My next Mac might be the last
morrick.me
morrick.me
How do people keep thinking nonsense like this, and then repeating it online to endanger other non-technical folks who also don’t know better?
Author has no idea if he has had any security problems, because most malware isn’t about to alert you to it’s presence.
You don’t run out-of-support software on an internet-connected computer.
https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2019-8601
Remote execution vulnerabilities happen in JavaScriptCore. Tech-savvy won’t save you, all it takes is some malicious ad code or some hacked server providing malicious JS (or media files, etc. etc.)
I assume the author thinks the same way.
It’s important to be conscious of security, but that doesn’t mean automatically upgrading to everything all the time. There’s no way, that I know of, to be completely secure so I’d rather be conscious than a false feeling of safety.
I run Catalina 10.15.7 and I think I run it secure enough. Of course maybe I’m rooted and all sorts of bad stuff, but I don’t think so. Of course, maybe the most recent version has an unknown zero day (negative day?) and would also be rooted.
I think it’s naive to have a blanket rule like never run out of support software because sometimes we must. I run old devices that aren’t patchable or supported because they still have use (YouTube/Netflix) and I use them in an appropriate way, I think. I won’t conduct banking, but if someone breaches my Netflix account, I don’t care much. If it’s part of a botnet, I don’t care much. Of course it’s inconvenient and I don’t want to harm others, but then I also don’t want to keep buying dumb terminals for things and companies don’t seem to be changing their support timelines.
This isn’t even mentioning stuff that’s risky like continuing to run my smart lightbulbs even though Phillips stopped supporting them years ago.
I believe in calm technology and I’m not going to keep replacing stuff just because it has a non-zero risk.
I would tend to think the author would be mainly concerned about having his bank account data leaked and loosing money or having some online account hacked and loosing access to it.
As your rightly said, the author might already run some malicious program without knowing but as it doesn't impact his life in any meaningful way, that is totally virtual to him and sort of not existing then.
The rail industry, alas, begs to differ.
The real problem is that there isn't a reasonable alternative. Windows is out of the question for me due to not being a POSIX-based OS. WSL isn't integrated deeply enough and is still a pain in the ass to use coming from MacOS. I experimented with using a mostly stock Xubuntu setup for a bit and also found the user experience to be really subpar. Call me old, but I have no interest in dealing with the amount of configuration and tweaking necessary to be productive in a Linux environment.
Ultimately, I'm just going to stick it out with MacOS.
* Finder -> Path Finder
* Spotlight -> Alfred
* Stage Manager/Snapping -> Moom
* Safari -> Chrome/Firefox
* Mail/Calendar/Contacts -> Outlook
* Photos -> Google Photos
* Maps -> Google Maps
* Weather -> Weather Channel
* System Sound -> SoundSource
* System Screen Shots -> Clean Shot X
* System Menu Bar -> Bartender
* Terminal -> iTerm2
* Preview (I actually use this one)I did use iTerm2 for a long time until it dawned on me I was using zero features that Terminal didn't support, so I stopped. Terminal's lighter and has lower input latency and it's one less thing to install.
I might start using Firefox again if they fixed a couple integration/UI issues and got their power use to roughly what Safari's is. Until then, it's Safari all the way.
I actually like some of Apple’s own apps. Particularly - Apple Notes and Preview.
I couldn’t yet find a notes app that would let me drag and drop whatever (screenshots, images, Unicode) into a note and move on with my active work, and later search for what I need easily. Even text that is on one of the screenshots. As a bonus, I can write on my iPhone, and continue on my Mac. All the while not paying some subscription fee to a company that I need to worry about not jacking up the price or simply vanishing.
Preview is nice to quickly view whatever doc, markup etc. It gets out of the way.
These two apps are actually the ones that would make it hard for me to move away from Mac.
Everything about it verifiably worse than the separate apps Apple ships with macOS, from data storage to integration.
That said, MacOS 10.6 was the pinnacle of Calendar, and it's been on the way down since...
* Keyboard Maestro (automation) * BetterTouch Tools (trackpad + mouse + shit tons of improvement of Destop Experience) * Curio (The best of The bests note taking App by the worst greedy dev in the world) * PopClip. * Fantastical (calandar app)
You still miss a lot of the potential brought by mac desktop develloper API and might as well be better off with a chromebook ou a Ubuntu Mate on an old lenovo thinkpad from ebay.
I was agreeable until that point. Outlook did/does more to ruin email and discussion on the internet than any other app in that realm.
I had that experience last year when my mac died and I decided to get a cheap laptop. It came with windows 10. Two hours into the process of feeling disgusted with the whole setup (and myself), I installed Linux on it (Manjaro) and have been pretty happy with that since.
It even runs Steam!, which is something that barely works on macs since they dropped 32 bit support. The point here is that because I never bought into the whole Apple universe in terms of software, switching to Linux was actually easy for me. All the OSS tools I use are there. I was up and running with my Linux laptop before I had a meeting with one of my clients the next day. I wouldn't recommend this to non technical users but if you know what you are doing and buy the right hardware, Linux is pretty nice to use these days. And most of the commonly used stuff in companies (Slack, Zoom, Skype, MS Live, Webex, etc.) you can actually get to work on Linux. Snap takes care of most of that and I was able to get webex going with a community package.
I now have a shiny new macbook 14" again for work and I still use the Linux laptop for private stuff. The new mac has the notch and while annoying, you get used to it. But it kind of destroys the case for full screen mode because all that does is replace the menu bar with a black bar. You can't use the pixels for anything else. But otherwise it runs circles around my Linux laptop. Build speeds are about 2.5x better on that machine. The M1 is just a really nice laptop processor. Apple hardware is great. I might another one to run Linux on it if the GPU support keeps on improving.
I use Gmail for probably close to twenty years (2004ish?). Before that, I used Thunderbird and Outlook for work. The last ten years, all my work email has been on gmail as well. So I've never used Apple's offline calendar and office apps that come with Macs. I left MS Office behind about ten years ago. For the same reason the lack of decent alternatives for any of that is a non issue for me on Linux because I can do all of that from my browser. I actually started using Darktable on a mac years ago because it's awesome for raw processing. And of course that runs way better on Linux as this is originally a native linux thing. So, that's nice. And it actually runs well on the M1, which is something I was worried about. No hw acceleration but the fast CPU compensates for that.
The thing I miss most on Linux from my mac is a non Apple product: iterm2. I've not found anything that comes close on Linux. Most alternatives are either too bare bones or just lack UI for any of the settings and are way too fiddly to setup. Kind of sad because you really spend a lot of time on the command line with Linux. But of course there are plenty of adequate terminals for Linux. So, a bit of a downgrade but it works. I have my dotfiles synced via git so, both sides are pretty similar.
