5 ms·

I've had similar observations with different behaviors in Safari and Finder. One would think the quality of Apple's software would be increasing with the usage

by eoskx 10mo ago

I've had similar observations with different behaviors in Safari and Finder. One would think the quality of Apple's software would be increasing with the usage of Swift over Objective-C, but the opposite seems to be true.

walthamstow 10mo ago
Spotlight is also slow and buggy now, on an M3 Pro no less. I loathe the feeling of being faster than my computer and having to wait for it to catch up, something that I haven't felt since the M1 came out.
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
- runjake 9mo ago
  This was my last straw that caused me to disable Spotlight: Typing something into Spotlight, having it pull up the right result and highlight it, and me hitting the Enter key, and the search results suddenly updating after and highlighting some new result and then opening that instead. It’s not just Liquid Glass. It’s bugs like these where I realized Apple software was truly rotten to the core. Whomever is running the show (Craig) can’t do their job. I’m now noticing the same bug in the latest versions of Windows 11 when I hit the start button and run a search. This was a solved computer science problem.
  - ptr 9mo ago
    Apple software used to exhibit reasonable UX for “edge cases” just like the one you described. This was one of my main reasons for going Mac — they cared about the details. Sad to see that seems to be going away.
    - layer8 9mo ago
      It seems to be that these things never last, as company culture inevitably changes.
  - seemaze 9mo ago
    The updating input locations under your cursor in particular is so f*ing frustrating. To be fair, it's not just macOS, but many webpages which load dynamic content as well.
  - jkestner 9mo ago
    That laggy behavior plus indexing not appearing to find some obvious files made me switch to Raycast.
    - walthamstow 9mo ago
      Raycast looks really cool, thanks
    - runjake 9mo ago
      Same. It’s closed source and has a subscription fee, but I’m all in on Raycast.
      - jkestner 9mo ago
        You only have to pay for the Pro version. As a replacement for Spotlight the free version does great for me.
phantasmish 9mo ago
There are like a half-dozen blatant bugs I encounter between daily and weekly in Safari. Text input and textarea editing is buggy in a couple ways, Apple Pay has a positioning bug where sometimes its bottom button is about 1/3 off the screen, certain elements on a couple pages smear when I scroll (but only sometimes). Not even counting ways the keyboard itself is worse now. I haven’t seen browsing this buggy outside weird niche Linux browsers in… 15+ years?
- eoskx 9mo ago
  My issues with Safari have mostly been iCloud-related. The latest one being the iCloud tabs SQLlite database getting corrupted constantly and keeping stale tabs around that I have long closed. 26.2 seems to have fixed it, but it was around at least since Sonoma. I've had similar issues with Reading List, where again, the database gets corrupted and changes that I've made to Reading List get reverted. It is just little stuff like this that adds up and creates poor UX.
  - eoskx 9mo ago
    What's also telling is how long the bugs stayed around, too. They were reported on Reddit and Apple's forums for awhile with various workarounds, like deleting the phantom entries from the SQLlite database manually and doing some other gymnastics like removing the other devices from iCloud in hopes that everything would sync up nicely. No one at Apple had the time or took the time to chase down the bugs. In a world of Claude Code or Codex you would think they would have at least tried a cursory "fix this". On a related note, maybe one of these days iCloud will have a force sync option that tells the other devices to trash their copies vs having to remove all devices and re-add to get everything coherently synced.
    - igregoryca 9mo ago
      The lack of a "refresh" option has been a problem with iCloud for years. Back in the iOS 8/9 days, I'd write in Pages on an iPad and then try to open the document on a Mac or the Pages web app. Pages itself was (and is) pretty nice, but iCloud sync was constantly broken. Things didn't appear when I needed them to. Some designers say that refresh buttons shouldn't exist because the interface should always reflect the current state of reality. They're right, but until the day we get 100% bug-free bidirectional sync with perfect conflict resolution that instantly polls the network whenever it reconnects, refresh buttons are a necessary evil.
manoDev 9mo ago
Swift was the worst thing that happened to Mac OS, because we’re now suffering second system syndrome.
- voidhorse 9mo ago
  I completely agree. I saw the writing on the wall the moment they started boosting swiftUI as a UI library of the future where it was only half done and not even compatible with existing frameworks.
- mort96 9mo ago
  I think it's worse than that: we're now suffering being a "supported but deprioritised platform" for a cross platform GUI. AppKit was developed for the Mac from the ground up. All effort that went into it was to make the Mac as good as possible. Experience from that went into making UIKit, which was made to be as good as possible for iPhone. Focus on iPhone made the Mac suffer somewhat from a lack of resources, but AppKit was still a rock solid foundation. Swift UI is primarily made for iPhone. It's secondarily made for iPad. I'm willing to bet that almost all the effort that goes into it is focused on making iPhone and iPad apps better. And it is succeeding there, to some degree (though not without its own issues; especially now with iOS 26). Mac support, however, is clearly an afterthought. Yet it's now the foundation of everything in macOS. It's not too dissimilar from what it would look like if Apple had decided to rewrite large swathes of the system in GTK when the GTK developers only really care about how well GTK works in a GNOME desktop.
  - andrekandre 9mo ago
    > Swift UI is primarily made for iPhone. It's secondarily made for iPad. I'm willing to bet that almost all the effort that goes into it is focused on making iPhone and iPad apps better. i think there is also another issue at play; i think with swiftui being "data based" for lack of a better term, you can easily end up with ui that matches underlying data models but doesn't match the users model/expectation... you can see this really clearly with the settings app vs the old preferences; its pretty obvious (imo) they are looping over underlying data and just spitting out endless lists and dialogs etc instead of mapping it to a presentation in a user-first way...
voidhorse 9mo ago
Maybe the sharper edges of objective-C lead to a programming practice that was more careful, which has been abandoned under the impression of Swift's increase default safety.
- vor_ 9mo ago
  I think it has to do with frameworks like SwiftUI.

