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My next Mac might be the last

• LAC-Tech 4y ago
  You know for all the disparaging remarks Mac users give Linux, they do seem to be deeply unhappy with their patron corporation.
• te_chris 4y ago
• gregjor 4y ago
  Way too emotionally invested in cosmetic details of… an operating system? I can’t imagine caring even half as much as the author does about MacOS. And I’ve used Macs since 1984. This comes off as entitled more than insightful: Do what I think you should or I’ll stop buying your computers. I upgraded to Ventura and iPadOS 16 yesterday. All of the things I care about still work. The sun still came up this morning and I didn’t get enraged over system preference settings or Stage Manager. Get a grip.
• bergenty 4y ago
  Literally no substance or examples except the settings and stage manager redesign.
• bergenty 4y ago
  I really like the new storage panel. It does a really good job of telling me what’s taking up space on my Mac.
• vietvu 4y ago
  You are me 2 years ago. I still using a Mac 15" 2015, the last decent one before the era of horror of Mac 2016. Not until the Mac M1 that hardware of the Mac is attracting to me again. But the real problem is the software. Updates by updates and I can see that quality is decreasing to the point I frustrating to use MacOS. The once developers centric laptop now is just another bunch of useless UI updates to appeal new generations. It's fine. I understand that they need to do something for new customers, not just me. But then again, it's not for me. I switch my work laptop to a Thinkpad for half a year now. I have to admit that Linux is not really as polished as Windows, MacOS, but I can control it to what I want. It is more important to me than the battery of the new M1. I still using the Mac 2015 less than 1 hour per day, mostly for web browsing. Once it die, I will use another laptop.
• parkingrift 4y ago
  > I’m not going into details here not because I don’t know what I’m talking about, but because, more pragmatically, the list of examples would constitute an article on its own, and would definitely exceed the scope and focus of this piece. Wow. There are so many egregious UI failures that the author can only choose to focus on a few of the most profound. Can’t wait to find out what those are. > The new System Settings and Stage Manager in Mac OS Ventura, to put it bluntly, are a fucking joke. Ah I see. It’s the disabled by default window manager, and the desperately needed settings overhaul. Must have been a great release, in that case. Hard to take the rest of this article seriously.
• drio 4y ago
  I just upgraded my M1 air to Ventura. I typically wait for apple to release the first software update before upgrading to a major version but I thought I'd give it a try after reading this post. It was absolutely painless and I did not notice any UI annoyances. I will update this comment if I encounter any issues. Disclaimer: I use hammerspoon(https://www.hammerspoon.org/ https://www.hammerspoon.org/) for, among other things, manage my windows and move them around. I do not use any special feature of the OSX UI.
• northisup 4y ago
• daviddever23box 4y ago
  Sitting on top of old macOS releases != reasonable security posture.
• SevenNation 4y ago
  > But what about security? Are you sure you want to stay on an older version of Mac OS? — Thankfully I’m tech-savvy enough to know what I’m doing. The two Macs I use most are still on High Sierra and Mojave, and haven’t received security updates in quite a while. I haven’t had any security-related problem whatsoever. ... Lots to unpack here. First, the author is stating a personal preference and won't be swayed. Fair enough. But the idea that the author would know they "haven't had any security-related problems whatsoever" is debatable at best. The attack surface is enormous. Even security experts admit they have trouble securing a consumer computer. And it doesn't sound like the author spends much time dealing with the topic in depth.
  • Apocryphon 4y ago
    macOS is much more prevalent than it used to be, but the attack surface is hardly “enormous” considering the prominence of security vulnerabilities on Windows. Would be more interesting to actually cite examples of high-risk exploits that have been discovered since High Sierra and Mojave.
  • RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y ago
    The OP points about security updates seem like a good example of Dunning-Kruger
  • kitsunesoba 4y ago
    Yeah, I won't say that I've enjoyed the restrictions that've come with the various security-associated measures added over the years, but I leave them turned on anyway because all it takes is one zero-day on some site you visit that manages to worm its way through your blocking extensions. I've been using computers for 25+ years and have been technically capable for the better part of that, but that doesn't mean I'm any less vulnerable. I'm not going to be intentionally clicking on fishy links or anything but we all make mistakes, which makes it more a matter of when than if.
  • jollyllama 4y ago
    How often do ordinary people actually get owned by zero days like you're describing? The majority have got to be malicious links, opening dangerous attachments, etc. Or, back in the day, a misconfigured firewall; I'd still absolutely recommend a strict firewall on the router.
• tpmx 4y ago
  What will Riccardo use instead? Windows? That's a joke. It's a fine platform for gaming and probably still the most performant platform for web browsing (I personally value that highly), but not really built for development (except for development of games, I guess). Desktop Linux/Gnome: Excellent for actual development work, but not great elsewhere.
  • Apocryphon 4y ago
    BSD - ravynOS
  • RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y ago
    > Windows? That's a joke. It's a fine platform for gaming and web browsing, but not for development. With WSL, I actually find Windows a better backend development platform than Mac.
    • xorl 4y ago
      I live in WSL for all my Dev work outside of Mac based apps. WSL allows me not to dual boot, still use "work" required applications w/out having a lot of issues and completing everything I need in one ecosystem.
    • specialp 4y ago
      Agreed strongly. I would rather develop on Linux as my development environment will not be destroyed on updates, and my applications run on Linux based systems. The only thing that saves MacOS from being completely unworkable is that there are so many devs on Macs, so workarounds/fixes to the breakage done to *nix subsystems are plentiful.
    • sublinear 4y ago
      I agree. Ubuntu and VSCode has been the typical dev environment on most company-issued Windows machines for years now.
      • xbar 4y ago
        "Most" and "years" is a stretch, but it's the way now.
• sylens 4y ago
  Article correctly calls out how they are ripping out perfectly good parts of macOS like System Preferences to replace them with an iOS-ified version. Instead of delivering features power users might want (proper window snapping/tiling!), the press release announcing Ventura talks up the new Weather app (from iOS) and Stage Manager, a horrible solution on both macOS and iPadOS.
  • shikshake 4y ago
    There are plenty of great third party tools that do power user features (including window snapping/tiling). Apple is better at defining a workflow and toolset for casual users and forcing them to adapt to the Apple way. Power users would naturally push back if Apple did a similar thing for them. So I think it's better that they leave any advanced features to outside developers.
  • FredPret 4y ago
    I’m new to MacOS but there’s a $4 app that enables window snapping. I know it’s annoying to pay for that but it’s still worth it in the big picture
    • CharlesW 4y ago
      In addition to the other free apps people have mentioned, the indispensable Raycast does windows management too. https://www.raycast.com/ https://www.raycast.com/
    • ace2358 4y ago
      Open source version of the app: https://rectangleapp.com/ https://rectangleapp.com/
    • toqy 4y ago
      There's also free ones, such as https://rectangleapp.com/ https://rectangleapp.com/ It does have a paid upgrade, but i've not found it necessary
      • 4y ago
• fdgsdfogijq 4y ago
  In the last six months I have purchased: 16 inch M1 Max ~4k Apple Watch Ultra ~800 Air pods pro 2 ~250 13 inch M1 16 GB ~2000 = 7000 dollars. A huge spend and I don't regret one single purchase. Each subsequent product interfaces extremely well with the ecosystem. I no longer carry my phone with me 80% of the time. I bring my watch and usually have a laptop if needed.
  • etrautmann 4y ago
    Do you text with friends, family, or colleagues, and if so, is it from the laptop? I find my communication hampered without the phone, but like the idea of leaving it away from me more often.
    • fdgsdfogijq 4y ago
      The texting is actually pretty good from the watch, can use Siri or type into the watch keyboard. Same with phone calls, I use the air pods to connect and its like talking on a regular phone. Apple pay works very well. Get emails, slack messages, etc. Can easily reply to slack messages from the watch. Cant see conversations but Basically everything works that I need. Alot of apps dont work, but thats the point. I dont need those apps all the time.
    • tannedNerd 4y ago
      Yeah iMessage has a pretty great tie in with iPhones to the point that they don’t even have to be on the same network to send an sms from your laptop via your phone.
      • FredPret 4y ago
        Just remember to deregister your number if you ever move off of Apple, or else every text from any iPhone to you will disappear into the void
        • dkonofalski 4y ago
          This used to be true but is not true anymore.
• kylehotchkiss 4y ago
  I actually like the new system settings. Feels much better organized than the previous version, and has space for adding new settings. I even noticed apple using the new space to show things like user groups, and rouge login items (I seriously found a Corel draw login item in there that I immediately discarded).
  • CharlesW 4y ago
    Agreed, System Settings really needed an update and is better for it. There's a bit of weirdness at the moment since apps/utilities make now-incorrect assumptions about where permissions are, but that'll be a memory soon. Stage Manager was opt-in for me and doesn't solve a problem that I have, but I think it's a great sign that Apple continues to try new things.
  • prh8 4y ago
    It's much better, it's pretty hilarious that was the example used for the article.
• jmbwell 4y ago
  Oof. Just last night I reset one of my personal systems to its original Yosemite. It couldn't access the app store or many modern web sites because of obsolete SSL. I manually upgraded to Sierra. It barely worked with iCloud and keychain. Getting it up to Mojave felt so much better. I hate that 32-bit got left behind, and I bemoan apparent "planned obsolescence" as much as anyone. But the fact is that these latest OSes are coming with genuine improvements in security posture. The point that the UI changes are sometimes unwelcome is well-taken, and I can see how the changes in security technologies change the experience for the user in sometimes awkward or baffling ways. Totally get it. But when it comes to stuff like this, I'm afraid the only way through it is forward.
• cglong 4y ago
  As someone who said "My next iPhone might be my last", just go ahead and leave the platform now. I ended up being irritated with so many things about that iPhone, looking longingly at the other side. You can always switch back later if things improve :)
  • FigurativeVoid 4y ago
    Just curious, what did you end up switching to?
    • cglong 4y ago
      I ended up getting a Pixel 4 and love it! Newer Pixels are too big for me though, so my next purchase will most likely be an Asus Zenfone.
