11 ms·

Last Week on My Mac: Losing confidence

441 points by frizlab 11mo ago

frizlab 11mo ago
This guy nailed exactly what’s wrong with macOS IMHO.
- kristofferR 11mo ago
  Yup, Eclectic Light is legit, probably one of the top power-users of macOS: https://eclecticlight.co/mac-problem-solving/ https://eclecticlight.co/mac-problem-solving/
  - saagarjha 11mo ago
    Err…no. He’s often wrong and not great at fact-checking :(
spooneybarger 11mo ago
I started experiencing this several years ago with MacOS including file copies that failed with no notification from the finder. I switched away from MacOS at that time. My last job we were given MacOS machines, I didn't experience anything that made me want to reconsider my decision to ditch MacOS as my daily driver.
cjbarber 11mo ago
To Apple: People are complaining because they'd rather you fix it, than them having to leave the platform (moving OSes is annoying, because operating systems have a lot of lock in - data you'd have to move, apps you need to find alternatives for and re-learn). The iOS / macOS 26 frustration I think is particularly felt by the HN type crowd. Don't want something that looks cool but is less effective/performant/usable. "We" can feel Apple's priorities drifting away from ours. Side note: I wonder how much easier AI will make it to migrate between operating systems? Perhaps future AI systems that are good at computer-usage could manage migrations/installs well.
- munificent 11mo ago
  Response from Apple: We know you have a lot of vendor lock-in, which is why we're doing this. We want shiny features to talk about to get people to buy their first Mac, and don't give a shit about providing a great experience for existing users because we know they won't leave anyway.
  - devin 11mo ago
    The current state does not feel malicious in this way to me at all. It feels bumbling and amateurish. It gives the feeling that the people who kept the product cohesive have left or retired, and that a new generation of overly ambitious careerists have entered positions of leadership.
    - lukifer 11mo ago
      I feel like it says a lot, when intelligent amorality seems genuinely preferable to blundering incompetence. Many such cases. One wonders how much "enshittification" is intrinsic to networked software and our late-stage-whatever political economy, versus how much is a farcical byproduct of office politics and org chart turf wars.
    - munificent 11mo ago
      I think any organization at Apple's scale has no shortage of skilled workers and ambitious careerists. But at the product level, I do believe that the result you see is generally an honest reflection of the organization's priorities. If Apple wanted to ship a rock-solid OS, they could. They're just choosing to put those resources elsewhere.
    - Mistletoe 11mo ago
      >the people who kept the product cohesive have left or retired This is everything post-covid. The competent people that could left and retired early.
      - devin 11mo ago
barfoure 11mo ago
Yeah I don’t recall ever seeing this on Windows in fact I can still run Win 95 games (yes, those exist) on Windows 11. Mostly[0] works. I can go and install games from my original CDs which shouldn’t be possible but a bit of toothpaste on them does the trick. Things just work for the most part because backwards compat is hardwired into the folks at Microsoft. Someone did a YouTube video not too long ago installing MS-DOS all the way through Windows 11, upgrading version by version. [0] Mostly.
krackers 11mo ago
If the error message happens to include a numeric code, OSStatus.com is sometimes helpful if the issue if they didn't bother with a localizable string for it.
Paria_Stark 11mo ago
While I love their hardware, this is why I will always chose a Linux distribution over anything closed source. Being able to retrieve logs of pretty much anything and change pieces of the OS as time goes on is extraordinarily resilient. Sure it's sometimes not as shiny as MacOS, and it will most likely never be polished enough for the mainstream market share, but there's something really awesome about not being reliant on a support engineer that does not have the financial incentive to spend the correct amount of time solving a one off problem.
- deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]
- creata 11mo ago
  Plus, resources like the Arch Wiki just don't have alternatives on macOS.
  - venturecruelty 11mo ago
    The Arch Wiki is an amazing resource! A hat tip to anyone who edits that. In fact, I think it's worth kicking a few bucks their way this holiday season: https://archlinux.org/donate/ https://archlinux.org/donate/
  - jeroenhd 11mo ago
    MSDN used to have some excellent guides for doing all kinds of debugging, configuration, and tweaking of Windows. Somewhere around Windows 8.1 the website got updated and now most resources are either gone or unfindable. I do occasionally come upon some (badly auto-translated) version of those old guides, but download links and links to more information are all 404. It's a real shame.
yunwal 11mo ago
I totally agree with most of the article, but the hallucinations bit puzzles me. If it’s genuinely an unchangeable limitation of the product (as hallucinations are with LLMs) it’s good to set the right expectation rather than making promises you can’t deliver on.
- an0malous 11mo ago
  It doesn't matter to the end user if hallucinations are an unchangeable limitation, the fact that they happen undermines the confidence that people have in them as a tool. I've wondered the same thing as the author about why we even call them "hallucinations." They're errors, the LLM generated an erroneous output.
  - jeroenhd 11mo ago
    The LLM doesn't produce erroneous output, its generated tokens fall within the statistical limits of the preset configuration, unless some kind of bitflip messed up the model in memory somehow. An LLM doesn't tell the truth or answer a question, it just spits out tokens. Its training doesn't involve validating whether or not the output forms a true fact or statement, but rather if the output looks like one. For the same reason, an LLM cannot lie, because an LLM doesn't have any intention, nor can it tell the truth. That level of thinking is beyond the capability of an LLM. The term "hallucinations" are an anthropomorphised interpretation of valid output that's factually incorrect. It happens to people all the time (the human brain will make up any missing memories and subconsciously explain away inconsistencies, which only becomes obvious once you're dealing with someone with memory problems), so it feels like a decent term to use for garbage information produced without any ill intent. The problem lies with the AI companies convincing their customers that the output generated by their tools is probable to mean anything. Probability engines are sold as some kind of chat program or even as some kind of autonomous agent because the output comes close enough to pass the Turing test to most people. LLMs can only mimic intelligence, interactivity, or any other kind of behavior, they cannot actually think or reason. If people knew what they were operating, the "hallucinations" wouldn't be a problem. Unfortunately, that would take out most of the confidence people have in these tools, so you won't see the AI salesmen provide their customers with reasonable expectations.
Nevermark 11mo ago
In my experience Apple's software has been accumulating small annoying bugs for a couple years. For a couple years I have been noticing regular new glitches in the Apple TV interface accumulating faster than old ones disappear. Lately the glitch accumulation syndrome seems to have hit macOS. Notes has started doing random bolding, unbolding, changing text size on only one line, etc. After a restart, a finder window with tabs springs to different screen spaces, depending on which tab is open when I try to drop a file on it. Message sometimes draws a few lines of a message with a few pixels vertical and horizontally offset, so there is actual overlap of message parts. Then there are chronic ones. Safari's save or print to PDF are notorious for not saving pictures you can see, even from reading mode. How are basic functions in Safari not worth fixing, for years? Apple's HomePods ... for many years. I could write a blog of interesting Pod behavior. I thought having one or a pair in each room would be nice. No, more of them is not nice. Constant bizarreness. The noticeable acceleration isn't encouraging.
- lapcat 11mo ago
  > In my experience Apple's software has been accumulating small annoying bugs for a couple years. A couple? That's the understatement of the last couple years.
- 0x1ch 11mo ago
  > Apple's HomePods ... for many years. I could write a blog of interesting Pod behavior. I thought having one or a pair in each room would be nice. No, more of them is not nice. Constant bizarreness. Yeah, these have quite the DIY / Jailbreak following I've noticed. They look like neat little devices for music and HA stuff, but I've read similar stuff to your comment.
  - tyre 11mo ago
    Interesting. I have one HomePod and four minis scattered about. I can’t remember having problems with the hardware or setup. Siri, on the other hand, is a pain in the ass.
- JimDabell 11mo ago
exitb 11mo ago
> rush to get the next version of macOS out of the door That’s the key I think. Apple these days never releases when products are ready, but on a predefined schedule. Point releases that should fix things, are actually delivering more features that were shown on the keynote, but didn’t quite make the main release date. As a result the systems accumulated some bugs that might never get fixed, unless the code happens to be completely rewritten. The desktop switching animation is hopelessly long when using keyboard shortcuts with ProMotion enabled. On both iOS and macOS the Music app will have an audible click couple of seconds into the first played song when using lossless quality. Stuff like these is known and reported, there’s just seemingly zero bandwidth to handle it.
- jonhohle 11mo ago
  20 years ago, I was excited to get OS X updates and each one made the system better. When Software Update showed something new, it was always going to be good. At the same time, Windows Update was an anxiety engine. Now Software Update has mostly become what Windows Update was. Uninteresting security patches. Each new major update makes the interface worse and adds new bugs or drops old hardware.
  - hnthrowaway0328 11mo ago
    Actually Windows would be much more lovely if MSFT keeps the Windows 7 core and just release security fixes and bug fixes. In the forseeable future, 64-bit should be enough. And I already had everything I need on Windows 7.
    - makeitdouble 11mo ago
      Windows audience will always be split between the people that loved it for what it is (Win7), and those who tolerate it as long as it plays nice with everything else (*nix subsystem, latest hardware etc) The win7 audience is IMHO shrinking the fastest, while the other camp has nowhere to go and is less demanding, making it an easier customer base.
jamesbelchamber 11mo ago
I have an on-again-off-again relationship with macOS - the deep integration with Apple hardware is stellar and IMO the new MacBook Airs are tremendous value for money, but otherwise the OS seems to be suffering from some deep technical debt and MBA-brained decision-making. I'm currently on the "meh hardware but solid OS" phase of the cycle - the battery life isn't as good and waking from suspend still (somehow) isn't as seamless, but my Linux of choice (Silverblue) is predictable and transparent - and ultimately if there's a problem it's in my gift to fix it, which is much more comforting to me. I wonder what they'll do to woo me back next time..
vondur 11mo ago
Isn't there a rumor that the next MacOS/iOS update are going to focus on reliablilty and fixing bugs? I think everyone would like that.
lapcat 11mo ago
There's actually a better format than Safari web archives hidden in the Safari Debug menu: Save Page Complete. This saves the individual files of the site in standard format, html, js, css, etc., much like Chrome does with Webpage, Complete.
- malshe 11mo ago
  Or just use SingleFile (https://www.getsinglefile.com https://www.getsinglefile.com)
- an0malous 11mo ago
  With the AI vision tools we have these days, I just export to PDF. At least within the Notes app, the search feature also searches the contents of PDFs.
brendong 11mo ago
Latest MacOS made my laptop speakers unusable
YouAreWRONGtoo 11mo ago
[dead]
cyberax 11mo ago