by eoskx 10mo ago

walthamstow 10mo ago

Spotlight is also slow and buggy now, on an M3 Pro no less. I loathe the feeling of being faster than my computer and having to wait for it to catch up, something that I haven't felt since the M1 came out.

deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
runjake 9mo ago
This was my last straw that caused me to disable Spotlight: Typing something into Spotlight, having it pull up the right result and highlight it, and me hitting the Enter key, and the search results suddenly updating after and highlighting some new result and then opening that instead. It’s not just Liquid Glass. It’s bugs like these where I realized Apple software was truly rotten to the core. Whomever is running the show (Craig) can’t do their job. I’m now noticing the same bug in the latest versions of Windows 11 when I hit the start button and run a search. This was a solved computer science problem.
- ptr 9mo ago
  Apple software used to exhibit reasonable UX for “edge cases” just like the one you described. This was one of my main reasons for going Mac — they cared about the details. Sad to see that seems to be going away.
  - layer8 9mo ago
    It seems to be that these things never last, as company culture inevitably changes.
- seemaze 9mo ago
  The updating input locations under your cursor in particular is so f*ing frustrating. To be fair, it's not just macOS, but many webpages which load dynamic content as well.
- jkestner 9mo ago
  That laggy behavior plus indexing not appearing to find some obvious files made me switch to Raycast.
  - walthamstow 9mo ago
    Raycast looks really cool, thanks
  - runjake 9mo ago
    Same. It’s closed source and has a subscription fee, but I’m all in on Raycast.
    - jkestner 9mo ago
      You only have to pay for the Pro version. As a replacement for Spotlight the free version does great for me.

phantasmish 9mo ago

There are like a half-dozen blatant bugs I encounter between daily and weekly in Safari. Text input and textarea editing is buggy in a couple ways, Apple Pay has a positioning bug where sometimes its bottom button is about 1/3 off the screen, certain elements on a couple pages smear when I scroll (but only sometimes). Not even counting ways the keyboard itself is worse now. I haven’t seen browsing this buggy outside weird niche Linux browsers in… 15+ years?

eoskx 9mo ago
My issues with Safari have mostly been iCloud-related. The latest one being the iCloud tabs SQLlite database getting corrupted constantly and keeping stale tabs around that I have long closed. 26.2 seems to have fixed it, but it was around at least since Sonoma. I've had similar issues with Reading List, where again, the database gets corrupted and changes that I've made to Reading List get reverted. It is just little stuff like this that adds up and creates poor UX.
- eoskx 9mo ago
  What's also telling is how long the bugs stayed around, too. They were reported on Reddit and Apple's forums for awhile with various workarounds, like deleting the phantom entries from the SQLlite database manually and doing some other gymnastics like removing the other devices from iCloud in hopes that everything would sync up nicely. No one at Apple had the time or took the time to chase down the bugs. In a world of Claude Code or Codex you would think they would have at least tried a cursory "fix this". On a related note, maybe one of these days iCloud will have a force sync option that tells the other devices to trash their copies vs having to remove all devices and re-add to get everything coherently synced.
  - igregoryca 9mo ago
    The lack of a "refresh" option has been a problem with iCloud for years. Back in the iOS 8/9 days, I'd write in Pages on an iPad and then try to open the document on a Mac or the Pages web app. Pages itself was (and is) pretty nice, but iCloud sync was constantly broken. Things didn't appear when I needed them to. Some designers say that refresh buttons shouldn't exist because the interface should always reflect the current state of reality. They're right, but until the day we get 100% bug-free bidirectional sync with perfect conflict resolution that instantly polls the network whenever it reconnects, refresh buttons are a necessary evil.

manoDev 9mo ago

Swift was the worst thing that happened to Mac OS, because we’re now suffering second system syndrome.

voidhorse 9mo ago
I completely agree. I saw the writing on the wall the moment they started boosting swiftUI as a UI library of the future where it was only half done and not even compatible with existing frameworks.
mort96 9mo ago
I think it's worse than that: we're now suffering being a "supported but deprioritised platform" for a cross platform GUI. AppKit was developed for the Mac from the ground up. All effort that went into it was to make the Mac as good as possible. Experience from that went into making UIKit, which was made to be as good as possible for iPhone. Focus on iPhone made the Mac suffer somewhat from a lack of resources, but AppKit was still a rock solid foundation. Swift UI is primarily made for iPhone. It's secondarily made for iPad. I'm willing to bet that almost all the effort that goes into it is focused on making iPhone and iPad apps better. And it is succeeding there, to some degree (though not without its own issues; especially now with iOS 26). Mac support, however, is clearly an afterthought. Yet it's now the foundation of everything in macOS. It's not too dissimilar from what it would look like if Apple had decided to rewrite large swathes of the system in GTK when the GTK developers only really care about how well GTK works in a GNOME desktop.
- andrekandre 9mo ago
  > Swift UI is primarily made for iPhone. It's secondarily made for iPad. I'm willing to bet that almost all the effort that goes into it is focused on making iPhone and iPad apps better. i think there is also another issue at play; i think with swiftui being "data based" for lack of a better term, you can easily end up with ui that matches underlying data models but doesn't match the users model/expectation... you can see this really clearly with the settings app vs the old preferences; its pretty obvious (imo) they are looping over underlying data and just spitting out endless lists and dialogs etc instead of mapping it to a presentation in a user-first way...

voidhorse 9mo ago

Maybe the sharper edges of objective-C lead to a programming practice that was more careful, which has been abandoned under the impression of Swift's increase default safety.

vor_ 9mo ago
I think it has to do with frameworks like SwiftUI.