My MacBook Pro is nagging me to upgrade to the new OS release. It lists a bunch of new features that don’t care about. In the meantime, the following bugs (which are regressions) have been unfixed for multiple major OS versions:
When a PDF changes, Preview reloads it. It remembers the page you were on (it shows it in the page box) but doesn’t jump there. If you enter the page in the page box, it doesn’t move there because it thinks you’re there already. This worked correctly for over a decade and then broke.
The calendar service fails to sync with a CalDAV server if you have groups in your contacts. This stopped working five or so years ago, I think.
Reconnecting an external monitor used to be reliable and move all windows that were there last time it was connected back there. Now it works occasionally.
There are a lot of others, these are the first that come to mind. My favourite OS X release was 10.6: no new user-visible features, just a load of bug fixes and infrastructure improvements (this one introduced libdispatch, for example).
It’s disheartening to see core functionality in an “abandonware” state while Apple pushes new features nobody asked for. Things that should be rock-solid, just… aren’t.
It really makes you understand why some people avoid updates entirely. Snow Leopard’s focus on refinement feels like a distant memory now.
The idea of Apple OS features as abandonware is a wild idea, and yet here we are. The external monitor issue is actually terrible. I have two friends who work at Apple (neither in OS dev) and both have said that they experience the monitor issue themselves.
I was thinking about this not too long ago; there are macOS features (ex the widgets UI) that don’t seem to even exist anymore. So many examples of features I used to really like that are just abandoned.
Reconnecting an external monitor used to be reliable and move all windows that were there last time it was connected back there. Now it works occasionally.
This works flawlessly for me every single time, I use Apple Studio Display at home and a high end Dell at the office.
On the other hand, activating iMessage and FaceTime on a new MacBook machine has been a huge pain for years on end…
On the other hand, activating iMessage and FaceTime on a new MacBook machine has been a huge pain for years on end…
I can quote on that, but not with my Apple account, but with my brother’s. Coincidentally, he had less problems activating iMessage/FaceTime on an Hackintosh machine.
A variation on that which I’ve run in to is turning the monitor off and putting the laptop to sleep, and waking without moving or disconnecting it.
To avoid all windows ending up on stuck on the laptop display, I have to sleep the laptop, the power off the monitor. To restore power on the monitor, then wake the laptop. Occasionally (1 in 10 times?) it still messes up and I have to manually move windows back to the monitor display.
(This is when using dual-head mode with both the external monitor and laptop display in operation)
iCloud message sync with message keep set to forever seems to load soooo much that messages on my last laptop would be so awful to type long messages (more than 1 sentence) directly into the text box I started to write messages outside of the application, copy/paste and send the message. The delay was in seconds for me.
I’m really heartened by how many people agree that OS X 10.6 was the best.
Edited to add … hm - maybe you’re not saying it was the best OS version, just the best release strategy? I think it actually was the best OS version (or maybe 10.7 was, but that’s just a detail).
It was before Apple started wanting to make it more iPhone-like and slowly doing what Microsoft did with Windows 8 (who did it in a ‘big bang’) by making Windows Phone and Windows desktop amost indistinguishable. After Snow Leopard, Apple became a phone company and very iPhone-centric and just didn’tbother with the desktop - it became cartoonish and all flashy, not usable. That’s when I left MacOS and haven’t looked back.
Recently, Disk Utility has started showing a permissions error when I click unmount or eject on SD cards or their partitions, if the card was inserted after Disk Utility started. You have to quit and re-open Disk Utility for it to work. It didn’t use to be like that, but it is now, om two different Macs. This is very annoying for embedded development where you need to write to SD cards frequently to flash new images or installers. So unmounting/ejecting drives just randomly broke one day and I’m expecting it won’t get fixed.
Another forever-bug: when you’re on a higher refresh rate screen, the animation to switch workspaces takes more time on higher refresh rate screens. This has forced me to completely change how I use macOS to de-emphasise workspaces, because the animation is just obscenely long after I got a MacBook Pro with a 120Hz screen in 2021. Probably not a new bug, but an old bug that new hardware surfaced, and I expect it will never get fixed.
I’m also having issues with connecting to external screens only working occasionally, at least through USB-C docks.
The hardware is so damn good. I wish anyone high up at Apple cared at all about making the software good too.
Oh, there’s another one: the fstab things to not mount partitions that match a particular UUID no longer work and there doesn’t appear to be any replacement functionality (which is annoying when it’s a firmware partition that must not be written to except in a specific way, or it will sofr-brick the device).
Oh, fun! I’ve tried to find a way to disable auto mount and the only solutions I’ve found is to add individual partition UUIDs to a block list in fstab, which is useless to me since I don’t just re-use the same SD card with the same partition layout all the time, I would want to disable auto mounting completely. But it’s phenomenal to hear that they broke even that sub-par solution.
Maybe, but we’re talking about roughly 1.2 seconds from the start of the gesture until keyboard input starts going to an app on the target workspace. That’s an insane amount of delay to just force the user to sit through on a regular basis… On a 60Hz screen, the delay is less than half that (which is still pretty long, but much much better)
Not a fix, but as a workaround have you tried Accessibility > Display > Reduce Motion?
I can’t stand the normal desktop switch animation even when dialed down all the way. With that setting on, there’s still a very minor fade-type effect but it’s pretty tolerable.
Sadly, that doesn’t help at all. My issue isn’t with the animation, but with the amount of time it takes from I express my intent to switch workspace until focus switches to the new workspace. “Reduce Motion” only replaces the 1.2 second sliding animation with a 1.2 second fading animation, the wait is exactly the same.
Don’t update/downgrade to Sequoia! It’s the Windows ME of MacOS’s. After Apple support person couldn’t resolve any of the issues I had, they told me to reinstall Sequoia and then gave me instructions to upgrade to Ventura/Sonoma.
I thought Big Sur was the Windows ME of (modern) Mac OS. I have had a decent experience in Sequoia. I usually have Safari, Firefox, Chrome, Mail, Ghostty, one JetBrains thing or another (usually PyCharm Pro or Clion), Excel, Bitwarden, Preview, Fluor, Rectangle, TailScale, CleanShot, Fantastical, Ice and Choosy running pretty much constantly, plus a rotating cast of other things as I need them.
Aside from Apple Intelligence being hot garbage, (I just turn that off anyway) my main complaint about Sequoia is that sometimes, after a couple dozen dock/undock cycles (return to my desk, connect to my docking station with a 30” non-hidpi monitor, document scanner, time machine drive, smart card reader, etc.) the windows that were on my Macbook’s high resolution screen and move to my 30” when docked don’t re-scale appropriately, and I have to reboot to address that. That seems to happen every two weeks or so.
Like so many others here, I miss Snow Leopard. I thought Tiger was an excellent release, Leopard was rough, and Snow Leopard smoothed off all the rough edges of Tiger and Leopard for me.
I’d call Sequoia “subpar” if Snow Leopard is your “par”. But I don’t find that to be the case compared to Windows 11, KDE or GNOME. It mostly just stays out of my way.