I couple of months ago, I wasted about 4 hours debugging issues with my app. Command-line scripts didn't work properly for some reason, while my IDE worked fine. Turned out that I either missed or accidentally denied the permission to access local networks for iTerm. So the `curl` utility installed from Homebrew was silently failing, while the system-provided `/usr/bin/curl` worked fine. Because it has special permission from Apple. Can I just give the same permission to iTerm? Nope. We are not worthy of that power, and must re-affirm permissions every 30 days for all non-Apple software. Oh, and these permission popups happen at random moments, including during presentations or meetings. And if you don't accept them, they are silently denied.
- tpmoney 11mo ago
  > Can I just give the same permission to iTerm? Nope. We are not worthy of that power, and must re-affirm permissions every 30 days for all non-Apple software. Not sure what permission you're referring to or what your curl script is trying to do but `/opt/homebrew/opt/curl/bin/curl http://www.google.com http://www.google.com` works just fine on Tahoe from both iTerm2 and ghostty. Looking through the various permission grants, the only one they both have in common is "App Management". They share some file permission grants, but where as iTerm has full disk access, ghostty only has Downloads and removable media. In the past I've found I've needed to add terminals like iTerm to the Developer Tools permission, but ghostty isn't in there currently and curl is still working just fine. And in none of these cases have I ever needed to re-affirm the permission every 30 days. Any chance you have "disclaim ownership of children" setting enabled in iTerm? Maybe if iTerm is not allowing child processes to use its own permissions, you're having to re-authorize curl specifically (and it's getting updated about once every 30 days?) > And if you don't accept them, they are silently denied. This is IMO the correct behavior. If something asks for permission and it's not explicitly granted, then the default should always be denied.
  - cyberax 11mo ago
    > Not sure what permission you're referring to or what your curl script is trying to do but `/opt/homebrew/opt/curl/bin/curl http://www.google.com http://www.google.com` works just fine on Tahoe from both iTerm2 and ghostty. Mwwahahaha. Yep. Curling something neutral like google.com worked fine for me as well. That's how I was verifying that everything was OK. Now try to do "curl https://192.168.0.1 https://192.168.0.1" (or whatever is your local router's IP). It will trigger this request: https://imgur.com/a/tMAApfB https://imgur.com/a/tMAApfB The permission in question is called "Local Network", you can find it in the "Security" section in the control panel. Yeah, their names don't match. Oh, and negative entries are NOT listed in that panel. So if you deny the request, there is NO indication of that. Anywhere. Logs will also be empty. > This is IMO the correct behavior. If something asks for permission and it's not explicitly granted, then the default should always be denied. The keyword is SILENTLY. The permission requests should be logged and made available in a central location, where they can be reviewed. It's literal recursive WTF. When you start looking at it, it gets worse and worse.
keyle 11mo ago
I typically jump on the latest macOS with enthusiasm. I once made the mistake to install the beta version of the next os, and well, that didn't go well for me. But typically, within X.1, I'm there. However something shifted since this "visionOS" melted version of macOS (Tahoe); where I have absolutely no intension to upgrade from Sequoia. I hope they will fix it by the time I'll be forced to upgrade (post support deadline). It started with the macOS that brought the iOS settings panel. We went from a logical structure of easily findable stuff to a complete mess. Just open the "Keyboard" settings on macOS today and it's bewildering how they could ship this and think this is fine. Steve would roll in his grave. The process to allow running applications that are unsigned is just a horrible hack. It feels like a last minute "shove it and move on!". By 2035 I wonder if we'll be all running KDE or WindowMaker and the hell with modern OS GUI. From a Gestalt standpoint, human relations with desktop computers are not the same as with thumb driven mobile OS or air-pinch driven vision OS, period. The hell with "glass" or "flat" design. Desktop OS should be as forgettable as possible, as it's about having long stints of flow, not giving a feeling of "air" or "play".
- andrekandre 11mo ago
  > Desktop OS should be as forgettable as possible, as it's about having long stints of flow, not giving a feeling of "air" or "play". 100% agree, though i wonder how much an influence casual users are having on apple's marketing of macos... its almost as if apple doesnt want to sell "trucks" anymore (as steve would say) and would prefer to morph macos slowly into a sedan like the ipad (cause that is where the money is) > By 2035 I wonder if we'll be all running KDE or WindowMaker and the hell with modern OS GUI. tbh this is probably me in 2026 or 2027 i think...
  - DuperPower 11mo ago
    Windows IS also suffering from macosification
    - keyle 11mo ago
      no, Windows is suffering from profiteering and corporate malignancy.
wuming2 11mo ago
Can we have Scott Forstall back now.
- AnonC 11mo ago
  I wish that could happen, but sadly Tim Cook’s ego wouldn’t allow that and I don’t think Craig Federighi would want his kingdom to be torn apart (I presume he had a big role in getting John Giannandrea to be pushed out of Siri and retire). Scott Forstall was fired for a lot less compared to the mess that Apple’s software is now.
- deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]
Mizza 11mo ago
Would love to see them do another OSX 10.6 and just release a version with lots bug fixes and no new features. But instead it'll be a new half-baked LLM tool to help you make new half-baked LLM tools.
a-dub 11mo ago
macos feels dated these days to me. it's time for a clean slate.
wunderg 11mo ago
The irony is that we all independently decided QA was a “process smell” around the same time. The logic seemed airtight: developers should own quality, shift left, test in prod with feature flags, move fast. Every tech blog and conference talk said the same thing. What nobody mentioned is that QA teams weren’t just finding bugs—they were the institutional memory of how things break. When you dissolve QA and tell developers “you own quality now,” that knowledge just evaporates. Each developer tests the happy path for their feature and calls it done. The edge cases? The interaction effects? The weird state machines? Those all ship to prod. The really insidious part is the metrics looked great. Velocity up, deployment frequency up, cycle time down. We were measuring output, not outcomes. Exec dashboards showed green across the board while user experience quietly degraded. Now we’re in the equilibrium state: software ships fast and breaks often, every deploy is a dice roll, and we’ve normalized “hotfix Friday” as just how things work. The velocity gains were real, but we were measuring distance traveled, not value delivered. Turns out “everyone owns quality” means nobody owns quality. Who knew.
- torben-friis 11mo ago
  There was a trend of devs being their own QA. Also devs being infra (devops). Also devs being PMs (product developers). Also devs being managers (flat orgs). Also devs being facilitators (rotative scrum masters). I wonder why expertise is being lost.
  - hedora 11mo ago
    This also leads to devs burning out, because you’ve listed a bunch of jobs most programmers hate, whether or not they happen to be able to do them well. That causes churn, which further erodes expertise.
    - torben-friis 11mo ago
      Yup. And dealing with the product of any of those topics half assed by a non expert colleague is cause for burnout too. Pipelines that fail, poorly thought tests, badly written docs… Which reminds me I forgot to add technical writers to the list.
aag 11mo ago
<rant>I've never had confidence in MacOS or Apple software in general, and especially not in Apple Photos. Photos beachballs constantly, even when I do simple things like creating a new folder or naming a photo. It loses keystrokes almost every time I type a folder or photo name. No other program does this on the same Mac, which is an M4 Pro with 64GB RAM and terabytes of SSD. I know that it's not a problem with the hardware because the previous Mac Mini, which was well equipped, had the same problem for years. Reconstructing the Photos database didn't help. Don't get me started about how Time Machine drops files — important files like the Photos Sqlite3 database — from backups. Yes, I should switch from Photos to something else, e.g. Immich. I barely use the software included with the Mac, and would only use Linux except that there are still just a few programs or bits of hardware that insist on there being a Mac or Windows machine somewhere. How Apple every got a reputation for high-quality, user-friendly software is beyond me. Not recommended.</rant>
- radicality 11mo ago
  Photos is definitely not great, though I still try and deal with it for the easy iCloud syncing. Some examples off top of my head for Photos crappiness, all on my top of the range 128GB macbook m4 max - doing 'cmd-R' (rotate) on a standard few-megabyte image might beachball the app for a few seconds. Rotating a small image file... - Rotating a video seems to re-encode the whole video, instead of setting some metadata flags. Imagine you have, say, a 20GB video recording, and rotate it. That will now be a separate new 20GB file on your mac drive. - If i view the album of some specific person that has many pictures with location metadata, and I scroll to the bottom where the map is, it almost immediately starts allocating >100GB memory, beachballs, starts gigabytes of memory paging, and you gotta kill the app asap.
  - FireBeyond 11mo ago
    Easy syncing? Kinda. It works, generally, eventually. No progress, no indicators. And what little status you get has no connection to reality. Will it sync? When? Who knows? You’re on WiFi with a full battery and charging? So? Might be a minute, might be an hour. Oh, you restarted Photos? Who cares? Not Photos. They'll get there. Sometime.
QuantumAtom 11mo ago
I know this might seem stupid as I don't own a Mac, but does Darwin use systemd? Can the author use journalctl, syslog or check /var/log?
- lapcat 11mo ago
  > does Darwin use systemd? No.
- hedora 11mo ago
  It has the thing that systemd and journalctl are poor clones of. Their ergonomics (especially the log viewer) are much worse than sysvinit/syslog, but they mostly work. I say “mostly”, because, like systemd, sometimes force disabling a broken service silently fails, even after reboot.
- wpm 11mo ago
  Darwin uses launchd/libxpc. journalctl's job is handled by the `log` command, with appropriate predicate filters to winnow out the relevant stuff from the chaff.
jasoneckert 11mo ago
I dual boot my M1 Mac Studio with Fedora Asahi Remix (native Linux for Apple Silicon for those unfamiliar). I'm far more comfortable and productive in Linux for development, but wanted to keep macOS there for times when I needed it. It turns out I haven't needed it, and I honestly don't remember the last time I've booted into macOS on that system. I like Apple hardware, but the last time I enjoyed using macOS was pre-2010.
- dreamcompiler 11mo ago
  I do the same thing on my M2 Air. But it's still annoying that Asahi drains the battery so fast when the computer sleeps.
- hnthrowaway0328 11mo ago
  What does Asahi lack for M1 boxes? I bought a used M1 pro and is itchy to try it out!
  - willis936 11mo ago
    The two big things missing for me are fingerprint scanning and 120 hz display.
    - hnthrowaway0328 11mo ago
      Thanks, looks like fine for me at the moment.
nixpulvis 11mo ago
Apple has completely lost the high ground it earned during the OS X high times, paired with the relentless innovation of the iPod and iPhone. If they were smart they would focus on refinement in this era of gradual and boring innovation, so when the next thing is ready, they have a solid and trusted platform to support it. As things stand, if the next thing comes tomorrow, the next generation could easily jump ship. They may have the people who are too lazy to learn something new and will survive like Microsoft has. But at this point there's nothing substantially different about the company that told us to "think different".
