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What’s the actual argument that will credibly convince the top leaders of Apple, to push fixing MacOS up the list of priorities? Because right now it’s clearly

What’s the actual argument that will credibly convince the top leaders of Apple, to push fixing MacOS up the list of priorities? Because right now it’s clearly so far down, beneath dozens of other priorities, that expecting it to just happen one day seems futile.

datadrivenangel 2y ago
It's all their OS software. The Messages app on 18.3 will just... not open the menu to send a photo attachment about ~10% of the time now...
- tracerbulletx 2y ago
  Ya and it’s something in maybe the top 3 of most used user actions. Really indefensible
- what 2y ago
  I’m pretty sure the touch target only covers the text label. Tap anywhere other than the text labels and it does nothing but close the menu. Really bizarre.
nextos 2y ago
IMHO, Mac OS X contributed decisively towards making Apple cool, which was followed by lots of boutique apps and the success of iOS. Loosing that critical mass of developers, even if it's a tiny userbase, would worry me if I was a top leader of Apple.
- yyyk 2y ago
  Apple has had a contemptuous attitude towards developers since.. the App Store? when the iPhone was out? The last two decades? They don't seem to care about this.
  - yunwal 2y ago
    And that’s a huge part of the reason why the Vision Pro will never take off.
    - greener_grass 2y ago
      I disagree - if the Vision Pro had some strong use-cases then developers would hold their nose and make apps for it. The platforms that get apps are the ones where businesses see value in delivering for them. Of course businesses prefer it when making apps is easier (read: cheaper) but this is not a primary driver.
      - ben_w 2y ago
        I think the potential high-return use-cases for VR and AR are (1) games, (2) telepresence robot control, (3) smart assistants that label (a) people and (b) stuff in front of you. Unfortunately: 1) AVP is about 10x too pricy for games. 2) It's not clear if it can beat even the cheapest headsets for anything important for telepresence (higher resolution isn't always important, but can be sometimes). Irregardless, you need the associated telepresence robot, and despite the obvious name, the closest Apple gets to iRobot is if someone bought a vaccum cleaner because Apple doesn't even have the trademark. 3) (a) is creepy, and modern AI assistants are the SOTA for (b) and yet still only "neat" rather than actually achieving the AR vision since at least Microsoft's Hololens, and because AI assistants are free apps on your phone, they can't justify a €4k headset — someone would need a fantastic proprieraty AI breakthrough to justify it.
  - ben_w 2y ago
    App Store was a big improvement for developers when it was new, relative to the alternatives. The things it does may not seem important today, but back then even just my bandwidth costs were a significant percentage of my shareware revenue. ObjC with manual reference counting wasn't much fun either; while we can blame Apple for choosing ObjC in the first place, they definitely improved things.
    - 2y ago
syeare 2y ago
The actual argument would be people voting with their wallets and moving away from the Apple ecosystem, but this something impossible at least in the USA due to these bullshit "blue bubbles"
- briandear 2y ago
  How do blue bubbles make any difference?
  - api 2y ago
    For most of the people here they don't. In popular culture and especially among teens and non-technical twenty-somethings there's this absurd "eww green text!" thing. A blue bubble is a status symbol for some reason, even though there's lots of Android phones that cost as much as iPhones.
- whstl 2y ago
  At this point this is not an argument anymore, it’s just a thought terminating cliche. Expecting users to change their daily habits in order to marginally improve the operating system of a trillion dollar company feels naive and a bit disrespectful to people who actually use these machines for work. Even developers… the vast majority of developers ignored Apple for decades (and Apple was also hostile) and it managed to grow despite that. Might as well ask people to contribute to Gnome or whatever so in the future everyone can go somewhere better. Feels way more feasible.
  - rickdeckard 2y ago
    But the opposite is assuming that Apple has a "responsibility" towards its existing users and has to acknowledge their expectations from them. A sentiment which famously led Steve Jobs to respond that he doesn't understand this, because "people pay us to make that decision for them" and "If people like our products they will buy them; if they don't, they won't" [0] So according to Steve Jobs himself, the only Apple-acknowledged way to disagree with Apple is to NOT buy their products, and by extend into the services-world of today it means STOP USING their products. Now Steve Jobs doesn't officially run this company anymore, but I don't see any indication that this philosophy has changed in any way. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5f8bqYYwps&t=772s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5f8bqYYwps&t=772s
