9 ms·

Welcome (back) to Macintosh

328 points by Udo_Schmitz 7mo ago

giobox 7mo ago
I genuinely view Time Machine as abandonware at this stage, Apple haven't really invested in it for many years and I would recommend a lot of other third party backup solutions first.
- dewey 7mo ago
  It's really sad. When this was introduced (With Lion I believe?) it was such a cool feature to demo to people that didn't have much exposure to Macs yet at that time. Just deleting and restoring a file on the Desktop with the "Space UI" and backups just being there and working without buying complicated backup software was a genuine peak macOS moment. Now I'm barely using it as every few months I'm prompted to just delete the backup and start fresh because something corrupted.
  - skibble 7mo ago
    I have set up Time Machine backups for literally hundreds, if not thousands of people in a support role over many years and have hardly ever witnessed this happening. It's one thing to say you may have had to do this once or twice in a decade or the like, but every few months is ridiculous and speaks to some other underlying issue with your setup, like a quietly failing drive or bad cable, etc. I'm not one of these 'it hasn't happened to me, ergo it's impossible people'. I completely think that many of the design elements of Tahoe are a horrendous regression versus even Sequoia, but I think asserting that Time Machine is completely broken in the shipping version of macOS is a bold statement that deserves a bit of pushback, even among the fire raging in a lot of other places in macOS!
    - dewey 7mo ago
      This is a very common error case, more common with storing the backup on a network share (Wifi / Ethernet doesn't matter). If you look for "Time Machine must erase your existing backup history and start a new backup to correct this." you'll find a lot of references for this problem. To be clear, I'm not saying it's Tahoe related, it has been there for many years.
    - crazygringo 7mo ago
      For me, it's backing up over a network share. My Synology NAS works perfectly and flawlessly for literally everything else. It's RAID 1. It supports Time Machine. But somehow it would get corrupted every few months and I'd have to start it all over. Tons of people complain about this. I suspect it's some subtle bug with sparse bundles and SMB.
    - chongli 7mo ago
      Did you only set up Time Machine? Or did you continue supporting all those users for years and years. If the issue is that eventually the backup store becomes corrupted then you may not see it at all if you're only setting up backups but never dealing with users who actually need to restore something from backup years later.
  - hedgehog 7mo ago
    Leopard, which means I've been using it for almost 20 years. The first ten were pretty good.
- itopaloglu83 7mo ago
  I think they think of time capsule as a done deal. It doesn’t bring any extra money for them, and even though it’s broken, it exist to a point that when they’re selling a Mac they can say that it comes with a backup software as well. Just like a shady landlord tells you that the apartment facing a wall has a nice window. I don’t know what these engineers are doing at Apple, but it surely isn’t making the ecosystem better, they’re just chasing hypes and shinny useless UI changes.
  - deleted 7mo ago
    [deleted]
  - giobox 7mo ago
    The cynic in me thinks Apple more or less gave up on Time Machine while ramping up on selling iCloud storage as a backup solution for macOS as well as iOS/ipadOS devices.
DrawTR 7mo ago
Every time I see a comment on the state of Tahoe I look wearily at my current install of Sequoia. I'll have to update at some point. But I'll hold out as long as I can...
- RowanH 7mo ago
  They've done something with the printer system in Tahoe. Brother removed support for native drivers on certain label printers on Tahoe (!!!) when you go searching you find other printer issues. Like, why. Why would you need to change the printer system? It works.. has worked for a very long time, there's no reasonable need to change it.
  - memco 7mo ago
    Oh man! I came here to complain about printing! I just discovered yesterday that you can no longer drag and drop print jobs from one printer to another. Apparently you can move a print job via some command line stuff but it just ended up deleting the jobs entirely. The only reasons I found this out is because the printer which had been working fine moments before just stopped working after replacing toner. No amount of deleting and re-padding the printer or power cycling either machine fixed it. One time the whole OS just froze and I had to force reboot. I spent a good chunk of the afternoon trying to get one 3 page document to print. To be fair, I haven’t had problems with this setup for 10+ years but when it went south it also went to the remote frigid corners of Antarctica.
  - cosmic_cheese 7mo ago
    This might've been a side effect of removing support for third-party kernel extensions rather than something changing with the printer system specifically. I have an old (~10 years old) printer that Cannon stopped supplying updated macOS drivers for several years ago. The installer for the drivers failed so I had to extract the files from the package and install them manually. In the end only the network drivers work, the USB drivers are kexts which won't run.
  - rcarmo 7mo ago
    They overhauled CUPS and replaced chunks of it.
badgersnake 7mo ago
Complaining about Finder being awful like it’s 1998. Yes, 28 years later and it’s still awful.
LeoPanthera 7mo ago
I've been running Tahoe since 26.2, after cowardly skipping 0 and 1. And... it's fine? Am I only using the happy path? Or are people just particularly confident about complaining about Tahoe after seeing everyone else do it. For sure it has glitches, but as far as I can tell, they're the same glitches that were in Sequoia. (If anyone at Apple is reading this, can you take a glance at your NFS client code? It does like to just hang up occasionally.) The only major complaint I have is the window resize target, which seems not to line up properly with the actual window corner, since they gave them Very Rounded Corners. It's also a bit weird that the radius of the VRCs seems to change app to app. But these are nits. I work on Tahoe every day and it seems fine.
- nl 7mo ago
  Yes I agree. I have an M1 Max like the author of this piece and recently upgraded. It's fine. I don't like the look of it much and the drag targets are annoying but other than that it's been completely normal.
  - card_zero 7mo ago
    So are you saying the long list of bugs don't actually happen?
    - bombcar 7mo ago
      They happen but you learn to work around them and they fall into the noise. FtFF has been a mantra for 20+ years; it’s never going to happen, stop trying to make it happen.
      - card_zero 7mo ago
        OK. I stopped buying Macs more than 20 years ago. The Finder used to work.
    - crazygringo 7mo ago
      They definitely do. But in my experience they "accumulate". Like, things all work pretty well at first. And then god only knows what happens as config and preference files get into weird states, and temp files accumulate and never get deleted, and cache files get stuck with old info and refuse to update, and god only knows. So people with relatively new installations have a pretty good time, while people who have migrated their data across three MacBooks over ten years are encountering problems left and right. I reinstalled Sequoia fresh last year because some mystery process would slowly consume 50GB of disk space over the course of every two weeks, no disk utility could locate any file responsible, but restarting reset it. But with the fresh reinstall, everything started working fine again. It's annoying. Then I upgraded to Tahoe and zero problems. But I'm sure they'll gradually start appearing over the next year or two.
ordinaryradical 7mo ago
This is going to be remembered as a comical fumble, in my view. I was fully locked-in to the ecosystem, the phone, the services, the TV, and I am looking for the exits. I’m starting to parallelize to software which will play well on Linux, and when I’m feeling ready (or miserable enough) I will not be looking back. The macOS exodus will be like Hemingway’s line about bankruptcy: very slowly and then all at once.
- nsbk 7mo ago
  I’m right where you are. Very happy Apple customer since my first PowerBook G4. Currently have an M1 Max, an iPhone 17 Pro, the iPad Pro, HomePod, Apple TV, and Watch Ultra. All the _just works_ feeling and reliability seem to be gone. Tahoe is so unstable that I now restart the Mac every day, when in the past it happened on software updates only. Apple Music is another huge mess, I can’t comprehend how can it be so unreliable. Looking for exits as well and kind of looking forward to migrating to Graphene OS, self-hosted Immich, and Navidrome
  - samdixon 7mo ago
    When even my "boomer" aged and non-tech savvy dad who has always used an iPhone notices the update is bad, I think you are in at least a little bit of trouble if you don't quickly course correct.
  - rafaelmn 7mo ago
    I'm sorry but if your out is linux and windows because you're not happy how stuff doesn't "just work" in the Apple ecosystem boy are you in for a bad surprise. However bad you think Apple is getting with MacOS - windows is getting worse. And Linux ? Good luck getting decent hardware that will run without having basic functionality issues. Queue the linux brigade "my PC works perfect, what linux issues are you having". Meanwhile I can't use bluetooth on my desktop (works perfectly fine on windows), and I was watching laptop reviews from justjosh recently where he's adding a segment where he is trying out linux on the device - and his experience on the two videos I've seen "sound does't work, wifi doesn't work, BT doesn't work ..." All that said I am looking into leaving the Apple ecosystem as well because I just don't like how locked down and the devices are, but I'm fully aware that it's going to take significant effort for stuff that I'd get out of the box from Apple.
p0w3n3d 7mo ago
TBH I plan downgrade i.e. recovery. I wanted Tahoe because apparently it contains Rosetta with x86-64-v3 support but more I need it in my work, so home computer will be reinstated. Btw isn't Rosetta going to be left but only for gaming and containerisation?
- harikb 7mo ago
