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> Because Apple stuff doesn't "just work" any more. This is essentially a false statement for all intents and purposes. Apple software does “just work” with A

by zepto 6y ago

> Because Apple stuff doesn't "just work" any more. This is essentially a false statement for all intents and purposes. Apple software does “just work” with Apple hardware.

lallysingh 6y ago
My mac kernel panicked weekly for the last year. The software had stopped major development for the last 5 years on any area that doesn't help major media production or make it more like iOS. But the software does work. It just doesn't do much interesting stuff anymore.
yellowapple 6y ago
> Apple software does “just work” with Apple hardware. This is essentially a false statement for all intents and purposes. Apple software is far from being immune to bugs, bad UX, etc., even on Apple hardware, as I can personally attest today from using a Macbook Pro daily for work.
- arcatech 6y ago
  “It just works” never meant it was immune to bugs. No software is.
- zepto 6y ago
  > being immune to bugs This is a total straw man. “Just works” has never meant free of bugs. It means not having to do a bunch of incidental configuration, tuning, and setup. Things do just work.
  - yellowapple 6y ago
    > This is a total straw man. You use this word, "straw man". I do not think it means what you think it means. No, it is not a straw man to point out that bugs interfere with the notion that something "just works". When bugs interfere with getting things done - as I've found they often do in the course of using macOS daily, like when I can't open firewall ports for development or share my screen via Google Hangouts because the Big Sur update broke the password prompt for editing restricted things like firewall settings or app permissions, or when apps can't present an Open File dialog anymore across the board because God knows why, then it's a complete farce to call that "just working". There is no "just" nor "works" about that. Not to mention all the little paper cuts, like the lock screen taking 30 seconds to unfuck itself before I can actually type in a password, or constantly forgetting which applications I've set to open things by default (meaning that every so often I end up with a cacophony of fan whirring instead of an editor window when I try to open an XML file because macOS yet again decided to reset the default app to fucking XCode). (EDIT: oh, and the Touch Bar stops working if I plug in an external keyboard, which is just dandy) Also, I love how both comments immediately coming to defend Apple's honor stop at the "bugs" bit and entirely ignore that I'm taking a fat steamy deuce on Apple's UX, too. So on that note: > It means not having to do a bunch of incidental configuration, tuning, and setup. Which you have to do anyway, because the macOS UX sucks, and seems to be getting worse with each update. Want to have persistent named workspaces? Nope, gotta install some buggy hack of an extension to do it (which in turn required going through a whole bunch of red tape to bypass a bunch of security checks, because of course it does). Want to control where in which of those workspaces application windows open (or at the very least whichever workspace currently has the selected window)? lol fuck user intent, Workspace 1 Monitor 1, and switching away from whatever workspace was on Monitor 1 because double fuck user intent. Application menus are so far away from application windows that the Ever Given could do a goddamn u-turn between them with room to spare. Forward/back buttons on mice don't inherently set focus, so instead of navigating the history on the window my cursor's actually pointing at said buttons end up doing so for some random window on an entirely different monitor. (EDIT: and how could I forget the arcane screenshot shortcuts! Command-Alt-whatever-4? The fuck?) I could go on, but this comment's already enough of a deranged rant. A Chromebook has fewer bugs and a better UX. Even the grotesque hackjob that is the average GNU/Linux desktop has fewer bugs and a better UX. The bugginess and UX is maybe better than (modern, non-LTSC) Windows, but that bar is so low that even ants have to duck when crawling under it. ---- EDIT: I will, however, give Apple credit where credit's due: I do like the use of Command instead of Control for the CUA shortcut prefix (and the use of Emacs shortcuts for text navigation), and the touchpad gestures are nice, even if limited in options. It'd be great if more operating systems adopted these things. And the Touch Bar's kinda cool, I guess. Beyond that, I don't really have much praise for macOS. It's overrated, and "just works" is a myth in this day and age. It was arguably a lot more true back in the PowerPC days (even if OpenBSD is my current preference for my PowerPC Macs), but it's been getting worse and worse over the years. Maybe the switch to ARM will be an inflection point re: software quality. Fingers crossed. ---- EDIT 2: And even just now, doing an SMC reset (to fix that password issue in System Preferences) broke the UI, giving me no background, no dock, and no workspaces. Rebooted to find that no input devices worked until I unplugged my docking station. Background loaded briefly, then back to brokenness. System logs say that the dock is crashing due to a SIGILL. Here goes another night of troubleshooting macOS again instead of getting work done. "Just works" alright...