nntwozz 11mo ago
“People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.” — Alan Kay It's ironic after fighting the good fight for so long and finally making their own hardware that Apple should fall on their own sword with software now. I've been loving Apple since Tiger, I'm still on Sequoia and iOS 18. Pepe prayge for the 27-releases to be another Snow Leopard as rumored.
- linguae 11mo ago
  This isn’t the first time Apple’s been in this situation. The first PowerPC Mac was released in 1994, but core elements of the classic Mac OS remained written for the Motorola 68000. Pink/Taligent and Copland never panned out. It took until Mac OS X to be released in 2001 for PowerPC Macs to receive an operating system that was fully made for it, and even then Mac OS X undergone successive performance improvements. By then, it was time for the Intel switch. Snow Leopard’s was Intel-only, so PowerPC Macs cannot go beyond Leopard.
- hnthrowaway0328 11mo ago
  Is it true there is a rumor about the next release being mostly a bug/perf fix?
  - nntwozz 11mo ago
    Apple iOS 27 to Be No-Frills ‘Snow Leopard’ Update, Other Than New AI https://archive.is/puYFU https://archive.is/puYFU
charlesabarnes 11mo ago
I love how both MacOS and Windows users are reaching a point of no return. Last week I finally decided to jump to Linux. While I realize that I have a few nits and annoying bugs I run in to, its hard to say if linux has any more than the mainstream offerings.
- venturecruelty 11mo ago
  As much as I have endless, white-hot disdain for the web-appification of everything, it does end up working out when Linux runs every popular web browser just as well as the two main commercial operating systems. (I forget if DRM works on Linux, but eh. DVDs exist.)
  - array_key_first 11mo ago
    DRM kind of works, but you don't get full DRM. But then again, I'm not sure you get that even on Windows. I believe full resolution streaming typically requires a smart TV or equivalent box.
- tvshtr 11mo ago
  Linux is not monolithic, if you have a buggy component you can replace it. With the exception of the kernel of course. I think we're entering the era of personal desktops.
iamshs 11mo ago
Tahoe has been giving spinning wheel on Firefox browser since updating it. You switch from spotlight to Firefox, there's the wheel; leave computer alone for sometime and comeback there's the wheel. I want this mess fixed. Similarly on iOS, Safari bookmarks don't expose all folder names but only "Bookmarks" and "Favourites" as default. Why do I have to do another extra tap to expose a single folder that I have to save bookmark in? Why cannot at least five folder names be exposed? Another absurdity is while saving a fullpage screenshot after cropping it, you have to click the checkmark "emoji" which is otherwise blank with no description, and then comes a sub-menu to save as pdf or photo; why cannot those four options be presented as is on the main menu?
- zbentley 11mo ago
  > You switch from spotlight to Firefox, there's the wheel; leave computer alone for sometime and comeback there's the wheel. You are definitely not alone: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1979283 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1979283 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1982717 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1982717 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2002102 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2002102 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1995973 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1995973 https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/961898 https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/961898 While there are a few overlapping/similar issues being alluded to in those threads, it definitely seems like something is going on re: task switching. There are also a couple of tricks mentioned that might fix some specific issues related to bookmarks or graphics acceleration, but no silver bullets so far.
- Klonoar 11mo ago
  The Firefox issue sounds like a Mozilla issue, not an Apple one. It’s not like Apple doesn’t ship betas for developers to catch issues like that.
- jeroenhd 11mo ago
  I have similar issues with Firefox on Linux, I don't think it's a macOS exclusive problem. Unfortunately it's hard to tell which problems are caused by which component when all of them are unreliable enough that they could be the culprit.
gkanai 11mo ago
I've been on Apple since the 1980s. Apple IIc was my first Apple. Since a few years ago, I've chosen to stay at least 1 full version behind the current version and I've never regretted that.
- hnthrowaway0328 11mo ago
  I picked the same strategy for Windows. I remember I was still on 2000 when XP is hot, and still on XP when 8 is available, and now I use 10 and this is going to be my last Windows as 11 is too shitty and I suspect 12 and beyond are going to be worse.
ChrisMarshallNY 11mo ago
I feel his pain. Some of those error alerts make me want to sob. Reporting problems to Apple is downright demoralizing. Most of the time, the bugs remain unassigned, unread, and unsolved. The few that do earn a response, are usually gaslighting. I suspect that Apple may have hired a whole bunch of less-than-stellar people, and it’s showing. That’s depressing, because I always considered them to be the gold standard.
dreamcompiler 11mo ago
It's possible to look at the behavior of a company over time and infer their internal incentive structure. It's been clear for several versions of MacOS recently that Apple spends much more energy adding features than fixing bugs. It seems obvious that there is no incentive within Apple to fix bugs; the only thing that gets one promoted at Apple must be adding new features -- so bugs (at least in MacOS) don't get fixed. We already know that Apple makes about 51% of its revenue from iPhone sales. Therefore it's reasonable to assume promotion opportunities are mostly centered around iPhone hardware and hardware, rather than MacOS. Those of us who depend on MacOS are likely screwed unless something at Apple changes.
- hnthrowaway0328 11mo ago
  Having read Showstoppers a few times, I wish Apple had a David Cutler that mows on developers' asses if their code is too buggy. Kinda all large system projects need someone similar to get things done properly.
  - pr3dr49 11mo ago
    Once having validated that it was not the product manager, or whatnot manager that decided that it was good enough to go, yes, sure, but are developers given the time to root out bugs?
FireBeyond 11mo ago
> You’re eventually advised to reinstall macOS or, in the worst case, to wipe a fairly new Apple silicon Mac and restore it in DFU mode, but have no reason to believe that will stop the problem from recurring. This isn't new. Back in GPU-gate days, I had a MBP that I could very reliably kernel panic due to that issue. But it'd pass Diagnostics so "no fix for you!" Even when I was there with a Genius, we did this, and on a brand new install - look, here, can replicate this KP (which was basically some of the same steps people had for identifying the GPU (and everything else matched up).
xp84 11mo ago
My least favorite thing on the Mac is when they have one of their infamous negative number “error codes” in the alert box, and I get my hopes up that at least it must represent a common thread of errors others have had that may be solved in a forum or subreddit somewhere, then when googling that you discover that all forms of failure from disk full to malware result in the exact same oddly-specific error code and that everyone is talking to each other about it and slowly realizing they have nothing in common but being cursed by Tim Cook.
- koito17 11mo ago
  If I recall correctly, many of those are "Carbon-related" errors and mostly represent legacy baggage of Mac OS. Not defending the design, but this website is sometimes useful for disambiguating OSStatus error codes: https://www.osstatus.com/ https://www.osstatus.com/
hedgehog 11mo ago
I've been using Macs in various forms since the 80s and I've carried a Mac laptop with me nearly full time since the early 2000s. While I don't think quality is necessarily overall worse than a decade or two ago I have run out of patience for rewrites with major regressions of most of the apps I care about. For the first time in a lot of years I have a Linux laptop along side my Mac and, if all works out, I'm planning to shift all my important workflows over.
xoa 11mo ago
It's pretty depressing as well as frustrating, watching something pretty solid get flushed in real time. This post puts words on it I hadn't really, but fading "confidence" is a really succinct foundation. There's no single massive thing just completely fubar'd, but the cumulative effect of hundreds to thousands of mysterious cuts combined with that now familiar sinking feeling of watching GUI bikeshedding accelerate with each new version, every more miserable, less useful, no more Feelings Of Delight at seeing some cool little attention to detail or nice new thing that clearly had some real thought and testing behind it. It all really eats away at one's day. I'm seeing this HN post and article literally right as I'm watching Activity Monitor and trying to figure out WTF is going on with mysterious ApplicationsStorageExtension (a plugin buried in the StorageManagement.framework) tasks spawning 4x on a Sequoia Mini M4 Pro and doing constant disk churn to no discernable purpose and introducing massive latency to certain file system access patterns. This started up out of nowhere in the last few weeks, almost exactly 1 year after getting this machine and with no major system upgrades. Why!? Who knows! Force quit them all and other stuff like MailStorageManagement goes nuts for a bit and then it settles down for an indeterminate period of time. Restart the computer and it goes away for awhile. No FS corruption issues found, seem to be no issues with spotlight. Sigh. After decades using macOS and significant investment the barrier to change is significant too, even if there was some ideal thing to jump to which there is not. But like others I am chipping away at it where I can, slowly divorcing from the Apple ecosystem, going ever more heterodox. I can see people reaching tipping points at various places, might take quite awhile but the thing is once someone jumps ship you're probably never getting them back and eventually that can add up to them taking others with them. It's just such a damned waste too.
stmw 11mo ago
"Mr. Jobs reportedly asked the assembled engineers and other MobileMe team members, “Can anyone tell me what MobileMe is supposed to do?” When one of those employees then volunteered a satisfactory answer, Mr. Jobs followed up with, “So why the fuck doesn’t it do that?” (source - https://www.businessinsider.com/steve-jobs-mobileme-failure-2011-5 https://www.businessinsider.com/steve-jobs-mobileme-failure-...)
coastalpuma 11mo ago
Last weekend I was writing some quick notes in the Notes app, and I could not get it to stop performing nonsensical completions in blinking yellow text. Apple Intelligence disabled, predictive text disabled, various combinations of backspace escape etc. Nothing worked. How hard is it to code a Notes app that doesn't mess with you?
- internetter 11mo ago
  I had to factory reset my Mac because inexplicably Siri, Spell Check, and Apple Intelligence were "disabled by my admin." I have no MDM. I am my admin. I spent roughly a month delving through logs trying to resolve it.
t-writescode 11mo ago
It must be exhausting and stressful being an OS dev or dev team. I haven't experienced any of the troubles that are referenced here; and, the one complaint I've had over the years was resolved, like, on the very next update. I use my mac for IntelliJ and Firefox. I guess maybe my usage surface is just really, really small; but I basically never have any problems ... and then others come along and say they're having huge issues. I see the various updates as they happen and like ... all of them are neutral or minor inconveniences that are resolved next patch, for me.
- hshdhdhj4444 11mo ago
  Must it? Very few of these complaints existed when Apple had a more reasonable update schedule for the Mac releasing a new update every 2 years or so. The Mac’s current update schedule isn’t being driven by the needs of the OS or its customers but by the need to align with iOS.
  - t-writescode 11mo ago
