Heh, it sure would be nice if they made a computer that was explicitly for getting work done (hell, they could call it a "workstation"). I miss the days when big tech still saw a market for this ...
There’s also so much inefficient, bloated crap that ships with modern macOS that I would never pick it for a proper workstation these days. I have CPU meters in the system tray, and there’s always some stupid process gobbling up all my spare cycles. The other day it was some automatic iPhone backup process. (Why was that using so much cpu, Apple?). Sometimes it’s indexing my hard drive, or looking for faces in photos, or who knows what stupid thing. It’s always something, and its almost always first party software.
In comparison, the cores on my Linux workstation are whisper quiet, and usually idle at 0%. The computer waits for me to give it work.
(Namely background QoS, it only runs on the efficiency cores, and more expensive activities stop when the user is active.)
If you're having an actual specific problem report it with Feedback Assistant. If you aren't, I recommend removing all that useless monitoring stuff and getting an outdoor hobby.
As an actual performance engineer I've basically never in my life gotten a useful report from someone looking at those every day. Although other vibes based bugs like "I feel like my battery life is bad lately" often do find something.
Are these processes behaving properly or is it in some stupid infinite loop? I can't tell. Is it considered acceptable by apple for background processes to make my efficiency cores sit at 100% utilisation more or less all the time - even when I'm on battery power? How much will that reduce my laptop's battery life?
I can't tell. I have no way to tell. Its all an opaque jungle of processes running processes. Half of them are buggy half the time, and I don't know which half. It gets more complex and stupid every year.
I swear, macos seemed to run better 10 years ago when I had a computer that was many times slower. Strangely, at the time, there were no constant background processes chewing up CPU all the time like this. Tell me, how is any of this stuff making my computing experience better?
I think my preferred computer has a fast, modern CPU and software from a decade or two ago. Off the top of my head, I can't name a single feature added in macos in the last decade that I actually care about. (Excluding support for modern hardware.)
If the battery life is less than you expect then there's a problem. I think that's pretty easy to notice.
It sounds like that's a bug though, you should report it. Posting on random forums about it won't cause it to get fixed.
The only way I could tell that my battery life has gone down would be by doing actual tests - but those are notoriously difficult - because I can't use my laptop at the same time. (Or, I guess I can - but I'd need to use it the same way across tests). It sounds like days of work to test my battery life with and without transient background tasks. I don't even know how I'd test that - because I don't know how to turn all that stuff off for the control.
I'm also not going to post an issue on apple's bug tracker that I have an intuition that my battery life is worse than it could be. That'd get deleted instantly.
I hear you that complaining online probably won't help. But can't see how complaining about battery life in feedback assistant would help either. The situation is crappy.
Don't worry, I am literally telling you to do this. Apple is made entirely out of bug reports. It's their job to handle them.
I would say that you shouldn't put too much effort into it, simply because of burnout.
The “bug” here is system activity I’m not deliberately invoking.
System activity can certainly cause problems like paging out all the file cache pages you wanted to use when you get back to the machine. It doesn't have to though.
Are those programs written well, or are they using so many cycles because they’re inefficient and slow? And when did I ever opt in to this? Spotlight has slowly gotten more and more horrible over time. Half the time I use it to invoke system preferences it can’t find it. Or it can’t find the applications folder. If Spotlight is this terrible, why is the hard disk indexer so busy? Is it any better engineered than spotlight? I doubt it. Likewise, I don’t want photoanalysisd looking at my photos. I don’t use that “photos by person” feature. Why does it use hour upon hour of cpu time to make this feature available - just in case I use it later I guess? Get lost.
I really wish Apple stopped adding random crappy features to macOS that I don’t use - but which burn cpu cycles. Instead, fix your shit. Indexing is fine if you make spotlight actually be good again. Photo analysis is useful if I decide it’s useful and turn it on. And maybe if Xcode and SwiftUI weren’t such a buggy, crash ridden, undocumented mess, then maybe, maybe, I’d trust you more to run random background processes.
As it stands, I don’t trust Apple - particularly their application teams - to be good custodians of my cpu.
https://forums.dolphin-emu.org/Thread-wiimote-pairing-macos-...
The bluetooth stack in Windows and Linux does.
Apple's official position is that my wiimotes are the problem and I should buy an Apple supported bluetooth game controller.
Presumably one of these four controllers:
When the people using your tools hate the tools, that isn't a good sign.
They own GitHub, they make Visual Studio Code, they made C#/.NET open-source and cross-platform, they added Linux support to Windows (twice), and they created WinGet, just off the top of my head.