Forget what everyone says. Just use Ubuntu (like, regular Ubuntu, not some stupid derivative) with everything default. It's what you're looking for. It takes zero configuration, is super easy to use and is a nice environment.
Sure, they might still not like it, but if you haven't even tried Ubuntu yet, it feels like it's a bit early to say that there isn't a reasonable alternative.
The #1 thing that holds me to macOS is family sharing with iCloud (and Messages). If I could access that from Linux ...
Also, if you want an application-centric desktop management style, macOS is the only game in town. Practically everything else follows Win9X conventions in that regard, even the iPadOS-reminiscent GNOME. While global menubars can be enabled in KDE and added to XFCE, they're only functional in some apps because a lot of apps (those built with GTK, mostly) have eschewed menubars entirely in favor of that infernal hamburger button.
Maybe as "web dev environment" it is enough, but this is the main reason why I absolutely detest these "cmdline/scripting only inside a sandboxed VM" approach that the major commercial platforms seem to be trying to sell us these days.
It really is not enough for general purpose computing. I want true integration with the operating system, not sandboxed crap. I want to be able to do almost anything the host OS is capable of doing from my command line, including receiving and sending SMS, filtering incoming phone calls with a script, renaming files en-masse (from _other_ programs, not just files from inside the sandbox itself), recording and playing sounds, access hardware that I have plugged in like USB serial ports or whatever, access hardware that I have not plugged in like diagnosing bluetooth device pairing, be able to fully backup/restore the "host OS" to my medium of choice, partition and format external OR internal filesystems, etc.
I want to do this stuff quite frequently and WSL is just NOT cut for that. The same applies to ChromeOS/Android sandboxed linux approaches. They are a joke designed for the user who is mostly going to simply run ssh into a real machine from within such a sandbox or perhaps run some programs that were so portable they already had win32 versions to begin with. This was not the case for macOS which until very recently was still a very command line centric OS.
Been a few months since I last checked but there didn't seem to be a way to get to your WSL (VM? Instance?) from outside the windows environment (ie via ssh) without setting up a bunch of firewall rules using Powershell to query the IP and create the rules from there. (Except that doesn't always work correctly because PS seems to get a different IP because it's starting up a new WSL? I dunno, I gave up a while back.)
Cygwin.
> I experimented with using a mostly stock Xubuntu setup for a bit and also found the user experience to be really subpar.
Did you try any other DE such as Cinnamon, mate, KDE or one of the many others?
Though I feel my recommendations will fall on deaf ears as I have the feeling you're one of those devs that doesn't want to put in the effort to learn a new platform and thus will ignore any and all advice and go back to whatever abusive platform they are familiar with. I get it, time is precious and you just want to get work done. But you cant complain about alternatives when you aren't willing to put in the effort to learn how to use them and help make them better. This isn't an insult mind you, just an observation.
> Call me old, but I have no interest in dealing with the amount of configuration and tweaking necessary to be productive in a Linux environment.
Exactly why I prefer Windows development to macOS and Linux!
Could you give some examples?
I have a sudden flashback of 2012
Apple is still great for Apple ecosystem developers.
This is how I understand all these posts. It’s fine not to like something. You don’t even need a good reason. That is what taste is all about. Just don’t pretend that your emotional response is grounded in objective and universal fact.
Am I being facetious? Not really. Calling a benign (and in my view long overdue) update to the settings panel “a fucking joke” is nothing but an emotional screech.
So these are the pet peeves that are mainly meant to back the author's point.
> With this (and more) in mind, you can see how difficult and painful upgrading to a new Mac becomes for me
I updated to Ventura something like a month ago. At first I was disoriented by the new System settings, as it broke my habits, yet I still managed to find what I needed to, only with a bit of drag because it's reorganised. But then I went back to my work laptop which has the old prefpane stuff, and... the sysprefs I was so used to ever since Tiger just seemed infuriatingly backwards to me, having accreted tons of preferences over time in preexisting places that made increasingly little sense.
So, sysprefs is revamped, things have been shuffled around to hopefully make more sense (personal take: it does), and it's hardly in your face any time of the day.
Then, Stage Manager. I didn't even try it (so can't share an opinion on that) because when you're upgrading it's disabled by default, so the argument that upgrading is difficult and painful falls flat on its face as you're literally left with the same desktop you had before. (I will try the feature eventually, I just didn't get to it yet because time is a scarce resource).
I could reasonably hear some arguments about macOS "losing its way", or being increasingly incompatible with one's values, but these two are not it.
I certainly do this a lot.
I'm going to put that paragraph on a postcard and put it up in my office to try to remind me about it.
(It would also be helpful to come up with a name for this phenomenon).
> Ever since the misguided visual redesign of Mac OS when it transitioned from 10.15 Catalina to 11 Big Sur, and the questionable UI choices embedded in such redesign
This is just so condescending, like that redesign was just obviously wrong and Apple designers are morons for not seeing it. As you say, it's ok not to like a redesign but there's no need to be a dick about it and present it like it's an objective fact and not just a subjective opinion.
Two can play at this game.
Just from a visual balance point of view, the new settings panel doesn't remotely match the intent of Aqua UI. The fact that they are then putting scrollable panels in the _middle_ of a _side_ of a window, with a sticky part both on top and at the bottom, shows you they don't particularly know where shit should go.
Making changes for the sake of making changes is by itself pointless busywork. But ignoring the established practices of desktop UIs to make them more in-line with touch UIs is destructive.
I ended up just going out and buying a bunch of old ThinkPads and running OpenBSD and Linux on them. I think I got like five computers for less than the price of a single MacBook Air.
I'm pretty much done with proprietary operating systems because they clearly no longer provide the best experience, from my perspective.
I'm tired of being locked out of software I paid for because I "upgraded" the OS (looking at you, Logic Pro), or vice versa, unable to use new software because I didn't "upgrade" (most new Mac software won't run on my MBP). If I upgrade, I literally throw away a $250 piece of software and have to spend another $250 (or whatever) to use the new version of _that same software_. At least open-source OSes allow me to stay up to date while still having nearly-maximum agency over how the computer works and what software it runs.
I'm tired of my computer doing a ton of stuff I didn't tell it to do. The amount of notifications/nags/etc. on a modern Mac/Windows computer is absolutely mind-boggling to me. The always-online aspect, software-update-checks, "telemetry" and "analytics", phoning home every time I launch a program...
I'm tired of my computer not being a tool for me to use, but rather just a gateway to a bunch of stores and ways I can spend money, with a bit of "productivity" sprinkled on the side. I could go on and on.
