The modern Apple feels like their hardware teams way outperforming the software teams.
> Hardware and software both matter, and Apple’s history shows that there’s a good argument to be made for developing integrated hardware and software. But if you asked me which matters more, I wouldn’t hesitate to say software. All things considered I’d much prefer a PC running Mac OS X to a Mac running Windows.
https://daringfireball.net/2009/11/the_os_opportunity
At the time I'd only been a Mac user for a few years and I would have strongly agreed. But definitely things have shifted— I've been back on Windows/WSL for a number of years, and it's software quality/compatibility issues that are a lot of what keeps me from trying another Mac. Certainly I'm far more tempted by the hardware experience than I am the software, and it's not even really close.
For a simple example, no app remembers the last directory you were working in. The keys each app uses are completely inconsistent from app to app. And it was only in Windows 11 that Windows started remembering my window configuration when I plugged and unplugged a monitor. Then there’s the Windows 95-style dialog boxes mixed in with the Windows 11-style dialog boxes; what a UI mess. I spoke with one vendor the other day who was actually proud they’d adopted a ribbon interface in their UI “just like Office” and I verbally laughed.
From a hardware perspective, I still don’t understand why Windows and laptop manufacturers can’t get sleep working right. My Intel MacBook Pro with an old battery still sleeps and wakes and lasts for several hours, while my new Windows laptop lasts about an hour and won’t wake from hibernate half the time without a hard reboot.
I think Windows is the “good enough” for most people.
While overall I may say MacOS is better, I would not say it's better in every way.
Believe it or not, I had a better experience with 3rd party window managers in Windows than on MacOS.
I don't think the automation options in MacOS are better than AutoHotKey (even Linux doesn't have something as good).
And for corporate work, the integration with Windows is much better than anything I've seen on MacOS.
Mac HW is great. The OS is in that uncanny valley where it's UNIX, but not as good as Linux.
Did you try Keyboard Maestro https://www.keyboardmaestro.com/main/ (I've never used AutoHotKey and I'd be super curious if there are deficiencies in KM relative to it, but Keyboard Maestro is, from my perspective, a masterpiece, it's hard to imagine it being any better.)
Also I think this statement needs a stronger defense given macOS includes Shortcuts, Automator, and AppleScript, I don't know much about Windows automation but I've never heard of them having something like AppleScript (that can say, migrate data between applications without using GUI scripting [e.g., iterate through open browser tabs and create todos from each of them operating directly on the application data rather than scripting the UI]).
You can't, really. Almost everyone resorts to buying an HDMI dongle to fake a display. Apple solved the problem at such a low level, the flexibility to run something in clamshell mode is broken, even when using caffeine/amphetamine/etc etc etc.
So, tradeoffs. They made their laptops go to sleep very well, but broke functionality in the process. You can argue it's a good tradeoff, just acknowledge that there WAS a tradeoff made.
If I’m wrong, someone tell me how to do it! On an M4 MacBook Air running latest OSX release.
So, Windows' saving grace is being able to run a different operating system inside it? Damning with faint praise if I ever heard it...
Oh god, I'm going to have to bite the bullet and switch to 11, huh?
The one thing that has been saving me from throwing my PC out the window in rage has been the monitor I have that supports a "keep alive" mode where switching inputs is transparent to the computers connected to it. So when switching inputs between my PC and laptop neither one thinks the monitor is being disconnected/reconnected. If it wasn't for that, I'd be screaming "WHY ARE YOU MOVING ALL MY WINDOWS?" on a regular basis. (Seriously, why are you moving all my windows? Sure, if they're on the display that was just disconnected, I get you. But when I connect a new display, Windows 10 seems to throw a dart at the display space for every window and shuffle them to new locations. Windows that live in a specific place on a specific display 100% of the time just fly around for no reason. Please god just stop.)
A friend of mine lost a ton of messages when upgrading the OS (and therefore Mail). A number of others were affected by the same issue. There have been show-stopper bugs in the core functionality of Photos as well. I don't get the impression that the basics are Apple's focus with respect to software.
But I’ve certainly never struggled with getting WiFi to work on a Mac, or struggled with getting it to sleep/wake, or a host of other problems you routinely have on both Windows and Linux.
It’s not even close.