  I thought you could only do it if you have own TM backup. Do they offer cloud recovery for older versions?
  - p0w3n3d 7mo ago
    My Mac is from 2021 so I will just reset it to factory and reinstall up to sonoma
bluedino 7mo ago
Each version has had its share of quirks. Other than the dumbing down of the UI and that kind of stuff, Tahoe seems to run fine. Safari seems to have more bugs than usual, though.
michaelbuckbee 7mo ago
Tahoe introduced some changes to the windowing code that badly disrupted my DisplayPort device that was rock solid on Sequoia. I ended up switching to a new device as a workaround. Window memory use (I have a lot of virtual desktops and extra screens) is much higher and there's a peristent bug where taking a screenshot with CleanShot somehow resets the DisplayPort driver and everything flips out for a minute and it has to rediscover the external monitors. Infuriating.
recursivedoubts 7mo ago
"Tog... Now, that's a name I haven't heard in a long time... A long time."
whalesalad 7mo ago
The first 6 paragraphs of this post start like this: For at least 10 years ... For several years, ... For a few months... For several years, ... For a year or so, ... For several years, ...
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
- freetonik 7mo ago
  Correct.
- simmerup 7mo ago
  I think the repetition is the point
- warpspin 7mo ago
  Exactly. Guess what: I've been on Apple for 26 years. iOS 26 is already a shit show, the new Watch OS even more so, and never ever will I allow it to update my main work platform, my Macbook Pro, to something which promises to be even worse.
- sunshowers 7mo ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anaphora_(rhetoric) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anaphora_(rhetoric)
harikb 7mo ago
Apart from the mess it caused for iPhone and Mac, my watch upgraded last night to 26 flavor. I am not kidding - I can't see anything on the screen now before coffee. Watch has become completely useless for my early morning eyes. What they did to Watch is much worse than what they did to iPhone and Mac
- steve_adams_86 7mo ago
  This will sound like hyperbole, but the direction on iOS and watchOS led directly to me selling my watch and giving my son my phone. I agree it's worse with watchOS. Apple are so stubborn and persistent in the way they choose directions. I realized I'd rather move on than be stuck with that mess for years. It's wild. I still use macOS but I'm steadily finding ways off. Weird times. I've been deeply embedded in the apple platform for over 25 years. I think I sensed things were meaningfully changing around 2020 (I can't recall exactly), but my sense of the ongoing decline is way more rapid than I anticipated back then. Maybe it started and gained momentum earlier than I realized.
- bombcar 7mo ago
  ATP spent like an hour complaining about workouts on watchOS 26; if they’re railing against the machine something is very broken.
JackuB 7mo ago
I’m in a camp where Tahoe is just ugly, but worked fine on my mac and with my usage and devices. On the other hand, iOS 26 is so incredibly bad. Anything from anti-user choices, UI glitches, to keyboard… it’s tiring. It might be the one where I’m pushed to a different OS for the first time. I doubt Apple can fix itself in the near future, with the leadership they have.
- allthetime 7mo ago
  I run all the betas on my macbook air just to see where things are going. When I first installed Tahoe, I thought to myself, I guess it's just the beta, there's no way they are going to keep this look... My workstation is pinned firmly to sequoia right now and will be until it's untenable or they undo their new UI design direction, which is, as you pointed out, ghastly.
projektfu 7mo ago
I was a big Mac user. I had a IIcx and an LC, and I evangelized it even when apple stock was $0.95 and the wolves were at the door. I couldn't afford a PowerMac at the time, but I generally used them at the university when I could. I had a desk lamp iMac, then bought the first big screen iMac, which lasted me quite a while. I really liked everything up to Snow Leopard, probably a little beyond that, too. But in a long time I haven't really enjoyed using the mac and I use other systems instead. They got rid of subpixel rendering and now text is blurry on my monitors. The interactions are much more of a chore. Features were removed from Preview and other apps that were better before. I quit using XCode for a few years and couldn't recognize it when I came back. So I use it maybe every 3-4 weeks now. I have no interest in buying another one. I just don't know why they seem to be going out of their way to make the system unfriendly to existing users.
- freetonik 7mo ago
  Better Display is the app that can help with non-5K monitors. I cannot imagine using macOS without it.
- DavidSJ 7mo ago
  I'm like you. I loved Apple IIs at schools and libraries as a young child, fell in love with my Mac IIsi at home at the age of 7. Later, at 13, I had a Macintosh-evangelizing web site and mailing list that Guy Kawasaki (Apple's lead evangelist) even subscribed to. I've been a primary Mac user through the 68k, PowerPC, Intel, and Apple Silicon days, from System 6.0.7 through today. Got an original iPhone and iPad, have upgraded my iPhone every few years since. The technofeudalism, bugginess, and UI crappiness has me done and looking for the exits, to say nothing of the embrace of Trump. My next laptop won't be a Mac, and my next phone won't be an iPhone.
- tempodox 7mo ago
  > I just don't know why they seem to be going out of their way to make the system unfriendly to existing users. Sadly, they’re not going out of their way. It’s fully in the way of beancounters in harvesting mode. Apple has become a lawnmower, just like any other megacorp.
freetonik 7mo ago
My partner’s iMac recently died (seemingly the Radeon graphics card had failed, which is not uncommon on 2017 model). It was frustrating to find out that Time Machine was not operational for 8 last months. It was always connected. There were zero indications of any issues. It just stopped backing up at some point. The disk had enough space. In the past I had problems with network attached Time Machine destinations, but now I have zero trust even in the “native” USB-based method.
- hedgehog 7mo ago
  I don't know what's happened to Time Machine, with the capabilities available in APFS etc it should be much better if anything. But it's not. Thankfully the failure mode I've experienced didn't lead to data loss but I definitely don't trust it any more.
  - freetonik 7mo ago
    Luckily I had Backblaze backup set up on our machines. In addition, this older iMac can still be booted up in Target disk mode, i.e. acting like an external drive. So I could salvage all data. Another funny thing is that Mac’s built in diagnostic mode, after running for good 20 minutes, proclaimed there were no issues with the system. Even though it was clearly failing in the graphics department, even when booting into an installer usb drive (or even a Linux live mode).
  - dgxyz 7mo ago
    It was always shit. I have seen horror stories going back since the day it came out. Think my favourite was a conceptual flaw. The lightning strike. You need a completely offline backup or you don't have a backup. Edit: using ChronoSync and two external (hard) disks, rotated once a month off site at the moment. That has a nice fat VERIFY button on it.
  - NegativeLatency 7mo ago
    Did time machine start using the APFS features? I thought it was still doing HFS+ stuff?
- 7mo ago
iamdamian 7mo ago
This has been the first year in a very long time that I’ve thought about leaving macOS. They seem to have lost the plot on software and documentation. It might be nice for someone to crowd source a reasonable list of features they need to improve or document. Could get traction.
chr15m 7mo ago
Time to switch.
broabprobe 7mo ago
it's the year of the Linux desktop, again ;)
- tempodox 7mo ago
  This time for real. Multi-decade users of both Windoze and macOS won’t take any more shit and take action, instead of just complaining. That’s a quality I haven’t seen before.
subterrane 7mo ago
Tahoe has this really cool clipboard history feature that just does not work on my work laptop. Maybe some corporate keep-me-safe-ware is preventing it from working but my third-party app, Maccy, has no problem at all, so I guess it's just Apple being Apple these days. I also held out for as long as possible using Safari, but I had to switch to Firefox. Every once in a while I forget the reason I switched and try to switch back and then get reminded. I'm currently in a "I can't remember the reason, but I'm too lazy to go find out" phase. I'm also one of those weirdos that liked the Safari compact tabs and I'm sad they removed it.
- commandersaki 7mo ago
  You need to make sure Files is being indexed, I think the Documents directory indexing, for the clipboard history to work.
  - subterrane 7mo ago
    Yeah, I've toggled that off and on trying to get it to work. I just checked it again to make sure and it's on. It works on my personal laptop but not my work laptop. I think there's some corporate policy or something that might be blocking it.
dgxyz 7mo ago
Yeah this resonates with me. Every single point. Every time they fuck something I move the workload over to Linux, not out of enthusiasm or any ideological purity but because I need to do some damn work. Add in the current geopolitical shit show, rising surveillance culture and the constant push for MRR and the whole "ecosystem" idea of computing and cloud becomes quite distasteful and risky. A monumental moment recently was Reminders which has a horrible bug in it since Tahoe where you are entering several tasks in the scheduled view and you hit enter and carry on typing and it doesn't register the enter until several keypresses later, splitting the last word you typed between two tasks. This is a very very minor but utterly annoying thing which has broken my workflow. I was so fucked off with this happening every day I pulled a sheet of paper out of my printer and just wrote everything on that. And I've been doing that for 4 months now. Reminders is dead. I forget things like I did before, but I get over that. One day I'll wake up and not use the Mac. The iPad and Apple Watch are already gone.
- freetonik 7mo ago