    - yellowapple 6y ago
      (As a follow up here: turns out the Dock crashing is a MacForge thing AFAICT, so I won't blame macOS for that beyond the fact that I wouldn't need MacForge at all if macOS supported things that even ChromeOS supports, let alone a "real" Linux distro. Still janky that I have to disconnect from my docking station to log in, though; that's a far cry from "just works")
    - zepto 6y ago
      > You use this word, "straw man". I do not think it means what you think it means. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/straw%20man https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/straw%20man Being ‘immune from bugs’ is an obvious straw man. > A Chromebook has fewer bugs and a better UX If by ‘better UX’ you mean doesn’t even try to do things. > Application menus are so far away from application windows that the Ever Given could do a goddamn u-turn between them with room to spare. Have you considered why? There are good UX reasons for this. It uses less screen real estate, and leverages Fitt’s law because you don’t have to be accurate in the vertical dimension. It’s fine to have a preference for menus in windows. There are some arguments in favor of that, but you are just articulating a preference here. Really your comment has nothing to do with whether MacOS *just works(, you have articulated a list of preferences and desires for it to work more like other things you have more familiarity with. You just want it to work differently - I.e. you just don’t like it. I increasingly don’t like it either for various reasons, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t just work.
      - yellowapple 6y ago
        Cherry picking bits and pieces of what I mentioned rather than addressing the entirety of the argument does not a good counter-argument make. And no, neither does linking some dictionary entry as if it actually proves you understand what that dictionary entry is saying. No comment on the Touch Bar being disabled with external keyboards plugged in? Or needing to disconnect USB-C devices to login? Or password prompts being broken in System Preferences? These are bugs that actively hinder usability and pretty clearly contradict the notion of "just works". It is not a strawman - at all - to suggest that these bugs and others directly challenge the notion that something "just works". You know what is a strawman? Cherry picking only some minor weaker points you want to attack while entirely ignoring the ones that you don't, and then trying to pass that off as a substitute for addressing all points in their entirety. If you actually understood what a "strawman" is, you would recognize immediately that your behavior in this discussion is much closer than mine to that definition you cited, and then you'd kindly refrain, thanks. > You just want it to work differently - I.e. you just don’t like it. I "just don't like it" specifically because it does not "just work". It is tolerable usability-wise only after extensive fiddling and tweaking and troubleshooting, and that's only on good days when those aforementioned bugs ain't actively preventing me from using basic OS functionality. And that's fine - I do enjoy fiddling with things on my Linux and OpenBSD desktops - but those Linux and OpenBSD desktops don't advertise themselves as "you shouldn't ever need to fiddle with things because everything just works" the way macOS does, and therefore I'm a lot less frustrated with that fiddling because those systems are designed for it and encourage it and make it easy and friendly and fun. Nothing about customizing macOS is easy or friendly or fun; it is not designed for it, and it does not encourage it. It is Apple's way or the highway - and given the evolution of Apple's way lately, the highway doesn't look so bad after all. > and leverages Fitt’s law because you don’t have to be accurate in the vertical dimension Right, let's watch users spend multiple seconds dragging a cursor to a window toward the bottom-right, clicking, and then dragging that cursor all the way back to the top-left just to save fractions of a second on vertical positioning in a specific spot. Fitt's law is hardly useful here. If the window ain't maximized, then you need some degree of vertical precision to select the window in order to make its menu visible anyway. And if it is maximized, then it literally doesn't matter what owns the menu 'cause it'll be in approximately the same place either way. That is: > There are good UX reasons for this. There were good UX reasons for this, back in the days of m68k Macs where mice were some newfangled invention and displays were tiny. In those days that unintuitive disconnection was a fair tradeoff to make if it meant conserving that tiny amount of vertical real estate and helping people figure out those newfangled rodents. Now? It's been, what, 40 years? People know how to use mice (or, if not, can figure it out with a bit of practice - Microsoft understood this and opted to encourage that practice with games like Minesweeper and Solitaire instead of paternalistically assuming users will remain permanently inept), and even the absolute lowest screen resolution Apple sells on a Macbook has multiple times the amount of vertical and horizontal screen space. That tradeoff is far less useful now.
Daho0n 6y ago
Yes if you live your life exactly as Apple wants you to (plus some luck). Otherwise you get "you are holding it wrong" bugs.
- zepto 6y ago