    They might have been fewer, sure. I haven't followed Mac issues as, again, I haven't really seen them, outside of the huge ones that get fixed quickly and are whole events. But, operating systems can be interacting with thousands of different types of components, monitors, external graphics cards, keyboards, mice, printers, etc, in a whole array of different configurations. Nothing like Windows or Linux experience, of course; but not a small number of different situations, each of which can impact the machines in strange ways. And I imagine that's quite hard to track down. You can minimize it, of course, but it's not nothing.
kstenerud 11mo ago
> Silent failures like these are least likely to be reported to Apple. They might be, but unfortunately Apple's MetricKit reporting system is extremely primitive when it comes to crashes. It can't even handle C++ exceptions, and important information like thread/queue names, CPU registers, stack area and app state are strangely absent. The ridiculously bad crash reporting on Apple products is why I wrote KSCrash.
- saagarjha 11mo ago
  Apple doesn’t use MetricKit themselves
Hasz 11mo ago
Apple hardware is absurdly good. Airpods, amazing, redefined what wireless headphones are. M-series macbooks, amazing, new benchmark in performance per core and battery life. Plenty of older products too that either created the category or completely dominate it. Apple software, on the other hand, feels like a totally different company. Stuff like Siri is miles behind the ball, things like Airplay (IME) are flaky with little recourse when they don't work, Liquid glass is slower feeling and a noticeable battery hog. Apple music still has more hiccups and random play stoppage than Spotify. I really, really like the hardware, but apple software needs some competition. Half of the features in the last 2-3 iOS releases were in Cydia over a decade ago.
- volemo 11mo ago
  Totally agree. > Half of the features in the last 2-3 iOS releases were in Cydia over a decade ago. And I don’t even care about the features. Just give me stability and reliability. Don’t bluntly break what was working before. Spend some time on bug fixing. Please, Apple.
- bigstrat2003 11mo ago
  > Airpods, amazing, redefined what wireless headphones are. Airpods are a cash grab solution to a problem that Apple created, and nobody actually had before. They are the exact opposite of a good product; they are Apple squeezing money from its captive audience. If the iPhone hadn't dropped the headphone jack nobody would've bought Airpods, thus the jack was killed.
  - jajuuka 11mo ago
    To be fair though the switch to wireless earbuds and headphones helped advance that market quickly. That applies to all of the companies in the space. It's also been so nice to not have to deal with tangled wired earbuds or headphones. Removing the jack was a band aid that needed to be ripped eventually, and Apple just happened to be the ones to do it. There is a reason the industry followed. Even when they didn't have their own product to offer.
  - EagnaIonat 11mo ago
gcanyon 11mo ago
Not 100% related, but I remember when OS...8? came out with balloon help, and one of the guidelines for it was that it should provide specific messages for when a menu item or control is disabled, to explain why the feature was disabled. e.g. on the Copy menu, "Not available because nothing is selected" Reporting an error is a good thing.
julianlam 11mo ago
Why do so many blog posts have such involved exposition, and then suddenly end? Seems like the author was building to a point and simply decided to end it early.
zkmon 11mo ago
>> the next step is to contact Apple Support Did you ever check Apple support forums? The issue reports just go into blackhole without response or with useless robotic replies.
- EagnaIonat 11mo ago
  > Did you ever check Apple support forums? I have. There is a whole power-mod clique over there that just turned me off using the site. I posted about how to get Launchpad back as the spotlight feature is frustrating to use. One of the mods posted suicide watch to my response. Asked if they were bot or what were they on about. My post got deleted and their post got edited. Then I had another mod telling me to "suck it up" and it wasn't just a response directed at myself. When I said it wasn't constructive they responded with insults and deleted my post. It was all surreal and totally messing with Apples brand.
nine_k 11mo ago
My first exposure to Macs was a Macintosh LC II, with System 6.5. It felt unusual, and the one-button mouse felt very limiting, but the interface felt logical. Even if I would not agree with certain design decisions, I could not fail to notice that somebody had thought them through, and made things coherent. Window management was clunky, but at the time it was clunky basically everywhere. (I missed some niceties of TurboVision UIs though.) Another time I had to work on (and even develop for) a Mac exposed me to System 9. Again, the interface felt unusual (in a different way), but it was very obvious that somebody had thought it through, and made things consistent and discoverable. Drag everything onto everything and see what happens! Sometimes very neat, and much richer than Windows 3.x or CDE. I loved the first releases of OS X, it was a real Unix at the foundation, and also a really nice, beautiful GUI on top, snappy even on the translucent triangular Macs. I adopted WindowMaker on my Linux machines, and kept to it for some years. I even hoped that OpenStep would help build some semblance of a new common GUI language across the platforms. Sadly, nicer window management I was used to under Linux did not materialize on Macs yet. Over about two decades since, I was periodically issued a Mac at work, and grew less and less happy with the direction the UI was taking. It became more and more showy and bulky, even though it kept enviable consistency and polish for quite some time. I wished that the UI could do its job and fade away, but it insisted in taking more and more screen space, larger graphics, etc. It rather stubbornly refused most customizations, like selecting a different color instead of the signature silver / platinum / gray, and the Apple's signature blue accents. Only in 2018 the bastion of gray finally fell. Last few years made things so much... less ideal that it was finally not only me who complained, but even die-hard Mac fans. The prized consistency, coherence, and, well, integral vision started to deteriorate openly. As if there's no single person who oversees the whole GUI experience and keeps it aligned any more. Not as bad as Windows, but... And, well, still no good window management, not even window snapping (except to screen edges, since quite recently). Still no "Alt-Tab"-like switching between windows (not apps). I bet that that feature has been requested by users countless times. No, go use Showtime, or whatnot. And, yes, the whole signed binaries thing. I understand why it may be beneficial for quite some users. But for a developer, and in general for a user of software not from App Store, it's increasingly annoying. Well, it incentivizes building stuff locally from source. Publishing binaries is effectively $99/year though, AFAICT. Compared to that, I'm pretty happy with my Linux Xfce setup. It allows me to customize the UI to my heart's content, and it adjusts to my workflows, not the other way around. Yes, I spent some noticeable time on these customizations, but that expense is amortized over at least 20 years (yes, my configs evolved mostly uninterrupted since 2006 or so). When I have to use a Mac, I sometimes try to find equivalents to some of the niceties I have under Xfce (not the most elaborate DE), and mostly find explanations saying that it's not possible on vanilla macOS and I should not want that. Third-party or open-source software sometimes helps quite a bit though; I'm very grateful to the authors of Hammerspoon and Rectangle. In short, I'm only a sporadic and involuntary user of macOS, and my lack of desire to switch to it only grows with time, despite the superb hardware Apple offers. (Thank you for reading my rant.)
simianparrot 11mo ago
What’s interesting is that I recently got a MB Air after being away from Mac since ~2019. The touchbar on the keyboard and awful keyboard quality drove me away. Now I return from having spent the intervening years with an Ubuntu laptop and Windows 10 desktop as my daily drivers at home and Windows 11 at work for the last year. MacOS is so much better than any of the alternatives. Maybe the bar really is just too low but that’s my experience. The grass is not greener on the other side.
- lloeki 11mo ago
  > The grass is not greener on the other side. One can still legitimately complain that the grass of their particular backyard is getting ungreener by the minute.
- SkiFire13 11mo ago
  > touchbar on the keyboard Didn't they get rid of it a couple of years ago?
  - simianparrot 11mo ago
    That was one of the reasons I even considered getting a new MB Air yes; I certainly wouldn't if they'd still have those.
    - deadlocked 11mo ago
      The Air never had the Touchbar. Only the Pro line had it.
      - simianparrot 10mo ago
        Yes well that wasn't the point. I was fed up with the direction and quality (or lack thereof) of Apple laptops at the time. I wasn't going to chance it on an Air , which at the time wasn't relevant to my use either due to its specs.
- throw-qqqqq 11mo ago
auscad 11mo ago
> "MacSecurityBriefing.pdf" can't be opened because it is from an unidentified developer. I think MacOS stopped you from executing unsigned code pretending to be a pdf, which would be a very good thing.
- saagarjha 11mo ago
  macOS doesn’t really know the difference between running something and opening it.
koevet 11mo ago
I moved back to Arch Linux after my 11 months old MBP died and took over a month to get it fixed. Not really looking at going back to macOS. There are no aspect of the Apple OS that I miss and Linux desktop just works nowadays.
caterama 11mo ago
My first hand experience with the deterioration of quality in MacOS: I bought a Mac Studio to run some traditional ML neural network type stuff with PyTorch. Unfortunately the GPU / MPS kept crashing (?!) and would require a full reboot of the computer to get working again. Without a reboot, PyTorch would not find a GPU / MPS device and random other apps would glitch. After finding nothing in logs and no information about how to debug anything related to MPS, I contacted Apple Support. Apple support was completely unhelpful and a very frustrating experience. It felt like they were laundering responsibility through the veneer of some engineer having glanced at whatever internal second hand report the support staff transcribed from me. The situation improved a bit after upgrading to Metal 4, but in the end I moved back to Tensorflow. It's very disappointing to spend $6k on a machine and the software doesn't work as expected.
- saagarjha 11mo ago
  System reboots should show up in logs, did you check the usual locations?
sharts 11mo ago
Who are these people making all of these garbage UX decisions? Surely many lurk in HN. Don’t they ever push back against ridiculous design changes for changes sake? Or do they just not care?
aucisson_masque 11mo ago
My take on macos. It's the less bad of the three. It's not bloated as windows, not susceptible to break as Linux and the desktop is more coherent. Sure it ain't perfect but it's quite better that the other 2.
redbell 11mo ago
> Over the last few weeks I’ve been discovering problems that have been eroding confidence in macOS. As we move forward, we're probably going to discover more hidden gems in the Apple’s ecosystem because, apparently, it's a serious crisis that is not going anywhere anytime soon. You might be also interested in these related submissions: Apple's Software Quality Crisis (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43243075 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43243075) What Happened to Apple's Legendary Attention to Detail?(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45685551 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45685551)
gtoast 11mo ago
I'm hearing this sentiment EVERYWHERE. This latest version of the OS on desktop and mobile, is aesthetically a disaster. Users requested none of this glass stupidity, they hate it, and there is no way to turn it off. Between that and the CEO gifting a participation trophy to our authoritarian felon "adjudicated s-assaulter" president, most people I know with a conscience are pretty much done with the platform and looking forward to the next opportunity to bail.
more_corn 11mo ago
I hear Linux is hot these days.

