One important thing not mentioned here: Apple should make sure to keep up Safari Development. It's by far the worst browser available and the web platform is only growing.
You cannot use anything outside of Safari on iOS [0]. FireFox/Chrome aren't allowed to have extensions on iOS for that reason (Regular Safari can because antitrust is MS-only).
It is always behind on web technologies and hasn't implemented may features that have been around for a while.
It only gets updated once a year, so any updates they do make are slow to hit users. This wouldn't be so bad if they were more up to date with Firefox and Chrome.
Not having web push is a feature. They're the 3rd party toolbar or BonziBuddy of the modern web—often enabled, but rarely wanted—however nice an idea they were in theory.
Firefox lets me simply deny a web page the ability to send a notification when it attempts to do so, allowing me to only let the apps I want do so, while not bothering me about the majority of web sites that don't use it.
I'd love some data on what percentage of web-push notifications going out are to users who want them, versus to users who didn't realize browsers had added a feature to let websites shit up their desktop, and, like most folks, just click "allow" on everything that pops up on a site (as there's rarely any reason, for normal people, not to) and don't know why or how some site they visited once is sending them stuff.
My experience from my immediate friends and family support circle is "0%" and "100%", respectively, but I'd be open to data showing that the first number is slightly higher than 0%. The "UX" for this feature for normal users is, as far as I can tell, exactly like the bad old days when people'd accidentally install 3rd party "search bars", then not know how to get rid of them.
Historically, browsers have worked to keep web sites from doing things that affect the machine outside that site's browser pane, that normal users don't want or expect them to be able to do.
It's a pure loss for non-geek users. It should be disabled—no dialog allowed, even—by default, if the feature's gonna exist. That hitting "allow" on a pane that pops up on a site—something users are conditioned to do without thinking by all kinds of shitty but extremely common web patterns—affects something outside the current site's browser window is unexpected and unwanted by normal users. Cases where it's easy for sites to affect the behavior of a machine, or of the browser, outside the current session on that site, have historically been a big problem for non-geeks, and this is no exception.
That sounds pretty reasonable to me. But that still doesn't excuse Apple not implementing it. Apple doesn't implement features like this because they want to maintain app store sales. They do this for them, not their customers.
I think if Apple really really wanted to implement it if not for the risk to app sales, they'd have it on desktop Safari, at least. As it is, I just think they don't want to implement it, App Store or no.
From observing non-geeks use the "feature", I think that's the right call regardless. It needs to go back to the drawing board, or be scrapped. In general, anything that expands the reach & capabilities of websites should be treated with a ton of suspicion, as a likely vulnerability vector (leaking tracking info; social engineering/phishing vector; straight-up exploitable bugs) or simply a net-negative annoyance for most users.
You must feel that way about push notifications from apps too then? You seem strongly against push. If you only dislike push on websites, why?
If Apple thinks push notifications are annoying, why does iOS have them? Again, Apple is protecting their walled garden. That's all this is. There really is no other good faith argument for this.
People don't switch between ten just-installed apps in under a minute. They do that all the time on the Web. There's more focus on what you're doing when you open an app for the first time, and installing the app in the first place is a strong signal that you're open to entertaining requests to expand permissions, like to receive push notifications. Browsing to a website is something people do on a whim while barely paying attention, which they don't consider any kind of commitment at all, and they're used to sites going away entirely when they close the tab, not sticking around because they clicked "allow" on a dialog that they don't even remember because the action didn't rise to the level of conscious thought, since the web bombards them with "allow/deny" boxes all day long, where "allow" is just the thing that consistently makes the dialog go away the fastest so they can get on with looking at the site.
For iPad oh boy they sure added new niceties such as:
- Not being able to click a tab unless you drag it to the center of the tab bar
- Make a "drag a link/anchor into a new window" feature; except it triggers way too easily from ordinary scrolling, forcing you to spend the next 15-30 seconds figuring out how the FUCK do you close it with an non-obvious swipe gesture. Apparently buttons with "Close" or a big X are too complicated.
Oh my god the inadvertent link drag to new window (or just overwrite current window) has been killing me, glad I’m not the only one, means there’s a chance it gets addressed.
Same experience. The amount of css "quirks" I have to work around trying to get a site "mobile friendly" is absurd. The navbar issue, and the scrolling still not being disabled with overflow:hidden makes me bang my head against the wall.
On a Mac, Safari is the best browser (as defined by being fast, battery efficient and native app) by a far margin compared to other mainstream choices, only matched by the Orion browser (but I may be biased).
Since Internet Explorer is not supported anymore by most websites Safari has become the new worst browser in regards to having really bad CSS and Web API Support.
Yeah maybe you as a developer want some fancy CSS and bleeding fresh Web API but I as a user don't.
The web is too bloated as it is, I feel that Apple is on my side putting a damper on that.
Safari is powerful enough as it is. You want voip, notifications, codecs and so on - do the work and learn to write a native app. I'd rather pay for that than paying with my attention to ads in your "free" web app.
Well I as a developer just want a browser which doesn't break existing features: localstorage, indexeddb were completely broken for months this year.
Like CSS containment is feature that was shipped in Chrome in 2016, Firefox 2019 so how many years have to pass for Safari to implement it so it isn't just 'some new shiny' feature anymore?
Yeah, this is the kind of entitled mentality that is going to sink the MacOS ship. I'm not writing a native app just for basic web browser functionality. If the choice comes down to re-writing everything for MacOS or dropping support altogether, I have no qualms cutting out less than 20% of the desktop market share.
