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Scary Hasty

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80 pointsGavinAnderegg30 comments

Maybe I’ve been lucky but I haven’t noticed a deterioration of software quality in MacOS. Things have been stable, perhaps even improved overall. Also the UI overall is extremely snappy, but likely that’s because of the M-series architectures.

I recall 10 years ago (circa 2012) I’d purchase a brand new MacBook Pro and things would have a small but frequent lag in many UI across the OS. And no, not only during initial sync. It would be a normal part of the “experience”.

Haven’t noticed any such thing especially with M-series in recent years.

Same! I don't get why there are so many complains about macOS? It works very well for me; as a programmer or as a simple media consumer user. In fact I switched to Safari for web browsing a few years ago and have not looked back. I use Chrome only for debugging web apps.

It’s because macOS used to be made with an inordinate (and I cannot emphasize this enough) amount of care for the user experience for the sake of the user experience.

Now that Apple has an existential crisis for growth and has become a services company, almost all Apple effort in software is aimed at maximizing recurring revenue and subscriptions. The UX for fitness, iCloud, IAPs, Apple TV, Arcade, Apple Pay, etc is top notch, because it makes them more money on an ongoing basis.

The Finder, not so much.

Also, a lot of the people who used to care deeply on a philosophical level about the UX of a computer for its own sake have either retired or moved on to other companies. Apple is not the same culture as it was fifteen years ago. A lot of younger people that work there don’t understand the Apple-ness of the Jobs era, and the products speak more to DJI than vegan counterculture hippies.

There is also obviously a lot of product-manager-career-driven-design going on, same as any other hip modern tech company in no danger of going out of business (cf Slack, Dropbox, etc).

Apple was, in many ways, an outgrowth of the obsessive nature of Jobs. He’s gone and it is perfectly natural that Apple would regress toward the mean of any well funded hip tech company.

The thing is (like I said above), I just don't see the evidence for that. Are there not-so-good parts of MacOS? Sure!

- Yes, Finder is no good but it's not like it has regressed from circa 2011 - it's always been kinda non-intuitive to search for anything

- Music app is probably the worst of all

- definitely can find more

... That being said, overall performance has increased and most other parts have improved:

- the recently redesigned settings menu is better than before

- Safari has improved (I use it every day)

- misc. useful features have been added, like using an iPad as an external display

- crucially, overall stability is better than ever, in my experience

Overall, MacOS mostly "stays out of the way" and lets various apps do the work, which is arguably what a good OS should be doing.

When people complain, you could look at what they are complaining about:

- the iOSification of the desktop OS

Yes, that includes the incredibly shitty new preferences app. Compare what they did with the design guidelines they used to have: https://marioaguzman.github.io/design/layoutguidelines/

- Forcing shitty mobile-first Catalyst and SwiftUI apps

Prime example... Well, all of Apple's recent first-party apps: from Messages to Home to Books to...

- Hiding and removing useful functionality for the sake of "clean interface"

- The insane amount of notifications by default, and the gazillion ways to deliver them

- Shitty support of external displays

- Bloated, unstable developer tools that get worse every year

- Superfluous half-baked "solutions" like Stage Manager. Also, mobile-first

- Superfluous half-baked untested abominations like language switchers, or Caps Lock indicator

A billion other things large and small.

> He’s gone and it is perfectly natural that Apple would regress toward the mean of any well funded hip tech company.

I remember when Jobs died I thought "Apple - Jobs = Sony". I don't think I was too wrong.

I think that gives Sony far too much credit.

One need only look at Apple’s attention to packaging design or audio quality to know they’re still a head and shoulders above any other consumer electronics company.

Sony stopped innovating in consumer products many years ago, as far as I can tell. Maybe the days of the Walkman were different but I was too young to know what it was like then.

Apple's hardware -- especially the M-series processors -- has been excellent lately. On the software side, it feels to me like there's been a large falloff in quality. This story is a good example of that, and I'd really love if we could get a release of macOS that focuses on bug fixes.

I have seen this kind of comment on the web since I switched to macOS in 2007. There were some very bad years, when Apple apparently thought that iPad was the future of computing. But the all the Apple Silicon releases have been rock-solid for me.

Seems like there were some missteps with introducing the M3, but macOS on existing hardware has been pretty good for me.

(Before someone starts about Snow Leopard, the early Snow Leopard releases were also pretty buggy, only near the end of the release cycle did it get good.)

> Before someone starts about Snow Leopard, the early Snow Leopard releases were also pretty buggy, only near the end of the release cycle did it get good.

This is one of the most misunderstood things about software releases. It's an iron law: major software updates always introduce more bugs than they fix. What you need is a lot of minor bug fix updates between the major updates, and Snow Leopard had about 2 years of bug fixes releases. What people remember fondly is not Mac OS X 10.6.0 but rather 10.6.8 v1.1.

Apple's annual major release schedule is just too rapid to leave any time to fix bugs. They need to go back to 2 years or more between major releases.

> but macOS on existing hardware has been pretty good for me.

If you don't count all the shitty Catalyst and Swift UI first party apps. If you don't count things like even switching keyboard layouts is a second-long animation that swallows keystrokes. If you don't count things like this: https://twitter.com/krzyzanowskim/status/1707684940337283563 or this: https://mjtsai.com/blog/2022/05/12/the-apple-services-experi... or this: https://mjtsai.com/blog/2022/12/27/ventura-issues/ or...

Another one: Switching between full screen windows doesn’t swallow keystrokes as such, but sends them to the window you’re switching away from, instead of to the window you’re switching to, while the animation completes. Highly annoying.

Rock-solid is a little far-- I've not been free of weirdness on M1 Max. But overall I agree-- things feel like they've been better than the vast majority of my tenure on MacOS ("X", all the way back to the original "Mac OS X Server" in 1999).

I don't update to new major releases immediately if I can help it, though.

This I think toes up to that saying - we've always done things this way so we'll continue to, even since OS X came out. These yearly releases are kind of drab for OS X I think. I want a huge focus on integration between my devices, I wish they'd go all in in icloud and make it where my stuff is just whatever device i'm on. Almost like how good they've made Bluetooth work on my airpod pro's work on whatever device I'm using.

i don’t expect much investment in iCloud since the trend (like it or not) is for cloud services to manage our data instead

I’m going to put whatever did I or didn’t happen here aside and marvel for a moment at how complicated it must be to coordinate the logistics behind managing release schedules of both hardware and software and preinstalling OSs on all these machines.

There's a tweet exemplifies the state of Apple software, and Apple's attention to it: https://twitter.com/krzyzanowskim/status/1707684940337283563

Did it annoy anybody else that during the whole event they compared M3 to M1 as if M2 didn't exist? Guess they didn't think 5-10% improvement would market well? But does anybody in their target audience even care or do they just buy the new hardware anyway?

Means their target audience includes people who own M1 Macs, but doesn’t include people who own M2 macs?

(Although I don’t think most M1 owners will be interested in upgrading yet. Maybe they should just compare to Intel chips.)

Especially since the M2 generation was very recent. Not much of a time gap.

If anything this is recognition that they know their customers don’t feel the need to upgrade every year! It’s refreshing.

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