  > you are entering several tasks in the scheduled view and you hit enter and carry on typing and it doesn't register the enter until several keypresses later I have been experiencing this type of bug since forever when renaming files. Enter (to switch to renaming mode), start typing, first 1-3 letters are missing.
monster_truck 7mo ago
Writing has been on the wall for some time now. It's completely unsuitable for serious work, or serious play. I had a massive rant written but it isn't worth it. Fuck em The M2 and M5 minis I have are the nicest drink coasters I've ever owned. I have unresolved radars old enough to drive, go to war, or even vote at this point. They used to blame Intel's TB controllers. Guess what? They make their own now and the same fucking issues persist! Enjoy the kernel panics
freetonik 7mo ago
Coincidentally, I had to leave macOS for a Windows 11 pc about a month ago and it’s… fine. There are absurd bugs and ux decisions, but I honestly think there are different but equally bad aspects of macOS. On the other hand, some of the things in windows land are just nicer. For one, my network samba shares stay connected and mounted through restarts. I could never make this work reliably on macOS. File explorer is good. Finder always felt clunky and awkward to use. In addition, certain class of software exists for windows and not for macOS. Like FilePilot, Anything, MusicBee, Foobar2000 (Mac version of the latter is not the same as the windows version). The biggest issue so far for me is keyboard shortcuts for text editing. Cmd-based movements are great and I have very deep muscle memory by now. I could not find a reliable way to recreate this on windows (I can make the cursor movement work, but some selections don’t work the same).
- pembrook 7mo ago
  > [on windows 11] my network samba shares stay connected and mounted through restarts. I could never make this work reliably on macOS. It’s wild to me that Apple has allowed SMB on MacOS to be so broken/slow and poorly implemented for so long. It’s been this way for over a DECADE. I have friends who work at production studios who complain about network storage and MacOS all the time given any modern video workflow involves a NAS. You would think a company that halos creative workers in all its ads would care about this. But they happily ignore since “SMB that works” is not a feature that will get much mainstream attention in a flashy keynote (that nobody watches anymore anyways).
  - bombcar 7mo ago
    They rewrote their own SMB handler because they didn’t want the Samba license. Which means they get none of the improvements from the Samba code.
    - jbverschoor 7mo ago
      I didn’t know.. that explains so much
  - 7mo ago
electriclove 7mo ago
Apple needs a 50% purge in headcount. Yes, they have so much money they don't need to but the organizational bloat there is on another level. The issues brought up in the article have been going on for decades and the right people are needed to address these things.
- reverius42 7mo ago
  Not sure how "purging" the headcount is supposed to fix all the problems.
  - dottedmag 7mo ago
    So they won't have idle hands sitting around and itching to redesign something that works just fine. Alternatively, if they could reassign that 50% of their headcount to bring Mountain Lion or Mavericks to the working state (updating cryptographic stacks, patching vulnerabilities) and just don't... touch... the... UI?
rcarmo 7mo ago
I have been feeling the same way _for years now_, and am writing this on this machine: https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2025/11/05/2200 https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2025/11/05/2200 - an Intel MacBook Air running Fedora Silverblue. I have been writing on/about and using Macs for 25 years, have had a bunch of semi-catastrophic failures with Tahoe (https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2026/02/18/1230 https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2026/02/18/1230) and Time Machine (https://taoofmac.com/space/til/2026/02/01/1630 https://taoofmac.com/space/til/2026/02/01/1630), and I have also been running Fedora daily for four or five years. Were it not for Apple Silicon, I would probably be running Linux only today. But after Tahoe, I am very, _very_ motivated to accelerate my transition. And, ironically, I can make GNOME look and feel more like what a Mac should feel like than what Tahoe does. But like I wrote the other day (https://taoofmac.com/space/links/2026/02/26/0806 https://taoofmac.com/space/links/2026/02/26/0806): > The most likely [outcome] is that they will simply carry on without acknowledging any of it publicly and discreetly patch the most critical issues, because they are still making tons of cash on hardware and services and software quality really hasn’t been a priority in half a decade.
mrbuttons454 7mo ago
I have been a Mac user since the classic mac days. I waited in line for the first iPhone. macOS/iOS 26 are bad enough that I've begun switching to Linux. I preordered a Clicks Communicator and Pebble Round 2. Switching from a Macbook Pro M4 to an Asus ROG Flow Z13 with Debian. macOS 26.3 updated clang and broke my emscripten workflow. I tried to unrar a file but the version of unrar provided in homebrew is deprecated because it's no longer signed/blessed. I ended up SFTPing the file to a Linux box, extracting, and bringing it back. My son wanted to try a Java minecraft app on his iPhone, but it required insane workarounds to enable JIT to get acceptable performance. This isn't a technical limitation, it's put in place specifically to protect Apple's walled garden, and their precious services revenue. Despite the thousands of dollars spent on these devices, I don't feel like we own them. We can't run code without the platform owner's permission. We are at the mercy of the platform owner, that has been making increasingly worse decisions. I'm really enjoying trying the available alternatives. My hope is that enough of us get fed up, and develop a thriving ecosystem in the open source world. I'll certainly be contributing back the things I build.
- ElijahLynn 7mo ago
  Gonna say that the switch from X11 to Wayland that was pretty much forced this year across many distributions, broke a ton of things too (screenshot programs, keyboard shortcuts), however, all the code is open source, and there are workarounds and source code available but it still sucks. Basic keyboard shortcuts are still broke with the Wayland migration. e.g. Copyq has this janky workaround for a shortcut to register with the xdg-portal (that works until reboot, then stops), Warp terminal claims there is no support, Flameshot was impossible to configure, have to use the built in Gnome shortcut tool now. The whole ecosystem got wrecked. I have been so irritated by this that I've been considering switching TO the mac ecosystem, BUT this thread is good on my eyes and makes me disinterested now.
  - benoau 7mo ago
    It's been a very frustrating year, I made the mistake of upgrading Pop OS 22.04 that I'd been using for years that was a rough couple of weeks! Toshy still works to give me Mac keyboard shortcuts I might never let go of, but I still haven't figured out the keyboard shortcut to switch between open instances of the same program which drives me insane!
jshaqaw 7mo ago
Apple hasn't been able to ship software in decades. They got bored of computing. Writing was on the wall when they started producing movies because Hollywood people are cooler than nerds and hey why earn a giant cash pile if not for some execs to have fun with it. This is a company which hasn't done anything meaningful to innovate since Steve Jobs died. Yeah I have all Apple gear. It's fine. Whatever. Nicest commodity on the block. But they could have done so much more in the last 15 years.
- freetonik 7mo ago
  To be fair, apple silicon is quite an innovation. Or did you mean only software? Perhaps, Rosetta 2 and the hypervisor/container thingy? Those are pretty cool.
  - bombcar 7mo ago
    Apple Silicon and Rosetta 2 are amazing precisely because the One Eye of Cupertino isn’t watching them so they can get real work done. Everyone else is mandated to make things unlickable.
benoau 7mo ago
> Even ignoring bugs and design changes, in which way does it serve users to phase out Rosetta 2, which in a container-heavy world is more or less required for developers due to the ecosystem of ARM64 Linux containers being nowhere near as widespread as for AMD x86-64 ones, and which keeps many applications runnable that otherwise wouldn't be? This is what tells me I'm completely misaligned with Apple's vision of the future. Why would I want an OS that aspires to prevent me from running perfectly good software that runs very well??? And at a time when even smartphones are starting to run x86 software well! That's literally the opposite of what I want from a computer. If I have to choose between losing Mac software vs losing x86 software it is much easier to leave Mac software behind.
- ryandrake 7mo ago
  "Preventing users from running the software they want to run" seems like such an anti-feature, yet every major system seems to be moving quickly in this direction. I feel like general purpose computing is going to be on life support, soon.
  - tempodox 7mo ago
    Cory Doctorow’s “The coming war on general-purpose computing” said it all. In 2012. https://boingboing.net/2012/01/10/lockdown.html https://boingboing.net/2012/01/10/lockdown.html
freetonik 7mo ago
Another issue I wanted to rant about is sleep. My last three desktop macs (Mac mini i7, iMac 5k, Mac Studio M2 Max) would with 50% probability wake up seconds after clicking “Sleep”. I have gotten used to having to do a “double sleep” routine.
- tom_ 7mo ago
  I have an M4 Max Mac Studio, and my record is 5 clicks. I found the success rate much improved after I assigned a keyboard shortcut; I have had it quickly wake up again a couple of times, so it's still not quite perfect, but that's very much the exception now. Some tiny bit of input from the mouse, which I'm possibly not holding quite perfectly still post-click, perhaps? I can only assume so. The odd thing about it, though: none of my laptop Macs had this problem, even though I am using the same keyboard, the same mouse, and the same USB hub. Something must be different, somewhere. I wonder what.
sylens 7mo ago