Oh, I didn't even touch on the software design/UX aspects. Like Riccardo wrote, it's a worthy of an entire article itself. I could probably spend an entire day documenting/critiquing the degradation of user experience in Mac OS and Windows. Mac OS had a lot further to fall, and indeed has been extra-disappointing because I used to hold it in such high regard :\
Custom OS’s are a complete waste of time, and you’re just fighting an uphill battle. I’d take my 20+ hour battery life MacBook Pro over anything else all day everyday.
The root problem is that computers and software have shifted from being tools to empower the user to being tools to empower the developer's company. I listened to software requirements discussions back in the 90s, and the questions were all "What does the user need to do?" and "What task is the user trying to accomplish?" and "What features will the user pay for?" Now, you talk to a software product manager, and it's "How do we get the user to do X?" and "We need to channel the user into Y." and "We need to understand how the user uses Z so we can monetize it." Totally reversed mindset. The company already knows what profitable actions are available to the user, so all the research and development is spent on is coercing and funneling the user into those actions. Nobody really cares what the user wants to do.
Really? Only notifications I get on my Mac right now are from few programs that I have allowed, mainly for messages and e-mail. That's it. On Windows there are more, but MacOS leaves me alone pretty much most of the time. Perhaps it was different in 2013, but it's not definitely "mind-boggling amount of notifications".
Yes, as long as it's available, which it mostly isn't. What would be your Logic replacement options in Linux? Reaper is OK for tracking and effects, but doesn't even come close to the built-in stuff Logic has, and BitWig looks like it will probably soon go the subscription way.
> I think it all stems from Apple’s desire to simplify things for themselves
This is the only logical explanation for a lot of Apple’s decisions lately. It’s funny how the release notes for Ventura say:
> System Preferences becomes System Settings and features a new design that's optimized for efficient navigation on Mac, and delivers a more consistent experience across iPhone and iPad.
I wonder how long it took their marketing people to come up with that. The truth is this design is not at all optimized for efficient navigation on a Mac. In some cases it actually requires more clicks than System Preferences. Also a consistent experience from iOS to MacOS is not as important as Apple makes it out to be. No one expects a computer to work exactly the same way as a phone or tablet.
The only real justification here is that it probably makes lives easier for Apple developers since they can now manage a single codebase for settings vs. separate ones.
It’s funny cause the one App that I think could actually benefit from this kind of change is the Music app which is a complete abomination on the Mac, but actually works quite well on the iPhone and iPad.
It’s a shame when companies put ease of use for their engineers above ease of use for their users, but this kind of thing seems to be more and more common in the software industry these days.
While this is probably a large factor in their decision to do this, I wouldn't say that "no one expects a computer to work exactly the same way as a phone or tablet". My parents would definitely say otherwise. In fact, there's been some discussion on HN before about today's kids & teens not knowing how computer file systems work [0].
Obviously the majority of folks on this orange site have a strong understanding of how computers and filesystems work. However, there are more and more people that will grow up fully on tablet and mobile devices that will have a completely different mental model of what a "computer" is.
The logic probably follows that if they were developing these settings panels anew, would they be different from one another, or should they be the same. Somewhere along the line they've realised keeping things consistent inside their ecosystem is simpler for their users, and the reasons for keeping them different are outweighed by the advantages of having them operated similarly.
This might be hard to believe, but I find some people are confused merely by the iOS app being called "Settings" and the macOS app being called "System Preferences". One is a hang over from earlier mac days and the other is a simple one word title that describes the app succinctly. It's not a surprise that they're both named Settings now, similar to how macOS and iOS apps have been slowly getting renamed for consistency (e.g. Address Book becoming Contacts.)
I think people also forget that it takes quite a bit of work to rejig apps, especially ones this central to the OS - so it's not exactly something I would describe as a lazy effort, even if it does produce more manageable code in the long term, which of course has invisible user benefits such as less bugs and faster deployment of security fixes.
I don't think normal people ever cared about file systems. Windows users from previous generations apparently only know three locations: Documents, Downloads and the Desktop. Save a file in any other location and it might as well be gone.
This isn't so bad. That's the system I want. A system by programmers for programmers. I guess Linux has been filling that niche for a while now.
The fact that I can remap caps lock more easily than on a Linux machine, for example, blows my mind. Window tiling also works out of the box with 3rd party apps. Meanwhile, Ubuntu switching to GNOME broke Compiz settings that many used for those features.
Poster won't know how good he has it until he switches to something else.
Also, if macOS and iOS converge into appleOS, won't that mean we finally get a MacBook we can touch and hack?
I've been waiting for that since 2009.
I dont think it is "simply" about simplification either. It is just very Tim Cook's way of operation. Cost cutting.
By unifying these platform, you reduce the cost of development. iPad, iPhone, and in the future, Mac, aren't all that different.
And reducing cost of development is something Tim Cook loves. It would have been much much better to leave iOS, iPadOS and macOS as three thing. Like in Steve's era. It would be more expensive, sure but it will be better.
I don't expect there to be any difference soon. There no point for a laptop when it is just a screen plus a keyboard, which you can do with a pad.
There are clearly planning for convergence.
1. Windows Management - Windows should snap to a grid like they do in Windows 11.
2. Fullscreen Mode - It is bad! Do I want to be in full screen mode or not? Some features are nice in fullscreen, but sometimes I can’t do things in fullscreen and that feels bad. And some apps don’t support it and that also feels bad.
3. The Dock - It takes up too much room on modern high resolution displays and if you hide it it is finicky. So you end up using fullscreen and that is finicky too, but then You miss the dock and then go back to it and get frustrated all over again.
4. The Finder - it isn’t really that bad, but it isn’t really that good either. For some reason I always feel like it takes me longer to navigate around in the finder. Maybe someone else knows why I feel this way. Maybe I need to enable the path as another commenter mentioned.
MacOS does a lot of good stuff, but it is all old stuff that it has done well for years, spotlight, command shortcuts, Automator, fonts, animations, OS stability. The newer UX changes are always nice in theorybut cumbersome in practice and some other elements just feel in need of a rethink. I think with modern high resolution and multi monitor displays a tiling windows mode would be interesting where you can save setups.
But i need to. 1. Return focus to vscode because the focus is stolen by finder. 2. Unfullscreen vscode. 3. Find the damn finder window. 4. Drag file. 5. Fullscreen vscode back. 6. Fix desktop order that was destroyed by the un-fullscreen action i did.
Can't you just allow me to overlay finder on it and drag file in???
One of the first things I do on a new install (as well as turning on the Finder status bar) is option-clicking on the Dock and shrinking it down by one step (or maybe two on a 13" MacBook).