441 points by frizlab 11mo ago

frizlab 11mo ago

This guy nailed exactly what’s wrong with macOS IMHO.

kristofferR 11mo ago
Yup, Eclectic Light is legit, probably one of the top power-users of macOS: https://eclecticlight.co/mac-problem-solving/ https://eclecticlight.co/mac-problem-solving/
- saagarjha 11mo ago
  Err…no. He’s often wrong and not great at fact-checking :(

spooneybarger 11mo ago

I started experiencing this several years ago with MacOS including file copies that failed with no notification from the finder. I switched away from MacOS at that time. My last job we were given MacOS machines, I didn't experience anything that made me want to reconsider my decision to ditch MacOS as my daily driver.

cjbarber 11mo ago

To Apple: People are complaining because they'd rather you fix it, than them having to leave the platform (moving OSes is annoying, because operating systems have a lot of lock in - data you'd have to move, apps you need to find alternatives for and re-learn). The iOS / macOS 26 frustration I think is particularly felt by the HN type crowd. Don't want something that looks cool but is less effective/performant/usable. "We" can feel Apple's priorities drifting away from ours. Side note: I wonder how much easier AI will make it to migrate between operating systems? Perhaps future AI systems that are good at computer-usage could manage migrations/installs well.

munificent 11mo ago
Response from Apple: We know you have a lot of vendor lock-in, which is why we're doing this. We want shiny features to talk about to get people to buy their first Mac, and don't give a shit about providing a great experience for existing users because we know they won't leave anyway.
- devin 11mo ago
  The current state does not feel malicious in this way to me at all. It feels bumbling and amateurish. It gives the feeling that the people who kept the product cohesive have left or retired, and that a new generation of overly ambitious careerists have entered positions of leadership.
  - lukifer 11mo ago
    I feel like it says a lot, when intelligent amorality seems genuinely preferable to blundering incompetence. Many such cases. One wonders how much "enshittification" is intrinsic to networked software and our late-stage-whatever political economy, versus how much is a farcical byproduct of office politics and org chart turf wars.
  - munificent 11mo ago
    I think any organization at Apple's scale has no shortage of skilled workers and ambitious careerists. But at the product level, I do believe that the result you see is generally an honest reflection of the organization's priorities. If Apple wanted to ship a rock-solid OS, they could. They're just choosing to put those resources elsewhere.
  - Mistletoe 11mo ago
    >the people who kept the product cohesive have left or retired This is everything post-covid. The competent people that could left and retired early.
    - devin 11mo ago

barfoure 11mo ago

Yeah I don’t recall ever seeing this on Windows in fact I can still run Win 95 games (yes, those exist) on Windows 11. Mostly[0] works. I can go and install games from my original CDs which shouldn’t be possible but a bit of toothpaste on them does the trick. Things just work for the most part because backwards compat is hardwired into the folks at Microsoft. Someone did a YouTube video not too long ago installing MS-DOS all the way through Windows 11, upgrading version by version. [0] Mostly.

krackers 11mo ago

If the error message happens to include a numeric code, OSStatus.com is sometimes helpful if the issue if they didn't bother with a localizable string for it.

Paria_Stark 11mo ago

While I love their hardware, this is why I will always chose a Linux distribution over anything closed source. Being able to retrieve logs of pretty much anything and change pieces of the OS as time goes on is extraordinarily resilient. Sure it's sometimes not as shiny as MacOS, and it will most likely never be polished enough for the mainstream market share, but there's something really awesome about not being reliant on a support engineer that does not have the financial incentive to spend the correct amount of time solving a one off problem.

deleted 11mo ago
[deleted]
creata 11mo ago
Plus, resources like the Arch Wiki just don't have alternatives on macOS.
- venturecruelty 11mo ago
  The Arch Wiki is an amazing resource! A hat tip to anyone who edits that. In fact, I think it's worth kicking a few bucks their way this holiday season: https://archlinux.org/donate/ https://archlinux.org/donate/
- jeroenhd 11mo ago
  MSDN used to have some excellent guides for doing all kinds of debugging, configuration, and tweaking of Windows. Somewhere around Windows 8.1 the website got updated and now most resources are either gone or unfindable. I do occasionally come upon some (badly auto-translated) version of those old guides, but download links and links to more information are all 404. It's a real shame.

yunwal 11mo ago

I totally agree with most of the article, but the hallucinations bit puzzles me. If it’s genuinely an unchangeable limitation of the product (as hallucinations are with LLMs) it’s good to set the right expectation rather than making promises you can’t deliver on.

an0malous 11mo ago
It doesn't matter to the end user if hallucinations are an unchangeable limitation, the fact that they happen undermines the confidence that people have in them as a tool. I've wondered the same thing as the author about why we even call them "hallucinations." They're errors, the LLM generated an erroneous output.
- jeroenhd 11mo ago
  The LLM doesn't produce erroneous output, its generated tokens fall within the statistical limits of the preset configuration, unless some kind of bitflip messed up the model in memory somehow. An LLM doesn't tell the truth or answer a question, it just spits out tokens. Its training doesn't involve validating whether or not the output forms a true fact or statement, but rather if the output looks like one. For the same reason, an LLM cannot lie, because an LLM doesn't have any intention, nor can it tell the truth. That level of thinking is beyond the capability of an LLM. The term "hallucinations" are an anthropomorphised interpretation of valid output that's factually incorrect. It happens to people all the time (the human brain will make up any missing memories and subconsciously explain away inconsistencies, which only becomes obvious once you're dealing with someone with memory problems), so it feels like a decent term to use for garbage information produced without any ill intent. The problem lies with the AI companies convincing their customers that the output generated by their tools is probable to mean anything. Probability engines are sold as some kind of chat program or even as some kind of autonomous agent because the output comes close enough to pass the Turing test to most people. LLMs can only mimic intelligence, interactivity, or any other kind of behavior, they cannot actually think or reason. If people knew what they were operating, the "hallucinations" wouldn't be a problem. Unfortunately, that would take out most of the confidence people have in these tools, so you won't see the AI salesmen provide their customers with reasonable expectations.

Nevermark 11mo ago

In my experience Apple's software has been accumulating small annoying bugs for a couple years. For a couple years I have been noticing regular new glitches in the Apple TV interface accumulating faster than old ones disappear. Lately the glitch accumulation syndrome seems to have hit macOS. Notes has started doing random bolding, unbolding, changing text size on only one line, etc. After a restart, a finder window with tabs springs to different screen spaces, depending on which tab is open when I try to drop a file on it. Message sometimes draws a few lines of a message with a few pixels vertical and horizontally offset, so there is actual overlap of message parts. Then there are chronic ones. Safari's save or print to PDF are notorious for not saving pictures you can see, even from reading mode. How are basic functions in Safari not worth fixing, for years? Apple's HomePods ... for many years. I could write a blog of interesting Pod behavior. I thought having one or a pair in each room would be nice. No, more of them is not nice. Constant bizarreness. The noticeable acceleration isn't encouraging.

lapcat 11mo ago
> In my experience Apple's software has been accumulating small annoying bugs for a couple years. A couple? That's the understatement of the last couple years.
0x1ch 11mo ago
> Apple's HomePods ... for many years. I could write a blog of interesting Pod behavior. I thought having one or a pair in each room would be nice. No, more of them is not nice. Constant bizarreness. Yeah, these have quite the DIY / Jailbreak following I've noticed. They look like neat little devices for music and HA stuff, but I've read similar stuff to your comment.
- tyre 11mo ago
  Interesting. I have one HomePod and four minis scattered about. I can’t remember having problems with the hardware or setup. Siri, on the other hand, is a pain in the ass.
JimDabell 11mo ago

exitb 11mo ago

> rush to get the next version of macOS out of the door That’s the key I think. Apple these days never releases when products are ready, but on a predefined schedule. Point releases that should fix things, are actually delivering more features that were shown on the keynote, but didn’t quite make the main release date. As a result the systems accumulated some bugs that might never get fixed, unless the code happens to be completely rewritten. The desktop switching animation is hopelessly long when using keyboard shortcuts with ProMotion enabled. On both iOS and macOS the Music app will have an audible click couple of seconds into the first played song when using lossless quality. Stuff like these is known and reported, there’s just seemingly zero bandwidth to handle it.

jonhohle 11mo ago
20 years ago, I was excited to get OS X updates and each one made the system better. When Software Update showed something new, it was always going to be good. At the same time, Windows Update was an anxiety engine. Now Software Update has mostly become what Windows Update was. Uninteresting security patches. Each new major update makes the interface worse and adds new bugs or drops old hardware.
- hnthrowaway0328 11mo ago
  Actually Windows would be much more lovely if MSFT keeps the Windows 7 core and just release security fixes and bug fixes. In the forseeable future, 64-bit should be enough. And I already had everything I need on Windows 7.
  - makeitdouble 11mo ago
    Windows audience will always be split between the people that loved it for what it is (Win7), and those who tolerate it as long as it plays nice with everything else (*nix subsystem, latest hardware etc) The win7 audience is IMHO shrinking the fastest, while the other camp has nowhere to go and is less demanding, making it an easier customer base.

jamesbelchamber 11mo ago

I have an on-again-off-again relationship with macOS - the deep integration with Apple hardware is stellar and IMO the new MacBook Airs are tremendous value for money, but otherwise the OS seems to be suffering from some deep technical debt and MBA-brained decision-making. I'm currently on the "meh hardware but solid OS" phase of the cycle - the battery life isn't as good and waking from suspend still (somehow) isn't as seamless, but my Linux of choice (Silverblue) is predictable and transparent - and ultimately if there's a problem it's in my gift to fix it, which is much more comforting to me. I wonder what they'll do to woo me back next time..

vondur 11mo ago

Isn't there a rumor that the next MacOS/iOS update are going to focus on reliablilty and fixing bugs? I think everyone would like that.

lapcat 11mo ago

There's actually a better format than Safari web archives hidden in the Safari Debug menu: Save Page Complete. This saves the individual files of the site in standard format, html, js, css, etc., much like Chrome does with Webpage, Complete.

malshe 11mo ago
Or just use SingleFile (https://www.getsinglefile.com https://www.getsinglefile.com)
an0malous 11mo ago
With the AI vision tools we have these days, I just export to PDF. At least within the Notes app, the search feature also searches the contents of PDFs.