  The counterpoint is that if you don’t want to use it for what it’s designed to be used for, that’s on you.
marcus_holmes 6y ago
No it doesn't. It really doesn't. There are sooo many issues that are still not fixed, years after being reported. Apple's Support site has pages where there's hundreds of people saying "I have this problem too", and no comment from an Apple dev. I'm not blaming them. This shit is hard, even if you control both the hardware and the software. I get why they don't say "it just works" any more.
- PpEY4fu85hkQpn 6y ago
  I'm going to shock you here but every platform has longstanding bugs with hundreds of people complaining about them.
  - ungamedplayer 6y ago
    Yah, but good luck penetrating the apple forcefield.
  - herbst 6y ago
    Not sure if i can agree. Major open source issues like this are usually solved at some point by some code hero. Or you just fix it yourself and solve anyone else problem too
    - zepto 6y ago
      This is an obvious straw man, parent is talking about ‘many issues’, and you are talking about major issues. Apple obviously doesn’t have a lot of unfixed major issues. Many small complaints is another matter.
      - herbst 6y ago
        Either i dont agree or we have a different understanding of major issue. Not being able to use a second screen withput active power, or being able to cook an egg in idle are in my eyes major issues. Both of which have long threads with no real response. I still get “me too“ emails from issues ive “me too“ 5+ years ago.
vladvasiliu 6y ago
It really doesn't anymore. In particular the UI became a dumpster fire. I won't go into the Playmobil interface of Big Sur, let's just say that's a question of (acquired?) taste. However, the interface is much too big. Most of my computer screen (a 15" MBP) is taken up by empty space. Then you have all kinds of weird behavior in Apple apps that just wasn't there before. And I'm talking "Apple apps as shipped with MacOS", in particular Safari and Mail. If I have Mail running in full screen, Safari in full screen also (different "virtual desktop") and I click on a link in Mail it will attempt to open it in safari on the same screen as Mail. No, it won't attempt to tile the windows, just stack them. Yeah, that's not supposed to work and it doesn't. In order to get back to Safari, I have to un-fullscreen Mail. If I try to reach Safari via Expose or Mission Control or whatever it's called today, it will select it, then when the animation finishes zooming in, it instantly switches back to Mail. Speaking of Safari, my "favorite": try to open a new tab. Wait around for an hour while it spins the beach ball. Tried removing the history, the "smart" thingies on the new tab page had already been disabled, etc. This keeps on happening from time to time. Then for some reason, sometimes in dark mode, the active button of dialog boxes is fully white. If I click outside the window and come back, it gets its regular color so I can read the text. Also, auto light / dark mode used to work as it says on the tin. Now it randomly doesn't and gets stuck in one mode or the other. Fun fact: if I go to settings, switch from Auto to the one it's stuck it, nothing happens. Switch back to Auto, and now it knows how to change. No, it's not timezone related, as I don't change those and haven't since 2019. The clock is always on time. I also use a USB drive for time machine. Sometimes, for some reason, the time machine icon in the menu bar becomes white on light grey. (In Big Sur the menu bar doesn't change color in dark mode, so why does the icon even have a light mode?). In Finder, the "eject" button is not aligned with the name of the drive until I click on it. Fun side effet: I have to click it twice to actually do something useful. You might argue that aligning the icon is useful (happens after the same click) but I'd rather I didn't have to do that. Even on my dinky file manager in Linux this doesn't happen and have never seen it happen. Then, there's the App Store. For some reason, sometimes it won't update the apps. The progress goes all the way to almost full. Then it does something for a while. Then it says it needs to close the app. I say ok. Then it says "yeah, actually, I can't update it". Why? Won't say. Then after a while, it manages to update it somehow. This has happened with multiple apps, including Numbers (Apple app). Now all these (except for the Safari beach ball) first started happening when I updated to Big Sur. I figured my mac may have accumulated cruft or incompatible settings during the years. It's a 2013 MBP that got the "transfer your data" from my older one and it also went through a bunch of public betas. So I figured might as well try the Windows treatment and do a clean install. Nope, none of the issues went away even without copying over anything from the previous install. So even on "Apple hardware", there still are issues. And I really don't think any of those issues can be attributed to my particular hardware being old. And all of those issues are new issues in functionality that had been in MacOS for years and that worked well. Now my MBP is gathering dust because it's just irritating to use. I find Linux (on Arch with i3 of all things) is getting out of my way and being less of a hassle to actually get my work done. Of course, I hate the hardware (some cheap HP probook from work that rubs my wrists when I type) but sitting at a desk all day it doesn't matter since I'm not physically touching it.

