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Comment by iLemming | Hacker News Reader

One of the most annoying things after installing Tahoe for me, that for no good reason an ordinary app would randomly lose its focus. In the midst of my typing. This is unbelievably preposterous and I just can't stop hating Apple for this crap. How the fuck this is acceptable? I just have no words. What makes it even worse that I couldn't even complain about it on their support pages - they just keep removing my comments for being "non-constructive". This is some random bug, and many people have complained about it, how am I suppose to make it "more constructive"? Send them the exact configuration of constellations, the number of monitors I use and their positioning angles, log the keyboard rate and delay, the latency, the level of magnetic interference caused by my Bluetooth devices, etc.?

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That is incidentally one of the many papercuts that are widely accepted in Windows, but never were a problem on a mac.

Don’t try to interact with a windows desktop while it is still booting up. Better to wait for everything to settle down, otherwise apps will constantly snatch away focus and your typing will go into random applications.

I recently built a windows PC again for gaming. Haven't used one for years. Everything's fresh, loads of room on hard drives etc and still sometimes it'll just be weird and needs a reset. But it doesn't surprise me, it's sad we've come to tolerate that from the world's most popular OS.

I have a Windows 11, macOS and Ubuntu Desktop VM that I alternate across throughout the week, I find I need to reset all three periodically to sort out random weirdness. It has more to do with which machine I've used most in the last few weeks not which OS is in-use in my experience.

Familiarity might be the biggest differentiator. I switch between windows on my work computer and fedora gnome on my personal computer (and only interact with Debian server over ssh) so I am more at ease on Windows than I am with something like cachy OS and KDE.

I have the same setup, just Arch instead of ubuntu on my laptop and I very rarely have any issues (like maybe once per month) that require me to reboot.

Once every few weeks and once per month seem pretty much the exact same - and about in line with my own experience with Windows on my work machine.

I have Win10, mac and Ubuntu, in 3 different machines I'm using constantly. None of them is perfect, but windows is just infuriating, macos in the middle, and I can more or less live with ubuntu...

And as always, I imagine Mac hardware with Ubuntu.

In my case I have 3 different computers. So no. The Ubuntu is a Z book

I agree.

Mac OS used to be rock solid. We had machines at work that had uptime measured in years. My own machine would go months.

It doesn’t anymore. Restarted twice today.

> the world's most popular OS

Wikipedia claims that Android "has the largest installed base of any operating system in the world", if you're going to measure popularity that way.

(Of course it's hard to know how to define an OS. Is Android a kind of Linux? Are the various things called "Windows" or "MacOS" to be regarded as different versions of the same OS just because marketing people decided to use the same name? If not, how much similarity in code or design is required?)

I assumed he was talking about desktop OS

Can you even consider Android a singular OS? I personally don't in the same way I don't consider Fedora and Ubuntu the same OS, and there's far more differences between something like HyperOS and AOSP/PixelUI as there is between Ubuntu and Fedora.

Android is an app platform.

App platforms are operating systems.

Didn’t someone recently uncover that this was usually do to ram losing bits over time? ECC would fix it? Maybe I’m misremembering

As an aside, unless you are playing games that need NT kernel anticheat or are using a store other than steam, odds are the overall experience and performance is better on linux at this point.

And even Mac is doing well with games, most of my library runs natively. Baldurs Gate 3 runs better on the newer Apple chips than my somewhat aging gaming PC.

Depends on your hardware. On my machine cyberpunk runs at 40fps on Linux but around 60fps on windows. Which is annoying as I’d rather it be better

Yeah it's just the kernel anti-cheat now which is keeping me on windows. I'm fully ready to swap to linux but unfortunately I do like to play games that need it.

> the world's most popular OS.

No.

Most common? Loathed? Used? Most tolerated?

It’s not liked, and ‘popular’ implies that.

I'd say that most PC users have vague knowledge that linux or MacOS exists.

Popular as in populous as in numerical

Did the same just end of last year, NVME drive, gobs of RAM, and yet... sometimes the whole UI freezes solid for multiple seconds at a time when I close one out of my 30-40 Chrome tabs. I know it's not a cheap app to run, but this doesn't happen on MacOS.

This is a constant irritation for me on Windows.

I work on a desktop Windows/Mac application that takes forever and a day to launch (CAD package), and pops up a million pop-ups during the process. I try to get minor admin tasks done while it is compiling/launching, but it steals focus every 10 seconds!

Still beats using XCode, though

Windows 11 also broke the active window from focusing when waking from sleep. Whenever I wake my PC, no window is active. I'll still have a fullscreen Chrome or whatever, but if I try to do Ctrl+T to open a tab nothing happens because nothing is in focus. I have to Alt+Tab once to bring it into focus.

Change the ForegroundLockTimeout registry setting to increase the timeout, or you can set it to the max integer value to never let the app steal the focus.

by default if you haven't typed anything for a little bit Windows allows an application to steal focus. If you change that value you can prevent windows from ever stealing focus or change how long they have to wait before they're allowed to.

