20 ms·

There are some factual "gaps" there about how good Snow Leopard was, but I understand the sentiment. As someone who's been a Mac user since System 6 and has bee

by rcarmo 2y ago

There are some factual "gaps" there about how good Snow Leopard was, but I understand the sentiment. As someone who's been a Mac user since System 6 and has been consistently using Macs alongside PCs _daily_ for over 20 years I can say that Apple's software quality (either in terms of polish or just plain QA) has steadily decreased. It's just that me and other old-time switchers have stopped complaining about it and moved on (taoofmac.com, my blog, was started when I wrote a few very popular switcher guides, and even though I kept using the same domain name I see myself as a UNIX guy, not "just" a Mac user). For me, Spotlight is no longer (anywhere) near as useful to find files (and sometimes forgets app and shortcut names it found perfectly fine 5 minutes ago), and there is no longer any way to effectively prioritize the results I want (apps, not internet garbage). Most of the other examples in the article also apply, but to be honest I've been using GNOME in parallel for years now and I consider it to be my "forever desktop" if PC hardware can ever match Apple Silicon (or, most likely, if I want something that is _just a computer_).

dmitrygr 2y ago
> prioritize the results I want (apps, not internet garbage). Settings -> Spotlight -> Websites, UNCHECK
- rcarmo 2y ago
  Does not work. I happen to know a fair bit about mdutil and the like and confirmed that does exactly nothing for my particular issue. A full Spotlight index reset works temporarily, but after a while it just conks out again. Also, I vaguely remember there being a way to _order_ results, not just disable them.
  - rco8786 2y ago
    Yea this has been happening on all of my family’s MacBooks. Spotlight indexing just hammers the CPU, and also seems to be doing nothing at all.
    - rcarmo 2y ago
      It seems to churn the index. I have no other explanation for its behavior. And of course filing Feedback in Apple's tools doesn't help.
  - CharlesW 2y ago
    > Also, I vaguely remember there being a way to _order_ results, not just disable them. Good memory! Apple removed this feature in El Capitan.
    - rcarmo 2y ago
      I'm ancient by today's AI standards :)
  - jay_kyburz 2y ago
    I have a vaguely related, kind of interesting story related to search indexes, but on windows instead of mac. My C drive was was super full for some reason I couldn't understand, and Explorer couldn't tell me where the data was. There was about 100GB just unaccounted for. I don't even use the search index.
AHTERIX5000 2y ago
Spotlight straight up broke on both of my Macs after Sequoia. It can't even find exact matches in many directories marked for indexing and re-indexing did nothing. Just searching for apps under Applications doesn't seem to find all apps.
- przemub 2y ago
  I’ve had so many issues with it as well! To the absurd level where I could not search for settings in the Settings app… People all over the net have had all kinds of issues and there’s never been any help other than „oh go and reindex”.
  - adriand 2y ago
    Just yesterday I was trying to find a file in Finder, using the search, and it could not find it even though I was just one directory up from the directory it was sitting in. It made no sense to me at all. Reading these stories, it’s clicking for me.
  - prawn 2y ago
    I gave up on it because of this and installed Raycast which seems a lot more reliable. I used Spotlight effectively as my launcher for apps/settings, and have the Dock completely hidden and Spotlight set to hide everything else. But when it can't even do that consistently, I have no idea how!
  - geerlingguy 2y ago
    Just adding a "me too" here, Spotlight used to be incredible. Now it's basically only good if you wait 5-10 seconds... sometimes.
  - cflewis 2y ago
    iOS has this problem as well. You search for a setting in the Settings app. It’ll say “doesn’t exist” (or whatever) while it’s looking for something extremely obvious (like “software update”) instead of just showing a processing icon. Then when it does show the results, they’re usually in some terribly unhelpful order. It took me ages to try and go through the CUJ of “this app isn’t sending me notifications because I turned them off now I want them back on”
zombiwoof 2y ago
Spotlight seemed to go from great to unusable in 5 years
- icsrutil 2y ago
  8 years mac user here, never use Spotlight, it's a trash.
r5Khe 2y ago
I've been using Macs since Mac OS 9, and Snow Leopard was indeed very good. It remains my favorite version of Mac OS. I actually think it was Snow Leopard that started the rush of developers to Mac as _the_ platform to use.
- TheOtherHobbes 2y ago
  Exactly. People don't want animojis, and they don't want other trite new features that only seem to exist because Apple feels it needs to demo something new every year. What they want is something that just works without annoyances, distractions, failures, or complications. Give them that and they'll break down the doors trying to get their hands on it, because it's so far from how most tech works today.
  - onemoresoop 2y ago
    Something that just works and is stable is bad business for companies these days.
    - kasey_junk 2y ago
      Why would it be bad business for Apple? Their business model is based on selling a holistic ecosystem. They don’t have any need to chase new features and there steady stream of high margin hardware revenue is at stake.
      - whywhywhywhy 2y ago
        > Their business model is based on selling a holistic ecosystem Yeah and they succeeded in that so now it's about selling subscriptions on top of that.
  - secstate 2y ago
    Animojis really feel like peak corporate board asking, "What do the kids like these days?" and dumping that shit into the world. Honestly ... AVERAGE age of the Apple board is 68!! This is a company that's reached some sort of corporate red giant stage where it's influence is massive but it's ability to grow is over and it's only real purpose is to generate heavy metals and seed them throughout the rest of the universe after it's eventual explosive death.
thewebguyd 2y ago
> Most of the other examples in the article also apply, but to be honest I've been using GNOME in parallel for years now and I consider it to be my "forever desktop" if PC hardware can ever match Apple Silicon (or, most likely, if I want something that is _just a computer_). I'm there as well. I've been really enjoying desktop Linux lately, but I can't go back to a non-Apple laptop at this point. There's just nothing else on the market that comes close, they all make some tradeoff I'm not willing to make - either screen, speakers, keyboard, heat/battery life/fan noise, touchpad, etc. Apple is the only one that has the entire package. There's Asahi, but no thunderbolt yet and I'm not sure the future of that project with the lead burning out and quitting. I just want an Apple Silicon-esque laptop, no trade offs on components, that runs Linux, and there's no OEM out there that's offering that experience. So, until that happens I'm staying on mac, and even with declining quality, it's not all that bad compared to the alternatives yet. I've learned to mostly work around/ignore the odd bugs.
- rcarmo 2y ago
  I have some hope that Framework and AMD can fix some of those issues. Would love to try out their new desktop (because it's a simpler, more tightly integrated thing) and replace my Mac mini -- then wait for Linux power management to improve.
  - nextos 2y ago