whstl 2y ago
Apple is addicted to growth. It is as big as it should be, but it acts like an early stage startup always trying to build some new flashy thing to attract the next customer.
- bolognafairy 2y ago
  Okay, if you are so confident in your convictions, convince enough Apple shareholders of this.
  - whstl 2y ago
    Why should I? That's not my job.
    - tesch1 2y ago
      b- was probably hinting that the confidence of your conviction may be unsupportable?
      - whstl 2y ago
        It's also not my job to prove my conviction to aggressive internet people. Regardless: that kind of message doesn't feel like HN-worthy productive discussion.
- andrepd 2y ago
  It's not Apple, it's capitalism. "Unlimited growth is the ideology of the cancer cell", yet for Apple (or any corporation), it's not good enough to sell 100,000,000 phones. Next year you must sell 105,000,000. And the year after 112,000,000 (not even 110 or your growth is stagnating). So you get rid of removable batteries so customers have to toss their phones away more often, you gimp other feature, you spend more money on advertising than you did actually developing the product (read this bit several times until it sinks in how crazy it is, yet that's how we are with every major phone, every major movie, etc), and so on.
  - 2y ago
troupo 2y ago
> What’s the actual argument that will credibly convince the top leaders of Apple, to push fixing MacOS up the list of priorities? That their own products depend on it because they developer their products in Mac. And that the professional people they pretend they cater to depend on Macs, and steadily move away.
latexr 2y ago
> What’s the actual argument that will credibly convince the top leaders of Apple, to push fixing MacOS up the list of priorities? Unrelenting bad press. People talking about nothing else but the decline of their software quality. We can already see that with the recent debacle which caused executive shuffling at the top of the company.
- rollcat 2y ago
  That shuffling was caused by Apple utterly failing to deliver a major feature, that was a key selling point for the latest generation of their hardware. "Bad press" for their declining software quality is like people complaining there's no iPhone mini/SE anymore. Apple just doesn't give a fuck. They've joined the rest of the flock at chasing fads and quarterly bottom lines.
  - whompyjaw 2y ago
    What was the major feature? The complete uselessness of “AI” on macOS? I updated and enabled all the AI features and I would ask Siri from my M1 and it failed every time. Would just continuously try with its annoying ping sound and never work. Blew my mind that they let this out.
    - rollcat 2y ago
      Yeah I was talking about the "AI". It's such an utter failure that even Gruber has been calling it out. It was already the same story with AirPower (the wireless charging mat). They've pre-announced it, even tried to upsell it by advertising it on the AirPods packaging. It just turned out physics is ruthless. TBH I've been increasingly sceptical about voice assistants in the "pre-AI" era. I sold my HomePods and unsubscribed from Apple Music because Siri couldn't even find things in my library.
      - ethbr1 2y ago
        The decreasing effectiveness of machine-local search is just developers fucking up integrations and indexing. This is a solved problem since ~1970 -- they're just not spending enough time on it.
butlike 2y ago
Probably nothing as it seems the major push is to get iPad OS and macOS in parity (and I assume to retire macOS completely)
jajuuka 2y ago
I think the best argument is to remind Apple that they aren't selling the OS anymore, so they don't need a new version every year. And that macOS features is not what is pushing Mac sales. People aren't buying the M series machines because of the new macOS version, they are buying it because of the hardware. The M series chips are impressive and provide some great benefits that you can't get elsewhere. And that hardware needs to be coupled with solid software to hook and keep people on this computer. So they can take more time to create more compelling upgrades and sand off more edges. I think they need to desync all their OS's and focus on providing better releases. There really is no benefit to spending the day updating your Mac, phone, tablet, appletv, and HomePod. Especially when there are no good reasons to update. I feel like Apple became far to addicting to habit and routine that it's become more important to keep that than deliver product. Apple Intelligence is a good example of that.