      • INeedMoreRam 4y ago
        You trust Google more than Apple to not misuse your data?
        • cglong 4y ago
          I never said that :) I just have other priorities that I personally rank higher.
• tomcam 4y ago
  > To me, Stage Manager is as useful and practical an addition to Mac OS as putting a USB numeric keypad inside the packaging of a new MacBook Pro. Not trying to be silly here. Probably need my brain calibrated here, I would love the inclusion of a keypad and would find it incredibly useful, especially for accessibility reasons. So I find the idea delightful, which I suspect is not the way it supposed to strike me. I am assuming one is supposed to find that idea exotically stupid and niche?
  • dkonofalski 4y ago
    I think he's trying to say, albeit poorly in my estimation, that adding a USB keypad in the box defeats the purpose of having a portable machine? I'm only assuming that because they're suggesting that Stage Manager is impractical and not useful for them and USB keypads seem impractical for a laptop and would be unused by the majority of people using Macbooks(?) Pro.
    • tomcam 4y ago
      That interpretation makes a lot of sense
• jdlyga 4y ago
  I couldn't even suggest a good alternative: Windows: Windows 11 is a mixed bag with some better design and some worse. Currently, it's a bit of a step backwards. Windows 10 is pretty ok though. Ubuntu: I wouldn't say Ubuntu is in a better place now with Gnome than it was 5 years ago. It works well, but it doesn't have the cool factor that Unity did and is missing a lot of its features. Ubuntu Unity exists, but it's a little buggy and not as polished as back in the 16.04 days. You could always go KDE Plasma (or MATE if you're old school). There's the rabbit hole of other Linux distributions, my favorite alternative being Arch. But depends on your tolerance for tweaking.
  • didibus 4y ago
    I think KDE Plasma is great, highly recommend it.
    • tmtvl 4y ago
      I like KDE, not the biggest fan of Kwin, but I've replaced it with awesome and it's a really nice experience.
    • INeedMoreRam 4y ago
      I’ve been very happy with Kubuntu KDE Plasma. Rock solid. Fast.
  • zekrioca 4y ago
    You forgot to mention Ubuntu’s worse part which is snap :)
    • e-brake 4y ago
      Absolutely. Although Ubuntu is popular, I find openSUSE Tumbleweed to be a better Linux distro, with flatpaks, hot updates, btrfs snapshots.
    • 72deluxe 4y ago
      How does snap compare to flatpak etc.? I use opensnitch and eventually found the appropriate blocking rule for every time a snap is launched or appimage from some random mount path for the process. Not sure what's wrong with using the established package management system instead of reinventing the wheel to distribute an app on your own binary system that you control - why?!?!
• briantkelley 4y ago
  I totally agree with the author’s summary: > That trepidation and sinking feeling of “What are they going to break this time?” every time the WWDC’s date approaches, has been wearing me down in the past few years. What one should feel, instead, is: “Apple got this. I’m in good hands. I see no reason not to upgrade straight away.” And I haven’t felt this in a long time. I haven’t looked forward to a release since Snow Leopard, and High Sierra was the only usable version after that. Mojave and onward have been just dreadful. Mac software hasn’t been fun, exciting, or good in a long time, sadly.
  • dkonofalski 4y ago
    I might agree with the summary if there was any examples given of what they're referring to. If there was even a small list of things that Apple broke every WWDC that anyone besides extreme power users cared about, the point might actually be made. As it stands, it's a lot of "feelings" and not enough substance.
• DoctorD68 4y ago
  I've been feeling this creeping since roughly the PPC->Intel transition. There was a point where I was turning off more new OS X features than using them. The inescapable fact is that if you do not want to fully jump into the Apple ecosystem, macOS treats you like a second class citizen. I sync my iPhone via lightning cable, use Retroactive to install iTunes (it's better than Apple's "Music" app if you're managing your own library), get my apps via homebrew casks, store my documents locally, and every new release of macOS makes these sort of things a little bit harder. As far as security posture goes, I'm not too concerned. Little Snitch + Pihole are pretty amazing and I have the skills to stay secure. But it is depressing watching from the Catalina shore as each year another macOS release takes more autonomy from the user.
  • dkonofalski 4y ago
    I'm genuinely curious why you're doing this. What advantages do you get from turning off these features, installing old apps, and storing everything locally? I sync via my own server but still leave the iCloud backups for Documents on and there's no a single reason that I can see to install iTunes that's not already done better by other media players without the addition of Apple Music (which I use heavily in addition to keeping my own music library in Plex). I feel like making those kinds of concessions means that MacOS doesn't treat you as a second-class citizen but that you've deliberately chosen to make yourself a second-class citizen. In what ways do Linux or Windows (or even older MacOS) treat you like a first-class citizen that the new MacOS doesn't anymore?
    • DoctorD68 4y ago
      I've started a draft to your comment 3 times now and it always becomes a "not your cloud, not your data" rant :) But better writers than me have, and continue to, bang that drum so I will not right now. I could write 100 blog posts about this but let me give you one good example: Years ago when many people still synced their iPhones via cable, you could sync all the major "iLife" apps -- photos, music, contacts, calendar etc. When Apple released Notes.app, it was around the time the iCloud push got really big and more people started using that. To this day, you cannot sync Notes.app via cable. It would be a trivial thing to implement, but it prevents cloud adoption and is so clearly in the "wontfix" category that the only conclusion is that it's intentionally left out. Want your Mac's notes on your iPhone? Get in the iCloud, citizen, and maybe we'll let you. Bottom line is that if you go back and look at Steve Jobs' 2001 digital hub strategy, the futuristic view was one where the Mac was the ground truth for your data and your apps. You were in charge. You owned the machine, it did what you wanted, and you bought neat peripherals that interfaced with it like mp3 players and cameras. But today the "digital hub" is the cloud, and the Mac is just another peripheral. Today by default Macs and iPhones need to be "activated" via internet connection to reinstall the OS, and any peripherals you buy (looking at you, fucking HP/Epson shit) will likely force you to create a cloud account which means they own it, not you. <insert cloud rant here> Side note: Windows is a worse offender, you need look no further than Windows 11 and its removal of the local account except via extremely technical/hacky means. This is an intentionally malicious push to their ecosystem, and one I hope Apple does not follow (but essentially has on iOS and I won't be surprised if/when macOS follows suit). PPS. One of the next big pushes here will be passkeys. If they can tightly couple your online services to their devices for authn then the ease and freedom to migrate systems is reduced further, and "knowing" your credentials for an online service means nothing. The cloud provider decides if you get to access it or not.
• tptacek 4y ago
  To my lights, we're in a bit of a golden age with the Mac platform; the newest revision of the M1 Macbooks are some of the best they've ever made. I'm not in love with much of the new OS stuff, but I don't need to be; I'm mostly not the audience for it, and I don't need my OS to have whizzy new stuff just for the sake of it. I have a hard time getting myself wound up over the UI design of the System Preferences app.
  • enneff 4y ago
    TBH the only thing pushing me away from macOS is that there’s a bunch of stuff running on there by default that I don’t understand, and I don’t really trust Apple’s direction wrt respecting user privacy. When I’ve been using Linux in other contexts lately it’s been awesome being able to fully understand exactly what each process is and why it’s running (and to be able to remove it if I want to). On my macOS (and windows) boxes I end up trusting Apple and Microsoft a lot more than I would actively choose to.
    • kjellsbells 4y ago
      That's quite amusing to me, because when I "ps ax" on my Linux machine I honestly could not swear that i know what half of them were doing. The names look plausible (dbus, systemd stuff, etc) but it would be easy to get one past me. OpenBSD is a bit of an ice cold shower, but it's the only OS I use regularly where I can point to every process and know exactly what it's doing.
      • greyw 4y ago
        It is just a matter of getting used to it by studying each process one by one. There is no magic behind it.
        • NoPicklez 4y ago
          Could you not do the same for a standard MacOS install?
• streblo 4y ago
  It's unfortunate that some of what made MacOS great for developers is now being phased out in favor of features that are lifted out of iOS. Apple has made developer-hostile moves over the years that seem out of line with it's old 'think different' ethos. I hope Apple takes this customer segment seriously and reverses course here, but I'm not super hopeful. The real problem is that there isn't a reasonable alternative. Windows is out of the question for me due to not being a POSIX-based OS. WSL isn't integrated deeply enough and is still a pain in the ass to use coming from MacOS. I experimented with using a mostly stock Xubuntu setup for a bit and also found the user experience to be really subpar. Call me old, but I have no interest in dealing with the amount of configuration and tweaking necessary to be productive in a Linux environment. Ultimately, I'm just going to stick it out with MacOS.
  • kitsunesoba 4y ago
    Windows also has some unfortunate papercuts like font rendering that's still optimized for super low rez displays all these years later, with bad hinting and kerning. Seriously, this drives me nuts. It's better when DPI scaling is above 1.0 but it's still not as good as that of macOS or any Linux desktop environment. Also, if you want an application-centric desktop management style, macOS is the only game in town. Practically everything else follows Win9X conventions in that regard, even the iPadOS-reminiscent GNOME. While global menubars can be enabled in KDE and added to XFCE, they're only functional in some apps because a lot of apps (those built with GTK, mostly) have eschewed menubars entirely in favor of that infernal hamburger button.
    • rcarmo 4y ago
      I have been using HIDPI displays on Windows for years and have zero issues with the font rendering. It is _different_ from macOS and Linux, sure, but I can’t see any reason to diss it today.
      • ryandrake 4y ago
        I've always found Windows's font rendering to be subjectively "off" in a way I couldn't really articulate. I'm not enough of a typography expert to explain what I'm seeing. Text display just seems beautiful on Mac and a half-assed afterthought on Windows. My big problem with Windows HiDPI support is that they still can't seem to handle multiple monitors with different DPI sensibly. I have a 5120x2880 display as my main display and 2560x1440 displays on either side of it. Dragging windows from one display to the other is janky and sized wrong during the dragging. Doing the same thing on Mac just works as you'd expect. How can Microsoft still get this so wrong?