Apple’s bug reporting process is so opaque it feels like shouting into the void.
And, Apple isn’t some little open source project staffed by volunteers. It’s the richest company on earth. QA is a serious job that Apple should be paying people for.
Apple’s bug reporting process is so opaque it feels like shouting into the void.
Yeah. To alleviate that somewhat (for developer-type bugs) when I was making things for Macs and iDevices most of the time, I always reported my bugs to openradar as well:
which would at least net me a little bit of feedback (along the lines of “broken for everyone or just me?”) so it felt a tiny bit less like shouting into the void.
I can’t remember on these. The CalDAV one is well known. Most of the time when I’ve reported bugs to Apple, they’ve closed them as duplicates and given no way of tracking the original bug.
No. I tried being a good user in the past but it always ended up with “the feature works as expected”. I won’t do voluntary work for a company which repeatedly shits on user feedback.
10.6 “Snow Leopard” was the last Mac OS that I could honestly say I liked. I ran it on a cheap mini laptop (a Dell I think) as a student, back when “hackintoshes” were still possible.
The thing that gives me a twitch with Apple software is that when it goes wrong it is awfully difficult to debug it, if not impossible.
Also what mad man set the ‘Facetime Reactions’ feature to ‘on’ by default? That upgrade was great I was swamped with messages asking why a confetti cannon was going off in their video during a job interview
This is what finally drove me out of the Apple ecosystem after almost 20 years. Paying premium prices for things that no longer “just work”, which Apple cannot/doesn’t care to fix, and are so opaque that they’re impossible to debug on your own.
If I’m going to be trapped in a world of flaky software, I don’t need to pay the Apple tax for that! I’ll be much happier with Linux where at least I stand a chance of fixing my own problems
The thing that gives me a twitch with Apple software is that when it goes wrong it is awfully difficult to debug it, if not impossible.
My last trip to the Apple Store concluded with a Genius opening a ticket with Apple. Even support personnel don’t have tools to properly support software.
Also what mad man set the ‘Facetime Reactions’ feature to ‘on’ by default?
So right after that came out, I had to fire someone help someone exit the org, and accidentally set off fireworks on the call. When I’m on my deathbed, that, and his reaction, will still be haunting me.
If it makes you feel any better, I’ve triggered both the heart emoji while describing a complicated engineering thing to a client and the balloons during a large group call at a point where it was highly inappropriate. At least the balloon thing brought a bit of levity to an otherwise serious discussion.
I enjoy the new “iPhone mirroring” feature in the latest OS, but it will stop working randomly, and when it does, there’s no way to debug why or get it to work again. You just have to hope it works tomorrow.
It seems like Apple went from wanting the software to be “insanely great” to “good enough”. It’s not bad enough that people talk about switching en masse since the alternatives don’t seem much better. Like Windows/Linux laptops still struggle to sleep-to-hibernate reliably in the backpack. Windows is all in on stuffing the OS full of ads, and Apple has started doing it too. At least Linux improves over time but still has basic stuff wrong like stuttering audio after waking from sleep on my device (needs a reboot to fix for me).
It seems like Apple went from wanting the software to be “insanely great” to “good enough”.
And sometimes even “meh”.
It’s not bad enough that people talk about switching en masse since the alternatives don’t seem much better.
That’s the sad truth, the other options are non-viable to me, so I’m tied to Apple, but I’m starting to feel fed up about the lack of care from people high up at Apple.
Apple has started doing it too.
Mainly for their services in contrast to Microsoft/Windows, but it’s getting annoying quickly.
I ran Linux as my main desktop/laptop operating system, but all those little broken things are not what you’d want while presenting in front people, working for your day job or even studying for University courses.
Windows does, but on a lot of hardware Linux does not have issues with sleep these days – I haven’t had any issues with Ryzen laptops going to sleep, even “modern standby” ones.
Got a brand new ThinkPad (T14 Gen 5 AMD) and every time the laptop resumes (or does a cold start), I have to unplug and replug the display (USB-C DP-Alt).
Aside from this big annoyance, so far so good. When I had an AMD ThinkPad four years ago, the fingerprint reader of trackpoint would often not come back after resume. No such issues so far…
My current axe to grind: on M-series Macs, when I plug a monitor in via HDMI, it uses YCbCr instead of RGB, giving the monitor this pervasive hazy tint that is perceptible even with Night Shift on.
I have to use BetterDisplay to force it to RGB every time I connect to the monitor. This should be something I can set on a per-monitor basis.
Unfortunately I can’t use DisplayPort because my Caldigit TS3 Plus seems to have difficulty passing DP1.2 signals over when variable refresh rates are selected. And guess what macOS likes to default to there, as well?
I believe it defaults to Y′CbCr only when a 10 bpc mode becomes available thanks to it, even if this means dropping down to 4:2:2 subsampling. Because 10 > 8 of course.
This happens because of bandwidth restrictions and because RGB (or Y′CbC 4:4:4) uses 3xN bpp and 4:2:2 uses 2xN bpp. So 20 bpp < 24 bpp and it’s “10-bit” so macos considers it a win-win.
Thank you for pointing out BetterDisplay. I thought that’s just how HDMI displays looked on M–Series Macs under MacOS.
It will join the rest of the applications I have to use to make MacOS usable. (AutoRaise, Caffeine, MiddleClick, RDM, Rectangle, SaneSideButtons/SensibleSideButtons)
Can’t forget how each app has its own updater, and that those updaters will steal focus or at least have the anxiety-inducing bounce animation. (How does macOS not have focus stealing prevention?)
The bounce can be disabled in accessibility settings. Also AutoRaise can prevent focus stealing by forcing the window that the mouse is over to remain focused. But ideally auto-updaters and add-on apps would not be required, but that’s why I use linux outside of work.
Fascinating, I have 2 different models of 27” Dells, one via HDMI and one via HDMI in a small USB-C dock.
Both seem to be YCbCr (according to their OSDs) and I haven’t noticed anything wrong. I suppose they wouldn’t switch when I have them on the other computer, but it’s mDP and… not sure, DP probably
I have to use BetterDisplay to force it to RGB every time I connect to the monitor.
What drove me away during last foray into the macOS ecosystem was the beginnings of this trend. I had last used then-still-named OS X during Snow Leopard and Lion, and when I gave it a go in 2014 (I think Yosemite?), I found a bunch of my standard setup tweaks and tasks were no longer available unless you paid for some extra app store tool.
A bunch of my personal preferences went from being configurable options in a menu, to being hidden settings you could only enable via CLI, to requiring a third-party app I needed to install (and often to pay for). I am sad to hear that the trend has not abated.
The recent sequoia updates that forcibly reenabled apple intelligence on my macs were especially infuriating. I do not want those features anywhere near my work, but they decided to ignore a user preference and opt me back in.
I want an insanely great system to exist again, and I’m open to suggestions.