Part of my focus to begin this year has been identifying cross platform replacements for any Apple native apps I still use, with a preference for open source and self hosted (where possible). The one I can't seem to fully kick is Apple Reminders, but I've been able to replace pretty much everything else.
- bigyabai 7mo ago
  I'm a big fan of Planify, which supports a few different syncing backends: https://github.com/alainm23/planify https://github.com/alainm23/planify
  - sylens 7mo ago
    Thanks for the recommendation, will check it out
Sym3tri 7mo ago
But the glass is so liquid and shiny.
trimethylpurine 7mo ago
I've run IT at two different multi-hundred million dollar companies (IT director 15+ years and help desk before that). I want Mac users to know that using a Mac, if you aren't very tech savvy, can have a dramatically negative impact on your career. When yours is the only computer in the meeting that can't load the graphics network share, and you're the graphics expert, your boss will be calling IT and sternly asking why. He/she will learn that the MacOS has known issues with basic file sharing in business networks, among other annoying problems that you keep contacting about, and that Apple will never fix. Your boss will discover that IT recommended that you use a Windows machine, and provided you with viable workflows that meet or exceed all of the needs for your work responsibilities. And that other users don't have these issues when following their guidance. But, you opted for a Mac despite all of that. Your boss will sigh. They will carry that sigh into how they perceive you. They will bring up how annoying your situation is every time they talk with IT. I've heard this exact conversation or many other similar conversations 100s of times in my career. I've heard your boss sigh. Do yourself a favor. If you aren't very technical, don't damage your career over something stupid like which OS you're using. It's the wrong hill to die on.
- giobox 7mo ago
  This would ring slightly true to me if it was say 20-30 years ago, but Apple are in many ways the IBM of end user business machines now and vast numbers of corporate drones have MacBooks - the rough edges are long ago sanded off. An IT team that treats Mac users this way today is just a bad IT team.
  - trimethylpurine 7mo ago
    Disagree. Explaining that they can't fix Apple's Samba implementation isn't "treating Mac users this way" such as to be called a "bad IT team." Or the rest of the laundry list of bugs in the post. How do you recommend an IT team should handle Apple's inability to function for basic business file sharing so that the user's boss doesn't think less of the end user or the IT team? They are being friendly, and objective. Their job is to fix problems so that employees can be productive. It's not to lie for them, or to them. It's Apple's marketing team who has that job. You'll notice they don't do much in the way of advertising to IT directors and business decision makers. Their focus is college kids, specifically graphic designers and iOS app developers. It's definitely not businesses. IBM? These are software issues. IBM doesn't make desktop operating systems for end users. Do you mean Microsoft? Apple never was and still isn't the Microsoft of business OS. I'm not sure what you're trying to say here.
NegativeLatency 7mo ago
I still have my childhood/family's Macintosh II, been a lifelong fan of Apple (warranted or not doesn't really matter), Tahoe and the rest of the version 26 updates have left such a bad taste in my mouth that I'm considering swtiching to Linux. Not sure what I'll do for a phone, but I'm actively replacing Apple, apps, workflows etc with stuff that will work on Linux to switch if it doesn't get fixed soon.
- tempodox 7mo ago
  I’m not waiting any longer. I have exactly zero hope that Apple will fix anything. I even doubt they’re still capable of it, even if they could be bothered to be interested in it.
iwontberude 7mo ago
Smooth sailing on Tahoe for me. Sorry it’s not working so well for you.
800xl 7mo ago
I (reluctantly) gave up on the Mac several years ago. Being on a PC might initially seem clunky and unrefined but it is actually very freeing to be able to choose my manufacturer, the OS, components, have tons of ports available, compatibility with older hardware (especially low res monitors). Standards and modularity are a beautiful thing.
esskay 7mo ago
macOS is in desperate need of another snow leopard. Theres a very good reason they did a zero feature OS cycle that year. It was unsustainable pumping out so many changes year after year. We're in a way worse position now as they rushed out all the comically poor UI updates (Why do I still have 6 different border radiuses, and about 40 different icon packs being used on the default damn applications?) and the half baked AI crap that I've yet to see anyone use.
chillpenguin 7mo ago
I'm glad I'm not the only one. What keeps me on mac, however, is the hardware seems so much better than the alternatives. I'd love a macbook quality linux laptop.
- tempodox 7mo ago
  Rumors persist that you can in fact put a Linux on a macbook. Just in case you have one lying around (which I don’t).
throwaway762423 7mo ago
“For at least 10 years, every Time Machine set up I have been in charge of, or tasked with maintaining for someone else, has eventually run into an issue where it stops backing up successfully.” Is this with or without feedback that backing up wasn’t successful?
curvaturearth 7mo ago
Spotlight has been broken for me for sometime. Nothing seems to fix it
bitwize 7mo ago
Absent the Satanists who run California and the nation conducting a dark ritual to summon Steve Jobs back from the abyss, the chances of him saving Apple from total enshittification collapse again the way he did the first time are slim to none. It's peak Apple fan to grouse about how rotten everything is in the Fruit Empire, and then conclude "Welp, nothing to be done for it except smoke hopium that Apple somehow gets better." Hint: This is what happens when you commit to joining any single company's ecosystem. No matter if it's Apple, Microsoft, Google, Commodore, or frickin' IBM. At some point, the beancounters are going to smother what drew you to them in the first place, and find ways to nickel-and-dime you whilst flipping the table on you UX-wise hoping to tap some rich vein of unconverted users to continue the illusion of quarterly growth.
- tempodox 7mo ago
  I would so love to contradict you, but I can’t. I have to completely agree.
talkingtab 7mo ago
Apple has created a social system - the company which causes this. Perhaps it could be called "The Next Big Thing" syndrome. In the past this worked for Apple. Unfortunately creating the "Next Big Thing" requires a creative process they collectively do not understand and are not able to instantiate. They could adopt another strategy, but doing so would be an admission that they do not have a clue. So instead they follow a cargo-cult system of enacting the side trappings without understanding the functionality. Personally my guess is the core of the problem is their contempt for the users. The willingness to act directly against the best interest of the users, as this article points out so well, is bewildering. You just have to wonder that a company so large, with so much money and so many resources can be so utterly dysfunctional. The iPhone, the iPod, the early Macs all demonstrated a profound understanding and care for users. And now? Contempt. Oh well.
rezmason 7mo ago
Since Apple turns 50 this year, I went looking for a graphic that symbolizes what I always liked about Apple and the Mac, without implying I condone anything I dislike about them. Here's my vector reproduction of the logo for MacAddict's and Guy Kawasaki's "EvangeList", circa 1997 : https://rezmason.net/evangelist.svg https://rezmason.net/evangelist.svg
lowbloodsugar 7mo ago
Also have an M1 Pro Max. Still not on Tahoe. Ready to buy an M5. Have the cash. Won't until they fix the OS.
samtheprogram 7mo ago
Tangeltial, can we still run custom Darwin kernels? IIRC that was blocked under security pretenses.
zombot 7mo ago
I for one have lost all hope and trust that Apple can steer the Mac platform in a direction that still intersects with my interests. I'm in the process of switching to Linux. Finally a computer again that does what I want, when I want it.
tempodox 7mo ago
Just now I have received mail that the Linux laptop I ordered has been assembled and handed over to shipping. After over 30 years on the Mac Apple has managed to make me look forward to switching to Linux. I never would have thought this day would come, but all things come to an end eventually.
sgtaylor5 7mo ago
I’ve got a M2 MBA and I love it. I can /live/ with Tahoe, would rather have Sequoia or something a little older (but keep the Password app!) I certainly /don’t need/ a touchscreen Mac laptop, which is what Liquid Glass seems to be designed for. Having said that, I probably would’ve switched to some version of Linux many years ago if it wasn’t for the lack of business accounting software that was easy to set up. GNUcash isn’t it for me. Switching would’ve saved me a lot of money on subscriptions. I could probably use Obsidian instead of NotePlan with a bit of work; I would just use it on mobile a bit less.
rheir 7mo ago
Lost of people complaining about their Macs in the discussion can switch to Asahi Linux without much effort. I think you don't even have to create boot medium, and it's installed as dual-boot by default.
notsigolhp 7mo ago
I've been a developer on Apple kit since 1982 and am coming to the conclusion that under Cook the company has lost its way. All too often the experience is as if I return to my home and find that, behind my back, someone has changed the lock on my front door and painted the house puse. My suggestion is for the company to provide 2 operating systems. One for kindergarten users, a toy that's locked down strictly within Apple's walled garden. The other OS which is for grownups, where stability and functional performance are paramount, with the user in control of their machine and where investment (in systems, digital activities, mental capital and muscle memory) are treated with the respect and value that they obviously have. That Apple could force Tahoe on the world makes it obvious that company's inward looking arogance has drifted far out of touch with reality. Could there be a more efficient way to shoot themselves in the foot, and at the same time poke their customers in the eye.