To compare Apples to apples, you'd have to look at a Framework computer and agree that wifi is going to work out of the box... but here I'm meeting you on a much weaker argument: "Apple's software basics are /not/ rock solid, but other platforms have issues too"
I don't find your original anecdote convincing:
> A friend of mine lost a ton of messages when upgrading the OS (and therefore Mail).
E.g., what does this mean? They lost mail messages? How did they verify they had those messages before and after? E.g., file-system operations? GUI search? How much do they know about how Mail app stores message (e.g., I used to try understand this decades ago, but I expect today messages aren't even necessarily always stored locally)? How are you syncing mail messages, e.g., using native IMAP, or whatever Gmail uses, or Exchange? What's the email backend?
E.g. without deeper evidence this sounds more like a mail message indexing issue rather than a mail-messages-stored-on-disk-issue (in 2025, I'd personally have zero expectations about how Mail manages messages on disk, e.g., I'd expect local storage of message to be dynamically managed like most applications that aren't document-based use a combination of cloud functionality and local caching, e.g., found this in a quick search https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/471801/ensure-maco...), but if you have stronger evidence I'd love to hear it. But as presented your extrapolating much stronger conclusions than are warranted by the anecdote in my opinion.
I want to be able to set different networking options (manual DNS, etc) for different wifi networks, but as far as I can tell, I can only set them per network interface.
There's something like "locations" but last time I tried using that, the entire System Settings.app slowed to a crawl / beachballed until I managed to turn it back off.
> or struggled with getting it to sleep/wake
My m1 MBP uses something like 3-5% of its battery per hour while sleeping, because something keeps waking it up. I tried some app that is designed to help you diagnose the issue but came up empty-handed.
... but yes on both counts, it's light years better than my last experience with Linux, even on hardware that's supposed to have fantastic support (thinkpads).
In my case it works roughly ~50% of the time. Probably because of the Thunderbolt monitor connected to power it, idk.
> the basics are still rock solid
The basics like the OS flat out refusing to provide you any debugging information on anything going wrong? It's rock solid allright. I had an issue where occasionally I would get an error "a USB device is using too much power, try unplugging it and replugging it." Which device? Why the hell would Apple tell you that, where is the fun in that?
Key remapping requires installing a keylogger, nor can you have a different scroll direction between mouse and touchpad. There still isn't window management which for the sizes of modern monitors is quite constraining.
> still has UNIX underneath
A very constrained UNIX. A couple of weeks ago I wanted to test something (pkcs11-tool signing with a software HSM), and turns out that Apple has decided that libraries can only be loaded from a number of authorised locations which can only be accessed while installing an application. You can't just use a dynamic library you're linking to, it has to be part of a wider install.
You can remap with config files: https://hidutil-generator.netlify.app
Long story short, I was very happy with the "it just works" of ChromeOS, and only let down by the lack of support for some installed apps I truly needed in my personal life. I tried a Mac back in 2015 but couldn't get used to how different it was, and it felt very bulky compared to ChromeOS and much slower than the Linux machine I'd had, so I switched to a Pixelbook as was pretty content.
Fast forward to 2023 when I needed to purchase a new personal laptop. I'd bought my daughter a Pixelbook Go in 2021 and my son a Lenovo x1 Carbon at the same time. Windows was such a dumpster fire I absolutely ruled it out, and since I could run all the apps I needed on ChromeOS it was between Linux & Mac. I decided to try a Mac again, for both work & personal, and I've been a very happy convert ever since.
My M2 Pro has been rock solid, and although I regret choosing to upgrade to Sequoia recently, it still makes me feel better than using Windows. M4 Pro for work is amazingly performant and I still can't get over the battery efficiency. The nicest thing, imho, is that the platform has been around long enough for a mature & vibrant ecosystem of quality-of-life utilities to exist at this point, so even little niggles (like why do I need the Scroll Reverser app at all?) are easy to deal with, and all my media editing apps are natively available.
Edit: Hard to call intentionally preventing support for web apis a power user thing. This creates more friction for basic users trying to use any web app.
Edit2: lol Apple PR must be all over this, went from +5 to -1 in a single refresh. Flagged for even criticizing what they intentionally break.
