The Mac Sonoma sure is starting to look like the iPhone
theverge.com
theverge.com
For example, Spotlight, ever since their updates, is now unable to find any of my applications, struggles to find PDF documents while being slower and worse than the spotlight I used to use in OS X Snow Leopard. Yes, my current Mac's spotlight has more features. But the core functionality no longer "just works."
Another example is networking. For some reason, MacOS is now really flaky when using VPNs and it seems to have struggle connecting with WiFi networks from time to time. It's bizarre.
I'm using the latest hardware (the 28GB M2 MacBook Air) — it shouldn't be this bad.
Let's not even talk about Apple Care. Apple Care theoretically does more now, but they've made it functionally worse for most consumers.
But I doubt that’s happening here. Anyone mounting NFS drives via a direct path in cmd-K isn’t shocked it’s quick.
Probably the only stuff people Hacker News care for.
I definitely that I liked each subsequent version less.
And on the window management side, OS X still doesn’t have the most basic way to lock windows to the side of the screen or create basic tiling layouts quickly - again something both Windows and Linux have been doing for years. They keep adding useless UX features without improving the most basic experience.
I mostly put up with it because battery life is great and my work requires it. And I do all my dev work on remote servers, so the sorry state of OS X package management / x86 compatibility doesn’t affect me.
Say i open a folder with 50 files and i want to filter them quickly, i go to the upper right corner of the window and click the little spotlight icon, then at first the OS default is to search your -entire- computer, a hilariously bad design choice, then when you change that and start typing for the hundredth time it takes minutes for anything to show up like spotlight has to index the folder again.
And sometimes nothing happens at all, and since apple doesn't show any feedback or what's going on you've got no idea if scrolling will be faster - so it's one of apples infamous "nothing is happening because we are doing magic" moment you meet daily.
What the hell is going on Apple?
Go to Finder settings, click on advanced, and change the option 'When performing a search' to just current folder.
I can't remember if that's the default or not, but it's easily fixed.
I now find myself rebooting my iPhone (or it rebooting itself if things are sufficiently bad) on a daily basis, as it always ends up with things like file handling just breaking - I use SMB mounts in the files app and this seems to be a poorly tested edge case. Also, the keyboard thing, where input starts to buffer - I’ve seen it on other people’s phones, too. Seems like a pretty fundamental thing to not get perfectly right.
It’s not just bugs - usability has plummeted as stuff has been shoehorned in left, right and centre. Gone is the simplicity of past iOS - the convergence works both ways, I suppose.
Over the past few years I have encountered numerous issues in each of iOS and macOS which generally never get resolved - usually nothing earth-shattering, but stuff that speaks of a lack of QA, or planning, or a lack of care.
imagine opening your phone to check your media player, then pressing the volume button up once to make something gently louder and locking the screen again before putting your phone down
then throwing your headphones on the ground for the tenth time because ios decided that was the secret button combination to blast at full volume
There’s really fundamental userland stuff that’s just broken these days. Probably speaks of horrors under the hood.
I can still do what I want in macOS, some things are just unnecessarily difficult to find, like Internet Sharing. I was only able to find it by searching for "Sharing". Staying with internet sharing, the interface for it is bonkers, you have to click a tiny gray (!) logo to configure it. That seems like someone ran out of space and just made something up, without the oversight of a designer.
While Apple seems hellbent on making macOS dumber, they've have no second thoughts about making iOS insanely complicated to use. Settings are all over the place, I frequently miss notification, because apparently I did something that disables them in some scenarios, no idea what that might be. There are so many features in iOS and very little is done to surface them or make them intuitive to use. I feel like they could yank 80% of iOS and I'd still have a workable phone.
Apple needs to take a break and reevaluate their design decisions for both operating systems, but neither is evolving in the right direction.
There is so much potential to overhaul the desktop metaphor, rethink the finder, how we share documents and review edits in text based files, automate using modular blocks, share media with your tv and other devices, share information between multiple running apps, allow central software updates for non store apps… the list is endless.
Instead it seems we’re content with the status quo and adding cosmetics.
When document versions was introduced and spotlight I remember the envy running windows at the time.
macOS needs a more courageous vision imho.
- dos / windows - game mode on/off - settings - dual booting
Etc.
Though I agree completely new approaches to some things can be great, for example the Stage Manager turned out far more useful than I expected, it's like a taskbar for virtual desktops.
I feel like I need ridiculously powerful hardware now just to do the same things I was doing 15 years ago - web browsing, web development, a photo library and playing music.
All this crap they’re adding should be able to be toggled off.
Beyond that, what actual stuff are you talking about?
By that I mean performance improvements that sounds like they should be faster, but don't scale as well as simply brute forcing.
The other is "security". My work Mac has 3 different VPN/Network Proxies and 2 malware checkers. I would assume that each one is caching network details, as I have to go in an disable/enable them all once or twice a day to restore network performance.
It's like the whole multiple anti-virus conflicts on Windows again like no one ever learnt.
There is really nothing to see here.
The M1 is 3 years old now but if you packaged it up in a new shell and told me it’s the 2023 edition, I wouldn’t know otherwise.
It was a bit of a one off OS release from Apple, and instead of being an intense focus on new features, the whole point of that release was to improve stability and performance.
They removed a ton of legacy support, but in the process gave all the core operating system mechanics a much needed house cleaning to improve performance. It breathed new life into older macs and made the OS significantly faster and more stable.
Since then we've had tons of bloat brought back in, then removed again, then added back in again (see widgets for example). It's time for another Snow Leopard.
This is a popular sentiment, but the last few releases were pretty tame feature-wise, and Monterey and Ventura have been quite solid for me. I think we are also looking back with rose-tinted glasses. I have been using macOS since 10.4/10.5 and those releases were quite rough. Even the initial 10.6 (Snow Leopard) releases were quite buggy, it was only towards the end of the end of the 10.6 release cycle (which was still two years) that it got really solid.
Especially the releases after Apple lost interest in the Mac (when they proclaimed the iPad was the future of computing) and later the Intel Mac were horrible. The mid to late 2010s were particularly horrible for Mac users. Bad hardware (the faulty butterfly keyboard, only 1 or 2 USB-C ports on many models, CPUs that got too hot for the limited cooling) and very buggy macOS releases.
But i agree you must be doing something wrong.
I've also switched between PC/DOS to Mac to DOS to OS/2 to Mac to Linux to Windows back to Mac to Linux and now back to Mac. My media server here is run on Linux. I'm pretty agnostic when it comes to computers, it just so happens that at this point in time I'm using a Mac as my daily driver.
Even decade-old hardware running Ubuntu Linux can outperform MacOS. It's not about the hardware any more, it's about the software!
[1] https://cyber.dabamos.de/unix/x11/#xeyes