datadrivenangel 2y ago

It's all their OS software. The Messages app on 18.3 will just... not open the menu to send a photo attachment about ~10% of the time now...

tracerbulletx 2y ago
Ya and it’s something in maybe the top 3 of most used user actions. Really indefensible
what 2y ago
I’m pretty sure the touch target only covers the text label. Tap anywhere other than the text labels and it does nothing but close the menu. Really bizarre.

nextos 2y ago

IMHO, Mac OS X contributed decisively towards making Apple cool, which was followed by lots of boutique apps and the success of iOS. Loosing that critical mass of developers, even if it's a tiny userbase, would worry me if I was a top leader of Apple.

yyyk 2y ago
Apple has had a contemptuous attitude towards developers since.. the App Store? when the iPhone was out? The last two decades? They don't seem to care about this.
- yunwal 2y ago
  And that’s a huge part of the reason why the Vision Pro will never take off.
  - greener_grass 2y ago
    I disagree - if the Vision Pro had some strong use-cases then developers would hold their nose and make apps for it. The platforms that get apps are the ones where businesses see value in delivering for them. Of course businesses prefer it when making apps is easier (read: cheaper) but this is not a primary driver.
    - ben_w 2y ago
      I think the potential high-return use-cases for VR and AR are (1) games, (2) telepresence robot control, (3) smart assistants that label (a) people and (b) stuff in front of you. Unfortunately: 1) AVP is about 10x too pricy for games. 2) It's not clear if it can beat even the cheapest headsets for anything important for telepresence (higher resolution isn't always important, but can be sometimes). Irregardless, you need the associated telepresence robot, and despite the obvious name, the closest Apple gets to iRobot is if someone bought a vaccum cleaner because Apple doesn't even have the trademark. 3) (a) is creepy, and modern AI assistants are the SOTA for (b) and yet still only "neat" rather than actually achieving the AR vision since at least Microsoft's Hololens, and because AI assistants are free apps on your phone, they can't justify a €4k headset — someone would need a fantastic proprieraty AI breakthrough to justify it.
- ben_w 2y ago
  App Store was a big improvement for developers when it was new, relative to the alternatives. The things it does may not seem important today, but back then even just my bandwidth costs were a significant percentage of my shareware revenue. ObjC with manual reference counting wasn't much fun either; while we can blame Apple for choosing ObjC in the first place, they definitely improved things.
  - 2y ago

syeare 2y ago

The actual argument would be people voting with their wallets and moving away from the Apple ecosystem, but this something impossible at least in the USA due to these bullshit "blue bubbles"

briandear 2y ago
How do blue bubbles make any difference?
- api 2y ago
  For most of the people here they don't. In popular culture and especially among teens and non-technical twenty-somethings there's this absurd "eww green text!" thing. A blue bubble is a status symbol for some reason, even though there's lots of Android phones that cost as much as iPhones.
whstl 2y ago
At this point this is not an argument anymore, it’s just a thought terminating cliche. Expecting users to change their daily habits in order to marginally improve the operating system of a trillion dollar company feels naive and a bit disrespectful to people who actually use these machines for work. Even developers… the vast majority of developers ignored Apple for decades (and Apple was also hostile) and it managed to grow despite that. Might as well ask people to contribute to Gnome or whatever so in the future everyone can go somewhere better. Feels way more feasible.
- rickdeckard 2y ago
  But the opposite is assuming that Apple has a "responsibility" towards its existing users and has to acknowledge their expectations from them. A sentiment which famously led Steve Jobs to respond that he doesn't understand this, because "people pay us to make that decision for them" and "If people like our products they will buy them; if they don't, they won't" [0] So according to Steve Jobs himself, the only Apple-acknowledged way to disagree with Apple is to NOT buy their products, and by extend into the services-world of today it means STOP USING their products. Now Steve Jobs doesn't officially run this company anymore, but I don't see any indication that this philosophy has changed in any way. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5f8bqYYwps&t=772s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5f8bqYYwps&t=772s

whstl 2y ago

Apple is addicted to growth. It is as big as it should be, but it acts like an early stage startup always trying to build some new flashy thing to attract the next customer.