On iOS you cannot even keep a web app running in the background. The second they mutlitask, even with an audio/microphone active, Apple kills it. Are they truly adding battery life or are they cheating by creating restrictions that prevent apps from working?
Being able to conduct a voice call through the browser seems like a pretty basic use case to me.
I understand that this post is about MacOS, but yes, we are forced to support Safari for iOS. Many of these corporate decisions to prevent web apps from functioning properly spill over from MacOS Safari to iOS Safari.
I want good window management. Linux gives me a huge number of options. MacOS - not as much.
If you're talking about hardware interaction from the command line, that's very different and I don't think there's a fix.
If I close my laptop for a few days, I don't want significant battery drain. If I don't use it for two weeks, I want it to still have life left. And I don't want to write tens of gigabytes to disk every time I close the lid, either!
One can just hand wave "Apple must support Linux and all" but that is not going to get anything done.
It's a server or developer box first and a non-technical user second.
On Linux there is variety and choice, which some folks dislike.
But on the Mac I get whatever Apple gives me, and that is often subject to the limitations of corporate attention spans and development budgets.
Should Emacs and Vim both be called "Editor" then?
To me, this is actually a great example of the problems with Linux as a community, that GUI applications seem to just be treated as placeholders (e.g., all word processors are the same?), but then its inconsistent by celebrating the unique differences between editors like Vim and Emacs. Photoshop, Excel, Logic Pro, Final Cut Pro are, in my opinion, crown jewels of what we've accomplished in computing, and by extension some of the greatest creations of the human race, democratizing tasks that in some cases would have cost millions of dollars before (e.g., a recording studio in your home). Relegating these to generic names like "spreadsheet", makes them sound interchangeable, when in my opinion they're each individual creations of great beauty that should wear their names with pride. They've helped improve the trajectory of the human race by facilitating many individuals to perform actions they never would have had the resources to do otherwise.
I've used some distributions in which they were. Tooltips and icons were provided to disambiguate. Worked for me.
Other distributions name applications explicitly, some place them in a folder together named "Editors".
None of the distributions I've used place either in a corporate branded subfolder as is typical on Windows and Mac.
Freedom of choice is wonderful.
But, to your point, even I'll admit the fact that the Photoshop is called "Adobe Photoshop 2025" is annoying lol.
And arbitrary turf wars like their war against web apis/apps causing more friction for devs and end users.
Quoth the Tao of Programming:
8.4
Hardware met Software on the road to Changtse. Software said: "You are Yin and I am Yang. If we travel together, we will become famous and earn vast sums of money." And so they set forth together, thinking to conquer the world.
Presently, they met Firmware, who was dressed in tattered rags and hobbled along propped on a thorny stick. Firmware said to them: "The Tao lies beyond Yin and Yang. It is silent and still as a pool of water. It does not seek fame; therefore, nobody knows its presence. It does not seek fortune, for it is complete within itself. It exists beyond space and time."
Software and Hardware, ashamed, returned to their homes.
Not once in 10 years have I had ti troubleshoot while she uses her personal macOS, but a Dell Latitude laptop in 2025 still can’t just “open lid, work, close lid”.
And it’s slower. And eats more battery.
They got away with pushing ads, online and enterprise services, Copilot, etc. to every desktop user.
AMD was also lagging with drivers, but now we see OpenAI swearing they gonna buy loads of their products, which so many people were not favor of liek just 5-7 years ago.
Hardware is naturally limited in scope due to manufacturing costs, and doesn't "grow" in the same way. You replace features and components rather than constantly add to them.
Apple needs someone to come in and aggressively cut scope in the software, removing features and products that are not needed. Pair it down to something manageable and sustainable.
macOS has way too many products but far too few features. In terms of feature-completeness, it's already crippled. What OS features can macOS afford to lose?
(I have the same complaint about AWS, where a bunch of services are in KTLO and would be better served by not being inside AWS)
There's also Krita, which artists love.
That this comment keeps oscillating between upvoted and downvoted (with significant spikes in both directions) is an interesting insight into the span of opinions on HN between the hustler types who hate the idea of software that doesn't turn a quick buck, and the crafters :-)
being poor, I need to sell my Macbook to get money to pay of my 16e, then sell the 16e and use that money to but a Pixel 9, then probably a but a Thinkpad Carbon X1. Just saying all that to show you the lengths I am going through to boycott/battle the enshitification.