Plus a barrel load more.
I do feel like the yearning for tiled windows or things like that are the result of trying to make OS X into Windows. Mac has Expose and virtual desktops - you don't need tiled windows.
I agree fullscreen mode is really annoying -- except for movies.
With movies every other computer/device in the world screws that up by putting something other than the movie on the screen (including just about every cable channel with "coming up next" overlays). Really, nothing except the movie. Nothing on top, nothing around the movie. sheesh.
The dock is fine on the left. or right. at the bottom ugh.
The finder is just ok. except imho one of the best features of macos is finder + spacebar to quickly preview just about anything.
I have a hard time getting myself wound up over the UI design of the System Preferences app.
Also I was amused at his notch hostility - I shared the same view; until I used a new Mac with the notch and discovered that I don't notice it. At all. I thought I would hate it, and I can't remember a single time it surfaced other than it coming up as a topic and then I notice it.
I'm trying to think of any of the recent changes they made and none of them are fatal enough to prevent me from working with macOS as I have for decades now, and can think of none. He doesn't like stage manager? Big deal. Spaces is still there and window management still works the way it always has without it - that one was really telling. It's not like they forced it to be the only way to manage windows.
When I’ve been using Linux in other contexts lately it’s been awesome being able to fully understand exactly what each process is and why it’s running (and to be able to remove it if I want to). On my macOS (and windows) boxes I end up trusting Apple and Microsoft a lot more than I would actively choose to.
I would still recommend Macs to people in general, but I think for people trying to get work done, the OS upgrade strategies that Apple chose in particular are extremely disruptive and lead to many team members at a previous job just breaking their setups over and over again. It's not fun to be using software beholden to marketing timelines, if you're fiddly with your machine.
[0]: I switch between QWERTY and AZERTY. "Select All" becomes "Quit App". My solution was to bind Spotlight to Command+Q , which would almost always work.
Not everything is hunky dory of course, I hate forced updates and constant nags for OneDrive/Edge and so on. But overall Windows 11 feels like Snow Leopard and Ventura feels like Windows 8.
Well I can't. There are old games in my Steam library right now that will not even launch on the latest Windows. Hunting for old DirectX redistributables didn't seem to help and I gave up. I wouldn't be surprised if they worked fine on Linux. Wouldn't that be ironic?
I feel like half the designers on Microsoft must be using MacOS as their daily driver, constantly messing with things that work, just to make it more Apple-y.
What do you mean?
The most changes I see in Windows is just more spyware/adds added to basic features.
The early versions of Expose were brilliant. One version which displayed all windows that were open, and another version which displayed windows for the current app. You could trigger it via the Keyboard, Hot Corners, or trackpad or mouse gestures (I’m not sure about the mouse gestures though).
Further, the windows largely maintained their spatial configuration as well as their relative sizes.
This was pretty much perfect and I’ve not seen any other implementation that does this better (Gnome is actually getting there by doing a good job of recreating Expose but adding Workspaces to it).
The problem for Apple was that they need to keep changing prominent visual elements to indicate progress, even if the elements get functionally worse. This led to first losing the spatial configuration and relative sizing. Then it morphed into Mission Control which tried to overload a highly successful Mac OS X feature, Expose, to promote workspaces and then full screen apps. And once Mission Control got long in the tooth it had to change for marketing reasons, so we get Stage Manager.
I suspect if Stage Manager or Mission Control would have come first, Max OS X would likely have evolved towards something like the original Expose instead and everyone would have been happier for it.
And it's not great if you have many windows. The arrangements of windows changes every time I invoke it. And even if it was consistent, I can't imagine that visually scanning through 30 tiny windows is efficient.
The great thing about stage manager is that it hides the rest of the windows/application. It gives you this clean and focused view. It’s about windows management, and not just applications like the dock
Switching works really well, and it’s easy to configure a new stage. This is what slaves should’ve been.
It’s still buggy though.
cmd-~ (cycle between windows), will cycle though all windows of all apps of the current stage.
Does anybody know of an algorithm that will maintain spatial configuration and relative size? My favorite implementation of Expose was on Panther/Tiger
I'm currently using a rectangle packing algorithm, but it only maintains relative size, not the spatial configuration.
As I've gotten older, I have 0 tolerance for spending time fiddling with hardware or OS issues. (I've reinstalled/tweaked Windows so many times just to keep it running well, let alone sitting through install wizards or messing with drivers).
I don't need to shop around for the most reliable hardware, I trust Apple that it will be fast enough, ergonomics will be better than most, and most importantly - will just work.
I find I need a lot more 3rd party utilities to make it usable (why is there no HDMI/DP sound control? Why is window snapping so bad? Why no MTP? etc.) Then you have all the new "security" features that have made doing what I need to do way harder than it needs to be.
Having close buttons on the left side and the right side of tabs depending on state (like the number of tabs in Safari) is something that following the Human Interface Guidelines wouldn't have allowed.
I love innovation and trying new things – but the styling improvements shouldn't ignore the basics. There will always be new users who need to see what is possible in order to navigate.
Eg. in directory /Users/rich/Library/Developer/CoreSimulator/Caches/dyld/21G115/com.apple.CoreSimulator.SimRuntime.iOS-13-2.17B102 I have no idea what path I am in because it truncates it to /Users/rich/Library/Developer/CoreSimu... and when I click on the title bar it shows the path as /Users/rich/Library/Developer/CoreSimulator/Caches/dyld/21G115/co... so I still have no idea what directory I am in.
Utter crap.
It's so glaring. What are these buttons in the FaceTime dropdown at the top right of this[0] screenshot? Why are there four different shades of buttons? Again, why don't they look like buttons? The flatness reduces meaning - maybe they're just status indicators? Actually, looking at the screenshot I'm not even sure they are buttons now?!
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20220712084619im_/https://www.ap...
As far as security posture goes, I'm not too concerned. Little Snitch + Pihole are pretty amazing and I have the skills to stay secure. But it is depressing watching from the Catalina shore as each year another macOS release takes more autonomy from the user.
I feel like making those kinds of concessions means that MacOS doesn't treat you as a second-class citizen but that you've deliberately chosen to make yourself a second-class citizen. In what ways do Linux or Windows (or even older MacOS) treat you like a first-class citizen that the new MacOS doesn't anymore?
I don’t find this to be true at all.
I also use Homebrew to install apps and casks, etc. and I’m running on Ventura.
I spend most of my time in WezTerm (was an iTerm user for many years) doing development… but I can use what Gruber calls Mac-assed Mac apps, which are the super useful indie apps which embody the original ethos of macOS apps.
That’s the beauty IMHO of the Mac today—best of breed native (NOT Electron) apps combined with all the power and flexibility of OSS GUI and terminal based apps.