I was a web developer in a previous life. You can write basic standard code and Firefox/Chrome/even old Edge works fine, but Safari has a million little things that are buggy or don't work, or break at random in new versions. I wasted so much time hacking random bits of code to support iPhone. In 2021 now that IE is finally dead, I'm sure Apple is singlehandedly keeping BrowserStack in business.
The first one that comes to mind is the <input> select method doesn't work[1], although MDN claims it does. It works _sometimes_, for reasons I couldn't discern. I'm not sure about you, but I wouldn't call selecting text a fancy or bleeding edge feature.
Why? I want it to run on all platforms. That's one of the best things about the web. I'd rather just not support Safari than write and deploy separate MacOS, Windows, and Mobile applications.
+ I don't want my users to download to have download a native binary that has unrestricted access to filesystem and I need a Apple Device to develop even if it's the smallest thing in the world.
Web browsers are the best of both worlds, secure enclaved sandboxes, easily reachable by just a link, and powerful enough to do many basic tasks, and cross compatible.
Web browsers are also huge, complexity-ridden, resource-hungry monsters long past their original mandate and currently well on their way to become a gigantic mess that include everything and the kitchen sink.
As an user, I do not mind downloading and installing slim and fast native application which take advantage of the hardware my devices provide and integrate nicely with my OS.
I personally do not mind the state of web browsers anymore, to be a web browser today is quite akin to the operating itself now (Let's not talk about Chromebooks), It's a very complex, resource heavy monster that abstracts away hardware differences from the software, and I love it. Web today is a mess, What we thought a browser will do, read HTML and render it on the screen, has been well offloaded to well, "web apps", and web browser just is a tool that runs them, quite similar to what the OS does.
What I like about web is how "safer" it is compared to well running binaries on the OS, me visiting a site would not give it access to all my private photos, and potentially allow it to add itself to startup everytime I open the OS without my permission.
As an end user, I felt like Safari should have done better. And extension for Safari are gated behind app store only (no sideloading the extension).
Also I came across a few sites that Safari couldn't render it correctly whereas Firefox and Vivaldi show the site just fine. I only use Safari as a last resort and only used it for Zoom/Doxy/Whereby/etc.
It's interesting that your list defining the "best browser" doesn't actually include properly rendering web pages and the general issues that safari has as a web browser outside what you mentioned. "Fast" is interesting, as if something doesn't work, is it really fast? I routinely see how Safari fakes speed. Being able to read a web page before someone else doesn't make it faster if you can't also interact with that web page. And while battery efficiency is critical, rarely do I know someone who is only using safari. And while being "native" is nice, it also means its use is limited to just the Apple ecosystem.
Best means different thing to different people. I have opted to define exactly what best means to me, so that we can get comments like yours to further the discussion.
Yes - Chrome, Brave, Edge, Firefox... all use non-native UI components in their macOS apps (even iOS), which makes them look and feel out of place on a Mac.
Apple's software quality has certainly slipped. I'm not sure if I'm just getting old but I find software quality in general seems to have slipped. Or is it just because there's more software around?
I think this is hard to recognize but almost certainly true. I have the Airpod Pro and was recently annoyed at how it wasn't quite doing the audio source switching like I wanted. Clearly some sort of software issue. Yet, if I honestly take a step back, the fact that I can put these in my ear and be using one of 3 devices that are right next to me and it seamlessly and correctly switches the audio based on what I am doing is quite magical. It's easy to be annoyed at the few times it doesn't when magic becomes the norm.
This sort of story always reminds me from a bit in Seinfeld where Kramer's phone number is one digit off from the Movie Phone number. He would say something like "press 1 for Total Recall, Press 2 for...". Of course he would not be able to determine which button was pressed, and would say "why don't you just tell me the name of the movie you want to see?"
I feel like we are creating really unpredictable, and hard to implement UIs in the name of "magic". Would a button in the UI been better? I think it would have been, at least for me.
That's a good point. I've observed in my own work that complex organizations have a way of driving out expertise. I don't mean that experts quit, as that is an unavoidable fact of doing business. Rather the organization is structured in such a way it is difficult to build expertise in the first place, and many of the experts are the people that were around before the organizational complexity arose.
I'm not so sure, at least in the context of Apple because they have slipped far more than their competitors. Android is way more stable and has far fewer bugs than iOS as a simple example.
Yeah, I agree. Apple has slipped while competitors have improved. Android today (especially the Google-only flavor) is pretty impressively stable. Even worse is that iOS is supposedly more "simple" than Android.
Mostly, my comment was projecting my own experiences with complexity on the projects I have been involved with. You are right, in this case other factors probably dominate.
Computers really are not doing much more today than they were in the early 2000s. Despite the massive increases in home computational power, the only thing that is really visibly improved is the graphical fidelity of video games. All other software is doing the same stuff it did 20 years ago...just worse.
Bad software is more due to needing to ship stuff ASAP for marketing, the board of directors, and for the investors. This decline in software can really be matched up with the increase of startup culture.
I would also argue that complexity is developers own doing, trying to strap every new fangled library, engine, tool, API ,buzzword of the day, etc. to their program...when there is zero reason to. Nothing about what modern software does is more complex than it was in the 2000s
I can Cmd-C on one device and Cmd-V on another. It works wirelessly and securely without explicit network configurarion and even without network access. The amount of complexity that enables this simple feature is staggering if you look into the implementation.
I think that it has to do mainly with two things: 1. The overall complexity of what's possible is growing, so software is just becoming much more complex.