328 points by Udo_Schmitz 7mo ago

I genuinely view Time Machine as abandonware at this stage, Apple haven't really invested in it for many years and I would recommend a lot of other third party backup solutions first.

dewey 7mo ago
It's really sad. When this was introduced (With Lion I believe?) it was such a cool feature to demo to people that didn't have much exposure to Macs yet at that time. Just deleting and restoring a file on the Desktop with the "Space UI" and backups just being there and working without buying complicated backup software was a genuine peak macOS moment. Now I'm barely using it as every few months I'm prompted to just delete the backup and start fresh because something corrupted.
- skibble 7mo ago
  I have set up Time Machine backups for literally hundreds, if not thousands of people in a support role over many years and have hardly ever witnessed this happening. It's one thing to say you may have had to do this once or twice in a decade or the like, but every few months is ridiculous and speaks to some other underlying issue with your setup, like a quietly failing drive or bad cable, etc. I'm not one of these 'it hasn't happened to me, ergo it's impossible people'. I completely think that many of the design elements of Tahoe are a horrendous regression versus even Sequoia, but I think asserting that Time Machine is completely broken in the shipping version of macOS is a bold statement that deserves a bit of pushback, even among the fire raging in a lot of other places in macOS!
  - dewey 7mo ago
    This is a very common error case, more common with storing the backup on a network share (Wifi / Ethernet doesn't matter). If you look for "Time Machine must erase your existing backup history and start a new backup to correct this." you'll find a lot of references for this problem. To be clear, I'm not saying it's Tahoe related, it has been there for many years.
  - crazygringo 7mo ago
    For me, it's backing up over a network share. My Synology NAS works perfectly and flawlessly for literally everything else. It's RAID 1. It supports Time Machine. But somehow it would get corrupted every few months and I'd have to start it all over. Tons of people complain about this. I suspect it's some subtle bug with sparse bundles and SMB.
  - chongli 7mo ago
    Did you only set up Time Machine? Or did you continue supporting all those users for years and years. If the issue is that eventually the backup store becomes corrupted then you may not see it at all if you're only setting up backups but never dealing with users who actually need to restore something from backup years later.
- hedgehog 7mo ago
  Leopard, which means I've been using it for almost 20 years. The first ten were pretty good.
itopaloglu83 7mo ago
I think they think of time capsule as a done deal. It doesn’t bring any extra money for them, and even though it’s broken, it exist to a point that when they’re selling a Mac they can say that it comes with a backup software as well. Just like a shady landlord tells you that the apartment facing a wall has a nice window. I don’t know what these engineers are doing at Apple, but it surely isn’t making the ecosystem better, they’re just chasing hypes and shinny useless UI changes.
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
- giobox 7mo ago
  The cynic in me thinks Apple more or less gave up on Time Machine while ramping up on selling iCloud storage as a backup solution for macOS as well as iOS/ipadOS devices.

DrawTR 7mo ago

Every time I see a comment on the state of Tahoe I look wearily at my current install of Sequoia. I'll have to update at some point. But I'll hold out as long as I can...

RowanH 7mo ago
They've done something with the printer system in Tahoe. Brother removed support for native drivers on certain label printers on Tahoe (!!!) when you go searching you find other printer issues. Like, why. Why would you need to change the printer system? It works.. has worked for a very long time, there's no reasonable need to change it.
- memco 7mo ago
  Oh man! I came here to complain about printing! I just discovered yesterday that you can no longer drag and drop print jobs from one printer to another. Apparently you can move a print job via some command line stuff but it just ended up deleting the jobs entirely. The only reasons I found this out is because the printer which had been working fine moments before just stopped working after replacing toner. No amount of deleting and re-padding the printer or power cycling either machine fixed it. One time the whole OS just froze and I had to force reboot. I spent a good chunk of the afternoon trying to get one 3 page document to print. To be fair, I haven’t had problems with this setup for 10+ years but when it went south it also went to the remote frigid corners of Antarctica.
- cosmic_cheese 7mo ago
  This might've been a side effect of removing support for third-party kernel extensions rather than something changing with the printer system specifically. I have an old (~10 years old) printer that Cannon stopped supplying updated macOS drivers for several years ago. The installer for the drivers failed so I had to extract the files from the package and install them manually. In the end only the network drivers work, the USB drivers are kexts which won't run.
- rcarmo 7mo ago
  They overhauled CUPS and replaced chunks of it.

badgersnake 7mo ago

Complaining about Finder being awful like it’s 1998. Yes, 28 years later and it’s still awful.

LeoPanthera 7mo ago

I've been running Tahoe since 26.2, after cowardly skipping 0 and 1. And... it's fine? Am I only using the happy path? Or are people just particularly confident about complaining about Tahoe after seeing everyone else do it. For sure it has glitches, but as far as I can tell, they're the same glitches that were in Sequoia. (If anyone at Apple is reading this, can you take a glance at your NFS client code? It does like to just hang up occasionally.) The only major complaint I have is the window resize target, which seems not to line up properly with the actual window corner, since they gave them Very Rounded Corners. It's also a bit weird that the radius of the VRCs seems to change app to app. But these are nits. I work on Tahoe every day and it seems fine.

nl 7mo ago
Yes I agree. I have an M1 Max like the author of this piece and recently upgraded. It's fine. I don't like the look of it much and the drag targets are annoying but other than that it's been completely normal.
- card_zero 7mo ago
  So are you saying the long list of bugs don't actually happen?
  - bombcar 7mo ago
    They happen but you learn to work around them and they fall into the noise. FtFF has been a mantra for 20+ years; it’s never going to happen, stop trying to make it happen.
    - card_zero 7mo ago
      OK. I stopped buying Macs more than 20 years ago. The Finder used to work.
  - crazygringo 7mo ago
    They definitely do. But in my experience they "accumulate". Like, things all work pretty well at first. And then god only knows what happens as config and preference files get into weird states, and temp files accumulate and never get deleted, and cache files get stuck with old info and refuse to update, and god only knows. So people with relatively new installations have a pretty good time, while people who have migrated their data across three MacBooks over ten years are encountering problems left and right. I reinstalled Sequoia fresh last year because some mystery process would slowly consume 50GB of disk space over the course of every two weeks, no disk utility could locate any file responsible, but restarting reset it. But with the fresh reinstall, everything started working fine again. It's annoying. Then I upgraded to Tahoe and zero problems. But I'm sure they'll gradually start appearing over the next year or two.

ordinaryradical 7mo ago

This is going to be remembered as a comical fumble, in my view. I was fully locked-in to the ecosystem, the phone, the services, the TV, and I am looking for the exits. I’m starting to parallelize to software which will play well on Linux, and when I’m feeling ready (or miserable enough) I will not be looking back. The macOS exodus will be like Hemingway’s line about bankruptcy: very slowly and then all at once.

nsbk 7mo ago
I’m right where you are. Very happy Apple customer since my first PowerBook G4. Currently have an M1 Max, an iPhone 17 Pro, the iPad Pro, HomePod, Apple TV, and Watch Ultra. All the _just works_ feeling and reliability seem to be gone. Tahoe is so unstable that I now restart the Mac every day, when in the past it happened on software updates only. Apple Music is another huge mess, I can’t comprehend how can it be so unreliable. Looking for exits as well and kind of looking forward to migrating to Graphene OS, self-hosted Immich, and Navidrome
- samdixon 7mo ago
  When even my "boomer" aged and non-tech savvy dad who has always used an iPhone notices the update is bad, I think you are in at least a little bit of trouble if you don't quickly course correct.
- rafaelmn 7mo ago
  I'm sorry but if your out is linux and windows because you're not happy how stuff doesn't "just work" in the Apple ecosystem boy are you in for a bad surprise. However bad you think Apple is getting with MacOS - windows is getting worse. And Linux ? Good luck getting decent hardware that will run without having basic functionality issues. Queue the linux brigade "my PC works perfect, what linux issues are you having". Meanwhile I can't use bluetooth on my desktop (works perfectly fine on windows), and I was watching laptop reviews from justjosh recently where he's adding a segment where he is trying out linux on the device - and his experience on the two videos I've seen "sound does't work, wifi doesn't work, BT doesn't work ..." All that said I am looking into leaving the Apple ecosystem as well because I just don't like how locked down and the devices are, but I'm fully aware that it's going to take significant effort for stuff that I'd get out of the box from Apple.

p0w3n3d 7mo ago

TBH I plan downgrade i.e. recovery. I wanted Tahoe because apparently it contains Rosetta with x86-64-v3 support but more I need it in my work, so home computer will be reinstated. Btw isn't Rosetta going to be left but only for gaming and containerisation?