It’s a different experience using apps in a fast, truecolor (16 million colors), GPU-accelerated, with full OpenType support terminal emulator.
What doesn’t get enough attention: the workflows and automations that can be created that aren’t possible on other platforms, since Apple Events are baked into the Cocoa/AppKit layer all the way down to the Unix layer.
Non-developers can use Automator or Shortcuts [1] to create workflows that combine the best features of GUI apps and the command line.
[1]: https://support.apple.com/en-in/guide/automator/welcome/mac
Windows: Windows 11 is a mixed bag with some better design and some worse. Currently, it's a bit of a step backwards. Windows 10 is pretty ok though.
Ubuntu: I wouldn't say Ubuntu is in a better place now with Gnome than it was 5 years ago. It works well, but it doesn't have the cool factor that Unity did and is missing a lot of its features. Ubuntu Unity exists, but it's a little buggy and not as polished as back in the 16.04 days. You could always go KDE Plasma (or MATE if you're old school).
There's the rabbit hole of other Linux distributions, my favorite alternative being Arch. But depends on your tolerance for tweaking.
I also think dnf is a more powerful and easier package manager than apt.
Tried Windows 11, and despite really wanting to like it, it left an impression of utterly unbelievable level of unpolished and unfinished mess, with basic features missing (primarily taskbar related) and still, after all these years, just being a skin over ever-present (and still there) Win95-era dialogs. I understand Windows 8 keeping the old Control Panel and having a weird and weak replacement with a new skin for it in parallel, but come on, we've had Win 10 for years and Win 11 still hasn't moved a bit from that same crap?
Switched to Manjaro (Arch-based distro), and KDE Plasma, spent a couple of days tinkering and customizing and have never been happier with my quick, light, rock-solid, completely customizable and fancy environment, that served me impeccably for 1.5 years until I was too tempted with MBP 14. It is a great device hardware-wise, but Mac OS has been a definite leap back, and I would pay hundreds of dollars to be able to put my Linux on MBP with everything working.
What we really want is design stability. We do want improvements but we don't want wholesale conceptual changes in our desktop environments every few years.
Pop!_OS. Its Ubuntu at its core, but somehow is better.
It took me a bit to get over not having MS Office, but honestly as a development box, it works much better.
Stage Manager was opt-in for me and doesn't solve a problem that I have, but I think it's a great sign that Apple continues to try new things.
Hacker News is obviously a different demographic but no tech company is going to cater to power users. There's not enough of us for anyone to take what we say meaningfully.
What's the point of writing this? If it was "My current Mac will be my last" then that's interesting. But stating that you're actually going to buy another one and maybe one after that. Of course it might be your last, you might die in a car crash on the way home from the store.
My next car might be my last. There's a bunch of things I don't like about my current car so I'll make an uninformed guess that the next one will have the same problems + some other ones and I'll be sick of cars after that.
As far as Apple's strategy is concerned it makes sense to me. There's an order of magnitude more iPadOS and iOS users than there are macOS users. Why not make it easier for them to migrate to the platform? Who knows? Maybe one day Apple will realize that what's needed is an Macbook that you can bend the screen back flat and use like an iPad? The more the UI's are unified the more likely it is we'll see such a machine.
I think the answer is that he's not really leaving.
> That trepidation and sinking feeling of “What are they going to break this time?” every time the WWDC’s date approaches, has been wearing me down in the past few years. What one should feel, instead, is: “Apple got this. I’m in good hands. I see no reason not to upgrade straight away.” And I haven’t felt this in a long time.
I haven’t looked forward to a release since Snow Leopard, and High Sierra was the only usable version after that. Mojave and onward have been just dreadful. Mac software hasn’t been fun, exciting, or good in a long time, sadly.
I say this as someone that has pretty much entirely shifted my tech to Apple over the last 5 years. I don't see me going elsewhere at the moment, but I do see a shift towards turning Mac devices into walled gardens that don't give the user actual control similar to iOS devices. I'm fine with that for my phone, not for my laptop, end of story.
Especially since the windows-rs[1] crate was published, for me it is just so much more infinitely customizable for my needs than macOS ever was.
Once you get the hang of the Win32 API (pretty easy with the excellent developer documentation), the sky is really the limit.[2]
[1]: https://github.com/microsoft/windows-rs
[2]: With the exception of the Virtual Desktops API. I'm still salty about this, see more here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33169588
I fail to take a blog that talks about how their "next" Mac "might" be the last, seriously.
I would have paid some attention if the blog was about how their current Mac "might" be the last, and definitely more if their current Mac would "most definitely be" the last.
I guess I should work on my next blog: My next space travel might be the last ..
I hate that 32-bit got left behind, and I bemoan apparent "planned obsolescence" as much as anyone. But the fact is that these latest OSes are coming with genuine improvements in security posture. The point that the UI changes are sometimes unwelcome is well-taken, and I can see how the changes in security technologies change the experience for the user in sometimes awkward or baffling ways. Totally get it. But when it comes to stuff like this, I'm afraid the only way through it is forward.
The thing is, Windows is still a lot worse and not getting any better.
Linux… I’m actually afraid I’d devote my life to endless configuration and frustration while having to deal with a Windows VM with GPU passthrough and whatnot. Or constant dual boot. Or a KVM. Who knows.
So Mac it is for now. Please stop breaking our favorite OS, Apple.
Aside from high-DPI, I'd be pressed to think of a single Mac interface convention or element that is better today than 2005. Many are a lot worse.
From 2002 to 2013, I loved OSX. Yes, even Puma.
Mavericks was the first release that broke the spell. Already, I could see the downward trajectory of the UX. With each subsequent release, my frustration grew.
In 2016, I ditched the Mac in favor of PC. I dual booted Windows and Fedora. Between the two, I didn't miss anything. Windows took care of all my office and casual use activities. Fedora is great as a distraction-free coding environment. I was surprised by how quickly I adjusted. Over the years, I stopped thinking much about the Mac.
In 2021, my new workplace issued me a new MacBook. This was my first real exposure to the Mac in five years.
And it's...fine. Not great. Just fine. It's not frustrating like it was in 2016. It gets the job done. But I wouldn't care if you took it away and put me back on Windows tomorrow.
I've accepted it. The glory days of OSX are gone. I've let go of my hope that macOS can reclaim that same magic. Expectations and disappointments are gone. Instead, the Mac is just one tool among many that can get the job done. And I'm okay with that.
In terms of finder/preview, I've since moved to using vifm (tui) configured with zathura(pdf/djvu), calibre(epub), sxiv(images), mpv(videos). This works very well with the tiling window manager.
