes-csam-detecti...

And the ominously named "Gatekeeper"

https://www.engadget.com/macos-slow-apps-launching-221445977...

"UPDATE: This issue has been resolved in macOS Big Sur 11.2. Apple has removed this whitelist completely, allowing third-party firewalls like Little Snitch to reliably monitor and filter any network traffic." - the Little Snitch link

A one-time certificate server slowdown two years ago and two deeply unpopular features that they scrapped?

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