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I've noticed that the MacOS codebase seems to have kibble. Features that used to work have degraded in quality for seemingly no reason over successive generatio

I've noticed that the MacOS codebase seems to have kibble. Features that used to work have degraded in quality for seemingly no reason over successive generations. For example, Spotlight, ever since their updates, is now unable to find any of my applications, struggles to find PDF documents while being slower and worse than the spotlight I used to use in OS X Snow Leopard. Yes, my current Mac's spotlight has more features. But the core functionality no longer "just works." Another example is networking. For some reason, MacOS is now really flaky when using VPNs and it seems to have struggle connecting with WiFi networks from time to time. It's bizarre. I'm using the latest hardware (the 28GB M2 MacBook Air) — it shouldn't be this bad. Let's not even talk about Apple Care. Apple Care theoretically does more now, but they've made it functionally worse for most consumers.

mcpackieh 3y ago
A few versions of MacOS ago, I noticed that mounting a network drive with NFS through the GUI (e.g. Command K) took far longer than it should; 15 to 20 seconds when it should have been nearly instant. And in fact if I had a terminal open when I did it, I could see that the drive was mounted and accessible in a veritable instant, while the GUI progress indicator just sat there for another 20 seconds. I never bothered to dig into it, but I presume it was waiting to stat all the files in at least the first level of sub-directories (more would have taken much longer, so it certainly wasn't doing the whole drive recursively.) I can't imagine any sane reason to delay showing the user the root directory of the mount before stating files in the sub-directories, but I also can't imagine any other quasi-legitimate reason it could have been taking so long.
- dragonelite 3y ago
  I heard a story a while ago that some apps just create a fake progress bar/indicator. Because if it happened instantly people don't trust/believe the action actually happened.
  - hnbear 3y ago
    https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/02/why-some-apps-use-fake-progress-bars/517233/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/02/why-s... But I doubt that’s happening here. Anyone mounting NFS drives via a direct path in cmd-K isn’t shocked it’s quick.
mastermojo 3y ago
I look back at the leopard to snow leopard upgrade with incredible fondness. 2 years worth of work. "Zero new features": improved performance, better cpu + memory usage. Probably the only stuff people Hacker News care for.
- jug 3y ago
  Snow Leopard was when I jumped onto their ecosystem. Let's just say it's been a ride... Already at Lion, I was starting to question their direction.
  - stevage 3y ago
    Yeah, me too. I was just randomly giving a Macbook Pro for work once, and it had Snow Leopard on it. I didn't know anything about OSX or why versions were named after animals. I definitely that I liked each subsequent version less.
- 128bytes 3y ago
  I remember my mom taking my White iBook G3 to the repair store and them upgrading me from Panther to Leopard in 2010. Completely blew my mind and I'm still in love with the UI.
nvarsj 3y ago
I noticed issues with networking as well. For example if I plug in an Ethernet cable, it will still use Wi-Fi as the default route in many cases - so I have to disable Wi-Fi every time. This works flawlessly on Windows/Linux in comparison. And on the window management side, OS X still doesn’t have the most basic way to lock windows to the side of the screen or create basic tiling layouts quickly - again something both Windows and Linux have been doing for years. They keep adding useless UX features without improving the most basic experience. I mostly put up with it because battery life is great and my work requires it. And I do all my dev work on remote servers, so the sorry state of OS X package management / x86 compatibility doesn’t affect me.
- coob 3y ago
  You need to re-order the network interfaces in System Settings to your desired order of preference.
  - kelnos 3y ago
    Kinda bizarre that the OS doesn't do this automatically. So much for "Just Works".
kossTKR 3y ago
Agreed with spotlight, and when searching in a folder in finder it just doesn't work - it's absolutely bizarre. Say i open a folder with 50 files and i want to filter them quickly, i go to the upper right corner of the window and click the little spotlight icon, then at first the OS default is to search your -entire- computer, a hilariously bad design choice, then when you change that and start typing for the hundredth time it takes minutes for anything to show up like spotlight has to index the folder again. And sometimes nothing happens at all, and since apple doesn't show any feedback or what's going on you've got no idea if scrolling will be faster - so it's one of apples infamous "nothing is happening because we are doing magic" moment you meet daily. What the hell is going on Apple?
- yankcrime 3y ago
  > Say i open a folder with 50 files and i want to filter them quickly, i go to the upper right corner of the window and click the little spotlight icon, then at first the OS default is to search your -entire- computer Go to Finder settings, click on advanced, and change the option 'When performing a search' to just current folder. I can't remember if that's the default or not, but it's easily fixed.
  - kossTKR 3y ago
    Ah, thank you! Still the search doesn't work though weirdly, but one step further i guess.
- davidivadavid 3y ago
  Took me years before I discovered you have to append "name:" at the start of your search for Spotlight to actually be useful when you know what you're looking for (i.e. the keyword should be in the filename). The default UX they went for is really puzzling.
madaxe_again 3y ago
It’s iOS, too - I recall their QA used to be impeccable - it all Just Worked, and user-facing bugs were pretty uncommon. I found myself a huge fan of the apple ecosystem 20 years ago after wrestling with windows and Linux for the previous decade, as the ease of it all was unbelievably refreshing. I now find myself rebooting my iPhone (or it rebooting itself if things are sufficiently bad) on a daily basis, as it always ends up with things like file handling just breaking - I use SMB mounts in the files app and this seems to be a poorly tested edge case. Also, the keyboard thing, where input starts to buffer - I’ve seen it on other people’s phones, too. Seems like a pretty fundamental thing to not get perfectly right. It’s not just bugs - usability has plummeted as stuff has been shoehorned in left, right and centre. Gone is the simplicity of past iOS - the convergence works both ways, I suppose. Over the past few years I have encountered numerous issues in each of iOS and macOS which generally never get resolved - usually nothing earth-shattering, but stuff that speaks of a lack of QA, or planning, or a lack of care.
- jareklupinski 3y ago
  for over a year, pressing a volume button on an ios device then quickly locking the screen would make the volume go all the way in the direction you were pressing imagine opening your phone to check your media player, then pressing the volume button up once to make something gently louder and locking the screen again before putting your phone down then throwing your headphones on the ground for the tenth time because ios decided that was the secret button combination to blast at full volume https://discussions.apple.com/thread/252351739 https://discussions.apple.com/thread/252351739
  - madaxe_again 3y ago
    Yeah, I encountered this so frequently I forgot about it - it was practically a feature. That along with the whole “screen freezes halfway through unlock” and “video canvas randomly shows video and audio from other WebKit instances”. There’s really fundamental userland stuff that’s just broken these days. Probably speaks of horrors under the hood.
izacus 3y ago
Does anyone here or at Apple know why it takes almost a second to switch tabs in new "redesigned" settings dialog on a M1 Max laptop? There's a very perceptible lag now... how do you mess up a UI Window on supposedly fastest laptop in the world?