brendong 11mo ago

Latest MacOS made my laptop speakers unusable

YouAreWRONGtoo 11mo ago

[dead]

cyberax 11mo ago

I couple of months ago, I wasted about 4 hours debugging issues with my app. Command-line scripts didn't work properly for some reason, while my IDE worked fine. Turned out that I either missed or accidentally denied the permission to access local networks for iTerm. So the `curl` utility installed from Homebrew was silently failing, while the system-provided `/usr/bin/curl` worked fine. Because it has special permission from Apple. Can I just give the same permission to iTerm? Nope. We are not worthy of that power, and must re-affirm permissions every 30 days for all non-Apple software. Oh, and these permission popups happen at random moments, including during presentations or meetings. And if you don't accept them, they are silently denied.

tpmoney 11mo ago
> Can I just give the same permission to iTerm? Nope. We are not worthy of that power, and must re-affirm permissions every 30 days for all non-Apple software. Not sure what permission you're referring to or what your curl script is trying to do but `/opt/homebrew/opt/curl/bin/curl http://www.google.com http://www.google.com` works just fine on Tahoe from both iTerm2 and ghostty. Looking through the various permission grants, the only one they both have in common is "App Management". They share some file permission grants, but where as iTerm has full disk access, ghostty only has Downloads and removable media. In the past I've found I've needed to add terminals like iTerm to the Developer Tools permission, but ghostty isn't in there currently and curl is still working just fine. And in none of these cases have I ever needed to re-affirm the permission every 30 days. Any chance you have "disclaim ownership of children" setting enabled in iTerm? Maybe if iTerm is not allowing child processes to use its own permissions, you're having to re-authorize curl specifically (and it's getting updated about once every 30 days?) > And if you don't accept them, they are silently denied. This is IMO the correct behavior. If something asks for permission and it's not explicitly granted, then the default should always be denied.
- cyberax 11mo ago
  > Not sure what permission you're referring to or what your curl script is trying to do but `/opt/homebrew/opt/curl/bin/curl http://www.google.com http://www.google.com` works just fine on Tahoe from both iTerm2 and ghostty. Mwwahahaha. Yep. Curling something neutral like google.com worked fine for me as well. That's how I was verifying that everything was OK. Now try to do "curl https://192.168.0.1 https://192.168.0.1" (or whatever is your local router's IP). It will trigger this request: https://imgur.com/a/tMAApfB https://imgur.com/a/tMAApfB The permission in question is called "Local Network", you can find it in the "Security" section in the control panel. Yeah, their names don't match. Oh, and negative entries are NOT listed in that panel. So if you deny the request, there is NO indication of that. Anywhere. Logs will also be empty. > This is IMO the correct behavior. If something asks for permission and it's not explicitly granted, then the default should always be denied. The keyword is SILENTLY. The permission requests should be logged and made available in a central location, where they can be reviewed. It's literal recursive WTF. When you start looking at it, it gets worse and worse.

keyle 11mo ago

I typically jump on the latest macOS with enthusiasm. I once made the mistake to install the beta version of the next os, and well, that didn't go well for me. But typically, within X.1, I'm there. However something shifted since this "visionOS" melted version of macOS (Tahoe); where I have absolutely no intension to upgrade from Sequoia. I hope they will fix it by the time I'll be forced to upgrade (post support deadline). It started with the macOS that brought the iOS settings panel. We went from a logical structure of easily findable stuff to a complete mess. Just open the "Keyboard" settings on macOS today and it's bewildering how they could ship this and think this is fine. Steve would roll in his grave. The process to allow running applications that are unsigned is just a horrible hack. It feels like a last minute "shove it and move on!". By 2035 I wonder if we'll be all running KDE or WindowMaker and the hell with modern OS GUI. From a Gestalt standpoint, human relations with desktop computers are not the same as with thumb driven mobile OS or air-pinch driven vision OS, period. The hell with "glass" or "flat" design. Desktop OS should be as forgettable as possible, as it's about having long stints of flow, not giving a feeling of "air" or "play".

andrekandre 11mo ago
> Desktop OS should be as forgettable as possible, as it's about having long stints of flow, not giving a feeling of "air" or "play". 100% agree, though i wonder how much an influence casual users are having on apple's marketing of macos... its almost as if apple doesnt want to sell "trucks" anymore (as steve would say) and would prefer to morph macos slowly into a sedan like the ipad (cause that is where the money is) > By 2035 I wonder if we'll be all running KDE or WindowMaker and the hell with modern OS GUI. tbh this is probably me in 2026 or 2027 i think...
- DuperPower 11mo ago
  Windows IS also suffering from macosification
  - keyle 11mo ago
    no, Windows is suffering from profiteering and corporate malignancy.

wuming2 11mo ago

Can we have Scott Forstall back now.

AnonC 11mo ago
I wish that could happen, but sadly Tim Cook’s ego wouldn’t allow that and I don’t think Craig Federighi would want his kingdom to be torn apart (I presume he had a big role in getting John Giannandrea to be pushed out of Siri and retire). Scott Forstall was fired for a lot less compared to the mess that Apple’s software is now.
deleted 11mo ago
[deleted]

Mizza 11mo ago

Would love to see them do another OSX 10.6 and just release a version with lots bug fixes and no new features. But instead it'll be a new half-baked LLM tool to help you make new half-baked LLM tools.

a-dub 11mo ago

macos feels dated these days to me. it's time for a clean slate.

wunderg 11mo ago

The irony is that we all independently decided QA was a “process smell” around the same time. The logic seemed airtight: developers should own quality, shift left, test in prod with feature flags, move fast. Every tech blog and conference talk said the same thing. What nobody mentioned is that QA teams weren’t just finding bugs—they were the institutional memory of how things break. When you dissolve QA and tell developers “you own quality now,” that knowledge just evaporates. Each developer tests the happy path for their feature and calls it done. The edge cases? The interaction effects? The weird state machines? Those all ship to prod. The really insidious part is the metrics looked great. Velocity up, deployment frequency up, cycle time down. We were measuring output, not outcomes. Exec dashboards showed green across the board while user experience quietly degraded. Now we’re in the equilibrium state: software ships fast and breaks often, every deploy is a dice roll, and we’ve normalized “hotfix Friday” as just how things work. The velocity gains were real, but we were measuring distance traveled, not value delivered. Turns out “everyone owns quality” means nobody owns quality. Who knew.

torben-friis 11mo ago
There was a trend of devs being their own QA. Also devs being infra (devops). Also devs being PMs (product developers). Also devs being managers (flat orgs). Also devs being facilitators (rotative scrum masters). I wonder why expertise is being lost.
- hedora 11mo ago
  This also leads to devs burning out, because you’ve listed a bunch of jobs most programmers hate, whether or not they happen to be able to do them well. That causes churn, which further erodes expertise.
  - torben-friis 11mo ago
    Yup. And dealing with the product of any of those topics half assed by a non expert colleague is cause for burnout too. Pipelines that fail, poorly thought tests, badly written docs… Which reminds me I forgot to add technical writers to the list.

aag 11mo ago

<rant>I've never had confidence in MacOS or Apple software in general, and especially not in Apple Photos. Photos beachballs constantly, even when I do simple things like creating a new folder or naming a photo. It loses keystrokes almost every time I type a folder or photo name. No other program does this on the same Mac, which is an M4 Pro with 64GB RAM and terabytes of SSD. I know that it's not a problem with the hardware because the previous Mac Mini, which was well equipped, had the same problem for years. Reconstructing the Photos database didn't help. Don't get me started about how Time Machine drops files — important files like the Photos Sqlite3 database — from backups. Yes, I should switch from Photos to something else, e.g. Immich. I barely use the software included with the Mac, and would only use Linux except that there are still just a few programs or bits of hardware that insist on there being a Mac or Windows machine somewhere. How Apple every got a reputation for high-quality, user-friendly software is beyond me. Not recommended.</rant>

radicality 11mo ago
Photos is definitely not great, though I still try and deal with it for the easy iCloud syncing. Some examples off top of my head for Photos crappiness, all on my top of the range 128GB macbook m4 max - doing 'cmd-R' (rotate) on a standard few-megabyte image might beachball the app for a few seconds. Rotating a small image file... - Rotating a video seems to re-encode the whole video, instead of setting some metadata flags. Imagine you have, say, a 20GB video recording, and rotate it. That will now be a separate new 20GB file on your mac drive. - If i view the album of some specific person that has many pictures with location metadata, and I scroll to the bottom where the map is, it almost immediately starts allocating >100GB memory, beachballs, starts gigabytes of memory paging, and you gotta kill the app asap.
- FireBeyond 11mo ago
  Easy syncing? Kinda. It works, generally, eventually. No progress, no indicators. And what little status you get has no connection to reality. Will it sync? When? Who knows? You’re on WiFi with a full battery and charging? So? Might be a minute, might be an hour. Oh, you restarted Photos? Who cares? Not Photos. They'll get there. Sometime.

QuantumAtom 11mo ago

I know this might seem stupid as I don't own a Mac, but does Darwin use systemd? Can the author use journalctl, syslog or check /var/log?

lapcat 11mo ago
> does Darwin use systemd? No.
hedora 11mo ago
It has the thing that systemd and journalctl are poor clones of. Their ergonomics (especially the log viewer) are much worse than sysvinit/syslog, but they mostly work. I say “mostly”, because, like systemd, sometimes force disabling a broken service silently fails, even after reboot.
wpm 11mo ago
Darwin uses launchd/libxpc. journalctl's job is handled by the `log` command, with appropriate predicate filters to winnow out the relevant stuff from the chaff.

jasoneckert 11mo ago

I dual boot my M1 Mac Studio with Fedora Asahi Remix (native Linux for Apple Silicon for those unfamiliar). I'm far more comfortable and productive in Linux for development, but wanted to keep macOS there for times when I needed it. It turns out I haven't needed it, and I honestly don't remember the last time I've booted into macOS on that system. I like Apple hardware, but the last time I enjoyed using macOS was pre-2010.

dreamcompiler 11mo ago
I do the same thing on my M2 Air. But it's still annoying that Asahi drains the battery so fast when the computer sleeps.
hnthrowaway0328 11mo ago
What does Asahi lack for M1 boxes? I bought a used M1 pro and is itchy to try it out!
- willis936 11mo ago
  The two big things missing for me are fingerprint scanning and 120 hz display.
  - hnthrowaway0328 11mo ago
    Thanks, looks like fine for me at the moment.

