Last Week on My Mac: Losing confidence
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However something shifted since this "visionOS" melted version of macOS (Tahoe); where I have absolutely no intension to upgrade from Sequoia. I hope they will fix it by the time I'll be forced to upgrade (post support deadline).
It started with the macOS that brought the iOS settings panel. We went from a logical structure of easily findable stuff to a complete mess. Just open the "Keyboard" settings on macOS today and it's bewildering how they could ship this and think this is fine. Steve would roll in his grave.
The process to allow running applications that are unsigned is just a horrible hack. It feels like a last minute "shove it and move on!".
By 2035 I wonder if we'll be all running KDE or WindowMaker and the hell with modern OS GUI.
From a Gestalt standpoint, human relations with desktop computers are not the same as with thumb driven mobile OS or air-pinch driven vision OS, period. The hell with "glass" or "flat" design. Desktop OS should be as forgettable as possible, as it's about having long stints of flow, not giving a feeling of "air" or "play".
> Desktop OS should be as forgettable as possible, as it's about having long stints of flow, not giving a feeling of "air" or "play".
its almost as if apple doesnt want to sell "trucks" anymore (as steve would say) and would prefer to morph macos slowly into a sedan like the ipad (cause that is where the money is)
> By 2035 I wonder if we'll be all running KDE or WindowMaker and the hell with modern OS GUI.
Steve understood better than anyone that having a finite amount of time to build means you can't please everyone. The vast majority of Apple's customers just do not care about the Keyboard settings UI or the clarity of unusual error messages.
Those are just some of the bugs I hit. I’d guess most normal users hit 4-5 problems this upgrade cycle.
Not for everything, but the excuse of "normies don't give a shit" is a bullshit one.
It’s difficult to pinpoint when exactly the decline started. But one key event before the Settings app was the Catalyst apps that were straight out and dismal ports from their iOS versions. Till date, none of those work well and cannot be navigated properly using the keyboard. Reminders, Messages, Notes and more.
Craig Federighi seems to be increasingly taking on so much authority without having a trusted set of people under him and his leadership (or lack of it) has resulted in neglecting software across device platforms. Some of the Apple apps on tvOS with paid subscriptions are worse, because the bugs in them don’t get any attention at all.
I think if you minimize the main window it gets even worse
It's completely unacceptable
Screenshot, right click, and "copy" doesn't appear. Sometimes moving the app to another screen makes it appear, sometimes just switching to another app and back will help, sometimes I can't get it to be an option at all and I have to close screenshot and retry.
Really awful. Just make it an option all the time.
The one that mostly bothered me, was not being able to select desktop regions if using multiple monitors, the rectangle region went nuts on what was possible to select.
I also don't need 99% of all of that, I just want the screenshot tool to not suck.
I just want to grab a bit of the screen to paste it into chats so I can tell people what problems I see.
My turning point was the passwordless root bug: https://x.com/lemiorhan/status/935578694541770752
October 5, 2011?
Mac OS is still my system of choice, but I don’t have as much confidence in it as I would like.
The big thing from around fifteen years ago is the mixed modes for autosave, where they sort of half heartedly changed the language around save/save as and just sort of… left it. Some apps use their new (for the 2010s) auto save system and some don’t. And it’s up the the user to muddle through. Weird. And there are many half baked things like this in the OS now.
Mac hardware, on the other hand, has never been better than it is right now!
I thought the same until trying a framework laptop with Ubuntu. Mac is the “IBM” choice, no one gets fired for choosing it, but quite frankly there’s better options these days.
for me, the screen on the framework is ok. I think there's little to gain with LCDs at this point. The trackpad on the framework is smaller, so it's better. A nicer camera requires a nicer piece of tape to cover it, I guess. Notification beeps do not require Atmos or whatever. I can pack a powerbank for trans-oceanic flights, but I'm usually at a desk if I work long stretches.
Having nicer stuff would be nice, but the value proposition does not work for me in light of the software situation.
1 - compromised hardware over better software is a trade-off you're willing to make and 2 - you believe that the Framework software experience is better than macOS
i can concede 2 (if true, I've not used a Framework laptop) but I don't understand point 1. packing a powerbank for example just feels ancient if you've used the arm chip macs. then again, I'm now pushing my trade-off
My point was that it's a tradeoff between software preference, tech politics, price, and hardware features. I think it's pretty easy to understand. It's not like Apple has an insurmountable lead; there are some benefits for some use cases.
I may be mistaken, but AFAIK, all Apple’s apps auto-save on quit and restore state on open. If so, what do you suggest they do about making third party applications do that as well?
With these two, most applications behave as they did in the pre-Lion document model.
The ridiculous thing is that Microsoft already made approximately this mistake with the Windows 8 “PC Settings” disaster.
I suspect Mac is going through the same thing right now as ipad is "growing up" and they're trying to reconcile all their UI. I'm a little surprised that Macs have never introduced touch.
From experience, I bet Apple and Microsoft have offshored all their desktop teams.
> Keyboard settings for "character repeat delay and rate", and "cursor blink rate", have moved from Control Panel to Settings.
The character repeat and cursor blink rate settings were already in Settings but it just opened up the older windows forms. This just gives them a new coat of paint by putting them in the Settings app.
This sentence here is my biggest heartbreak with modern “computing.” I came up in the Windows 98/XP days and over about 7 years from 98-05 basically gained full mastery of basically every aspect of Windows and how to change it, and also from 03 on started using Mac OS X daily and found it to be just as customizable or more, in most ways that mattered. I felt that my computer was my own and loved having full control, making it perfect for me.
None of that is possible now. You cannot even select your own notification sound for Messages on MacOS anymore. Only the 20 sounds packaged with the OS. What. The. F%$k.
