I really wanted to hear the opinion from Mac diehards about modern MacOS. I've used Windows for decades but bought a Mac M2 a while ago. I really like it so I'm not trying to say "Apple Bad". But I'm yet to see Apple's legendary simplicity, minimalism and attention to detail.
I keep complaining about the fact Mac OS asks me whether I want to allow chrome to access the local network with every update. I tried to dig deeper and discovered a privacy settings UI with dozens of entries written "Google Chrome" with the permission disabled. One for each time I said "No".
This is absolutely embarrassing. I wouldn't call it a bug, but a lazy and incompetent design that I thought could not happen in a Apple product.
I'll give you another example. Lately I've noticed a progress bar under the Apps icon on the dock. At first I didn't even know it was a progress bar because I use the Dock vertically - it looked like a separator - and the progress bar made no progress.
One day, the progress bar actually made progress and stayed stuck at 80%. I thought something had crashed and rebooted the machine. It stayed there. I eventually discovered by trial and error that the problem was that a running WhatsApp app prevented the WhatsApp update process to finish. Since it was always open as I used the computer, that annoying UI element stayed around forever. By closing WhatsApp, the bar unlocked and the update finished.
Pretty horrible. Is Apple learning from Microsoft?
Roughly 2002-2010 that attention to detail was on display and the OS struck an impressive balance between features, ease of use, and power user access.
Since then it’s been straight downhill. First they stopped investing in desktop in favor of mobile. Then they underwent some rewrites to OS and bundled apps that dumbed things down and exploded the defect rate. Then they started setting the stage for a touch experience on desktop at the expense of UI density. Around the same time they started to prioritize short term profit over UX — spamming with notifications to try to get you to sign in, upgrade, etc. And then there’s the travesty that is Tahoe.
> And then there’s the travesty that is Tahoe.
Liquid Glass has no place on the desktop (or the phone really).
I migrated to Mac OS X from OpenBSD in like 2002 or so. MacOS has been a steady decline for many years, probably soon after the iPhone. Snow Leopard was probably the height of the MacOS experience. It’s been lots of little things along the way but I agree Tahoe is an inflection point.
Towards the end of it's dev cycle I think Snow Leopard got pretty good.
I do think about this article though: https://www.rubenerd.au/the-myth-of-snow-leopard/
Obviously (to me anyway, maybe folk disagree) comparing a new release to the previous versions last release (with years of bugfixing) wasn't totally fair, but my experience with Snow Leopard wasn't great either and I wonder if it wasn't quite the peak everyone thinks of it as.
It's sad how much faster and cooler my phone runs with the accessibility feature that turns off parts of Liquid Glass.
The Liquid Glass thing is a migraine trigger for my mum, and everyone I know with an iPhone has turned as much of it off as possible.
And the worst part? It's still the best option.
Depending on your needs. I'm not sure it's that cut and dry. For developer experience I don't find it very good. My System76 laptop provides a better experience.
It is all pretty subjective though. Windows is the best option for some.
> Roughly 2002-2010 that attention to detail was on display
I think steve jobs had common sense... from the user's perspective.
He could throw a little nonsense or a lot of nonsense (and the entire department that created it) out the window.
Oh my god for the love of all is holy why can’t I remove Apple Music.
I don't get asked about access for Chrome at every update.
I have bigger issues with the way a lot of MacOS apps are just poorly designed.
Like screen capture - I want to be able to save to my choice of destination folder after clicking. But instead you get a selection of preset choices, and the option to select a destination before you capture the file, which is unnaturally distracting.
Finder hasn't changed for decades. It should be possible to have source and destination trees visible in the same window, but it isn't.
Mac Mail has threaded conversations, which means some emails don't appear in searches.
App Store search was designed by cynics, idiots, or both. If you know the exact name of an app, search will probably show it but it probably won't be anywhere near the first hit.
Xcode - I can't even...