nixpulvis 11mo ago

Apple has completely lost the high ground it earned during the OS X high times, paired with the relentless innovation of the iPod and iPhone. If they were smart they would focus on refinement in this era of gradual and boring innovation, so when the next thing is ready, they have a solid and trusted platform to support it. As things stand, if the next thing comes tomorrow, the next generation could easily jump ship. They may have the people who are too lazy to learn something new and will survive like Microsoft has. But at this point there's nothing substantially different about the company that told us to "think different".

nntwozz 11mo ago

“People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.” — Alan Kay It's ironic after fighting the good fight for so long and finally making their own hardware that Apple should fall on their own sword with software now. I've been loving Apple since Tiger, I'm still on Sequoia and iOS 18. Pepe prayge for the 27-releases to be another Snow Leopard as rumored.

linguae 11mo ago
This isn’t the first time Apple’s been in this situation. The first PowerPC Mac was released in 1994, but core elements of the classic Mac OS remained written for the Motorola 68000. Pink/Taligent and Copland never panned out. It took until Mac OS X to be released in 2001 for PowerPC Macs to receive an operating system that was fully made for it, and even then Mac OS X undergone successive performance improvements. By then, it was time for the Intel switch. Snow Leopard’s was Intel-only, so PowerPC Macs cannot go beyond Leopard.
hnthrowaway0328 11mo ago
Is it true there is a rumor about the next release being mostly a bug/perf fix?
- nntwozz 11mo ago
  Apple iOS 27 to Be No-Frills ‘Snow Leopard’ Update, Other Than New AI https://archive.is/puYFU https://archive.is/puYFU

charlesabarnes 11mo ago

I love how both MacOS and Windows users are reaching a point of no return. Last week I finally decided to jump to Linux. While I realize that I have a few nits and annoying bugs I run in to, its hard to say if linux has any more than the mainstream offerings.

venturecruelty 11mo ago
As much as I have endless, white-hot disdain for the web-appification of everything, it does end up working out when Linux runs every popular web browser just as well as the two main commercial operating systems. (I forget if DRM works on Linux, but eh. DVDs exist.)
- array_key_first 11mo ago
  DRM kind of works, but you don't get full DRM. But then again, I'm not sure you get that even on Windows. I believe full resolution streaming typically requires a smart TV or equivalent box.
tvshtr 11mo ago
Linux is not monolithic, if you have a buggy component you can replace it. With the exception of the kernel of course. I think we're entering the era of personal desktops.

iamshs 11mo ago

Tahoe has been giving spinning wheel on Firefox browser since updating it. You switch from spotlight to Firefox, there's the wheel; leave computer alone for sometime and comeback there's the wheel. I want this mess fixed. Similarly on iOS, Safari bookmarks don't expose all folder names but only "Bookmarks" and "Favourites" as default. Why do I have to do another extra tap to expose a single folder that I have to save bookmark in? Why cannot at least five folder names be exposed? Another absurdity is while saving a fullpage screenshot after cropping it, you have to click the checkmark "emoji" which is otherwise blank with no description, and then comes a sub-menu to save as pdf or photo; why cannot those four options be presented as is on the main menu?

zbentley 11mo ago
> You switch from spotlight to Firefox, there's the wheel; leave computer alone for sometime and comeback there's the wheel. You are definitely not alone: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1979283 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1979283 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1982717 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1982717 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2002102 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2002102 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1995973 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1995973 https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/961898 https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/961898 While there are a few overlapping/similar issues being alluded to in those threads, it definitely seems like something is going on re: task switching. There are also a couple of tricks mentioned that might fix some specific issues related to bookmarks or graphics acceleration, but no silver bullets so far.
Klonoar 11mo ago
The Firefox issue sounds like a Mozilla issue, not an Apple one. It’s not like Apple doesn’t ship betas for developers to catch issues like that.
jeroenhd 11mo ago
I have similar issues with Firefox on Linux, I don't think it's a macOS exclusive problem. Unfortunately it's hard to tell which problems are caused by which component when all of them are unreliable enough that they could be the culprit.

gkanai 11mo ago

I've been on Apple since the 1980s. Apple IIc was my first Apple. Since a few years ago, I've chosen to stay at least 1 full version behind the current version and I've never regretted that.

hnthrowaway0328 11mo ago
I picked the same strategy for Windows. I remember I was still on 2000 when XP is hot, and still on XP when 8 is available, and now I use 10 and this is going to be my last Windows as 11 is too shitty and I suspect 12 and beyond are going to be worse.

ChrisMarshallNY 11mo ago

I feel his pain. Some of those error alerts make me want to sob. Reporting problems to Apple is downright demoralizing. Most of the time, the bugs remain unassigned, unread, and unsolved. The few that do earn a response, are usually gaslighting. I suspect that Apple may have hired a whole bunch of less-than-stellar people, and it’s showing. That’s depressing, because I always considered them to be the gold standard.

dreamcompiler 11mo ago

It's possible to look at the behavior of a company over time and infer their internal incentive structure. It's been clear for several versions of MacOS recently that Apple spends much more energy adding features than fixing bugs. It seems obvious that there is no incentive within Apple to fix bugs; the only thing that gets one promoted at Apple must be adding new features -- so bugs (at least in MacOS) don't get fixed. We already know that Apple makes about 51% of its revenue from iPhone sales. Therefore it's reasonable to assume promotion opportunities are mostly centered around iPhone hardware and hardware, rather than MacOS. Those of us who depend on MacOS are likely screwed unless something at Apple changes.

hnthrowaway0328 11mo ago
Having read Showstoppers a few times, I wish Apple had a David Cutler that mows on developers' asses if their code is too buggy. Kinda all large system projects need someone similar to get things done properly.
- pr3dr49 11mo ago
  Once having validated that it was not the product manager, or whatnot manager that decided that it was good enough to go, yes, sure, but are developers given the time to root out bugs?

FireBeyond 11mo ago

> You’re eventually advised to reinstall macOS or, in the worst case, to wipe a fairly new Apple silicon Mac and restore it in DFU mode, but have no reason to believe that will stop the problem from recurring. This isn't new. Back in GPU-gate days, I had a MBP that I could very reliably kernel panic due to that issue. But it'd pass Diagnostics so "no fix for you!" Even when I was there with a Genius, we did this, and on a brand new install - look, here, can replicate this KP (which was basically some of the same steps people had for identifying the GPU (and everything else matched up).

xp84 11mo ago

My least favorite thing on the Mac is when they have one of their infamous negative number “error codes” in the alert box, and I get my hopes up that at least it must represent a common thread of errors others have had that may be solved in a forum or subreddit somewhere, then when googling that you discover that all forms of failure from disk full to malware result in the exact same oddly-specific error code and that everyone is talking to each other about it and slowly realizing they have nothing in common but being cursed by Tim Cook.

koito17 11mo ago
If I recall correctly, many of those are "Carbon-related" errors and mostly represent legacy baggage of Mac OS. Not defending the design, but this website is sometimes useful for disambiguating OSStatus error codes: https://www.osstatus.com/ https://www.osstatus.com/

hedgehog 11mo ago

I've been using Macs in various forms since the 80s and I've carried a Mac laptop with me nearly full time since the early 2000s. While I don't think quality is necessarily overall worse than a decade or two ago I have run out of patience for rewrites with major regressions of most of the apps I care about. For the first time in a lot of years I have a Linux laptop along side my Mac and, if all works out, I'm planning to shift all my important workflows over.

xoa 11mo ago

It's pretty depressing as well as frustrating, watching something pretty solid get flushed in real time. This post puts words on it I hadn't really, but fading "confidence" is a really succinct foundation. There's no single massive thing just completely fubar'd, but the cumulative effect of hundreds to thousands of mysterious cuts combined with that now familiar sinking feeling of watching GUI bikeshedding accelerate with each new version, every more miserable, less useful, no more Feelings Of Delight at seeing some cool little attention to detail or nice new thing that clearly had some real thought and testing behind it. It all really eats away at one's day. I'm seeing this HN post and article literally right as I'm watching Activity Monitor and trying to figure out WTF is going on with mysterious ApplicationsStorageExtension (a plugin buried in the StorageManagement.framework) tasks spawning 4x on a Sequoia Mini M4 Pro and doing constant disk churn to no discernable purpose and introducing massive latency to certain file system access patterns. This started up out of nowhere in the last few weeks, almost exactly 1 year after getting this machine and with no major system upgrades. Why!? Who knows! Force quit them all and other stuff like MailStorageManagement goes nuts for a bit and then it settles down for an indeterminate period of time. Restart the computer and it goes away for awhile. No FS corruption issues found, seem to be no issues with spotlight. Sigh. After decades using macOS and significant investment the barrier to change is significant too, even if there was some ideal thing to jump to which there is not. But like others I am chipping away at it where I can, slowly divorcing from the Apple ecosystem, going ever more heterodox. I can see people reaching tipping points at various places, might take quite awhile but the thing is once someone jumps ship you're probably never getting them back and eventually that can add up to them taking others with them. It's just such a damned waste too.

stmw 11mo ago

"Mr. Jobs reportedly asked the assembled engineers and other MobileMe team members, “Can anyone tell me what MobileMe is supposed to do?” When one of those employees then volunteered a satisfactory answer, Mr. Jobs followed up with, “So why the fuck doesn’t it do that?” (source - https://www.businessinsider.com/steve-jobs-mobileme-failure-2011-5 https://www.businessinsider.com/steve-jobs-mobileme-failure-...)

coastalpuma 11mo ago

Last weekend I was writing some quick notes in the Notes app, and I could not get it to stop performing nonsensical completions in blinking yellow text. Apple Intelligence disabled, predictive text disabled, various combinations of backspace escape etc. Nothing worked. How hard is it to code a Notes app that doesn't mess with you?

internetter 11mo ago
I had to factory reset my Mac because inexplicably Siri, Spell Check, and Apple Intelligence were "disabled by my admin." I have no MDM. I am my admin. I spent roughly a month delving through logs trying to resolve it.

t-writescode 11mo ago

It must be exhausting and stressful being an OS dev or dev team. I haven't experienced any of the troubles that are referenced here; and, the one complaint I've had over the years was resolved, like, on the very next update. I use my mac for IntelliJ and Firefox. I guess maybe my usage surface is just really, really small; but I basically never have any problems ... and then others come along and say they're having huge issues. I see the various updates as they happen and like ... all of them are neutral or minor inconveniences that are resolved next patch, for me.

