7 ms·

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 t

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.
  - ssl-3 7mo ago
    We seem to have a world where neither Linux, nor MacOS, nor Windows "just work". None of them have meaningful support channels for individuals. All of them have issues. They're very similar in these ways. The first of these systems is actionable: When it doesn't work, it can generally be made to work. The whole journey may be an awful affair for the entire duration, but a person can usually (not always!) get there. The other two systems are inactionable: When it doesn't work, there is no fixing it. There is no pathway, nor any journey. One can only accept that it is broken, that they are powerless to change it, and that this is the end of the road for that problem. --- There are probably healthier ways to learn acceptance than this.
    - exmadscientist 7mo ago
      And phones are even worse! I have come to hate Android, but every time I seriously look at switching to iOS, it seems Apple has chosen that time to make things even worse. Unfortunately, there's no Linux equivalent for phones. (Or at least, nothing that's easier than gentoo was in 2004. That was great for learning, but for daily use of a critical device, not so great.)
    - einpoklum 7mo ago
      > The first of these systems is actionable: When it doesn't work, it can generally be made to work. The whole journey may be an awful affair for the entire duration, but a person can usually It's also important to mention that it is more likely a person would get help along the way. And - it should also be said that there are non-Linux free operating systems, like the BSD's, for which it can also "generally be made to work". And there's the more niche HaikuOS (where I don't know if what doesn't work can be made to work, but people do use it).
    - rafaelmn 7mo ago
      The category of things that don't "just work" on a Mac for me compared to Linux and even Windows is just a class apart. You can't compare shared buffers between phones being flaky or using face time on PC to answer calls from iphone being glitchy to my browser crashing when I try to screenshare, repeatedly, on linux.
- itopaloglu83 7mo ago
  And yet Apple engineers are going through numerous forums and Reddit posts to gaslight people by commenting “well, it doesn’t happen to me, mine works perfectly”. They managed to mess up an entire ecosystem and they’re acting so stupid about it that I cannot believe all this software was made by Apple. There’s no elegance, no thought out user experience, no good design, it’s all stupid glass design with comical amount of padding. It all looks like it was designed and implemented by a team five over a half assed pool party. What the hell is Apple doing with its tens of thousands of engineers, if they cannot make a freaking window manager.
  - vrosas 7mo ago
    It often feels like Apple hires the best hardware and marketing people in the world and holds them to the highest standards, but the software design and engineering people are left to just kind of screw around, redesign stuff for shits and giggles, and laugh as people fill their forums with bug reports and (very obvious) feature requests.
  - chongli 7mo ago
    I'm convinced that this is the fate of all successful software companies. It's not a result of arrogance or hubris or anything else like that. It's the result of turnover. Take your favourite rock band and turn over all the musicians until no one is left from the original band. Should we expect the band to continue cranking out chart-topping hits? There's one further factor that makes the situation even worse than the "Rock Band of Theseus." That's the fact that young software engineers are not interested in stewardship. They want to build their own projects, not fix bugs in someone else's. Across the software industry we see this lead to a continual churn, rewrites and redesigns no one wants, and a huge amount of wasted effort reinventing the wheel (and often making a worse wheel).
    - direwolf20 7mo ago
      There should be leadership at the top focussing the efforts of developers though. Developers wanting to make new stuff doesn't only happen because of turnover.
- jemmyw 7mo ago
  I can't quite believe how bad Apple Music is. I will say this for Apple, when I tried out Music on a brand new Mac and it didn't work properly, I got to chat to a real support person who walked me through fixing it. It shouldn't have been broken though. It shouldn't be a native app written by Apple that feels worse to use than both Spotify and YouTube music. I mean, I open it now just to see if there's anything janky and yeah. "Get 3 months for $5.99" and then below that "Get 3 months for $8.99" and you'd have to scroll and read much smaller text to see that the second one is for family - I mean that's reasonably obvious but it's weirdly unpolished. And then the play bar, which is floating around, looks unintegrated with the app, obscures the content area, and provides enabled controls that do nothing because there is no song to play. Not broken, but UX stuff that shows a lack of care.
observationist 7mo ago
It is the year of the Linux desktop. ElementaryOS is supposed to be a very clean transition environment for mac refugees. AI makes everything so much easier, Windows and Mac both have far more friction and hassle in contrast. Good luck!
- weaksauce 7mo ago
  I'm rocking cachyos(arch based though) wayland+kde and https://github.com/RedBearAK/toshy https://github.com/RedBearAK/toshy. it's great to keep the keyboard shortcuts that I'm so used to from the mac almost seamlessly. kde lets you configure pretty much everything how a mac was if you want it though it did take a month or two to get everything the way I like it. I've found that it is nice to have an operating system that is mine and not the whims of some company trying to make money off me. I don't think I'll go back unless I'm forced to for a job.
karel-3d 7mo ago
I don't have anywhere to escape. With iOS I have at least a chance with Android (even when I am locked in due to Find My, which is still the one thing that works great and keeps me at Apple). When someone (Google?) finds me a way to seamlessly find/lock my phone from my computer, my computer from phone, and they all find my wife phone and computer, and they all find my keys and my wife keys... that will be the day I escape.
Derbasti 7mo ago
Off the top of my head: Yesterday, my wife wanted to use Discord. It was right there in the applications folder. But MacOS couldn't find it. Launching it manually took minutes, for some reason. We wanted to download a clip using yt_dlp (a Python program). Terminal told us, this would require dev tools, which it doesn't. So we installed Python from python.org instead, which worked. Except, that non-blessed python could not access the internet because of some MacOS "security" feature. Another security feature requires all apps to be notarized, even the ones I built myself. This used to have a relatively easy workaround (right click, open, accept the risk). Now it needs a terminal command. I live and work in a multi-lingual environment, and have set up a keyboard shortcut to switch between the German and English keyboard. MacOS does not have a keyboard shortcut for this. But Karabiner can do it, albeit a bit jankily. Lately, the keyboard layout no longer sticks. It resets to English when I press shift. Sometimes it does work, sometimes it doesn't. This is unrelated to the aforementioned Karabiner shortcut. The German keyboard layout for MacOS on non-Apple keyboards is insane. So I made my own layout. This is relatively easy, and worked well. Except, every single OS update reinstates Apple's insane layout. Sometimes my Mac does not wake from sleep. Pressing the power button does nothing. Hitting keyboard keys does nothing. Only a long-press of the power button eventually reboots it. The power button on the Mac Studio is in an insane place of course. There is still no indication anywhere that the hard drive is getting full. There is still no simple way to reset the computer to factory conditions. Gaming is still largely impossible, even though the hardware is very capable. I have replaced TimeMachine with restic, as TimeMachine keeps resetting itself after a while. My Linux PC should arrive this week, and will replace the Mac. I've had enough. It will require wine for two apps, and a VM for two others. At this point, that's a price I'm willing to pay.
- ttepasse 7mo ago
  > I live and work in a multi-lingual environment, and have set up a keyboard shortcut to switch between the German and English keyboard. MacOS does not have a keyboard shortcut for this. MacOS has since the early OS X days the default shortcut CTRL+Space for that. It may be deactivated for newer releases. It's findable under: Settings → Keyboard → Keyboard Shortcuts → Inputsomething (Einstellungen → Tastatur → Tastaturkurzbefehle → Eingabequellen) Personally I dream of a Mac keyboard with OLED key caps for multilingual keyboard layouts.

