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Comment by optymizer | Hacker News Reader

The hardware is indeed great. The software experience is getting worse imo, particularly when upgrading. It used to be rock solid for me.

The m1 worked without any issues for 2 months. I upgraded yesterday to macOS Ventura:

* Upgrade finished but laptop froze. Hard reset.

* On first boot, the new System Settings failed to load icons, then froze. Trying to quit it froze the OS. Hard reset.

* I left the laptop plugged in for 12 hours, connected to 2 other displays over USBC. Laptop screen didnt turn on, other monitors did. Unplugged monitors, mashed keys on keyboard, replugged, laptop screen was still off. Hard reset.

I give Apple lots of credit for switching to ARM, but the last time I had this many issues that required a hard reset because the OS became unusable was Windows ME.

I used to praise macOS for its stability. It's still on average very stable, but in the last ~5 years the upgrade experience has not been rock solid anymore. I must have used at least a dozen Macbook Pro/Air and Mac Pro in that time, so I know it's not just 1 buggy laptop.

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I feel like people have ALWAYS had problems when upgrading MacOS (or OSX). However, those problems aren't with the OS itself usually, but 3rd party software that lags. For that reason I always intentionally lag 1 major version behind. I'll upgrade to Ventura whenever the next version is released. Been doing this forever and can't recommend it highly enough.

I don't entirely think it's just 3rd party software, I think Apple's decision to bundle major app and OS updates together gives people the illusion that every major release is causing problems.

If they were to separate their first party app updates and OS updates (release wise, they can still market them together), more people would be able to pinpoint "ok it's not the entire update since I was on it just fine for a month, but actually just the notes app updated yesterday eating battery randomly". At least for cautious users.

OS X user since 10.3, and while I share the opinion that their software quality has gone downhill, they've always done bundled app and OS upgrades: they co-develop major updates to the OS and its SDKs with applications that make use of them. That isn't a major delta from prior releases which held themselves to higher standards.

While holding back app updates to stabilize the early upgrade experience might work, it's also somewhat contradictory to the idea that they upgraded the apps and their features and upgraded the OS as necessary to support the apps and features.

The last version that was 100% forward progress for me was Snow Leopard, which was essentially the performance/bug fix revision of Leopard. The Windows 7 from Vista equivalent.

Every update since then has felt slow, or introduced bugs. Perhaps it was because Snow Leopard came on a physical disk, so they couldn't "just ship it".

I remember feeling like how GP (with M1 Pro) feels when I upgraded my 2007 Intel MBP with Snow Leopard and and SSD. Everything was snappy and instantaneous until the wave of Electron apps and Lion and forced convergence with iOS design...

I think it’s time for them to do an OS upgrade like SL again. Just bug fixes. But this time they need to do it across all their devices too.

Not just one — two release cycles focused solely on bugs & performance are really in order. The sheer amount of change, necessary and otherwise, that has been dropped on the macOS in recent years has left things a right mess under the hood. Shoot, one release cycle alone should be focused on fixing/reversing the attempts to iOSify the Mac. The controls are wrong, the spacing is wrong, the appearance is wrong. Things are not consistent, and they do not work as the rest of the OS gives reason to expect.

People have said this for every single OS X release…

Just look at the Ventura settings window dude. How are they so sloppy that it cannot even scale properly, not commenting here about how ugly the experience is. At least make it scale a bit. Oh, and I did not say that it even has a lag when it loads, on a fresh login with no apps.

IMHO Ventura's rethink is a huge improvement — search is now actually useful, 3rd-party extensibility is much better, etc. (It does scale vertically, BTW. The old one did not.)

Snappy it is not. I think they’ve used the latest UX pattern called ‘click & wait’

I've never had a problem upgrading macOS... I've never had a noteworthy problem with Macs in general.

Same. It's easy to say I don't like the software when that's the ecosystem you're living in. Go do windows for a month, hell, even my ubuntu certified laptop has issues with Ubuntu. There is no perfect experience but I would argue the alternatives are vastly worse.

An update (Xcode tools) broke git in September. It's not just 3rd party software.