At least its open source and free I guess.
It's not even about open source or closed source at this point. It's about feature creep.
Why parse whatever is in the logs, at all?
Imagine the same stuff in your SSH client, it would parse the content before sending them over because a functionality requires it to talk to some server somewhere, it's insanity.
That would be the end of open source, hobbyists and startup companies because you'd have to pay up just to have a basic C library (or hope some companies would have reasonable licensing and support fees).
Remember one of the first GNU projects was GCC because a compiler was an expensive, optional piece of software on the UNIX systems in those days.
Adding extra features that aren't necessarily needed is enshittification, and very not-unix.
This, and while in this case it is specifically unwise on security terms, there are plenty of other example where the feature are completely cosmetic and deviates from the core user requirements/scenario.
I remember using iTunes when fixing the name of an album was a modal blocking function that had to write to each and every MP3, one by one, in the slowest write I have ever experienced in updating file metadata. Give me a magnetised needle and a steady hand and I could have done it faster.
A long time ago they had some pretty cool design guides, and the visual design has often been nice, but other than that I don't think their software has been notable for its quality.
Curious if I'm missing something though, is there another entity with a stronger suite than that? Or some other angle to look at this? (E.g., it seems silly to me to use an MP3 metadata example when you're talking about the same company that makes Logic Pro.)
I also think you're confusing what I wrote. It's not a competition.
I have just found that Apple's hardware on desktop has been stronger than their software, in my experience (periodic sporadic use, ~2006->now).
[1] and now from a sibling comment I hear that perhaps people regard that tool as bad, so there you go, they jury is clearly out
E.g., I'd rank something like VS Code "lower quality" because when I launch VS Code, I can see each layer of the UI pop in as it's created, e.g., first I see a blank window, then I see window chrome being loaded, then a I see a row of icons being loaded on the left. This gives an impression of the software not being solid, because it feels like the application is struggling just to display the UI.
> I also think you're confusing what I wrote. It's not a competition.
> I have just found that Apple's hardware on desktop has been stronger than their software, in my experience (periodic sporadic use, ~2006->now).
I disagree with this, the only way to make an argument that Apple has deficiencies in their software is to demonstrate that other software is higher quality than Apples. Otherwise it could just be Apple's quality level is the maximum feasible level of quality.
> unremarkable (notes, calendar, contacts!?) and awkward (pages, numbers, keynote).
This is laughable, Notes is unremarkable? Give me a break, and Keynote is awkward? Have you ever Google'd how people feel about these applications?
I'd argue a critic only has value if they're willing to offer their own taste for judgement.
It's not exactly clear to me what niche Apple occupies in this market. It doesn't feel like "native Mac UI" is a must-have feature for DAWs or IDEs alike, but maybe that's just my perspective.
> It lacks support for lots of plugins and hardware, and costs loads for what is essentially a weaker value prop than Bitwig or Ableton Live.
This is an obviously silly statement, not only is Logic Pro competitively priced ($200, relative to $100-$400 for Bitwig, $99-$750 for Live), but those applications obviously have different focuses than Logic Pro (sound design and electronic music, versus the more general-purpose and recording focus of Logic Pro, also you'd be hard pressed to find anyone who doesn't think Logic Pro comes with the best suite of stock plugins of any DAW, so the value prop angle is a particularly odd argument to make [i.e., Logic Pro is pretty obviously under priced]).
But all this isn't that important because many of these applications are great. DAWs are one of the most competitive software categories around and there are several applications folks will vehemently defend as the best and Logic Pro is unequivocally one of them.
> Most bedroom musicians are using Garageband or other cheap DAWs like Live Lite, and the professional studios are all bought into Pro Tools or Audition.
This is old, but curious if you have a better source for your statement https://blog.robenkleene.com/2019/06/10/2015-digital-audio-w...
Found a more recent survey https://www.production-expert.com/production-expert-1/2024-d...
> We can see that Pro Tools for music is the most popular choice, with Logic for music second and Pro Tools for post coming third.
