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Comment by silvr | Hacker News Reader

Agree. Apple needs to clean up shop - MacOS has been egregiously worsening year over year. Some features like Universal Control and Continuity Camera are legitimately awesome, but they do not make up for the INSANELY slow System Settings app that gets harder to navigate with each release and which has >2s wait times for the right pane to respond to a change in the left pane. Steve Jobs would have fired the person responsible for that overhaul three years ago, it's embarrassing. Messages too needs a ground-up rewrite. Getting more elaborate emoji tapbacks doesn't make up for fundamental instability and poor syncing behavior. C'mon!

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Absolutely. I love the work they have been doing on the backend, like PQ3 [1], but it just doesn't work for me when the Stickers and Emojis extensions on Mac leak several GBs of RAM and I have to terminate it several times a day to free up memory.

Another thing I dislike is that it stores the whole message history on the device. It's nice to have at times, but I send a lot of photos, which adds up in storage over time. I pay for iCloud, and store my messages there. Why does my Mac need to hold every single photo I have ever sent?

[1] https://security.apple.com/blog/imessage-pq3/

Local iMessage storage is debilitating. I have over 90GB of iMessage history that I don't want deleted. The keep messages for x days removes it from iCloud and the Mac though. Why?

System Settings is awful. Whoever decided to hide tons of settings inside innocuous "(i)" non-buttons should be kept far away from UX design. It's the hamburger menu of macOS.

It's what they have available in the SwiftUI toolbox of "shitty widgets from mobile operating systems" though.

Thankfully, that is also somehow the future of UI frameworks on all of their platforms!

> Getting more elaborate emoji tapbacks doesn't make up for fundamental instability and poor syncing behavior. C'mon!

Oh but you forgot about the “catch up” button they added 2 releases ago that takes you to the last unread message! …

… but only if said last message is within the N most recent messages, in the messages which are already “fetched” from local storage. If it’s more unread messages than that, the button is nowhere to be found.

Like they said “ok we can implement a catch up button but it’ll be hard to solve due to how we do paging.” “Ok we just won’t put the button on screen if we have to page then. Save the hard problem for the next release.” Then they just forgot about it.

Apple used to obsess over details like these. Now it feels like they're hoping we won't notice.

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