Notable (https://notable.app/) works very well as a notes app and you can also sync it with your mobile and use Noteless (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.redsolver....) on android with the synced notable folder
Kitty terminal (https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/) is great as a terminal, fast, and can also display images.
But instead of delighting customers, Apple is now chasing the mystical "services revenue". In my opinion, that's just a more pleasant way of saying "everything will be infested with DRM so that we can sell you the same movie multiple times". We can already see the start of it with Apple Music which is raising prices now that customers are appropriately entrapped and have lost their old (purchased) iTunes mp3 collection.
Catalyst apps suck and don't feel right. For some reason Messages just loses typing focus at weird times. I'm sure it's nice for Apple to share codebases but for the end user it feels like a weird mobile app that had some desktop functionality tacked on at the last second.
And the little control center they added to the right of the menu bar is just weird cause it's doubled-up implementations of menu items I already have. Volume control is already there. Media controls are already there. Wifi toggle is already there. Bluetooth switcher is already there. Why does this thing exist? So it can have bigger controls that look designed for a touch screen even though Macs don't have touchscreens (which I'm personally fine with)
Thankfully they backtracked on the dumb Safari tab changes where they tried to make the web page and browser chrome bleed together which was just confusing.
There's too many icons taking up space from menu items on laptop screens, it's always been a problem.
Not trying to be silly here. Probably need my brain calibrated here,
I would love the inclusion of a keypad and would find it incredibly useful, especially for accessibility reasons. So I find the idea delightful, which I suspect is not the way it supposed to strike me. I am assuming one is supposed to find that idea exotically stupid and niche?
After that, they changed the default scrolling to "natural scrolling" to match the iPhone/iPad. The headlining features at WWDC became more about how they were bringing phone apps like iMessage and Calls over to OSX.
Lots to unpack here. First, the author is stating a personal preference and won't be swayed. Fair enough.
But the idea that the author would know they "haven't had any security-related problems whatsoever" is debatable at best. The attack surface is enormous.
Even security experts admit they have trouble securing a consumer computer. And it doesn't sound like the author spends much time dealing with the topic in depth.
I've been using computers for 25+ years and have been technically capable for the better part of that, but that doesn't mean I'm any less vulnerable. I'm not going to be intentionally clicking on fishy links or anything but we all make mistakes, which makes it more a matter of when than if.
Would be more interesting to actually cite examples of high-risk exploits that have been discovered since High Sierra and Mojave.
I'm much happier developing on a recent Ubuntu LTS and deploying to the same thing in the cloud - easier setup, more reliable, and KDE is good enough...
I've still been using macs but rarely ever logging in to the app store. My personal mac recently developed a booting problem so I opened the store to see if there's some software I could download to help diagnose it, of course I've forgotten my password again, couldn't even tell you the last time I entered it. Go to reset it and despite entering a 2fa code from the backup email address and one from my phone via text message, it's going to take 15 days to reset the password. It's frankly ridiculous.
At this point I think I'm done, this will probably be my last macbook outside of oens provided by work.
You get the feeling, all their best people are doing amazing work on the Apple Watch, then the iPhone.
User facing MacOS improvements are a dead end for career focused big tech employees sadly. They're not revenue generating.
A total change from 2009. In 2009, the hardware of an Apple laptop was awful, so they HAD to ship brilliant software to compensate.
Now the MBP has the BEST screen, the BEST chip, the BEST battery life.
Apple has moved the "A Team" to other platforms.
If you pick well-supported hardware and a distro that's designed to "just work" without too much customization (and commit to not changing everything), such as Fedora Silverblue, it really doesn't take more time than Windows or Mac. Probably less even, assuming you know each OS equally well.
While I'm satisfied with my FreeBSD (with KDE Plasma as my desktop)/Windows dual-boot situation, neither KDE nor Windows are my ideal desktops. For the past few years I've been doing a lot of thinking about what I'd like out of an operating system and what would be a compelling alternative to macOS even in its heyday. I'm working on a side project called MallowOS (http://mallowos.com/) that is my vision of an ideal workstation OS and could be thought of as a "retrofuturistic" operating system had some of the visions of Xerox PARC researchers, the Apple's Advanced Technology Group, and Lisp hackers (among others) been realized.
Other operating system projects I'm paying close attention that are even more macOS-inspired than my system are helloSystem (https://hellosystem.github.io/docs/) and rayvnOS (https://airyx.org/). I hope these projects gain traction so that way they become solid options for long-time Mac users who are disappointed in Apple's direction but who want to use a familiar interface with applications designed with familiar UI/UX guidelines.
Update: closing and reopening the windows puts them back into normal mode. Apparently the little close buttons in the sidebar still work (along with the rest of the window). Really weird...
In terms of the Mac experience, it was quickly downhill from Mojave in my opinion (though I'm more fond of Snow Leopard or possibly Mavericks aesthetically), plus the 32 bit cutoff which kills important backwards compatibility for me.
I already leverage some of the really nifty Mac features like Target Disk Mode, cloning and booting from external drives etcetera, to enable some hardware agnostic behavior, and will eventually move to virtualization, probably through Proxmox.
Not having upgrades introduce breaking changes (Notes.app, I'm looking at you!) is such a relief.
When I finally get past my “sell by date” and completely stop working, I really like the Chromebook since the UI is nice enough and the Linux containers work well enough for light weight coding for fun projects. I would hang on to my iPhone and Apple Watch. Maybe keep an iPad instead of a Chromebook if not having Linux containers is OK.
I virtually never turn on any of my Mac computers anymore if I am not in work mode. Even with valid criticisms of recent UI changes, macOS is great for getting work done.
Anyone that deeply uses any operating system is going to find many things that delight them and many things that are deeply frustrating to the point where you think you might want to switch... only to find that the grass is not in fact greener on the other side, you're simply given a different set of delights and frustrations.
I just don't really know what someone like this expects to do. Just use Mojave into perpetuity? That won't work for all that long. Switch to Windows or Linux? He might luck out and find that they serve his needs better, but more than likely he'll just find them frustrating to use too. I think one ultimately has to accept that whatever they choose to use (or eschew computers entirely) that they'll be dealing with a lot of frustrations. There is no panacea.
I also find it odd that many Mac users in this thread claim that Linux requires too much tweaking. I've been daily driving Linux for years and I feel like I spend more time fiddling trying to get stuff to work correctly on my Mac work laptop. Perhaps it's just a matter of perspective?
How is it that there are countless people repeating how difficult it is to maintain Linux?
It runs out of the box for most hardware flawlessly.