• tristor 4y ago
  I've been using Macs exclusively since 2010, and I basically feel the same way. The hardware is still fantastic. I still plan to replace my 2015 MBP with an M2 Max MBP when they become available. But I am intensely frustrated by unnecessary and inferior UI changes that would frankly never have passed muster when Steve Jobs was alive. I know it's trite to say, but I honestly think the current Apple UX team doesn't have the same philosophy and understanding of the Apple UX teams of yore. I say this as someone that has pretty much entirely shifted my tech to Apple over the last 5 years. I don't see me going elsewhere at the moment, but I do see a shift towards turning Mac devices into walled gardens that don't give the user actual control similar to iOS devices. I'm fine with that for my phone, not for my laptop, end of story.
• turtlebits 4y ago
  I don't love everything about MacOS, but the IMO the Apple ecosystem is worlds ahead of everything else when it comes to amount of time spent using it vs maintenance/tweaking/updating. As I've gotten older, I have 0 tolerance for spending time fiddling with hardware or OS issues. (I've reinstalled/tweaked Windows so many times just to keep it running well, let alone sitting through install wizards or messing with drivers). I don't need to shop around for the most reliable hardware, I trust Apple that it will be fast enough, ergonomics will be better than most, and most importantly - will just work.
  • marssaxman 4y ago
    I feel the same, but for me that's Ubuntu on a Thinkpad. Just works, no fuss.
  • goosedragons 4y ago
    I dunno. MacOS point releases take longer than entire Linux/Windows reinstalls. I clocked some at over 40 minutes. I find I need a lot more 3rd party utilities to make it usable (why is there no HDMI/DP sound control? Why is window snapping so bad? Why no MTP? etc.) Then you have all the new "security" features that have made doing what I need to do way harder than it needs to be.
    • esskay 4y ago
      macOS updates happen overnight when the machine is idle unless you disable that. I've not witnessed a mac update in years now, it happens automatically, and when I open my laptop it's done and everything is exactly as I left it.
      • goosedragons 4y ago
        Same with Windows. And it can be done on Linux. Sometimes you may need to update manually, like if you turned off the computer while transporting it, you need to do something at 2 a.m. etc. And everything is exactly as you left it except not really. Your REPL is now dead, Emacs has lost all its buffers, etc. I just have all the programs I had open but they all lost their state and so it's completely utterly useless. But hey they're all open and technically in the same position...
• coding123 4y ago
  I sometimes feel like Apple is catering to me: A convert of the last 3/4 years. Used Windows forever, dabbled in Linux for a while, saw everyone at conferences presenting from a Mac, so why the heck not. It's the 2018+ crowd that seems to be adopting at rates high enough that it's making the 2018- crowd feel their OS is getting ripped up.
  • bdougherty 4y ago
    It is getting ripped up, but all the new people on the platform are unaware of how much better it was before. I don't think anybody has issues changing things to make them better for newcomers as long as Apple doesn't throw out all of their design principles to do it (which is what they have been doing).
• yumraj 4y ago
  Sometimes I wonder if such blogs are written just because the author needs/wants to publish a blog at some frequency for whatever reason. I fail to take a blog that talks about how their "next" Mac "might" be the last, seriously. I would have paid some attention if the blog was about how their current Mac "might" be the last, and definitely more if their current Mac would "most definitely be" the last. I guess I should work on my next blog: My next space travel might be the last ..
• mcbuilder 4y ago
  For me I have to look at the battery life to performance tradeoff, and Apple hardware seems to win that game against Intel and AMD. I hope that a more open perhaps RISC-V SoC thing appears and a company like Framework could put it into modules or I could hack it into my Frakenpads, but until then it's Apple Silicon. OS wise Asahi has you covered for a hobbyist grade Linux experience. Probably get something ARM or x86 if using an open source operating system is important.
• enneff 4y ago
  Am I the only one here who finds the title and central message of this post totally ridiculous? Like “I don’t like what Apple are doing so I’m only going to give them a few more thousand bucks, but then in a few more years I’m probably gonna switch to another OS!!!”
  • chipotle_coyote 4y ago
    You are not. :)
• wizardman 4y ago
  While we're getting things off our chest I wanted to share something. I'm still using the original iPhone SE (you know, the small phone with bezels). The design of Safari for iOS used to be perfect. The + sign to open a new tab was right in the middle. Switching to incognito was 1 tap away. The open tabs were stacked open behind another. Apple redesigned Safari in iOS 15 to accommodate it for the bigger all-screen iPhones. The address bar was moved to the bottom for better reachability. The + sign was moved away not to be so close to that horizontal line that replaced the home button. Incognito was hidden away. The stack of open tabs become a grid. Even though the redesign made sense for the bigger bezel-less phones it was a regression for phones like the iPhone SE. I would have loved if they introduced the changes only to newer models but I can also understand that maintaining 2 different UIs would've been more work.
• non-nil 4y ago
  I'm nursing a Mojave install that I intend to keep around for a long time, even though there are newer devices and operating systems in my houshold for everyday online stuff. In terms of the Mac experience, it was quickly downhill from Mojave in my opinion (though I'm more fond of Snow Leopard or possibly Mavericks aesthetically), plus the 32 bit cutoff which kills important backwards compatibility for me. I already leverage some of the really nifty Mac features like Target Disk Mode, cloning and booting from external drives etcetera, to enable some hardware agnostic behavior, and will eventually move to virtualization, probably through Proxmox. Not having upgrades introduce breaking changes (Notes.app, I'm looking at you!) is such a relief.
• DwnVoteHoneyPot 4y ago
  Seems like he's just arguing about cosmetics. System Settings is now vertical instead of rows. Big deal - how much time does he spend in System Settings? In command line I prefer "ls -la" over "ls". Vertical is faster to read. An article says Stage Manager can be turned off. I'm using AltTab.app to customize my multi-tasking.
  • Aaargh20318 4y ago
    > An article says Stage Manager can be turned off. AFAIK it’s off by default and you have to explicitly enable it.
  • bdougherty 4y ago
    It's not about System Settings being vertical now. Just look at any of the panels and tell me how the new version is an improvement on the old? The panels in System Preferences were meticulously designed and the new ones are just a list of checkboxes.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • rodric 4y ago
    In case you haven’t already, you may want to create a .zshrc file in your home directory with the line alias ls='ls -la' Like you, I always want a vertical list.
• hbn 4y ago
  So far none of the recent changes to macOS have been any kind of deal-breaker to me. But there has been a lot of changes that are just... odd. Catalyst apps suck and don't feel right. For some reason Messages just loses typing focus at weird times. I'm sure it's nice for Apple to share codebases but for the end user it feels like a weird mobile app that had some desktop functionality tacked on at the last second. And the little control center they added to the right of the menu bar is just weird cause it's doubled-up implementations of menu items I already have. Volume control is already there. Media controls are already there. Wifi toggle is already there. Bluetooth switcher is already there. Why does this thing exist? So it can have bigger controls that look designed for a touch screen even though Macs don't have touchscreens (which I'm personally fine with) Thankfully they backtracked on the dumb Safari tab changes where they tried to make the web page and browser chrome bleed together which was just confusing.
  • crazygringo 4y ago
    It exists so you can delete the menu items taking up space that you don't use frequently. There's too many icons taking up space from menu items on laptop screens, it's always been a problem.
• hot_gril 4y ago
  Isn't this the same old story since 2008? First they ruined iMovie, but they fixed it later. Then they made mistakes in Lion which were later fixed. What exactly are the permanent problems with macOS, other than maybe iTunes becoming gimped?
• rhaway84773 4y ago
  In a strange way, part of Apple’s downfall with multi-tasking IMO is because they basically got it right the first time. The early versions of Expose were brilliant. One version which displayed all windows that were open, and another version which displayed windows for the current app. You could trigger it via the Keyboard, Hot Corners, or trackpad or mouse gestures (I’m not sure about the mouse gestures though). Further, the windows largely maintained their spatial configuration as well as their relative sizes. This was pretty much perfect and I’ve not seen any other implementation that does this better (Gnome is actually getting there by doing a good job of recreating Expose but adding Workspaces to it). The problem for Apple was that they need to keep changing prominent visual elements to indicate progress, even if the elements get functionally worse. This led to first losing the spatial configuration and relative sizing. Then it morphed into Mission Control which tried to overload a highly successful Mac OS X feature, Expose, to promote workspaces and then full screen apps. And once Mission Control got long in the tooth it had to change for marketing reasons, so we get Stage Manager. I suspect if Stage Manager or Mission Control would have come first, Max OS X would likely have evolved towards something like the original Expose instead and everyone would have been happier for it.
  • SebastianKra 4y ago
    Maybe I'm misremembering, but right now, expose is still available by unticking "Group Windows by Application". And it's not great if you have many windows. The arrangements of windows changes every time I invoke it. And even if it was consistent, I can't imagine that visually scanning through 30 tiny windows is efficient.
  • jbverschoor 4y ago
    It’s still there. The great thing about stage manager is that it hides the rest of the windows/application. It gives you this clean and focused view. It’s about windows management, and not just applications like the dock Switching works really well, and it’s easy to configure a new stage. This is what slaves should’ve been. It’s still buggy though.
    • jbverschoor 4y ago
• woah 4y ago
  Somebody should make a compendium of the thousands of blog posts from programmers threatening to leave Mac because of graphic design reasons over the past 20 years.
• tambourine_man 4y ago
  I mostly agree with the author. Having been a Mac user for almost 40 years, the recent disaster in usability and aesthetics is disheartening. The thing is, Windows is still a lot worse and not getting any better. Linux… I’m actually afraid I’d devote my life to endless configuration and frustration while having to deal with a Windows VM with GPU passthrough and whatnot. Or constant dual boot. Or a KVM. Who knows. So Mac it is for now. Please stop breaking our favorite OS, Apple.
  • INeedMoreRam 4y ago
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• mfarris 4y ago
  I regularly use a 10.4 Tiger machine for music and graphic projects and it is a breath of fresh air compared to where MacOS is today. My daily drivers are Mavericks/Mojave/Mojave but recently got an M1 iMac with Monterey. Nothing about Mojave-->Monterey feels like an improvement. Aside from high-DPI, I'd be pressed to think of a single Mac interface convention or element that is better today than 2005. Many are a lot worse.