by zepto 6y ago

> Because Apple stuff doesn't "just work" any more. This is essentially a false statement for all intents and purposes. Apple software does “just work” with Apple hardware.

lallysingh 6y ago

My mac kernel panicked weekly for the last year. The software had stopped major development for the last 5 years on any area that doesn't help major media production or make it more like iOS. But the software does work. It just doesn't do much interesting stuff anymore.

yellowapple 6y ago

> Apple software does “just work” with Apple hardware. This is essentially a false statement for all intents and purposes. Apple software is far from being immune to bugs, bad UX, etc., even on Apple hardware, as I can personally attest today from using a Macbook Pro daily for work.

arcatech 6y ago
“It just works” never meant it was immune to bugs. No software is.
zepto 6y ago
> being immune to bugs This is a total straw man. “Just works” has never meant free of bugs. It means not having to do a bunch of incidental configuration, tuning, and setup. Things do just work.
- yellowapple 6y ago
  > This is a total straw man. You use this word, "straw man". I do not think it means what you think it means. No, it is not a straw man to point out that bugs interfere with the notion that something "just works". When bugs interfere with getting things done - as I've found they often do in the course of using macOS daily, like when I can't open firewall ports for development or share my screen via Google Hangouts because the Big Sur update broke the password prompt for editing restricted things like firewall settings or app permissions, or when apps can't present an Open File dialog anymore across the board because God knows why, then it's a complete farce to call that "just working". There is no "just" nor "works" about that. Not to mention all the little paper cuts, like the lock screen taking 30 seconds to unfuck itself before I can actually type in a password, or constantly forgetting which applications I've set to open things by default (meaning that every so often I end up with a cacophony of fan whirring instead of an editor window when I try to open an XML file because macOS yet again decided to reset the default app to fucking XCode). (EDIT: oh, and the Touch Bar stops working if I plug in an external keyboard, which is just dandy) Also, I love how both comments immediately coming to defend Apple's honor stop at the "bugs" bit and entirely ignore that I'm taking a fat steamy deuce on Apple's UX, too. So on that note: > It means not having to do a bunch of incidental configuration, tuning, and setup. Which you have to do anyway, because the macOS UX sucks, and seems to be getting worse with each update. Want to have persistent named workspaces? Nope, gotta install some buggy hack of an extension to do it (which in turn required going through a whole bunch of red tape to bypass a bunch of security checks, because of course it does). Want to control where in which of those workspaces application windows open (or at the very least whichever workspace currently has the selected window)? lol fuck user intent, Workspace 1 Monitor 1, and switching away from whatever workspace was on Monitor 1 because double fuck user intent. Application menus are so far away from application windows that the Ever Given could do a goddamn u-turn between them with room to spare. Forward/back buttons on mice don't inherently set focus, so instead of navigating the history on the window my cursor's actually pointing at said buttons end up doing so for some random window on an entirely different monitor. (EDIT: and how could I forget the arcane screenshot shortcuts! Command-Alt-whatever-4? The fuck?) I could go on, but this comment's already enough of a deranged rant. A Chromebook has fewer bugs and a better UX. Even the grotesque hackjob that is the average GNU/Linux desktop has fewer bugs and a better UX. The bugginess and UX is maybe better than (modern, non-LTSC) Windows, but that bar is so low that even ants have to duck when crawling under it. ---- EDIT: I will, however, give Apple credit where credit's due: I do like the use of Command instead of Control for the CUA shortcut prefix (and the use of Emacs shortcuts for text navigation), and the touchpad gestures are nice, even if limited in options. It'd be great if more operating systems adopted these things. And the Touch Bar's kinda cool, I guess. Beyond that, I don't really have much praise for macOS. It's overrated, and "just works" is a myth in this day and age. It was arguably a lot more true back in the PowerPC days (even if OpenBSD is my current preference for my PowerPC Macs), but it's been getting worse and worse over the years. Maybe the switch to ARM will be an inflection point re: software quality. Fingers crossed. ---- EDIT 2: And even just now, doing an SMC reset (to fix that password issue in System Preferences) broke the UI, giving me no background, no dock, and no workspaces. Rebooted to find that no input devices worked until I unplugged my docking station. Background loaded briefly, then back to brokenness. System logs say that the dock is crashing due to a SIGILL. Here goes another night of troubleshooting macOS again instead of getting work done. "Just works" alright...
