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> I worry that "unification" will be realized by dumbing down the desktop rather than empowering the mobile device. This appears to be their plan. It has stead

> I worry that "unification" will be realized by dumbing down the desktop rather than empowering the mobile device. This appears to be their plan. It has steadily ramped up since Mojave, and Big Sur was the inflection point. I have used OS X exclusively since 2008, and last year I made the choice to no longer upgrade any of my machines beyond Catalina. I'm slowly getting used to the fact that I won't be able to use Macs for my work in the near future, and am making adjustments to my workflow accordingly. I know this is probably the life-long FruitCo® fan in me speaking, but I'm genuinely distraught about this. My absolute favourite software platform in the world is being chipped away at to appeal to the lowest common denominator. Even worse, most people seem to be cheering them on for doing it. Really upsets me.

quenix 5y ago
Apart from questionable changes to the user interface, I don’t see how Apple have been “dumbing down” macOS in terms of usability so dramatically. Could you point to some concrete examples?
- pkulak 5y ago
  Not being able to edit huge portions of the file system, even as root. Apps not having file system access at all until you grant it, and then it’s folder by folder. Those control panel plug-in things just stopped being supported at all, so good bye custom mouse drivers and such.
  - threeseed 5y ago
    What you call dumbing down I call incredibly useful security features. Apps shouldn’t be able to read my entire hard drive unless I give it permission. And the core OS should be immutable. Also not sure what you’re talking about. Custom mouse drivers of course still work.
    - viraptor 5y ago
      It really depends on your usage. It can be a security feature for many contexts, but otherwise: - docker - you need to be able to bind any folder - IDE - you need to be able to edit basically anything - office software beyond "I have some things in 'Documents'" - same - python, ruby, any other interpreter - same - brew, or any other package manager - same etc. This simply doesn't work well for many developer workflows. I tried to use a dedicated app for per-app security control like that (can't remember the name anymore) - but for development it was a disaster. It just makes you click "allow" on a popup 10 times a day until you stop paying attention. Now, macos is not at that level yet, but the direction towards that is the complaint usually.
      - evgen 5y ago
        The problem is that your 'developer workflow' sounds like you are assuming a particular level of insecurity that is unwarranted. Learn about the principle of least authority and try to apply it to your workflows. None of the applications you mention need complete access to the filesystem and in every one of those cases the access could be easily limited to a few directories and you would probably never notice.
        viraptor 5y ago
        Yes/no. The security policies as they are implemented today just aren't possible to effectively use by developers. I've got a project in progress which allows you to go into the context of a specific project as a selinux policy and then work on it that way. It's hard, it's a lot of work, and there are endless edge cases. This is not me giving up, it's actually hard to build a system where you both enforce realistic restrictions and don't end up going "yeah, whatever, I've got enough of those permission questions" after a week. Consider: An interpreter needs to run homebrew which installs new app, but the same interpreter running a script for your project should not read anything apart from those project files. Same interpreter needs to update local packages via bundle and git, but a random script you run shouldn't be able to access your ssh key via git commands. This is basically impossible to achieve without large compromises outside of selinux right now.
  - Bondi_Blue 5y ago
    If you’re referring to Gatekeeper, that was introduced long before even Mojave. Likewise the third party kernel extension lock down was also a security move. The former can be disabled in recovery mode and you can add exceptions to the latter. Apple usually allows power users to work around their security features. Besides the introduction of new bugs, most changes in recent years have been cosmetic and the unification features are bloat at worst, for users that don’t want them.
    - salamandersauce 5y ago
      There's other little changes. You used to be able to install and use GDB and debug stuff without doing anything. Now you need to dick around with certificates and code signing to get it to work. I never could despite following different sets of instructions to the letter multiple times because of some bug. I gave up and switched to the built in lldb as that worked at least. I think in Catalina or Big Sur they made another change, hardened runtimes, so now if I need to upgrade R I have to install it like it's 1985 and extract a tarball in root. It's shit. Every single version they seem to do something where I need to waste time tracking down some workaround to deal with "security". I'm tired of granting every other app accessibility permissions for reasons I'm not even sure of, tired of having to grant access to my documents. It's just endless hassle and I don't feel like I'm actually safer. Every new version seems to bring something like this.
  - ToFab123 5y ago