    Linux power management is pretty good. The problem is that defaults favor desktop and server performance. On a MacBook Air 11, my custom Linux setup and Mac OS had the same battery autonomy, despite Safari being much more energy efficient. The real problem is that, just like the grandparent post pointed out, Apple's software quality has been declining. The Tiger to Snow Leopard epoch was incredible. Apps were simple, skeumorphic, and robust. Right now, the whole system feels a lot less coherent and robustness has declined. IMHO, there are not so many extra features worth adding. They should focus on making all software robust and secure. Robustness should come from better languages that are safe by construction. Apple can afford to invest on this due to their vertical integration.
ohgr 2y ago
Yeah I stopped using spotlight a few years ago. I didn't really notice that I stopped using it until recently. It just became useless. I reorganised my stuff carefully so I know where I put it. I think that turned out to be more powerful than hoping a search engine over the top would be able to sift through the nuances.
- alabastervlog 2y ago
  ... I'm not sure I've ever found any GUI system search reliable enough that I've used it on-purpose (though accidentally, sometimes) on Windows, Linux, or Mac. I always just use "find" and "grep" (and ripgrep when I remember that exists and realize I just grepped a lot and will be waiting for like an hour if I don't re-run the command with rg instead). Or nothing on Windows, which is fine because I haven't used Windows for anything but launching video games in about two decades.
  - ad-astra 2y ago
    Alfred
    - wyclif 2y ago
      Spotlight was bad back in the day, so I installed Alfred and started using that. Then Spotlight suddenly improved a lot, enough that it was usable for me, and I deleted Alfred. Then about five years ago something happened internally at Apple to the Spotlight team and it just got worse and worse and more difficult to use, making me regret deleting Alfred. I wish Apple would just fix Spotlight. They don't seem to think it's worth fixing.
      - asimovDev 2y ago
        I wonder if Apple has internal metrics that most people just stick everything in the dock and on desktop and don't use Spotlight
        2y ago
hnlurker22 2y ago
Apple (at least current leadership) is programmatically degrading it's products so people would buy a new one. Who expects anything good from such a team.
- intrasight 2y ago
  That statement makes no sense, as the new products are worse than the old ones
  - Fr3ck 2y ago
    Umm the new products are better than the old ones. Not sure if you are being nostalgic.
atombender 2y ago
Regarding Spotlight, one thing that started happening for me on Sequioa was that Finder and other apps started getting very slow to react to file changes. For example, I can save a new file to a directory, and the Finder window takes maybe 10-20 seconds before the file shows up in the list. If I navigate to a different folder and then back, the file is there. I notice the same delay in apps like IntelliJ. I could be wrong, but apparently Spotlight is the service that drives this kind of file system watching. I think macOS has a lower-level inotify-style file system event API, which should be unaffected, but Finder and these other apps apparently use Spotlight. I really wish I had a fix, because it's just crazy having to constantly "refresh" things.
- robszumski 2y ago
  This KILLS me. It's so frustrating. APFS is supposed to be great at deduping files and such, but in practice it seems like it really sucks. It's bad at both saving a file to the desktop and dumping a million npm files into a directory.
- kevincox 2y ago
  My favourite feature is when spotlight tells me that indexing is paused when I am searching for something. You went through the effort to show some UI when something I am looking for may not be there because indexing is paused... but you didn't think to just unpause the indexing so that I can find it? I feel like I am being spit on, "Yeah, you not finding what you are looking for? I know, I'm not even trying"
- lobsterthief 2y ago
  I highly recommend using Alfred. I’ve been using it since before Spotlight came out, tried and then disabled Spotlight, and went back to Alfred. It’s extremely configurable but highly usable out of the box. Sort of like creating your own CLI shortcuts to open files, apps, copy things to the clipboard, etc. https://www.alfredapp.com/ https://www.alfredapp.com/
  - atombender 2y ago
    Alfred is nice. I use Raycast these days: https://www.raycast.com/ https://www.raycast.com/.
_aavaa_ 2y ago
If only there was a good Linux version of Alfred.
dannyobrien 2y ago
I just wanted to say that I've been a keen reader of your blog for ... I guess, decades. I appreciate your work. Thank you.
- rcarmo 2y ago
  Thanks!
detourdog 2y ago
I have been using a Mac since the 128k came out. System 7.5.3 and Snow Leopard 10.6.8 are in my opinion the high water mark for both OS’s. I still have some 10.6.8 install media for both server and client. Truly loved them both.
- whalesalad 2y ago
  I worked at Apple Retail during the Snow Leopard launch. I think I still have a boxed disk somewhere, too. I remember it was not a product I had to sell to customers. People came in asking for it. Another highlight of that job was selling a green iPod Nano to "John Locke" from LOST
  - detourdog 2y ago
    Those were the days… The most ridiculous thing that happend to me was in the early days of the Apple Store in SOHO I stopped in to see if I could just buy RAM. The music was loud so it was like I was speaking loudly to be heard and asked for RAM and the they thought I was asking if I could buy a gram.
- flenserboy 2y ago
  Interesting that you think that of 7.5.3 — it worked, sure, but it could be painfully slow. System 6 was preferable as an OS — MultiFinder was better than 7, at least in the first couple iterations — but much of the software I needed demanded 7. 7.6.x was the first bright spot since 7.1 fixed much of what went wrong in 7.0, & there was a ton of waiting after that. 9 just chugged along for me, for the most part, which was nice. Loved Snow Leopard too, & was shocked by how bad Lion was in comparison. Glad they got back on track after that.
  - detourdog 2y ago
    System 7 was better for me due to AppleTalk file sharing. System 6 was confined to LocalTalk or printer sharing.
    - 2y ago
olivierestsage 2y ago
I can't believe I'm saying it, but I agree with you about GNOME being my forever desktop. I used to really make fun of GNOME during the 2->3 transition, which seemed so profoundly misguided, but now I love it. I don't know if they've massively improved it or if my perspective has just changed with time.
- onemoresoop 2y ago
  It could be a third option, the bloat in other OSes has made a less bloated OS look very pleasant and useful.
- zozbot234 2y ago
  It's not just you, the early GNOME 3 releases sucked. It has seen a lot of gradual improvement over time. Of course there are reasonable alternatives also, such as Xfce, MATE or Cinnamon. (And these three 'alternative' desktops have also edged closer over time, sharing more and more of the underlying tech stack even as GNOME itself has continued to develop in a rather seperate direction).
- cassepipe 2y ago
  Unified button that disguises as two different icons hiding other useful options You can only cycle windows in one direction even if you try to do some remapping Choosing keyboard languages hides a lot of options. Once you understand you need to click on English US to see more detailed options then you get them all, UK, Canadian... Then it's unclear which keyboard layout is currently selected and how to select one from the list you made. I can't fathom how a DE whose is all about human machine interface guidelines whatever and supposed to be the epitome of UX can't figure out basic stuff about discoverability and clarity
  - secstate 2y ago
    Default keybindings have Shift+Super+Tab doing reverse window cycling in GNOME. Just tried it. Also, which unified button masquerades as two icons? Keyboard layouts are a pain, but there are some solid extensions that clean the flow up and may be upstreamed into GNOME at some point. It's all opinions, but boy, compared to the mess that is macOS and iOS regarding discoverability ... I'll take GNOME any. day.