mcpackieh 3y ago

A few versions of MacOS ago, I noticed that mounting a network drive with NFS through the GUI (e.g. Command K) took far longer than it should; 15 to 20 seconds when it should have been nearly instant. And in fact if I had a terminal open when I did it, I could see that the drive was mounted and accessible in a veritable instant, while the GUI progress indicator just sat there for another 20 seconds. I never bothered to dig into it, but I presume it was waiting to stat all the files in at least the first level of sub-directories (more would have taken much longer, so it certainly wasn't doing the whole drive recursively.) I can't imagine any sane reason to delay showing the user the root directory of the mount before stating files in the sub-directories, but I also can't imagine any other quasi-legitimate reason it could have been taking so long.

dragonelite 3y ago
I heard a story a while ago that some apps just create a fake progress bar/indicator. Because if it happened instantly people don't trust/believe the action actually happened.
- hnbear 3y ago
  https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/02/why-some-apps-use-fake-progress-bars/517233/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/02/why-s... But I doubt that’s happening here. Anyone mounting NFS drives via a direct path in cmd-K isn’t shocked it’s quick.

mastermojo 3y ago

I look back at the leopard to snow leopard upgrade with incredible fondness. 2 years worth of work. "Zero new features": improved performance, better cpu + memory usage. Probably the only stuff people Hacker News care for.

jug 3y ago
Snow Leopard was when I jumped onto their ecosystem. Let's just say it's been a ride... Already at Lion, I was starting to question their direction.
- stevage 3y ago
  Yeah, me too. I was just randomly giving a Macbook Pro for work once, and it had Snow Leopard on it. I didn't know anything about OSX or why versions were named after animals. I definitely that I liked each subsequent version less.
128bytes 3y ago
I remember my mom taking my White iBook G3 to the repair store and them upgrading me from Panther to Leopard in 2010. Completely blew my mind and I'm still in love with the UI.