It looks to me like no one attempts to compete with Apple at their user experience game—consistent behavior, minimum surprise, things just working. Enjoying popularity and a lack of opposition in the space they’ve carved out, they no longer have to make their systems insanely great for many of us users to continue thinking they’re the best. Eventually that has meant they’re merely the least bad. A lot of the time I’m happy enough, but sometimes I feel stuck with all this. I wonder what battles they fight internally to keep the dream of the menu bar alive. But dammit, the same key shortcuts copy and paste in every app.
The last time I used Gnome, I mouse-scrolled through a settings screen, snagged on a horizontal slider control, adjusted the setting with no clue what the original value was, and found there’s no setting I could use to avoid that. The last time I used Windows, I was again in the system settings app but found it didn’t have a setting I remembered. I learned Control Panel still exists too, and the half the settings still live there. My Mac, on the other hand, is insanely OK.
If you’re open to suggestions, have you tried Haiku before? It, too, has the same key shortcuts copy/pasting in every app (even when you use “Windows” shortcuts mode, i.e. Ctrl not Alt as the main accelerator key). We’re not quite as full-featured or polished yet as macOS was/is, but we’d like to think the potential is there in ways it’s not for the “Linux desktop” :)
Thanks; I have eyed Haiku with interest from time to time! It does strike me as in line with some of my values. Maybe I’ll give it a more earnest try.
Update, impressions after a few hours of uptime: This is nice. I could get comfortable here. It’s really cohesive and all the orthogonal combinable parts feel well chosen. The spatial Finder is alive and well. I was especially impressed when I figured out how a plain text file was able to have rich text styling, while remaining perfectly functional with cat. Someone really must be steering this ship because it emphatically doesn’t suck.
Thanks for your kind words! Some of the “orthogonal combinable” parts (“styled text in extended attributes” and spatial Tracker included) are ideas we originally inherited from BeOS (but of course we’ve continued that philosophy). And we actually don’t have a single “project leader” role; the project direction is determined by the development team (with the very occasional formal vote to make final decisions; but more often there is sufficient consensus that this simply is not needed.) But we definitely is a have a real focus on cohesiveness and “doing things well”, which sometimes leads to strife and development taking longer than it does with other projects (I wrote about this a few years back in another comment on Lobsters – the article that comment was in a discussion thread for, about Haiku’s package manager is also excellent and worth a read), but in the end leads to a much more cohesive and holistic system design and implementation, which makes it all worth it, I think.
But dammit, the same key shortcuts copy and paste in every app.
So much this. I am continually disappointed that both Gnome and KDE managed to fuck this up. Given that they both started as conceptual clones of Windows (more-or-less) I guess it isn’t surprising, but still
A minimal Linux setup can be great. You have few components that are really well maintained, so nothing breaks. It also moves slowly. My setup is essentially the same as back in 2009: A WM (XMonad), a web browser (Firefox), and an editor (Emacs). When I need some other program for a one-off task, I launch an ephemeral Nix shell. If you prefer Wayland, Hyprland can give you many niceties offered by desktop environments, like gestures, but it is still really minimal.
Nix is really cool for keeping a system clean like that. I bounced off NixOS because persisting the user settings I cared about started to remind me of moving a cloud service definition to Terraform. I do love the GC’ed momentary tool workspaces.
If Emacs was my happy place, I think your setup would be really pleasing. But I am a GUI person, to the degree that tiling window managers make my nose wrinkle. Windows are meant to breathe and crowd, I think. That’s related to the main reason I want apps to work similarly, because I’ll be gathering several of them around a task.
I want to believe there is a world in which a critical mass of FOSS apps are behaviorally cohesive and free of pesky snags, but I have my doubts that I’d find it in Linux world, simply because the culture biases toward variety and whim, and away from central guidance and restraint. Maybe I just don’t know where to look. BSDs look nice this way in terms of their base systems, but maybe not all the way to their GUIs.
For the past 6 months we’ve been banging our heads against APFS running out of disk space on our CI while showing 60GB free space. And I mean, it runs out of disk space hard, can’t even save the zsh history.
This started with Sonoma. Upgrading to the latest point release made no difference. The internet is littered with what looks like the same problem and the suggested fix is always to empty your trash (can’t you read, I still have tens, even hundreds of GB free, I shouldn’t need to clean my trash). My current theory is that APFS is not able to keep up with recycling some internal garbage and reports it as generic ENOSPC. Mac OS, at least from the CI perspective, is worse than Windows.
P.S. If anyone has any clue what’s going on with APFS space issue, I am all ears.
EDIT: Forgot to add, the bizarre thing is that once you login into such a machine, it’s no longer out of space and you can write as much as you need. This is the reason for my “cannot recycle garbage fast enough” theory.
I do a lot of low level filesystem development and I’ve hit this frequently. It’s like it’s caching globally some free count and it gets desynced and freaks out. Very annoying.
Nope, looked into this: there are no snapshots besides the standard few and backup is disabled. We’ve even monitored if any transient snapshots are being created during the CI run but didn’t see anything suspicious.
The only way I know of to run out of space when you have plenty of space is to run out of inodes. If logging in fixes the problem, that suggests some per-user process such as a LaunchAgent is doing something to fix the problem. And in fact there is a LaunchAgent that deletes caches (/System/Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.cache_delete.plist), so perhaps you’ve somehow accumulated so much cache that you’ve run out of inodes? I can’t imagine what might be making so many cache files though.
Thanks for the information, much appreciated. I am not familiar with the cache files you are talking about (need to do some research) but I can tell you what we do: we compile (e.g., with Apple Clang) a large number of files and there are quite a few intermediate files being created and deleted in the process by the build system.
So we definitely don’t create any cache files ourselves but it’s possible Apple does automatically (maybe some kind of search indexing).
Another problem with the cache file theory is that we monitored disk space as the build progresses and there is always plenty of free space reported. But it’s possible APFS somehow does not count cache files towards usage.
You monitored disk space, but did you monitor inode count? If you have plenty of disk space but are getting ENOSPC then that suggests you’ve run out of inodes.
I have a good friend that I talk to about this at least once a month. I’ve had bigger issues on iOS, but definitely have some on MacOS.
for years, if I had Bluetooth connected and used speakerphone, iOS would absolutely fight with me to play music on the speaker too. Just all out battle to stop it from playing music. Sometimes it was just easier to disconnect from say the car.
He and I went thru a period where chatting on Facetime would sometimes ring, sometimes drop, sometimes connect and then drop, sometimes connect with no audio, sometimes I would hear his voice before we connected (as in I would hear his voice and then the connection sound play) or some combination between those.
My current phone has a 1-15s stutter when I open the camera sometimes. So moments that I’d like to get a picture of just end up being pictures of the floor or the moment having passed, because the camera app froze
I can’t search my messages completely because my phone hasn’t finished indexing them… it’s been over a year
On MacOS at work, some combination of profiles means that whenever I use the System Settings app to view my “at login” items, it will randomly crash
And power management is abysmal. Mac laptops especially seem to need 10 minutes to think about starting up if you let the power get below 1-2%, even if you… plugin right then. This is a pain for work laptops.
