However something shifted since this "visionOS" melted version of macOS (Tahoe); where I have absolutely no intension to upgrade from Sequoia. I hope they will fix it by the time I'll be forced to upgrade (post support deadline).
It started with the macOS that brought the iOS settings panel. We went from a logical structure of easily findable stuff to a complete mess. Just open the "Keyboard" settings on macOS today and it's bewildering how they could ship this and think this is fine. Steve would roll in his grave.
The process to allow running applications that are unsigned is just a horrible hack. It feels like a last minute "shove it and move on!".
By 2035 I wonder if we'll be all running KDE or WindowMaker and the hell with modern OS GUI.
From a Gestalt standpoint, human relations with desktop computers are not the same as with thumb driven mobile OS or air-pinch driven vision OS, period. The hell with "glass" or "flat" design. Desktop OS should be as forgettable as possible, as it's about having long stints of flow, not giving a feeling of "air" or "play".
It’s difficult to pinpoint when exactly the decline started. But one key event before the Settings app was the Catalyst apps that were straight out and dismal ports from their iOS versions. Till date, none of those work well and cannot be navigated properly using the keyboard. Reminders, Messages, Notes and more.
Craig Federighi seems to be increasingly taking on so much authority without having a trusted set of people under him and his leadership (or lack of it) has resulted in neglecting software across device platforms. Some of the Apple apps on tvOS with paid subscriptions are worse, because the bugs in them don’t get any attention at all.
I think if you minimize the main window it gets even worse
It's completely unacceptable
Mac OS is still my system of choice, but I don’t have as much confidence in it as I would like.
The big thing from around fifteen years ago is the mixed modes for autosave, where they sort of half heartedly changed the language around save/save as and just sort of… left it. Some apps use their new (for the 2010s) auto save system and some don’t. And it’s up the the user to muddle through. Weird. And there are many half baked things like this in the OS now.
Mac hardware, on the other hand, has never been better than it is right now!
My current OS X update strategy is: I don't, mostly. I'm a few versions behind, and at this point, I'd rather keep an OS that sort of works and just deal with the script kiddies, then upgrade to an OS that doesn't work and have to deal with my OS vendor.
The majority of users are content with chromebooks, what does that tell you about the requirements of desktop computers today? It tells me that they are just niche professional tools; and professional tools largely suck for UX..
I had an interesting realisation the other day (that's tangentially related): on my iPhone and iPad: I can't access my work emails or chats at all. Yet on my significantly more difficult to secure laptops: no problem.
The mobile platforms have built-in mechanisms for remote attestation. Desktop operating systems do not.
I think as soon as companies realise that an iPad is "good enough" for email/excel/word workers, we'll see an even more precipitous decline of the desktop operating system experience.
This sentence here is my biggest heartbreak with modern “computing.” I came up in the Windows 98/XP days and over about 7 years from 98-05 basically gained full mastery of basically every aspect of Windows and how to change it, and also from 03 on started using Mac OS X daily and found it to be just as customizable or more, in most ways that mattered. I felt that my computer was my own and loved having full control, making it perfect for me.
None of that is possible now. You cannot even select your own notification sound for Messages on MacOS anymore. Only the 20 sounds packaged with the OS. What. The. F%$k.
The ridiculous thing is that Microsoft already made approximately this mistake with the Windows 8 “PC Settings” disaster.
> Keyboard settings for "character repeat delay and rate", and "cursor blink rate", have moved from Control Panel to Settings.
That being said, now AWS is forcing all my RDS instances to upgrade to mysql 9 (also: Why???), so I need to get 9 working on my dev box, and tonight I'm up against a wall trying to work through Homebrew issues. There's no way to win.
I get that Apple would want to unify the user experience across the two devices. But, seriously, iOS settings have been shit since iPhone 1.
They should have fixed iOS instead.
And iOS's transparencies are disastrous. They make so much of the test illegible.
> Desktop OS should be as forgettable as possible, as it's about having long stints of flow, not giving a feeling of "air" or "play".
its almost as if apple doesnt want to sell "trucks" anymore (as steve would say) and would prefer to morph macos slowly into a sedan like the ipad (cause that is where the money is)
> By 2035 I wonder if we'll be all running KDE or WindowMaker and the hell with modern OS GUI.
I mean when the apps are small and have just a couple settings, you save having every app having a settings widget that takes you to another panel, etc.
(But a "Good" iOS app in my mind would still have a widget in the app to take you straight to the correct pane in Settings where you configure it.)
Steve understood better than anyone that having a finite amount of time to build means you can't please everyone. The vast majority of Apple's customers just do not care about the Keyboard settings UI or the clarity of unusual error messages.