    > Apps not having file system access at all until you grant it, and then it’s folder by folder. This is actually a feature I wish Windows had. On Windows you can enable "protected folders" and mark folders as protected. Applications cannot access those folders until you grant it. On Windows when granting an app permission to a protected folder you grant it access to all of your protected folders. You cannot grant a specific application access to a specific folder only eg. grant VLC access to your video folder only but will have to grant VLC permission to all your protected folders. In the default configuration this includes all your personal documents. I wish Microsoft would make the protected folder feature just as granular as I can hear it is an a mac.
    - pjmlp 5y ago
      I am not that deep into it, but I think it is possible, but only via Active Directory application policies.
  - grishka 5y ago
    > Not being able to edit huge portions of the file system, even as root. The important part is that system integrity protection can be disabled.
- pantulis 5y ago
  I think the lament has some justificiation if you remember Mac OSX as the de-facto developer dream workstation circa 2009. As a consumer platform desktop macOS will be great, for a non-apple developer workload... not so sure.
- flohofwoe 5y ago
  Some examples I noticed (haven't look at Monterey yet though), most of those changes make sense on a small portrait display with touch interaction (e.g. iPhone), but not on a notebook display in landscape orientation (most of those fall under "questionable changes to the user interface", but I still think it's important to point them out, because IMHO they don't make sense on a notebook-style computer): - scroll bars have been removed (but they can be enabled again), not sure when this happened, Catalina maybe? - Ok/Cancel style dialog boxes are vertically stacked (since Big Sur) - the completely intuitive "Save As..." action has been replaced with "Duplicate" (at least in Apple tools), no idea what's the reasoning behind this is TBH, this wouldn't make sense on iPhones either - more vertical space wasted for window chrome since Big Sur, especially in the Finder - "Natural Scrolling" (can also still be reversed thankfully) - ...and probably a few more subtle changes which I don't care much about
  - vosper 5y ago
    How is any of that “dumbing down”?
    - flohofwoe 5y ago
      Well, apparently those changes are made to appease iOS users so they don't feel lost on Macs. I just can assume that Apple thinks this user group is too dumb to adapt to a different user interface philosophy? Don't know :)
      - monkey_monkey 5y ago
        OK, so none of those things are dumbing down, they're just decisions you don't agree with.
        serf 5y ago
        unless we formally define 'dumbing down', I think that's just opinion. Just to take one example, scroll bars were turned optional with default off -- a simpler UX that's in favor of less visible user interactions for the sake of reducing user complexity is usually considered dumbing down. Now, in Apple Land, far behind the Reality Distortion Field, they may refer to the reduction of user interaction options as 'beautification' -- but everyone else usually just calls it 'simplification', which is often (diminutively, perhaps) referred to as 'dumbing down'. (in reply to "scrollbars only disappear without a mouse" , so what? That's still a reduction in user-visible information -- do touch users somehow not need to be told that an active view can be scrolled by anything other than visual gestures and cues? It's a nice pipe-dream, indicative design, but there isn't any design standard that suggests that may be or even could be the case.) tl;dr : when a user loses visible indications, and loses possible interactions, it's not uncommon to phrase the state as being 'dumbed down'.
- matwood 5y ago
  Even the changes to the UI are following current design trends in general. More space, bigger elements, and removing what can be removed for simplicity. See the upcoming Android 12. For years the industry moved towards more and more information density, and is now moving back. Whether macOS is a good implementation of this trend can be debated.
- panta 5y ago
  A random example: desktop Spaces has been arbitrarily limited to a single row of max 9 desktops (with Lion I believe). Before you could arrange the desktops in a matrix (up to 16 desktops IIRC). Also the removal of RSS support, X11, emacs.
- s_dev 5y ago
  Kernel Extensions are gone -- regular users would never care about this sort of thing but you can't use products like Little Snitch properly on Big Sur and onwards. Kexts were also used for making Hackintoshes -- again not something normal Apple users would care for. mac OS is simply becoming less versatile and more locked down.
  - Wowfunhappy 5y ago
    Well, Hackintosh users at least definitely don't care whether Apple is signing third party kexts, because they were never signing Hackintosh kexts anyway. The ability to load kexts in general is still used extensively by Apple and isn't going away any time soon. (Hackintosh's days are numbered anyway due to Apple Silicon.)
  - watersb 5y ago
    ?? Little Snitch works fine for me on macOS BS on my M1 MacBook Pro. Does it fail to work properly on Intel Macs? All of my x86 Macs are far too old to try Big Sur. EDIT: Oh, I see -- first-party Apple apps can stream unlimited data, tracking your activity. Egads... https://sneak.berlin/20210202/macos-11.2-network-privacy/ https://sneak.berlin/20210202/macos-11.2-network-privacy/
  - robertoandred 5y ago
    Kernel extensions going away doesn’t mean their functionality is going away.
  - pjmlp 5y ago
    They not gone, rather replaced by user space solutions, improving overall OS stability.