wdavidw 2y ago
> consider it to be my "forever desktop" Feelings shared, if only Gnome would provide this column-based file navigation that I miss so much
tristor 2y ago
Wow, I feel like I almost could have written this except I prefer Plasma/KDE to GNOME. I use Linux + Mac laptops somewhat interchangeably since 2012, and have also seen the marked decline in quality. In fact, it seems like Linux has gotten better at almost the same pace (or maybe a bit faster) than macOS has gotten worse. The things that most frustrate me about Macs is that they've violated the never spoken but always expected "it just works" in so many ways. Things like how Thunderbolt Displays containing a USB hub which are Apple-certified handle re-connection to a Macbook, should "just work", but require fiddling every time. That's just one of numerous examples I could come up with. Apple historically was probably the best company in the world in understanding the full depth of what "User Experience" means, and it seems like they've really retreated from this position and are regressing to the mean.
wyclif 2y ago
At one point a few years ago, Spotlight improved enough that I could use it instead of relying on Alfred. So I deleted Alfred, and whaddaya know...a few years later Spotlight got worse and worse, making me regret that move.
GolDDranks 2y ago
My biggest annoyance with recent macOS versions that most QuickLook plugins stopped working. Apparently one could re-develop them with their new framework-of-the-day, but I have no doubt a lion's share of what I'm using will just become abandonware.
lisper 2y ago
> There are some factual "gaps" there about how good Snow Leopard was Here are some data points I collected at the time: https://blog.rongarret.info/2009/08/snow-leopard-is-disaster.html https://blog.rongarret.info/2009/08/snow-leopard-is-disaster... https://blog.rongarret.info/2009/09/esata-on-snow-leopard.html https://blog.rongarret.info/2009/09/esata-on-snow-leopard.ht... In retrospect Snow Leopard deserves the love it eventually got, but at the time it was not entirely clear. > Apple's software quality (either in terms of polish or just plain QA) has steadily decreased. Amen to that.
adastra22 2y ago
> and there is no longer any way to effectively prioritize the results I want (apps, not internet garbage) OMG this one drives me bonkers. If anyone out there knows how to turn off internet results, please share!
- JSR_FDED 2y ago
  Open Settings, scroll down to Spotlight. Unselect the things you don’t want. You’re welcome :-)
  - ballenf 2y ago
    Just noticed that I was sharing my entire Safari, Spotlight and Siri search history in that menu. Why is that setting in Spotlight settings and not under Privacy/Analytics?
    - adastra22 2y ago
      Because spotlight indexing is local and not shared with Apple?
  - adastra22 2y ago
    Thanks!
  - rcarmo 2y ago
    Like I pointed out elsewhere, it doesn’t stick for me.
    - JSR_FDED 2y ago
      I've found that kind of thing is often caused by a damaged preferences file. The easy way to check that is to make another user account, and see if it happens there too.
amluto 2y ago
Spotlight is unbelievable bad, especially on iOS. If I type a substring of the name of an installed app, it should find it effectively instantly (say, within 1-2 frames of the input showing up). Instead, it finds it sometimes. On occasion I need to hit backspace (removing a letter that should match) to get it to find it. I struggle to imagine the software design that works so poorly.
- DidYaWipe 2y ago
  Finder search is just as bad. You can be viewing a directory full of JPEGs, all with the jpg extension. Then you do a search for .jpg, and get NOTHING. But only sometimes. Other times it'll work.
- sph 2y ago
  I've yet to find a decent implementation of search-as-you-type anywhere, not just Spotlight. I have that same issue on Firefox, and with Windows Search, for example. And it makes no sense whatsoever. If "foo" matches "foobar", so should "foob". I honestly don't know how the hell can they still f up such a simple piece of technology in 2025.
  - Nextgrid 2y ago
    Windows 7 start menu search was always reliable and had predictable behavior from my experience. It can be done, just that modern software engineers' skills and career incentives no longer permit it.
  - SSLy 2y ago
    > I've yet to find a decent implementation of search-as-you-type anywhere https://www.voidtools.com/en-uk/support/everything/ https://www.voidtools.com/en-uk/support/everything/
- whywhywhywhy 2y ago
  See this same search issue in everything these days for what was a solved problem a decade ago, what “best practice” is causing this
DidYaWipe 2y ago
Spotlight was never useful, because of an absurd and glaring design defect: It doesn't show you WHERE it found stuff. There's no path shown with hits. Same blunder in Finder's search, and you can't even optionally add "path" as a column. WTF. So... when the hits include six identically-named files, you can't eliminate ones that you know are wrong (on a backup volume or whatever). The level of stupidity here is just mind-boggling.
- phony-account 2y ago
  > There's no path shown with hits I guess you do know the path is shown at the bottom of the window if you select the filename in the list of results?
  - pickdan 2y ago
    In all fairness, you do need to hold down the command key to show the file location in Sequoia. It is an interesting default behavior to pretend the files location doesn't exist, mobile-centric.
    - Reason077 2y ago
      No you don’t. In Finder search results, the path is always shown at the bottom. For regular Finder windows, you can optionally show the path with “View -> Show Path Bar”
      - DidYaWipe 2y ago
        Not a solution, because, again, you have to click on every single entry one at a time, and you can't sort by it.
    - DidYaWipe 2y ago
      In all fairness, secret hotkey BS may as well not exist. Are you supposed to mash every modifier key and every combination thereof on every screen and in every menu, looking for hidden goodies? Absurd.
datadrivenangel 2y ago
And now spotlight defaults to the whole computer even when I start a search within a folder... for items in the folder... Turned to garbage sometime in the last ~18-24 months. At least there's quicksilver
sandreas 2y ago
I personally think that it is reasonable to "want" an Apple notebook. They have great hardware, great battery life and an ecosystem where every device integrates. Only on macOS you can nicely develop software for iOS. Furthermore most vendors release software for macOS, while they don't for Linux (not only Adobe). BTW the apps I miss most on Linux is the Preview App and Apple Mail. However I'm done with Apple. I think it's a decision - not "reasoning". That decision takes time and is painful. It's also a decision specifically against "the best" ecosystem available in favor of something "ok". Not only they repeatedly disappointed my expectations - they just suck as a company (in my opinion). It's not about being less innovative for decreasing software quality, they have done so much for the market, that I think GNOME wouldn't even exist as it is without them... Its about sealing off every inch of their software and hardware they can. No repair without paying... Making RAM and SSD upgrades ridiculously expensive, you cannot even put default NVMe drives into a mac mini - everything is proprietary. Even their sensors have serial numbers to prevent hibernating if you change them out without "hacking" the firmware. Hardware-wise I have high hopes for framework working with AMD - although they did not address the issues I'd suggest (speakers, lpcamm2), they're constantly improving without breaking their promises. This is hopefully not going to change when they get bigger. OS-wise I'll stay on Linux. After a long journey going from Ubuntu to Debian to Fedora using GNOME, KDE and even NixOS with Hyprland for a short period, I gained enough knowledge required to really enjoy Linux. System76 is working on COSMIC, which could be pretty amazing, once it is released. In case anyone would like to try my current Linux config, I'm constantly working on an "install everything" script (pretty early stage): https://github.com/sandreas/zarch https://github.com/sandreas/zarch HF ;)