  • Tagbert 4y ago
    Tabs as a first-class UI element used in many apps is a big improvement. They are a big part of how I use Finder for instance.
    • mfarris 4y ago
      Yes, good call on tabs.
• taylodl 4y ago
  The guy hates macOS so much he's buying another Mac? Seems strange to me. If macOS is so awful then why not leave it today? Why wait another five or more years? As far as Apple's strategy is concerned it makes sense to me. There's an order of magnitude more iPadOS and iOS users than there are macOS users. Why not make it easier for them to migrate to the platform? Who knows? Maybe one day Apple will realize that what's needed is an Macbook that you can bend the screen back flat and use like an iPad? The more the UI's are unified the more likely it is we'll see such a machine.
  • hot_gril 4y ago
    > The guy hates macOS so much he's buying another Mac? Seems strange to me. If macOS is so awful then why not leave it today? Why wait another five or more years? I think the answer is that he's not really leaving.
• rib3ye 4y ago
  > But what about security? Are you sure you want to stay on an older version of Mac OS? — Thankfully I’m tech-savvy enough to know what I’m doing. The two Macs I use most are still on High Sierra and Mojave, and haven’t received security updates in quite a while. Good luck with that.
• sosodev 4y ago
  Why buy a Mac if you're just going to immediately downgrade? Maybe I'm wrong but I can't imagine that outdated versions of MacOS will remain for productive for very long. I also find it odd that many Mac users in this thread claim that Linux requires too much tweaking. I've been daily driving Linux for years and I feel like I spend more time fiddling trying to get stuff to work correctly on my Mac work laptop. Perhaps it's just a matter of perspective?
  • INeedMoreRam 4y ago
    I am with you. How is it that there are countless people repeating how difficult it is to maintain Linux? It runs out of the box for most hardware flawlessly.
• digitthedog 4y ago
  More or less saying "the UI has gone bad", but not in the functional sense. It's gone bad in the sense of UI principals and aesthetics, but not usability. Not a single complaint about usability. Not just click-bait, it's trolling.
  • nnoitra 4y ago
    The UI is bad, 7 years of OS updates and the older versions of the Mac still feel better. It's just glitz on top of very bad ideas.
• drcongo 4y ago
  I feel like my current Mac (MBP M1 Pro) might be my last, because it's so damn good that I can't imagine ever needing more.
• throw7 4y ago
  This guy sounds like how I felt during the gnome 2 -> gnome 3 shift. Thank goodness I could just stick with mate.
• least 4y ago
  I've used Windows, Linux, and MacOS as my primary operating system for long stretches of time and I make an effort to stay current on all their developments. I personally find MacOS to be the right set of compromises for what I primarily do on my computer (for now), but that familiarity also means I am much more aware currently of all the things that piss me off about MacOS. A lot of the criticisms that the author has written here are valid. I probably have a larger set of grievances about the OS than he does. Anyone that deeply uses any operating system is going to find many things that delight them and many things that are deeply frustrating to the point where you think you might want to switch... only to find that the grass is not in fact greener on the other side, you're simply given a different set of delights and frustrations. I just don't really know what someone like this expects to do. Just use Mojave into perpetuity? That won't work for all that long. Switch to Windows or Linux? He might luck out and find that they serve his needs better, but more than likely he'll just find them frustrating to use too. I think one ultimately has to accept that whatever they choose to use (or eschew computers entirely) that they'll be dealing with a lot of frustrations. There is no panacea.
• ttfkam 4y ago
  MacOS Ventura review on Ars Technica https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/10/macos-13-ventura-the-ars-technica-review/#h45 https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/10/macos-13-ventura-the...
• wellthisisgreat 4y ago
  What is the upside of Stage Manager? I love me some new features, but I turned this on, and it’s some weird motion-sickness inducing always-on cmd+tab monstrosity. Is it supposed to learn about my usage habits and adapt?
• chipotle_coyote 4y ago
  I’m eternally conflicted by personal stories like this, with part of me going do we have to do this again? and another part responding with surely you don’t think Apple is above criticism. No. Of course I don’t. Apple has made criticism-worthy decisions for years and they still regularly make them. But at times it seems like there’s just a…reach. I’m using macOS Monterey right now, and while I don’t think the Big Sur UI refresh is a substantial improvement over its predecessor Catalina and it made a few aesthetic choices I’d charitably describe as dubious, it’s hardly a catastrophic regression. Yeah, people are nostalgic about OS X Snow Leopard, but that’s not a particularly good indication of it being the pinnacle of design. People are also nostalgic about Windows 3.1, AmigaOS, and CP/M. (Snow Leopard is full of the old “metal” UI, glowy candy-colored buttons, and drawers. It’s adorable, but it’s very 2000s.) And, I mean, okay, Mac people are stereotypically (over)sensitive to UX decisions, I get that. So when the author writes, “I’m not saying I’m dumping the Mac and switching to Windows or Linux,” well: no, he’s clearly not, is he. He’s just written a a fair number of words with the clear subtext, I am a Mac person who is stereotypically oversensitive to UX decisions. Apple will undoubtedly make other weird choices next year with macOS Fresno or Oxnard or whatever, but they will probably still on the whole be choices Mac UX nerds will like more than the alternatives. (Also, dumping the Mac and switching to Windows or Linux will deprive people of the opportunity to write about how much they hate the Mac, and you know, where would the fun be in that.)
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  • derbOac 4y ago
    You're correctly pointing to some hypocritical subtext, but to be fair to the author, they explain the reason for their ambivalence: it's because there's such a contrast between hardware and software. This is nothing new really, but then that goes to the heart of why people "love to hate the Mac". It's not that they love to hate it, it's that the hardware is so great, but then you have this kind of increasingly corporate consumer-hostile stuff that gets thrown on top of it (in the past it was just plain bloated inefficiency, like early iTunes). So let's say you are in the author's position: what do you do? Regardless of whether it's Linux or Windows, you're going to go onto other hardware systems. Many of the options are pretty nice and underrated in "Mac faithful" communities. But really, they're probably not quite what Apple offers, if not in quality, than in selling points. Recently this has been exacerbated because Apple is putting out an ARM chip that's pretty powerful but also power-efficient. Add nice trackpads, nice monitors, great battery life, and so forth, and it's hard to leave even if you are frustrated with the software. What other high-performing consumer ARM/RISC power efficient laptop are you going to find? A lot of people (I'm in this boat now) would love to see the ability to buy Apple hardware and slap Linux on it seamlessly, but it's not quite there yet. Asahi Linux is incredibly impressive in how fast its grown but it's not actually ready for primetime: last time I looked at the status notes, you were at risk of literally blowing up your speakers by doing much with them. So then the ambivalence goes around and around.
• bsnnkv 4y ago
  I jumped ship from macOS to Windows back in 2020 and honestly it has been great. Most of the time I essentially use Windows as a DE for Linux under WSL2. Especially since the windows-rs[1] crate was published, for me it is just so much more infinitely customizable for my needs than macOS ever was. Once you get the hang of the Win32 API (pretty easy with the excellent developer documentation), the sky is really the limit.[2] [1]: https://github.com/microsoft/windows-rs https://github.com/microsoft/windows-rs [2]: With the exception of the Virtual Desktops API. I'm still salty about this, see more here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33169588 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33169588
• mark_l_watson 4y ago
  I am in my 70s, but still do some work as an architect/software developer so I am going to hang on to my Mac computers for a while. When I finally get past my “sell by date” and completely stop working, I really like the Chromebook since the UI is nice enough and the Linux containers work well enough for light weight coding for fun projects. I would hang on to my iPhone and Apple Watch. Maybe keep an iPad instead of a Chromebook if not having Linux containers is OK. I virtually never turn on any of my Mac computers anymore if I am not in work mode. Even with valid criticisms of recent UI changes, macOS is great for getting work done.
  • INeedMoreRam 4y ago
    Are you okay with Google’s telemetry on that Chromebook?
    • mark_l_watson 4y ago
      Good question! I am aware of it, do not love it though. I have made peace with Google and privacy by carefully setting my account privacy settings, basically asking them to not store any of my data except for my music and YouTube history (I want good recommendations). I am a heavy user of Colab and prefer GCP over AWS, and I buy books from Google Play because of family sharing. And I worked at Google in 2013. I have read the major new books on privacy by Carissa Velez and Shoshana Zuboff and take privacy seriously but for me it is a value vs. costs thing.
• yawnxyz 4y ago
  I decided my last Macbook Pro 15 was my last Macbook, then bought a top of the range DELL running Windows 10, and the fit and finish of both the device and the OS is just not there. Using the touchpad was a chore as it's not as responsive; ads pop up all over the Start menu; the monitor is blurry; and even setting up things like Bluetooth devices were hit and miss. Ended up getting another Macbook, for better or worse
• jemmyw 4y ago
  > My next Mac might be the last What's the point of writing this? If it was "My current Mac will be my last" then that's interesting. But stating that you're actually going to buy another one and maybe one after that. Of course it might be your last, you might die in a car crash on the way home from the store. My next car might be my last. There's a bunch of things I don't like about my current car so I'll make an uninformed guess that the next one will have the same problems + some other ones and I'll be sick of cars after that.
• fxtentacle 4y ago
  I'm quite jealous of the nice hardware that Macs have. If Apple would commit to first class Linux support, I'd immediately buy a set for my family. But instead of delighting customers, Apple is now chasing the mystical "services revenue". In my opinion, that's just a more pleasant way of saying "everything will be infested with DRM so that we can sell you the same movie multiple times". We can already see the start of it with Apple Music which is raising prices now that customers are appropriately entrapped and have lost their old (purchased) iTunes mp3 collection.