pkulak 5y ago
Same thing happened to me too. I prepared myself for a year or so by replacing everything with an equivalent open-source project. Taught myself Vim so I could use those bindings in editors instead of the standard Apple ones. Then I made the switch, and it was pretty seamless.
spijdar 5y ago
Question is, what alternatives do you plan to use that are better for you? Many of the same sorts of interface and "unification" changes seem to be coming to Windows, and Linux is sort of in another world as far as usability goes. Great for some people, but if you don't already prefer it, are the changes to MacOS bad enough to accept the similarly-changing Windows or the many caveats Linux desktop?
- vkoskiv 5y ago
  That is the part that upsets me the most - there are no viable alternatives. Linux I can get by with, but it's a huge compromise on all fronts except the terminal experience. Windows is obviously out of the question completely.
  - komuher 5y ago
    New windows is more like Windows + Linux in one device so dunno if it'll be out of question for most folks who see how apple is killing macos :)
    - spijdar 5y ago
      People who think Apple is killing MacOS generally do because they think Apple is sacrificing the utility of the desktop in favor of sharing code/UI with their mobile platforms. I don't think these people will be fond of the sweeping changes made in Win11's UI that are dedicated to touch interfaces/tablets, and to the big new feature of running Android apps "natively" on Windows, along with an Android app store. The ability to run Linux software is also mostly irrelevant, as MacOS/Darwin has largely been able to run those same programs natively since the beginning. It's never needed a POSIX compatibility layer -- it was built to support that functionality from day 1. e.g. Apple didn't need to build a compatibility shim to tunnel Wayland/X11 applications because Quartz was designed from the start to support that use case.
      - GekkePrutser 5y ago
        The changes in Windows 11 are much more mellow than those in Windows 8, which were ridiculously geared towards tablets and totally ignored the existence of desktops, which happened to be 99% of the Windows userbase :/ Windows 11 is a much better compromise of usability on both, and I like the idea of panes, it is sorta kinda heading towards a tiling window system which really appeals to me. And the android thing and Amazon's involvement. Yeah a lot written about this and I don't agree with it either. But you don't have to use it.
nbzso 5y ago
I was in shock, when realised that everything that I love about Mac Desktop since beginning of OSX era will be showed away in the name of vertical integration. Now I am ok. Catalina is the last Apple OS that I will run on my computers. Figma is in the browser. Blender is working under Linux perfectly. Windows is horrible, but if used properly for specific tasks it will perform. The big problem was to move away from Logic, but where there's a will, there's a way. I am deeply thankful for all those years of Desktop Bliss, but Apple nowadays is marketing and shareholders driven company and this is the opposite of Jobs philosophy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4VBqTViEx4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4VBqTViEx4
- arvinsim 5y ago
  > The big problem was to move away from Logic, but where there's a will, there's a way. I moved to Ableton years ago because I wanted a cross-platform DAW.
- physicsguy 5y ago
  My workflow these days is to use WSL2 for everything. It even handles CUDA now
- JKCalhoun 5y ago
  > this is the opposite of Jobs philosophy I would caution you about pigeon-holing "Jobs' philosophy". I have observed that his philosophy often suited the circumstances he found himself in at various points in his fascinating career. ;-)
- danaris 5y ago
  > this is the opposite of Jobs philosophy. Frankly, I think that the design changes Apple has been making are very much in line with how Jobs would have done things. Would he have made it exactly the same? No, certainly not; he was a different person who was very opinionated, so there would be differences—but the direction of the changes would, I think, be very similar. However, I think it's also pretty irrelevant, given that Jobs himself explicitly said "Don't try to do things the way I would do them. Just do the right things." (Paraphrased from memory.)
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
alwillis 5y ago
I disagree that macOS is being “dumbed down”. Unfortunately, the days of easy access to system volumes, kernel extensions had to end because the internet isn’t a friendly place and we just can’t have nice things. I spend more time on the command line now than I did 10 years ago on macOS and I don’t see that changing any time soon. It’s been a three release arc, starting with Catalina, to Big Sur and now Monterey, that started off pretty rocky and seemingly coming to fruition with this release. I’m using the public beta of Monterey as my daily driver and the transition couldn’t have gone any smoother, especially given it’s still months away from being released. So much better than Catalina which was ridiculously bad two years ago. I also don’t agree this is the lowest common denominator; since iPadOS, iOS and macOS all have the same core operating system, it only makes sense there should be a baseline of functionality and that users are able to use the appropriate platform for a given task. But that doesn’t mean unfettered access to everything on the Mac; given the world we live in, that’s a a recipe for disaster, which is why we can’t have nice things.