Before they switched to image-based updates over APFS, the issue was partially with the upgrade process.

My personal record stood at a bit over one week spent observing a dark screen with unmoving progress bar in the hopes that this time it will actually finish the upgrade.

> but 3rd party software that lags

Microsoft does distribute beta versions of Windows for third-parties to test against.

Does apple do the same? If Apple doesn't, then it's Apple's we have to blame it onto.

Two beta streams - dev, where a dev account is required ($99 per year) and the public beat which is basically a few weeks behind dev, minus early betas. The availability is always announced at WWDC, normally the dev availability is on the day of the keynote.

Much like Windows devs, Apple devs need to pay attention to this. If your livelihood is dependent on a platform, not paying attention is on you.

They could provide a package manager, rather than expecting the Homebrew community to fix it for them. My issues are almost always related to command line tools

I’m sure there’s always been those who were affected. There’s always been those who weren’t. And I think the former tend to exaggerate.

My own experience is different. \Years ago I would wait at least 6 months or more before doing a mac upgrade because of the inevitable problems. With Ventura I didn't even wait for the first point release, and had no problems whatsoever. (I did have two complete backups handy just in case.)

I'm not invaliding your experience, just mentioning that others have different experiences.

Same here. Traditionally, I always waited for the point one release before upgrading. This time with Ventura, for the first time I just updated to the point zero release and crossed my fingers. No problems, so I'm quite pleased.

Seconded. I've never hesitated with an OS upgrade, and I've never experienced anything resembling a critical issue.

This has been my experience as well. One of the first times I had zero issues with a major Mac OS upgrade.

I turned on auto updates and haven’t seen any problems since.

For both iOS and Macos (and Windows for that matter) it's a good idea to backup everything and reinstall the OS from scratch for each major version. Yes it's a headache but it will prevent 10x more headaches that result from upgrading from a previous major version. Many of the problems people have with Apple OS upgrades are issues that happen during the process of converting configurations from one version to the next. This is especially true if you've done multiple major version upgrades without starting from scratch at some point.

If you upgrade from Catalina -> Big Sur -> Monterey -> Ventura, for example, it becomes like a game of telephone. Small issues that happen with converting configurations accumulate. This makes me wonder if Apple tests new versions installed from scratch rather than upgraded over multiple generations like what happens in the real world.

I have a mac that has only been upgraded between what 20 major versions and migrated between 6 macs since 2003, never an issue small or large. Never reinstalled from scratch. You must have had bad luck.

This is why I never upgrade my Mac. The lost productivity risk is just not worth it.

I do a full macOS reinstall approx 1.5 years, depending on external factors, mostly to be able to clean up obsolete apps/packages/etc (after the reinstall I move everything into a "Old machine" folder and only move back what I need. only drawback is winding up with an "Oldmac" folder inside the "Oldmac" folder inside the "Oldmac..." well one day I'll clear those up)

But I've never felt like needing to do that with iOS - the only 'reinstall' occurs when I upgrade devices (and then I restore from iCloud backup). What problems did you run into that were resolved by a clean reinstall of iOS?

Battery drain. I managed a big fleet of iOS devices around the iOS 6 to iOS 10 time period when battery drain was a common complaint (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13054056). Completely wiping the phone and setting it back up without restoring the backup fixed those battery drain issues 100% of the time. If you wiped the phone and restored the iCloud backup the battery drain would persist because you restored whatever glitched config file was causing it.

This used to be the standard advice for MS Windows.

Funny to think that it's now Apple who have this problem.

This is still worth doing occasionally on Windows, but iOS users have never had to do this, and there's been no reason for Mac users to do this since the System 7 (pre-Mac OS X) days. Some habits die hard, though.

I managed a big fleet of iOS devices (hundreds) around the iOS 6 to iOS 10 time period when battery drain was a common complaint (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13054056). Completely wiping the phone and setting it back up without restoring the backup fixed those battery drain issues 100% of the time. If you wiped the phone and restored the iCloud backup the battery drain would persist because you restored whatever glitched config file was causing it.