• etempleton 4y ago
  I cannot agree more with this post. I like Apple, probably more than most, but the MacOS UX is not good right now. The author won’t list the issues so I will: 1. Windows Management - Windows should snap to a grid like they do in Windows 11. 2. Fullscreen Mode - It is bad! Do I want to be in full screen mode or not? Some features are nice in fullscreen, but sometimes I can’t do things in fullscreen and that feels bad. And some apps don’t support it and that also feels bad. 3. The Dock - It takes up too much room on modern high resolution displays and if you hide it it is finicky. So you end up using fullscreen and that is finicky too, but then You miss the dock and then go back to it and get frustrated all over again. 4. The Finder - it isn’t really that bad, but it isn’t really that good either. For some reason I always feel like it takes me longer to navigate around in the finder. Maybe someone else knows why I feel this way. Maybe I need to enable the path as another commenter mentioned. MacOS does a lot of good stuff, but it is all old stuff that it has done well for years, spotlight, command shortcuts, Automator, fonts, animations, OS stability. The newer UX changes are always nice in theorybut cumbersome in practice and some other elements just feel in need of a rethink. I think with modern high resolution and multi monitor displays a tiling windows mode would be interesting where you can save setups.
  • rsfinn 4y ago
    Re the Dock: it may not be easily discoverable, but you can resize the Dock by hovering over a vertical bar between icon groups, then dragging up and down. Hold down the Option key to snap to (what I presume is one of a number of) unscaled icon sizes. One of the first things I do on a new install (as well as turning on the Finder status bar) is option-clicking on the Dock and shrinking it down by one step (or maybe two on a 13" MacBook).
    • klodolph 4y ago
      The option key won’t snap to the unscaled icon sizes. The unscaled icon sizes are just too far apart—there’s 48 px, but the other sizes are powers of 2.
  • matchbok 4y ago
    What do you use the dock for? CMD-Tab is all you need. I do feel like the yearning for tiled windows or things like that are the result of trying to make OS X into Windows. Mac has Expose and virtual desktops - you don't need tiled windows.
• nnoitra 4y ago
  This M1 Mac Air will definitely be my last. I am switching to Windows laptop soon. The thing is that Macs were head and shoulders above the competition and I just don't see it anymore. It's becoming an isolated ecosystem and the competition is just more than keeping up even with the M1. I started using Macs in 2015 roughly and at that time they were destroying the competition. The retina display sucks. It doesn't feel natural to me.
• jedberg 4y ago
  I've been running the beta OS for months. Never tried Stage Manager. I just turned it on and so far... I'm actually really liking it! It's basically like having one desktop per app. Maybe as I use it more the complaints will make more sense to me.
  • nsxwolf 4y ago
    I'm looking forward to trying it. There's been a million ways to manage desktops and windows, and there probably never will be the perfect one. I'm all in favor of experimentation in this area.
  • _nhynes 4y ago
    I turned stage manager on after learning about it from the article. Maybe it's my OS version, but it's super buggy, and I can't seem to turn it off. I'm with the author on this one :\ Update: closing and reopening the windows puts them back into normal mode. Apparently the little close buttons in the sidebar still work (along with the rest of the window). Really weird...
• rdiddly 4y ago
  I promise I read the whole article, but to paraphrase the title, he plans to buy at least one more computer from this company, and possibly more. Is that how we send a message? He says it's clickbait. No my friend. "I gave my Mac to a homeless guy and bought a Dell" would be more clickbaity, yet also more substantive.
• caleblloyd 4y ago
  I have always maintained that the last release of OSX I needed was 10.6.8 Snow Leopard. This was back when Safari for Windows was still a thing. The headlining feature was full 64-bit support. After that, they changed the default scrolling to "natural scrolling" to match the iPhone/iPad. The headlining features at WWDC became more about how they were bringing phone apps like iMessage and Calls over to OSX.
  • klodolph 4y ago
    Released in 2009, Snow Leopard was the last version of macOS before mobile took over everything. I agree that Snow Leopard is perhaps the best macOS release. Windows 7 came out around the same time and it was also excellent—almost as if the new smartphone industry just disrupted everything to hell. This was also a couple years before Gnome 3 came out.
• rootusrootus 4y ago
  Reminds me of the regular WSJ articles that alternatively extoll the virtues of Apple products, or how something is going terribly wrong with them. It's like clockwork. People have been submitting articles to HN for as long as it has existed proclaiming that now, now is the time they're giving up on Apple. This time for real, pinky promise!
• nikolay 4y ago
  They need to fix the keyboard! My 2019 MacBook Pro has 2 dead keys already, 3 keys, which black paint got scratched off, and many keys not functioning perfectly! "They will fix it for free!" is not an excuse! The old keyboard were solid!
  • nsxwolf 4y ago
    I currently am using a 16 inch 2019 for work, and the keyboard has been a return to form for me, after blowing multiple "butterfly" keyboards on multiple machines - even though I use an external keyboard 99% of the time. It's impossible to paint a picture from individual anecdotes, but my experience with organizations that deployed a large number of MacBook Pros was that about half of them would eventually be turned in for butterfly keyboard failures, and it hasn't been happening with the new "retro" keyboards. I do have a friend with a huge hole scratched in the paint of his 2017's left Shift key, backlight shining through. I'd never seen that before!
    • nikolay 4y ago
      Paint holes are not a new problem, but keys breaking after less than a year of light usage is definitely a new issue - it got a little better with my 2019 as the 2017 model key caps got detached (I have 3 or 4 like that) after light normal use and no accidents. I've been using MacBooks exclusively since 2009 and I have a bunch of old MacBooks - Pro and Air - and their keyboards work perfectly well still unlike the new ones! My Magic Keybaord, which is saving me now, is marvelous (it's a 2017 model though, I'm not sure about the newer ones).
• metmac 4y ago
  > .. I feel that the software tools Apple wants me to use today are getting worse and shallower, created or modified according to an equally shallower design concept that prioritises eye-candy over pretty much anything else… Then we wonder why so many people are nostalgic about Mac OS X Snow Leopard. I’m sure that, if a hypothetical ‘super-patch’ could be issued to bring Snow Leopard up-to-date with regard to Internet protocols and the like, many would gladly go back to use it. +100 frankly.
  • mergy 4y ago
    All downhill after Snow Leopard IMHO.
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• urthor 4y ago
  Apple is innovating fantastically. You get the feeling, all their best people are doing amazing work on the Apple Watch, then the iPhone. User facing MacOS improvements are a dead end for career focused big tech employees sadly. They're not revenue generating. A total change from 2009. In 2009, the hardware of an Apple laptop was awful, so they HAD to ship brilliant software to compensate. Now the MBP has the BEST screen, the BEST chip, the BEST battery life. Apple has moved the "A Team" to other platforms.
  • callmemclovin 4y ago
    Huh, interesting, I always think of the Macbooks from the 2007-2011 era to be the best in terms of hardware regarding the reliability - if you look up the major Macbook recalls and problems, they all begin after that time, for example the dying graphics problems, faulty logic boards, delaminating retina screens, faulty SSDs and so on...
    • urthor 4y ago
      Oh, I'm speaking from a performance per watt/single threaded perspective. Feature oriented. If you're buying your laptop for reliability, not quite the same thing.
      • 72deluxe 4y ago
        My 2012 MacBook Pro non-retina is still going strong! Just replaced the battery in it after the original would only charge to 67%, so hopefully I'll get another 10 years out of it. Now it's running Linux, as of this year.
        • SyneRyder 4y ago
          Still using a mid-2012 MBP as my second machine here too. It's a great machine if you upgrade it to 16GB RAM (which it can take despite Apple's official claims) and an SSD. And unlike modern Macs, those are easy upgrades / repairs that you can do yourself. I actually just bought another mid-2012 MBP on eBay, as a backup in case this one dies, and as a dedicated Linux / elementary OS machine until then. Also, the mid-2012 has the best trackpad, ever. A proper, satisfying mechanical click when you press it. I just can't use those haptic trackpads Apple put on every laptop from 2015 onwards. The mid-2012 MBPs have very unreliable SATA flex cables though, so make sure you keep some spare flex-cables on hand. I had six of them replaced by Apple during the 3 year warranty period. (That unreliability is what made me switch back to Windows & use a Thinkpad X1 as my daily driver, but I'm keeping the Mac alive with my own repairs after Apple refused.)
• RickHull 4y ago
  This reads to me as a power user (and thus influencer) totally disenchanted with the product, yet the product manager is most assuredly hitting his KPIs. Net result for Apple in 1-3-5-10 years: ?
• etchalon 4y ago
  While the points of the article are salient, they remind me of the complaints OS 9 die-hards made about OS X. As Apple dog-foods and builds using new tooling (back then Carbon and Cocoa, today Swift UI), stuff gets worse until it gets better. Everything will be better in the next version, and even better in the version after that. Accept for the new stuff, which will be worse before it gets better, and then five years from now we'll get an article about how Apple is "ruining macOS" for some other reason.
• willnonya 4y ago
  While not a Mac user I find many of the trends outlined in the article are equally applicable to iOS, Android and Windows. Change is bei g driven for the same of change and press announcements without regard to usability and practicality.
• dimgl 4y ago
  I can't say I feel this way about MacOS. If anything, I want to stop using Windows altogether. I absolutely love my Macbook and I can't see myself using any other operating system.
• linguae 4y ago
  I'm a long-time Mac user who made the switch back to FreeBSD and Windows at the beginning of the year due to my disappointments with the direction the Mac has gone since Tim Cook took over. I started thinking about switching away from the Mac after the October 2016 release of the touch menu MacBook Pro, but what took me a while to switch was wrestling with leaving macOS, which has been (and still is, at least until Mojave) my favorite desktop operating system. However, what pushed me toward finally switching to PCs was (1) the increased iOS-ificiation of macOS starting with Catalina, plus (2) my desire for user-upgradeable hardware. While I'm satisfied with my FreeBSD (with KDE Plasma as my desktop)/Windows dual-boot situation, neither KDE nor Windows are my ideal desktops. For the past few years I've been doing a lot of thinking about what I'd like out of an operating system and what would be a compelling alternative to macOS even in its heyday. I'm working on a side project called MallowOS (http://mallowos.com/ http://mallowos.com/) that is my vision of an ideal workstation OS and could be thought of as a "retrofuturistic" operating system had some of the visions of Xerox PARC researchers, the Apple's Advanced Technology Group, and Lisp hackers (among others) been realized. Other operating system projects I'm paying close attention that are even more macOS-inspired than my system are helloSystem (https://hellosystem.github.io/docs/ https://hellosystem.github.io/docs/) and rayvnOS (https://airyx.org/ https://airyx.org/). I hope these projects gain traction so that way they become solid options for long-time Mac users who are disappointed in Apple's direction but who want to use a familiar interface with applications designed with familiar UI/UX guidelines.