> Don’t try to interact with a windows desktop while it is still booting up

I experience the same with macOS. For example Discord steals focus.

I remember using the NT5 betas (that became Win2k) and being so pleased that the focus (not) stealing was working much better. They "fixed" that for the final release

They have changed the default focus lock timeout behavior over the years, but you can still very easily tweak it to whatever you want

> That is incidentally one of the many papercuts that are widely accepted in Windows

A flashing cursor in an inactive text box. Possibly the most annoying of bugs.

Looking at you Windows, COMRAD and every login I ever do.

I've been beefing about this for decades; X Window didn't do this by default and you could adjust window manager behavior however you liked to prevent windows stealing focus in X, even for newly realized windows. Microsoft Windows decided for some reason the newest window gets focus, which is annoying as heck. I really don't want my attention involuntarily switched because my window manager things it knows better than I do where I should be looking.

You want to change the ForegroundLockTimeout registry key or set it via power shell.

Windows has a ton of little settings you can tweak like this if it's not working quite how you like it.

I personally tweak it the other way to allow a window to pop up and still focus sooner .

If you set up via PowerShell you can do it more dynamically and if you're doing it via the API there's behavior in there too force a lock

Check/change your ForegroundLockTimeout registry value.

Macs have largely been the same. It is just a matter of buzy compute and letting all the accumulated tasks complete.

When you buy powerfull computers, this problem basically doesn't exist, both on Windows or macOS. Since Macs have historically been more expensive and premium, even the cheaper model was powerfull enough to finish the boot sequence fast enough that the desktop would feel snappy almost instantly. On the other hand, cheap PCs struggle to accomplish every task in a timely manner.

I am amazed about how stupid and ignorant is the average Mac fanboy. I have been a Mac user first and foremost, but you guys are just full of shit.

The support pages are not for you to contact Apple. They are there for users to help other users. The cynical person would say they are there to get unpaid labor from other users so Apple can spend less on support.

If you want to report something to Apple you use the "Feedback Assistant App"

The support pages are exactly this. They're called Level 0 support in most companies internally.

"Just award them with some stars or points or whatever, and they'll be happy."

I wish these people would wake up and spend their time helping peers on a forum for some open source project instead.

There's a bunch of hyperactive people in those Apple "support" forums who don't actually help anyone. They respond to almost every discussion thread aggressively deflecting any criticism directed at Apple.

They pretend to offer "solutions" so their posts don't come across as unconstructive, but their solutions are always essentially the same, often culminating in a factory reset. There is never any attempt to get to the bottom of anything or diagnose what the actual issue is.

They are volunteering their time to make people shut up, bow their head in shame and go away. I don't think this is what you want in an open source project.

That may be true to some extent but I am still often able to find some kind of answer, granted it's often just "NO, Apple doesn't do this".

Indeed. Apple should close those forums. It damages their brand to have such antagonistic people pretending to be support agents. A company of Apple's wealth could afford to have a small army of people in the Philippines do the same job with much less aggression.

Wholeheartedly agree. The few times in my life that I’ve bothered to post there with a problem, it’s been all the more upsetting that the patronizing generic advice and scolding of the frustrated users, is coming from random volunteer fanbois on the Internet, not even paid Apple staff who contractually have to be positive about Apple. A company with such rabidly loyal supporters shouldn’t deploy them like this. And if it was wise back in 2010 when Apple software was for the most part quite good… it sure isn’t wise now when they’re reaching what I hope is a temporary nadir in quality.

I don't think anything Apple does at this point can damage their brand. It's indestructible.

Tim Cook runs a well oiled machine. At some point, leadership will change. And I don’t think it is as simple as, “Just keep going what Tim was doing.” There are so many moving parts that it is nigh certain Apple will go through a period of brand damage when things begin to fall through the cracks. Will that fall be dramatic? Probably not. But I think you underestimate just how much a shift in leadership can tip the scales.

>small army

Instead we get:

https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/669252

>”… Now, the few Apple engineers that get back to me for some of these issues and the Apple support as well often tell me that Apple really cares about customer feedback. I really want to believe this ... but it's so hard to believe it, if less than 1% of my submitted reports (yes, less than 1%, and it's probably much less) ever gets a response. A response, if it ever comes, can come after 3 months, or after 1 year, or after 3 years; only rarely does it come within 1 month. To some of the feedbacks, after getting a response from the Apple engineers, I responded, among other things, by asking if I'm doing something wrong with the way I submit the feedback reports. Because if I do something wrong, then that could be the reason why only so few of them are considered by the Apple engineers. But I never got any answer to that. I told them that it's frustrating sending so much feedback without ever knowing if it's helpful or not, and never got an answer. …”

Why is this Apple’s path?

I pretty much expect 0 support from any major company unless I am covered with juicy Enterprise support contract. They are too big to care.

