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Comment by skydhash | Hacker News Reader

It still remains a crippled user experience in many ways:

- PDF reader: Preview would be a nice addition to the set of default app, but you have to choose between the very basic viewer tied to Files.app and various viewers with many schemes to get into your wallet.

- Files: I know a lot of apps rely on databases, but we still have to use files every now and then. The Files.app is very clunky for what I consider a solved problem.

- The weird stage manager: Even on a 13" screen, it's hard to manage more than two apps side by side. Why not introduce a simple workspace manager a la GNOME if they user want to save a particular set of windows.

- Profiles: Even browsers are adding them these days as they recognize that people have a faceted life. Instead we have custom notification settings. The ipad is not that personal of a device. It's closer to the Apple TV than my laptop in terms of privacy.

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Additional crippled features:

- Requirement to use ONLY the Apple web renderer (WebKit)

- Why does my iPad Pro take minutes to refresh my email boxes and show new messages, when it's not doing anything else at all? Email on all my other devices is snappy.

- Little or no support for emulation of other platforms.

- No way to turn off participation in the "Find My" BLE mesh network. I'd rather have a choice about whether or not I want to use my battery/network to support their mesh network.

With Apple's announcement about incorporating AI into all their future products, I'm not certain that I will not be buying anything else from them.

> No way to turn off participation in the "Find My" BLE mesh network

There is a setting to disable participation in the "Find My network" under "Settings > [your name] > Find My > Find My iPhone/iPad > Find My network"

You're confusing opting out of the Find My functionality with opting out of their mesh network, which there is no way to do unless you turn off Bluetooth, which has other undesirable consequences.

There are two separate options on that screen.

One is "Find My iPhone/iPad" which just turns off the functionality.

The second one is "Find My network" which opts out of the mesh network. This one has a description that starts with "Participating in the Find My network..." since turning it off means you are no longer participating in the mesh network.

https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/data/en/find-my/

> "When your device participates in the Find My network, it can both be located by the network and anonymously help locate other missing devices. You can choose to have your iOS or iPadOS device not participate in the Find My network by going to Settings[...]"

After years with a mini, I jumped to an Air just so I could finally get a proper 'netbook' experience. Don't like Chromebooks, Windows is too complex; there is room for a simplified laptop that is easy to use and update but let's you use proper apps without going all the way to a full laptop with pro tools.

I've started to see this as a generational challenge. I am Gen X, I used to run FreeBSD and Linux, I don't mind the complexity and upkeep of a Windows laptop with all the trimmings (I do mind the complexity of the unixes, sorry). But what about Gen Z who are used to simple, powerful technology with simplified apps and UIs? why would they/should they put up with legacy UX and ways of working?

My guess is that where Microsoft is going with the new Office apps which are just web apps with thicker clients. Simplify, simplify until we can all work with iPads, Windows/ARM or whatever. Makes sense to be honest, although I'll probably keep a Thinkpad around the way old mechanics keep a set of tools in the garage although they will probably never use them again.

The iPad can work wonder if your workflow suits it. But it's the antithesis of power users. It's very tied to a cloud approach, but when you don't control the cloud backend, nor the app, it's hard to customize your workflow. Which is kinda the first step to mastery.

> Gen Z who are used to simple, powerful technology with simplified apps and UIs? why would they/should they put up with legacy UX and ways of working?

I disagree with the premise. The modern UIs are rife with more special cases, hidden gestures and non-transferable knowledge than the old “one mouse button is enough” or even early windows’ ugly but constant model. Gen Z has harder UI, over a superficial simplicity that is really just a constrained interaction space.

The problem for zoomers is now when they use a deep interaction model, the new complexity of UI becomes a frustration multiplier rather than fixed cost.

That and the visual language is so ambiguous and slapdash. Discovery is so much harder these days. And with every changing widget layouts, it's so hard to have a spatial memory if where to interact! Word in Windows 3.1 was far easier.

Preview was just included in iOS 26

Books is much better for PDFs

It would be, if not for the constant Book Store upselling in the UI. You can't disable it.

Never saw it. Screen time to your help!

It’s not really a solved problem on any desktop platform. Once you download an app on a desktop, it has complete access to all of your files you have access to in user space.

The Files app itself works just the same to manage files as Windows and Macs assuming you didn’t have multiple windows to work with.

The Files app as method to open and save files with in an app, works like any other file picker with more granular permissions.

The idea that any file storage service is a first class citizen (Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive, etc) is definitely a win.

> It’s not really a solved problem on any desktop platform. Once you download an app on a desktop, it has complete access to all of your files you have access to in user space.

Amusingly, Linux solved that with flatpack.

Applications are installed in their own sandboxed containers and you decide which files they can and can’t access.

The Linux desktop has some very interesting pieces of technology.