Meanwhile a lot of clever and useful features remain hidden or ignored. Automator and AppleScript would have been gamechangers if Apple had promoted them, but they were just left on a shelf to moulder.
I can't imagine ever swapping back to Windows, but these annoyances are an insult to the quality of the hardware, which is on another level.
Somebody has to push back about all the senseless permission boxes as an accessibility problem.
Like my home computer has 12 perfectly good USB charging ports but I'm not 100% happy using them, as opposed to wall wart or a wireless adapter, because I have to clear a dialog on my phone and on my computer when I want to plug it in. And of course the "import pictures" functions on both MacOS and Windows "just don't work" so when I really want to transfer photos I either email them (one at a time) or ftp them to my home server with Photosync.
...and sometimes it stops charging the device when you clear the dialog box. Not always, though, which actually makes it worse because of the uncertainty.
And, yeah, I solve it by having a separate USB hub for charging things - but that's a pain for travelling as I'd rather not have to bring an extra device.
(And it doesn't happen under Linux, so I'm pretty sure it's a MacOS issue rather than something inherent to usb-c)
> I don't get asked about access for Chrome at every update.
Is it possible that you clicked "Approve" while the parent clicked "Not now"?
One of my personal issues is that I was using software called "Secretive" which installed a Secretive Agent system service. I later patched and forked it, but reused the name. Despite the app bundle ID being different, and having a different signer, they show up collapsed in the "Login items" panel, with no way to enable one and disable the other: https://i.servepic.com/t5DvVjB0.png
There are also numerous entries for software that has been completely removed from my system for years. I wholeheartedly believe OP's experience.
I highly recommend ScreenFloat for screenshots, it's one of my favourite and most used apps - endless power user features that mostly sit elegantly out of the way until you need them. https://eternalstorms.at/ScreenFloat/
This is great, thank you!
thank you, drcongo, I really appreciate your shout-out : ) So happy you like my app! Cheers, – Matthias
Thank you sir. It's indispensable.
I went through this around 15 years ago, even migrating my parents from Windows to MacOS on the promise of simplicity and better UI. No, it’s not simpler or more intuitive, instead it has its own world of quirks, issues, and annoyances. And both Apple and Microsoft have become worse since.
iPad with attachable keyboard is perfect for the elderly. Change your parents to one or two of those instead.
> I keep complaining about the fact Mac OS asks me whether I want to allow chrome to access the local network with every update. I tried to dig deeper and discovered a privacy settings UI with dozens of entries written "Google Chrome" with the permission disabled. One for each time I said "No".
IMO the party that should be blamed here is Google. Why do they keep asking you for local network access when you've already denied it? Why do they just prompt for access without first showing a page telling you why they want access along with a button to go through with the prompt? Ironically, this is what Google and the other browser vendors force websites to do when they want to ask users to grant certain permissions.
No, Google should be blamed for asking, Apple should be blamed for poorly designing permission system
That's reasonable, I agree there.
I use and have used Windows and macOS for decades. I think Windows is better, but both are doing their best to drive users to Linux. Their relentless focus on extracting subscription and "service" revenue from others is fundamentally undermining the user experience in countless ways. Ads. Dark patterns. Nags windows. Auto-bundled games and software. Telemetry. Every year they make their operating systems just a little bit worse.
I really want a Linux laptop. The problem is that Apple's M series CPUs are too good.
Have you looked at Asahi?
I have not, but I am looking into it now. Thanks!
Apple's days of simplicity out of the box are over. The simplicity is still in there somewhere. Through a combination of turning off a lot of features in settings and using a few defaults shell command it can be made simple.
Apple got complex due to dynamic workspaces that result in windows unexpectedly flying off screen or popping up as one mouses's around and the new security model which no longer trusts defaults to local applications trusting each other.
This security model is why each application needs to be granted local access. I believe Apple encourages all apps to stick to their own sandbox to the extent possible.