We're now paying the piper for many years of accrued monopoly effects, it turns out the way our IP law is structured, the rights we've granted corporations to sue people who attempt any kind of reverse engineering etc. all privilege the monopolist and encourage the formation of the monopoly, because the entire legal and regulatory system is designed to juice corporate profits and pesky old laws like the Sherman Act which got in the way have essentially been ignored for decades.
One really important thing for people to understand is that until there's a serious change to these dynamics, IT WILL GET WORSE. Mac OS will get worse, FOREVER. So will Windows and all other monopolist products. This is why you really need to switch away from them as soon as you can; life will be an order of magnitude more miserable for whoever's still using these products a decade from now. They will just keep on squeezing whoever's left, harder and harder until the heat death of the universe.
There may be some truth to that, but I really don't think it's the whole story. Otherwise how do you explain spending so much effort on eye candy like MacOS "liquid glass", or the redesigned settings app? For that matter, why bother with an annual release at all?
To me, I think it's a pretty obvious case of prioritizing style over substance. For whatever reason, but not to save money. If they really wanted to save money they'd stop with the gratuitous change.
I don’t see a UI for it, but when I drop a sound in ~/Library/Sounds (tested with .aif an .m4r; .aiff likely will work, too, looking at ~/System/Library/Sounds) it shows up in the “Sound Effects/Alert sound” pop-up for me.
My current OS X update strategy is: I don't, mostly. I'm a few versions behind, and at this point, I'd rather keep an OS that sort of works and just deal with the script kiddies, then upgrade to an OS that doesn't work and have to deal with my OS vendor.
The majority of users are content with chromebooks, what does that tell you about the requirements of desktop computers today? It tells me that they are just niche professional tools; and professional tools largely suck for UX..
I had an interesting realisation the other day (that's tangentially related): on my iPhone and iPad: I can't access my work emails or chats at all. Yet on my significantly more difficult to secure laptops: no problem.
The mobile platforms have built-in mechanisms for remote attestation. Desktop operating systems do not.
I think as soon as companies realise that an iPad is "good enough" for email/excel/word workers, we'll see an even more precipitous decline of the desktop operating system experience.
Fine grained control, informative error messages, thought out keybinds, all make the system easier to use for experts
Intuitiveness is often seen as a outright positive by most people but actually it’s more of a trade off. Often the greatest efficiency is achieved by interfaces that require a bit of learning by the user. The ultimate example of that is command line interfaces which are very powerful and efficient but require you to know what you’re doing and give you relatively little help.
You’re on the other side of a steep learning curve for a lot of professional software you use. A steep learning curve is bad UX.
This has a ring of SurfacePro as a corporate EUC choice. Quite common these days.
And iOS's transparencies are disastrous. They make so much of the test illegible.
That being said, now AWS is forcing all my RDS instances to upgrade to mysql 9 (also: Why???), so I need to get 9 working on my dev box, and tonight I'm up against a wall trying to work through Homebrew issues. There's no way to win.
And latest 8.0 and 8.4 is supported at least a year from now.
8.4 won't build in homebrew under Monterey, though, so I'm stuck with 8.3 for my dev stack. I guess I can live with that. I'm dreading the next forced upgrade.
I mean when the apps are small and have just a couple settings, you save having every app having a settings widget that takes you to another panel, etc.
(But a "Good" iOS app in my mind would still have a widget in the app to take you straight to the correct pane in Settings where you configure it.)
I honestly wish this "central settings" app idea would spread to desktop operating systems.
I get that Apple would want to unify the user experience across the two devices. But, seriously, iOS settings have been shit since iPhone 1.
They should have fixed iOS instead.
This is another huge facet of the problem. Not only does it hide glaring problems from the user and prevent him from taking action, but it prevents him from reporting it to Apple for potential redress.
Apple loves to hide information, with the excuse that it's "too scary" for the "average user." This has always been bullshit. If "the average user" is put off by information he receives, he can at least use it to consult someone who isn't.
iOS Mail is a great example. It can utterly fail to access your mail server because of wrong credentials or whatever, but it won't tell you. In fact, it'll claim, "Updated just now." So a day or two goes by and you've missed important work or personal E-mails before you even decide to investigate. This is obviously offensive, because Apple has decided that your work and your communications are less important than hiding their defects... which might not even have been to blame!
When you combine the glaring QA failures piling up with the obnoxious douchebaggery and law-flouting that Apple has engaged in with its app store, it's pretty clear that the company needs a major management housecleaning.
Apple loves to coddle and promote certain pets, who are often incompetent but for some reason curry favor with management. Look at the "Liquid Glass" fiasco and hideous UI regressions in Mac OS and iOS. This is what happens when you put an unqualified packaging designer in charge of UI at a company that's held out as the paragon of "elegant" design. Jony Ive was a pompous hack with one idea... or actually two: 1. "Thinner" 2. Less useful
We had a brief respite with his departure, but now... things might be even worse. And at a time when Windows has been degraded into unredeemable garbage... it's a grim outlook for popular computing.
The rest of your comment I can’t argue against at all.
And if you don't show further details up front, provide the user a means to dig them up if he desires to do so. Otherwise, what is he supposed to do?
If you're talking about the process that just says "Foo.app is damaged and can’t be opened." and the only way around that is to manually remove the com.apple.quarantine extended attribute, that's arguably working as intended. Apple doesn't want users to run untrusted apps period. They want only apps approved by them.
As a dev and open source dev I don't like it. But, I can't totally be against it I think. It is safer for some users and experts can learn how to remove the attribute with `xattr -d com.apple.quarantine filename`
In general I'd contend that the mindest which leads you to believe "we need to lie to our users because they are dumb" isn't conducive to making good software.
It's no wonder granny has zero confidence in the computer and is always behind.
Briefly poked around w/ linux again for the first time in years (Omarchy, DHH's tune of Arch + hyprland), and hoo boy, it's come a long way! Nothing like the KDE/Gnome+X jankery of the olden times. Very polished, very slick, very nice.