Same! Though—

In my exp. their _support_ is fantastic which is another reason it’s odd they will simply leave countless _feedback_ submissions open nearly indefinitely. They ignore their free laborers!

I wonder if other cult brands attract the same kind of personalities, or if Apple has somehow done something special to encourage it. When a Harley Davidson owner says he has a problem with his bike, do Harley zealots jump out of the woodwork to attack the dissenter and defend the brand from which they derive their personality?

Given that it appears in Windows, I presume if there was a Harley Davidson support forum, there'd be fanatics defending them there.

(They do defend them IRL, it's "commonly known" that HDs have issues that the install base "overlooks".)

“ When a Harley Davidson owner says he has a problem with his bike, do Harley zealots jump out of the woodwork to attack the dissenter and defend the brand from which they derive their personality?”

I’m no Harley owner but you and I both know the answer to that.

Honestly I'm not sure. Motorcycle interest might select against relevant personality traits/disorders. Maybe they bond over commiseration over Harley's decline (a narrative I've heard of)

Fanatical supporters of brands with a high defect rate are a thing. Norton motorcycles. A broad range of English cars. Amiga computers.

This shows up in a lot of other areas, like small game companies that have a devoted following. It can get pretty nasty because these types of people are able to be condescending just short of ToS, while baiting other people into crossing the line. A common thread is weak moderation or biased moderation.

As a developer, it's easy to be blind to this because they're on "your side", but it's bad for the health of your support forums.

Yes, fanbois, lecturing people that they're using it wrong.

It's not just on Apple's forums, Microsoft has the same kind of guys. They tend to look really popular too because all the other fanbois upvote their comments.

And not only there, many open-source software forums have the same problem.

Exactly same are the Google “support forums”.

At least you know it’s not working as place to submit issue reports. It is better than other way, like Figma, 1Password and many others: a Support Forum with an army of yes-men “support specialists”. They would answer your query with basic troubleshooting and then will say that it will be passed to development team or will be considered, etc. perfectly designed system to pacify user and dismiss their report.

Are those the people who recommend "fixes" like resetting the PRAM / NVRAM to solve application level issues, or who recommend removing all files from the Desktop to somehow speed up general responsiveness? The Apple pages are awash with them.

Then we would have zero support, or they would shut down the forums entirely. Or are you implying that the companies would be forced to finally offer official support?

There is official support. Apple Support should be more deluged with callers, but they rely on these forum mod suckers to carry water for them and tell people it’s their fault to lessen that load.

For Windows support I assume it accrues some benefit to the unpaid support, like it contributes to them getting their Microsoft Certified Windows End User Support Helpful Guy badge.

> If you want to report something to Apple you use the "Feedback Assistant App"

and watch years go by with no fixes or improvements to basic OS fundamentals.

> Feedback Assistant

They finally found a marketable name for /dev/null.

well said. well, sad. but true ...

As an Easter egg, I wonder if they can make it accept input in stdin and just discard it. If I was working there and didn’t mind burning some bridges (I’m not sure how many people would get wind of it as it’s quite obscure) I would be tempted to implement it.

This is starting to make sense. In the past I've been confused at a seemingly useful question thread there and the answer from some other user there with some like "top support user" badge or something, is just not an answer at all, and then the thread gets locked because they deemed it resolved.

> They are there for users to help other users.

lol. Can't tell you how many times I've clicked "I have this problem too" on a page where users can't help each other because apple is doing/hiding something stupid.

I've been troubleshooting this on and off since early December.

There's a handy Python script here to show log which application is stealing focus: https://superuser.com/a/874314

If you find it's SecurityAgent then you might be hitting this bug: https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/807112

I suspect it's related to a JIT privilege management app my company uses.

My MacBook is corporate, and it's therefore loaded with a ton of corporate auto-update, VPN and apparently questionnaire software. Stuff pops up at the most annoying times. And sometimes, indeed it takes focus away from the thing I'm currently typing. Extremely annoying.

But apparently Apple is not the only offender. Just as I was typing this (on Harmonic on Android), a popup popped up, ate a few of the characters I typed and disappeared again. No idea what it said. Why do people do this? Don't hijack let applications I didn't ask for hijack my input.

I wonder whether this could be a touchpad malfunction, causing phantom clicks that move focus. To diagnose, you could temporarily disable it and use an external mouse.

External mice also suck with macOS though.

Not sure why this is getting downvotes, it's absolutely true. For a very long time you couldn't even set different scroll directions for external mice and the touchpad - even if it's (maybe? I forget) supported now it's always been an area Apple didn't care about and was far behind Windows and Linux.

I assume it’s getting down votes because it’s off-topic. The parent comment was suggesting external mice as a temporary measure to debug the intermittent issue they’re facing.

Whether or not external micr suck on MacOS doesn’t really matter. The objective was to diagnose an issue.

Well, if the suggestion is to use an alternative for a while to diagnose an issue that causes equivalent or even worse issues, then it might not be(come) very debuggable.

