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Comment by blitz_skull | Hacker News Reader

As an Apple Stan, I don’t understand what you’re referring to. MacOS is light years ahead of Windows in so many arenas, I’m not really sure what you could be referring to when you say “stagnation”. Every OS ever released has issues at launch, not sure if that’s what you mean by “regression”.

But man… windows has been garbage for the better part of 2 decades now.

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macOS daily driver for last 5 years because the hardware is better; I can stay unplugged for almost my entire workday.

Lots of things irk me about macOS UX. Finder's lack of tree view sidebar really irks me. Having to disable the silly animations and sounds when I get a new machine irks me. The absolutely terrible window tiling system irks me. When I minimize a window, I can no longer tab into it. The settings dialog's weird behavior with respect to resizing on both axes irks me. Can't use 3 monitors without an expensive DisplayLink dock and the secondary monitors end up with limited refresh rate options. Meanwhile, I can just plug just about any dock into my 5 year old Windows laptop and multiple monitors just work. Still can't find anything as good as IrfanView (as old and dated as it is, it made working with image libraries a breeze).

Finder and the poor external monitor support somehow irks me the most because now I end up typing into the CLI 90% of the time because the navigation experience is so bad and for me this is a work machine and the difficulty in using 3+ monitors is silly.

I get being an Apple Stan (love the hardware), but the software UX is 100% bottom of the barrel stuff. Basic OS stuff like Explorer is just light years ahead of Finder.

Exactly my thought, the last paragraph.

> Can't use 3 monitors without an expensive DisplayLink dock

Or you could buy a MacBook Pro with an M4 Max and plug in four monitors without displaylink.

Something that most sub 1000€ laptops could do over a decade ago, requires a macbook costing well above 2000€ in 2025.

I'm running multiple types of machines in my home for work and personal use but macs have been by far the worst offender for multiscreen support for a long time.

Most $1000 laptops supported three monitors a decade ago?

Vintage 2015? Yes. Any Dell Latitude (mid tier business line) would have supported 3 monitors and would have been in the ~$1000 range, especially picked up off of Dell Outlet. I have Dell Latitude Windows machines from 2011 that supported 3 monitors.

Using what ports? I had Dells back then and at most they had one VGA or HDMI port.

If you’re referring to using a dongle with its own GPU like some of the modern Displaylink adapters, any Mac can do that.

Not dongle; docking station (old school ones with port on the bottom).

That wasn’t a capability of the laptop. The docking station had its own dedicated graphics hardware that drove the extra monitors. Of course the lowest end Macs can do that. When we talk about how many monitors a certain laptop can drive, we mean plugging them in directly to the laptop in some combination of HDMI ports and USB C/Thunderbolt ports.

This is embarrassing, just stop. You can go look up the specs of any chip and how many discrete displays the iGPU supported instead of bickering about what is or isn't a laptop feature. Citing sources isn't illegal or passe.

Here is the chip in my dogshit 2015 Ultrabook I still lug around, it very clearly states that the chip supports 3 displays regardless of how IO bandwidth is distributed on the mobo: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/88192/i...

Exactly how did you attached three monitors to your laptop without a docking station? I bet you the docking station had displaylink based hardware/software like most of the Dell docking stations had

You didn’t give any citations on your specific model of laptop or docking station. You just admitted that you used an old school docking station - those came with GPUs.

And your citation said it wasn’t available in all configurations.

It wasn't DisplayLink. Docking station only added ports.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/274734034597?itmmeta=01KAWK2DRBFS5H...

The docking station didn't have GPUs; they only had the extra ports.

I haven't kept up, but do they support display port daisy chaining and multi display docks now?

After two decades of relentless effort, Apple has finally managed to make Spotlight as broken and useless as Windows Search where it doesn't find local files and just returns web results.

The question is not whether MacOS is ahead of Windows. As an Apple user since the Apple IIe, I agree it's still the best OS by a mile.

But that has basically always been true, at least since Mac OS X. (I liked the earlier OSes too, but they really did crash all the time and have no memory protection, so arguably Windows had some compelling advantages.)

The interesting question is whether recent MacOS releases are ahead of their previous versions. Of the top of my head, I can't think of a single feature that MacOS has shipped since 2020 that I care about. Maybe dark mode?

The hardware keeps better, and the experience of third-party apps I care about (VS Code and Ableton) is superior to Windows. But the OS and first-party apps seem completely stagnant.

Which, arguably, is OK. Maybe the OS should just be a commodity. But I have to imagine that there are user experience improvements they could make at the OS but I certainly haven't seen any.

> Of the top of my head, I can't think of a single feature that MacOS has shipped since 2020 that I care about.

They all kind of blend together, so I asked Claude to give me a list of major features since 2020. Here are those that I've enjoyed:

* Universal control * iPhone mirroring * Stage Manager * Container CLI

Granted it's not a giant list, but each release does have little refinements here and there, and Claude may have missed some (it didn't mention container CLI, for instance; that was from my memory). I also omitted some features I don't care about (like Safari profiles and some other window management stuff).