>The hardware is indeed great. The software experience is getting worse imo, particularly when upgrading.

Yeah, I feel the same. It's 180 degrees from a few years ago, when the MacBook specs were ho-hum but using MacOS was a big benefit (the physical hardware has always been great). The overall software experience with MacOS is now just "okay". The upgrade process is slow and there are a few UI quirks that other OS's just seem to do better.

Yeah, not as enthusiastic about OS X as I used to be, but I wish I had that kind of hardware in everything now.

Maybe it's my nostalgia/rose tinted glasses talking, but I recently used one of the old white plastic macbooks running Snow Leopard 10.6.8 and was shocked at how instantaneous the user interface felt in comparison with Ventura on a modern machine. Even small details, such as opening/closing windows and typing text into TextEdit feels like it has lower delay/input lag on the old hardware/software.

Had a similar feeling while playing with an old iPod touch running the skeuomorphic/pre-flat iOS when compared with a modern iPhone.

Snow Leopard was a high point for stability and speed. Unfortunately, changing expectations of integrations and feature demands meant they couldn't stay there.

What is rose-tinted is the OP's remembering the OSes of a few years ago being great. Mojave and Catalina had a bunch of annoyances and weren't as good at recovering from a bad install or a bad update push as Monterey and Ventura. Not that Monterey and Ventura are great either.

That's the thing. Hardware keeps getting more and more powerful, but somehow the computers its in don't seem to be getting any faster. UI responses should be instantaneous by now. They used to be. Why aren't they? How many cores do these things have? Why is one of them not dedicated to catering to my impatience?

Sorry, that was getting a bit ranty.

It's the event-driven event-driven event-driven programming programming programming.

But my clicks are events. Why are they not given priority?

I recently decommissioned my iMac Pro and wiped its storage, which involved a High Sierra reinstall via Internet Recovery (http netboot).

It's amazing how snappy it is. I wish Apple would offer levers to turn off all the new (and laggy) features in their OSes for those of us who just want a computer to be simple and run apps.

I feel like Apple has forgotten what makes their Macs so successful, which is the seamless experience. I always wanted to own the latest one but not anymore, will stick with Linux.

I have an M1 mini and an M1 Pro 14”, both with 16GB. I upgraded both to Ventura 13.1 and have really had zero issues with a variety of hardware setups.

The software _design_ however… yes, Apple is sliding. The new Settings is a mess. It’s so disorienting, even when I put aside the fact that I had used the old, NeXT-derived one for 20 years. You just can’t find anything without search, which adds steps.

There is a relative lack of attention to polish, discoverability, and charm. It’s all just made to be slick and shiny now.

The settings window in MacOS needed to evolve IMHO. Just like the old disgusting confusing Windows settings/profilers/doodads, it worked only for old Mac power users. When the young audience is coming from iOS, MacOS has to satisfy what they’re used to. And Apple needs to stay consistent to not become like Windows.

As I age and switch constantly between OSes and devices for work, search has increasingly become my primary way of finding settings and whatnot. The part of my brain that remembers things spacially just doesn’t bother anymore.

Yeah, I can see this. However, I’ve been on iOS from the start (as a developer) and there is not a lot of sense to why some settings are organized the way that they are.

- “General” is a trash fire of hodgepodge

- “Home Screen” & “Wallpaper” are separate top-levels

In general, the top level items are grouped by task, but the tasks aren’t labeled but instead implied:

  - Radio signals (Airplane Mode, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth)
  
  - Noise & distractions (Notifications, Sounds, Focus, Screen Time)
  
  - Input, output, and appearance (General, Control Center, Display, … Touch ID, …)
  
  - Purchasing (App Store, Wallet & Apple Pay)
  
  - Apple apps (except for the first, Passwords)… Mail, Contacts, Calendar, …
  
  - Apple apps with media (Music, TV, Photos, …)
  
  - All the other apps

This is on iOS. Is it too much to ask for some commitment to naming of these sections?

Oh yeah agreed, hence my approach with search taking over. Who has the time to be pointing around ever changing menus. (Which fails of course when what you’re looking for can’t be easily named to search.)