nvarsj 3y ago

I noticed issues with networking as well. For example if I plug in an Ethernet cable, it will still use Wi-Fi as the default route in many cases - so I have to disable Wi-Fi every time. This works flawlessly on Windows/Linux in comparison. And on the window management side, OS X still doesn’t have the most basic way to lock windows to the side of the screen or create basic tiling layouts quickly - again something both Windows and Linux have been doing for years. They keep adding useless UX features without improving the most basic experience. I mostly put up with it because battery life is great and my work requires it. And I do all my dev work on remote servers, so the sorry state of OS X package management / x86 compatibility doesn’t affect me.

coob 3y ago
You need to re-order the network interfaces in System Settings to your desired order of preference.
- kelnos 3y ago
  Kinda bizarre that the OS doesn't do this automatically. So much for "Just Works".

kossTKR 3y ago

Agreed with spotlight, and when searching in a folder in finder it just doesn't work - it's absolutely bizarre. Say i open a folder with 50 files and i want to filter them quickly, i go to the upper right corner of the window and click the little spotlight icon, then at first the OS default is to search your -entire- computer, a hilariously bad design choice, then when you change that and start typing for the hundredth time it takes minutes for anything to show up like spotlight has to index the folder again. And sometimes nothing happens at all, and since apple doesn't show any feedback or what's going on you've got no idea if scrolling will be faster - so it's one of apples infamous "nothing is happening because we are doing magic" moment you meet daily. What the hell is going on Apple?

yankcrime 3y ago
> Say i open a folder with 50 files and i want to filter them quickly, i go to the upper right corner of the window and click the little spotlight icon, then at first the OS default is to search your -entire- computer Go to Finder settings, click on advanced, and change the option 'When performing a search' to just current folder. I can't remember if that's the default or not, but it's easily fixed.
- kossTKR 3y ago
  Ah, thank you! Still the search doesn't work though weirdly, but one step further i guess.
davidivadavid 3y ago
Took me years before I discovered you have to append "name:" at the start of your search for Spotlight to actually be useful when you know what you're looking for (i.e. the keyword should be in the filename). The default UX they went for is really puzzling.

madaxe_again 3y ago

It’s iOS, too - I recall their QA used to be impeccable - it all Just Worked, and user-facing bugs were pretty uncommon. I found myself a huge fan of the apple ecosystem 20 years ago after wrestling with windows and Linux for the previous decade, as the ease of it all was unbelievably refreshing. I now find myself rebooting my iPhone (or it rebooting itself if things are sufficiently bad) on a daily basis, as it always ends up with things like file handling just breaking - I use SMB mounts in the files app and this seems to be a poorly tested edge case. Also, the keyboard thing, where input starts to buffer - I’ve seen it on other people’s phones, too. Seems like a pretty fundamental thing to not get perfectly right. It’s not just bugs - usability has plummeted as stuff has been shoehorned in left, right and centre. Gone is the simplicity of past iOS - the convergence works both ways, I suppose. Over the past few years I have encountered numerous issues in each of iOS and macOS which generally never get resolved - usually nothing earth-shattering, but stuff that speaks of a lack of QA, or planning, or a lack of care.

jareklupinski 3y ago
for over a year, pressing a volume button on an ios device then quickly locking the screen would make the volume go all the way in the direction you were pressing imagine opening your phone to check your media player, then pressing the volume button up once to make something gently louder and locking the screen again before putting your phone down then throwing your headphones on the ground for the tenth time because ios decided that was the secret button combination to blast at full volume https://discussions.apple.com/thread/252351739 https://discussions.apple.com/thread/252351739
- madaxe_again 3y ago
  Yeah, I encountered this so frequently I forgot about it - it was practically a feature. That along with the whole “screen freezes halfway through unlock” and “video canvas randomly shows video and audio from other WebKit instances”. There’s really fundamental userland stuff that’s just broken these days. Probably speaks of horrors under the hood.

izacus 3y ago

Does anyone here or at Apple know why it takes almost a second to switch tabs in new "redesigned" settings dialog on a M1 Max laptop? There's a very perceptible lag now... how do you mess up a UI Window on supposedly fastest laptop in the world?