I think next phone cycle I’m just going to get the cheapest version possible, and I don’t think I’ll buy an Apple laptop again (I’ve never bought any of my MBPs, I got them from work refreshes, but my 2019 MacBook Air just went out of support, which is annoying). The combination of “fast” OS support dropping for decently new machines and the quality of the software being terrible means I’d like to remove some of this pain from costing so much, at least for me.
My current phone has a 1-15s stutter when I open the camera sometimes. So moments that I’d like to get a picture of just end up being pictures of the floor or the moment having passed, because the camera app froze
I literally did this the other day. I was like wtf? for an I have a “Pro” model which is literally marketed/targeting professional photographers. They would throw this phone in the trash if their photo wasn’t taken at the exact moment they wanted it. This should be embarrassing for apple.
I can’t search my messages completely because my phone hasn’t finished indexing them… it’s been over a year
Even if you finished indexing them you can only search globally there is no way to search a single conversation. Which is wild to me in 2025.
for years, if I had Bluetooth connected and used speakerphone, iOS would absolutely fight with me to play music on the speaker too. Just all out battle to stop it from playing music.
I don’t know if it’s the same issue, but this happens pretty often to me:
I play something in Apple Music on my MacBook Pro connected to my AirPods Pro, then pause it and fold my laptop away
I play something in Apple Music on my iPhone (also on my AirPods Pro), then pause it and put my phone away
I open my laptop again, not intending to play music, but Apple Music is bouncing its Dock icon and has opened two or three small error-message windows telling me that to play “Song Name” I have to stop playing on another device.
This feels like a good chance to ask: has anybody else been completely unable to use DTrace (or anything built on DTrace such as dtruss) on M2 Pro/Max? I’m surprised that nobody seems to be talking abobut it anywhere, but these (in my opinion) rather critical tools appear completely broken. Running any dtrace program whatsoever instantly causes my entire system to freeze until I forcibly power it off. There’s a thread about it here where an Apple developer replied, but they seem have been wrong about the scope of the issue, which a number of people pointed out in the comments, but there hasn’t been an update in quite a while.
At least it led to me discovering the wonderful world of eBPF on Linux.
Yup, the whole dtrace is broken since the M hardware. I reported it as FB12061147 3 years ago and it basically just got a “yes, we know” comment. I have no idea how Apple devs can internally debug anything without it. There’s just no way of doing systemwide syscall profiles anymore as far as I can tell.
I find it amusing that most of the devs I know use their macbooks to develop on a remote machine, or for Linux, or for VM powered languages. Almost no one develops directly on a macbook for darwin, as debugging is impossible (at least for standard unix tools). Dtrace has not been working for more than a decade, requiring one to disable SIP and other inconveniences. Logging became so convoluted as well.
Yup, it really sucks (M1 Max for me). I find Instruments kind of confusing, but it at least doesn’t completely hang my system if I’ve done the incredibly uncommon operation of putting my system to sleep even once since boot.
I abandoned Apple back in 2020. It was when they did the whole csam thing. I do have a Mac at work, which is better than Windows, but I always make it a point. Never to update until the next year for any given OS. So if I were to do the new one it would be in June or July. This seems to avoid a lot of the problems. On my from theater PC. I use Debian. Even though x windows may seem old, the KDE and experience” just works “. I don’t have any raise many problems as in Windows, or OSX. Just a zoom and or web browsing machine. It’s the best machine I’ve ever had.
I didn’t like the fact that they would be scanning my pictures. Even though I don’t have any such material in my library, guilty until proven innocent simply goes against my ethos.
They were only scanning files that would be uploaded to iCloud and this was before advanced data protection was introduced so icloud could’ve scanned them anyway
The impression I get is that ever since Steve Jobs died, the quality at Apple has decreased. Very slowly at first, but now at a greater rate. I think Steve Jobs had the power to say “No” to any release he felt didn’t meet his expectations, and not get threatened by the board of Apple. A similar thing happened to Apple in the 90s when Jobs wasn’t there—Apple became rudderless and quality went down.
Somehow, I suspect that Apple isn’t Apple without Steve Jobs.
Tim Cook’s only job is to make number go up. Why should he care about any of these complaints if they don’t affect the stock price? Normal CEOs don’t care about product for its own sake at all; Jobs was practically sui generis in that respect.
It turns out the year of the Linux desktop won’t be a result of free desktop environments catching up to macOS; it’ll be a result of macOS regressing below the level of free desktops ;-P
(Seriously: this already happened with Windows many years ago. I switched from Windows NT (!) to Linux (Red Hat, IIRC?) at work many years ago and it was faster, smoother, more stable (!), and more feature-rich.)
I can’t find the source of it but there was a line floating around like “They promised me that they would make computers as easy to use as making a telephone call. They’ve succeeded! I can no longer figure out how to make a telephone call.”
When it comes to software development, something started going wrong around the year 2000 or so. Everything started becoming much slower, more bloated, and more buggy. It’s been getting worse and worse every year since then.
This isn’t nostalgia or rose tinted glasses talking. I’ve got old stuff that’s fast, lean, and very stable, and does just about all the same “stuff.”
It was around 2005 that CPUs stop getting faster and the only thing that has increased since then are the number of CPU cores, memory (which hasn’t kept up with CPU speeds) and disk (which also pretty much stalled at memory speeds). I’m guessing it is taking a bit of time for the world to catch on that computers aren’t getting faster like they used to.
My 4 year old or whatever M1 with a fresh install can’t hardly handle the mouse moving across the screen. Every aspect of the machine has rendering jank, weirdly except for when a video is playing.
It’s actually crazy how nearly unusable it is just a few years after buying it.
I don’t want to be an Apple apologist (using both macOS and Linux), but a lot of family/friends are not upgrading their M1/M1 Pro Macs, because it’s still very fast and they don’t see the need to upgrade. A subset of them would update every 1 or 2 years in the Intel days.
It sounds like there’s something else going on here. I use an M1 heavily every day, as do a few other people I know, with no issues like this. It still feels very fast and responsive to me.
Gonna chime in too and say that my 4 year old M1 MacBook Pro is still performing like a champ. I suspect there’s something faulty with your hardware so it would be worth getting it checked out.
I just recently tried GNOME 45, after last using GNOME 2.
It felt like what macOS should be. It has all the nice windowing and tiling out of the box (usually buy Magnet for this). All the convenient hotkeys. Super clean and non-buggy file, app, setting management. Clean fonts.
Now I install macOS and I get unwanted apps. Unwanted upgrades. Dumb cloud stuff cluttering the settings and pestering me to sign in.
I use GNOME on my Linux machines, my primary annoyances are: (1) removing menus in favor of hamburger menus; (2) removing support for system tray icons, luckily it still works with the AppIndicator extension, but how you can remove something so fundamental is beyond me.
Aside from that it’s very clean and not in the way. And with two experimental flag even fractional scaling for Wayland and XWayland applications work.
The extent to which macOS and iOS aggressively hawk recurring revenue streams for Apple is underappreciated. As a Linux user who also has a Windows PC, Microsoft’s doing it as well.