The other is the fact that server based software has an almost zero time deployment cycle, and even native code for desktop/mobile can be shipped really quickly. This makes software mostly an iterative process. If fixing bugs on a weekly basis in a major mobile app is no biggie, and almost nothing gets blocked because of a bug that can be just fixed next week, you just get a lot more bugs shipped to users.
> Or is it just because there's more software around?
I think there's _less software around_, insofar as there's fewer discrete software titles around, but each title has far, far more software code behind it.
I remember as a sprog, running my cracked copy of Adobe Photoshop 6.0 - that in order to do anything "cool" in PS (especially when you just can't grok how to paint, even with a Wacom) you needed a huge smattering of third-party Photoshop plug-ins: Alienskin, Kai's Power Tools, Flaming Pear, FilterFactory, etc - but nowadays while plug-ins are still a thing I find myself getting-by with only Photoshop's stock functionality. It certainly doesn't help that Apple continues toward completely locking-down their platforms: in-proc and binary plug-ins for Photoshop on iOS will never be a thing.
It feels industry-wide to me. Quality was never a high priority, but in the past decade it’s fallen that much further. Everything has become centered around shoveling as much code as possible as quickly as possible, with little to no regard for how well it works. Nobody cares if it requires obscene amounts of memory, turns laptops into furnaces, and functions correctly only half the time so long as it’s getting shipped quickly.
It is industry wide, but I don’t think this gets Apple off the hook. They sell a premium product so it’s not unreasonable to expect something a little better.
I've been using and supporting Apple software since the 90s and I think this is more an artifact of most bugs not being especially memorable than anything else. People have complained about bugs after every release, a fair fraction of the complaints circulating online will be attribution error or overly-generalizing a niche condition as global, etc. and that seems to have been basically constant since OS X 10.2 or so.
There is one more interesting discussion, however, which I think is probably a legitimate trade-off: the entire industry has been moving to faster releases since it's easy to ship updates over the internet to huge audiences. When that wasn't possible and update cycles were measured in years, teams did spend more time on QA so you probably did have a somewhat lower chance of seeing bugs of the sort which were caught by that kind of process but at the expense of taking much longer to see new features or get fixes for bugs which slipped through either due to complexity or limited trigger conditions. Since the amount and complexity of software has generally been increasing, I think that this is generally the right trend with the addition of telemetry to collect crash reports, but it does seem like this could increase the perceived number of bugs even if the duration of time where you're exposed to a particular bug decreases.
The good news is that for once we have a precedent of Apple listening to what people actually want with the new MBP lineup. Whether they'll be able to replicate that magic with their software teams remains to be seen, but at least now it feels within the realm of possible.
I'm sure plenty of people will disagree with me, but I don't think this is a good precedent. Apple has always been opinionated, and that's a lot of what made Apple different. Admittedly, sometimes their opinionated takes weren't great, but a lot of times they really were great, even when some people didn't realize it. That's what allowed Apple to grow and soar to the heights it did. I worry that the new MBP line is a sign of Apple beginning to loose that quality that made them different from so many other companies... I worry that it's the start of a fall into mediocrity.
I agree that Apple's hot headedness in the past has helped the industry in the long run. For example, eliminating the floppy drive with the original iMac, or pushing for open alternatives to Flash by not allowing it on iPhones. It is concerning that they included a full size sd card reader (22 year old technology at this point).
The SD form factor is over two decades old, but the technology inside the cards and readers has advanced significantly, so you're effectively complaining that nobody has broken backwards compatibility by switching form factors.
I love SD cards, theyre like miniature floppy disks, but not too miniature - microSD feels very fragile and more difficult to handle - what do you have against full size SD?
I'm sure plenty of people will disagree with me, but I don't think this is a good precedent. Apple has always been opinionated, and that's a lot of what made Apple different.
I agree in principle but in practice Apple made a lot of bad bets with the previous generation across the entire product line.
Intel failed to meet its targets time and time again, which hit Apple's production schedules especially hard since they tend to make big updates infrequently rather than continuously updating internals to be as fast as possible.
The USB-C ecosystem never got as convenient or extensible as they had hoped. Only now do I see a lot of good USB-C docks and peripherals coming out and it's still not as robust as you would want if you're building your entire product suite around it.
Some stuff there just was no good alternative, particularly SD cards.
The TouchBar was a dud.
The low-profile switches on their keyboards had big reliability issues.
And many more! Part of being a bold innovator is knowing when an idea didn't work out. The latest generation shows that they're willing to defer to practical needs rather than doubling-down on failed ideas.
I’m startled by this. Apple got too good at believing it knew best when the industry told it that it was wrong. This created false confidence for bad ideas. Note that I’m a hardcore Apple fan saying this. The previous design was bad. Recent UI changes in the OS are bad. I criticize because I want the thing that I love to kick ass. On HW, they’ve got it. On SW, not so much.
I have a few issues with Apple software, but with AirPods Pro they recently added an AI-driven voice isolation mode which was an incredible change. Went from the other side barely being able to hear you when you were speaking in a noisy environment to feeling like you were in a quiet room together. Massive quality of life improvement and increased competitive moat from better software.
My AirPods almost never connect automatically to my phone when trying to take a call. I've since just reverted to the wired set when talking on the phone. Awful.
You're probably in the minority there, I've seen complaints few and far between about AirPods connectivity, but lots of glowing praise for. Personally, AirPods UX is better than any other Bluetooth product I've used.
I've had similar problems with the UX on AirPods.
Here are the choices in Bluetooth for AirPods to connect to my Mac:
1. Automatically
2. When Last Connected to this Mac
What does #2 even mean? I want my AirPods to connect when I last connected?