It's not supported as of now. Tools like Scroll Reverser are still needed to specify scrolling behavior between the touchpad and an external mouse.

Recent switcher to macos. I can't find a way to separately set mouse acceleration and scroll wheel momentum.

I use a trackball for RSI reasons, in order to get across the screen in a single flick means high sensitivity, mouse acceleration is absolutely needed to be able to make small movements. This makes my scroll wheel useless because a single scroll moves the page about 1/10 of a line

I will pile on here and claim Apple is shockingly hostile to accessibility. From the weird way tabs work for focus to the limited options for text clarity, to the lack of control for mice customization, it feels like it has been a low item on their priorities for some time.

Have you tried Better Mouse? IIRC, it can set different settings per HID.

I cant use mice without https://linearmouse.app to adjust acceleration. (0$)

Oh is that supported now? I've always used some tool (ScrollReverser) to fix this.

Another comment suggests that third-party tools are still required and that Apple still hasn't added support for this, which makes me wonder if anyone at Apple uses an external mouse or if this is a scenario they literally don't care about.

That was my experience as well. macOS adopted the iOS UI pattern of list cells using a swipe gesture to show a delete button and other actions. This doesn’t work with mouse and you have to use the right click context menu. This is a constant annoyance when switching between the Mac with an external mouse and the one with a trackpad, as it breaks your muscle memory.

Gotta use Scroll Reverser unfortunately. Sometimes even that breaks though. Sad

Shortcuts.app and AppleScript works for this.

I have a Logitech MX Vertical and it works flawlessly.

I have a great time using my G502 on macOS, but I absolutely rely on SteerMouse to configure its behavior.

the steermouse g502 combo is just incredible. been my staple for years

i have a logitech mx something and it's absolutely awesome.

Those are great but often expensive mice. I wish the Apple tax didn't extend to third party hardware, but here we are.

It's not really an Apple tax. Those are just great mice, and I've used variations of them on Linux for more than a decade.

(except that my latest one has just suffered catastrophic battery failure)

Catastrophic? Like a battery fire?

It has just stopped holding charge. It can be 100% charged according to Solaar, unplug the cable and it is discharged in < 1 minute. Warranty replacement on the way.

I loved my Performance MX. I finally had to replace it at work (software wouldn't install after migrating to Windows 11) and the MX Master 3 I got seems much ergonomically worse to me. I also am not a fan of the thumb wheel replacing buttons. Only thing I won't complain about is that the resolution is better. From testing my coworkers' mouses (older Masters) I'm pretty sure they have each been a step downhill from my perspective.

My sister in law gave me her G700S to fix the main button microswitches, and she convinced me that it's the apotheosis of the design - it's what should have replaced the Performance MX. No soft-touch plastic, extra buttons, and the higher resolution sensor. I'll probably have to get one off eBay.

Edit: also all of the Masters have non-user-replaceable batteries.

But the battery only lasts a day or two. The G604 is almost as nice, but battery lasts weeks. But it will likewise need switch replacements before long and is likewise no longer made. None of Logitech's current mice fill the same niche. Why do they discontinue their most popular mice without replacing them? Who can say. I'm pretty confident a direct 700/604 replacement with better switches would sell well.

> But the battery only lasts a day or two

Yes, but the battery is standard and easily replaceable.

My main gripe with the G700s is the weight, although it's not much heavier than the mx master 3. It also helps to have a great mousepad, or else I get tired of pushing that brick around. There are also aftermarket pads if you use it on the desk and they wear. I haven't tried any, though, my pads are still fine.

> Yes, but the battery is standard and easily replaceable.

The G604 that the prior post referenced uses a single AA battery, so also standard and easily replaceable.

I have a 20-year-old hard plastic gaming mouse pad I use at home and it's terrific. At work I have some promotional neoprene covered pad with a terrible Qi charger on one side. The mouse pad similarly works great. The biggest annoyance I have with these things is that I have replaced the switches on all of them, the process of which tends to destroy the skates. None of the replacement skate kits ($10, highway robbery) on eBay or Amazon or whatever include the thick adhesive like the originals, and all the foam tape I can find is too thick, so I've taken to building up layers of double sided tape until they are both even and proud of the recesses in the mouse. This isn't exactly a criticism of Logitech except that they could absolutely sell repair parts for their peripherals and they don't.

I can't say I like the 604 from looking at it, but that's a pretty surface level judgment and I'd have to use it to really compare. For my purposes a rechargeable mouse that lasts more than a day is fine because I'm using this at work and I just plug it in when I leave. Having a replaceable rechargeable battery also means if it starts running out of juice before one day I can just pop in a new battery and it'll be good for a couple more years.

G604s are pretty annoying to open up but if you don't want to solder on eBay they have full replacement boards that you can just drop in that have new switches already soldered in there for you.

You have to use third party software to configure them properly, then they work fine. I used logitech’s drivers for a while but they’ve become the biggest pile of garbage I have ever seen call itself a driver. I now use BetterMouse instead.