harikb 7mo ago
I thought you could only do it if you have own TM backup. Do they offer cloud recovery for older versions?
- p0w3n3d 7mo ago
  My Mac is from 2021 so I will just reset it to factory and reinstall up to sonoma

bluedino 7mo ago

Each version has had its share of quirks. Other than the dumbing down of the UI and that kind of stuff, Tahoe seems to run fine. Safari seems to have more bugs than usual, though.

michaelbuckbee 7mo ago

Tahoe introduced some changes to the windowing code that badly disrupted my DisplayPort device that was rock solid on Sequoia. I ended up switching to a new device as a workaround. Window memory use (I have a lot of virtual desktops and extra screens) is much higher and there's a peristent bug where taking a screenshot with CleanShot somehow resets the DisplayPort driver and everything flips out for a minute and it has to rediscover the external monitors. Infuriating.

recursivedoubts 7mo ago

"Tog... Now, that's a name I haven't heard in a long time... A long time."

whalesalad 7mo ago

The first 6 paragraphs of this post start like this: For at least 10 years ... For several years, ... For a few months... For several years, ... For a year or so, ... For several years, ...

deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
freetonik 7mo ago
Correct.
simmerup 7mo ago
I think the repetition is the point
warpspin 7mo ago
Exactly. Guess what: I've been on Apple for 26 years. iOS 26 is already a shit show, the new Watch OS even more so, and never ever will I allow it to update my main work platform, my Macbook Pro, to something which promises to be even worse.
sunshowers 7mo ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anaphora_(rhetoric) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anaphora_(rhetoric)

harikb 7mo ago

Apart from the mess it caused for iPhone and Mac, my watch upgraded last night to 26 flavor. I am not kidding - I can't see anything on the screen now before coffee. Watch has become completely useless for my early morning eyes. What they did to Watch is much worse than what they did to iPhone and Mac

steve_adams_86 7mo ago
This will sound like hyperbole, but the direction on iOS and watchOS led directly to me selling my watch and giving my son my phone. I agree it's worse with watchOS. Apple are so stubborn and persistent in the way they choose directions. I realized I'd rather move on than be stuck with that mess for years. It's wild. I still use macOS but I'm steadily finding ways off. Weird times. I've been deeply embedded in the apple platform for over 25 years. I think I sensed things were meaningfully changing around 2020 (I can't recall exactly), but my sense of the ongoing decline is way more rapid than I anticipated back then. Maybe it started and gained momentum earlier than I realized.
bombcar 7mo ago
ATP spent like an hour complaining about workouts on watchOS 26; if they’re railing against the machine something is very broken.

JackuB 7mo ago

I’m in a camp where Tahoe is just ugly, but worked fine on my mac and with my usage and devices. On the other hand, iOS 26 is so incredibly bad. Anything from anti-user choices, UI glitches, to keyboard… it’s tiring. It might be the one where I’m pushed to a different OS for the first time. I doubt Apple can fix itself in the near future, with the leadership they have.

allthetime 7mo ago
I run all the betas on my macbook air just to see where things are going. When I first installed Tahoe, I thought to myself, I guess it's just the beta, there's no way they are going to keep this look... My workstation is pinned firmly to sequoia right now and will be until it's untenable or they undo their new UI design direction, which is, as you pointed out, ghastly.

projektfu 7mo ago

I was a big Mac user. I had a IIcx and an LC, and I evangelized it even when apple stock was $0.95 and the wolves were at the door. I couldn't afford a PowerMac at the time, but I generally used them at the university when I could. I had a desk lamp iMac, then bought the first big screen iMac, which lasted me quite a while. I really liked everything up to Snow Leopard, probably a little beyond that, too. But in a long time I haven't really enjoyed using the mac and I use other systems instead. They got rid of subpixel rendering and now text is blurry on my monitors. The interactions are much more of a chore. Features were removed from Preview and other apps that were better before. I quit using XCode for a few years and couldn't recognize it when I came back. So I use it maybe every 3-4 weeks now. I have no interest in buying another one. I just don't know why they seem to be going out of their way to make the system unfriendly to existing users.

freetonik 7mo ago
Better Display is the app that can help with non-5K monitors. I cannot imagine using macOS without it.
DavidSJ 7mo ago
I'm like you. I loved Apple IIs at schools and libraries as a young child, fell in love with my Mac IIsi at home at the age of 7. Later, at 13, I had a Macintosh-evangelizing web site and mailing list that Guy Kawasaki (Apple's lead evangelist) even subscribed to. I've been a primary Mac user through the 68k, PowerPC, Intel, and Apple Silicon days, from System 6.0.7 through today. Got an original iPhone and iPad, have upgraded my iPhone every few years since. The technofeudalism, bugginess, and UI crappiness has me done and looking for the exits, to say nothing of the embrace of Trump. My next laptop won't be a Mac, and my next phone won't be an iPhone.
tempodox 7mo ago
> I just don't know why they seem to be going out of their way to make the system unfriendly to existing users. Sadly, they’re not going out of their way. It’s fully in the way of beancounters in harvesting mode. Apple has become a lawnmower, just like any other megacorp.

freetonik 7mo ago

My partner’s iMac recently died (seemingly the Radeon graphics card had failed, which is not uncommon on 2017 model). It was frustrating to find out that Time Machine was not operational for 8 last months. It was always connected. There were zero indications of any issues. It just stopped backing up at some point. The disk had enough space. In the past I had problems with network attached Time Machine destinations, but now I have zero trust even in the “native” USB-based method.

hedgehog 7mo ago
I don't know what's happened to Time Machine, with the capabilities available in APFS etc it should be much better if anything. But it's not. Thankfully the failure mode I've experienced didn't lead to data loss but I definitely don't trust it any more.
- freetonik 7mo ago
  Luckily I had Backblaze backup set up on our machines. In addition, this older iMac can still be booted up in Target disk mode, i.e. acting like an external drive. So I could salvage all data. Another funny thing is that Mac’s built in diagnostic mode, after running for good 20 minutes, proclaimed there were no issues with the system. Even though it was clearly failing in the graphics department, even when booting into an installer usb drive (or even a Linux live mode).
- dgxyz 7mo ago
  It was always shit. I have seen horror stories going back since the day it came out. Think my favourite was a conceptual flaw. The lightning strike. You need a completely offline backup or you don't have a backup. Edit: using ChronoSync and two external (hard) disks, rotated once a month off site at the moment. That has a nice fat VERIFY button on it.
- NegativeLatency 7mo ago
  Did time machine start using the APFS features? I thought it was still doing HFS+ stuff?
7mo ago

iamdamian 7mo ago

This has been the first year in a very long time that I’ve thought about leaving macOS. They seem to have lost the plot on software and documentation. It might be nice for someone to crowd source a reasonable list of features they need to improve or document. Could get traction.

chr15m 7mo ago

Time to switch.

broabprobe 7mo ago

it's the year of the Linux desktop, again ;)

tempodox 7mo ago
This time for real. Multi-decade users of both Windoze and macOS won’t take any more shit and take action, instead of just complaining. That’s a quality I haven’t seen before.

subterrane 7mo ago

Tahoe has this really cool clipboard history feature that just does not work on my work laptop. Maybe some corporate keep-me-safe-ware is preventing it from working but my third-party app, Maccy, has no problem at all, so I guess it's just Apple being Apple these days. I also held out for as long as possible using Safari, but I had to switch to Firefox. Every once in a while I forget the reason I switched and try to switch back and then get reminded. I'm currently in a "I can't remember the reason, but I'm too lazy to go find out" phase. I'm also one of those weirdos that liked the Safari compact tabs and I'm sad they removed it.

commandersaki 7mo ago
You need to make sure Files is being indexed, I think the Documents directory indexing, for the clipboard history to work.
- subterrane 7mo ago
  Yeah, I've toggled that off and on trying to get it to work. I just checked it again to make sure and it's on. It works on my personal laptop but not my work laptop. I think there's some corporate policy or something that might be blocking it.

dgxyz 7mo ago

Yeah this resonates with me. Every single point. Every time they fuck something I move the workload over to Linux, not out of enthusiasm or any ideological purity but because I need to do some damn work. Add in the current geopolitical shit show, rising surveillance culture and the constant push for MRR and the whole "ecosystem" idea of computing and cloud becomes quite distasteful and risky. A monumental moment recently was Reminders which has a horrible bug in it since Tahoe where you are entering several tasks in the scheduled view and you hit enter and carry on typing and it doesn't register the enter until several keypresses later, splitting the last word you typed between two tasks. This is a very very minor but utterly annoying thing which has broken my workflow. I was so fucked off with this happening every day I pulled a sheet of paper out of my printer and just wrote everything on that. And I've been doing that for 4 months now. Reminders is dead. I forget things like I did before, but I get over that. One day I'll wake up and not use the Mac. The iPad and Apple Watch are already gone.