If anything though, Omarchy shows it's not impossible to get a nice working environment on linux.
Ironically, it was all downhill since KDE2.
I love Linux, but I doubt that will happen. If anything, by then Linux will be a feature of a workstation OS running in a hypervisor, just like it is with Windows and ChromeOS today.
> The hell with "glass" or "flat" design. Desktop OS should be as forgettable as possible, as it's about having long stints of flow, not giving a feeling of "air" or "play".
There's nothing stopping you from running a Linux desktop with a minimalist tiling window manager - I have for years and found it does exactly what you say.
But it sounds like it's more that you don't like that there aren't many product offerings like that. That is true. Even computers with Linux pre installed use "bouncy" desktop environments like Gnome/KDE by default.
My preference - ChromeOS - comes the closest but is still nowhere near as stripped down as i3 tiling window manager (which I also think is great).
Do you run ChromeOS Flex on some thinkpads or do you work on a Chromebook?
What are the pros/cons vs running a debian if you can elaborate?
Chromebook.
> What are the pros/cons vs running a debian if you can elaborate?
I like minimalist desktop environments. I like full screen window tiling using keyboard shortcuts, power management, fingerprint readers, accelerated displays, phone tethering, touch screen, passkey support for auth, and verified boot, and preferences synced across devices.
And I like all that to work out of the box with no fiddling,
I feel the same about a good setup that works out of the box. Everything works, from sleep, to cameras, Bluetooth, and shutdown actually shuts down, which I can't get with debian, arch or bsd!
I will trial it further, the Linux WSL type enclosure feels right. I'm trying to understand if Penguin is actually a web rendered terminal or native. I only really know Ghostty which I can't get to run as it's missing some gnome libs I think. I will see if alacrity is better.
Thanks!
Beware of not upgrading accidentally, like i did... (dark pattern):
"The Software Update UI for Upgrading to MacOS 26 Tahoe Is Needlessly Confusing" : https://daringfireball.net/2025/11/software_update_tahoe_con...
I swear after the first 3 days, I’ve only even noticed the new UI maybe a dozen times. If I stop and really pay attention to it, I think the old UI was a bit better, but strangely I don’t really seem to notice the new UI. If it’s worse, I rarely notice.
Then again I spend most of my time in jetbrains IDEs, iterm2, and Firefox (none of which have changed much). So I might be a special case.
Update frustration has long set in.
Im gonna buy the new macbook pro with the M5 max when it comes out in a couple of months (from an intel 2019) and this will probably be my last mac, im giving them one last chance before i move to Linux.
I dont have big hopes though…
That is what I wished for back in the 2000's, eventually I went back to Windows starting with Windows 7, because I got fed up with laptop support.
As the main laptop OS, I never stopped having UNIX based systems on servers across many customer projects, or trying out the flavour of the month via local VMs, since hardware virtualization became a commodity.
For a couple years I have been noticing regular new glitches in the Apple TV interface accumulating faster than old ones disappear.
Lately the glitch accumulation syndrome seems to have hit macOS. Notes has started doing random bolding, unbolding, changing text size on only one line, etc. After a restart, a finder window with tabs springs to different screen spaces, depending on which tab is open when I try to drop a file on it. Message sometimes draws a few lines of a message with a few pixels vertical and horizontally offset, so there is actual overlap of message parts.
Then there are chronic ones. Safari's save or print to PDF are notorious for not saving pictures you can see, even from reading mode. How are basic functions in Safari not worth fixing, for years?
Apple's HomePods ... for many years. I could write a blog of interesting Pod behavior. I thought having one or a pair in each room would be nice. No, more of them is not nice. Constant bizarreness.
The noticeable acceleration isn't encouraging.
A couple? That's the understatement of the last couple years.
Yeah, these have quite the DIY / Jailbreak following I've noticed. They look like neat little devices for music and HA stuff, but I've read similar stuff to your comment.
They’ve never not been like this. They don’t know how to write software sustainably and don’t seem interested to learn. They add features faster than they fix bugs. Early on, it was masked by less frequent releases, but switching to an annual cadence made it more obvious. They worked around the problem once by focusing Snow Leopard on bug fixing, but they are just letting the bugs accumulate again now.
If you only look at their earlier 10.x.0 releases this is true.
But it was well known that you don’t upgrade to a new macOS on any non experimental system until the 10.x.1 release.
In the past (until the mid 2010s I think), if you upgraded to 10.x.1 you’d have a very smooth experience.
Contact management is so painful still. Separate fields for first and last name? Also, I'm not really going to fill out each individual field for somebody's address on my phone! Let me just paste a blob into the card and the software should figure it out. But what's worse is that the contact sync between my mac laptop and my phone is all brokeney.
It feels like we’re waaaay over due for one or two of those.
There's two awful colliding factors here.
1) People absolutely buy features.
I am in the Apple ecosystem, why? Because iMessage on my laptop, seamless copy/paste and the fact that it supports every bit of software I want to run.
2) MBA thinkers value features, for the previous reason. They can show that features move the needle of units sold. It's easier to quantify.
What you and I implicitly understand is that Apple has a captive audience, people will continue to buy MacOS (by virtue of Apple Hardware) for the coming few years at least.
The higher quality the software, the more performant and less buggy: the more likely we stay in the ecosystem longer. This will sell units in the 4-7 year timeframe for sure.
The more Apple focus on this, the larger their moat.
MBA's barely understand how to build a moat, other than monopolising a market by M&A.
This is a good example of a feature that is actually useful. But it is also one that has been around for a long time. Can you think of something more recent?
- I haven’t had a chance to use it yet but Preview was just about the only thing keeping me on macOS for my personal computing, rather than going all iPad/phone. Now it’s on iOS, as of the (otherwise terrible, maybe my least-favorite iOS release yet and I hated 7) version. Provided it’s close on features, that’s one of the only things I’d have missed going iOS-only, gone.