Depends on the mice. As a sibling says, Logitech mice with their drivers work great. The app isn't great and loads a boatload of javascript crap. Can't vouch for bettermouse, never tried it.

Another option which sidesteps the Logi Options crap is Logitech "gaming" mice. These have an integrated memory that actually remembers the configuration set by the driver. So, you only have to put up with the shitty experience once, and then the mouse remembers those settings wherever you use it. Some models can actually remember multiple setting sets.

One of my best mice is a G700s. I haven't used the Logitech G crap in like... ten years? The mouse is still going strong. Its only issue is that it goes through batteries like a hot knife through butter. I like it so much, I actually bought a second one for work. Got it used, since they weren't making them anymore.

The window losing focus but OP reports is due to this:

https://support.logi.com/hc/en-us/articles/37493733117847-Op...

Which would only happen if you are using it wireless.

It happened to me this morning.

> Logitech mice with their drivers work great.

That's not macos fault in this case, it's just that Logitech mouses (MX Master at least) doesn't act well at all without driver. Like, for scrolling, it's like the mouse is sending raw smooth scrolling each time you just touch the wheel and without the driver that presumably fake it on the computer side, there is no synchronisation between your actual scroll and the steps you physically feel in the wheel.

a touchpad malfunction that only happens after an OSX update?

Yes, there is a very large amount of software that's involved in making touchpads work and that software is part of the OS.

I once had a vexing problem with my old Intel MacBook — macOS failed to boot, but Windows seemed totally normal. Can't possibly be a hardware failure, right? The symptoms disappeared after replacing the SATA cable!

This reminds of the infamous GPU issues of the unibody models (the last non-retina ones). I have one such 2012 15" MBP which has a dedicated GPU which, as I understand it, has developed soldering issues.

Non-Mac OSs don't know how to turn this GPU on out of the box, so it just sits there without bothering anybody. But, for some reason, MacOS turns it on and it craps the bed, rendering the machine unusable.

I had the 2010 version of this model, with the same symptoms starting in mid 2011. I would get 5-8 crashes a day from the GPU being on the fritz.

Apple ended up replacing the mainboard in a free out-of-AppleCare repair. I never had the problem again and I used the machine regularly until about 2018.

In my case, it lasted one or two more years, and I only learned about the repair after they stopped offering it. By that time, the machine had already been replaced for other, unrelated reasons.

When your trackpad worked in a previous OS version and suddenly don't in the newest, that's called a software bug. Not a trackpad malfunction.

Trackpad malfunction may be hardware, or it may be software, but in either case it more clearly specified the issue than simply "software bug".

I have similar behaviour on a Mac Mini, and only since Tahoe.

I've had the same issue while using external mouse and keyboard, so I definitely don't touch the touchpad.

But was the touchpad disabled at the time? Phantom touches could happen even if your hand is not near the touchpad.

My hand was at least 40cm away from the touchpad, no it wasn't disabled.

It's not, it's just increasingly badly made. Started creeping in the release before Sequoia

Focus stealing has been an issue in windowed multi-tasking environments from the beginning. It's certainly been an issue in all macOS/OS X versions I've used since I started in 2011.

I've been using windowed multi-tasking environments since 1986. Never been a problem for me (SunOS -> Solaris -> Linux). I rely very, very, very much on focus-follows-mouse.

This bug isn't that. It's the frontmost app losing focus to nothing.

You are using it wrong.

Just install the SuperTyping app. It's sooo good and intuitive. Totally worth the $189, if you consider how often you need to type something.

I also recommend Little Snitch as firewall and Parallels for virtualization.

Does anyone have a recommendation for bootloader or filesystem app? Preferably subscription model for intuitive accounting.

Agreed. Since sharing input between multiple applications (and the OS services) is its primary role, you would think that UI designers would have “thou shalt not steal focus” as a commandment, but that is not the case.

My latest version of the problem is with Ubuntu Gnome. Upgrade software and, later, you will be interrupted with a pop-up window to enter your system password. Not only is this an interruption, I’m always doubtful that this is the system asking for a sudoer password!

UIs, in my experience, are very bad at handling “interrupts”. Sorry, my dad designed chips, so I use that hardware term when talking about notifications and other times another application needs to notify or get the input from user. Personally, I’d have the UI change the color/texture of the system menubar/taskbar and wait for the user to click it.

Dont get me started on the number of times Signal/formerly Skype opened up a dialog in-the-midst of me typing and me accidentally accepting a call because i happened to write 'space' at that moment in time

I have no information to add, but I also have started experiencing this after “upgrading” to Tahoe. Never was a problem before.

Interesting. This is exactly the problem I've begun to have on my 14" M2 MB Air. I'm on 15.7.3. The issue started with 15.7.1.

Here I've been thinking it's a hardware problem, like some sort of mechanical intermittent. Maybe not.