No. Of course I don’t. Apple has made criticism-worthy decisions for years and they still regularly make them. But at times it seems like there’s just a…reach. I’m using macOS Monterey right now, and while I don’t think the Big Sur UI refresh is a substantial improvement over its predecessor Catalina and it made a few aesthetic choices I’d charitably describe as dubious, it’s hardly a catastrophic regression. Yeah, people are nostalgic about OS X Snow Leopard, but that’s not a particularly good indication of it being the pinnacle of design. People are also nostalgic about Windows 3.1, AmigaOS, and CP/M. (Snow Leopard is full of the old “metal” UI, glowy candy-colored buttons, and drawers. It’s adorable, but it’s very 2000s.)
And, I mean, okay, Mac people are stereotypically (over)sensitive to UX decisions, I get that. So when the author writes, “I’m not saying I’m dumping the Mac and switching to Windows or Linux,” well: no, he’s clearly not, is he. He’s just written a a fair number of words with the clear subtext, I am a Mac person who is stereotypically oversensitive to UX decisions. Apple will undoubtedly make other weird choices next year with macOS Fresno or Oxnard or whatever, but they will probably still on the whole be choices Mac UX nerds will like more than the alternatives.
(Also, dumping the Mac and switching to Windows or Linux will deprive people of the opportunity to write about how much they hate the Mac, and you know, where would the fun be in that.)
This is nothing new really, but then that goes to the heart of why people "love to hate the Mac". It's not that they love to hate it, it's that the hardware is so great, but then you have this kind of increasingly corporate consumer-hostile stuff that gets thrown on top of it (in the past it was just plain bloated inefficiency, like early iTunes).
So let's say you are in the author's position: what do you do? Regardless of whether it's Linux or Windows, you're going to go onto other hardware systems. Many of the options are pretty nice and underrated in "Mac faithful" communities. But really, they're probably not quite what Apple offers, if not in quality, than in selling points.
Recently this has been exacerbated because Apple is putting out an ARM chip that's pretty powerful but also power-efficient. Add nice trackpads, nice monitors, great battery life, and so forth, and it's hard to leave even if you are frustrated with the software. What other high-performing consumer ARM/RISC power efficient laptop are you going to find?
A lot of people (I'm in this boat now) would love to see the ability to buy Apple hardware and slap Linux on it seamlessly, but it's not quite there yet. Asahi Linux is incredibly impressive in how fast its grown but it's not actually ready for primetime: last time I looked at the status notes, you were at risk of literally blowing up your speakers by doing much with them.
So then the ambivalence goes around and around.
People are just getting old, and lounging those old times by rejecting new stuff.
It was absolutely painless and I did not notice any UI annoyances. I will update this comment if I encounter any issues.
Disclaimer: I use hammerspoon(https://www.hammerspoon.org/) for, among other things, manage my windows and move them around. I do not use any special feature of the OSX UI.
It's fine. I understand that they need to do something for new customers, not just me. But then again, it's not for me.
I switch my work laptop to a Thinkpad for half a year now. I have to admit that Linux is not really as polished as Windows, MacOS, but I can control it to what I want. It is more important to me than the battery of the new M1.
I still using the Mac 2015 less than 1 hour per day, mostly for web browsing. Once it die, I will use another laptop.
>I’m honestly more concerned by third-party apps dropping support of these older system versions rather than vague security threats.
This guy probably won't notice that someone used one of many available root privilege escalation vulnerabilities against his system before his bank account is emptied.
In windows, since approximately 8, they have been changing the system, to the point of having two control panels. The new control panel is in an interface that doesn't look integrated with anything because the trend of modern UI has been ditched.
The new changes on the taskbar etc... is something I can live with, but still I don't like it. I don't think I will change to Linux, because honestly. It doesn't have the stability that I got on windows.
With android is the same, everytime I get a new phone, I have the feeling that I got less and less features.
I can only pray that for 2025, that linux has improved eve more (it has done it a lot) and try to recover part of the freedom.
As a technology enthusiast, I am less and less enthusiastic with the future things.
There's just the air around it and the enthusiasm I feel from Microsoft. I think it's been received well. They're moving Office towards it and many other applications too, even Windows Terminal. Common taskbar complaints are addressed at ... well, let's just say a pace. Windows 11 22H2 now supports drag & drop again. Wow.
Unfortunately it's taken them many years to get here due to the missteps starting with Windows 8, where they thought they could have both desktop and smartphones sharing the same design language. Then they didn't manage to penetrate the smartphone market and suddenly many design decisions no longer made sense, because choices on desktop were made due to choices on smartphone... In turn due to touch interfaces and limited screen space.
They're slowly undoing it all over the OS.
But it's taking them so damn long. Years and years to make a single Control Panel page obsolete. They're truly victims to their own mega success and idea of maintaining backwards compatibility causing them to move at the bare minimum speed forward for some sort of software development that a manager can still call "progress".
And now they recently moved from the idea of two releases per year to one every third year with minor feature updates in between. I think they realized they are just moving too damn slow forward to make anything quicker marketable.
I started off, writing embedded stuff, so I’ve used tools and environments that would have a lot of today’s programmers hiding under their desks, whimpering.
It’ll be fine.
Wow. There are so many egregious UI failures that the author can only choose to focus on a few of the most profound. Can’t wait to find out what those are.
> The new System Settings and Stage Manager in Mac OS Ventura, to put it bluntly, are a fucking joke.
Ah I see. It’s the disabled by default window manager, and the desperately needed settings overhaul.
Must have been a great release, in that case. Hard to take the rest of this article seriously.
Good luck with that.
16 inch M1 Max ~4k
Apple Watch Ultra ~800
Air pods pro 2 ~250
13 inch M1 16 GB ~2000
= 7000 dollars.
A huge spend and I don't regret one single purchase. Each subsequent product interfaces extremely well with the ecosystem. I no longer carry my phone with me 80% of the time. I bring my watch and usually have a laptop if needed.
I keep throwing money at Apple and they almost never disappoint.
Has this person ever multitasked on MacOS? The amount of third party tools I need to not want to cry when managing windows and spaces is embarrassing for a company as big as apple
Apple isn't just fiddling with the UI. It has actively got worse with every rendition of MacOS since Lion, and the pace of destruction is getting faster.
Frankly, the UI teams have no idea what they're doing any more, other than a clear instruction from above to make it look like iOS when a) iOS has so much UI debt at this point it is a chore to use and needs an instruction manual (seriously, hand someone who doesn't spend their time a beta blog and ask them to use Stage Manager) and b) is for a completely different size and interaction modal.
Apple desperately needs someone with some taste at the helm.
I upgraded to Ventura and iPadOS 16 yesterday. All of the things I care about still work. The sun still came up this morning and I didn’t get enraged over system preference settings or Stage Manager. Get a grip.