The incentives are just not aligned in the user’s favor with commercial end-user software.
Airplane mode on my iPhone was broken for multiple iOS releases (not sure if it still is). I’d have to toggle it back and forth a few times to make it stick. Seems like they’d be testing such basic functionality but apparently not.
My MacBook Pro is nagging me to upgrade to the new OS release. It lists a bunch of new features that don’t care about. In the meantime, the following bugs (which are regressions) have been unfixed for multiple major OS versions:
There are a lot of others, these are the first that come to mind. My favourite OS X release was 10.6: no new user-visible features, just a load of bug fixes and infrastructure improvements (this one introduced libdispatch, for example).
It’s disheartening to see core functionality in an “abandonware” state while Apple pushes new features nobody asked for. Things that should be rock-solid, just… aren’t.
It really makes you understand why some people avoid updates entirely. Snow Leopard’s focus on refinement feels like a distant memory now.
The idea of Apple OS features as abandonware is a wild idea, and yet here we are. The external monitor issue is actually terrible. I have two friends who work at Apple (neither in OS dev) and both have said that they experience the monitor issue themselves.
It is one thing when a company ignores bugs reported by its customers.
It is another thing when a company ignores bugs reported by its own employees that are also customer-facing.
When I worked for a FAANG, they released stuff early internally as part of dogfooding programs to seek input and bug reports before issues hit users.
Sounds good, just that “you’re not the target audience” became a meme because so many bug reports and concerns were shut down with that response.
I was thinking about this not too long ago; there are macOS features (ex the widgets UI) that don’t seem to even exist anymore. So many examples of features I used to really like that are just abandoned.
This works flawlessly for me every single time, I use Apple Studio Display at home and a high end Dell at the office.
On the other hand, activating iMessage and FaceTime on a new MacBook machine has been a huge pain for years on end…
I can quote on that, but not with my Apple account, but with my brother’s. Coincidentally, he had less problems activating iMessage/FaceTime on an Hackintosh machine.
A variation on that which I’ve run in to is turning the monitor off and putting the laptop to sleep, and waking without moving or disconnecting it.
To avoid all windows ending up on stuck on the laptop display, I have to sleep the laptop, the power off the monitor. To restore power on the monitor, then wake the laptop. Occasionally (1 in 10 times?) it still messes up and I have to manually move windows back to the monitor display.
(This is when using dual-head mode with both the external monitor and laptop display in operation)
iCloud message sync with message keep set to forever seems to load soooo much that messages on my last laptop would be so awful to type long messages (more than 1 sentence) directly into the text box I started to write messages outside of the application, copy/paste and send the message. The delay was in seconds for me.
I’m really heartened by how many people agree that OS X 10.6 was the best.
Edited to add … hm - maybe you’re not saying it was the best OS version, just the best release strategy? I think it actually was the best OS version (or maybe 10.7 was, but that’s just a detail).
Lion was hot garbage. It showed potential (if you ignored the workflow regressions) but it was awful.
10.8 fixed many of lion’s issues and was rather good.
Snow Leopard was definitely peak macOS.
Are there people who still use 10.6? I wonder what would be missing compared to current MacOS. Can it run a current Firefox? Zoom?
It would be pretty hard to run 10.6 for something other than novelty, the root certs are probably all expired, and you definitely can’t run any sort of modern Firefox on it, the last version of FF to support 10.6 was ESR 45 released in 2016: https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2016/04/29/update-on-firefox-support-for-os-x/
I know there are people keeping Windows 7 usable despite lack of upstream support; it would be cool if that existed for 10.6 but it sounds like no.
Maybe 10.6 could still be useful for professional video/audio/photo editing software, the type that wasn’t subscription based.
It was before Apple started wanting to make it more iPhone-like and slowly doing what Microsoft did with Windows 8 (who did it in a ‘big bang’) by making Windows Phone and Windows desktop amost indistinguishable. After Snow Leopard, Apple became a phone company and very iPhone-centric and just didn’tbother with the desktop - it became cartoonish and all flashy, not usable. That’s when I left MacOS and haven’t looked back.
Recently, Disk Utility has started showing a permissions error when I click unmount or eject on SD cards or their partitions, if the card was inserted after Disk Utility started. You have to quit and re-open Disk Utility for it to work. It didn’t use to be like that, but it is now, om two different Macs. This is very annoying for embedded development where you need to write to SD cards frequently to flash new images or installers. So unmounting/ejecting drives just randomly broke one day and I’m expecting it won’t get fixed.
Another forever-bug: when you’re on a higher refresh rate screen, the animation to switch workspaces takes more time on higher refresh rate screens. This has forced me to completely change how I use macOS to de-emphasise workspaces, because the animation is just obscenely long after I got a MacBook Pro with a 120Hz screen in 2021. Probably not a new bug, but an old bug that new hardware surfaced, and I expect it will never get fixed.
I’m also having issues with connecting to external screens only working occasionally, at least through USB-C docks.
The hardware is so damn good. I wish anyone high up at Apple cared at all about making the software good too.
Oh, there’s another one: the fstab things to not mount partitions that match a particular UUID no longer work and there doesn’t appear to be any replacement functionality (which is annoying when it’s a firmware partition that must not be written to except in a specific way, or it will sofr-brick the device).
Oh, fun! I’ve tried to find a way to disable auto mount and the only solutions I’ve found is to add individual partition UUIDs to a block list in fstab, which is useless to me since I don’t just re-use the same SD card with the same partition layout all the time, I would want to disable auto mounting completely. But it’s phenomenal to hear that they broke even that sub-par solution.
Maybe it’s an intended “feature”, because 120Hz enabled iPhones and iPads have the same behavior.
Maybe, but we’re talking about roughly 1.2 seconds from the start of the gesture until keyboard input starts going to an app on the target workspace. That’s an insane amount of delay to just force the user to sit through on a regular basis… On a 60Hz screen, the delay is less than half that (which is still pretty long, but much much better)
Not a fix, but as a workaround have you tried Accessibility > Display > Reduce Motion?
I can’t stand the normal desktop switch animation even when dialed down all the way. With that setting on, there’s still a very minor fade-type effect but it’s pretty tolerable.
Sadly, that doesn’t help at all. My issue isn’t with the animation, but with the amount of time it takes from I express my intent to switch workspace until focus switches to the new workspace. “Reduce Motion” only replaces the 1.2 second sliding animation with a 1.2 second fading animation, the wait is exactly the same.
Don’t update/downgrade to Sequoia! It’s the Windows ME of MacOS’s. After Apple support person couldn’t resolve any of the issues I had, they told me to reinstall Sequoia and then gave me instructions to upgrade to Ventura/Sonoma.
I thought Big Sur was the Windows ME of (modern) Mac OS. I have had a decent experience in Sequoia. I usually have Safari, Firefox, Chrome, Mail, Ghostty, one JetBrains thing or another (usually PyCharm Pro or Clion), Excel, Bitwarden, Preview, Fluor, Rectangle, TailScale, CleanShot, Fantastical, Ice and Choosy running pretty much constantly, plus a rotating cast of other things as I need them.