Note that I'd say Logic Pro's popularity is actually particularly notable since it's not crossplatform, so the addressable market is far smaller than the other big players. It's phenomenal popular software, both in terms of raw popularity and fans who rave about it. E.g., note the contrast in how people talk about Pro Tools vs. Logic Pro. Logic Pro has some of the happiest users around, but Pro Tools customers talk like they feel like their hostages to the software. That difference is where the quality argument comes in.
I'm sorry to say it, but I genuinely think you're detached from the way professionals evaluate software. While I enjoyed my time on macOS when Apple treated it like a professional platform, I have no regrets leaving it behind or it's "quality" software. Apple Mail fucking sucks, iCloud is annoying as sin, the Settings App only got worse year-over-year and the default Music app is somehow slower than iTunes from 2011. Ads pop up everywhere, codecs and filesystems go unsupported due to greed, and hardware you own gets randomly depreciated because you didn't buy a replacement fast enough.
If that's your life, go crazy. People like you helped me realize that Macs aren't made for people like me.
I definitely didn't say this. Pro Tools likely has higher marketshare than Logic Pro, but I don't think anyone would conflate that with quality. I only brought up marketshare because you framed Logic Pro as being unpopular, which is just objectively not true.
> I'm sorry to say it, but I genuinely think you're detached from the way professionals evaluate software.
I literally think I've spent more time trying to understand this than practically anyone else e.g., https://blog.robenkleene.com/2023/06/19/software-transitions... but also my blog archives https://blog.robenkleene.com/archive/, it's one of the main subjects I think about and write about.
Note that how professionals evaluate software is tangential to what "quality" means in the context of software. E.g., I don't think anyone would argue Adobe is the paragon of software quality, but they're arguably the most important GUI software there is for creative professionals.
Both topics are very interesting to me, what software professionals use and why, and what constitutes quality in software.
> In the other response, you're telling off a perfectly valid criticism of Apple software because they won't fulfill your arbitrary demand for a better-looking DAW. Are you even engaging with the point they're trying to make?
I'm not sure what this means, who's talking about a "better-looking DAW" and which point am I not engaging with?
Now that they own the SoC design pipeline, they’re really able to flex these muscles.
The above link is a video where he mentions that.
It is true that Apple’s major software products like iOS and MacOS are only available on Apple’s own hardware. But the Steve Jobs justification for this (which he said in a different interview I can’t find right now so I will paraphrase) is that he felt Apple made the best hardware and software in the world so he wanted Apple’s customers to experience the best software on the best hardware possible which he felt only Apple could provide. (I wish I could find the exact quote.)
Anyway according to Steve Jobs Apple is a software first company.
If you care about software you have to make your own hardware.
I'll allow that perhaps Apple considers hardware a means to an end. But what an end.
But I have had 2 iMac power supply die one me, the grounding problem on a MBP and a major annoyance with power noise leaking from a Mac Mini (makes for some nasty audio output, hilarious when you consider they supposedly target creative who clearly need good audio output).
You always find people raving about Apple's engineering prowess but my experience is that it's mostly a smoke show, they make things look good, miniaturise/oversimplify beyond what is reasonable and you often end up with major hardware flaws that are just a pain to deal with.
They always managed to have good performance and a premium feeling package but I don't think their engineering tradeoffs are actually very good most of the time.
As far as I can tell, the new Mac Mini design still has grounding issues, and you will get humming issues, which is beyond stupid for a product of that caliber. At this point I don't care about having the power supply inside the dam box, just use a brick if you must to prevent that sort of problem. This is particularly infuriating since they made the iMac PSU external, which is beyond stupid for an AiO.
But common sense left Apple a long time ago and now they just chase specs benchmarks and fashionnable UIs above everything.
And this would eventually evolve into MacOS.
Very often the intel chips in macbooks were stellar, they were just seriously inhibited by Apples terrible cooling designs and so were permanently throttled.
They could never provide decent cooling for the chips coupled with their desire to make paper thin devices.
Curiously they managed to figure this out exactly when it became their silicon instead (M1 MacBook Pros were notably thicker and with more cooling capacity than the outgoing Intel ones)
That is probably the least of reasons why people buy Apple - to many it's just a status symbol, and the OS is a secondary consideration.
https://www.google.com/search?q=apple+products+as+status+sym...
EDIT: I seem to be getting downvoted, so I will just leave this here for people to see I am not lying:
https://www.businessinsider.com/tim-cook-apple-is-not-a-hard...