But I can’t think of anything between those two.
Universal Control
Oh my fucking god, thank you. I have one in my kitchen and one in the living room, and every few weeks they decide it would be the bees knees to have a 3AM conversation with one another.
No idea if 26 fixed any of this, I've avoided updating because of how poorly received Glass is in all the UI discussions.
I could also add to this that occasionally the status bar gets two not-quite-aligned-with-each-other copies of the time, connectivity icons, and battery percentage.
The iOS / macOS 26 frustration I think is particularly felt by the HN type crowd. Don't want something that looks cool but is less effective/performant/usable. "We" can feel Apple's priorities drifting away from ours.
Side note: I wonder how much easier AI will make it to migrate between operating systems? Perhaps future AI systems that are good at computer-usage could manage migrations/installs well.
If Apple wanted to ship a rock-solid OS, they could. They're just choosing to put those resources elsewhere.
This is everything post-covid. The competent people that could left and retired early.
But what do I know - the year of the Linux desktop for me was 1996.
You see.
It's not enough.
Buy OneDrive, Gamepass, Copilot Pro. This is a big part of why Microsoft is fine with all the sites selling 10$ Windows keys.
Otherwise you might try Linux to save money.
Buy a Mac, you need Apple Plus Deluxe. You need iCloud, etc.
Ubuntu only tries to upsell you via Ubuntu Pro, I guess it's not as aggressive though.
https://9to5linux.com/unity-7-7-desktop-environment-to-get-a...
https://unityd.org/unityx-7-7-testing/
https://gitlab.com/ubuntu-unity/unity-x/unityx#manual-instal...
but here's the real question: why? the global menu bar is literally the most dated and outmoded element in macos. it isn't 1993 anymore. your computer can run more than one program at a time. a globally modal application focus is completely ridiculous. the only thing more ridiculous than a global menu bar is a global spinning beach ball mouse cursor. these are relics of the past and have no place in a modern, multitasking, multiprocessing, multiprocessor, multiscreen computing environment.
moreover, the things that matter, browsers and terminals, don't even have normal menus anyway.
kde plasma is superior in all ways. stop wasting time with weird outmoded 1993 era computer interfaces.
I agree though that placing it on top of the screen (as opposed to the window to which it applies) doesn't make any sense. Windows actually got that right with MDI way back in the day, if you remember how menu merging worked there.
However, there is an unexpected upside to having the menubar there even so. Because macOS apps can't not have a menu bar, they are forced to expose their commands there. Which usually ends up being a more stable UX compared to all the moving around of buttons in the window itself, plus you can search the menus.
that is not nothing- but maybe a vestigial training wheel for onboarding a generation onto single application guis. maintaining separate stacks of applications and then document windows within applications (as is done with the global macos window switching keyboard shortcuts) also feels clunky and more suited to an outmoded (har) ui paradigm.
If it doesn't wipe your drive.
Still, interesting thought.
While I could just export my config file with Mikrotik and ask ChatGPT to make whatever changes I wanted in seconds ("here's my config, make a vlan 20 with all my iot devices") and get a fully working config back, with Ubiquiti you just get a bunch of inaccurate "click here and there" instructions back instead since the UI changes slightly all the time.
The switchover was still worth it, as the Ubiquity UI is nicer in daily use (and Mikrotik wifi sucks ass, so I had to use other APs). However, every time I want to change something I wish I had an easily ediable config file to edit, and get LLM help with, instead of a confusing UI to click around in.
Indeed, large language models have much easier time working with a real written language.
I wonder if the modern GUI conventions could be reliably translated to machine-understandable text representation, operated on, and then mapped back to the GUI picture.
Sure it's sometimes not as shiny as MacOS, and it will most likely never be polished enough for the mainstream market share, but there's something really awesome about not being reliant on a support engineer that does not have the financial incentive to spend the correct amount of time solving a one off problem.
It's a real shame.
That’s the key I think. Apple these days never releases when products are ready, but on a predefined schedule. Point releases that should fix things, are actually delivering more features that were shown on the keynote, but didn’t quite make the main release date.
As a result the systems accumulated some bugs that might never get fixed, unless the code happens to be completely rewritten. The desktop switching animation is hopelessly long when using keyboard shortcuts with ProMotion enabled. On both iOS and macOS the Music app will have an audible click couple of seconds into the first played song when using lossless quality. Stuff like these is known and reported, there’s just seemingly zero bandwidth to handle it.
At the same time, Windows Update was an anxiety engine.
Now Software Update has mostly become what Windows Update was. Uninteresting security patches. Each new major update makes the interface worse and adds new bugs or drops old hardware.
The win7 audience is IMHO shrinking the fastest, while the other camp has nowhere to go and is less demanding, making it an easier customer base.
Don't get me started about how Time Machine drops files — important files like the Photos Sqlite3 database — from backups.
Yes, I should switch from Photos to something else, e.g. Immich.
I barely use the software included with the Mac, and would only use Linux except that there are still just a few programs or bits of hardware that insist on there being a Mac or Windows machine somewhere.
How Apple every got a reputation for high-quality, user-friendly software is beyond me.
Not recommended.</rant>
- doing 'cmd-R' (rotate) on a standard few-megabyte image might beachball the app for a few seconds. Rotating a small image file...
- Rotating a video seems to re-encode the whole video, instead of setting some metadata flags. Imagine you have, say, a 20GB video recording, and rotate it. That will now be a separate new 20GB file on your mac drive.
- If i view the album of some specific person that has many pictures with location metadata, and I scroll to the bottom where the map is, it almost immediately starts allocating >100GB memory, beachballs, starts gigabytes of memory paging, and you gotta kill the app asap.
No progress, no indicators. And what little status you get has no connection to reality.