  - yellowapple 6y ago
    (As a follow up here: turns out the Dock crashing is a MacForge thing AFAICT, so I won't blame macOS for that beyond the fact that I wouldn't need MacForge at all if macOS supported things that even ChromeOS supports, let alone a "real" Linux distro. Still janky that I have to disconnect from my docking station to log in, though; that's a far cry from "just works")
  - zepto 6y ago
    > You use this word, "straw man". I do not think it means what you think it means. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/straw%20man https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/straw%20man Being ‘immune from bugs’ is an obvious straw man. > A Chromebook has fewer bugs and a better UX If by ‘better UX’ you mean doesn’t even try to do things. > Application menus are so far away from application windows that the Ever Given could do a goddamn u-turn between them with room to spare. Have you considered why? There are good UX reasons for this. It uses less screen real estate, and leverages Fitt’s law because you don’t have to be accurate in the vertical dimension. It’s fine to have a preference for menus in windows. There are some arguments in favor of that, but you are just articulating a preference here. Really your comment has nothing to do with whether MacOS *just works(, you have articulated a list of preferences and desires for it to work more like other things you have more familiarity with. You just want it to work differently - I.e. you just don’t like it. I increasingly don’t like it either for various reasons, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t just work.
    - yellowapple 6y ago
      Cherry picking bits and pieces of what I mentioned rather than addressing the entirety of the argument does not a good counter-argument make. And no, neither does linking some dictionary entry as if it actually proves you understand what that dictionary entry is saying. No comment on the Touch Bar being disabled with external keyboards plugged in? Or needing to disconnect USB-C devices to login? Or password prompts being broken in System Preferences? These are bugs that actively hinder usability and pretty clearly contradict the notion of "just works". It is not a strawman - at all - to suggest that these bugs and others directly challenge the notion that something "just works". You know what is a strawman? Cherry picking only some minor weaker points you want to attack while entirely ignoring the ones that you don't, and then trying to pass that off as a substitute for addressing all points in their entirety. If you actually understood what a "strawman" is, you would recognize immediately that your behavior in this discussion is much closer than mine to that definition you cited, and then you'd kindly refrain, thanks. > You just want it to work differently - I.e. you just don’t like it. I "just don't like it" specifically because it does not "just work". It is tolerable usability-wise only after extensive fiddling and tweaking and troubleshooting, and that's only on good days when those aforementioned bugs ain't actively preventing me from using basic OS functionality. And that's fine - I do enjoy fiddling with things on my Linux and OpenBSD desktops - but those Linux and OpenBSD desktops don't advertise themselves as "you shouldn't ever need to fiddle with things because everything just works" the way macOS does, and therefore I'm a lot less frustrated with that fiddling because those systems are designed for it and encourage it and make it easy and friendly and fun. Nothing about customizing macOS is easy or friendly or fun; it is not designed for it, and it does not encourage it. It is Apple's way or the highway - and given the evolution of Apple's way lately, the highway doesn't look so bad after all. > and leverages Fitt’s law because you don’t have to be accurate in the vertical dimension Right, let's watch users spend multiple seconds dragging a cursor to a window toward the bottom-right, clicking, and then dragging that cursor all the way back to the top-left just to save fractions of a second on vertical positioning in a specific spot. Fitt's law is hardly useful here. If the window ain't maximized, then you need some degree of vertical precision to select the window in order to make its menu visible anyway. And if it is maximized, then it literally doesn't matter what owns the menu 'cause it'll be in approximately the same place either way. That is: > There are good UX reasons for this. There were good UX reasons for this, back in the days of m68k Macs where mice were some newfangled invention and displays were tiny. In those days that unintuitive disconnection was a fair tradeoff to make if it meant conserving that tiny amount of vertical real estate and helping people figure out those newfangled rodents. Now? It's been, what, 40 years? People know how to use mice (or, if not, can figure it out with a bit of practice - Microsoft understood this and opted to encourage that practice with games like Minesweeper and Solitaire instead of paternalistically assuming users will remain permanently inept), and even the absolute lowest screen resolution Apple sells on a Macbook has multiple times the amount of vertical and horizontal screen space. That tradeoff is far less useful now.