It's been common for me using my AirPods to take a pause in talking and while using my PC for the AirPods to detect sound on my PC and then switch.
Yes, definitely better than many other Bluetooth earbuds but I think people were hoping Apple's control of the OS and hardware would've produced a better, consistent experience.
This is just a guy griping about his bugs. Apple’s software quality is by far the best among competitors (Facebook’s is better but not really an Apple competitor).
Whether or not Apple software is better than that of its competitors it's getting worse relative to older Apple software - at least when it comes to macOS. I just had the experience of "upgrading" from Mojave to Big Sur and the number of new graphical glitches and bugs I'm seeing is pretty infuriating. And this isn't some new x.0 release, Big Sur is on 11.6 at this point.
It feels like the macOS desktop experience peaked with Snow Leopard and it's been slowly sliding downhill ever since.
Real time update: Now my Bluetooth is acting up in a way I've never seen before. Thanks Big Sur!
When an Apple feature doesn't work I give up on it for the remainder of the software version.
Trying to fix broken Apple bits is always time-consuming and almost always fruitless. They have trained me to believe "it just works" or it just doesn't and I am just hopeless.
The uneven distribution part is interesting, especially because it compares Apple Maps to Google Maps.
I think “unevenness” shows what’s in the main focus for a company: Google Maps are great almost everywhere, but you can’t buy a Google Pixel phone except in a handful of countries. Apple’s the opposite: iPhones are available everywhere in the world on the same day, but software is spotty.
I've definitely noticed this over the years with working professionally as a software dev with Apple products. The random freezes, app crashes, clicks stop working in apps until a restart, memory leaks bogging the entire system down, etc.
Yesterday I prepared a few years old Windows laptop for my daughter to use in school.
It took me a few hours just to install updates, remove bloatware (my oh my, the amount is staggering!) and fix privacy settings. And this was for Windows 10 which I hear is a mild version of a mess that Windows 11 is.
I was instantly reminded why I appreciate Apple software more.
Windows is horrible in this regard. And what's worse is that the users seem not to care such that this behavior proliferates. I have a windows machine that I take it offline and want it running at all times. No updates possible, Wi-Fi is turned of right? Wrong, windows does restart machine and enables Wi-Fi. It pisses me to no end how little control I have of this machine
Sounds like you're just using the basic toggle switch to "disable" Wi-Fi when that's not really the purpose of the switch. If you actually want the Wi-Fi disabled, you have to do it right. Do it in the UEFI menu, or disable it in Device Manager if that option isn't available. It won't get re-enabled if you do it right.
In reality, you just don't realise how much bloatware osx has. Install a firewall and watch as studentd or 100 other services you never use contacts apple.
Edit: List of most recent and trying not to include things that may be useful to me
syncdefaultsd,
nsurlsessiond,
apsd,
cloudd,
transparencyd,
mapspushd,
cloudphotod,
akd,
parsec-fbf,
appstoreagent,
AddressBookSourceSync,
com.apple.iCloudHelper.xpc,
familycircled,
trustd,
AssetCacheLocatorService.xpc,
imagent,
indentyservicesd,
com.apple.sbd,
studentd,
airportd,
configd,
parsecd,
com.apple.geod.xpc,
com.apple.geod.xpc,
avconferenced,
rapportd,
trustd,
remindd,
helpd,
syspolicyd
Long list right.... that's from the previous 3 hours.
As long as corporate banking is our value store that’s true.
I’d rather see humans themselves as our value store and motivate, teach, and mentor each other to do the logistics work to that end.
Letting banks gamble with our deposits when we’re all in the habit of doing these things daily anyway seems like pointless extra steps.
I think people are more willing to be a stable mesh network of agents for each other than history full of feudal warlords will let us believe, we don’t need to prop up ephemeral tent poles. That’s just old story.
Bonobo tribes have been observed killing alphas and then developing social harmony. Not saying we should behead billionaires, but austerity for elites would be a figurative death.
I agree with the previous person that Windows has more bloat. I don't want the 3-5 3rd party games it pre-installs and several other things. I also agree with you though. For me, All the Apple software is stuff I don't use so when I get a new Mac the first thing is removing Mail, Maps, Contacts, Pages, Photos, Calendar, Facetime, Reminders, AppleTV, Music, Keynote, and more and then removing the bloat widgets like News, Stocks, etc...
> removing Mail, Maps, Contacts, Pages, Photos, Calendar, Facetime, Reminders, AppleTV, Music, Keynote, and more and then removing the bloat widgets like News, Stocks, etc
All of the things in your list are just apps that can be removed with one click. My partner’s PC comes pre-installed with masses of hidden spyware. I know the kneejerk reaction is to bash Apple for everything - but the two are totally not comparable.
Hey so I’ll be getting my first MacBook Pro in a couple weeks, so I’m still learning the details about OS X. I’m coming from a windows / Linux background.
I thought the OS shipped with its own firewall? Would you recommend using a third party firewall despite having its own?
Windows and Linux user for 25 years [EDIT Windows for 25, Linux for 20, to be more precise], heavy macOS user (in addition to those) for the last 10 or so.
If it has a firewall of any kind, I've never noticed nor interacted with it. I've also never installed a third party firewall.
Firewalls can do two things, mainly. Block inbound connections, block outbound connections. The macOS firewall is mainly intended for the former. Many folks want to prevent the latter (e.g. blocking phone home connections).
Get little snitch. This is a firewall that dosen't care what apple thinks is useful.