I'm currently trying to figure out how to give Image Events access to my local hard disk. My old applescripts using Image Events have broken due to the loss of access.
With Apple, the stuff I want to do just works. I actually like the granularity in permissions, because I only give them out sparingly.
Having said that, the OS felt better a few years ago. I feel like they have less attention to detail and don’t care for Liquid Glass.
Still blazingly fast machines compared to my intel windows corporate workstation though.
I have been using macOS for I think fewer than ten years and I think the attention of detail may always have been just about the hardware... macOs and iOS have presented me with some of the clunkiest edge cases and mishandled situations and a lot of them are damn near undebuggable. I think Windows is very tasteless OS making macOS seem good in comparison but in isolation there is a lot that could a should be improved
Apple is learning from Microsoft, sometimes as counterexample.
You won’t know Apple joy until you replace the one you have with another. If you’re backed up via Time Machine — because you are, right? — then you plug in your new machine, hit “restore” or whatever it’s called, and head off to sleep. In the morning all your data, applications, and settings will be there. Your new machine will be indistinguishable from the old but for the grime.
I'm in the same position ... just got my first mac, love the hardware, but man, I don't know why everyone is so smug about the software - it has a fairly similar number of annoyances as Windows (not qiute as much, but it's close).
I have a massive screen and the right most application has it's menu ... at the very, very left of my screen. It's soo far away it is just crazy. And that menu can't be moved to teh side or turned off or whatever.
Applications that get closed aren't really closed ... you have to quit them. I don't know why. Or if they are minimised, then I can't alt-tab to them .. or I actually can ... but they don't actually OPEN!
Windows insist on opening to some arbitrary width and height instead of neatly snapping to a side etc.
Anyway, at lot of it is fixable with add-ons etc, but it's still annoying. I'll be happier when I can jsut run linux.
Think almost all of that is purely visuals. For example, there are many Windows apps with blurry fonts due to poor dpi support, and that's not common on Macs.
Otherwise it's mostly about... the visuals again, but in the hardware side - how the hardware looks better, though, to be fair, that also has a bunch of "doesn't flex like cheap plastic" improvements)
Maybe also the fact that you're less frequently exposed to a garbage sea of complexity like the registry (sure, it exists and is even worse because there is no built in GUI)
But ultimately you're asking about legends, that's the stuff of history, not something you should expect to experience
I've been using macbooks since 2015 and I feel like every single update has made it worse somehow
How is the Chrome example an Apple issue and not a Google issue? Chrome in fact likely doesn’t need mDNS-SD in most cases, so why is it asking for that permission (to browse services on your local network, no doubt sending all findings back to Google and closely associating the things it found with your Google account and more) the moment it launches every new copy? Why are they treating updates as unique copies? How would it be the fault of macOS if any app behaved this way? Clearly not all apps behave this way, so how is it an OS level issue?
The failure of the OS is not identifying those updates as a single app and applying the same permissions
But it works for other apps, no? I'm no app developer, completely out of my depth here, but it sounds like Google isn't following whatever process Apple has set, as opposed to Apple screwing Google over specifically (which there are many examples of)
It doesn't work for other apps because it's unrealistic to expect that only Google "isn't following" A non "lazy and incompetent design" would make "non-following" a non-issue unless ... well, that's where you actually need to know what's going on and prove that it's such a special case of non-following that it's hard-to-impossible to design around - in which case yeah, the OS designers are off the hook
I bought an original 128K Mac, and then used them professionally for decades --- Snow Leopard, 10.6.8, which I view as the most perfect Mac OS ever, was the last version I really liked, or found comfortable.
