Mac: It Just Works–Terribly | Hacker News Reader

Mac: It Just Works–Terribly

medium.com

These articles, which show up here in spades, are of course insightful and as far as I can tell factually accurate. But they all follow a similar model in which the author concludes that because the quirks that macOS exhibits fall squarely on the functionalities that he cares deeply about, that the product is condemnable for all users. Or worse, he infers that only the vast unwashed masses of non cognoscenti are the only ones who can put up with Apple’s shenanigans.

Of course, there’s much lamentable about some of the design choices in macOS, and they irritate me - a little, sometimes more - but as I read this latest diatribe, I was surprised that the author spent such a sum on a new M1 Mac without evaluating its fitness for his use cases.

Yeah, this article in particular seems geared towards a handful of peripherals. Anecdotal but everything I've wanted to just work, has just worked and worked better than any windows machine or linux machine even comes close to.

Isn't support for external displays is a basic functionality, that is expected to be handled by the system? MacOS makes sub-4k monitors pretty much unusable for people with good eyesight who works with text a lot. Yet Apple haven't fixed the jaggy fonts in a years, they deliberately made it worse by removing subpixel anti-aliasing.

Not only that, but macOS routinely (or aggressively) likes to treat off-brand(?) monitors (e.g. Dell) as a YPbPr device rather than RGB that adds to the blurriness. You can override that by generating and installing a custom EDID display profile. This is mentioned in the post and it has been a recurring problem for me.

With recent macOS versions, I've often had displays auto-negotiate with 30 Hz refresh for no apparent reason, and only sometimes.

This article was already submitted 22 days ago and 1 month ago.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31518939

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31269367 (11 comments)

"IMO, it’s unfortunate that the power of M1 is being wasted on such an outdated crappy macOS"

Is my opinion as well. I gave up on MacOS like 16 years ago. Great hardware held back by not so great software which hasn't been keeping up with the hardware advances.

The difficulty in configuring a high dpi mouse without acceleration is maddening.

  defaults write -g com.apple.mouse.scaling -1

doesn't seem to be cutting it for me anymore.

I eventually settled on CursorSense to fix this because nothing else I tried actually fixed it. Sucks to have to pay $10 to fix something that is a basic OS setting on literally every other modern desktop OS.

Thanks, good to have a known solution. Mine at the moment is to have a dedicated gaming Windows PC for casual gaming, even though I also have the game for Mac.

With Apple it's "do as you're told", not "do as you like".

My wireless mouse has always been crappy and glitchy on osx. Has been for years.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com