quenix 5y ago

Apart from questionable changes to the user interface, I don’t see how Apple have been “dumbing down” macOS in terms of usability so dramatically. Could you point to some concrete examples?

pkulak 5y ago
Not being able to edit huge portions of the file system, even as root. Apps not having file system access at all until you grant it, and then it’s folder by folder. Those control panel plug-in things just stopped being supported at all, so good bye custom mouse drivers and such.
- threeseed 5y ago
  What you call dumbing down I call incredibly useful security features. Apps shouldn’t be able to read my entire hard drive unless I give it permission. And the core OS should be immutable. Also not sure what you’re talking about. Custom mouse drivers of course still work.
  - viraptor 5y ago
    It really depends on your usage. It can be a security feature for many contexts, but otherwise: - docker - you need to be able to bind any folder - IDE - you need to be able to edit basically anything - office software beyond "I have some things in 'Documents'" - same - python, ruby, any other interpreter - same - brew, or any other package manager - same etc. This simply doesn't work well for many developer workflows. I tried to use a dedicated app for per-app security control like that (can't remember the name anymore) - but for development it was a disaster. It just makes you click "allow" on a popup 10 times a day until you stop paying attention. Now, macos is not at that level yet, but the direction towards that is the complaint usually.
    - evgen 5y ago
      The problem is that your 'developer workflow' sounds like you are assuming a particular level of insecurity that is unwarranted. Learn about the principle of least authority and try to apply it to your workflows. None of the applications you mention need complete access to the filesystem and in every one of those cases the access could be easily limited to a few directories and you would probably never notice.
      - viraptor 5y ago
        Yes/no. The security policies as they are implemented today just aren't possible to effectively use by developers. I've got a project in progress which allows you to go into the context of a specific project as a selinux policy and then work on it that way. It's hard, it's a lot of work, and there are endless edge cases. This is not me giving up, it's actually hard to build a system where you both enforce realistic restrictions and don't end up going "yeah, whatever, I've got enough of those permission questions" after a week. Consider: An interpreter needs to run homebrew which installs new app, but the same interpreter running a script for your project should not read anything apart from those project files. Same interpreter needs to update local packages via bundle and git, but a random script you run shouldn't be able to access your ssh key via git commands. This is basically impossible to achieve without large compromises outside of selinux right now.
- Bondi_Blue 5y ago
  If you’re referring to Gatekeeper, that was introduced long before even Mojave. Likewise the third party kernel extension lock down was also a security move. The former can be disabled in recovery mode and you can add exceptions to the latter. Apple usually allows power users to work around their security features. Besides the introduction of new bugs, most changes in recent years have been cosmetic and the unification features are bloat at worst, for users that don’t want them.
  - salamandersauce 5y ago
    There's other little changes. You used to be able to install and use GDB and debug stuff without doing anything. Now you need to dick around with certificates and code signing to get it to work. I never could despite following different sets of instructions to the letter multiple times because of some bug. I gave up and switched to the built in lldb as that worked at least. I think in Catalina or Big Sur they made another change, hardened runtimes, so now if I need to upgrade R I have to install it like it's 1985 and extract a tarball in root. It's shit. Every single version they seem to do something where I need to waste time tracking down some workaround to deal with "security". I'm tired of granting every other app accessibility permissions for reasons I'm not even sure of, tired of having to grant access to my documents. It's just endless hassle and I don't feel like I'm actually safer. Every new version seems to bring something like this.
- ToFab123 5y ago
  > Apps not having file system access at all until you grant it, and then it’s folder by folder. This is actually a feature I wish Windows had. On Windows you can enable "protected folders" and mark folders as protected. Applications cannot access those folders until you grant it. On Windows when granting an app permission to a protected folder you grant it access to all of your protected folders. You cannot grant a specific application access to a specific folder only eg. grant VLC access to your video folder only but will have to grant VLC permission to all your protected folders. In the default configuration this includes all your personal documents. I wish Microsoft would make the protected folder feature just as granular as I can hear it is an a mac.