Aside from Apple Intelligence being hot garbage, (I just turn that off anyway) my main complaint about Sequoia is that sometimes, after a couple dozen dock/undock cycles (return to my desk, connect to my docking station with a 30” non-hidpi monitor, document scanner, time machine drive, smart card reader, etc.) the windows that were on my Macbook’s high resolution screen and move to my 30” when docked don’t re-scale appropriately, and I have to reboot to address that. That seems to happen every two weeks or so.
Like so many others here, I miss Snow Leopard. I thought Tiger was an excellent release, Leopard was rough, and Snow Leopard smoothed off all the rough edges of Tiger and Leopard for me.
I’d call Sequoia “subpar” if Snow Leopard is your “par”. But I don’t find that to be the case compared to Windows 11, KDE or GNOME. It mostly just stays out of my way.
Have you ever submitted these regressions to Apple through a support form or such?
Apple’s bug reporting process is so opaque it feels like shouting into the void.
And, Apple isn’t some little open source project staffed by volunteers. It’s the richest company on earth. QA is a serious job that Apple should be paying people for.
Yeah. To alleviate that somewhat (for developer-type bugs) when I was making things for Macs and iDevices most of the time, I always reported my bugs to openradar as well:
https://openradar.appspot.com/page/1
which would at least net me a little bit of feedback (along the lines of “broken for everyone or just me?”) so it felt a tiny bit less like shouting into the void.
I can’t remember on these. The CalDAV one is well known. Most of the time when I’ve reported bugs to Apple, they’ve closed them as duplicates and given no way of tracking the original bug.
No. I tried being a good user in the past but it always ended up with “the feature works as expected”. I won’t do voluntary work for a company which repeatedly shits on user feedback.
I wonder if this means that tests have been red for years, or that there are no tests for such core functionality.
Sometimes we are the tests, and yet the radars go unread
10.6 “Snow Leopard” was the last Mac OS that I could honestly say I liked. I ran it on a cheap mini laptop (a Dell I think) as a student, back when “hackintoshes” were still possible.
The thing that gives me a twitch with Apple software is that when it goes wrong it is awfully difficult to debug it, if not impossible.
Also what mad man set the ‘Facetime Reactions’ feature to ‘on’ by default? That upgrade was great I was swamped with messages asking why a confetti cannon was going off in their video during a job interview
This is what finally drove me out of the Apple ecosystem after almost 20 years. Paying premium prices for things that no longer “just work”, which Apple cannot/doesn’t care to fix, and are so opaque that they’re impossible to debug on your own.
If I’m going to be trapped in a world of flaky software, I don’t need to pay the Apple tax for that! I’ll be much happier with Linux where at least I stand a chance of fixing my own problems
My last trip to the Apple Store concluded with a Genius opening a ticket with Apple. Even support personnel don’t have tools to properly support software.
So right after that came out, I had to
fire someonehelp someone exit the org, and accidentally set off fireworks on the call. When I’m on my deathbed, that, and his reaction, will still be haunting me.If it makes you feel any better, I’ve triggered both the heart emoji while describing a complicated engineering thing to a client and the balloons during a large group call at a point where it was highly inappropriate. At least the balloon thing brought a bit of levity to an otherwise serious discussion.
I enjoy the new “iPhone mirroring” feature in the latest OS, but it will stop working randomly, and when it does, there’s no way to debug why or get it to work again. You just have to hope it works tomorrow.
Not only that, but if you turn it off, it’ll nag you with notifications every time an app starts using the webcam
It seems like Apple went from wanting the software to be “insanely great” to “good enough”. It’s not bad enough that people talk about switching en masse since the alternatives don’t seem much better. Like Windows/Linux laptops still struggle to sleep-to-hibernate reliably in the backpack. Windows is all in on stuffing the OS full of ads, and Apple has started doing it too. At least Linux improves over time but still has basic stuff wrong like stuttering audio after waking from sleep on my device (needs a reboot to fix for me).
And sometimes even “meh”.
That’s the sad truth, the other options are non-viable to me, so I’m tied to Apple, but I’m starting to feel fed up about the lack of care from people high up at Apple.
Mainly for their services in contrast to Microsoft/Windows, but it’s getting annoying quickly.
I ran Linux as my main desktop/laptop operating system, but all those little broken things are not what you’d want while presenting in front people, working for your day job or even studying for University courses.
Windows does, but on a lot of hardware Linux does not have issues with sleep these days – I haven’t had any issues with Ryzen laptops going to sleep, even “modern standby” ones.
Got a brand new ThinkPad (T14 Gen 5 AMD) and every time the laptop resumes (or does a cold start), I have to unplug and replug the display (USB-C DP-Alt).
Aside from this big annoyance, so far so good. When I had an AMD ThinkPad four years ago, the fingerprint reader of trackpoint would often not come back after resume. No such issues so far…
I have yet to be able to resume my T14 gen 4 AMD from sleep…
My current axe to grind: on M-series Macs, when I plug a monitor in via HDMI, it uses YCbCr instead of RGB, giving the monitor this pervasive hazy tint that is perceptible even with Night Shift on.
I have to use BetterDisplay to force it to RGB every time I connect to the monitor. This should be something I can set on a per-monitor basis.
Unfortunately I can’t use DisplayPort because my Caldigit TS3 Plus seems to have difficulty passing DP1.2 signals over when variable refresh rates are selected. And guess what macOS likes to default to there, as well?
I believe it defaults to Y′CbCr only when a 10 bpc mode becomes available thanks to it, even if this means dropping down to 4:2:2 subsampling. Because 10 > 8 of course. This happens because of bandwidth restrictions and because RGB (or Y′CbC 4:4:4) uses 3xN bpp and 4:2:2 uses 2xN bpp. So 20 bpp < 24 bpp and it’s “10-bit” so macos considers it a win-win.
Thank you for pointing out BetterDisplay. I thought that’s just how HDMI displays looked on M–Series Macs under MacOS.
It will join the rest of the applications I have to use to make MacOS usable. (AutoRaise, Caffeine, MiddleClick,
RDM, Rectangle, SaneSideButtons/SensibleSideButtons)Can’t forget how each app has its own updater, and that those updaters will steal focus or at least have the anxiety-inducing bounce animation. (How does macOS not have focus stealing prevention?)
The bounce can be disabled in accessibility settings. Also AutoRaise can prevent focus stealing by forcing the window that the mouse is over to remain focused. But ideally auto-updaters and add-on apps would not be required, but that’s why I use linux outside of work.
Fascinating, I have 2 different models of 27” Dells, one via HDMI and one via HDMI in a small USB-C dock.
Both seem to be YCbCr (according to their OSDs) and I haven’t noticed anything wrong. I suppose they wouldn’t switch when I have them on the other computer, but it’s mDP and… not sure, DP probably
What drove me away during last foray into the macOS ecosystem was the beginnings of this trend. I had last used then-still-named OS X during Snow Leopard and Lion, and when I gave it a go in 2014 (I think Yosemite?), I found a bunch of my standard setup tweaks and tasks were no longer available unless you paid for some extra app store tool.