But for a corporation making these decisions, I would venture that the questions around how iOS should do it better are a separate concern from this merging the iOS way into the Mac way.

The old setting app was nowhere near the mess Windows settings apps are. And I'm not quite sure what's so complicated about the old settings for iOS users? It is way more non power users friendly than the old windows control panel and imho actually more simple and easier to use than iOS settings (where I find it impossible to find anything without search and search doesn't even work that great there..)

> I used to praise macOS for its stability. It's still on average very stable, but in the last ~5 years the upgrade experience has not been rock solid anymore. I must have used at least a dozen Macbook Pro/Air and Mac Pro in that time, so I know it's not just 1 buggy laptop.

If you think that is bad... don't get me started on Screen Time in macOS. It is 100% broken, in every way, for kids and adults, in the most inexplicable ways possible. [Example: The "internet filter" fails open after a few hours. You thought your 8-year-old was only on approved sites? MacOS says yes, but actually no.]

I have never seen any of the issues you're having here and I've had probably 20-30 iterations of apple products over the last 20 years.

The last true issue I had with apple hardware or software was in 2002-2003ish with a snow iBook that had a motherboard failure, but after that I've had nearly 20 unbroken years of basically fault-free existence which is pretty amazing if you ask me.

Can't say I share your experience. Just upgraded to Ventura and didn't run into any issues.

> The software experience is getting worse imo

EVERY OS release will have some issues, and the people who are most impacted are the ones who chime in. If it "just works" for someone, they aren't going to chime in.

This is true of Mac, Windows, Linux, etc. I'd be curious to see a quantitative pre-release breakdown by OS and version. That might be more useful than individual anecdotes, as interesting as those are.

Okay, sure. Fine. Humans write software and humans make mistakes

*However* Apple specifically only targets a very small subset of devices. The amount of obvious bugs that slip through in every release upgrade against such a small handful of devices from a company as big as Apple is pretty disappointing

Windows has to run on the overwhelming majority of "weird" x86 devices on the planet. The amount of work they have to put in with their hardware partners is comparatively staggering

Microsoft has done a great job, don't get me wrong.

My question is still legit: is there an (relatively) unbiased third-party that tracks bugs across major OS releases? Is that a bad question to ask?

Rolling release distros avoid this by not having these giant catastrophic upgrades.

It seems weird that these companies which presumably employ some programmers have this convention of bundling up all the bugs together for some nice combinatorial confusion. Everybody knows you keep your code in a working state from commit to commit, so you only have to handle one bug at a time, right?

Yup. Software is why I am on Linux on a thinkpad. It’s fast enough. And I control everything.

Personally, I switched to Asahi Linux on my M1. It’s becoming the perfect experience for me: Apple hardware with an OS without bloat.

(Yes, many things don’t work yet. For personal use it’s fine though)

I’ll never be overly critical of anyone’s computing choices, but this just seems like the worst of both worlds to me unless you specifically want to tinker with Apple-ARM Linux.

Why not Linux on much better supported hardware from Lenovo or Dell? It just doesn’t make sense to me to buy such an expensive computer only to remove a core part of the package, Mac OS.

> Why not Linux on much better supported hardware from Lenovo or Dell?

Specific Intel laptops aside, something doesn’t work for each of them either. These days sleep is a big issue with Linux on modern Intel laptops due to Windows Modern Standby. All in all, characterizing Asahi Linux as poorly supported is probably just based on some expectation that does not necessarily match reality. It runs very well and GPU is about the only thing that is missing. Plus, Linux on Macs has always had the advantage of having a big community focused on solving very standardized hardware issues. Once they work they work for everyone out of the box.

I think you’d be surprised!

I have a Dell Workstation from work (Specifically a Linux supported one, whatever that means) using linux and my personal Macbook Air M1 is running Asahi Linux.

I really ran into no issues, the experience was almost scarily smooth. Everything just works. Sleep is definitely worse than on MacOS but it’s better than my Dell.

I can’t name a single thing that is not equally bad or worse on the Dell.

