“Gravity is worth asking about”

Since then it’s been straight downhill. First they stopped investing in desktop in favor of mobile. Then they underwent some rewrites to OS and bundled apps that dumbed things down and exploded the defect rate. Then they started setting the stage for a touch experience on desktop at the expense of UI density. Around the same time they started to prioritize short term profit over UX — spamming with notifications to try to get you to sign in, upgrade, etc. And then there’s the travesty that is Tahoe.

Having said that, the OS felt better a few years ago. I feel like they have less attention to detail and don’t care for Liquid Glass.

Still blazingly fast machines compared to my intel windows corporate workstation though.

I have bigger issues with the way a lot of MacOS apps are just poorly designed.

Like screen capture - I want to be able to save to my choice of destination folder after clicking. But instead you get a selection of preset choices, and the option to select a destination before you capture the file, which is unnaturally distracting.

Finder hasn't changed for decades. It should be possible to have source and destination trees visible in the same window, but it isn't.

Mac Mail has threaded conversations, which means some emails don't appear in searches.

App Store search was designed by cynics, idiots, or both. If you know the exact name of an app, search will probably show it but it probably won't be anywhere near the first hit.

Xcode - I can't even...

Meanwhile a lot of clever and useful features remain hidden or ignored. Automator and AppleScript would have been gamechangers if Apple had promoted them, but they were just left on a shelf to moulder.

I can't imagine ever swapping back to Windows, but these annoyances are an insult to the quality of the hardware, which is on another level.

> the problem was that a running WhatsApp app prevented the WhatsApp update process to finish.

Oh so that’s what it is. Thought it was a desync between UI state and software logic.

Apple got complex due to dynamic workspaces that result in windows unexpectedly flying off screen or popping up as one mouses's around and the new security model which no longer trusts defaults to local applications trusting each other.

This security model is why each application needs to be granted local access. I believe Apple encourages all apps to stick to their own sandbox to the extent possible.

I'm currently trying to figure out how to give Image Events access to my local hard disk. My old applescripts using Image Events have broken due to the loss of access.

I need to replace a MacBook Pro w/ Touchbar, and am _not_ excited about the options, and I find the OS version numbering/naming baffling (why they couldn't've counted versions, started at the next letter of the alphabet, and then cycled through the alphabet in the California Gazetteer when they switched place names from there on out mystifies me) --- probably I'll end up w/ a hand-me-down iMac, but I'd be a bit more interested if there was a portable Mac tablet w/ a stylus and touch, having preferred that form-factor for portable usage since Go Corp.'s PenPoint on an NCR-3125 (which I paired w/ a NeXT Cube and represents the highwatermark of my GUI experience).

I wish that there was an option to limit the OS to only Cocoa/SwiftUI/equivalent "native" apps, and I really wish that Preferences.app would arrive at a simplified and stable state which makes sense.

Trying to push poorly done, rushed UI frameworks to match iOS in the wrong form factor has trashed the OS.

iOS has gotten gross as well. You see that email notification on your lock screen? Wanna see what it says? Tap it. HAHA, that just expands the stack. Tap it again... that reveals a bit.... TAP IT AGAIN - ah, now we're unlocking and revealing it in the app....

IMO the party that should be blamed here is Google. Why do they keep asking you for local network access when you've already denied it? Why do they just prompt for access without first showing a page telling you why they want access along with a button to go through with the prompt? Ironically, this is what Google and the other browser vendors force websites to do when they want to ask users to grant certain permissions.

- The preview app - document editing at its best

- Apple Mail Search - you can filter by nearly every aspect, even between dates

- the mighty Alt key (alt+click unlocks an extra feature all the time, alt + shift + volume makes smaller steps, etc)

- apple headphone remotes also work on macbooks

- you can turn off the display by setting 0 brightness

- Printing just works - everywhere

- the trackpad integration

- brew is just awesome

I have a massive screen and the right most application has it's menu ... at the very, very left of my screen. It's soo far away it is just crazy. And that menu can't be moved to teh side or turned off or whatever.

Applications that get closed aren't really closed ... you have to quit them. I don't know why. Or if they are minimised, then I can't alt-tab to them .. or I actually can ... but they don't actually OPEN!

Windows insist on opening to some arbitrary width and height instead of neatly snapping to a side etc.

Anyway, at lot of it is fixable with add-ons etc, but it's still annoying. I'll be happier when I can jsut run linux.