Not for everything, but the excuse of "normies don't give a shit" is a bullshit one.
Those are just some of the bugs I hit. I’d guess most normal users hit 4-5 problems this upgrade cycle.
For a couple years I have been noticing regular new glitches in the Apple TV interface accumulating faster than old ones disappear.
Lately the glitch accumulation syndrome seems to have hit macOS. Notes has started doing random bolding, unbolding, changing text size on only one line, etc. After a restart, a finder window with tabs springs to different screen spaces, depending on which tab is open when I try to drop a file on it. Message sometimes draws a few lines of a message with a few pixels vertical and horizontally offset, so there is actual overlap of message parts.
Then there are chronic ones. Safari's save or print to PDF are notorious for not saving pictures you can see, even from reading mode. How are basic functions in Safari not worth fixing, for years?
Apple's HomePods ... for many years. I could write a blog of interesting Pod behavior. I thought having one or a pair in each room would be nice. No, more of them is not nice. Constant bizarreness.
The noticeable acceleration isn't encouraging.
They’ve never not been like this. They don’t know how to write software sustainably and don’t seem interested to learn. They add features faster than they fix bugs. Early on, it was masked by less frequent releases, but switching to an annual cadence made it more obvious. They worked around the problem once by focusing Snow Leopard on bug fixing, but they are just letting the bugs accumulate again now.
If you only look at their earlier 10.x.0 releases this is true.
But it was well known that you don’t upgrade to a new macOS on any non experimental system until the 10.x.1 release.
In the past (until the mid 2010s I think), if you upgraded to 10.x.1 you’d have a very smooth experience.
It feels like we’re waaaay over due for one or two of those.
Yeah, these have quite the DIY / Jailbreak following I've noticed. They look like neat little devices for music and HA stuff, but I've read similar stuff to your comment.
A couple? That's the understatement of the last couple years.
I use my mac for IntelliJ and Firefox. I guess maybe my usage surface is just really, really small; but I basically never have any problems ... and then others come along and say they're having huge issues.
I see the various updates as they happen and like ... all of them are neutral or minor inconveniences that are resolved next patch, for me.
Very few of these complaints existed when Apple had a more reasonable update schedule for the Mac releasing a new update every 2 years or so.
The Mac’s current update schedule isn’t being driven by the needs of the OS or its customers but by the need to align with iOS.
The iOS / macOS 26 frustration I think is particularly felt by the HN type crowd. Don't want something that looks cool but is less effective/performant/usable. "We" can feel Apple's priorities drifting away from ours.
Side note: I wonder how much easier AI will make it to migrate between operating systems? Perhaps future AI systems that are good at computer-usage could manage migrations/installs well.
If it doesn't wipe your drive.
Still, interesting thought.
If Apple wanted to ship a rock-solid OS, they could. They're just choosing to put those resources elsewhere.
This is everything post-covid. The competent people that could left and retired early.
But what do I know - the year of the Linux desktop for me was 1996.
You see.
It's not enough.
Buy OneDrive, Gamepass, Copilot Pro. This is a big part of why Microsoft is fine with all the sites selling 10$ Windows keys.
Otherwise you might try Linux to save money.
Buy a Mac, you need Apple Plus Deluxe. You need iCloud, etc.
Ubuntu only tries to upsell you via Ubuntu Pro, I guess it's not as aggressive though.
but here's the real question: why? the global menu bar is literally the most dated and outmoded element in macos. it isn't 1993 anymore. your computer can run more than one program at a time. a globally modal application focus is completely ridiculous. the only thing more ridiculous than a global menu bar is a global spinning beach ball mouse cursor. these are relics of the past and have no place in a modern, multitasking, multiprocessing, multiprocessor, multiscreen computing environment.
moreover, the things that matter, browsers and terminals, don't even have normal menus anyway.
kde plasma is superior in all ways. stop wasting time with weird outmoded 1993 era computer interfaces.
https://9to5linux.com/unity-7-7-desktop-environment-to-get-a...
https://unityd.org/unityx-7-7-testing/
https://gitlab.com/ubuntu-unity/unity-x/unityx#manual-instal...
We already know that Apple makes about 51% of its revenue from iPhone sales. Therefore it's reasonable to assume promotion opportunities are mostly centered around iPhone hardware and hardware, rather than MacOS. Those of us who depend on MacOS are likely screwed unless something at Apple changes.
Kinda all large system projects need someone similar to get things done properly.