- musicale 2y ago
  Apple delivered on Steve Jobs' vision of an "appliance computer". You might not want one though.
  - sandreas 2y ago
    Yeah... probably. I forgot to mention that Apple computers are a pretty good deal if you are looking for an AI / LLM experimentation machine due to unified RAM which nearly translates 1:1 into VRAM.
davidthewatson 2y ago
Indeed. I complained that Apple design gets a free pass while being haunted by Steve from beyond the grave for a decade. Your comments resemble my habits except rusted sway right into cosmic desktop alpha and done.
throwaway2037 2y ago
> if PC hardware can ever match Apple Silicon What is wrong with an AMD Ryzen 9 with 16 physical cores? If you need more and you have a virtually unlimited budget, then Ryzen Threadripper is even better. Also: Is Asahi Linux an option for you?
- rcarmo 2y ago
  Of course Asahi isn’t an option. The hardware support is far from finished.
bullfightonmars 2y ago
Oh wow. I am realizing I have just been living with these bugs as tiny frustrations all day long not understanding how pervasive they are! This issue with spotlight is so bad. I use the switcher to pull up my Downloads or Documents directories and half the time it can’t even find them!
th3iedkid 2y ago
Did you know, you can set your wallpapers to be continuously updating and make macs use terabytes of your network in hours or days depending on speed? https://discussions.apple.com/thread/255329956 https://discussions.apple.com/thread/255329956
- Tempest1981 2y ago
  I also wish I could preview the wallpapers without triggering a 100MB download. There's nothing in between the 320x240 thumbnail, and the 4k video. And so many tiny thumbnails wedged into the too-narrow System Settings window.
donatj 2y ago
> no longer any way to effectively prioritize the results I want (apps, not internet garbage) FWIW you can massively improve things by just disabling the internet results. It's easily done in the System Preferences
- mschnell 2y ago
  I would much prefer if you could change the order so that _local_ results come first, web results after — not possible (anymore). Sad.
- rcarmo 2y ago
  Like I pointed out elsewhere, it doesn’t stick for me.
jamil7 2y ago
I generally agree it’s decreased steadily but I also remember macOS 9 and early X versions especially being pretty buggy and having awful performance.
echohack5 2y ago
Honestly yeah, Raycast is the replacement I'd recommend these days for spotlight.
HexPhantom 2y ago
It's wild how much of the original "it just works" ethos has eroded
microtonal 2y ago
Apple's software quality (either in terms of polish or just plain QA) has steadily decreased I think the decline of software went hand-in-hand with the decline of the native indie Mac app. They still exist, but when I started with the Mac (2007), there was a very rich ecosystem of native Mac apps. Most stood head and shoulders above their Linux and Windows counterparts. Apple has nearly destroyed that ecosystem with: race-to-the-bottom pricing incited by the App Store; general neglect of the Mac platform (especially between ~2016 and Apple Silicon); and a messy reactionary toolkit story with Catalyst, SwiftUI, etc. The new toolkits seem to imply that Apple says that it's the end of AppKit, but most SwiftUI applications are noticeably worse. With their messy toolkit story and general neglect, developers have started using Electron more and more. Sure, part of the popularity is cost savings, since Electron apps can be used on multiple platforms. But part of it is also that a Catalyst or SwiftUI app is not going to provide much more over an Electron app. They will also feel weirdly out of place and you become dependent on Apple working out quirks in SwiftUI. E.g. 1Password tried SwiftUI for their Mac app, but decided in the end that it was an uphill battle and switched to Electron on Mac instead. I recently bought a ThinkPad to use besides my MacBook. Switching is much easier than 10 or 15 years ago, since 80% of the apps that I use most frequently (Slack, Obsidian, 1Password, etc.) are Electron anyway. Even fingerprint unlocking works in 1Password. I was vehemently anti-electron and still don't like it a lot, but I am happy that it makes moving to a non-Apple platform much easier.
- cameldrv 2y ago
  I think most of this is just downstream of the Mac being eclipsed by the iPhone in terms of Apple’s revenue. The Mac just isn’t critical to Apple’s business like it was in 2009 when Snow Leopard came out. They would have started development on SL in 2008, when the iPhone was still a fairly niche product and there wasn’t even an App Store. Now, ios gets the executive attention and it will generally get the best developers assigned to it, and the Mac has to live with the scraps.
  - Cthulhu_ 2y ago
    Yeah I think this is the one, in terms of number of users, revenue, etc. The iPhone is more than 50% of their revenue, Mac is only ~8. Lower volume and higher price, but it doesn't come anywhere near their phone. Same with tablets, although they share an app revenue income stream with the iphone which makes up for the difference in hardware sales.
lostlogin 2y ago
> As someone who's been a Mac user since System 6 and has been consistently using Macs alongside PCs _daily_ for over 20 years I can say that Apple's software quality (either in terms of polish or just plain QA) has steadily decreased. Similar for me but started in system 7. It’s just lucky Windows has got worse faster.
lostlogin 2y ago
> As someone who's been a Mac user since System 6 and has been consistently using Macs alongside PCs _daily_ for over 20 years I can say that Apple's software quality (either in terms of polish or just plain QA) has steadily decreased. Similar for me but started in system 7. It’s lucky for Apple that Windows has got worse faster.
nvarsj 2y ago
I do love Gnome. If only we had hardware to run it :/. I'm stuck on a MBP because it's the only laptop with a great screen, speakers, and battery life. Meanwhile my keyboard keys keep getting stuck after a year of usage, and OSX is garbage. Soon as there is similar hardware I can load Linux on, I'll be insta-switching.
- rafaelmn 2y ago
  AMD AI Max 395 (superb name) proved that x86 can get to Apple silicon perf. (even not that far in power efficiency), but there seems to be 0 devices from non-trash brands (I am not buying ASUS or HP). I would love to finally get out of Apple ecosystem, I just don't have any decent alternatives right now. Hopefully next year.
dsego 2y ago
I'm going to purchase a framework just because I value repairability. And honestly, before the m1 macbook I was using a t480s, and I'm okay with compromising on hardware, esp. having been burned with the 2016 butterfly macbook. Apart from the haptic touchpad I wouldn't miss much, other makers are finally ditching low resolution 16:9 screens and you can even find nice oleds. I'm mostly missing the polished software that's only available on macos (things like carbon copy cloner or pixelmator). But with my m1 having degraded battery and having to send it off for a week or two to the nearest service center just to get a new battery, the prospect of a repairable laptop like framework where I can just order a new battery and replace it myself is looking all the more enticing.
GTP 2y ago
> if PC hardware can ever match Apple Silicon IIRC some competitors are starting to offer a few laptops with ARM processors, I think Samsung has a few. How do you feel about those?