There was some controversy in the previous year because apple tried to deprecate the firewall hooks and allow their junk passed the replacement they offered.
I'm leaving apple for linux as we speak for two reasons, privacy and they can't help but mess with shit every time they release an update.
The most recent, this week they released an update and now their airport service listens on port 5000 making a conflict with running a dev flask service locally.
I left Apple for the same reasons. They want complacent morons who pay $2000+ for a glorified email checker. Not legitimate developers. Idgaf how much iOS/MacOS users pay, I'm not learning Swift or objective C. Apple is the farthest thing from a company that wants to encourage development. They just want major players to shell out large amounts 30% transactions.
> I'm leaving apple for linux as we speak for two reasons, privacy and they can't help but mess with shit every time they release an update.
"Mess with shit" was what drove me to Linux by around 2015. It seemed like every major MacOS upgrade torched my Eclipse-based Java dev environment, generally requiring a reinstall.
I mean, you can turn that off. Is changing a port such a showstopper?
I’ve flip flopped for years, (I was using freebsd more than 20 years ago, genuinely ran Solaris 10 with my own build of kde4 on a hp probook, etc) but last time I tried to use Linux for work I got defeated by a conference suite projector at a client and it cost us a big contract. The happy path (for me anyway) is doing all actual dev work on Linux vms and using macOS as your browser/im/terminal client — which it’s great at.
And it works with those stupid little projector dongles at clients when you’re trying to pitch them 6 figures of consulting ;)
> I’ve flip flopped for years, (I was using freebsd more than 20 years ago, genuinely ran Solaris 10 with my own build of kde4 on a hp probook, etc) but last time I tried to use Linux for work I got defeated by a conference suite projector at a client and it cost us a big contract. The happy path (for me anyway) is doing all actual dev work on Linux vms and using macOS as your browser/im/terminal client — which it’s great at.
It takes about one time of "this didn't work and it's your fault for using Linux" in a business context to break one of using Desktop Linux (or BSD, et c.), I think. I doubt similar stories are uncommon. I've got one, certainly.
At least if MacOS or Windows breaks, you're not the asshole. And it doesn't hurt that they in fact do break less often (well, Win10 with its abrupt, unexpected, and slow forced updates was a real problem for a while, but otherwise)
>There was some controversy in the previous year because apple tried to deprecate the firewall hooks and allow their junk passed the replacement they offered.
Funny how framing something that's true (allowing apple software to bypass firewalls) is seen as a controversy. See previous discussion on hn: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24838816
There are multiple firewall options, but it's worth noting that Apple can circumvent them at a kernel-level if they want to phone home. You should think long and hard about how much you trust Apple before switching everything over.
Apple ships the pf fireball by default. It's a powerful firewall (same as OpenBSD AFAIK) but the way Apple configures it is very permissive. You can use a utility like Murus to configure it to your liking, although the configuration is rather complicated. It's also a network-level firewall, not an application-level firewall.
If you'd like an application-level firewall, you can check out Lulu or Little Snitch. Back when Little Snitch still(?) installed kernel extensions, it was found to be quite insecure—there were talks at DEFCON about it. Lulu is a lesser-known alternative.
Mac OS comes with pf installed. This can block inbound and outbound traffic. There is a utility called Murus that manages this with a GUI, https://www.murusfirewall.com
Thanks, forgot about pf! Murus seems the perfect middle-ground for when day-to-day management through commandline tools is too much (I lasted for about a week!), but GUI tools sometimes too restrictive.
So basically in that list you’re suggesting disabling the ability to download web content, syncing of address books, getting updated security signatures, connecting to iCloud, downloading dynamic assets that many apps use to reduce initial size and provide non-binary updates, Siri keyword suggestions in Safari, Airdrop, Maps integration, push notifications for Messages, etc.
Most Apple users will definitively want those on, and will break your system in subtle ways if you disable them. I wouldn’t make such assumptions about whatever you use the service or not. If you don’t use a service, it typically will have very little traffic if any at all.
> Most Apple users will definitively want those on, and will break your system in subtle ways if you disable them.
What happened to the good old days of "ask for user consent before phoning home"?
I mean, Apple is miles ahead of Windows in that regard, but your average Linux or BSD setup won't phone home outside of repository downloads unless requested.
I think you have your target demographics mixed up for MacOS and Linux. Once you reframe it in that light, you've answered your question. One is a poweruser who wants complete control of their environment, the other is a much broader user who wants a convenience of experience and safe environment. Trade offs to both of them.
The only happy medium I would consider to your approach is that if MacOS had two set up routes, one defaulting as a power user turning everything off and then initiating things are you want and another as a general user. Maybe that would solve it (though would be a heavy lift I am sure).
This is the Little Snitch[0] problem. If you have ever used Little Snitch, you will soon realize that 1) there is so much crap phoning home and 2) most people do not want to deal with giving permission to each and every one of these services.
I have tried giving permission and at the end of the day, it's just not worth the time. For me, Little Snitch is great as a reporting tool but it's just too much work as a firewall.
> most people do not want to deal with giving permission to each and every one of these services.
It’s far worse than just annoying: if people have to give permission to a bunch of things they don’t understand, they will absolutely give permission to something they shouldn’t.
You want the user to make a few decisions as possible, and every single one should be an actual decision: where the user knows what the options are, has an actual stake, and might legitimately choose either option depending on their preferences and circumstance.
The more times they have to click “yes” without thinking, the more susceptible to malware they become.
I think this is a bit of an odd take, given that the alternative is that the computer just silently allows you to download content from anywhere. I don't think this makes someone any more susceptible to malware than they already were. Little Snitch is the sort of software that the average person wouldn't install, anyway.