Regardless of revenue, Apple isn't a hardware company or a software company. It's a product company. The hardware doesn't exist merely to run the software, nor does the software exist merely to give functionality to the hardware. Both exist to create the product. Neither side is the "main" one, they're both parts of what ultimately ships.
Watch this and maybe you might change your mind:
Modern Apple is also quite a bit more integrated. A company designing their own highly competitive CPUs is more hardware-oriented than one that gets their CPUs off the shelf from Intel.
Yes, it's $70B a year from iPhones alone and $23B from the totality of the Services org. (including all app store / subscription proceeds). Significantly more than 50% of the company's total profits come from hardware sales.
We should be comparing profit on those departments not revenue. Do you have those figures?
It is well known that companies often sell the physicval devices at a loss, in order to make the real money from the services on top.
Apple's product revenue in this fiscal year has been $233B, with a gross margin of $86B.
Their services revenue is $80B with $60B gross margin.
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/pdfs/fy2025-q3/FY25_Q3_Consol...
Look, I totally understand making an off-hand comment like you did based on a gut feeling. Nobody can fact-check everything they write, and everyone is wrong sometimes. But it is pretty lazy to demand a source when you were just making things up. When challenged with specific and verifiable nubmers, you should have checked the single obvious source for the financials of any public company. Their quarterly statements.
[1] They used that exact term, and it has stuck with me ever since.
Steve Jobs consistently made the point that Apples hardware is the same as everyone elses, what makes them different is they make the best software which enables the best user experience.
Here see this quote from Steve Jobs which shows that his attitude is the complete opposite of what you wrote.
Apple is and always has been a HW company first.
Now the M1 range, that really was an impressive 'outperform' moment of engineering for them, but otherwise this is just a clock-work MBA driven trickle of slightly better over-hyped future eWaste.
To outperform during this crisis, hardware engineers worth their salt need to designing long lived boxes with internals that can be easily repaired or upgraded. "yeah but the RAM connections are fiddly" Great, now that sounds like a challenge worth solving.
But you are right about the software. Installing Asahi makes me feel like I own my compter again.
"Linux on Apple Silicon: Asahi Linux aims to bring you a polished Linux® experience on Apple Silicon Macs."
Why the "®" after Linux? I think this is the first time I've seen this.
It was coherent, (relatively) bug free, and lacked the idiot level iOSification and nagging that is creeping in all over MacOS today.
I haven't had to restart Finder until recently, but now even that has trouble with things like network drives.
I'm positive there are many internals today that are far better than in Snow Leopard, but it's outweighed by user visible problems.
It shouldn't surprise you I think that Android Jelly Bean was the best phone OS ever made as well, and they went completely in the wrong direction after that.
Programs absolutely could have much more controllable auto save before for when it made sense.
Speaking of security it didn't have app sandboxing either.
This is what I mean about iOSification - it's trending towards being a non serious OS. Linux gets more attractive by the day, and it really is the absence of proper support of hardware in the class of the M series that prevents a critical mass of devs jumping ship.
There aren't a lot of tangible gains left to be made by the software teams. The OS is fine, the office suite is fine, the entertainment apps are fine.
If "performance" is shoving AI crap into software that was already doing what I wanted it to do, I'd rather the devs take a vacation.
Who knows, maybe the era of "exciting computing" is over, and iteration will be a more pleasant and subtle gradient curve of improvements, over the earth-shattering announcements of yore (such as the advent of popular cellular phones).
May be steve is true. We don't know what we want until some one shows it .
Aside from that, I think of Apple as a hardware company that must write software to sell their devices, maybe this isn't true anymore but that's how I used to view them. Maintaining and updating as much software as Apple owns is no small task either.
Hopefully that will bring whatever they’re doing right to other teams.
Software (iOS26), services (Music/Tv/Cloud/Apple Intelligence) and marketing (just keep screaming Apple Intelligence for 3 months and then scream Liquid Glass) ---- on the other hand seem like they are losing steam or very reactive.
No wonder John Ternus is the widely anticipated to replace Tim Cook (and not Craig).
Apple (post Apple II) has always been a systems company, which is much different. Dell is a hardware company.