  - pjmlp 5y ago
    I am not that deep into it, but I think it is possible, but only via Active Directory application policies.
- grishka 5y ago
  > Not being able to edit huge portions of the file system, even as root. The important part is that system integrity protection can be disabled.
pantulis 5y ago
I think the lament has some justificiation if you remember Mac OSX as the de-facto developer dream workstation circa 2009. As a consumer platform desktop macOS will be great, for a non-apple developer workload... not so sure.
flohofwoe 5y ago
Some examples I noticed (haven't look at Monterey yet though), most of those changes make sense on a small portrait display with touch interaction (e.g. iPhone), but not on a notebook display in landscape orientation (most of those fall under "questionable changes to the user interface", but I still think it's important to point them out, because IMHO they don't make sense on a notebook-style computer): - scroll bars have been removed (but they can be enabled again), not sure when this happened, Catalina maybe? - Ok/Cancel style dialog boxes are vertically stacked (since Big Sur) - the completely intuitive "Save As..." action has been replaced with "Duplicate" (at least in Apple tools), no idea what's the reasoning behind this is TBH, this wouldn't make sense on iPhones either - more vertical space wasted for window chrome since Big Sur, especially in the Finder - "Natural Scrolling" (can also still be reversed thankfully) - ...and probably a few more subtle changes which I don't care much about
- vosper 5y ago
  How is any of that “dumbing down”?
  - flohofwoe 5y ago
    Well, apparently those changes are made to appease iOS users so they don't feel lost on Macs. I just can assume that Apple thinks this user group is too dumb to adapt to a different user interface philosophy? Don't know :)
    - monkey_monkey 5y ago
      OK, so none of those things are dumbing down, they're just decisions you don't agree with.
      - serf 5y ago
        unless we formally define 'dumbing down', I think that's just opinion. Just to take one example, scroll bars were turned optional with default off -- a simpler UX that's in favor of less visible user interactions for the sake of reducing user complexity is usually considered dumbing down. Now, in Apple Land, far behind the Reality Distortion Field, they may refer to the reduction of user interaction options as 'beautification' -- but everyone else usually just calls it 'simplification', which is often (diminutively, perhaps) referred to as 'dumbing down'. (in reply to "scrollbars only disappear without a mouse" , so what? That's still a reduction in user-visible information -- do touch users somehow not need to be told that an active view can be scrolled by anything other than visual gestures and cues? It's a nice pipe-dream, indicative design, but there isn't any design standard that suggests that may be or even could be the case.) tl;dr : when a user loses visible indications, and loses possible interactions, it's not uncommon to phrase the state as being 'dumbed down'.
matwood 5y ago
Even the changes to the UI are following current design trends in general. More space, bigger elements, and removing what can be removed for simplicity. See the upcoming Android 12. For years the industry moved towards more and more information density, and is now moving back. Whether macOS is a good implementation of this trend can be debated.
panta 5y ago
A random example: desktop Spaces has been arbitrarily limited to a single row of max 9 desktops (with Lion I believe). Before you could arrange the desktops in a matrix (up to 16 desktops IIRC). Also the removal of RSS support, X11, emacs.
s_dev 5y ago
Kernel Extensions are gone -- regular users would never care about this sort of thing but you can't use products like Little Snitch properly on Big Sur and onwards. Kexts were also used for making Hackintoshes -- again not something normal Apple users would care for. mac OS is simply becoming less versatile and more locked down.
- Wowfunhappy 5y ago
  Well, Hackintosh users at least definitely don't care whether Apple is signing third party kexts, because they were never signing Hackintosh kexts anyway. The ability to load kexts in general is still used extensively by Apple and isn't going away any time soon. (Hackintosh's days are numbered anyway due to Apple Silicon.)
- watersb 5y ago
  ?? Little Snitch works fine for me on macOS BS on my M1 MacBook Pro. Does it fail to work properly on Intel Macs? All of my x86 Macs are far too old to try Big Sur. EDIT: Oh, I see -- first-party Apple apps can stream unlimited data, tracking your activity. Egads... https://sneak.berlin/20210202/macos-11.2-network-privacy/ https://sneak.berlin/20210202/macos-11.2-network-privacy/
- robertoandred 5y ago
  Kernel extensions going away doesn’t mean their functionality is going away.
- pjmlp 5y ago
  They not gone, rather replaced by user space solutions, improving overall OS stability.