Sure it's sometimes not as shiny as MacOS, and it will most likely never be polished enough for the mainstream market share, but there's something really awesome about not being reliant on a support engineer that does not have the financial incentive to spend the correct amount of time solving a one off problem.
It's a real shame.
That’s the key I think. Apple these days never releases when products are ready, but on a predefined schedule. Point releases that should fix things, are actually delivering more features that were shown on the keynote, but didn’t quite make the main release date.
As a result the systems accumulated some bugs that might never get fixed, unless the code happens to be completely rewritten. The desktop switching animation is hopelessly long when using keyboard shortcuts with ProMotion enabled. On both iOS and macOS the Music app will have an audible click couple of seconds into the first played song when using lossless quality. Stuff like these is known and reported, there’s just seemingly zero bandwidth to handle it.
At the same time, Windows Update was an anxiety engine.
Now Software Update has mostly become what Windows Update was. Uninteresting security patches. Each new major update makes the interface worse and adds new bugs or drops old hardware.
Don't get me started about how Time Machine drops files — important files like the Photos Sqlite3 database — from backups.
Yes, I should switch from Photos to something else, e.g. Immich.
I barely use the software included with the Mac, and would only use Linux except that there are still just a few programs or bits of hardware that insist on there being a Mac or Windows machine somewhere.
How Apple every got a reputation for high-quality, user-friendly software is beyond me.
Not recommended.</rant>
In the 1990s Windows gradually improved, and Windows 95 was on par with Macintosh System 7.5 in terms of features and ease of use. It even had its own UI guidelines. Windows 95 was one of the factors that led to Apple’s troubles in the mid-1990s.
Even though it took over four years for the purchase of NeXT to lead to the first client release of Mac OS X in 2001, Apple distinguished itself from Windows PC vendors in other ways, such as ease of installation and Apple’s pursuit of the “digital hub” where the Mac was the center of a digital lifestyle involving music, digital cameras, and digital camcorders. This was the era of the iPod, iPhoto, iMovie, GarageBand, and related software.
Of course, Mac OS X solved the Mac’s long-standing stability issues, and Mac OS X also came of age when the Windows world was suffering with malware and security issues.
In my opinion, the Mac peaked in the mid-to-late 2000s, where Mac OS X provided users a solid operating system that was easy to use, and where Macs came bundled with a variety of apps from Apple that made it easy to do a lot of tasks many computer users care about, such as organizing music and photos, as well as editing music and videos.
Then came the iPhone and the tremendous profits that came from the iOS ecosystem, and with it came Apple’s shift in strategy, from the Mac being the digital hub to a hub focused increasingly on iOS and Apple’s cloud services. The Mac hasn’t been the main focus, and in my opinion the decline of Mac software is a reflection of Apple’s focus shift.
- doing 'cmd-R' (rotate) on a standard few-megabyte image might beachball the app for a few seconds. Rotating a small image file...
- Rotating a video seems to re-encode the whole video, instead of setting some metadata flags. Imagine you have, say, a 20GB video recording, and rotate it. That will now be a separate new 20GB file on your mac drive.
- If i view the album of some specific person that has many pictures with location metadata, and I scroll to the bottom where the map is, it almost immediately starts allocating >100GB memory, beachballs, starts gigabytes of memory paging, and you gotta kill the app asap.
It turns out I haven't needed it, and I honestly don't remember the last time I've booted into macOS on that system.
I like Apple hardware, but the last time I enjoyed using macOS was pre-2010.
It's ironic after fighting the good fight for so long and finally making their own hardware that Apple should fall on their own sword with software now.
I've been loving Apple since Tiger, I'm still on Sequoia and iOS 18.
Pepe prayge for the 27-releases to be another Snow Leopard as rumored.
Not defending the design, but this website is sometimes useful for disambiguating OSStatus error codes: https://www.osstatus.com/
Last week I finally decided to jump to Linux. While I realize that I have a few nits and annoying bugs I run in to, its hard to say if linux has any more than the mainstream offerings.
Things just work for the most part because backwards compat is hardwired into the folks at Microsoft. Someone did a YouTube video not too long ago installing MS-DOS all the way through Windows 11, upgrading version by version.
[0] Mostly.
When you dissolve QA and tell developers “you own quality now,” that knowledge just evaporates. Each developer tests the happy path for their feature and calls it done. The edge cases? The interaction effects? The weird state machines? Those all ship to prod. The really insidious part is the metrics looked great. Velocity up, deployment frequency up, cycle time down. We were measuring output, not outcomes. Exec dashboards showed green across the board while user experience quietly degraded.
