4 ms·

It's such a shame that we have come to this. MacOS is basically Windows now. :(

by peterisza 8mo ago

spiderfarmer 8mo ago
As long as apps can continue to steal focus on windows, windows will always be worse.
- oneeyedpigeon 8mo ago
  Apps can do that on macOS too — Steam is a very good example.
  - willis936 8mo ago
    Every login steam steals focus no less than two times. Steam is one of the few login items I'd choose to keep, but wasting the first 30 seconds of login is too heavy a price to pay.
  - spiderfarmer 8mo ago
    I personally can’t name any examples and I have been using Macs for design and development for 15 years.
- eviks 8mo ago
  It's worse on a Mac, not only can they streal input focus directly, but also visual focus by continuously jumping up at the dock
closewith 8mo ago
I don't know if you've used Windows lately, but Windows is orders of magnitude less pleasant than MacOS (or even previous bad Windows versions like Vista).
WesSouza 8mo ago
Windows 7 you mean. Windows 11 is far deeper into the sewer.
- bigyabai 8mo ago
  Post Big Sur, macOS has felt alarmingly close to Windows 8.
  - sbuk 8mo ago
    It really hasn't. The hyperbole here has been though.
    - bigyabai 8mo ago
      Comparing Tahoe to Windows 7 is hyperbolic. 7 had Media Player, 8 had Groove Music. 7 was welcomed as a feature-rich upgrade, 8 was boycotted as a user-hostile downgrade. I don't know what school of contemporary design you hail from, but you can't piss on my back and tell me it's raining. Liquid Glass needs an 8.1 update, at the very least.
      - sbuk 8mo ago
        The Windows 7 vs 8 analogy doesn’t support your argument, it undermines it. Windows 8 wasn’t disliked because it was “modern”, it was disliked because it broke core interaction models in a way that actively obstructed use. macOS Tahoe hasn’t done anything remotely comparable. No Start screen catastrophe, no forced touch-first UI on non-touch hardware, no fundamental workflow regression. What you’re reacting to is aesthetic drift, not functional decay. Liquid Glass is a visual language experiment, not a UX rupture. You may dislike it, that’s fine, but equating it to Windows 8 is category error. One is a design iteration layered on top of a relatively stable interaction model, the other was a structural interface failure. Also, invoking Media Player vs Groove Music as if those are meaningful historical markers of “user-hostile downgrade” is... generous to the point of fiction. Windows 8’s problem was input metaphors, not media apps. This isn’t Apple becoming Microsoft. It’s Apple doing what Apple always does: overreaching aesthetically, then sanding it down in point releases until everyone forgets they were angry in the first place. Which, incidentally, is exactly what happened with Aqua, iOS 7, Big Sur, and every other supposed apocalypse.
- downrightmike 8mo ago
sharkjacobs 8mo ago
Has MacOS ever been better than Windows for allowing fine grained control over system services? I've been a Mac user for my entire life so maybe I didn't understand what things were like with Windows, but the fundamental problem identified by Howard, that there are many many system daemons and it is expected that the user not know what they are, or what they do, and to just leave them alone, has been the case for at least 20 years, I think.
- p_ing 8mo ago
  The entire point of Macintosh is that you don't need to know anything about it (and Apple used to actively try to hide things you didn't need to know about). Or at least that is the user it has always been targeted at since the original Mac OS was released. Windows used to be known as the OS you'd "have to" tinker with. Early versions of OS X allowed more freedom in what you could do with the OS. As soon as SSV/SIP entered, that cut off a lot of freeform access.

It's such a shame that we have come to this. MacOS is basically Windows now. :(

spiderfarmer 8mo ago

As long as apps can continue to steal focus on windows, windows will always be worse.

oneeyedpigeon 8mo ago
Apps can do that on macOS too — Steam is a very good example.
- willis936 8mo ago
  Every login steam steals focus no less than two times. Steam is one of the few login items I'd choose to keep, but wasting the first 30 seconds of login is too heavy a price to pay.
- spiderfarmer 8mo ago
  I personally can’t name any examples and I have been using Macs for design and development for 15 years.
eviks 8mo ago
It's worse on a Mac, not only can they streal input focus directly, but also visual focus by continuously jumping up at the dock

closewith 8mo ago

I don't know if you've used Windows lately, but Windows is orders of magnitude less pleasant than MacOS (or even previous bad Windows versions like Vista).

WesSouza 8mo ago

Windows 7 you mean. Windows 11 is far deeper into the sewer.

bigyabai 8mo ago
Post Big Sur, macOS has felt alarmingly close to Windows 8.
- sbuk 8mo ago
  It really hasn't. The hyperbole here has been though.
  - bigyabai 8mo ago
    Comparing Tahoe to Windows 7 is hyperbolic. 7 had Media Player, 8 had Groove Music. 7 was welcomed as a feature-rich upgrade, 8 was boycotted as a user-hostile downgrade. I don't know what school of contemporary design you hail from, but you can't piss on my back and tell me it's raining. Liquid Glass needs an 8.1 update, at the very least.
    - sbuk 8mo ago
      The Windows 7 vs 8 analogy doesn’t support your argument, it undermines it. Windows 8 wasn’t disliked because it was “modern”, it was disliked because it broke core interaction models in a way that actively obstructed use. macOS Tahoe hasn’t done anything remotely comparable. No Start screen catastrophe, no forced touch-first UI on non-touch hardware, no fundamental workflow regression. What you’re reacting to is aesthetic drift, not functional decay. Liquid Glass is a visual language experiment, not a UX rupture. You may dislike it, that’s fine, but equating it to Windows 8 is category error. One is a design iteration layered on top of a relatively stable interaction model, the other was a structural interface failure. Also, invoking Media Player vs Groove Music as if those are meaningful historical markers of “user-hostile downgrade” is... generous to the point of fiction. Windows 8’s problem was input metaphors, not media apps. This isn’t Apple becoming Microsoft. It’s Apple doing what Apple always does: overreaching aesthetically, then sanding it down in point releases until everyone forgets they were angry in the first place. Which, incidentally, is exactly what happened with Aqua, iOS 7, Big Sur, and every other supposed apocalypse.
downrightmike 8mo ago

sharkjacobs 8mo ago

Has MacOS ever been better than Windows for allowing fine grained control over system services? I've been a Mac user for my entire life so maybe I didn't understand what things were like with Windows, but the fundamental problem identified by Howard, that there are many many system daemons and it is expected that the user not know what they are, or what they do, and to just leave them alone, has been the case for at least 20 years, I think.

p_ing 8mo ago
The entire point of Macintosh is that you don't need to know anything about it (and Apple used to actively try to hide things you didn't need to know about). Or at least that is the user it has always been targeted at since the original Mac OS was released. Windows used to be known as the OS you'd "have to" tinker with. Early versions of OS X allowed more freedom in what you could do with the OS. As soon as SSV/SIP entered, that cut off a lot of freeform access.