Fair enough, I wasn’t aware they’d made so much progress. I was under the impression it was still a proof of concept and people were glossing over a lot of issues.

I guess that’s the benefit of only having to target a very small amount of hardware, it saves time for improving other things.

I remember preferring Linux on PPC to Linux on intel laptops years ago. Apple PPC laptops tended to “just work” with Linux in my experience.

Because Lenovo, Dell don't make laptops as sleek as Apple's

I still ditched Apple though, I don't regret having traded battery life for compatibility. Arm64 remains a pain over 2 years later and for many years to come.

How much does sleekness actually matter day to day? Both vendors offer very nice hardware these days, it’s not the bad days mid-00s anymore.

As soon as Asahi gets proper GPU support I'm installing linux and relegating macOS to a tiny partition for managing my iPhone.

I’m surprised there are still people out there using their Mac to manage their iPhone.

Is there a way on Linux to backup the photos to the computer without using a cloud service?

Yes! There is an OSS implementation of (parts of) the proprietary protocol for USB communication to iTunes so you can indeed get your photos. I say parts because some functionality is not implemented, like the offline backups feature.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/IOS

Thanks for the link. Looks like I won't need macOS at all! :-)

Note though that with only one apple device, you won't have access to to icloud if your device is stolen or you get locked out because you forgot your pin or similar. If I log in to icloud on my laptop, I first have to confirm it on a linked device... if you only own one device if that device is linked you thus can't use Find My, remote locking or similar. See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34407087

Any suggestions for calendar syncing? It's basically the only thing I use iCloud for.

Would like to avoid Google and don't mind running my own server to manage it so long as I can use the default calendar app on iOS.

You can run owncloud and use their app to automatically upload photos and videos in the background.

I can't even resume my Ubuntu ThinkPad from suspend without the nVidia driver going absolutely off the rails. I'm generally happy with the laptop, but it's got basic issues that Macbooks solved decades ago. The touchpad is noticeably worse.

To be completely fair an apples-to-apples comparison would be an all Intel (GPU included) laptop or one with an AMD GPU’d laptop as their drivers are baked into the kernel and are 1st-class supported. This, to me, is akin to the Apple top-down, wholly owned model. Even Intel MacBooks stopped shipping Nvidia GPUs years ago.

But… I get you. To have a really good experience you need to have a really supported setup and then everything works swimmingly. My work issued thinkpad is the AMD version of the P14s and it’s brilliant.

You may control _more_ but not certainly everything. You choose from the options available to you. You don’t control the processor internals, chipset, networking hardware, or millions of decisions behind the software and hardware. I’d say you curate, but you don’t really control.

You’re being needlessly pendantic: of course I don’t control the stuff in the cpu or the firmware blobs in the Wifi … but I control my OS and have freedom to choose a different distro or even a BSD one if I like — I love that I’m part of a community of hackers of fellow Linux nerds (and thinkpad enthusiasts) instead of being beholden to a giant company to dictate the direction the OS will take. It has its pros and it has its cons but on the whole I like it a ton more.

Yes, I understand what you are saying.

It is interesting: I clarify and point out the limits of your (own) control, which you agree with, but you still call me pedantic.

You didn't have to write "everything". You could have said "more".

It is so easy for open source proponents (which I am, but not to an unlimited degree) to fall into these illusions that are entangled with imprecise language.

Perhaps the answer is not to shoot the messenger? Perhaps the cause of the negativity is the realization that we don't have that much control. You knew this at some level, but your choice of language downplays it. The big manufacturers are in the drivers seat, like it or not. This reality is uncomfortable. Better not to mention it, then!

If I was being too harsh I am sorry. I mean I am open to moving from the traditional AMI bios to CoreBoot but I am not a FOSS zealot. I mean I have to get work done. So I make compromises.

I think we're very much on the same page.

No problem at all. I just learned about CoreBoot, BTW, thanks for mentioning firmware.

You're welcome! There's a really cool hacker that's been refurbishing old Thinkpads with the coreboot bioses -- https://minifree.org/ and the sales help fund the development!