pkulak 5y ago

Same thing happened to me too. I prepared myself for a year or so by replacing everything with an equivalent open-source project. Taught myself Vim so I could use those bindings in editors instead of the standard Apple ones. Then I made the switch, and it was pretty seamless.

spijdar 5y ago

Question is, what alternatives do you plan to use that are better for you? Many of the same sorts of interface and "unification" changes seem to be coming to Windows, and Linux is sort of in another world as far as usability goes. Great for some people, but if you don't already prefer it, are the changes to MacOS bad enough to accept the similarly-changing Windows or the many caveats Linux desktop?

vkoskiv 5y ago
That is the part that upsets me the most - there are no viable alternatives. Linux I can get by with, but it's a huge compromise on all fronts except the terminal experience. Windows is obviously out of the question completely.
- komuher 5y ago
  New windows is more like Windows + Linux in one device so dunno if it'll be out of question for most folks who see how apple is killing macos :)
  - spijdar 5y ago
    People who think Apple is killing MacOS generally do because they think Apple is sacrificing the utility of the desktop in favor of sharing code/UI with their mobile platforms. I don't think these people will be fond of the sweeping changes made in Win11's UI that are dedicated to touch interfaces/tablets, and to the big new feature of running Android apps "natively" on Windows, along with an Android app store. The ability to run Linux software is also mostly irrelevant, as MacOS/Darwin has largely been able to run those same programs natively since the beginning. It's never needed a POSIX compatibility layer -- it was built to support that functionality from day 1. e.g. Apple didn't need to build a compatibility shim to tunnel Wayland/X11 applications because Quartz was designed from the start to support that use case.
    - GekkePrutser 5y ago
      The changes in Windows 11 are much more mellow than those in Windows 8, which were ridiculously geared towards tablets and totally ignored the existence of desktops, which happened to be 99% of the Windows userbase :/ Windows 11 is a much better compromise of usability on both, and I like the idea of panes, it is sorta kinda heading towards a tiling window system which really appeals to me. And the android thing and Amazon's involvement. Yeah a lot written about this and I don't agree with it either. But you don't have to use it.

nbzso 5y ago

I was in shock, when realised that everything that I love about Mac Desktop since beginning of OSX era will be showed away in the name of vertical integration. Now I am ok. Catalina is the last Apple OS that I will run on my computers. Figma is in the browser. Blender is working under Linux perfectly. Windows is horrible, but if used properly for specific tasks it will perform. The big problem was to move away from Logic, but where there's a will, there's a way. I am deeply thankful for all those years of Desktop Bliss, but Apple nowadays is marketing and shareholders driven company and this is the opposite of Jobs philosophy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4VBqTViEx4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4VBqTViEx4

arvinsim 5y ago
> The big problem was to move away from Logic, but where there's a will, there's a way. I moved to Ableton years ago because I wanted a cross-platform DAW.
physicsguy 5y ago
My workflow these days is to use WSL2 for everything. It even handles CUDA now
JKCalhoun 5y ago
> this is the opposite of Jobs philosophy I would caution you about pigeon-holing "Jobs' philosophy". I have observed that his philosophy often suited the circumstances he found himself in at various points in his fascinating career. ;-)
danaris 5y ago
> this is the opposite of Jobs philosophy. Frankly, I think that the design changes Apple has been making are very much in line with how Jobs would have done things. Would he have made it exactly the same? No, certainly not; he was a different person who was very opinionated, so there would be differences—but the direction of the changes would, I think, be very similar. However, I think it's also pretty irrelevant, given that Jobs himself explicitly said "Don't try to do things the way I would do them. Just do the right things." (Paraphrased from memory.)

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

alwillis 5y ago

I disagree that macOS is being “dumbed down”. Unfortunately, the days of easy access to system volumes, kernel extensions had to end because the internet isn’t a friendly place and we just can’t have nice things. I spend more time on the command line now than I did 10 years ago on macOS and I don’t see that changing any time soon. It’s been a three release arc, starting with Catalina, to Big Sur and now Monterey, that started off pretty rocky and seemingly coming to fruition with this release. I’m using the public beta of Monterey as my daily driver and the transition couldn’t have gone any smoother, especially given it’s still months away from being released. So much better than Catalina which was ridiculously bad two years ago. I also don’t agree this is the lowest common denominator; since iPadOS, iOS and macOS all have the same core operating system, it only makes sense there should be a baseline of functionality and that users are able to use the appropriate platform for a given task. But that doesn’t mean unfettered access to everything on the Mac; given the world we live in, that’s a a recipe for disaster, which is why we can’t have nice things.