Otherwise it's mostly about... the visuals again, but in the hardware side - how the hardware looks better, though, to be fair, that also has a bunch of "doesn't flex like cheap plastic" improvements)

Maybe also the fact that you're less frequently exposed to a garbage sea of complexity like the registry (sure, it exists and is even worse because there is no built in GUI)

But ultimately you're asking about legends, that's the stuff of history, not something you should expect to experience

You won’t know Apple joy until you replace the one you have with another. If you’re backed up via Time Machine — because you are, right? — then you plug in your new machine, hit “restore” or whatever it’s called, and head off to sleep. In the morning all your data, applications, and settings will be there. Your new machine will be indistinguishable from the old but for the grime.

This is not a good thing. Not for Apple, and not for Android, as in terms of exerting gravity on the market, Apple is a supermassive black hole. Anything they do instantly becomes normalized as a business practice.

Old Apple would never have done that I don't think.

Using an Apple device these days is to be spoken to in a weird language that invites you become one of those people who lives at the genius bar, if you are so lucky to live within range of one. Like the touch id failed on my iPad and I got some really strange messages. I also get weird dialogs about failing things on my Mac (like some "widget" having to do with Find My) that usually center Apple brand names. It just makes those brands sound shoddy. [1]

I was delighted with my iPhone when I first got it but about six months later I was always getting important phone calls... and it wouldn't ring, I was getting important texts... some of which would appear on my iPhone, some of which would appear on my Ipad, some of which would never appear at all, I was getting important notifications... and I couldn't find them, or they would disappear before I could tap on them, it was like my phone was possessed by the devil.

I turned off filtering and grouping for notifications and went through the menus, deleted every app that I didn't use, turned off notifications for apps unless I absolutely needed them, etc. After spending an hour digging through the settings my phone now rings when people call.

And don't get me started on AirPods; like they sorta kinda work if you stay in the Apple ecosystem, but if you pair them with Windows they will do everything in their power to punish you, including force you to reboot your phone so you can talk on the microphones.

The most amusing thing is that so many of the ads and nags in MacOS use the Liquid Glass refresh of the 2001 Mac OS X version of the dialog box from the 1984 Mac Classic. Microsoft nags are based on web technology and look kinda appealing, but Apple nags are a blast from the past.

[1] ... if only your XBOX could show a Playstation logo when it is acting like an ADHD kid rather than an XBOX logo!

"links to show with screenshots"

I always want to either copy and delete or save and forget, so I'd select those two options (or rather have the old behaviour) and ignore the rest. You can choose other things.

Same with adverts. I would select "zero adverts", but you could select "upto six adverts" or whatever. After all adverts are for the benefit of the customer right - that's what advert apologists say.

If you look at or used macOS 9 and the early OS X none of that expresses minimalism

I use 4 of those 5 options all the time. But there are other places where options make me slow because I need to was through them.

And at the time, everyone was perfectly fine with opening the photo library to access the options that are now in that menu

There is no justifiable reason that Safari's find in page option is under the share menu, hidden underneath a View More button. Finding within a page has nothing to do with sharing, and even if somehow a user guessed that it might be in that menu without searching the web for it, they're probably going to dismiss it because they haven't expanded the view more menu.

iOS and macOS are riddled with illogical decisions like this. The menu bar is an unusable mess of icons that things have added, a problem that Windows (kind of) solved about a decade ago by allowing me to select which icons appear by default. The Dock seems to choose at random whether an app remains pinned or not, with particular confusion brought by apps updating themselves. Shortcuts is a wonderful idea in principle while in practice anytime I try to do something with it some part is missing.

I used to be a huge proponent of macOS in particular, and I would like to be one again, but currently its incredibly hard to do that.

I started using the f-droid app "store" recently and it's amazing: bare bones stuff that just does what you want.

The idea that visionary leadership in a single organization can make a difference is very true.

> Not only is it very hard to create interfaces that have limitations, but a bad decision is not just precedent – it’s code that can be copied and reused. Existing code always had tons of… well, gravity, even before LLMs.

I assume this is just LLM nonsense?

It's an article that inadvertently confuses readers with too many layers of indirection and requires reading another article to get the prerequisite "Insider Baseball" knowledge to connect all the metaphors together.

So... asking "why not Intel stickers on MacBooks?" ... analogous to asking about gravity. And "too many confusing options on GUIs" ... lines of code to enable extra options has a gravity.

You can even cut the word "apps" from the analysis here, the appstore just gets most of its money from games which are pretty much slot machines.

That's exactly why every time they promote the appstore somewhere, they put a productivity app as an example, they would like to avoid to be classified with gambling regulations, which is essentially what they are.

Tbf, I'm not sure anyone is any at Microsoft for removing things. They are angry because Microsoft does not actually remove those settings, they just don't allow them to be changed from the new UI, and instead hide them away somewhere in the same classic control panel that has existed since Windows NT...