Everything will be better in the next version, and even better in the version after that. Accept for the new stuff, which will be worse before it gets better, and then five years from now we'll get an article about how Apple is "ruining macOS" for some other reason.
I love me some new features, but I turned this on, and it’s some weird motion-sickness inducing always-on cmd+tab monstrosity.
Is it supposed to learn about my usage habits and adapt?
I've used 5+ macs at this point and I've barely used the graphical UI. Personal or professional the default and preferred interface for local interaction on the mac is the terminal, and then there's the browser for online stuff. `open` is a wonderful command.
I've also found Finder very annoying to work with when I had to use it for file upload etc. But I never had to do that too often.
Using the touchpad was a chore as it's not as responsive; ads pop up all over the Start menu; the monitor is blurry; and even setting up things like Bluetooth devices were hit and miss.
Ended up getting another Macbook, for better or worse
In a way Jobs managed to replace himself, at least for the short term, with something even better. Which should be the goal of everyone.
Windows? That's a joke. It's a fine platform for gaming and probably still the most performant platform for web browsing (I personally value that highly), but not really built for development (except for development of games, I guess).
Desktop Linux/Gnome: Excellent for actual development work, but not great elsewhere.
Desktop Linux is pretty serviceable for any tasks that aren't gaming. It may require learning different tools if you are used to Microsoft/adobe products, but the alternatives do exist. If you're doing command line work, it's better on Linux than osx anyway.
With WSL, I actually find Windows a better backend development platform than Mac.
99% of everything I do is either browser based, vscode, or command line.
I don't know how to use, or care to use any of the applications that come with the Mac.
For me, it's pretty much identical to windows with wsl that I switched from, but the M1 chip is just amazing.
But that CPU...
It's impossible to paint a picture from individual anecdotes, but my experience with organizations that deployed a large number of MacBook Pros was that about half of them would eventually be turned in for butterfly keyboard failures, and it hasn't been happening with the new "retro" keyboards.
I do have a friend with a huge hole scratched in the paint of his 2017's left Shift key, backlight shining through. I'd never seen that before!
If you issue is "the cosmetic changes between 10.15 and 11" then you have no issue.
>in case I haven’t been clear enough: I loathe what Apple is doing with Mac OS now. The visuals, the UI… I simply don’t enjoy it. I tolerate it.
There's nothing really wrong, or that different with the UI between the latest macOS versions...
(The Settings in Ventura being the sole exception, not for the UI redesign/visuals, but because it's half-done and needs polish).
I'm really enjoying Stage Manager so far as well.
I am so tired of that flat cartoonish look that all software is going for. It looks bland and boring
I miss the pre Big Sur design
I like boring macOS versions, where we just fix bugs and don't put new unnecessary features that nobody wants.
Have you tried using Stage Manager? It's a joke. Why would I want to hide my apps that are on the side of each of other to give highlight to one of them?
Do you guys even do some serious work where you need a terminal and a document guide by the side?
Actually it’s so when Macs eventually run iPad OS it’s less of a shock to the system.
System Settings is now vertical instead of rows. Big deal - how much time does he spend in System Settings? In command line I prefer "ls -la" over "ls". Vertical is faster to read.
An article says Stage Manager can be turned off. I'm using AltTab.app to customize my multi-tasking.
AFAIK it’s off by default and you have to explicitly enable it.
alias ls='ls -la'
What. The. Hell.
I'm guessing you got old and didn't like that they changed something you had gotten used to. It's for that same reason you'll never be able to change to anything else.
Not just click-bait, it's trolling.
Get over it, and celebrate that it's still not as bad as the redesigned control center/panel in Windows 10.
+100 frankly.
I'm still using the original iPhone SE (you know, the small phone with bezels). The design of Safari for iOS used to be perfect. The + sign to open a new tab was right in the middle. Switching to incognito was 1 tap away. The open tabs were stacked open behind another.
Apple redesigned Safari in iOS 15 to accommodate it for the bigger all-screen iPhones. The address bar was moved to the bottom for better reachability. The + sign was moved away not to be so close to that horizontal line that replaced the home button. Incognito was hidden away. The stack of open tabs become a grid.
Even though the redesign made sense for the bigger bezel-less phones it was a regression for phones like the iPhone SE. I would have loved if they introduced the changes only to newer models but I can also understand that maintaining 2 different UIs would've been more work.
I started using Macs in 2015 roughly and at that time they were destroying the competition. The retina display sucks. It doesn't feel natural to me.
> But what about security? Are you sure you want to stay on an older version of Mac OS? — Thankfully I’m tech-savvy enough to know what I’m doing.
It's hard to be more misinformed. Ventura fixes 66 CVEs. Monterey 12.6.1, released simultaneously, fixes 3. This is typical for Apple.[0] You are not secure unless you are running the latest public version, period.
Don't like Stage Manager? Don't use it.
And the move to System Settings is just a way to make the Mac easier for brand new Mac users, who are more likely used to iOS Settings.
Far from promoting eye-candy, they've kept building in powerful social, collaboration and productivity features, like SharePlay (Monterey), scheduled send in Mail, Shared Tab Groups in Safari, iPhone-as-webcam, and Freeform. I still have misgivings about Apple Music and Books being buggy, but you can't say they're ignoring pro users.
[0]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/11/psa-apple-isnt-actua...
I've been on the internet for a long time and I've seen these kind of complaints in all kind of forms. Comments, forum posts, blog posts, video, podcast. Each time a UI gets updated, people start to write melodramatic pieces about how this ruins it forever and it's the point of no return for the platform.
I've heard it when facebook abandoned this UI (https://beta.techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/fbpag...), when youtube changed this homepage (https://www.versionmuseum.com/images/websites/youtube-websit...) and so on. You get the point. When a UI change happens it feels strange, but in hindsight they were right to do it.
Designers are not fools, if they are working on a good team (like at Apple) they don't take decisions on a whim. They prototype, they do user testing, the validate ideas and scrap others considering many many many different factors. If you see a design decision, it has been carefully thought out from different perspectives. This assuming that there are actual design team with enough resources behind, which is Apple case.
Whatever criticism you have for any design, they have thought about it at least 10 months ago. They know about it and took a decision balancing other 100 aspects and considerations that you are not even aware about.
Now the younger generation is much more promising in terms of revenues and it already has an iphone so it's very logical to make macOS intuitive for ios users. Providing instant productivity is probably the most valuable thing you can do to those new users from a software perspective.
Still -- megacorps can and do screw things (like design) up. Regularly. I can't imagine that the best way of exporting a web page as a PDF should be 'long tap on the Print button'.