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.
- ssl-3 7mo ago
  We seem to have a world where neither Linux, nor MacOS, nor Windows "just work". None of them have meaningful support channels for individuals. All of them have issues. They're very similar in these ways. The first of these systems is actionable: When it doesn't work, it can generally be made to work. The whole journey may be an awful affair for the entire duration, but a person can usually (not always!) get there. The other two systems are inactionable: When it doesn't work, there is no fixing it. There is no pathway, nor any journey. One can only accept that it is broken, that they are powerless to change it, and that this is the end of the road for that problem. --- There are probably healthier ways to learn acceptance than this.
  - exmadscientist 7mo ago
    And phones are even worse! I have come to hate Android, but every time I seriously look at switching to iOS, it seems Apple has chosen that time to make things even worse. Unfortunately, there's no Linux equivalent for phones. (Or at least, nothing that's easier than gentoo was in 2004. That was great for learning, but for daily use of a critical device, not so great.)
  - einpoklum 7mo ago
    > The first of these systems is actionable: When it doesn't work, it can generally be made to work. The whole journey may be an awful affair for the entire duration, but a person can usually It's also important to mention that it is more likely a person would get help along the way. And - it should also be said that there are non-Linux free operating systems, like the BSD's, for which it can also "generally be made to work". And there's the more niche HaikuOS (where I don't know if what doesn't work can be made to work, but people do use it).
  - rafaelmn 7mo ago
    The category of things that don't "just work" on a Mac for me compared to Linux and even Windows is just a class apart. You can't compare shared buffers between phones being flaky or using face time on PC to answer calls from iphone being glitchy to my browser crashing when I try to screenshare, repeatedly, on linux.
itopaloglu83 7mo ago
And yet Apple engineers are going through numerous forums and Reddit posts to gaslight people by commenting “well, it doesn’t happen to me, mine works perfectly”. They managed to mess up an entire ecosystem and they’re acting so stupid about it that I cannot believe all this software was made by Apple. There’s no elegance, no thought out user experience, no good design, it’s all stupid glass design with comical amount of padding. It all looks like it was designed and implemented by a team five over a half assed pool party. What the hell is Apple doing with its tens of thousands of engineers, if they cannot make a freaking window manager.
- vrosas 7mo ago
  It often feels like Apple hires the best hardware and marketing people in the world and holds them to the highest standards, but the software design and engineering people are left to just kind of screw around, redesign stuff for shits and giggles, and laugh as people fill their forums with bug reports and (very obvious) feature requests.
- chongli 7mo ago
  I'm convinced that this is the fate of all successful software companies. It's not a result of arrogance or hubris or anything else like that. It's the result of turnover. Take your favourite rock band and turn over all the musicians until no one is left from the original band. Should we expect the band to continue cranking out chart-topping hits? There's one further factor that makes the situation even worse than the "Rock Band of Theseus." That's the fact that young software engineers are not interested in stewardship. They want to build their own projects, not fix bugs in someone else's. Across the software industry we see this lead to a continual churn, rewrites and redesigns no one wants, and a huge amount of wasted effort reinventing the wheel (and often making a worse wheel).
  - direwolf20 7mo ago
    There should be leadership at the top focussing the efforts of developers though. Developers wanting to make new stuff doesn't only happen because of turnover.
jemmyw 7mo ago
I can't quite believe how bad Apple Music is. I will say this for Apple, when I tried out Music on a brand new Mac and it didn't work properly, I got to chat to a real support person who walked me through fixing it. It shouldn't have been broken though. It shouldn't be a native app written by Apple that feels worse to use than both Spotify and YouTube music. I mean, I open it now just to see if there's anything janky and yeah. "Get 3 months for $5.99" and then below that "Get 3 months for $8.99" and you'd have to scroll and read much smaller text to see that the second one is for family - I mean that's reasonably obvious but it's weirdly unpolished. And then the play bar, which is floating around, looks unintegrated with the app, obscures the content area, and provides enabled controls that do nothing because there is no song to play. Not broken, but UX stuff that shows a lack of care.