by rcarmo 2y ago

dmitrygr 2y ago

> prioritize the results I want (apps, not internet garbage). Settings -> Spotlight -> Websites, UNCHECK

rcarmo 2y ago
Does not work. I happen to know a fair bit about mdutil and the like and confirmed that does exactly nothing for my particular issue. A full Spotlight index reset works temporarily, but after a while it just conks out again. Also, I vaguely remember there being a way to _order_ results, not just disable them.
- rco8786 2y ago
  Yea this has been happening on all of my family’s MacBooks. Spotlight indexing just hammers the CPU, and also seems to be doing nothing at all.
  - rcarmo 2y ago
    It seems to churn the index. I have no other explanation for its behavior. And of course filing Feedback in Apple's tools doesn't help.
- CharlesW 2y ago
  > Also, I vaguely remember there being a way to _order_ results, not just disable them. Good memory! Apple removed this feature in El Capitan.
  - rcarmo 2y ago
    I'm ancient by today's AI standards :)
- jay_kyburz 2y ago
  I have a vaguely related, kind of interesting story related to search indexes, but on windows instead of mac. My C drive was was super full for some reason I couldn't understand, and Explorer couldn't tell me where the data was. There was about 100GB just unaccounted for. I don't even use the search index.

AHTERIX5000 2y ago

Spotlight straight up broke on both of my Macs after Sequoia. It can't even find exact matches in many directories marked for indexing and re-indexing did nothing. Just searching for apps under Applications doesn't seem to find all apps.

przemub 2y ago
I’ve had so many issues with it as well! To the absurd level where I could not search for settings in the Settings app… People all over the net have had all kinds of issues and there’s never been any help other than „oh go and reindex”.
- adriand 2y ago
  Just yesterday I was trying to find a file in Finder, using the search, and it could not find it even though I was just one directory up from the directory it was sitting in. It made no sense to me at all. Reading these stories, it’s clicking for me.
- prawn 2y ago
  I gave up on it because of this and installed Raycast which seems a lot more reliable. I used Spotlight effectively as my launcher for apps/settings, and have the Dock completely hidden and Spotlight set to hide everything else. But when it can't even do that consistently, I have no idea how!
- geerlingguy 2y ago
  Just adding a "me too" here, Spotlight used to be incredible. Now it's basically only good if you wait 5-10 seconds... sometimes.
- cflewis 2y ago
  iOS has this problem as well. You search for a setting in the Settings app. It’ll say “doesn’t exist” (or whatever) while it’s looking for something extremely obvious (like “software update”) instead of just showing a processing icon. Then when it does show the results, they’re usually in some terribly unhelpful order. It took me ages to try and go through the CUJ of “this app isn’t sending me notifications because I turned them off now I want them back on”

zombiwoof 2y ago

Spotlight seemed to go from great to unusable in 5 years

icsrutil 2y ago
8 years mac user here, never use Spotlight, it's a trash.

r5Khe 2y ago

I've been using Macs since Mac OS 9, and Snow Leopard was indeed very good. It remains my favorite version of Mac OS. I actually think it was Snow Leopard that started the rush of developers to Mac as _the_ platform to use.

TheOtherHobbes 2y ago
Exactly. People don't want animojis, and they don't want other trite new features that only seem to exist because Apple feels it needs to demo something new every year. What they want is something that just works without annoyances, distractions, failures, or complications. Give them that and they'll break down the doors trying to get their hands on it, because it's so far from how most tech works today.
- onemoresoop 2y ago
  Something that just works and is stable is bad business for companies these days.
  - kasey_junk 2y ago
    Why would it be bad business for Apple? Their business model is based on selling a holistic ecosystem. They don’t have any need to chase new features and there steady stream of high margin hardware revenue is at stake.
    - whywhywhywhy 2y ago
      > Their business model is based on selling a holistic ecosystem Yeah and they succeeded in that so now it's about selling subscriptions on top of that.
- secstate 2y ago
  Animojis really feel like peak corporate board asking, "What do the kids like these days?" and dumping that shit into the world. Honestly ... AVERAGE age of the Apple board is 68!! This is a company that's reached some sort of corporate red giant stage where it's influence is massive but it's ability to grow is over and it's only real purpose is to generate heavy metals and seed them throughout the rest of the universe after it's eventual explosive death.

thewebguyd 2y ago

> Most of the other examples in the article also apply, but to be honest I've been using GNOME in parallel for years now and I consider it to be my "forever desktop" if PC hardware can ever match Apple Silicon (or, most likely, if I want something that is _just a computer_). I'm there as well. I've been really enjoying desktop Linux lately, but I can't go back to a non-Apple laptop at this point. There's just nothing else on the market that comes close, they all make some tradeoff I'm not willing to make - either screen, speakers, keyboard, heat/battery life/fan noise, touchpad, etc. Apple is the only one that has the entire package. There's Asahi, but no thunderbolt yet and I'm not sure the future of that project with the lead burning out and quitting. I just want an Apple Silicon-esque laptop, no trade offs on components, that runs Linux, and there's no OEM out there that's offering that experience. So, until that happens I'm staying on mac, and even with declining quality, it's not all that bad compared to the alternatives yet. I've learned to mostly work around/ignore the odd bugs.

rcarmo 2y ago
I have some hope that Framework and AMD can fix some of those issues. Would love to try out their new desktop (because it's a simpler, more tightly integrated thing) and replace my Mac mini -- then wait for Linux power management to improve.
- nextos 2y ago
  Linux power management is pretty good. The problem is that defaults favor desktop and server performance. On a MacBook Air 11, my custom Linux setup and Mac OS had the same battery autonomy, despite Safari being much more energy efficient. The real problem is that, just like the grandparent post pointed out, Apple's software quality has been declining. The Tiger to Snow Leopard epoch was incredible. Apps were simple, skeumorphic, and robust. Right now, the whole system feels a lot less coherent and robustness has declined. IMHO, there are not so many extra features worth adding. They should focus on making all software robust and secure. Robustness should come from better languages that are safe by construction. Apple can afford to invest on this due to their vertical integration.