I understand the point, though. Going to just about any major website you will be pummeled with prompts to allow for a dozen different domains just to view one page, and it doesn't really give any indication of what those are used for. They have a what seems to be infinitesimally small list of connections that they do recognize and explain their use, but ultimately it's pretty useless for the vast majority of prompts.
I'd like there to be a better way to deal with this, but I'm not really sure what the solution to it would look like. You can download blocklists and just silently allow other connections, but I don't think that's significantly better than just using a hosts file.
The most useful thing Little Snitch does is alert me when individual applications try to phone home. For browsing the web it feels more like a chore.
> the computer just silently allows you to download content from anywhere
How many times have you been asked to approve a download? How many of those times have you said "no"?
If the answer is "hundreds" and "zero," what's the point? If the answer "hundreds" and "ten just in the past week," then that's exactly the point, and it serves a valuable purpose.
My response was mostly to your last sentence, "The more times they have to click 'yes' without thinking, the more susceptible to malware they become." There exists a dichotomy of you click on a link, it loads the page or begins the download or alternatively, you click the link, Little Snitch checks its filters and if it doesn't have a rule set, it'll prompt you to set one. In no case is the second one going to make someone more susceptible to malware, because the worst case scenario, where someone approves every single download, results in exactly identical outcomes as the person who does not have Little Snitch installed.
I agree broadly with your point that prompt fatigue or decision fatigue is problematic and should be avoided when possible. I think this is a problem in particular with Little Snitch even, which doesn't do enough to provide. However, the point of Little Snitch is to allow someone to monitor and control the traffic at a granular level and the consequence of providing that utility is the frequent prompts whenever you're visiting a new site. To Obdev's credit, silent mode exists and you can set it to deny or allow all traffic without a prompt (and evaluate the traffic at your leisure).
Yep. I have a system tray CPU monitor running on both my Linux mint and mac computers. On mint when I don’t touch the computer it just sits at 0% basically all the time. On macos there’s always some junk flitting around doing who knows what. photoanalysisd, or sending telemetry for 3rd party apps, or iCloud syncing or something. It’s like the 2 E cores are there just to run apple’s bloaty crap. Shame those processes don’t limit themselves to E cores.
>If you don’t use a service, it typically will have very little traffic if any at all.
Like I said this was all from the last 3 hours and I haven't used any of those services listed. It's also missing the point a bit, I'm not bandwidth poor on a 3G connection trying to save my datacap.
I don't want apple turning my laptop into a thinclient for their cloud systems. I don't want telemetry and meta data going to them every ~30 seconds (the little snitch icon flashes a red X every time something is blocked, it's on a per minute basis).
Of all those services I use calendarsync. I miss having airdrop a little bit but everything else I don't need.
Also, the way you've phrased some of those, especially the notarisation
> getting updated security signatures
is a bit disingenuous when there's a massive privacy implication in that it allows apple to know every single application I run on my computer.
Most Apple users wouldn't agree to that if you stuck it in their face and the fact that it breaks the OS in subtle ways is a user hostile position to argue from. Hence why I'm giving up my Apple addicition.
What data is actually going over OCSP? I thought it was only ever checking for revocation and not actually sending app data, and I believe only ever happens when you want to take an app out of quarantine versus every app launch. You can always disable gatekeeper if you so please.
It does check for revocation. Using the developer's unique certificate ID, which, for the vast majority of developers, uniquely identifies an app. Over unencrypted HTTP.
OCSP over unencrypted http has not yet been replaced. I believe that the constellation of apps (identified by proxy by their developer IDs which are transmitted) can in a lot of cases uniquely identify a system, given a sufficient number of apps installed/used.
Many of those are useful to me even if you don’t care about them…which proves your point: there’s no reasonable (and sometimes none at all) way to pick and choose.
Jesus Christ, thank you. People act as if bullshit like TV and FaceTime are perfectly innocuous binaries without 6478 daemons molesting your memory irrespective of deliberate use & permissions.
Does it make a difference if you disable all of the iCloud stuff in settings? I let it sync most of my stuff so it moves between platforms, but I always assumed it wouldn't phone home for services where syncing is disabled. If it does this anyway, seems like a mistake.
Yeah that sucks, but on OSX side I have to restart my computer every week or so because of forced updates.
Restarting really is a big deal for me as my workspace consists of several dozen open windows, some of them I have to login, navigate to a particular place, etc... also you lose your train of thought. It has gotten that bad for me, that I have to take screenshots before restarting every time, so I don't lose track of where I was.
I understand not everybody has my same use case but for me it truly is a PITA.
Of course, the alternative is to just click on "Install Later" every 8 hours for the rest of your life, and then the one time you miss that button for a few pixels and click on "Install Now" everything gets closed and obliterated in an instant. But yeah, at least now I have the latest version of Safari which I haven't used in 10 years.
But you don't have to update. The consequence is that every day you have to choose "Ask me later" on the notification that pops up once a day, but that's a lot easier than restoring everything I have open. I only update when I have to reboot for some reason.
The really weird thing is that I have an older iMac that seems to be powered on constantly (albeit with the screen off - I don't understand why) and also an M1 Macbook Air which does genuinely go to sleep with the lid closed. I seldom use either of them more than once every week or two. The iMac sporadically reboots itself without my consent, presumably to install updates. The Macbook Air has been running since the day it was delivered to my door without ever rebooting (100+ days uptime).