• yosito 4y ago
• killion 4y ago
  The Alan Dye era at Apple has been the worst for me. Basic UX concepts like Fitts Law are ignored for the sake of "simplification". Finder notifications with tiny click targets that only appear on hover are something that wouldn't have stayed around for multiple OS revisions. Discoverability is lacking everywhere. Having close buttons on the left side and the right side of tabs depending on state (like the number of tabs in Safari) is something that following the Human Interface Guidelines wouldn't have allowed. I love innovation and trying new things – but the styling improvements shouldn't ignore the basics. There will always be new users who need to see what is possible in order to navigate.
  • LtWorf 4y ago
    Companies have a need to randomly change designs so that the new version looks different and people understand "it's new".
    • amatecha 4y ago
      I miss Apple's confidence in their OS design. System 6 - Mac OS 8 (maybe even 9) are so similar in design, like all they really did for 7 and 8 was add a bit of shading/depth. Seriously, here's a screenshot of System 4 "Open File" dialog vs. Mac OS 9's "Open File" dialog: System 4.2: https://guidebookgallery.org/pics/gui/interface/dialogs/openfile/macos42.png https://guidebookgallery.org/pics/gui/interface/dialogs/open... OS 9: https://guidebookgallery.org/pics/gui/interface/dialogs/openfile/macos90.png https://guidebookgallery.org/pics/gui/interface/dialogs/open... (and here's System 7's, somewhere in the middle: https://guidebookgallery.org/pics/gui/interface/dialogs/openfile/macos70.png https://guidebookgallery.org/pics/gui/interface/dialogs/open... )
  • amatecha 4y ago
    Oh yeah, I had to use a brand new MacBook for work stuff, and I was literally yelling at the Desktop Picture settings (for example). Buttons that are just a floating text label? I didn't even realize it was a button until I randomly guessed it _might_ be, secretly hoping it wasn't because it didn't look like a clickable element whatsoever... spoiler alert: it was a button. Like, come ON. It's 2022, stuff like "a button should look like a button" was something Apple themselves standardized on like, 30 years ago? It's so glaring. What are these buttons in the FaceTime dropdown at the top right of this[0] screenshot? Why are there four different shades of buttons? Again, why don't they look like buttons? The flatness reduces meaning - maybe they're just status indicators? Actually, looking at the screenshot I'm not even sure they are buttons now?! [0] https://web.archive.org/web/20220712084619im_/https://www.apple.com/v/macos/monterey/d/images/overview/facetime_screen_sharing__bvvgynshm2j6_large.jpg https://web.archive.org/web/20220712084619im_/https://www.ap...
• Aperocky 4y ago
  I shall come and represent the other segment. I've used 5+ macs at this point and I've barely used the graphical UI. Personal or professional the default and preferred interface for local interaction on the mac is the terminal, and then there's the browser for online stuff. `open` is a wonderful command. I've also found Finder very annoying to work with when I had to use it for file upload etc. But I never had to do that too often.
• concinds 4y ago
  Couldn't agree less. > But what about security? Are you sure you want to stay on an older version of Mac OS? — Thankfully I’m tech-savvy enough to know what I’m doing. It's hard to be more misinformed. Ventura fixes 66 CVEs. Monterey 12.6.1, released simultaneously, fixes 3. This is typical for Apple.[0] You are not secure unless you are running the latest public version, period. Don't like Stage Manager? Don't use it. And the move to System Settings is just a way to make the Mac easier for brand new Mac users, who are more likely used to iOS Settings. Far from promoting eye-candy, they've kept building in powerful social, collaboration and productivity features, like SharePlay (Monterey), scheduled send in Mail, Shared Tab Groups in Safari, iPhone-as-webcam, and Freeform. I still have misgivings about Apple Music and Books being buggy, but you can't say they're ignoring pro users. [0]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/11/psa-apple-isnt-actually-patching-all-the-security-holes-in-older-versions-of-macos/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/11/psa-apple-isnt-actua...
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• amatecha 4y ago
  My 2013 MacBook Pro is/was my last Mac. It worked just fine, but I opted out of newer OS X updates because I noticed each successive "upgrade" was making the OS worse, in countless ways, and adding exactly zero improvement I could discern. Change for the sake of change, as far as I'm concerned. I feel the same way about Windows... I ended up just going out and buying a bunch of old ThinkPads and running OpenBSD and Linux on them. I think I got like five computers for less than the price of a single MacBook Air. I'm pretty much done with proprietary operating systems because they clearly no longer provide the best experience, from my perspective. I'm tired of being locked out of software I paid for because I "upgraded" the OS (looking at you, Logic Pro), or vice versa, unable to use new software because I didn't "upgrade" (most new Mac software won't run on my MBP). If I upgrade, I literally throw away a $250 piece of software and have to spend another $250 (or whatever) to use the new version of _that same software_. At least open-source OSes allow me to stay up to date while still having nearly-maximum agency over how the computer works and what software it runs. I'm tired of my computer doing a ton of stuff I didn't tell it to do. The amount of notifications/nags/etc. on a modern Mac/Windows computer is absolutely mind-boggling to me. The always-online aspect, software-update-checks, "telemetry" and "analytics", phoning home every time I launch a program... I'm tired of my computer not being a tool for me to use, but rather just a gateway to a bunch of stores and ways I can spend money, with a bit of "productivity" sprinkled on the side. I could go on and on. Oh, I didn't even touch on the software design/UX aspects. Like Riccardo wrote, it's a worthy of an entire article itself. I could probably spend an entire day documenting/critiquing the degradation of user experience in Mac OS and Windows. Mac OS had a lot further to fall, and indeed has been extra-disappointing because I used to hold it in such high regard :\
  • bdlowery 4y ago
    I thought the same until I saw my boss with a basic MacBook setup move around his OS, programs, and IDE faster than me. The only difference was he didn’t spend 20 hours setting it up at every new dev job. Custom OS’s are a complete waste of time, and you’re just fighting an uphill battle. I’d take my 20+ hour battery life MacBook Pro over anything else all day everyday.
    • 4y ago
• fsociety999 4y ago
  I think the key point in this article is this: > I think it all stems from Apple’s desire to simplify things for themselves This is the only logical explanation for a lot of Apple’s decisions lately. It’s funny how the release notes for Ventura say: > System Preferences becomes System Settings and features a new design that's optimized for efficient navigation on Mac, and delivers a more consistent experience across iPhone and iPad. I wonder how long it took their marketing people to come up with that. The truth is this design is not at all optimized for efficient navigation on a Mac. In some cases it actually requires more clicks than System Preferences. Also a consistent experience from iOS to MacOS is not as important as Apple makes it out to be. No one expects a computer to work exactly the same way as a phone or tablet. The only real justification here is that it probably makes lives easier for Apple developers since they can now manage a single codebase for settings vs. separate ones. It’s funny cause the one App that I think could actually benefit from this kind of change is the Music app which is a complete abomination on the Mac, but actually works quite well on the iPhone and iPad. It’s a shame when companies put ease of use for their engineers above ease of use for their users, but this kind of thing seems to be more and more common in the software industry these days.
  • ksec 4y ago
    >This is the only logical explanation for a lot of Apple’s decisions lately. I dont think it is "simply" about simplification either. It is just very Tim Cook's way of operation. Cost cutting. By unifying these platform, you reduce the cost of development. iPad, iPhone, and in the future, Mac, aren't all that different. And reducing cost of development is something Tim Cook loves. It would have been much much better to leave iOS, iPadOS and macOS as three thing. Like in Steve's era. It would be more expensive, sure but it will be better.
  • pishpash 4y ago
    It's not companies putting ease of use for their engineers above others. It's their engineers putting ease of use for themselves above others. Blame the industry itself. Nowadays engineers are wannabes after money, not great designers or architects with deep expertise or a sense of art.
• titzer 4y ago
  My Macbook Pro from 2021 has 22GiB of "System" according to the HD explorer. With each new generation of Apple software, there is more bloat and fewer features. They randomly move stuff, change the whole color scheme, animate random stuff, break random stuff, take away all the ports... But that CPU...
• friendlyHornet 4y ago
  Can I just take a second to hate on the redesign of the theme? I am so tired of that flat cartoonish look that all software is going for. It looks bland and boring I miss the pre Big Sur design
• claytongulick 4y ago
  I'm pretty happy with macs these days, but my use case is very simple. 99% of everything I do is either browser based, vscode, or command line. I don't know how to use, or care to use any of the applications that come with the Mac. For me, it's pretty much identical to windows with wsl that I switched from, but the M1 chip is just amazing.
• abujazar 4y ago
  >Thankfully I’m tech-savvy enough to know what I’m doing. >I’m honestly more concerned by third-party apps dropping support of these older system versions rather than vague security threats. This guy probably won't notice that someone used one of many available root privilege escalation vulnerabilities against his system before his bank account is emptied.
• cat_plus_plus 4y ago
  I hate to say that, but Microsoft turned out to be the adult in the room. I can still run most software from 20 years ago without any changes and, when needed, unofficial patches are far more feasible than say running 32 bit software on Monterey. On top of that, new comparability is being added, not removed - I can now also run Linux and Android apps out of the box. While new functionality meaningfully improves user experience, especially when it comes to gaming. Also openness to simultaneously support different CPUs/GPUs/peripherals and technologies like touch screens rather than forcing a single selection on the user. Not everything is hunky dory of course, I hate forced updates and constant nags for OneDrive/Edge and so on. But overall Windows 11 feels like Snow Leopard and Ventura feels like Windows 8.
  • nathias 4y ago
    > While new functionality meaningfully improves user experience, especially when it comes to gaming. What do you mean? The most changes I see in Windows is just more spyware/adds added to basic features.