ohgr 2y ago

Yeah I stopped using spotlight a few years ago. I didn't really notice that I stopped using it until recently. It just became useless. I reorganised my stuff carefully so I know where I put it. I think that turned out to be more powerful than hoping a search engine over the top would be able to sift through the nuances.

alabastervlog 2y ago
... I'm not sure I've ever found any GUI system search reliable enough that I've used it on-purpose (though accidentally, sometimes) on Windows, Linux, or Mac. I always just use "find" and "grep" (and ripgrep when I remember that exists and realize I just grepped a lot and will be waiting for like an hour if I don't re-run the command with rg instead). Or nothing on Windows, which is fine because I haven't used Windows for anything but launching video games in about two decades.
- ad-astra 2y ago
  Alfred
  - wyclif 2y ago
    Spotlight was bad back in the day, so I installed Alfred and started using that. Then Spotlight suddenly improved a lot, enough that it was usable for me, and I deleted Alfred. Then about five years ago something happened internally at Apple to the Spotlight team and it just got worse and worse and more difficult to use, making me regret deleting Alfred. I wish Apple would just fix Spotlight. They don't seem to think it's worth fixing.
    - asimovDev 2y ago
      I wonder if Apple has internal metrics that most people just stick everything in the dock and on desktop and don't use Spotlight
      - 2y ago

hnlurker22 2y ago

Apple (at least current leadership) is programmatically degrading it's products so people would buy a new one. Who expects anything good from such a team.

intrasight 2y ago
That statement makes no sense, as the new products are worse than the old ones
- Fr3ck 2y ago
  Umm the new products are better than the old ones. Not sure if you are being nostalgic.

atombender 2y ago

Regarding Spotlight, one thing that started happening for me on Sequioa was that Finder and other apps started getting very slow to react to file changes. For example, I can save a new file to a directory, and the Finder window takes maybe 10-20 seconds before the file shows up in the list. If I navigate to a different folder and then back, the file is there. I notice the same delay in apps like IntelliJ. I could be wrong, but apparently Spotlight is the service that drives this kind of file system watching. I think macOS has a lower-level inotify-style file system event API, which should be unaffected, but Finder and these other apps apparently use Spotlight. I really wish I had a fix, because it's just crazy having to constantly "refresh" things.

robszumski 2y ago
This KILLS me. It's so frustrating. APFS is supposed to be great at deduping files and such, but in practice it seems like it really sucks. It's bad at both saving a file to the desktop and dumping a million npm files into a directory.
kevincox 2y ago
My favourite feature is when spotlight tells me that indexing is paused when I am searching for something. You went through the effort to show some UI when something I am looking for may not be there because indexing is paused... but you didn't think to just unpause the indexing so that I can find it? I feel like I am being spit on, "Yeah, you not finding what you are looking for? I know, I'm not even trying"
lobsterthief 2y ago
I highly recommend using Alfred. I’ve been using it since before Spotlight came out, tried and then disabled Spotlight, and went back to Alfred. It’s extremely configurable but highly usable out of the box. Sort of like creating your own CLI shortcuts to open files, apps, copy things to the clipboard, etc. https://www.alfredapp.com/ https://www.alfredapp.com/
- atombender 2y ago
  Alfred is nice. I use Raycast these days: https://www.raycast.com/ https://www.raycast.com/.

_aavaa_ 2y ago

If only there was a good Linux version of Alfred.

dannyobrien 2y ago

I just wanted to say that I've been a keen reader of your blog for ... I guess, decades. I appreciate your work. Thank you.

rcarmo 2y ago
Thanks!

detourdog 2y ago

I have been using a Mac since the 128k came out. System 7.5.3 and Snow Leopard 10.6.8 are in my opinion the high water mark for both OS’s. I still have some 10.6.8 install media for both server and client. Truly loved them both.

whalesalad 2y ago
I worked at Apple Retail during the Snow Leopard launch. I think I still have a boxed disk somewhere, too. I remember it was not a product I had to sell to customers. People came in asking for it. Another highlight of that job was selling a green iPod Nano to "John Locke" from LOST
- detourdog 2y ago
  Those were the days… The most ridiculous thing that happend to me was in the early days of the Apple Store in SOHO I stopped in to see if I could just buy RAM. The music was loud so it was like I was speaking loudly to be heard and asked for RAM and the they thought I was asking if I could buy a gram.
flenserboy 2y ago
Interesting that you think that of 7.5.3 — it worked, sure, but it could be painfully slow. System 6 was preferable as an OS — MultiFinder was better than 7, at least in the first couple iterations — but much of the software I needed demanded 7. 7.6.x was the first bright spot since 7.1 fixed much of what went wrong in 7.0, & there was a ton of waiting after that. 9 just chugged along for me, for the most part, which was nice. Loved Snow Leopard too, & was shocked by how bad Lion was in comparison. Glad they got back on track after that.
- detourdog 2y ago
  System 7 was better for me due to AppleTalk file sharing. System 6 was confined to LocalTalk or printer sharing.
  - 2y ago

olivierestsage 2y ago

I can't believe I'm saying it, but I agree with you about GNOME being my forever desktop. I used to really make fun of GNOME during the 2->3 transition, which seemed so profoundly misguided, but now I love it. I don't know if they've massively improved it or if my perspective has just changed with time.

onemoresoop 2y ago
It could be a third option, the bloat in other OSes has made a less bloated OS look very pleasant and useful.
zozbot234 2y ago
It's not just you, the early GNOME 3 releases sucked. It has seen a lot of gradual improvement over time. Of course there are reasonable alternatives also, such as Xfce, MATE or Cinnamon. (And these three 'alternative' desktops have also edged closer over time, sharing more and more of the underlying tech stack even as GNOME itself has continued to develop in a rather seperate direction).
cassepipe 2y ago
Unified button that disguises as two different icons hiding other useful options You can only cycle windows in one direction even if you try to do some remapping Choosing keyboard languages hides a lot of options. Once you understand you need to click on English US to see more detailed options then you get them all, UK, Canadian... Then it's unclear which keyboard layout is currently selected and how to select one from the list you made. I can't fathom how a DE whose is all about human machine interface guidelines whatever and supposed to be the epitome of UX can't figure out basic stuff about discoverability and clarity
- secstate 2y ago
  Default keybindings have Shift+Super+Tab doing reverse window cycling in GNOME. Just tried it. Also, which unified button masquerades as two icons? Keyboard layouts are a pain, but there are some solid extensions that clean the flow up and may be upstreamed into GNOME at some point. It's all opinions, but boy, compared to the mess that is macOS and iOS regarding discoverability ... I'll take GNOME any. day.