What features are you hoping for? Aside from a tiling WM, which won't happen, I'd be happy just with refinements and bug fixes.

> it's still the best OS by a mile

I'm not so sure about that, modern Linux is pretty good — I was able to configure it to fit my needs much better than I could a mac. It's also free of dark patterns (looking at Windows).

If you're willing and able to configure Linux, I would say that, for some people, it's much better than a mac.

One of the main things I run on my Mac is Ableton Live, so Linux is a no-go.

Also, I'm no longer the kind of person who really wants to tinker with an OS set up and doing a lot of manual configuration. I just want a decent user experience out of the box and good connectivity with all my various peripherals.

> it's still the best OS by a mile.

I wish I could disagree, but Microsoft won't let me thanks to their determination and speed in destroying what was good about Windows.

Right now I find myself forced to use macos for iOS dev, and Windows for gaming-adjacent stuff. For the first time in 33 years, I truly wish I could just have Linux everywhere.

I bought a MacBook last year. The amount of stupid bugs is insane. Safari eating text input, Safari simply not connecting to internet after several days (while chrome is working well). I have to restart my Mac more often than I had to restart my last Windows machine, because it simply grinds to a halt (with a frickin' M4 Max processor)

Yea, Safari 26.1 is really buggy for me on macOS 15. Google searching the issue, lots of my issues are fixed int he 26.2 beta, I had to download beta from apple developer website.

It's telling that to defend Apple against the charge of stagnation you immediately attacked Windows.

They only attacked Windows at the very end of their statement.

And the second sentence.

And I mean... They're not wrong.

I use a Mac for work, but also use windows and Linux machines.

The best experience hands down when it comes to specific things would be Linux, for very niche things because it's way less clunky than it used to and people have figured things out in the meantime.

My mac is the only system that I can mount (without too much pain because people have figured it out) any filesystem, I can virtually open every document from Mac to Windows to Linux. I have something close to package control with homebrew. The M chips are ridiculously good at both being decently performant while low energy consumption.

Sure it has its host of issues and I would be the first one in line to dunk on Apple for many many... many many, reasons, but there are things to like with their laptops...

In comparison, recently, Windows has been more and more aggressive towards their users and their data, attempting to lock people in for some spreadsheet editor... Gone are the days of Lotus1-2-3...

I use all three and I have to say Windows shitifize itself by adding too much ads, but if you can remove those than it’s a better experience than MacOS.

Someone else on HN has a line that I agree with:”Apple makes the OS apps mundane so that people can write replacements and sell those in App Store where Apple has a fat share”.

Windows 7 is the last good one. And that is only... Oh, almost 20 years ago. Never mind.

Windows 7 was supported until 10 years ago.

Yeah, the version history as perceived by the vendor and as perceived by the commoner are somewhat out of touch. To me Windows 10 is basically new and already considered to be out-of-date.

10 is OK if you remove the ads and stop random update. I’ll never use 11 and beyond. I always switched to Linux for my dev box and now that I play less and less game (haven’t played for weeks) I’ll switch to Linux for my personal box too, once the current one broke down.

Windows 10 Pro is actually a pretty decent OS. It brought quite a few major improvements over Windows 7 and I can't really think of any notable downsides.

If light years means not inundate the OS with ads, shove AI down our throats and redesign every app with regressed UX, then sure.

Actually in the latest MacOS release it constantly trains local models for all kinds of junk without asking you at all.

I had to disable all that AI garbage in the settings after researching a bunch of local inference and training processes that were grinding my MacBook to a halt every time it woke up from sleep.

I love the Mac, but the OS has gone nowhere in ages. I can't think of a new feature since APFS.

Have you _seen_ system preferences?

Insanely hostile permissions and "untrusted software" behavior.

Nobody seems to like Tahoe, but I can't really speak to it because I don't even want to install it.

Snapping and switching windows is light-years ahead of Windows? It only recently became a little more reasonable, and even then they still kept that idiotic full screen mechanic.

The full screen thing was great on an 11” MacBook Air. It’s pretty useless on anything bigger.

> MacOS is light years ahead of Windows in so many arenas

At least Windows dignifies you with an error message (even if a hex code and badly tanslated text) when something is wrong. macOS mocks you with a dumb and utterly useless message like "Something went wrong, try again" or "A USB device is using too much power, try unplugging it". Or just flat out not showing the button for the thing you're looking for if prerequisites aren't filled (iPad screen extending, unless the iPad is on the same Apple ID, and has been restarted since, the button just isn't there and there is nothing you can do to debug it other than tryingn to guess what is missing).

Also, Windows allows you to install whatever with a clear UX (this might be dangerous for random crap from the internet vs having to jump through a weird non-existing UX to get it to open, or flat out being blocked from using downloaded libaries).

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