> You may control _more_ but not certainly everything

I control some important details, like having 128G of RAM and a dual 4Tb NVMe setup.

Very similar experience here when upgrading, although not quite as bad.

My M1 MBP wouldn't reconnect to my monitor via USB-C until I unplugged the monitor and plugged it back in. Of course, I had to go digging on forums to find that out.

Permission issues also arise after every upgrade. I purposely wait until the .1 so that other people find all these issues but it's still super annoying.

i have similar issues with my m1 max, using an ultrawide monitor while in clamshell

To offer a counter anecdote: I’ve always had a rock solid upgrade experience in the past few years and remember how something would always break up until around ~5 years ago.

Upgrading used to be an event. Now it’s a meh-fest of clicking a button, waiting a little, and being unimpressed with the new features thinking “why did I even bother? Total waste of an hour”

I upgraded my m1 pro to Ventura last weekend, and the computer just kept working... much like most updates..

As someone else mentioned, people have always had issues when upgrading. So much so that for a long time people recommended wiping and re-installing instead of upgrading. Some of the early macOS versions were also really rough comparatively.

I've been using macs for a long time and have never had any issues though. I also tend to run the betas very early on.

I don't doubt that you have issues though, I just think they have always been some % of users. And, now that more and more people are using macs that % turns into absolute larger numbers.

A certain percentage of ram and storage goes bad in ways that cause this kind of instability, and an upgrade will have a tendency to bring this out. I’ve had my own share of stability issues fixed by ram and storage swaps. Too bad new macs no longer allow this kind of repair.

The issue talking to Displays was way worse with Intel Macs than it is today. Unfortunately there are definitely software issues with it. I think there was a thread on Twitter about Ashai Linux and how they figured out how to make something related more reliable than macOS by simply doing it correctly.

And why can't my mac remember what screen applications were on when I unlock the screen. Everytime, unlock, drag them back to right screens, resize them. If someone has a fuc for this I'm an ears, but seems to me it should work out if the box.

Actually, I've noticed that if I plug in the displays after I log in, the windows do get repositioned based on the screen they were previously on. I haven't looked into it at all though.

I've just upgraded my two Macs, one Mackbook Air around 3 years old, and a more recent MBP M1. Both worked perfectly fine. What could be causing your issues if not the OS?

> plugged in for 12 hours, connected to 2 other displays

Going back to the early osx versions there’s have been weird problems when upgrading with peripherals and stuff plugged in

Just to leave that n=1 here, I haven't really used a laptop without an external display (and USB keyboard, Magic Mouse, LAN adapter ...) in well over a decade, and I've never had any issues upgrading macOS, neither on Intel nor on M2.

> The software experience is getting worse imo, particularly when upgrading.

Many people chiming-in about the absolutely rock-solid stability of the last few updates, and I'm adding my vote to that.

I have had zero system-crashes or freezes for maybe 2 or even 3 years now. I tend to wait to hear what other people's experiences are, but that waiting-time is getting shorter these days. And the update process is also getting smoother: almost never any need to fix update issues with apps.

If I go back 10 or 15 years, I remember regular kernel panics, tricky restarts into 'safe mode', spinning beachballs, clearing the PRAM (don't even remember what that was about anymore - but it was needed all the time), and so on. It was an ongoing task to keep the OS running.

So this idea that MacOS is "getting worse" is just complete amnesia, in my view. I have never worked with anything so stable and powerful in my entire developer experience over the last 25+ years.

If we're talking about the price of these machines (and especially the measly disks and RAM on the cheapest options) - that's another matter...

macOS is almost getting worse than Windows, which is absolutely amazing.

Every day i have to fight my macbook to get it to work properly. It’s slow to start up and external display is a daily struggle.

And this is a 2019 i9, not some old slow machine

Give Windows 10 or 11 a try. It cured me of this feeling.

The adverts in particular.

IMO, Windows is just fine with Classic Shell. I don't know how people get by without it since Windows 8.

http://www.classicshell.net/

I’m on windows 10.

What adverts? Apple Music? iCloud Storage? Apple TV? Oh wait those are macOS

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