Will it sync? When? Who knows? You’re on WiFi with a full battery and charging? So? Might be a minute, might be an hour. Oh, you restarted Photos? Who cares? Not Photos.
They'll get there. Sometime.
In the 1990s Windows gradually improved, and Windows 95 was on par with Macintosh System 7.5 in terms of features and ease of use. It even had its own UI guidelines. Windows 95 was one of the factors that led to Apple’s troubles in the mid-1990s.
Even though it took over four years for the purchase of NeXT to lead to the first client release of Mac OS X in 2001, Apple distinguished itself from Windows PC vendors in other ways, such as ease of installation and Apple’s pursuit of the “digital hub” where the Mac was the center of a digital lifestyle involving music, digital cameras, and digital camcorders. This was the era of the iPod, iPhoto, iMovie, GarageBand, and related software.
Of course, Mac OS X solved the Mac’s long-standing stability issues, and Mac OS X also came of age when the Windows world was suffering with malware and security issues.
In my opinion, the Mac peaked in the mid-to-late 2000s, where Mac OS X provided users a solid operating system that was easy to use, and where Macs came bundled with a variety of apps from Apple that made it easy to do a lot of tasks many computer users care about, such as organizing music and photos, as well as editing music and videos.
Then came the iPhone and the tremendous profits that came from the iOS ecosystem, and with it came Apple’s shift in strategy, from the Mac being the digital hub to a hub focused increasingly on iOS and Apple’s cloud services. The Mac hasn’t been the main focus, and in my opinion the decline of Mac software is a reflection of Apple’s focus shift.
While Mac OS X in the mid-late 2000s may have been a technologically superior operating system to Classic Mac OS, it was never as easy to use. The loss of the spatial Finder [1] along with the very strong UI consistency of Classic Mac OS apps (including 3rd party apps) left non-power-users behind forever. However, like everyone else in the operating system space, Apple didn't have to care about that because the browser took over and these users stopped doing things in native apps.
Classic Mac OS still can't be beat for working on projects in visual media. The persistence of the spatial Finder is so rock-solid that you can develop muscle memory for where icons will appear on the screen when you open a folder. This allows you to anticipate where they will be and move the mouse toward them before you can even see them (the zooming rectangles animation helps with this).
This method of working exemplifies the core philosophy of what the "desktop metaphor" was all about: having a spatial relationship with documents and tools on a physical desk lets you move your hands and eyes independently, grabbing and interacting with things without having to look at them. Apple worked extremely hard to bring this "illusion" to the Mac OS and no other operating system (including Mac OS X in all its versions up to the present day) has achieved this.
That's because the spatial illusion is very fragile and must be maintained with extreme care. Any loss of persistence (a window opening in a different place, an icon that moved or changed colour) shatters the illusion and puts the user into a defensive, "hunt and click" mode. Imagine cooking or working in a workshop and having someone re-arrange all your utensils or tools while you're away. Your entire workflow gets disrupted and your performance suffers.
Power users survived this disruption (in Mac OS X onwards) by moving to the keyboard and the Terminal, which have the rock-solid physical persistence of the keyboard itself to back them. Any time Apple tried to mess with the keyboard they got a ton of pushback from power users (see the touchbar on older MacBook Pros).
[1] https://archive.arstechnica.com/paedia/f/finder/finder-3.htm
We already know that Apple makes about 51% of its revenue from iPhone sales. Therefore it's reasonable to assume promotion opportunities are mostly centered around iPhone hardware and hardware, rather than MacOS. Those of us who depend on MacOS are likely screwed unless something at Apple changes.
Kinda all large system projects need someone similar to get things done properly.
It turns out I haven't needed it, and I honestly don't remember the last time I've booted into macOS on that system.
I like Apple hardware, but the last time I enjoyed using macOS was pre-2010.
It's ironic after fighting the good fight for so long and finally making their own hardware that Apple should fall on their own sword with software now.
I've been loving Apple since Tiger, I'm still on Sequoia and iOS 18.
Pepe prayge for the 27-releases to be another Snow Leopard as rumored.
Things just work for the most part because backwards compat is hardwired into the folks at Microsoft. Someone did a YouTube video not too long ago installing MS-DOS all the way through Windows 11, upgrading version by version.
[0] Mostly.
Now I return from having spent the intervening years with an Ubuntu laptop and Windows 10 desktop as my daily drivers at home and Windows 11 at work for the last year.
MacOS is so much better than any of the alternatives. Maybe the bar really is just too low but that’s my experience.
The grass is not greener on the other side.
One can still legitimately complain that the grass of their particular backyard is getting ungreener by the minute.
Didn't they get rid of it a couple of years ago?
> The grass is not greener on the other side.
Openbox does everything I need it to. I don’t want Mac or Windows, they both suck in ways I can’t change.
Sure, Linux can be rougher, but at least I’m not helpless here. I can make the changes I need, and the software is generally less broken IME.
Last week I finally decided to jump to Linux. While I realize that I have a few nits and annoying bugs I run in to, its hard to say if linux has any more than the mainstream offerings.
Sure it ain't perfect but it's quite better that the other 2.
I switched away from MacOS at that time.
My last job we were given MacOS machines, I didn't experience anything that made me want to reconsider my decision to ditch MacOS as my daily driver.
I've wondered the same thing as the author about why we even call them "hallucinations." They're errors, the LLM generated an erroneous output.
The term "hallucinations" are an anthropomorphised interpretation of valid output that's factually incorrect. It happens to people all the time (the human brain will make up any missing memories and subconsciously explain away inconsistencies, which only becomes obvious once you're dealing with someone with memory problems), so it feels like a decent term to use for garbage information produced without any ill intent.