wdavidw 2y ago

> consider it to be my "forever desktop" Feelings shared, if only Gnome would provide this column-based file navigation that I miss so much

tristor 2y ago

Wow, I feel like I almost could have written this except I prefer Plasma/KDE to GNOME. I use Linux + Mac laptops somewhat interchangeably since 2012, and have also seen the marked decline in quality. In fact, it seems like Linux has gotten better at almost the same pace (or maybe a bit faster) than macOS has gotten worse. The things that most frustrate me about Macs is that they've violated the never spoken but always expected "it just works" in so many ways. Things like how Thunderbolt Displays containing a USB hub which are Apple-certified handle re-connection to a Macbook, should "just work", but require fiddling every time. That's just one of numerous examples I could come up with. Apple historically was probably the best company in the world in understanding the full depth of what "User Experience" means, and it seems like they've really retreated from this position and are regressing to the mean.

wyclif 2y ago

At one point a few years ago, Spotlight improved enough that I could use it instead of relying on Alfred. So I deleted Alfred, and whaddaya know...a few years later Spotlight got worse and worse, making me regret that move.

GolDDranks 2y ago

My biggest annoyance with recent macOS versions that most QuickLook plugins stopped working. Apparently one could re-develop them with their new framework-of-the-day, but I have no doubt a lion's share of what I'm using will just become abandonware.

lisper 2y ago

> There are some factual "gaps" there about how good Snow Leopard was Here are some data points I collected at the time: https://blog.rongarret.info/2009/08/snow-leopard-is-disaster.html https://blog.rongarret.info/2009/08/snow-leopard-is-disaster... https://blog.rongarret.info/2009/09/esata-on-snow-leopard.html https://blog.rongarret.info/2009/09/esata-on-snow-leopard.ht... In retrospect Snow Leopard deserves the love it eventually got, but at the time it was not entirely clear. > Apple's software quality (either in terms of polish or just plain QA) has steadily decreased. Amen to that.

adastra22 2y ago

> and there is no longer any way to effectively prioritize the results I want (apps, not internet garbage) OMG this one drives me bonkers. If anyone out there knows how to turn off internet results, please share!

JSR_FDED 2y ago
Open Settings, scroll down to Spotlight. Unselect the things you don’t want. You’re welcome :-)
- ballenf 2y ago
  Just noticed that I was sharing my entire Safari, Spotlight and Siri search history in that menu. Why is that setting in Spotlight settings and not under Privacy/Analytics?
  - adastra22 2y ago
    Because spotlight indexing is local and not shared with Apple?
- adastra22 2y ago
  Thanks!
- rcarmo 2y ago
  Like I pointed out elsewhere, it doesn’t stick for me.
  - JSR_FDED 2y ago
    I've found that kind of thing is often caused by a damaged preferences file. The easy way to check that is to make another user account, and see if it happens there too.

amluto 2y ago

Spotlight is unbelievable bad, especially on iOS. If I type a substring of the name of an installed app, it should find it effectively instantly (say, within 1-2 frames of the input showing up). Instead, it finds it sometimes. On occasion I need to hit backspace (removing a letter that should match) to get it to find it. I struggle to imagine the software design that works so poorly.

DidYaWipe 2y ago
Finder search is just as bad. You can be viewing a directory full of JPEGs, all with the jpg extension. Then you do a search for .jpg, and get NOTHING. But only sometimes. Other times it'll work.
sph 2y ago
I've yet to find a decent implementation of search-as-you-type anywhere, not just Spotlight. I have that same issue on Firefox, and with Windows Search, for example. And it makes no sense whatsoever. If "foo" matches "foobar", so should "foob". I honestly don't know how the hell can they still f up such a simple piece of technology in 2025.
- Nextgrid 2y ago
  Windows 7 start menu search was always reliable and had predictable behavior from my experience. It can be done, just that modern software engineers' skills and career incentives no longer permit it.
- SSLy 2y ago
  > I've yet to find a decent implementation of search-as-you-type anywhere https://www.voidtools.com/en-uk/support/everything/ https://www.voidtools.com/en-uk/support/everything/
whywhywhywhy 2y ago
See this same search issue in everything these days for what was a solved problem a decade ago, what “best practice” is causing this

DidYaWipe 2y ago

Spotlight was never useful, because of an absurd and glaring design defect: It doesn't show you WHERE it found stuff. There's no path shown with hits. Same blunder in Finder's search, and you can't even optionally add "path" as a column. WTF. So... when the hits include six identically-named files, you can't eliminate ones that you know are wrong (on a backup volume or whatever). The level of stupidity here is just mind-boggling.

phony-account 2y ago
> There's no path shown with hits I guess you do know the path is shown at the bottom of the window if you select the filename in the list of results?
- pickdan 2y ago
  In all fairness, you do need to hold down the command key to show the file location in Sequoia. It is an interesting default behavior to pretend the files location doesn't exist, mobile-centric.
  - Reason077 2y ago
    No you don’t. In Finder search results, the path is always shown at the bottom. For regular Finder windows, you can optionally show the path with “View -> Show Path Bar”
    - DidYaWipe 2y ago
      Not a solution, because, again, you have to click on every single entry one at a time, and you can't sort by it.
  - DidYaWipe 2y ago
    In all fairness, secret hotkey BS may as well not exist. Are you supposed to mash every modifier key and every combination thereof on every screen and in every menu, looking for hidden goodies? Absurd.

datadrivenangel 2y ago

And now spotlight defaults to the whole computer even when I start a search within a folder... for items in the folder... Turned to garbage sometime in the last ~18-24 months. At least there's quicksilver

sandreas 2y ago

I personally think that it is reasonable to "want" an Apple notebook. They have great hardware, great battery life and an ecosystem where every device integrates. Only on macOS you can nicely develop software for iOS. Furthermore most vendors release software for macOS, while they don't for Linux (not only Adobe). BTW the apps I miss most on Linux is the Preview App and Apple Mail. However I'm done with Apple. I think it's a decision - not "reasoning". That decision takes time and is painful. It's also a decision specifically against "the best" ecosystem available in favor of something "ok". Not only they repeatedly disappointed my expectations - they just suck as a company (in my opinion). It's not about being less innovative for decreasing software quality, they have done so much for the market, that I think GNOME wouldn't even exist as it is without them... Its about sealing off every inch of their software and hardware they can. No repair without paying... Making RAM and SSD upgrades ridiculously expensive, you cannot even put default NVMe drives into a mac mini - everything is proprietary. Even their sensors have serial numbers to prevent hibernating if you change them out without "hacking" the firmware. Hardware-wise I have high hopes for framework working with AMD - although they did not address the issues I'd suggest (speakers, lpcamm2), they're constantly improving without breaking their promises. This is hopefully not going to change when they get bigger. OS-wise I'll stay on Linux. After a long journey going from Ubuntu to Debian to Fedora using GNOME, KDE and even NixOS with Hyprland for a short period, I gained enough knowledge required to really enjoy Linux. System76 is working on COSMIC, which could be pretty amazing, once it is released. In case anyone would like to try my current Linux config, I'm constantly working on an "install everything" script (pretty early stage): https://github.com/sandreas/zarch https://github.com/sandreas/zarch HF ;)

musicale 2y ago
Apple delivered on Steve Jobs' vision of an "appliance computer". You might not want one though.
- sandreas 2y ago
  Yeah... probably. I forgot to mention that Apple computers are a pretty good deal if you are looking for an AI / LLM experimentation machine due to unified RAM which nearly translates 1:1 into VRAM.