    • amatecha 4y ago
      Yeah, what? I would happily argue the optimal UX ever present in Windows was either Windows 7 or Windows XP.
  • matheusmoreira 4y ago
    > I can still run most software from 20 years ago without any changes Well I can't. There are old games in my Steam library right now that will not even launch on the latest Windows. Hunting for old DirectX redistributables didn't seem to help and I gave up. I wouldn't be surprised if they worked fine on Linux. Wouldn't that be ironic?
    • ColonelPhantom 4y ago
      For games, the PC Gaming Wiki is a treasure trove of "how do I get game X running on modern machines". Usually the culprit is either an ancient version of DirectX for 1990s titles, or DRM for the 2000s. And usually there's a crack/patch for the DRM, and for DirectX you can use tools like dgVoodoo.
• verisimilidude 4y ago
  I've already returned from the other side of my breakup with the Mac. Full cycle. From 2002 to 2013, I loved OSX. Yes, even Puma. Mavericks was the first release that broke the spell. Already, I could see the downward trajectory of the UX. With each subsequent release, my frustration grew. In 2016, I ditched the Mac in favor of PC. I dual booted Windows and Fedora. Between the two, I didn't miss anything. Windows took care of all my office and casual use activities. Fedora is great as a distraction-free coding environment. I was surprised by how quickly I adjusted. Over the years, I stopped thinking much about the Mac. In 2021, my new workplace issued me a new MacBook. This was my first real exposure to the Mac in five years. And it's...fine. Not great. Just fine. It's not frustrating like it was in 2016. It gets the job done. But I wouldn't care if you took it away and put me back on Windows tomorrow. I've accepted it. The glory days of OSX are gone. I've let go of my hope that macOS can reclaim that same magic. Expectations and disappointments are gone. Instead, the Mac is just one tool among many that can get the job done. And I'm okay with that.
  • saagarjha 4y ago
    Mavericks looks pretty much like the release preceding it?
    • verisimilidude 4y ago
      I had a lot of technical problems with Mavericks. The first installation failed. The WiFi never worked correctly, with frequent slow-downs and drops that didn’t affect any other devices (including older Macs). This was a commonly reported problem at the time. For a system that sold itself on “just working”, this was all very jarring.
• esskay 4y ago
  The new system settings suck. But as someone who really cannot at all be arsed with wasting half my life pissing round with tweaking a Linux distro it's ideal.
• Mindwipe 4y ago
  I very much agree. Apple isn't just fiddling with the UI. It has actively got worse with every rendition of MacOS since Lion, and the pace of destruction is getting faster. Frankly, the UI teams have no idea what they're doing any more, other than a clear instruction from above to make it look like iOS when a) iOS has so much UI debt at this point it is a chore to use and needs an instruction manual (seriously, hand someone who doesn't spend their time a beta blog and ask them to use Stage Manager) and b) is for a completely different size and interaction modal. Apple desperately needs someone with some taste at the helm.
• intellectronica 4y ago
  I'm pretty sure Apple also wishes for the next Mac to be the last. And though that's unlikely, it does look like where they're heading is to over time move to iPad devices + cloud services. It's better business for Apple, and better experience for users.
• phil917 4y ago
  I think the System Settings app can be improved but I think the hate is a little overblown. How often are you really in the system settings anyways? I'm really enjoying Stage Manager so far as well.
• highwaylights 4y ago
  “But what about security? Are you sure you want to stay on an older version of Mac OS? — Thankfully I’m tech-savvy enough to know what I’m doing. The two Macs I use most are still on High Sierra and Mojave, and haven’t received security updates in quite a while. I haven’t had any security-related problem whatsoever.” How do people keep thinking nonsense like this, and then repeating it online to endanger other non-technical folks who also don’t know better? Author has no idea if he has had any security problems, because most malware isn’t about to alert you to it’s presence. You don’t run out-of-support software on an internet-connected computer.
  • hinoki 4y ago
    https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2018-4192 https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2018-4192 https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2019-8601 https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2019-8601 Remote execution vulnerabilities happen in JavaScriptCore. Tech-savvy won’t save you, all it takes is some malicious ad code or some hacked server providing malicious JS (or media files, etc. etc.)
    • newaccount74 4y ago
      Are there any proof-of-concept exploits for these issues anywhere that people could try out for themselves? I think it would go a long way to convincing people if you could for example visit a website that eg. changes your desktop background when you visit it, to show how dangerous it is to run unpatched systems. There are so many documented vulnerabilities that only apply to certain scenarios, that people (myself included) just think, "Hey, that sounds very theoretical, I don't think it applies in my case"
      • saagarjha 4y ago
        They’re a bit of a pain to implement but it might be worth doing…?
        • newaccount74 4y ago
• ulfw 4y ago
  Ranting ranting about an optional function (Stage Manager). But good to know it's your last Mac. Thanks.
• shp0ngle 4y ago
  I just cannot believe that the new System Settings is what really got shipped. What. The. Hell.
• 2341throwaway 4y ago
  I still continue using 10y old i3 2nd gen with no issues. Loaded Ubuntu it just works
• msravi 4y ago
  I switched to lenovo+linux+regolith for daily use a long time ago after my mid-2010 macbook pro started having problems. I love the productivity gain from using a tiling window manager now, and can't imagine using anything else. In terms of finder/preview, I've since moved to using vifm (tui) configured with zathura(pdf/djvu), calibre(epub), sxiv(images), mpv(videos). This works very well with the tiling window manager. Notable (https://notable.app/ https://notable.app/) works very well as a notes app and you can also sync it with your mobile and use Noteless (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.redsolver.noteless https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.redsolver....) on android with the synced notable folder Kitty terminal (https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/ https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/) is great as a terminal, fast, and can also display images.
  • amatecha 4y ago
    Aw sweet, Regolith is using i3, right? I've been using i3 for about a year now and just love it. So fast/effortless and completely out of the way. A simple i3bar for a bit of status stuff and it's like ... ahh, finally, that's all I ever wanted. :)
    • msravi 4y ago
      Yes! Just that regolith has all the sane defaults and i3bar and rofi bundled in, and serves as a good starting point if you haven't used i3 before.
• zelly 4y ago
  It seems people still have not grasped free software. You could have full control over your computing experience, limited only by your abilities.
• sumo89 4y ago
  Some years ago I bought my first iphone, the 6s. One time I forgot apple password, changed it to something more obscure due to their annoying rules. I promptly forgot that a short while later and had to reset it again to an even more obscure version. After that kept getting prompts to enter it, it felt like almost every time I unlocked the screen I'd have to enter a 10 digit thing with capitals, numbers etc; very annoying on a small phone screen. After about a year or owning the thing and 6 months of having to enter a password 10 times a day I gave up and sold it, never owned an iphone since. I've still been using macs but rarely ever logging in to the app store. My personal mac recently developed a booting problem so I opened the store to see if there's some software I could download to help diagnose it, of course I've forgotten my password again, couldn't even tell you the last time I entered it. Go to reset it and despite entering a 2fa code from the backup email address and one from my phone via text message, it's going to take 15 days to reset the password. It's frankly ridiculous. At this point I think I'm done, this will probably be my last macbook outside of oens provided by work.
• danwee 4y ago
  What I hate about the last mbp M1 PRO is the keyboard. Don't get me wrong, it feels amazing when typing, but it just gets oily and used very quickly. I have an mbp 2015 still around and its keyboard looks better (not used, not oily) than the keyboard of my mbp M1 PRO that I bought 9 months ago.
• activitypea 4y ago
  > And they’re fixing or adding to what was never broken: multitasking Has this person ever multitasked on MacOS? The amount of third party tools I need to not want to cry when managing windows and spaces is embarrassing for a company as big as apple
• alainchabat 4y ago
  Is there anything better than mac M1's today performance wise? I've been impressed by how fast things run on it. Are other laptop comparable?
• DuckFeathers 4y ago
  Couldn't get past the second paragraph because it seems like clickbait followed by nothing of substance. I'm guessing you got old and didn't like that they changed something you had gotten used to. It's for that same reason you'll never be able to change to anything else.
• password1 4y ago
  Someone can't handle change so bad that they had to write a whole blog post about how upset they are at slightly different UI. I've been on the internet for a long time and I've seen these kind of complaints in all kind of forms. Comments, forum posts, blog posts, video, podcast. Each time a UI gets updated, people start to write melodramatic pieces about how this ruins it forever and it's the point of no return for the platform. I've heard it when facebook abandoned this UI (https://beta.techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/fbpage.png https://beta.techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/fbpag...), when youtube changed this homepage (https://www.versionmuseum.com/images/websites/youtube-website/webp/youtube-website%5E2011%5Ehomepage.webp https://www.versionmuseum.com/images/websites/youtube-websit...) and so on. You get the point. When a UI change happens it feels strange, but in hindsight they were right to do it. Designers are not fools, if they are working on a good team (like at Apple) they don't take decisions on a whim. They prototype, they do user testing, the validate ideas and scrap others considering many many many different factors. If you see a design decision, it has been carefully thought out from different perspectives. This assuming that there are actual design team with enough resources behind, which is Apple case. Whatever criticism you have for any design, they have thought about it at least 10 months ago. They know about it and took a decision balancing other 100 aspects and considerations that you are not even aware about.
  • sz4kerto 4y ago
    > Whatever criticism you have for any design, they have thought about it at least 10 months ago. They know about it and took a decision balancing other 100 aspects and considerations that you are not even aware about. Still -- megacorps can and do screw things (like design) up. Regularly. I can't imagine that the best way of exporting a web page as a PDF should be 'long tap on the Print button'.
  • HenriTEL 4y ago
    The real lesson here is that apple can do pretty much anything at this point and the historical users will still stay into their ecosystem (even the author who seems more and more disappointed as the years are passing admits that). Now the younger generation is much more promising in terms of revenues and it already has an iphone so it's very logical to make macOS intuitive for ios users. Providing instant productivity is probably the most valuable thing you can do to those new users from a software perspective.