freetonik 7mo ago
> you are entering several tasks in the scheduled view and you hit enter and carry on typing and it doesn't register the enter until several keypresses later I have been experiencing this type of bug since forever when renaming files. Enter (to switch to renaming mode), start typing, first 1-3 letters are missing.

monster_truck 7mo ago

Writing has been on the wall for some time now. It's completely unsuitable for serious work, or serious play. I had a massive rant written but it isn't worth it. Fuck em The M2 and M5 minis I have are the nicest drink coasters I've ever owned. I have unresolved radars old enough to drive, go to war, or even vote at this point. They used to blame Intel's TB controllers. Guess what? They make their own now and the same fucking issues persist! Enjoy the kernel panics

freetonik 7mo ago

Coincidentally, I had to leave macOS for a Windows 11 pc about a month ago and it’s… fine. There are absurd bugs and ux decisions, but I honestly think there are different but equally bad aspects of macOS. On the other hand, some of the things in windows land are just nicer. For one, my network samba shares stay connected and mounted through restarts. I could never make this work reliably on macOS. File explorer is good. Finder always felt clunky and awkward to use. In addition, certain class of software exists for windows and not for macOS. Like FilePilot, Anything, MusicBee, Foobar2000 (Mac version of the latter is not the same as the windows version). The biggest issue so far for me is keyboard shortcuts for text editing. Cmd-based movements are great and I have very deep muscle memory by now. I could not find a reliable way to recreate this on windows (I can make the cursor movement work, but some selections don’t work the same).

pembrook 7mo ago
> [on windows 11] my network samba shares stay connected and mounted through restarts. I could never make this work reliably on macOS. It’s wild to me that Apple has allowed SMB on MacOS to be so broken/slow and poorly implemented for so long. It’s been this way for over a DECADE. I have friends who work at production studios who complain about network storage and MacOS all the time given any modern video workflow involves a NAS. You would think a company that halos creative workers in all its ads would care about this. But they happily ignore since “SMB that works” is not a feature that will get much mainstream attention in a flashy keynote (that nobody watches anymore anyways).
- bombcar 7mo ago
  They rewrote their own SMB handler because they didn’t want the Samba license. Which means they get none of the improvements from the Samba code.
  - jbverschoor 7mo ago
    I didn’t know.. that explains so much
- 7mo ago

electriclove 7mo ago

Apple needs a 50% purge in headcount. Yes, they have so much money they don't need to but the organizational bloat there is on another level. The issues brought up in the article have been going on for decades and the right people are needed to address these things.

reverius42 7mo ago
Not sure how "purging" the headcount is supposed to fix all the problems.
- dottedmag 7mo ago
  So they won't have idle hands sitting around and itching to redesign something that works just fine. Alternatively, if they could reassign that 50% of their headcount to bring Mountain Lion or Mavericks to the working state (updating cryptographic stacks, patching vulnerabilities) and just don't... touch... the... UI?

rcarmo 7mo ago

I have been feeling the same way _for years now_, and am writing this on this machine: https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2025/11/05/2200 https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2025/11/05/2200 - an Intel MacBook Air running Fedora Silverblue. I have been writing on/about and using Macs for 25 years, have had a bunch of semi-catastrophic failures with Tahoe (https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2026/02/18/1230 https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2026/02/18/1230) and Time Machine (https://taoofmac.com/space/til/2026/02/01/1630 https://taoofmac.com/space/til/2026/02/01/1630), and I have also been running Fedora daily for four or five years. Were it not for Apple Silicon, I would probably be running Linux only today. But after Tahoe, I am very, _very_ motivated to accelerate my transition. And, ironically, I can make GNOME look and feel more like what a Mac should feel like than what Tahoe does. But like I wrote the other day (https://taoofmac.com/space/links/2026/02/26/0806 https://taoofmac.com/space/links/2026/02/26/0806): > The most likely [outcome] is that they will simply carry on without acknowledging any of it publicly and discreetly patch the most critical issues, because they are still making tons of cash on hardware and services and software quality really hasn’t been a priority in half a decade.

mrbuttons454 7mo ago

I have been a Mac user since the classic mac days. I waited in line for the first iPhone. macOS/iOS 26 are bad enough that I've begun switching to Linux. I preordered a Clicks Communicator and Pebble Round 2. Switching from a Macbook Pro M4 to an Asus ROG Flow Z13 with Debian. macOS 26.3 updated clang and broke my emscripten workflow. I tried to unrar a file but the version of unrar provided in homebrew is deprecated because it's no longer signed/blessed. I ended up SFTPing the file to a Linux box, extracting, and bringing it back. My son wanted to try a Java minecraft app on his iPhone, but it required insane workarounds to enable JIT to get acceptable performance. This isn't a technical limitation, it's put in place specifically to protect Apple's walled garden, and their precious services revenue. Despite the thousands of dollars spent on these devices, I don't feel like we own them. We can't run code without the platform owner's permission. We are at the mercy of the platform owner, that has been making increasingly worse decisions. I'm really enjoying trying the available alternatives. My hope is that enough of us get fed up, and develop a thriving ecosystem in the open source world. I'll certainly be contributing back the things I build.

ElijahLynn 7mo ago
Gonna say that the switch from X11 to Wayland that was pretty much forced this year across many distributions, broke a ton of things too (screenshot programs, keyboard shortcuts), however, all the code is open source, and there are workarounds and source code available but it still sucks. Basic keyboard shortcuts are still broke with the Wayland migration. e.g. Copyq has this janky workaround for a shortcut to register with the xdg-portal (that works until reboot, then stops), Warp terminal claims there is no support, Flameshot was impossible to configure, have to use the built in Gnome shortcut tool now. The whole ecosystem got wrecked. I have been so irritated by this that I've been considering switching TO the mac ecosystem, BUT this thread is good on my eyes and makes me disinterested now.
- benoau 7mo ago
  It's been a very frustrating year, I made the mistake of upgrading Pop OS 22.04 that I'd been using for years that was a rough couple of weeks! Toshy still works to give me Mac keyboard shortcuts I might never let go of, but I still haven't figured out the keyboard shortcut to switch between open instances of the same program which drives me insane!

jshaqaw 7mo ago

Apple hasn't been able to ship software in decades. They got bored of computing. Writing was on the wall when they started producing movies because Hollywood people are cooler than nerds and hey why earn a giant cash pile if not for some execs to have fun with it. This is a company which hasn't done anything meaningful to innovate since Steve Jobs died. Yeah I have all Apple gear. It's fine. Whatever. Nicest commodity on the block. But they could have done so much more in the last 15 years.

freetonik 7mo ago
To be fair, apple silicon is quite an innovation. Or did you mean only software? Perhaps, Rosetta 2 and the hypervisor/container thingy? Those are pretty cool.
- bombcar 7mo ago
  Apple Silicon and Rosetta 2 are amazing precisely because the One Eye of Cupertino isn’t watching them so they can get real work done. Everyone else is mandated to make things unlickable.

benoau 7mo ago

> Even ignoring bugs and design changes, in which way does it serve users to phase out Rosetta 2, which in a container-heavy world is more or less required for developers due to the ecosystem of ARM64 Linux containers being nowhere near as widespread as for AMD x86-64 ones, and which keeps many applications runnable that otherwise wouldn't be? This is what tells me I'm completely misaligned with Apple's vision of the future. Why would I want an OS that aspires to prevent me from running perfectly good software that runs very well??? And at a time when even smartphones are starting to run x86 software well! That's literally the opposite of what I want from a computer. If I have to choose between losing Mac software vs losing x86 software it is much easier to leave Mac software behind.

ryandrake 7mo ago
"Preventing users from running the software they want to run" seems like such an anti-feature, yet every major system seems to be moving quickly in this direction. I feel like general purpose computing is going to be on life support, soon.
- tempodox 7mo ago
  Cory Doctorow’s “The coming war on general-purpose computing” said it all. In 2012. https://boingboing.net/2012/01/10/lockdown.html https://boingboing.net/2012/01/10/lockdown.html

freetonik 7mo ago

Another issue I wanted to rant about is sleep. My last three desktop macs (Mac mini i7, iMac 5k, Mac Studio M2 Max) would with 50% probability wake up seconds after clicking “Sleep”. I have gotten used to having to do a “double sleep” routine.

tom_ 7mo ago
I have an M4 Max Mac Studio, and my record is 5 clicks. I found the success rate much improved after I assigned a keyboard shortcut; I have had it quickly wake up again a couple of times, so it's still not quite perfect, but that's very much the exception now. Some tiny bit of input from the mouse, which I'm possibly not holding quite perfectly still post-click, perhaps? I can only assume so. The odd thing about it, though: none of my laptop Macs had this problem, even though I am using the same keyboard, the same mouse, and the same USB hub. Something must be different, somewhere. I wonder what.