The problem lies with the AI companies convincing their customers that the output generated by their tools is probable to mean anything. Probability engines are sold as some kind of chat program or even as some kind of autonomous agent because the output comes close enough to pass the Turing test to most people. LLMs can only mimic intelligence, interactivity, or any other kind of behavior, they cannot actually think or reason.
If people knew what they were operating, the "hallucinations" wouldn't be a problem. Unfortunately, that would take out most of the confidence people have in these tools, so you won't see the AI salesmen provide their customers with reasonable expectations.
Similarly, anyone who claims that LLMs in their current form are going to achieve AGI sounds like Newton bragging that he had solved all of math.
My point was that, from the perspective of the end user, this is an error. If ChatGPT was described as a “random text generator” then sure maybe this wouldn’t be considered an error because “5+5=55” is random text. But that’s not what 90% or ChatGPT users expect nor how the app is marketed, it’s marketed as an Artificial Intelligence Assistant.
Of course it does. I don’t go around complaining that my stove burns me when I touch it. Anyone who knows anything about LLMs at this point knows not to do anything mission critical with them and that’s a good thing.
This saves the individual files of the site in standard format, html, js, css, etc., much like Chrome does with Webpage, Complete.
Not defending the design, but this website is sometimes useful for disambiguating OSStatus error codes: https://www.osstatus.com/
They might be, but unfortunately Apple's MetricKit reporting system is extremely primitive when it comes to crashes. It can't even handle C++ exceptions, and important information like thread/queue names, CPU registers, stack area and app state are strangely absent.
The ridiculously bad crash reporting on Apple products is why I wrote KSCrash.
When you dissolve QA and tell developers “you own quality now,” that knowledge just evaporates. Each developer tests the happy path for their feature and calls it done. The edge cases? The interaction effects? The weird state machines? Those all ship to prod. The really insidious part is the metrics looked great. Velocity up, deployment frequency up, cycle time down. We were measuring output, not outcomes. Exec dashboards showed green across the board while user experience quietly degraded.
Now we’re in the equilibrium state: software ships fast and breaks often, every deploy is a dice roll, and we’ve normalized “hotfix Friday” as just how things work. The velocity gains were real, but we were measuring distance traveled, not value delivered. Turns out “everyone owns quality” means nobody owns quality. Who knew.
Also devs being infra (devops).
Also devs being PMs (product developers).
Also devs being managers (flat orgs).
Also devs being facilitators (rotative scrum masters).
I wonder why expertise is being lost.
That causes churn, which further erodes expertise.
And dealing with the product of any of those topics half assed by a non expert colleague is cause for burnout too.
Pipelines that fail, poorly thought tests, badly written docs… Which reminds me I forgot to add technical writers to the list.
But Apple ships on a schedule. A project’s code is either on the train when it departs, or it’s not. Promo packets depend on shipping, so you take the bugs, and you assign them to next release.
Bugs don’t stop releases, features just occasionally get punted. For every public feature you saw at WWDC that gets delayed because it’s not ready yet, probably 3-4 things shipped with known bugs that just weren’t important enough to punt the feature, so they just ship with the bugs.
QA is not the problem at Apple, because they know about the bugs. The culture of “we ship in September no matter what, nothing holds up the release” is the cause.
Your point should probably culminate in “they need to stop promo’ing for features and start promo’ing for performance and stability”. It’s the only way to satisfy the competing constraints at play.
Bring back specialization. Bring back paying experts for their expertise. Bring back one person having one job.
The idea of owning your own quality only works if you can trust the dev to understand quality, and want to implement it. Independent almost adversarial QA is required when you can't trust the devs.
If anything I'd argue that the 'Shift of QA into Dev' was a first step to the role consolidation and job enshittification we see today.
[0] - I still recall the time where I had a 'bad' bug and he told me "look, nobody died". It was a good benchmark set for understanding "I need to know how dangerous this -could- be."
It’s equally possible for a different woodworker to build a table which will collapse when deployed in a customer’s dining room.
The difference comes down to which woodworker I’ve hired, and how they’ve been trained.
If you can’t trust a woodworker to ship a table that stands under its own weight, layering on third-party QA isn’t really going to fix the underlying problem.
That said, cargo culting the “no QA” model is ill-advised. If a particular dev shop needs QA today, they’ll probably need it tomorrow.
A table is a table. It has one core function. An argument can be made that it could be built in a way that a chair can't be pushed against it for example. But the number of such cases for a table are infinitely smaller than the number of edge cases and unexpected interactions a software system can have.
QA is a way to catch those edge cases that a single developer cannot find because of various reasons. One such reason is that devs are very close to their work and they might subconsciously not trigger the unhappy path in their code.
Testing if a table works is vastly different from testing a software system.
It also paints a picture of a scenario where requiring QA would be more of a red flag than a best practice. It seems a tad silly to imagine a woodworker nailing boards together so they look like a table, then passing to QA to determine if the table is “good enough”, then having QA ship it back with defect reports. But this is exactly what many less-mature teams end up looking like.
You make a good point about unexpected interactions.
I’d argue the question for software isn’t whether QA Bad or QA Good. It’s at what level of complexity does QA become necessary. Most software teams aren’t dealing with all that much complexity (or, more specifically, inherent complexity that can’t be designed away.)
This is a good point. My answer would be that it depends on how many depend on the software and what is the tolerance for unintended interactions that users discover?
Based on which domain the software is written/deployed in, this answer will be different.
Similarly on iOS, Safari bookmarks don't expose all folder names but only "Bookmarks" and "Favourites" as default. Why do I have to do another extra tap to expose a single folder that I have to save bookmark in? Why cannot at least five folder names be exposed? Another absurdity is while saving a fullpage screenshot after cropping it, you have to click the checkmark "emoji" which is otherwise blank with no description, and then comes a sub-menu to save as pdf or photo; why cannot those four options be presented as is on the main menu?