• mattbillenstein 4y ago
  Macs are pretty awful for actually building and running software nowadays - Apple seems hostile to OSS in general shipping broken ancient ssl libs, the huge downloads, icloud accounts, and xcode to get a working compiler. And it's pretty impossible to do anything without homebrew which has it's own bleeding edge of everything problems. I'm much happier developing on a recent Ubuntu LTS and deploying to the same thing in the cloud - easier setup, more reliable, and KDE is good enough...
• septimus111 4y ago
  What annoys me about using Apple products recently is the glitches. When I scroll up to find very old messages on my iPhone, it randomly snaps back to the most recent message. Trying to edit text on a touchscreen is also still a nightmare in 2022. My brand new MacBook randomly crashed and turned itself off the day I bought it. It wouldn't bother me if the products weren't literally the most expensive things I own aside from my house.
• akho 4y ago
  What I didn’t understand is why they plan to buy another Mac if they find Macs frustrating.
• elzbardico 4y ago
  I don't like the cosmetics, I am gonna write a wall of text without any substance, with a click-baity title, and will start it by saying I am sorry for the title, but I don't care, I am saying sorry.
• 8fingerlouie 4y ago
  So much anger over a redesign of the system preferences app that you use what ? once per week ? once per month ? Get over it, and celebrate that it's still not as bad as the redesigned control center/panel in Windows 10.
  • vkoskiv 4y ago
    The settings app is not the problem, it's a symptom of the problem. This current design/engineering culture at Apple that seems to either ignore or not be aware of design guidelines and best practices. The perception of many, myself included, that it's just downhill from here. I managed to find a way to not hate desktop Linux (minimal tiling window managers), so I jumped to that boat.
• cloudengineer94 4y ago
  Apple Silicon is amazing, but the new Software Updates ever since 2020 have been going down hill. I like boring macOS versions, where we just fix bugs and don't put new unnecessary features that nobody wants. Have you tried using Stage Manager? It's a joke. Why would I want to hide my apps that are on the side of each of other to give highlight to one of them? Do you guys even do some serious work where you need a terminal and a document guide by the side?
• bambax 4y ago
  The author apparently hates the last version of MacOS, but plans to buy a new Mac soon nontheless (it's only the one after that may not be a Mac -- maybe). Why should Apple care if people keep buying their machines?
• ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
  I write native Apple software, so it’s not a choice. I won’t use cross-platform “hybrid” solutions, so I need to use native tools. I started off, writing embedded stuff, so I’ve used tools and environments that would have a lot of today’s programmers hiding under their desks, whimpering. It’ll be fine.
• Eliezer 4y ago
  It's amazing to me how Steve Jobs was never able to replace himself, to find somebody who could serve the role he did at Apple, despite having an entire planet to draw upon with compensation that couldn't be matched anywhere else on earth. It makes me feel less awful about my own failure to replace myself.
  • sharpneli 4y ago
    To be honest the best modern Apple UI happened after era of Jobs. iDevices during his tenure were pretty bad designs heavily based on skeuomorphism. The current usability issues in OSX are something that he'd likely have supported, or made even worse. In a way Jobs managed to replace himself, at least for the short term, with something even better. Which should be the goal of everyone.
• gherkinnn 4y ago
  Hello. I am rational developer. I am very clever and very rational. Devoid of emotion. Oh what is this? The pixels in my screen have changed. What is this bubbling feeling in me? An emotional response? No way. I am rational. Therefore these changes must be objectively stupid and dumb and wrong. Let me explain why. This is how I understand all these posts. It’s fine not to like something. You don’t even need a good reason. That is what taste is all about. Just don’t pretend that your emotional response is grounded in objective and universal fact. Am I being facetious? Not really. Calling a benign (and in my view long overdue) update to the settings panel “a fucking joke” is nothing but an emotional screech.
  • thiht 4y ago
    This sentence triggered me: > Ever since the misguided visual redesign of Mac OS when it transitioned from 10.15 Catalina to 11 Big Sur, and the questionable UI choices embedded in such redesign This is just so condescending, like that redesign was just obviously wrong and Apple designers are morons for not seeing it. As you say, it's ok not to like a redesign but there's no need to be a dick about it and present it like it's an objective fact and not just a subjective opinion.
  • Singletoned 4y ago
    > Hello. I am rational developer. I am very clever and very rational. Devoid of emotion. Oh what is this? [Something has changed that I don't like]. What is this bubbling feeling in me? An emotional response? No way. I am rational. Therefore these changes must be objectively stupid and dumb and wrong. Let me explain why. I certainly do this a lot. I'm going to put that paragraph on a postcard and put it up in my office to try to remind me about it. (It would also be helpful to come up with a name for this phenomenon).
    • girvo 4y ago
      I think anyone who thinks they don’t do this should think again, and refer to the postcard. Myself included!
    • tiagod 4y ago
• erremerre 4y ago
  I feel similarly but with the Windows / Android ecosystem. In windows, since approximately 8, they have been changing the system, to the point of having two control panels. The new control panel is in an interface that doesn't look integrated with anything because the trend of modern UI has been ditched. The new changes on the taskbar etc... is something I can live with, but still I don't like it. I don't think I will change to Linux, because honestly. It doesn't have the stability that I got on windows. With android is the same, everytime I get a new phone, I have the feeling that I got less and less features. I can only pray that for 2025, that linux has improved eve more (it has done it a lot) and try to recover part of the freedom. As a technology enthusiast, I am less and less enthusiastic with the future things.
  • jug 4y ago
    At least with Windows 11, I honestly think Microsoft feel like they have a winner on their hands in terms of a next gen interface that feels more fresh and able to be modernized than Win32 that ultimately is based on a fixed display resolution. There's just the air around it and the enthusiasm I feel from Microsoft. I think it's been received well. They're moving Office towards it and many other applications too, even Windows Terminal. Common taskbar complaints are addressed at ... well, let's just say a pace. Windows 11 22H2 now supports drag & drop again. Wow. Unfortunately it's taken them many years to get here due to the missteps starting with Windows 8, where they thought they could have both desktop and smartphones sharing the same design language. Then they didn't manage to penetrate the smartphone market and suddenly many design decisions no longer made sense, because choices on desktop were made due to choices on smartphone... In turn due to touch interfaces and limited screen space. They're slowly undoing it all over the OS. But it's taking them so damn long. Years and years to make a single Control Panel page obsolete. They're truly victims to their own mega success and idea of maintaining backwards compatibility causing them to move at the bare minimum speed forward for some sort of software development that a manager can still call "progress". And now they recently moved from the idea of two releases per year to one every third year with minor feature updates in between. I think they realized they are just moving too damn slow forward to make anything quicker marketable.
• therealmarv 4y ago
  When will the macOS team make Finder great? ;)
• hcarvalhoalves 4y ago
  The only reason this update exists is so Apple drops support for MacBooks before 2017 and boost new mac sales post-pandemic. This update has exactly zero relevant features to show, and none that justifies backwards incompatibility.
• auggierose 4y ago
  The question is, what is the alternative. Note that the article doesn't really say. Is it Windows? No, thank you very much. No matter how much macOS degrades, it's still way above Windows. Is it Linux? Linux is a time sink to get all the things working (if at all) that just work out of the box on the Mac, and it also is quite ugly. I cannot see being ready to bite into the very sour apple that is Linux anytime soon.
  • joelthelion 4y ago
    Depends on which Linux, on which hardware. If you pick well-supported hardware and a distro that's designed to "just work" without too much customization (and commit to not changing everything), such as Fedora Silverblue, it really doesn't take more time than Windows or Mac. Probably less even, assuming you know each OS equally well.
    • auggierose 4y ago
      Sorry, I don't believe you.
• hk1337 4y ago
  Intel Macs are really easy to use and setup for development. Since Apple Silicon, they seem to be pushing their focus towards Apple development only at the expense of everything else. I’m thinking the MacBook Pro 16 (2019) will be my last Mac. I have a Mac mini m1 but I have wiped it and shut it down, ready to get rid of it. I don’t know, we’ll see, maybe the landscape will change.
• coldtea 4y ago
  >Ever since the misguided visual redesign of Mac OS when it transitioned from 10.15 Catalina to 11 Big Sur, and the questionable UI choices embedded in such redesign, I’ve been disheartened to see my favourite environment for work and leisure enter a downward spiral. If you issue is "the cosmetic changes between 10.15 and 11" then you have no issue. >in case I haven’t been clear enough: I loathe what Apple is doing with Mac OS now. The visuals, the UI… I simply don’t enjoy it. I tolerate it. There's nothing really wrong, or that different with the UI between the latest macOS versions... (The Settings in Ventura being the sole exception, not for the UI redesign/visuals, but because it's half-done and needs polish).
• Aleksdev 4y ago
  Could it be that OP just misses the good old days? Many of us miss the OS X Snow Leopard and windows XP days.
• footlose_3815 4y ago
  [dead]
• dontbenebby 4y ago
  The phones are still good -- I might want a bigger one? -- but yeah the laptops have sucked for years. Touchbar was a signal they can't hire (or fire) designers properly and a symptom of larger issues since the computers used to prop up the phone department not the other way around.
• whywhywhywhy 4y ago
  >want to bring the iOS look and feel to the Mac. It was unnecessary, it has broken so many tried-and-true Mac interface guidelines, and it has delivered a massive blow to the whole operating system’s identity. Just to make the Mac what, more fashionable? Actually it’s so when Macs eventually run iPad OS it’s less of a shock to the system.
• uwagar 4y ago
  my next wife maybe the last one.
• jononomo 4y ago
  My main takeaway was that he doesn't like some UI stuff and thinks something to do with settings is a fucking joke.
• effnorwood 4y ago
• vladcodes 4y ago
  TLDR; “I don’t like new Settings UI and MBA M2 notch, but I’ll be still using Apple”
• layer8 4y ago
  It’s funny and also depressing that there’s a (vaguely) similar UI degradation on Windows, triggered by the desire to make it touch-usable (although 98% of actual Windows users don’t use touch) and by adopting web flat design UI aesthetics, although web usability was always worse than native desktop. This already began with Windows 8, but it’s not getting better with Windows 11.