Apple could do the same on macOS but that would pierce the veil that their user hostile policies are actually motivated by greed and not security.

Apple has "App Sandbox" and an entitlement system on the Mac: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/security/app-sandb... It's "baked in" and doesn't require containers.

Isn’t this only enforced for Mac App Store apps?

I've read that apps outside of the Mac App Store can use it. I think they have to be signed / notarized.

I want to just say "yes, obviously". But "obviously" is carrying a lot of weight there. For a TLDR: I think Apple has already gone too far in prioritizing security over the priorities of multimedia editors (e.g., https://insydium.ltd/support-home/manuals/x-particles-video-...).

But something like the After Effects plugin ecosystem I don't think could ever be sandboxed. So it makes sense to have sandboxing conditional based on certain criteria, e.g., the Mac App Store. But even there I'm not sure it makes sense, I suspect we'll never see a Mac-first tier 1 new creative application like Sketch (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sketch_(software)), purely because it's to detrimental to the priorities of that kind of app.

Er that's exactly how macOS works already. The App Sandbox stuff bounces through the kernel if something asks for access and you can say "no thanks". It's basically a proper Mandatory Access Control framework.

And the apps themselves are shipped in isolated bundles containing all their resources, which may include other binaries/libraries etc.

It’s only how App Store apps work.

There is nothing stopping a popular video conferencing app that you install from the web from surreptitiously installing a web server on your computer leading to a security vulnerability.

https://michael.team/zoom/

It’s not. They changed a lot of stuff in Sequoia. I know this because it broke something I rely on and I had to go fix it. It can’t even open a file without the correct entitlements and code signing done and permission granted by the end user.

macOS and iOS have sandboxed containers too, and regardless I don't understand your last statement about motivations (i.e., whether Apple platforms have sandboxes relating to greed isn't a clear connection).

Yes and they are only as far as I know enforced for Mac App Store apps. But once an app has free reign to read and write anywhere on a shared folder, it defeats the purpose as opposed to being able to read and write to the apps own folder and the user can choose a file from another folder explicitly.

But what do sandboxes have to do with greed?

I comment on the Mac App Store part here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44952088

> But once an app has free reign to read and write anywhere on a shared folder, it defeats the purpose as opposed to being able to read and write to the apps own folder and the user can choose a file from another folder explicitly.

Not sure I'm following this statement, isn't just being able to read/write to a shared folder a large improvement over an app being able to write to the entire file system (user-permissions allowing, granted)? I.e., "it defeats the purpose" seems like an odd phrase to use there? (For the record, I wish all this sandboxing/entitlement-based security stuff didn't exist on desktop computers [my priorities are clearer from my linked to comment], so I'm probably wrong person to ask anyway, but I was missing what you meant there.)

The only part of my computer I care about are my own files and of course things like passwords in the Secure Enclave. If the operating system gets hosed (see the former Chrome bug where if you turned System Integrity Protection off and installed Chrome it hosed your entire OS), that’s an annoyance. But recoverable.

It’s actually the concept of an old XKCD

https://xkcd.com/1200/

It sounds like you're treating "a shared folder" as a synonym to "all user files"? Those aren't the same thing? E.g., a shared folder can be a far smaller subset of all a user's files?

(Also, Apple's sandboxing supports access to a single files, reference https://developer.apple.com/documentation/security/accessing... so not sure if any of this is important anyway.)

Apple likes to present the AppStore as the only thing protecting its users from the Wild West.

Admitting their sandbox could be turned on by default and give the same protection without having to go through their vetting system and giving them their cut would be counterproductive. How would they justify it makes sense on the phones and iPads then?

There are a couple of problems with the argument you're making:

1. Any app can be sandboxed, not just Mac App Store apps (the only link is that Mac App Store apps require sandboxing).

2. Enforcing sandboxing on macOS would hinder industries Mac users value, per my comment here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44952088 Apple would love to enforce sandboxing by default, because it would serve their long-term strategic goals (moving computing towards devices that benefit from integrated software/hardware), but it hurts their short-term goals (maintaining Apple's [somewhat tenuous these days] penetration across a variety of particularly creative industries) too much to do so.

Apple added functionality to macOS a few years ago that requires a separate pop-up / permissions dialog when apps try to access various directories the user can otherwise access (like Documents, Downloads, Desktop, other apps' files, etc.).

And that doesn’t help. Once an app has permission to your folder along with every other app, it’s not actually solving the problem of an app having access to all of your files.

An app on iOS can only read and write to its own folder in your iCloud Drive by default. You can specifically choose a file in another folder or from another storage provider.

they are adding Preview to iOS. I haven’t tried it yet but if it works like on macOS then most file formats should be handled rather well.

Saddest is the removal of slideover, ultimately that’s the only multi-tasking feature I really used in the old iPadOS and it was really quite nice.

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