But this is the exception.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/08/report-apple-is-savi...
Apple's chip engineering is top tier, but money also buys them a lot of advance.
Furthermore, they do also engage in the traffic and sale of digital programmes wrought by the hands of other, independent artisans.
The PowerBook from the mid 1990’s were hugely successful, especially the first ones, which were notable for what we now take for granted: pushing the keyboard back allowing space for palm rests. Wikipedia says at one time Apple had captured 40% of the laptop market. All the while the ’90s roared on, Apple was languishing, looking for a modern OS.
Apple's Hardware Chief, John Ternus, seems to be next in line for succession to Tim Cook's position.
So give the software some slack.
Biggest grief with MacOS software:
- Finder is very mediocre comparing to even File explorer in Windows
- Scrollbar and other UI issues
Unfortunately I don't think Asahi is going to catch up, and Macbook is so expensive, so I'll probably keep buying second hand Dell/Lenovo laptop and dump a Linux on top of it.
It really is awful. Why the hell is there no key to delete a file? Where's the "cut" option for moving a file? Why is there no option for showing ALL folders (ie, /bin, /etc) without having to memorize some esoteric key combination?
For fuck's sake, even my home directory is hidden by default.
> - Scrollbar and other UI issues
Disappearing scrollbars make sense on mobile where screen real estate is at a premium and people don't typically interact with them. It does not make sense on any screen that you'd use a mouse to navigate.
For years, you couldn't even disable mouse acceleration without either an esoteric command line or using 3rd party software. Even now, you can't disable scroll wheel acceleration. I hate that I can't just make a consistent "one click = ~2 lines of text" behavior.
I could go on and on about the just outright dumb decisions regarding UX in MacOS. So many things just don't make sense, and I feel like they were done for the sole purpose of being different from everyone else, rather than because of a sense of being better.
MacOS doesn't have enough 'openness' to it. There's no debug information, lack of tools etc. To this day I can still daily drive a XP or 98/2000 machine( if they supported the modern web) because all the essentials are still intact. You can look around system files, you customize them edit them. I could modify game files to change their behaviour. I could modify windows registry in tons of ways to customize my experience, experiment lot of things.
As a 'Pro' user my first expectation is options, options in everything I do , which MacOS lacks severely.
All the random hardware that we see launching from time to time have drivers for windows but not for Mac. Even linux has tons of terminal tools and customisation.
MacOS is like a glorified phone OS. It's weirdly locked down at certain places that drive you crazy. Tons of things do not have context menus(windows is filled with it).
Window management sucks, there's no device manager! Not even cli tools! (Or maybe I'm not aware?) Why can't I simpy cut and paste?
There's no API/way to control system elements via scripting, windows and linux are filled to the brim with these! Even though the UI is good looking I just cannot switch to an Apple device (both Mac and iPhone) for these reasons. I bought an iPad pro and I'm regretting. There's no termux equivalent in iPadOS/iOS , there are some terminal tools but they can't use the full processing power, they can't multi thread. They can't run in background, it's just ridiculous. The iPad Pro is just a glorious iPhone. Hardware doesn't make a device 'Pro' software does. Video editing isn't a 'Pro' workflow in the sense that it can be done in any machine that has sufficient oomph. An iPad Pro from 5 years ago will be slower than an iPad Air of today, does that make the air a 'Pro' device? No!
It's a bad idea to add an option entirely for the purpose of making the product not work anymore.
> Window management sucks
I'm always mystified reading these kinds of posts on HN because it literally always starts out as "macOS is an OS for babies" and turns out to mean "macOS doesn't have a tiling window manager". Like, cmon man, who cares.
> there's no device manager! Not even cli tools!
`ioreg -l` or `system_profiler`. Why does this matter?
> There's no API/way to control system elements via scripting
https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Ac...
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/XCUIAutomation
The tiling window manager thing is epidemic on Hacker News, and I think the explanation is two fold: Hacker News obviously leans towards programmers, programmers in general don't like the mouse, tiling window managers, as a general rule, are about avoiding needing to manage windows with the mouse.