Now we’re in the equilibrium state: software ships fast and breaks often, every deploy is a dice roll, and we’ve normalized “hotfix Friday” as just how things work. The velocity gains were real, but we were measuring distance traveled, not value delivered. Turns out “everyone owns quality” means nobody owns quality. Who knew.
But Apple ships on a schedule. A project’s code is either on the train when it departs, or it’s not. Promo packets depend on shipping, so you take the bugs, and you assign them to next release.
Bugs don’t stop releases, features just occasionally get punted. For every public feature you saw at WWDC that gets delayed because it’s not ready yet, probably 3-4 things shipped with known bugs that just weren’t important enough to punt the feature, so they just ship with the bugs.
QA is not the problem at Apple, because they know about the bugs. The culture of “we ship in September no matter what, nothing holds up the release” is the cause.
Your point should probably culminate in “they need to stop promo’ing for features and start promo’ing for performance and stability”. It’s the only way to satisfy the competing constraints at play.
Also devs being infra (devops).
Also devs being PMs (product developers).
Also devs being managers (flat orgs).
Also devs being facilitators (rotative scrum masters).
I wonder why expertise is being lost.
That causes churn, which further erodes expertise.
And dealing with the product of any of those topics half assed by a non expert colleague is cause for burnout too.
Pipelines that fail, poorly thought tests, badly written docs… Which reminds me I forgot to add technical writers to the list.
Bring back specialization. Bring back paying experts for their expertise. Bring back one person having one job.
The idea of owning your own quality only works if you can trust the dev to understand quality, and want to implement it. Independent almost adversarial QA is required when you can't trust the devs.
It’s equally possible for a different woodworker to build a table which will collapse when deployed in a customer’s dining room.
The difference comes down to which woodworker I’ve hired, and how they’ve been trained.
If you can’t trust a woodworker to ship a table that stands under its own weight, layering on third-party QA isn’t really going to fix the underlying problem.
That said, cargo culting the “no QA” model is ill-advised. If a particular dev shop needs QA today, they’ll probably need it tomorrow.
A table is a table. It has one core function. An argument can be made that it could be built in a way that a chair can't be pushed against it for example. But the number of such cases for a table are infinitely smaller than the number of edge cases and unexpected interactions a software system can have.
QA is a way to catch those edge cases that a single developer cannot find because of various reasons. One such reason is that devs are very close to their work and they might subconsciously not trigger the unhappy path in their code.
Testing if a table works is vastly different from testing a software system.
It also paints a picture of a scenario where requiring QA would be more of a red flag than a best practice. It seems a tad silly to imagine a woodworker nailing boards together so they look like a table, then passing to QA to determine if the table is “good enough”, then having QA ship it back with defect reports. But this is exactly what many less-mature teams end up looking like.
You make a good point about unexpected interactions.
I’d argue the question for software isn’t whether QA Bad or QA Good. It’s at what level of complexity does QA become necessary. Most software teams aren’t dealing with all that much complexity (or, more specifically, inherent complexity that can’t be designed away.)
If anything I'd argue that the 'Shift of QA into Dev' was a first step to the role consolidation and job enshittification we see today.
[0] - I still recall the time where I had a 'bad' bug and he told me "look, nobody died". It was a good benchmark set for understanding "I need to know how dangerous this -could- be."
I've wondered the same thing as the author about why we even call them "hallucinations." They're errors, the LLM generated an erroneous output.
The term "hallucinations" are an anthropomorphised interpretation of valid output that's factually incorrect. It happens to people all the time (the human brain will make up any missing memories and subconsciously explain away inconsistencies, which only becomes obvious once you're dealing with someone with memory problems), so it feels like a decent term to use for garbage information produced without any ill intent.
The problem lies with the AI companies convincing their customers that the output generated by their tools is probable to mean anything. Probability engines are sold as some kind of chat program or even as some kind of autonomous agent because the output comes close enough to pass the Turing test to most people. LLMs can only mimic intelligence, interactivity, or any other kind of behavior, they cannot actually think or reason.
If people knew what they were operating, the "hallucinations" wouldn't be a problem. Unfortunately, that would take out most of the confidence people have in these tools, so you won't see the AI salesmen provide their customers with reasonable expectations.
I switched away from MacOS at that time.
My last job we were given MacOS machines, I didn't experience anything that made me want to reconsider my decision to ditch MacOS as my daily driver.
After decades using macOS and significant investment the barrier to change is significant too, even if there was some ideal thing to jump to which there is not. But like others I am chipping away at it where I can, slowly divorcing from the Apple ecosystem, going ever more heterodox. I can see people reaching tipping points at various places, might take quite awhile but the thing is once someone jumps ship you're probably never getting them back and eventually that can add up to them taking others with them. It's just such a damned waste too.