A bunch of my personal preferences went from being configurable options in a menu, to being hidden settings you could only enable via CLI, to requiring a third-party app I needed to install (and often to pay for). I am sad to hear that the trend has not abated.
The recent sequoia updates that forcibly reenabled apple intelligence on my macs were especially infuriating. I do not want those features anywhere near my work, but they decided to ignore a user preference and opt me back in.
I want an insanely great system to exist again, and I’m open to suggestions.
It looks to me like no one attempts to compete with Apple at their user experience game—consistent behavior, minimum surprise, things just working. Enjoying popularity and a lack of opposition in the space they’ve carved out, they no longer have to make their systems insanely great for many of us users to continue thinking they’re the best. Eventually that has meant they’re merely the least bad. A lot of the time I’m happy enough, but sometimes I feel stuck with all this. I wonder what battles they fight internally to keep the dream of the menu bar alive. But dammit, the same key shortcuts copy and paste in every app.
The last time I used Gnome, I mouse-scrolled through a settings screen, snagged on a horizontal slider control, adjusted the setting with no clue what the original value was, and found there’s no setting I could use to avoid that. The last time I used Windows, I was again in the system settings app but found it didn’t have a setting I remembered. I learned Control Panel still exists too, and the half the settings still live there. My Mac, on the other hand, is insanely OK.
If you’re open to suggestions, have you tried Haiku before? It, too, has the same key shortcuts copy/pasting in every app (even when you use “Windows” shortcuts mode, i.e. Ctrl not Alt as the main accelerator key). We’re not quite as full-featured or polished yet as macOS was/is, but we’d like to think the potential is there in ways it’s not for the “Linux desktop” :)
Thanks; I have eyed Haiku with interest from time to time! It does strike me as in line with some of my values. Maybe I’ll give it a more earnest try.
Update, impressions after a few hours of uptime: This is nice. I could get comfortable here. It’s really cohesive and all the orthogonal combinable parts feel well chosen. The spatial Finder is alive and well. I was especially impressed when I figured out how a plain text file was able to have rich text styling, while remaining perfectly functional with cat. Someone really must be steering this ship because it emphatically doesn’t suck.
Thanks for your kind words! Some of the “orthogonal combinable” parts (“styled text in extended attributes” and spatial Tracker included) are ideas we originally inherited from BeOS (but of course we’ve continued that philosophy). And we actually don’t have a single “project leader” role; the project direction is determined by the development team (with the very occasional formal vote to make final decisions; but more often there is sufficient consensus that this simply is not needed.) But we definitely is a have a real focus on cohesiveness and “doing things well”, which sometimes leads to strife and development taking longer than it does with other projects (I wrote about this a few years back in another comment on Lobsters – the article that comment was in a discussion thread for, about Haiku’s package manager is also excellent and worth a read), but in the end leads to a much more cohesive and holistic system design and implementation, which makes it all worth it, I think.
I’ll read up, thanks!
So much this. I am continually disappointed that both Gnome and KDE managed to fuck this up. Given that they both started as conceptual clones of Windows (more-or-less) I guess it isn’t surprising, but still
On the other hand, having an entire Super key available for essentially whatever you want to do with it is… super.
A minimal Linux setup can be great. You have few components that are really well maintained, so nothing breaks. It also moves slowly. My setup is essentially the same as back in 2009: A WM (XMonad), a web browser (Firefox), and an editor (Emacs). When I need some other program for a one-off task, I launch an ephemeral Nix shell. If you prefer Wayland, Hyprland can give you many niceties offered by desktop environments, like gestures, but it is still really minimal.
Nix is really cool for keeping a system clean like that. I bounced off NixOS because persisting the user settings I cared about started to remind me of moving a cloud service definition to Terraform. I do love the GC’ed momentary tool workspaces.
If Emacs was my happy place, I think your setup would be really pleasing. But I am a GUI person, to the degree that tiling window managers make my nose wrinkle. Windows are meant to breathe and crowd, I think. That’s related to the main reason I want apps to work similarly, because I’ll be gathering several of them around a task.
I want to believe there is a world in which a critical mass of FOSS apps are behaviorally cohesive and free of pesky snags, but I have my doubts that I’d find it in Linux world, simply because the culture biases toward variety and whim, and away from central guidance and restraint. Maybe I just don’t know where to look. BSDs look nice this way in terms of their base systems, but maybe not all the way to their GUIs.
For the past 6 months we’ve been banging our heads against APFS running out of disk space on our CI while showing 60GB free space. And I mean, it runs out of disk space hard, can’t even save the
zshhistory.This started with Sonoma. Upgrading to the latest point release made no difference. The internet is littered with what looks like the same problem and the suggested fix is always to empty your trash (can’t you read, I still have tens, even hundreds of GB free, I shouldn’t need to clean my trash). My current theory is that APFS is not able to keep up with recycling some internal garbage and reports it as generic
ENOSPC. Mac OS, at least from the CI perspective, is worse than Windows.P.S. If anyone has any clue what’s going on with APFS space issue, I am all ears.
EDIT: Forgot to add, the bizarre thing is that once you login into such a machine, it’s no longer out of space and you can write as much as you need. This is the reason for my “cannot recycle garbage fast enough” theory.
I do a lot of low level filesystem development and I’ve hit this frequently. It’s like it’s caching globally some free count and it gets desynced and freaks out. Very annoying.
Does your system show any pending updates?
Maybe apfs snapshots?
Nope, looked into this: there are no snapshots besides the standard few and backup is disabled. We’ve even monitored if any transient snapshots are being created during the CI run but didn’t see anything suspicious.
I was going to suggest maybe the 10% buffer that many filesystems keep, but that wouldn’t explain a behavior change once you log in.
The only way I know of to run out of space when you have plenty of space is to run out of inodes. If logging in fixes the problem, that suggests some per-user process such as a LaunchAgent is doing something to fix the problem. And in fact there is a LaunchAgent that deletes caches (
/System/Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.cache_delete.plist), so perhaps you’ve somehow accumulated so much cache that you’ve run out of inodes? I can’t imagine what might be making so many cache files though.Thanks for the information, much appreciated. I am not familiar with the cache files you are talking about (need to do some research) but I can tell you what we do: we compile (e.g., with Apple Clang) a large number of files and there are quite a few intermediate files being created and deleted in the process by the build system.
So we definitely don’t create any cache files ourselves but it’s possible Apple does automatically (maybe some kind of search indexing).
Another problem with the cache file theory is that we monitored disk space as the build progresses and there is always plenty of free space reported. But it’s possible APFS somehow does not count cache files towards usage.
You monitored disk space, but did you monitor inode count? If you have plenty of disk space but are getting
ENOSPCthen that suggests you’ve run out of inodes.Yes, we need to look into this, thanks. The strange thing is, as I mentioned, it’s temporary, so maybe it can’t recycle inodes fast enough?
I have a good friend that I talk to about this at least once a month. I’ve had bigger issues on iOS, but definitely have some on MacOS.