I looked into this and the issue is the inbuilt SecurityAgent briefly taking focus. For me I believe it’s related to some management setting our company has added not getting on with Tahoe.

Tahoe made at least one undocumented change to timer events in the GUI. This resulted in a difficult to debug problem in solvespace. I suspect we were doing something "wrong" and had to correct it, but the fact remains they made a change to how some GUI events work and didn't tell anyone.

I have experienced the same, and still have no idea what is going on.

Especially annoying when every app is likely to have single-key shortcuts which end up being accidentally triggered.

Do you have Admin by Request on your machine (if its a company laptop). That was the culprit for me.

> how am I suppose to make it "more constructive"?

Obviously by shutting the hell up, you ungrateful serf. The beatings will continue until morale improves.

Seriously, though, if you want this to stop, people like you are going to have to start voting with their wallets.

I finally pulled the plug on macOS a couple years ago for Linux, and I haven't been unhappy about it. However, I did make a point of buying a laptop that was well supported on Linux (a Lenovo X1 Carbon that was in the same price class as an equivalent Mac).

I did the same a decade ago, and I've been fully content with my Linux-only life - but a new MacBook recently arrived along with a new job, so now I'm using Tahoe whether I like it or not. It's generally difficult to vote with someone else's wallet.

Well, be glad you're working for a company that is still willing to stump up properly for hardware.

Too many companies are balking at spending money on hardware right now. While I would love to think that this will drive Linux adoption, it probably won't. Microsoft is going to cave on TPM 2.0 for Windows 11 or extend Windows 10 support much further.

I can't speak for all companies, but the feeling I get from mine is that the issue is more about the maintenance and support for Mac rather than the little extra spend to get a MacBook pro instead of the standard windows box.

It will be interesting to see how RAM prices affect the behavior of all companies.

I wouldn't mind if this finally lights a fire under certain software companies to also actually optimize their shit for memory use, but... I'm not that optimistic.

Don't worry, Microsoft has your cloud desktops all ready to go! Very little RAM needed.

Happened to me many times. As my other colleagues, I ran a Linux VM inside macOS. The overhead is not that large and is totally worth the sanity. Of course I had to use a few corporate-managed macOS apps, like Zoom, or Outlook, but this is not a very big deal.

The IT department must hate you. I’m not in IT but I think it’s hard to be compliant with some kinds of regulations if you allow end users to run VMs.

The dev environment is Linux anyway, mirroring the production environment.

It's literally impossible to run docker containers on mac without virtualization. An IT dept that forbade developers with macs from virtualizing would be facing a lack of developement in any company using docker/k8s

I’m in the same situation, have to use Mac for SOC2 reasons after having used Linux for 10 years. The apps are fine, it’s the KDE window management I miss the most, and a VM won’t really help there.

Why, running KDE in VirtualBox in full-screen mode must be fine :) At least, I did it breathlessly with Xfce, on much older Apple hardware, and it was... just fine.

(OTOH running text-mode Emacs from a headless VM in a full-screen built-in Terminal may suddenly feel sluggish. Kitty or WezTerm solves this.)

Last time I tried, it didn't work well (or at all) with multiple monitors.

> people like you are going to have to start voting with their wallets.

You think I CHOSE to be miserable? Sorry, I have kids, and you know, they don't exactly live on dog food, but even that costs money. My job requires me to use a Mac. And please don't tell me to "find a better job". I've been programming for over twenty years, only once I was given a clearance to pick "whatever kind of machine you want". For my personal computing I do use Linux.

Random possibility - if you have Bartender installed, it's buggy as shit on Tahoe, and has some really weird stuff it does with hiding the cursor and otherwise changing the focus around. I haven't switched off yet because the alternatives don't anywhere near as much functionality, but I probably will at some point soon, because while the updates have made it somewhat better it's still a pretty terrible experience at times.

Avoid using Bartender:

https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/1d8a0wv/if_you_are...

https://talk.macpowerusers.com/t/bartender-change-of-ownersh...

Never heard of Bartender before, seems to be this:

> superpowered your menu bar, giving you total control over your menu bar items, what's displayed, and when, with menu bar items only showing when you need them.

Which also, for some reason has permission to record your desktop and recently had a change of owner? I'd be reformatting my computer so quickly if I found this out about software on my computer...

I replied to the parent post, but in short, I used it through a subscription service that specifically didn’t update until the ownership issues were clarified to their (and ultimately my) satisfaction.

The screen recording permissions are needed for it to be aware of when menu bar icons update so it can move them in and out of the menu bar; I believe later versions allow you to skip screen recording permissions if you’re willing to forgo that feature.