The problem with that viewpoint, to me, is that, programming is literally the only complex modern computing task I can think of that isn't mouse-centric. E.g., if you're doing CAD, spreadsheet work, media editing, 3D, audio editing, all of those tasks are mouse-centric and the tiling thing just feels silly to me in that context (like I'm going to put Cinema 4D in a tile?). So it solves a problem I don't have (managing, what, my IDE and terminal windows? this isn't even something I think about) and makes seems like it would make things I think are hard today, even harder (arranging the Cinema 4D Redshift material graph, render preview, object manager, and geometry view where I can see the important parts of each all at the same time, which I do by arranging overlapping windows carefully).
> I'm always mystified reading these kinds of posts on HN because it literally always starts out as "macOS is an OS for babies" and turns out to mean "macOS doesn't have a tiling window manager". Like, cmon man, who cares.
For me, not so much the window management, but task management. I very strongly believe that the task bar (I guess the Dock bar in MacOS) should have a separate item for each open window of an app. If I have 3 Firefox windows open, that should be 3 entries in the task/dock bar so I can switch between them in a single click. I can do this in Windows, can't do it in MacOS.
One of the problems I have with MacOS is that it's not obvious how to start a second instance of an app. Sure, some apps will have a "New Window" option. But what about apps that don't, like Burp Suite? If I bring up the launcher, then click Burp Suite when one is already loaded, it just shows me the existing one.
A weakness of this is you can duplicate apps and launch the duplicate, even though they have the same bundle ID, so they might still fight over things.
Powershell now is lot more powerful than what Apple can dream to offer. MacOS is an opinionated OS for people who want to do simple tasks. MacOS apart from good looks offers nothing else.
Sums up how I feel about MacOS perfectly.
Which is why I'm so utterly baffled that it's become so popular among tech workers.
Don't both of those exist now?
The reason the Mac is more "app-centric" is Conway's law; developers own apps so it's thought if you tried breaking apart an app it would fail, since previous "document-centric" efforts like OpenDoc failed.
Cmd+delete? I don't really want it to be a single key as it's too easy to accidentally trigger (say I try to delete some text in a filename but accidentally bump my mouse and lose focus on the name)
You don't cut, you move files, so copy and then choose the move option.
Command + backspace.
Command+Backspace.
I still agree that second hand Thinkpads are ridiculously better in terms of price/quality ratio, and also more environmentally sustainable.
But I could be wrong. Maybe the earlier Macs didn't have great software either -- but at least the UI is better.
I do miss window shading from MacOS 8 or 9, though. I think a whimsical skin for MacOS would be nice, too. The system error bomb icon was classic, the sad-Mac boot-failure icon was at least consolation. Now everything is cold and professional, but at least it stays out of my way and looks decent.
Unfortunately, backwards-compatibility requirements prevented the addition of process memory isolation before OS X. One result of not having this protection was that an application with a memory bug could overwrite memory location zero(the beginning of a critical OS-only area), or any other memory area, and then all bets were off. Some third-party utilities, such as Optimem RAMCharger, gave partial protection from this by using the processor's protected mode, and also removed the occasional need for users to manually set the amount of memory allocated to a program. However, many programs were not compatible with these utilities.
But just once, I'd love to hear someone reply to this and say they really love something like OneNote, and list out why they think it's a "higher quality" piece of software than Apple Notes. Personally, while I observe a lot of bugs in Apple's software, really that's true of all the (GUI in particular) software I use. If I go across all the software I use, Apple's offerings are almost universally on the top end by the metrics I'd measure for quality compared to similar offerings (e.g., something like OneNote is directly comparable to Apple Notes, whereas a custom built notes app that doesn't sync across devices most certainly is not). Apple's apps are usually well-designed, performant, bug free (relatively speaking, there are always bugs in software, but if I put, say, OmniFocus and Reminders next to each other [two apps that have the same purpose that I use every day, Reminders overall has less bugs than OmniFocus]), and they're mostly consistent with each other.
Putting all that together, the breadth of Apple's software offerings, and they're consistent high quality relative to similar offerings from other companies, makes Apple seem to me like the best company in the world today at making GUI software! Which doesn't mean they're perfect, and doesn't mean they can't do better, but is still super impressive.
The UI itself is supposed to be intense to render to some degree. That's crazy because most of the time it looks like an Android skin from 2012.
And on top of this all -- absolutely nobody asked for this. No one asked for some silly new UI that is transparent or whateveer.