You are definitely not alone:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1979283
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1982717
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2002102
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1995973
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/961898
While there are a few overlapping/similar issues being alluded to in those threads, it definitely seems like something is going on re: task switching. There are also a couple of tricks mentioned that might fix some specific issues related to bookmarks or graphics acceleration, but no silver bullets so far.
As we move forward, we're probably going to discover more hidden gems in the Apple’s ecosystem because, apparently, it's a serious crisis that is not going anywhere anytime soon.
You might be also interested in these related submissions:
Apple's Software Quality Crisis (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43243075)
What Happened to Apple's Legendary Attention to Detail?(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45685551)
This isn't new. Back in GPU-gate days, I had a MBP that I could very reliably kernel panic due to that issue. But it'd pass Diagnostics so "no fix for you!"
Even when I was there with a Genius, we did this, and on a brand new install - look, here, can replicate this KP (which was basically some of the same steps people had for identifying the GPU (and everything else matched up).
I think MacOS stopped you from executing unsigned code pretending to be a pdf, which would be a very good thing.
Since a few years ago, I've chosen to stay at least 1 full version behind the current version and I've never regretted that.
Seems like the author was building to a point and simply decided to end it early.
Reporting an error is a good thing.
Apple software, on the other hand, feels like a totally different company. Stuff like Siri is miles behind the ball, things like Airplay (IME) are flaky with little recourse when they don't work, Liquid glass is slower feeling and a noticeable battery hog. Apple music still has more hiccups and random play stoppage than Spotify.
I really, really like the hardware, but apple software needs some competition. Half of the features in the last 2-3 iOS releases were in Cydia over a decade ago.
> Half of the features in the last 2-3 iOS releases were in Cydia over a decade ago.
And I don’t even care about the features. Just give me stability and reliability. Don’t bluntly break what was working before. Spend some time on bug fixing. Please, Apple.
Airpods are a cash grab solution to a problem that Apple created, and nobody actually had before. They are the exact opposite of a good product; they are Apple squeezing money from its captive audience. If the iPhone hadn't dropped the headphone jack nobody would've bought Airpods, thus the jack was killed.
My understanding was Apple wanted to get rid of cables entirely if they could. It's one of the major pieces of waste and the reason EU forced USB-C on everyone.
Personally I find the airpods great. I use the noise cancellation to sleep.
Or do they just not care?
Did you ever check Apple support forums? The issue reports just go into blackhole without response or with useless robotic replies.
I have. There is a whole power-mod clique over there that just turned me off using the site.
I posted about how to get Launchpad back as the spotlight feature is frustrating to use.
One of the mods posted suicide watch to my response. Asked if they were bot or what were they on about. My post got deleted and their post got edited.
Then I had another mod telling me to "suck it up" and it wasn't just a response directed at myself. When I said it wasn't constructive they responded with insults and deleted my post.
It was all surreal and totally messing with Apples brand.
I use my mac for IntelliJ and Firefox. I guess maybe my usage surface is just really, really small; but I basically never have any problems ... and then others come along and say they're having huge issues.
I see the various updates as they happen and like ... all of them are neutral or minor inconveniences that are resolved next patch, for me.
Very few of these complaints existed when Apple had a more reasonable update schedule for the Mac releasing a new update every 2 years or so.
The Mac’s current update schedule isn’t being driven by the needs of the OS or its customers but by the need to align with iOS.
But, operating systems can be interacting with thousands of different types of components, monitors, external graphics cards, keyboards, mice, printers, etc, in a whole array of different configurations. Nothing like Windows or Linux experience, of course; but not a small number of different situations, each of which can impact the machines in strange ways. And I imagine that's quite hard to track down. You can minimize it, of course, but it's not nothing.
After decades using macOS and significant investment the barrier to change is significant too, even if there was some ideal thing to jump to which there is not. But like others I am chipping away at it where I can, slowly divorcing from the Apple ecosystem, going ever more heterodox. I can see people reaching tipping points at various places, might take quite awhile but the thing is once someone jumps ship you're probably never getting them back and eventually that can add up to them taking others with them. It's just such a damned waste too.
I'm currently on the "meh hardware but solid OS" phase of the cycle - the battery life isn't as good and waking from suspend still (somehow) isn't as seamless, but my Linux of choice (Silverblue) is predictable and transparent - and ultimately if there's a problem it's in my gift to fix it, which is much more comforting to me.
I wonder what they'll do to woo me back next time..
(source - https://www.businessinsider.com/steve-jobs-mobileme-failure-...)
Reporting problems to Apple is downright demoralizing. Most of the time, the bugs remain unassigned, unread, and unsolved. The few that do earn a response, are usually gaslighting.
I suspect that Apple may have hired a whole bunch of less-than-stellar people, and it’s showing. That’s depressing, because I always considered them to be the gold standard.
it's time for a clean slate.
Turned out that I either missed or accidentally denied the permission to access local networks for iTerm. So the `curl` utility installed from Homebrew was silently failing, while the system-provided `/usr/bin/curl` worked fine. Because it has special permission from Apple.
Can I just give the same permission to iTerm? Nope. We are not worthy of that power, and must re-affirm permissions every 30 days for all non-Apple software.
Oh, and these permission popups happen at random moments, including during presentations or meetings. And if you don't accept them, they are silently denied.
Not sure what permission you're referring to or what your curl script is trying to do but `/opt/homebrew/opt/curl/bin/curl http://www.google.com` works just fine on Tahoe from both iTerm2 and ghostty. Looking through the various permission grants, the only one they both have in common is "App Management". They share some file permission grants, but where as iTerm has full disk access, ghostty only has Downloads and removable media. In the past I've found I've needed to add terminals like iTerm to the Developer Tools permission, but ghostty isn't in there currently and curl is still working just fine. And in none of these cases have I ever needed to re-affirm the permission every 30 days.