I think next phone cycle I’m just going to get the cheapest version possible, and I don’t think I’ll buy an Apple laptop again (I’ve never bought any of my MBPs, I got them from work refreshes, but my 2019 MacBook Air just went out of support, which is annoying). The combination of “fast” OS support dropping for decently new machines and the quality of the software being terrible means I’d like to remove some of this pain from costing so much, at least for me.
I literally did this the other day. I was like wtf? for an I have a “Pro” model which is literally marketed/targeting professional photographers. They would throw this phone in the trash if their photo wasn’t taken at the exact moment they wanted it. This should be embarrassing for apple.
Even if you finished indexing them you can only search globally there is no way to search a single conversation. Which is wild to me in 2025.
I don’t know if it’s the same issue, but this happens pretty often to me:
This feels like a good chance to ask: has anybody else been completely unable to use DTrace (or anything built on DTrace such as
dtruss) on M2 Pro/Max? I’m surprised that nobody seems to be talking abobut it anywhere, but these (in my opinion) rather critical tools appear completely broken. Running anydtraceprogram whatsoever instantly causes my entire system to freeze until I forcibly power it off. There’s a thread about it here where an Apple developer replied, but they seem have been wrong about the scope of the issue, which a number of people pointed out in the comments, but there hasn’t been an update in quite a while.At least it led to me discovering the wonderful world of eBPF on Linux.
Yup, the whole dtrace is broken since the M hardware. I reported it as FB12061147 3 years ago and it basically just got a “yes, we know” comment. I have no idea how Apple devs can internally debug anything without it. There’s just no way of doing systemwide syscall profiles anymore as far as I can tell.
I find it amusing that most of the devs I know use their macbooks to develop on a remote machine, or for Linux, or for VM powered languages. Almost no one develops directly on a macbook for darwin, as debugging is impossible (at least for standard unix tools). Dtrace has not been working for more than a decade, requiring one to disable SIP and other inconveniences. Logging became so convoluted as well.
Yup, it really sucks (M1 Max for me). I find Instruments kind of confusing, but it at least doesn’t completely hang my system if I’ve done the incredibly uncommon operation of putting my system to sleep even once since boot.
Yeah it’s not worked for me at all.
Real (native) development is ignored on macOS. They’re always breaking stuff in the toolchain.
I abandoned Apple back in 2020. It was when they did the whole csam thing. I do have a Mac at work, which is better than Windows, but I always make it a point. Never to update until the next year for any given OS. So if I were to do the new one it would be in June or July. This seems to avoid a lot of the problems. On my from theater PC. I use Debian. Even though x windows may seem old, the KDE and experience” just works “. I don’t have any raise many problems as in Windows, or OSX. Just a zoom and or web browsing machine. It’s the best machine I’ve ever had.
I’m curious about why that was a problem for you?
I didn’t like the fact that they would be scanning my pictures. Even though I don’t have any such material in my library, guilty until proven innocent simply goes against my ethos.
They were only scanning files that would be uploaded to iCloud and this was before advanced data protection was introduced so icloud could’ve scanned them anyway
Forcing a little robot in my computer making sure I’m behaving the way it wants seems like a violation of the third amendment.
Why is it not a problem for you?
The impression I get is that ever since Steve Jobs died, the quality at Apple has decreased. Very slowly at first, but now at a greater rate. I think Steve Jobs had the power to say “No” to any release he felt didn’t meet his expectations, and not get threatened by the board of Apple. A similar thing happened to Apple in the 90s when Jobs wasn’t there—Apple became rudderless and quality went down.
Somehow, I suspect that Apple isn’t Apple without Steve Jobs.
Tim Cook’s only job is to make number go up. Why should he care about any of these complaints if they don’t affect the stock price? Normal CEOs don’t care about product for its own sake at all; Jobs was practically sui generis in that respect.
It turns out the year of the Linux desktop won’t be a result of free desktop environments catching up to macOS; it’ll be a result of macOS regressing below the level of free desktops ;-P
(Seriously: this already happened with Windows many years ago. I switched from Windows NT (!) to Linux (Red Hat, IIRC?) at work many years ago and it was faster, smoother, more stable (!), and more feature-rich.)
I can’t find the source of it but there was a line floating around like “They promised me that they would make computers as easy to use as making a telephone call. They’ve succeeded! I can no longer figure out how to make a telephone call.”
I think that’s Bjarne Stroustrup
Old man yelling at clouds here.
When it comes to software development, something started going wrong around the year 2000 or so. Everything started becoming much slower, more bloated, and more buggy. It’s been getting worse and worse every year since then.
This isn’t nostalgia or rose tinted glasses talking. I’ve got old stuff that’s fast, lean, and very stable, and does just about all the same “stuff.”
The new world is just garbage.
It was around 2005 that CPUs stop getting faster and the only thing that has increased since then are the number of CPU cores, memory (which hasn’t kept up with CPU speeds) and disk (which also pretty much stalled at memory speeds). I’m guessing it is taking a bit of time for the world to catch on that computers aren’t getting faster like they used to.
My 4 year old or whatever M1 with a fresh install can’t hardly handle the mouse moving across the screen. Every aspect of the machine has rendering jank, weirdly except for when a video is playing.
It’s actually crazy how nearly unusable it is just a few years after buying it.
I don’t want to be an Apple apologist (using both macOS and Linux), but a lot of family/friends are not upgrading their M1/M1 Pro Macs, because it’s still very fast and they don’t see the need to upgrade. A subset of them would update every 1 or 2 years in the Intel days.
It sounds like there’s something else going on here. I use an M1 heavily every day, as do a few other people I know, with no issues like this. It still feels very fast and responsive to me.
Gonna chime in too and say that my 4 year old M1 MacBook Pro is still performing like a champ. I suspect there’s something faulty with your hardware so it would be worth getting it checked out.
I just recently tried GNOME 45, after last using GNOME 2.
It felt like what macOS should be. It has all the nice windowing and tiling out of the box (usually buy Magnet for this). All the convenient hotkeys. Super clean and non-buggy file, app, setting management. Clean fonts.
Now I install macOS and I get unwanted apps. Unwanted upgrades. Dumb cloud stuff cluttering the settings and pestering me to sign in.
I use GNOME on my Linux machines, my primary annoyances are: (1) removing menus in favor of hamburger menus; (2) removing support for system tray icons, luckily it still works with the AppIndicator extension, but how you can remove something so fundamental is beyond me.
Aside from that it’s very clean and not in the way. And with two experimental flag even fractional scaling for Wayland and XWayland applications work.
The extent to which macOS and iOS aggressively hawk recurring revenue streams for Apple is underappreciated. As a Linux user who also has a Windows PC, Microsoft’s doing it as well.
The incentives are just not aligned in the user’s favor with commercial end-user software.
Amen
Airplane mode on my iPhone was broken for multiple iOS releases (not sure if it still is). I’d have to toggle it back and forth a few times to make it stick. Seems like they’d be testing such basic functionality but apparently not.