Definitely not defending windows here, but don't you find that macs come with bloatware as well? Safari, apple music, maps, etc - some of which you cannot uninstall as well.
Sure, but Win 10/11 have had stuff like candy crush and other 3rd party apps installed by default for a bit. MacOS only has 1st party bloat, which may be a big difference for some.
The difference is that none of that stuff is running in the background when you aren't using it. Maps doesn't take up a global menu slot. Apple Music doesn't open unless you explicitly open it (unless you happen to hit an Apple Music URL on the web). You can ignore it and it doesn't bother you. Whereas on Windows, bloatware tends to add a Start menu icon, tray icon, background process, startup item, etc.
And Apple's built-in apps aren't harmful, they're just unnecessary. In the early 2000s, my parents got me a Mac that came with Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2. :-)
I never found a way of disabling the automatic starting of iTunes when you press the play/pause button on the keyboard. How do I choose my own music player app?
And my new Mac has things like (can't remember exactly) 'musiccreationd'.
If you're running a non-iTunes music app (including web pages, on newer versions of macOS), the play/pause button goes to whichever one last grabbed the audio. So if you start VLC (or whatever) first thing (or add it to the auto-start items), then the play/pause button will always go there.
It always worked as a pause/play for already playing media, my complaint was about its use as a launcher. Made muscle memory tricky as its behaviour depended on what was running at the time.
There's a great little utility called BetterTouchTool that will customize the default play button app. It can do a bunch of other little things, too. https://folivora.ai
I had a another look in "Keyboard Shortcuts". Lots of shortcuts, including a category called 'App shortcuts'. No mention of iTunes / Apple Music. I think it's just hard-coded in the OS.
Grab it with your mouse, drag it off the dock, done.
I guess I’m not really seeing what I’m supposed to be outraged about, here. Modifying the stuff in the dock on OSX isn’t difficult or unintuitive at all? Just grab the stuff you don’t want on there and drag it out, and grab the stuff you do want on there and drag it in? It’s just using the standard desktop metaphor and interface, and you’re in no danger of breaking fragile uninstall scripts like you would be if you manually removed a program’s entry from the start menu on Windows. It really isn’t comparable at all.
Sounds like your PC vendor installed a whole bunch of crap. I put W10 on a fresh PC just a couple of months back and it was a painless process. It was a W10 Pro ISO from Microsoft.
The last time I looked at Windows computers at Best Buy a year ago, anything mid-level and below was almost unusable because McAfee was using all the CPU.
I bought a Windows laptop (wanted to game with a modern-ish GPU). Step 1 was uninstall McAfee, and turn on Windows Defender for some modicum of protection. There are error popups for software I haven't installed when it boots. My parents have a new Windows computer which was showing popups advertising an extended warranty when I visited this weekend.
A fresh install of Win10 from the Microsoft ISO is very different from the typical factory configuration found on new hardware.
What businesses want Xbox companion and xbox game bar running on all their work computers - seriously -> if you are on Microsoft search for xbox on your work computer.
Does Candy Crush Saga still come on the business pro ISO installs? That used to make the office laugh - who is paying $200/machine to get candy crush saga pre-installed.
In fact, the trick was they also had a separate app called app updater that would reload these things even if you uninstalled Candy Crush.
Too funny! The only way to get candy crush to go away was to uninstall it, then uninstall app updater - though people didn't date do that biz side because they didn't know what else app updater supported.
Every business should enable & demo Xbox Game bar. The video capture is awesome for helping debug things. Just record what's happening & send it over with your Help Desk ticket.
It's free, easy to use & comes with Windows.
Microsoft could & should also just load that as a stand alone tool like the snipping tool. But they haven't, so I encourage Xbox Game bar.
I don't have the same experience as you, sorry I am not sure why you're facing so many issues with an OS install. What does your IT department say? Any troubleshooting steps?
I did the same. I disagree. It required two rounds of reboots even though it was the latest iso and the Ethernet didn’t work (i219). Then whenever the thing goes to sleep all the windows move to the top left of the screen when it wakes up.
Sorry to hear you're facing issues with the install! I simply presented my own experience, I'm not saying anyone is right or wrong, so I am not sure what you're disagreeing with!
1. Yes first thing I run if I ever have to use a Windows PC is this little gem called Shutup 10 (1).
2. Then there is another software called 10AppsManager (2) to remove further bloatware like Onedrive, Skype, etc.
3. After that I visit ninite.com (3) to get the usual software without toolbars and spyware.
4. For other software like ffmpeg I use choco or chocolatey (4).
I am now a full time linux user but this was the least painful way to get my PC running before that. I'm sure things have changed or improved since, but this really worked for me 2 years ago.. hope this helps someone.
I am forced to use a Windows machine sometimes for work, and to me the unpardonable sin is that Windows seems to randomly reboot _without asking me_! I come to my office and all my open sessions are gone. How do you turn this off?! I try turning off the setting but it randomly turns itself back on.
Also, how do people set up a reasonable dev environment not built around Visual Studio? On my Mac I just use Terminal + MacVim (with my plugins), so I don't have particularly demanding needs. I tried WSL, but its just Linux side-by-side with Windows, not integrated with windows. If that's what I wanted I would just use Linux, but I need a command-line where I can still build Windows apps. Currently I use bash-for-git (so I can run `cmake --build ...`) but its so non-standard in lots of ways that it drives me a little nutty.
> I am forced to use a Windows machine sometimes for work, and to me the unpardonable sin is that Windows seems to randomly reboot _without asking me_! I come to my office and all my open sessions are gone. How do you turn this off?!