Since a few years ago, I've chosen to stay at least 1 full version behind the current version and I've never regretted that.
(source - https://www.businessinsider.com/steve-jobs-mobileme-failure-...)
I'm currently on the "meh hardware but solid OS" phase of the cycle - the battery life isn't as good and waking from suspend still (somehow) isn't as seamless, but my Linux of choice (Silverblue) is predictable and transparent - and ultimately if there's a problem it's in my gift to fix it, which is much more comforting to me.
I wonder what they'll do to woo me back next time..
Reporting problems to Apple is downright demoralizing. Most of the time, the bugs remain unassigned, unread, and unsolved. The few that do earn a response, are usually gaslighting.
I suspect that Apple may have hired a whole bunch of less-than-stellar people, and it’s showing. That’s depressing, because I always considered them to be the gold standard.
This saves the individual files of the site in standard format, html, js, css, etc., much like Chrome does with Webpage, Complete.
Their ergonomics (especially the log viewer) are much worse than sysvinit/syslog, but they mostly work.
I say “mostly”, because, like systemd, sometimes force disabling a broken service silently fails, even after reboot.
No.
it's time for a clean slate.
This isn't new. Back in GPU-gate days, I had a MBP that I could very reliably kernel panic due to that issue. But it'd pass Diagnostics so "no fix for you!"
Even when I was there with a Genius, we did this, and on a brand new install - look, here, can replicate this KP (which was basically some of the same steps people had for identifying the GPU (and everything else matched up).
Similarly on iOS, Safari bookmarks don't expose all folder names but only "Bookmarks" and "Favourites" as default. Why do I have to do another extra tap to expose a single folder that I have to save bookmark in? Why cannot at least five folder names be exposed? Another absurdity is while saving a fullpage screenshot after cropping it, you have to click the checkmark "emoji" which is otherwise blank with no description, and then comes a sub-menu to save as pdf or photo; why cannot those four options be presented as is on the main menu?
You are definitely not alone:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1979283
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1982717
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2002102
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1995973
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/961898
While there are a few overlapping/similar issues being alluded to in those threads, it definitely seems like something is going on re: task switching. There are also a couple of tricks mentioned that might fix some specific issues related to bookmarks or graphics acceleration, but no silver bullets so far.
Scott Forstall was fired for a lot less compared to the mess that Apple’s software is now.
Turned out that I either missed or accidentally denied the permission to access local networks for iTerm. So the `curl` utility installed from Homebrew was silently failing, while the system-provided `/usr/bin/curl` worked fine. Because it has special permission from Apple.
Can I just give the same permission to iTerm? Nope. We are not worthy of that power, and must re-affirm permissions every 30 days for all non-Apple software.
Oh, and these permission popups happen at random moments, including during presentations or meetings. And if you don't accept them, they are silently denied.
Not sure what permission you're referring to or what your curl script is trying to do but `/opt/homebrew/opt/curl/bin/curl http://www.google.com` works just fine on Tahoe from both iTerm2 and ghostty. Looking through the various permission grants, the only one they both have in common is "App Management". They share some file permission grants, but where as iTerm has full disk access, ghostty only has Downloads and removable media. In the past I've found I've needed to add terminals like iTerm to the Developer Tools permission, but ghostty isn't in there currently and curl is still working just fine. And in none of these cases have I ever needed to re-affirm the permission every 30 days.
Any chance you have "disclaim ownership of children" setting enabled in iTerm? Maybe if iTerm is not allowing child processes to use its own permissions, you're having to re-authorize curl specifically (and it's getting updated about once every 30 days?)
> And if you don't accept them, they are silently denied.
This is IMO the correct behavior. If something asks for permission and it's not explicitly granted, then the default should always be denied.
Mwwahahaha. Yep. Curling something neutral like google.com worked fine for me as well. That's how I was verifying that everything was OK.
Now try to do "curl https://192.168.0.1" (or whatever is your local router's IP). It will trigger this request: https://imgur.com/a/tMAApfB
The permission in question is called "Local Network", you can find it in the "Security" section in the control panel. Yeah, their names don't match.
Oh, and negative entries are NOT listed in that panel. So if you deny the request, there is NO indication of that. Anywhere. Logs will also be empty.
> This is IMO the correct behavior. If something asks for permission and it's not explicitly granted, then the default should always be denied.
The keyword is SILENTLY. The permission requests should be logged and made available in a central location, where they can be reviewed.
It's literal recursive WTF. When you start looking at it, it gets worse and worse.