observationist 7mo ago

It is the year of the Linux desktop. ElementaryOS is supposed to be a very clean transition environment for mac refugees. AI makes everything so much easier, Windows and Mac both have far more friction and hassle in contrast. Good luck!

weaksauce 7mo ago
I'm rocking cachyos(arch based though) wayland+kde and https://github.com/RedBearAK/toshy https://github.com/RedBearAK/toshy. it's great to keep the keyboard shortcuts that I'm so used to from the mac almost seamlessly. kde lets you configure pretty much everything how a mac was if you want it though it did take a month or two to get everything the way I like it. I've found that it is nice to have an operating system that is mine and not the whims of some company trying to make money off me. I don't think I'll go back unless I'm forced to for a job.

karel-3d 7mo ago

I don't have anywhere to escape. With iOS I have at least a chance with Android (even when I am locked in due to Find My, which is still the one thing that works great and keeps me at Apple). When someone (Google?) finds me a way to seamlessly find/lock my phone from my computer, my computer from phone, and they all find my wife phone and computer, and they all find my keys and my wife keys... that will be the day I escape.

Derbasti 7mo ago

Off the top of my head: Yesterday, my wife wanted to use Discord. It was right there in the applications folder. But MacOS couldn't find it. Launching it manually took minutes, for some reason. We wanted to download a clip using yt_dlp (a Python program). Terminal told us, this would require dev tools, which it doesn't. So we installed Python from python.org instead, which worked. Except, that non-blessed python could not access the internet because of some MacOS "security" feature. Another security feature requires all apps to be notarized, even the ones I built myself. This used to have a relatively easy workaround (right click, open, accept the risk). Now it needs a terminal command. I live and work in a multi-lingual environment, and have set up a keyboard shortcut to switch between the German and English keyboard. MacOS does not have a keyboard shortcut for this. But Karabiner can do it, albeit a bit jankily. Lately, the keyboard layout no longer sticks. It resets to English when I press shift. Sometimes it does work, sometimes it doesn't. This is unrelated to the aforementioned Karabiner shortcut. The German keyboard layout for MacOS on non-Apple keyboards is insane. So I made my own layout. This is relatively easy, and worked well. Except, every single OS update reinstates Apple's insane layout. Sometimes my Mac does not wake from sleep. Pressing the power button does nothing. Hitting keyboard keys does nothing. Only a long-press of the power button eventually reboots it. The power button on the Mac Studio is in an insane place of course. There is still no indication anywhere that the hard drive is getting full. There is still no simple way to reset the computer to factory conditions. Gaming is still largely impossible, even though the hardware is very capable. I have replaced TimeMachine with restic, as TimeMachine keeps resetting itself after a while. My Linux PC should arrive this week, and will replace the Mac. I've had enough. It will require wine for two apps, and a VM for two others. At this point, that's a price I'm willing to pay.

ttepasse 7mo ago
> I live and work in a multi-lingual environment, and have set up a keyboard shortcut to switch between the German and English keyboard. MacOS does not have a keyboard shortcut for this. MacOS has since the early OS X days the default shortcut CTRL+Space for that. It may be deactivated for newer releases. It's findable under: Settings → Keyboard → Keyboard Shortcuts → Inputsomething (Einstellungen → Tastatur → Tastaturkurzbefehle → Eingabequellen) Personally I dream of a Mac keyboard with OLED key caps for multilingual keyboard layouts.