I need to replace a MacBook Pro w/ Touchbar, and am _not_ excited about the options, and I find the OS version numbering/naming baffling (why they couldn't've counted versions, started at the next letter of the alphabet, and then cycled through the alphabet in the California Gazetteer when they switched place names from there on out mystifies me) --- probably I'll end up w/ a hand-me-down iMac, but I'd be a bit more interested if there was a portable Mac tablet w/ a stylus and touch, having preferred that form-factor for portable usage since Go Corp.'s PenPoint on an NCR-3125 (which I paired w/ a NeXT Cube and represents the highwatermark of my GUI experience).
I wish that there was an option to limit the OS to only Cocoa/SwiftUI/equivalent "native" apps, and I really wish that Preferences.app would arrive at a simplified and stable state which makes sense.
I bought my first modern Mac in 2003 to switch from Linux in a (stolen) Compaq to a commercial Unix on supported hardware. Instantly I got it and there was nearly a decade where every update was better.
Last year, for the first time since 2003, I didn’t upgrade to the latest macOS (né OS X) release. I’m hopeful for Golden Gate and continue to love the hardware, but man Tahoe is a low point.
The Swift UI-ification of System Preferences and all of the consistency lost by moving AWS from AppKit drag macOS down to the level of lesser systems and even Electron (that is to say, I’ve used more Mac-like electron apps than some of the first party Swift UI rewrites).
20 years later and desktop Linux still has no consistency. I’m not even sure how people use Windows. Could this be the year Haiku saves the desktop?
I dunno, I kinda stopped tracking BeOS (and derivatives) when I was essentially bodily ejected from a Be user's group meeting/demonstration by asking how the slides were printed (at that time, BeOS lacked printer drivers).
Maybe a distro focused on GNUstep?
I'm planning on trying a Raspberry Pi 5 (Compute Module --- anyone want to trade for a pair of regular Pis?) once the Soulcircuit Pilet I backed on Kickstarter ships. If it seems promising, I'll get a Wacom MovinkPad and see if I can really make it work.
I can tell you that Apple grows closer and closer to Microsoft-level annoying every year. The update situation is just stupid at this point. 10:30am and "hey, we'd like to take your computer offline for 45 minutes? Want to defer until this evening? Yeah? put your password in anyway.
iOS has gotten gross as well. You see that email notification on your lock screen? Wanna see what it says? Tap it. HAHA, that just expands the stack. Tap it again... that reveals a bit.... TAP IT AGAIN - ah, now we're unlocking and revealing it in the app....
Fwiw, you can change how notifications work and change the 'stack' style to a standard 'list'
Not sure if you can get the entire email in the notif, I think the only stock options are 'previews' or nothing
Here are some things that existed for a long time but still blow my mind (note: this is not "modern macOS", I migrated to Linux long time ago, so forgive me ignoring modern flaws).
- The preview app - document editing at its best
- Apple Mail Search - you can filter by nearly every aspect, even between dates
- the mighty Alt key (alt+click unlocks an extra feature all the time, alt + shift + volume makes smaller steps, etc)
- apple headphone remotes also work on macbooks
- you can turn off the display by setting 0 brightness
- Printing just works - everywhere
- the trackpad integration
- brew is just awesome
> the progress bar actually made progress and stayed stuck at 80%.
> the problem was that a running WhatsApp app prevented the WhatsApp update process to finish.
Oh so that’s what it is. Thought it was a desync between UI state and software logic.
Don't get me started on the whole iCloud thing, and apple account sign in (although to be fair to them they've improved this it was way too onerous in the past).
I think they could remove most of what they have added to the OS in the past 6-7 years and I wouldn’t even notice or miss it.
Both of your examples are software from Meta and Google. Those companies ship what cannot be called anything else than malware. But it is possible to stop Chrome from updating and messing with your system in the background. I forgot which guide I followed, but search and you shall find.
I doubt you will get many long term Mac users disagreeing that the attention to detail has got consistently worse every year since Lion.
Trying to push poorly done, rushed UI frameworks to match iOS in the wrong form factor has trashed the OS.
Wait until you have to exit the video call because you haven't yet granted screenshare permissions to the current app, and it needs a restart.