Any chance you have "disclaim ownership of children" setting enabled in iTerm? Maybe if iTerm is not allowing child processes to use its own permissions, you're having to re-authorize curl specifically (and it's getting updated about once every 30 days?)
> And if you don't accept them, they are silently denied.
This is IMO the correct behavior. If something asks for permission and it's not explicitly granted, then the default should always be denied.
Mwwahahaha. Yep. Curling something neutral like google.com worked fine for me as well. That's how I was verifying that everything was OK.
Now try to do "curl https://192.168.0.1" (or whatever is your local router's IP). It will trigger this request: https://imgur.com/a/tMAApfB
The permission in question is called "Local Network", you can find it in the "Security" section in the control panel. Yeah, their names don't match.
Oh, and negative entries are NOT listed in that panel. So if you deny the request, there is NO indication of that. Anywhere. Logs will also be empty.
> This is IMO the correct behavior. If something asks for permission and it's not explicitly granted, then the default should always be denied.
The keyword is SILENTLY. The permission requests should be logged and made available in a central location, where they can be reviewed.
It's literal recursive WTF. When you start looking at it, it gets worse and worse.
Because it's a macOS dialog, not something that is controlled by applications.
Meanwhile, the genuinely scary "Accessibility" permissions that allow spying over the entire system are granted once and never need to be re-approved.
After experimenting a bit, it seems like:
1) You're right that it doesn't show the rejected apps in the list. Seems like the only way to find that is to query the tcc sqlite db.
2) The permission does apply equally to the built in `curl` as it does to the homebrew installed curl.
3) What it doesn't apply to apparently is the gateway address on your network, regardless of which app you use.
4) It also doesn't apply to all "private" IP space addresses, just ones that are on your subnet. So for example, I have an IOT subnet on my network on its own VPN with a route in the gateway for accessing it from some specific devices on the primary LAN. Without the permission, I can ping and curl (with both the built in and homebrew versions) all of the devices on the IOT subnet. But I can't ping or curl (again with either version) any of the devices on the LAN subnet. Turn the permission on and I can hit everything on the local subnet fine from all the devices.
5) I also validate that the above rules are true even for an application (alacritty in this case) that had never been given permission (in case setting and then removing the permission did something odd)
> The keyword is SILENTLY. The permission requests should be logged and made available in a central location, where they can be reviewed.
This I agree on, the rejected apps should show in the privacy permissions, even if in a collapsed tab/pane so that you can review later. I could swear it used to do this, but maybe I'm thinking of iOS which does do that.
I think this might have been fixed? `codesign -dvvv /usr/bin/curl` no longer prints anything about permissions. I definitely remember investigating this particular point.
> 3) What it doesn't apply to apparently is the gateway address on your network, regardless of which app you use.
Doesn't work for me. I can't ping or HTTP into my gateway from a terminal app that doesn't have this permission.
Edit: apparently pinging the gateway works if you're on WiFi. But not with wired Ethernet. Wow.
No.
Their ergonomics (especially the log viewer) are much worse than sysvinit/syslog, but they mostly work.
I say “mostly”, because, like systemd, sometimes force disabling a broken service silently fails, even after reboot.
Another time I had to work on (and even develop for) a Mac exposed me to System 9. Again, the interface felt unusual (in a different way), but it was very obvious that somebody had thought it through, and made things consistent and discoverable. Drag everything onto everything and see what happens! Sometimes very neat, and much richer than Windows 3.x or CDE.
I loved the first releases of OS X, it was a real Unix at the foundation, and also a really nice, beautiful GUI on top, snappy even on the translucent triangular Macs. I adopted WindowMaker on my Linux machines, and kept to it for some years. I even hoped that OpenStep would help build some semblance of a new common GUI language across the platforms. Sadly, nicer window management I was used to under Linux did not materialize on Macs yet.
Over about two decades since, I was periodically issued a Mac at work, and grew less and less happy with the direction the UI was taking. It became more and more showy and bulky, even though it kept enviable consistency and polish for quite some time. I wished that the UI could do its job and fade away, but it insisted in taking more and more screen space, larger graphics, etc. It rather stubbornly refused most customizations, like selecting a different color instead of the signature silver / platinum / gray, and the Apple's signature blue accents. Only in 2018 the bastion of gray finally fell.
Last few years made things so much... less ideal that it was finally not only me who complained, but even die-hard Mac fans. The prized consistency, coherence, and, well, integral vision started to deteriorate openly. As if there's no single person who oversees the whole GUI experience and keeps it aligned any more. Not as bad as Windows, but... And, well, still no good window management, not even window snapping (except to screen edges, since quite recently). Still no "Alt-Tab"-like switching between windows (not apps). I bet that that feature has been requested by users countless times. No, go use Showtime, or whatnot.
And, yes, the whole signed binaries thing. I understand why it may be beneficial for quite some users. But for a developer, and in general for a user of software not from App Store, it's increasingly annoying. Well, it incentivizes building stuff locally from source. Publishing binaries is effectively $99/year though, AFAICT.
Compared to that, I'm pretty happy with my Linux Xfce setup. It allows me to customize the UI to my heart's content, and it adjusts to my workflows, not the other way around. Yes, I spent some noticeable time on these customizations, but that expense is amortized over at least 20 years (yes, my configs evolved mostly uninterrupted since 2006 or so). When I have to use a Mac, I sometimes try to find equivalents to some of the niceties I have under Xfce (not the most elaborate DE), and mostly find explanations saying that it's not possible on vanilla macOS and I should not want that. Third-party or open-source software sometimes helps quite a bit though; I'm very grateful to the authors of Hammerspoon and Rectangle.
In short, I'm only a sporadic and involuntary user of macOS, and my lack of desire to switch to it only grows with time, despite the superb hardware Apple offers.
(Thank you for reading my rant.)
Scott Forstall was fired for a lot less compared to the mess that Apple’s software is now.