Daho0n 6y ago

Yes if you live your life exactly as Apple wants you to (plus some luck). Otherwise you get "you are holding it wrong" bugs.

zepto 6y ago
The counterpoint is that if you don’t want to use it for what it’s designed to be used for, that’s on you.

marcus_holmes 6y ago

No it doesn't. It really doesn't. There are sooo many issues that are still not fixed, years after being reported. Apple's Support site has pages where there's hundreds of people saying "I have this problem too", and no comment from an Apple dev. I'm not blaming them. This shit is hard, even if you control both the hardware and the software. I get why they don't say "it just works" any more.

PpEY4fu85hkQpn 6y ago
I'm going to shock you here but every platform has longstanding bugs with hundreds of people complaining about them.
- ungamedplayer 6y ago
  Yah, but good luck penetrating the apple forcefield.
- herbst 6y ago
  Not sure if i can agree. Major open source issues like this are usually solved at some point by some code hero. Or you just fix it yourself and solve anyone else problem too
  - zepto 6y ago
    This is an obvious straw man, parent is talking about ‘many issues’, and you are talking about major issues. Apple obviously doesn’t have a lot of unfixed major issues. Many small complaints is another matter.
    - herbst 6y ago
      Either i dont agree or we have a different understanding of major issue. Not being able to use a second screen withput active power, or being able to cook an egg in idle are in my eyes major issues. Both of which have long threads with no real response. I still get “me too“ emails from issues ive “me too“ 5+ years ago.

vladvasiliu 6y ago

It really doesn't anymore. In particular the UI became a dumpster fire. I won't go into the Playmobil interface of Big Sur, let's just say that's a question of (acquired?) taste. However, the interface is much too big. Most of my computer screen (a 15" MBP) is taken up by empty space. Then you have all kinds of weird behavior in Apple apps that just wasn't there before. And I'm talking "Apple apps as shipped with MacOS", in particular Safari and Mail. If I have Mail running in full screen, Safari in full screen also (different "virtual desktop") and I click on a link in Mail it will attempt to open it in safari on the same screen as Mail. No, it won't attempt to tile the windows, just stack them. Yeah, that's not supposed to work and it doesn't. In order to get back to Safari, I have to un-fullscreen Mail. If I try to reach Safari via Expose or Mission Control or whatever it's called today, it will select it, then when the animation finishes zooming in, it instantly switches back to Mail. Speaking of Safari, my "favorite": try to open a new tab. Wait around for an hour while it spins the beach ball. Tried removing the history, the "smart" thingies on the new tab page had already been disabled, etc. This keeps on happening from time to time. Then for some reason, sometimes in dark mode, the active button of dialog boxes is fully white. If I click outside the window and come back, it gets its regular color so I can read the text. Also, auto light / dark mode used to work as it says on the tin. Now it randomly doesn't and gets stuck in one mode or the other. Fun fact: if I go to settings, switch from Auto to the one it's stuck it, nothing happens. Switch back to Auto, and now it knows how to change. No, it's not timezone related, as I don't change those and haven't since 2019. The clock is always on time. I also use a USB drive for time machine. Sometimes, for some reason, the time machine icon in the menu bar becomes white on light grey. (In Big Sur the menu bar doesn't change color in dark mode, so why does the icon even have a light mode?). In Finder, the "eject" button is not aligned with the name of the drive until I click on it. Fun side effet: I have to click it twice to actually do something useful. You might argue that aligning the icon is useful (happens after the same click) but I'd rather I didn't have to do that. Even on my dinky file manager in Linux this doesn't happen and have never seen it happen. Then, there's the App Store. For some reason, sometimes it won't update the apps. The progress goes all the way to almost full. Then it does something for a while. Then it says it needs to close the app. I say ok. Then it says "yeah, actually, I can't update it". Why? Won't say. Then after a while, it manages to update it somehow. This has happened with multiple apps, including Numbers (Apple app). Now all these (except for the Safari beach ball) first started happening when I updated to Big Sur. I figured my mac may have accumulated cruft or incompatible settings during the years. It's a 2013 MBP that got the "transfer your data" from my older one and it also went through a bunch of public betas. So I figured might as well try the Windows treatment and do a clean install. Nope, none of the issues went away even without copying over anything from the previous install. So even on "Apple hardware", there still are issues. And I really don't think any of those issues can be attributed to my particular hardware being old. And all of those issues are new issues in functionality that had been in MacOS for years and that worked well. Now my MBP is gathering dust because it's just irritating to use. I find Linux (on Arch with i3 of all things) is getting out of my way and being less of a hassle to actually get my work done. Of course, I hate the hardware (some cheap HP probook from work that rubs my wrists when I type) but sitting at a desk all day it doesn't matter since I'm not physically touching it.