Yep, I’m aware of the (incredibly-poorly-handled) change of ownership. I’ve been using it through a SetApp[1] subscription, and they stayed on the pre-acquisition version for quite a while; long enough that enough details came out about the new owner and I felt _relatively_ okay with continuing to use it after it got updates, especially going through another party. The Tahoe issues are making me rethink that heavily now - but the alternatives I briefly looked at when I upgraded to Tahoe all seemed incredibly lacking in one way or another, and I haven’t wanted to blow up my menu bar yet again :/

[1]: https://setapp.com/

If all you need is to hide infrequently-used menu entries so they don't spill under the notch, then zNotch is a pretty good alternative.

Oh decent timing, this happened to me first time today, I even looked down at the track pad to see if my hand was close enough to accidentally swipe it because I felt it wasn't

Do you have a logitech mouse? If so you need to reinstall the logi and/or G Hub apps. The cert changed and that's what's causing it to fail and keep grabbing focus away. Incredibly strange bug.

https://support.logi.com/hc/en-us/articles/37493733117847-Op...

Delinia does this currently (I don’t think the fix is public yet).

You can run a python script to track the focused window every few seconds to identify what’s stealing focus.

By chance are you using any Logitech stuff? I have a similar issue and narrowed it down to one of the Logi Options taking focus away randomly.

I had the same issue, and in my case it turned out it was caused by Logitech G Hub which was running in the background. I uninstalled it and did not experience the issue again. My suggestion is to check any background process that might be doing that.

I had this, it was our company's security software prompting an update (Admin by Request) that was getting hidden. An update to that software and the latest tahoe update seems to have resolved that issue.

> One of the most annoying things after installing Tahoe for me, that for no good reason an ordinary app would randomly lose its focus. In the midst of my typing.

So its not just me!

I updated to iPadOS 26 on my iPad Pro, opened Safari, and tried to log into a website. For some reason the full-screen keyboard didn't load, all I could get was a miniature thing that floated on the left part of the screen (like the two-handed layout but with the full keyboard in one half, like typing on an iPhone 5s).

The memes about Steve Jobs turning in his grave are true. He would not have stood for slop like this for even a moment. Apple's quality game was miles higher back in the day.

Even if they tried to do some kind of Snow Leopard maintenance release for all of their products, I don't think they could raise the bar on quality high enough in just a single release. They'd have to do it a few times with nothing new to show for it.

This speaks nothing of the transition to MacOS looking more and more like a dysfunctional toy since Jony Ive left and Alan Dye took over.

Tiger and Snow Leopard were the peak.

If only Stevesie was still here to roll some heads :(

I appreciate your frustration, but at the same time what is Apple supposed to do? If it's affecting only a tiny number of users, and you just happen to be an unlucky one, and they don't know how to reproduce it, and you can't help them reproduce it, then what? I think they just have to wait until somebody (such as yourself) is able to figure out with some kind of logging what is happening. E.g. the first question to answer is probably what actually gets the focus, if anything? To produce a bug report that at least suggests which area of code might be responsible.

I had a similar problem at one point, then finally figured out it was when I accidentally hit the fn button which triggered the emoji picker window and moved focus to it (IIRC), but it was off-screen because I'd previously used it on a secondary monitor. Reconnecting the monitor and moving the window back to my primary display fixed it. (Obviously, it's a bug to show a picker window outside of visible coordinates, and I think it got fixed eventually.)

But it also might not be Apple at all, if it's some third-party background utility with a bug. E.g. if that were happening to me, my first thought would be that it might be a Logitech bug or a Karabiner-Elements bug. Uninstalling any non-Apple background processes or utilities seems like a necessary first step.

I can tell you bartender 6 has been perpetually broken since release and does this. I finally gave up on it after the devs sent me “fixes” that never fixed anything.

Windows has had a “prevent apps from stealing focus” option for at least a decade. It was one of the things that I still dislike the most about macOS, and Apple can absolutely address this.

Windows has no such option, and regularly steals focus, particularly Visual Studio/Debug tools/applications loading. It had an option for a short period with the original TweakUI, but Microsoft removed support for it even in the registry.

No OS should steal focus, Windows absolutely is guilty of it.

Many Linux display managers let you chose what to do, when a window requests focus. For me on Sway, it just turns the border red.

I chose what happens after. Can recommend. I wasn't even aware of my privilege.

Windows itself isn't guilty of this in my experience (lifetime of use until Linux switch last year), but other apps like shitty Akamai. Some years ago a coworker wrote this blog post and a simple tool to find out which programs are doing it: https://forwardscattering.org/post/30

Windows is absolutely guilty of this, and it is trivial to reproduce.

Reproduction steps:

- Start a reply to this comment in your browser, type some example words.

- Create a BAT file with the following contents:

         @echo off
         timeout /t 15 /nobreak >nul       
         start notepad.exe         

  - Run the BAT file.   

  - Immediately switch back to the browser tab, and place your focus into the HN reply box. Type a word. 

  - Wait for notepad to open   

  - Continue typing. Your typing will go into Notepad and not the browser tab you had focused last.