davidthewatson 2y ago

Indeed. I complained that Apple design gets a free pass while being haunted by Steve from beyond the grave for a decade. Your comments resemble my habits except rusted sway right into cosmic desktop alpha and done.

throwaway2037 2y ago

> if PC hardware can ever match Apple Silicon What is wrong with an AMD Ryzen 9 with 16 physical cores? If you need more and you have a virtually unlimited budget, then Ryzen Threadripper is even better. Also: Is Asahi Linux an option for you?

rcarmo 2y ago
Of course Asahi isn’t an option. The hardware support is far from finished.

bullfightonmars 2y ago

Oh wow. I am realizing I have just been living with these bugs as tiny frustrations all day long not understanding how pervasive they are! This issue with spotlight is so bad. I use the switcher to pull up my Downloads or Documents directories and half the time it can’t even find them!

th3iedkid 2y ago

Did you know, you can set your wallpapers to be continuously updating and make macs use terabytes of your network in hours or days depending on speed? https://discussions.apple.com/thread/255329956 https://discussions.apple.com/thread/255329956

Tempest1981 2y ago
I also wish I could preview the wallpapers without triggering a 100MB download. There's nothing in between the 320x240 thumbnail, and the 4k video. And so many tiny thumbnails wedged into the too-narrow System Settings window.

donatj 2y ago

> no longer any way to effectively prioritize the results I want (apps, not internet garbage) FWIW you can massively improve things by just disabling the internet results. It's easily done in the System Preferences

mschnell 2y ago
I would much prefer if you could change the order so that _local_ results come first, web results after — not possible (anymore). Sad.
rcarmo 2y ago
Like I pointed out elsewhere, it doesn’t stick for me.

jamil7 2y ago

I generally agree it’s decreased steadily but I also remember macOS 9 and early X versions especially being pretty buggy and having awful performance.

echohack5 2y ago

Honestly yeah, Raycast is the replacement I'd recommend these days for spotlight.

HexPhantom 2y ago

It's wild how much of the original "it just works" ethos has eroded

microtonal 2y ago

Apple's software quality (either in terms of polish or just plain QA) has steadily decreased I think the decline of software went hand-in-hand with the decline of the native indie Mac app. They still exist, but when I started with the Mac (2007), there was a very rich ecosystem of native Mac apps. Most stood head and shoulders above their Linux and Windows counterparts. Apple has nearly destroyed that ecosystem with: race-to-the-bottom pricing incited by the App Store; general neglect of the Mac platform (especially between ~2016 and Apple Silicon); and a messy reactionary toolkit story with Catalyst, SwiftUI, etc. The new toolkits seem to imply that Apple says that it's the end of AppKit, but most SwiftUI applications are noticeably worse. With their messy toolkit story and general neglect, developers have started using Electron more and more. Sure, part of the popularity is cost savings, since Electron apps can be used on multiple platforms. But part of it is also that a Catalyst or SwiftUI app is not going to provide much more over an Electron app. They will also feel weirdly out of place and you become dependent on Apple working out quirks in SwiftUI. E.g. 1Password tried SwiftUI for their Mac app, but decided in the end that it was an uphill battle and switched to Electron on Mac instead. I recently bought a ThinkPad to use besides my MacBook. Switching is much easier than 10 or 15 years ago, since 80% of the apps that I use most frequently (Slack, Obsidian, 1Password, etc.) are Electron anyway. Even fingerprint unlocking works in 1Password. I was vehemently anti-electron and still don't like it a lot, but I am happy that it makes moving to a non-Apple platform much easier.

cameldrv 2y ago
I think most of this is just downstream of the Mac being eclipsed by the iPhone in terms of Apple’s revenue. The Mac just isn’t critical to Apple’s business like it was in 2009 when Snow Leopard came out. They would have started development on SL in 2008, when the iPhone was still a fairly niche product and there wasn’t even an App Store. Now, ios gets the executive attention and it will generally get the best developers assigned to it, and the Mac has to live with the scraps.
- Cthulhu_ 2y ago
  Yeah I think this is the one, in terms of number of users, revenue, etc. The iPhone is more than 50% of their revenue, Mac is only ~8. Lower volume and higher price, but it doesn't come anywhere near their phone. Same with tablets, although they share an app revenue income stream with the iphone which makes up for the difference in hardware sales.

lostlogin 2y ago

> As someone who's been a Mac user since System 6 and has been consistently using Macs alongside PCs _daily_ for over 20 years I can say that Apple's software quality (either in terms of polish or just plain QA) has steadily decreased. Similar for me but started in system 7. It’s just lucky Windows has got worse faster.

lostlogin 2y ago

nvarsj 2y ago

I do love Gnome. If only we had hardware to run it :/. I'm stuck on a MBP because it's the only laptop with a great screen, speakers, and battery life. Meanwhile my keyboard keys keep getting stuck after a year of usage, and OSX is garbage. Soon as there is similar hardware I can load Linux on, I'll be insta-switching.

rafaelmn 2y ago
AMD AI Max 395 (superb name) proved that x86 can get to Apple silicon perf. (even not that far in power efficiency), but there seems to be 0 devices from non-trash brands (I am not buying ASUS or HP). I would love to finally get out of Apple ecosystem, I just don't have any decent alternatives right now. Hopefully next year.

dsego 2y ago

I'm going to purchase a framework just because I value repairability. And honestly, before the m1 macbook I was using a t480s, and I'm okay with compromising on hardware, esp. having been burned with the 2016 butterfly macbook. Apart from the haptic touchpad I wouldn't miss much, other makers are finally ditching low resolution 16:9 screens and you can even find nice oleds. I'm mostly missing the polished software that's only available on macos (things like carbon copy cloner or pixelmator). But with my m1 having degraded battery and having to send it off for a week or two to the nearest service center just to get a new battery, the prospect of a repairable laptop like framework where I can just order a new battery and replace it myself is looking all the more enticing.

GTP 2y ago

> if PC hardware can ever match Apple Silicon IIRC some competitors are starting to offer a few laptops with ARM processors, I think Samsung has a few. How do you feel about those?