bolognafairy 2y ago
Okay, if you are so confident in your convictions, convince enough Apple shareholders of this.
- whstl 2y ago
  Why should I? That's not my job.
  - tesch1 2y ago
    b- was probably hinting that the confidence of your conviction may be unsupportable?
    - whstl 2y ago
      It's also not my job to prove my conviction to aggressive internet people. Regardless: that kind of message doesn't feel like HN-worthy productive discussion.
andrepd 2y ago
It's not Apple, it's capitalism. "Unlimited growth is the ideology of the cancer cell", yet for Apple (or any corporation), it's not good enough to sell 100,000,000 phones. Next year you must sell 105,000,000. And the year after 112,000,000 (not even 110 or your growth is stagnating). So you get rid of removable batteries so customers have to toss their phones away more often, you gimp other feature, you spend more money on advertising than you did actually developing the product (read this bit several times until it sinks in how crazy it is, yet that's how we are with every major phone, every major movie, etc), and so on.
- 2y ago

troupo 2y ago

> What’s the actual argument that will credibly convince the top leaders of Apple, to push fixing MacOS up the list of priorities? That their own products depend on it because they developer their products in Mac. And that the professional people they pretend they cater to depend on Macs, and steadily move away.

latexr 2y ago

> What’s the actual argument that will credibly convince the top leaders of Apple, to push fixing MacOS up the list of priorities? Unrelenting bad press. People talking about nothing else but the decline of their software quality. We can already see that with the recent debacle which caused executive shuffling at the top of the company.

rollcat 2y ago
That shuffling was caused by Apple utterly failing to deliver a major feature, that was a key selling point for the latest generation of their hardware. "Bad press" for their declining software quality is like people complaining there's no iPhone mini/SE anymore. Apple just doesn't give a fuck. They've joined the rest of the flock at chasing fads and quarterly bottom lines.
- whompyjaw 2y ago
  What was the major feature? The complete uselessness of “AI” on macOS? I updated and enabled all the AI features and I would ask Siri from my M1 and it failed every time. Would just continuously try with its annoying ping sound and never work. Blew my mind that they let this out.
  - rollcat 2y ago
    Yeah I was talking about the "AI". It's such an utter failure that even Gruber has been calling it out. It was already the same story with AirPower (the wireless charging mat). They've pre-announced it, even tried to upsell it by advertising it on the AirPods packaging. It just turned out physics is ruthless. TBH I've been increasingly sceptical about voice assistants in the "pre-AI" era. I sold my HomePods and unsubscribed from Apple Music because Siri couldn't even find things in my library.
    - ethbr1 2y ago
      The decreasing effectiveness of machine-local search is just developers fucking up integrations and indexing. This is a solved problem since ~1970 -- they're just not spending enough time on it.

butlike 2y ago

Probably nothing as it seems the major push is to get iPad OS and macOS in parity (and I assume to retire macOS completely)

jajuuka 2y ago

I think the best argument is to remind Apple that they aren't selling the OS anymore, so they don't need a new version every year. And that macOS features is not what is pushing Mac sales. People aren't buying the M series machines because of the new macOS version, they are buying it because of the hardware. The M series chips are impressive and provide some great benefits that you can't get elsewhere. And that hardware needs to be coupled with solid software to hook and keep people on this computer. So they can take more time to create more compelling upgrades and sand off more edges. I think they need to desync all their OS's and focus on providing better releases. There really is no benefit to spending the day updating your Mac, phone, tablet, appletv, and HomePod. Especially when there are no good reasons to update. I feel like Apple became far to addicting to habit and routine that it's become more important to keep that than deliver product. Apple Intelligence is a good example of that.