sylens 7mo ago

Part of my focus to begin this year has been identifying cross platform replacements for any Apple native apps I still use, with a preference for open source and self hosted (where possible). The one I can't seem to fully kick is Apple Reminders, but I've been able to replace pretty much everything else.

bigyabai 7mo ago
I'm a big fan of Planify, which supports a few different syncing backends: https://github.com/alainm23/planify https://github.com/alainm23/planify
- sylens 7mo ago
  Thanks for the recommendation, will check it out

Sym3tri 7mo ago

But the glass is so liquid and shiny.

trimethylpurine 7mo ago

I've run IT at two different multi-hundred million dollar companies (IT director 15+ years and help desk before that). I want Mac users to know that using a Mac, if you aren't very tech savvy, can have a dramatically negative impact on your career. When yours is the only computer in the meeting that can't load the graphics network share, and you're the graphics expert, your boss will be calling IT and sternly asking why. He/she will learn that the MacOS has known issues with basic file sharing in business networks, among other annoying problems that you keep contacting about, and that Apple will never fix. Your boss will discover that IT recommended that you use a Windows machine, and provided you with viable workflows that meet or exceed all of the needs for your work responsibilities. And that other users don't have these issues when following their guidance. But, you opted for a Mac despite all of that. Your boss will sigh. They will carry that sigh into how they perceive you. They will bring up how annoying your situation is every time they talk with IT. I've heard this exact conversation or many other similar conversations 100s of times in my career. I've heard your boss sigh. Do yourself a favor. If you aren't very technical, don't damage your career over something stupid like which OS you're using. It's the wrong hill to die on.

giobox 7mo ago
This would ring slightly true to me if it was say 20-30 years ago, but Apple are in many ways the IBM of end user business machines now and vast numbers of corporate drones have MacBooks - the rough edges are long ago sanded off. An IT team that treats Mac users this way today is just a bad IT team.
- trimethylpurine 7mo ago
  Disagree. Explaining that they can't fix Apple's Samba implementation isn't "treating Mac users this way" such as to be called a "bad IT team." Or the rest of the laundry list of bugs in the post. How do you recommend an IT team should handle Apple's inability to function for basic business file sharing so that the user's boss doesn't think less of the end user or the IT team? They are being friendly, and objective. Their job is to fix problems so that employees can be productive. It's not to lie for them, or to them. It's Apple's marketing team who has that job. You'll notice they don't do much in the way of advertising to IT directors and business decision makers. Their focus is college kids, specifically graphic designers and iOS app developers. It's definitely not businesses. IBM? These are software issues. IBM doesn't make desktop operating systems for end users. Do you mean Microsoft? Apple never was and still isn't the Microsoft of business OS. I'm not sure what you're trying to say here.

NegativeLatency 7mo ago

I still have my childhood/family's Macintosh II, been a lifelong fan of Apple (warranted or not doesn't really matter), Tahoe and the rest of the version 26 updates have left such a bad taste in my mouth that I'm considering swtiching to Linux. Not sure what I'll do for a phone, but I'm actively replacing Apple, apps, workflows etc with stuff that will work on Linux to switch if it doesn't get fixed soon.

tempodox 7mo ago
I’m not waiting any longer. I have exactly zero hope that Apple will fix anything. I even doubt they’re still capable of it, even if they could be bothered to be interested in it.

iwontberude 7mo ago

Smooth sailing on Tahoe for me. Sorry it’s not working so well for you.

800xl 7mo ago

I (reluctantly) gave up on the Mac several years ago. Being on a PC might initially seem clunky and unrefined but it is actually very freeing to be able to choose my manufacturer, the OS, components, have tons of ports available, compatibility with older hardware (especially low res monitors). Standards and modularity are a beautiful thing.

esskay 7mo ago

macOS is in desperate need of another snow leopard. Theres a very good reason they did a zero feature OS cycle that year. It was unsustainable pumping out so many changes year after year. We're in a way worse position now as they rushed out all the comically poor UI updates (Why do I still have 6 different border radiuses, and about 40 different icon packs being used on the default damn applications?) and the half baked AI crap that I've yet to see anyone use.

chillpenguin 7mo ago

I'm glad I'm not the only one. What keeps me on mac, however, is the hardware seems so much better than the alternatives. I'd love a macbook quality linux laptop.

tempodox 7mo ago
Rumors persist that you can in fact put a Linux on a macbook. Just in case you have one lying around (which I don’t).

throwaway762423 7mo ago

“For at least 10 years, every Time Machine set up I have been in charge of, or tasked with maintaining for someone else, has eventually run into an issue where it stops backing up successfully.” Is this with or without feedback that backing up wasn’t successful?

curvaturearth 7mo ago

Spotlight has been broken for me for sometime. Nothing seems to fix it

bitwize 7mo ago

Absent the Satanists who run California and the nation conducting a dark ritual to summon Steve Jobs back from the abyss, the chances of him saving Apple from total enshittification collapse again the way he did the first time are slim to none. It's peak Apple fan to grouse about how rotten everything is in the Fruit Empire, and then conclude "Welp, nothing to be done for it except smoke hopium that Apple somehow gets better." Hint: This is what happens when you commit to joining any single company's ecosystem. No matter if it's Apple, Microsoft, Google, Commodore, or frickin' IBM. At some point, the beancounters are going to smother what drew you to them in the first place, and find ways to nickel-and-dime you whilst flipping the table on you UX-wise hoping to tap some rich vein of unconverted users to continue the illusion of quarterly growth.

tempodox 7mo ago
I would so love to contradict you, but I can’t. I have to completely agree.

talkingtab 7mo ago

Apple has created a social system - the company which causes this. Perhaps it could be called "The Next Big Thing" syndrome. In the past this worked for Apple. Unfortunately creating the "Next Big Thing" requires a creative process they collectively do not understand and are not able to instantiate. They could adopt another strategy, but doing so would be an admission that they do not have a clue. So instead they follow a cargo-cult system of enacting the side trappings without understanding the functionality. Personally my guess is the core of the problem is their contempt for the users. The willingness to act directly against the best interest of the users, as this article points out so well, is bewildering. You just have to wonder that a company so large, with so much money and so many resources can be so utterly dysfunctional. The iPhone, the iPod, the early Macs all demonstrated a profound understanding and care for users. And now? Contempt. Oh well.

rezmason 7mo ago

Since Apple turns 50 this year, I went looking for a graphic that symbolizes what I always liked about Apple and the Mac, without implying I condone anything I dislike about them. Here's my vector reproduction of the logo for MacAddict's and Guy Kawasaki's "EvangeList", circa 1997 : https://rezmason.net/evangelist.svg https://rezmason.net/evangelist.svg

lowbloodsugar 7mo ago

Also have an M1 Pro Max. Still not on Tahoe. Ready to buy an M5. Have the cash. Won't until they fix the OS.

samtheprogram 7mo ago

Tangeltial, can we still run custom Darwin kernels? IIRC that was blocked under security pretenses.

zombot 7mo ago

I for one have lost all hope and trust that Apple can steer the Mac platform in a direction that still intersects with my interests. I'm in the process of switching to Linux. Finally a computer again that does what I want, when I want it.

tempodox 7mo ago

Just now I have received mail that the Linux laptop I ordered has been assembled and handed over to shipping. After over 30 years on the Mac Apple has managed to make me look forward to switching to Linux. I never would have thought this day would come, but all things come to an end eventually.

sgtaylor5 7mo ago

I’ve got a M2 MBA and I love it. I can /live/ with Tahoe, would rather have Sequoia or something a little older (but keep the Password app!) I certainly /don’t need/ a touchscreen Mac laptop, which is what Liquid Glass seems to be designed for. Having said that, I probably would’ve switched to some version of Linux many years ago if it wasn’t for the lack of business accounting software that was easy to set up. GNUcash isn’t it for me. Switching would’ve saved me a lot of money on subscriptions. I could probably use Obsidian instead of NotePlan with a bit of work; I would just use it on mobile a bit less.

rheir 7mo ago

Lost of people complaining about their Macs in the discussion can switch to Asahi Linux without much effort. I think you don't even have to create boot medium, and it's installed as dual-boot by default.

notsigolhp 7mo ago

I've been a developer on Apple kit since 1982 and am coming to the conclusion that under Cook the company has lost its way. All too often the experience is as if I return to my home and find that, behind my back, someone has changed the lock on my front door and painted the house puse. My suggestion is for the company to provide 2 operating systems. One for kindergarten users, a toy that's locked down strictly within Apple's walled garden. The other OS which is for grownups, where stability and functional performance are paramount, with the user in control of their machine and where investment (in systems, digital activities, mental capital and muscle memory) are treated with the respect and value that they obviously have. That Apple could force Tahoe on the world makes it obvious that company's inward looking arogance has drifted far out of touch with reality. Could there be a more efficient way to shoot themselves in the foot, and at the same time poke their customers in the eye.