hshdhdhj4444 11mo ago
Must it? Very few of these complaints existed when Apple had a more reasonable update schedule for the Mac releasing a new update every 2 years or so. The Mac’s current update schedule isn’t being driven by the needs of the OS or its customers but by the need to align with iOS.
- t-writescode 11mo ago
  They might have been fewer, sure. I haven't followed Mac issues as, again, I haven't really seen them, outside of the huge ones that get fixed quickly and are whole events. But, operating systems can be interacting with thousands of different types of components, monitors, external graphics cards, keyboards, mice, printers, etc, in a whole array of different configurations. Nothing like Windows or Linux experience, of course; but not a small number of different situations, each of which can impact the machines in strange ways. And I imagine that's quite hard to track down. You can minimize it, of course, but it's not nothing.

kstenerud 11mo ago

> Silent failures like these are least likely to be reported to Apple. They might be, but unfortunately Apple's MetricKit reporting system is extremely primitive when it comes to crashes. It can't even handle C++ exceptions, and important information like thread/queue names, CPU registers, stack area and app state are strangely absent. The ridiculously bad crash reporting on Apple products is why I wrote KSCrash.

saagarjha 11mo ago
Apple doesn’t use MetricKit themselves

Hasz 11mo ago

Apple hardware is absurdly good. Airpods, amazing, redefined what wireless headphones are. M-series macbooks, amazing, new benchmark in performance per core and battery life. Plenty of older products too that either created the category or completely dominate it. Apple software, on the other hand, feels like a totally different company. Stuff like Siri is miles behind the ball, things like Airplay (IME) are flaky with little recourse when they don't work, Liquid glass is slower feeling and a noticeable battery hog. Apple music still has more hiccups and random play stoppage than Spotify. I really, really like the hardware, but apple software needs some competition. Half of the features in the last 2-3 iOS releases were in Cydia over a decade ago.

volemo 11mo ago
Totally agree. > Half of the features in the last 2-3 iOS releases were in Cydia over a decade ago. And I don’t even care about the features. Just give me stability and reliability. Don’t bluntly break what was working before. Spend some time on bug fixing. Please, Apple.
bigstrat2003 11mo ago
> Airpods, amazing, redefined what wireless headphones are. Airpods are a cash grab solution to a problem that Apple created, and nobody actually had before. They are the exact opposite of a good product; they are Apple squeezing money from its captive audience. If the iPhone hadn't dropped the headphone jack nobody would've bought Airpods, thus the jack was killed.
- jajuuka 11mo ago
  To be fair though the switch to wireless earbuds and headphones helped advance that market quickly. That applies to all of the companies in the space. It's also been so nice to not have to deal with tangled wired earbuds or headphones. Removing the jack was a band aid that needed to be ripped eventually, and Apple just happened to be the ones to do it. There is a reason the industry followed. Even when they didn't have their own product to offer.
- EagnaIonat 11mo ago

gcanyon 11mo ago

Not 100% related, but I remember when OS...8? came out with balloon help, and one of the guidelines for it was that it should provide specific messages for when a menu item or control is disabled, to explain why the feature was disabled. e.g. on the Copy menu, "Not available because nothing is selected" Reporting an error is a good thing.

julianlam 11mo ago

Why do so many blog posts have such involved exposition, and then suddenly end? Seems like the author was building to a point and simply decided to end it early.

zkmon 11mo ago

>> the next step is to contact Apple Support Did you ever check Apple support forums? The issue reports just go into blackhole without response or with useless robotic replies.

EagnaIonat 11mo ago
> Did you ever check Apple support forums? I have. There is a whole power-mod clique over there that just turned me off using the site. I posted about how to get Launchpad back as the spotlight feature is frustrating to use. One of the mods posted suicide watch to my response. Asked if they were bot or what were they on about. My post got deleted and their post got edited. Then I had another mod telling me to "suck it up" and it wasn't just a response directed at myself. When I said it wasn't constructive they responded with insults and deleted my post. It was all surreal and totally messing with Apples brand.

nine_k 11mo ago

My first exposure to Macs was a Macintosh LC II, with System 6.5. It felt unusual, and the one-button mouse felt very limiting, but the interface felt logical. Even if I would not agree with certain design decisions, I could not fail to notice that somebody had thought them through, and made things coherent. Window management was clunky, but at the time it was clunky basically everywhere. (I missed some niceties of TurboVision UIs though.) Another time I had to work on (and even develop for) a Mac exposed me to System 9. Again, the interface felt unusual (in a different way), but it was very obvious that somebody had thought it through, and made things consistent and discoverable. Drag everything onto everything and see what happens! Sometimes very neat, and much richer than Windows 3.x or CDE. I loved the first releases of OS X, it was a real Unix at the foundation, and also a really nice, beautiful GUI on top, snappy even on the translucent triangular Macs. I adopted WindowMaker on my Linux machines, and kept to it for some years. I even hoped that OpenStep would help build some semblance of a new common GUI language across the platforms. Sadly, nicer window management I was used to under Linux did not materialize on Macs yet. Over about two decades since, I was periodically issued a Mac at work, and grew less and less happy with the direction the UI was taking. It became more and more showy and bulky, even though it kept enviable consistency and polish for quite some time. I wished that the UI could do its job and fade away, but it insisted in taking more and more screen space, larger graphics, etc. It rather stubbornly refused most customizations, like selecting a different color instead of the signature silver / platinum / gray, and the Apple's signature blue accents. Only in 2018 the bastion of gray finally fell. Last few years made things so much... less ideal that it was finally not only me who complained, but even die-hard Mac fans. The prized consistency, coherence, and, well, integral vision started to deteriorate openly. As if there's no single person who oversees the whole GUI experience and keeps it aligned any more. Not as bad as Windows, but... And, well, still no good window management, not even window snapping (except to screen edges, since quite recently). Still no "Alt-Tab"-like switching between windows (not apps). I bet that that feature has been requested by users countless times. No, go use Showtime, or whatnot. And, yes, the whole signed binaries thing. I understand why it may be beneficial for quite some users. But for a developer, and in general for a user of software not from App Store, it's increasingly annoying. Well, it incentivizes building stuff locally from source. Publishing binaries is effectively $99/year though, AFAICT. Compared to that, I'm pretty happy with my Linux Xfce setup. It allows me to customize the UI to my heart's content, and it adjusts to my workflows, not the other way around. Yes, I spent some noticeable time on these customizations, but that expense is amortized over at least 20 years (yes, my configs evolved mostly uninterrupted since 2006 or so). When I have to use a Mac, I sometimes try to find equivalents to some of the niceties I have under Xfce (not the most elaborate DE), and mostly find explanations saying that it's not possible on vanilla macOS and I should not want that. Third-party or open-source software sometimes helps quite a bit though; I'm very grateful to the authors of Hammerspoon and Rectangle. In short, I'm only a sporadic and involuntary user of macOS, and my lack of desire to switch to it only grows with time, despite the superb hardware Apple offers. (Thank you for reading my rant.)

simianparrot 11mo ago

What’s interesting is that I recently got a MB Air after being away from Mac since ~2019. The touchbar on the keyboard and awful keyboard quality drove me away. Now I return from having spent the intervening years with an Ubuntu laptop and Windows 10 desktop as my daily drivers at home and Windows 11 at work for the last year. MacOS is so much better than any of the alternatives. Maybe the bar really is just too low but that’s my experience. The grass is not greener on the other side.

lloeki 11mo ago
> The grass is not greener on the other side. One can still legitimately complain that the grass of their particular backyard is getting ungreener by the minute.
SkiFire13 11mo ago
> touchbar on the keyboard Didn't they get rid of it a couple of years ago?
- simianparrot 11mo ago
  That was one of the reasons I even considered getting a new MB Air yes; I certainly wouldn't if they'd still have those.
  - deadlocked 11mo ago
    The Air never had the Touchbar. Only the Pro line had it.
    - simianparrot 10mo ago
      Yes well that wasn't the point. I was fed up with the direction and quality (or lack thereof) of Apple laptops at the time. I wasn't going to chance it on an Air , which at the time wasn't relevant to my use either due to its specs.
throw-qqqqq 11mo ago

auscad 11mo ago

> "MacSecurityBriefing.pdf" can't be opened because it is from an unidentified developer. I think MacOS stopped you from executing unsigned code pretending to be a pdf, which would be a very good thing.

saagarjha 11mo ago
macOS doesn’t really know the difference between running something and opening it.

koevet 11mo ago

I moved back to Arch Linux after my 11 months old MBP died and took over a month to get it fixed. Not really looking at going back to macOS. There are no aspect of the Apple OS that I miss and Linux desktop just works nowadays.

caterama 11mo ago

My first hand experience with the deterioration of quality in MacOS: I bought a Mac Studio to run some traditional ML neural network type stuff with PyTorch. Unfortunately the GPU / MPS kept crashing (?!) and would require a full reboot of the computer to get working again. Without a reboot, PyTorch would not find a GPU / MPS device and random other apps would glitch. After finding nothing in logs and no information about how to debug anything related to MPS, I contacted Apple Support. Apple support was completely unhelpful and a very frustrating experience. It felt like they were laundering responsibility through the veneer of some engineer having glanced at whatever internal second hand report the support staff transcribed from me. The situation improved a bit after upgrading to Metal 4, but in the end I moved back to Tensorflow. It's very disappointing to spend $6k on a machine and the software doesn't work as expected.

saagarjha 11mo ago
System reboots should show up in logs, did you check the usual locations?

sharts 11mo ago

Who are these people making all of these garbage UX decisions? Surely many lurk in HN. Don’t they ever push back against ridiculous design changes for changes sake? Or do they just not care?

aucisson_masque 11mo ago

My take on macos. It's the less bad of the three. It's not bloated as windows, not susceptible to break as Linux and the desktop is more coherent. Sure it ain't perfect but it's quite better that the other 2.

redbell 11mo ago

> Over the last few weeks I’ve been discovering problems that have been eroding confidence in macOS. As we move forward, we're probably going to discover more hidden gems in the Apple’s ecosystem because, apparently, it's a serious crisis that is not going anywhere anytime soon. You might be also interested in these related submissions: Apple's Software Quality Crisis (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43243075 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43243075) What Happened to Apple's Legendary Attention to Detail?(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45685551 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45685551)

gtoast 11mo ago

I'm hearing this sentiment EVERYWHERE. This latest version of the OS on desktop and mobile, is aesthetically a disaster. Users requested none of this glass stupidity, they hate it, and there is no way to turn it off. Between that and the CEO gifting a participation trophy to our authoritarian felon "adjudicated s-assaulter" president, most people I know with a conscience are pretty much done with the platform and looking forward to the next opportunity to bail.

more_corn 11mo ago

I hear Linux is hot these days.