This occurs commonly and continuously on Windows, it is damn obnoxious. The OS should never ever change focus, it should however flash the window/taskbar, that is acceptable, but not shift my typing into whatever arbitrary program opened. This used to be fixable via "ForegroundLockTimeout" which is what classic TweakUI altered, but was killed in Vista.

If you're a Visual Studio user, it is a daily annoyance. You hit Start/Play, go about your work, and then suddenly some time later focus shifts out from under you.

I'm running Windows (25H2, 26200.7462). I used the batch file you pasted and tried your repro steps, multiple times (I started writing this comment, in fact). It didn't steal focus. (Edit: See below). I'm quite sure that I haven't had a steal-focus issue at the OS level for many years, and I use Windows all day, every day. I'm also a Visual Studio user.

Edit: I tried it with Firefox and got a repro there. No stealing with Edge.

Why does a window manager allow applications to steal focus?

Focus should change only in response to user commands.

I've found that the login dialog in Win 11 no longer consistently takes focus on the password field. Really annoying to login blind and find your typing was rejected because it doesn't do the sensible thing any more.

When I hit Win+L to lock my screen and come back 4 hours later to input my pin, I turn on my monitor (that I turned off because every 5 minutes Windows turns it on and off again), push esc or Ctrl a few times to clear off the image, and start typing in my PIN. 90% of the time by the time my monitor displays the picture, it's sitting at the unlock screen with the last 2 digits of my 4-digit PIN

Where's that hiding? Discord is horrifically guilty of this across every OS, so I'd love a way to quash that on at least one.

GNOME on Linux prevents it. You get a notification "Discord updater is ready" instead which you can activate if you want to give it focus - which I never do. F the Discord updater.

Adobe programs were the worst offenders for this in my experience.

How does that even work?

When you launch an application or open a dialog, you expect the new window to "steal" focus. When you close a dialog, you expect focus to go back to the main window. If it didn't, it would impair usability.

So how would an OS decide when "stealing focus" is allowed and when it is not?

Like, I'm frustrated with it too. I hate when an app pops up a dialog while I'm typing and my next keystroke dismisses it and I have no idea what I've done. But at the same time, I'd hate to have to manually switch focus to a pop-up dialog every single time before dismissing it with Enter or Escape too -- that would be way too annoying in the other direction.

Dunno, not deleting the posts would be a good start.

Exactly. They're just acting like Trump during the pandemic - "no testing - no cases..." Why not just keep the posts and allow people exchange ideas for workarounds?

> ... what is Apple supposed to do? ...

This seems like an example of a situation that modern machine learning could help with. Take bug reports permissively and look through all of them for patterns. Loss of focus should be the kind of thing that would stand out and could be analyzed for similarities and recurring features. Making sense of large amounts of often vague and rambling reports has been a problem for a long time and seems like a domain that machine learning is well set for.

They could throw some small portion of their billions of dollars into proper quality control and reproduce it themselves if they wanted to. It’s an industry-wide malaise, but it isn’t inevitable. It’s amazing that every year it becomes more and more economically nonviable for basic shit to meet the most modest standards of usability, yet we can use the power consumption of a small country to have Copilot in Notepad.

The way I see it, money can’t buy one of the most important ingredients: the motivation to do the best work of your life. No matter how much cash you throw at a problem, you’re likely just going to get people who want to "do their job" from 9 to 5. Those are exactly the kind of workers that companies like the Apple of 2026 are looking for. It’s a big ship, and it needs to stay steady and predictable. People who want to achieve something "insanely great" or "make a dent in the universe" are just a distraction.

In my experience, shipping a product as polished as Mac OS X 10.6.8 Snow Leopard requires a painful level of dedication from everyone involved, not just Quality Assurance.

As long as neither the New York Times nor the Wall Street Journal writes about how bad Apple’s software has gotten, there’s even no reason for them to think about changing their approach.

The drama surrounding Apple’s software quality isn’t showing up in their earnings. And at the end of the day, those earnings are the "high order bit," no matter what marketing tries to tell us.

Well, if there's one thing history has shown us (including the history of Apple's own insurgency against the PC), it's that complacency and stagnation make the incumbent a target for every newcomer who does have the drive to make a dent in the universe. And there are always a lot of people with that drive. This is how we keep ending up in the cycle of chaos > new paradigm > perfect software that probably should not be improved upon > collapse under weight of new features > chaos > new paradigm... repeat.

> They could throw some small portion of their billions of dollars into proper quality control and reproduce it themselves if they wanted to.

How?

How do you reproduce something when you have no idea of the cause and it's not happening on any of your machines?

And remember they don't have just this one unreproducible bug reported. They have thousands.

If you have experience writing software, you're going to end up with a lot of unreproducible bug reports. They're a genuine challenge for everyone, not just Apple.

> If it's affecting only a tiny number of users

Tiny number of users with such an enormous user base (10-16% desktop share) still means there's thousands of users affected.

Apple has had 30 years to make UI focus and input stable, and not let something invisible steal input focus. Fortunately for mac, this is much worse on Windows.

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