That's the neat part, you don't! Windows loves to revert those settings after every major update, even if you dig into the registry and scheduler and change the settings at the source. It is one of my biggest gripes.
One of the best things Apple added to macOS a while back was the reopen all windows on startup. I don't even think twice about rebooting my Mac any more. Windows could sorely use the equivalent.
One way I dramatically reduce the amount of random reboots is I have a thing that looks like a USB flash drive but it has a few switches on the side - one of them, when activated, randomly moves the mouse every 1-5 minutes (there is also a hardware wheel knob that lets you customize the duration). It was meant to be a practical joke thing - slip it onto the back of a friends PC and drive them nuts, but it works great at tricking Windows to think the computer is being actively used. It doesn't stop all reboots caused by Windows updates, but it dramatically reduces them.
I also use it to keep my work PC awake when attending online meetings, or especially when I'm presenting. We have mandatory screen saver timeouts and for some reason I can't convince the IT overlords to tweak group policy to allow non-admins the ability to enable presentation mode. Oh well. At least they haven't resorted to only allowing whitelisted USB devices to run so my little joke USB fob still does its thing. I got it from Think Geek in their heyday but there are tons of similar devices on Amazon.
I moved from Linux to Windows for less hassle with hardware and sleep. I stopped using windows because of the reboot issue (and hassle with sleep...laptops kept waking and burning out in my bag). I went to ridiculous lengths to avoid it rebooting when I had a bunch of VMs running doing long-running computations and it just kept biting me. Sometimes the VM disk would get corrupted from this.
Eventually I realized it hated me and wanted me to fail in life, or perhaps click on all the crappy games or whatever it insisted on installing from time to time.
I don't love everything about macOS, but it's the least bad option and to my mind and for my needs, it's not even close.
Reboots should be configurable via Windows Update settings if these aren't taken over by a group policy.
Last time I've dealt with random reboots turned out to be a hardware issue (bluescreen->autoreboot).
Note that Windows now has an official package manager called WinGet (https://github.com/microsoft/winget-cli), which worked very well when I tried it a few months ago; Skype and OneDrive can now be uninstalled without an external tool; and disabling all telemetry also seems to weaken antivirus protection.
Late, but in looking at things it looks like there are a significant number of things that Ninite will install and Chocolatey does not. While one can re-run the Ninite installer later for updates I do prefer the less all-or-nothing model of Chocolatey.
I like it far more than Ninite and it is a good way to find some open source software that you may not have heard about or used before, quickly install the programs, and keep them up to date with only a few clicks.
Windows in the Ballmer Era, Vista to Windows 8, was a disaster. Windows 10 was released a year after Satya Nadella took over and was an improvement. Windows 11 of the Nadella era is a big improvement. It seems like Microsoft decided to spend the money to get it right to create something stable and pleasing. I've been running it for a month and highly recommend it. I think a big attraction to Mac OS is that the UI hasn't changed much over the years. Time will tell if Microsoft is on board with that. I don't listen to the Microsoft or Apple haters who are always on here telling me one or the other sucks.
Common refrain from the fanboys: You’re enjoying the things you like wrong.
Seriously, I am using Windows 11 since official release and I am getting to a point where things are just the way I like them. I was lucky enough to have a machine that just met the TPM/processor requirements cutoff.
There are a few annoyances: I would like to use the dashboard/widgets for weather, etc but they force their newsfeed on you.
I believe Windows 11 is that last desktop machine UI we'll see for awhile from Microsoft as they intend to refine and improve this one and stop irritating people with changes. I'm happy finding work arounds for things that don't work for me. For example, I can no longer read the time from the task bar from a distance, so I have a browser tab loaded with a time service that I like better. https://www.clocktab.com/
> I believe Windows 11 is that last desktop machine UI we'll see for awhile from Microsoft as they intend to refine and improve this one and stop irritating people with changes.
Yes, I believe that was their intent, but they said it too soon. 10 still had a lot of ugly artifacts that appear to be cleaned up in 11. Well, I'm keeping my fingers crossed that I'm right. I think it's what they should do.
What are the Windows use cases that Linux doesn’t do?
General web browsing type tasks are solid, text editing/note taking works. Videos and audio (including Spotify) work. Steam and games generally work (even most windows games through Proton).
What else does ones daughter need for school? She’s not video editing or creating music (two use cases where you may need windows or OSX; art is more or less covered through blender/Inkscape/krita)
Mint or Manjaro are easy to install and setup and come with good defaults that should be pretty easy to navigate for someone new to Linux.
Dunno what you mean by peripherals, at least ones that don't work on Linux, but the other two categories work just fine. Gaming has come a long way thanks to Valve and their work on Proton.
I'm guessing you're not someone who would describe themselves as a "gamer"?
EDIT: (I don't mean this in a mean way, just to say that people who care a lot about being able to play specific games probably still won't be satisfied without a Windows box).
I play plenty of games and have a Steam library of ~400 or so games. I haven't had a Windows install in a few years. The only issues I've had with Windows games on Linux, using Proton on Steam, is that it doesn't work in Wayland (but every game I've tried works fine under X, of course I do check ProtonDB.com before buying games that don't have official Linux support).
I personally don’t play many, but generally you won’t see any performance difference. Do check ProtonDB to see if the ones you have in mind work as expected. Typically games that are rated platinum work as well as on Windows, Gold typically works well but some people had some issues (Check the comments, sometimes the issues are unrelated things like the launcher not working but the game works fine) while anything else expect headaches. Some multiplayer shooters have issues with anti cheat for example.
Yeah, I don't either, mostly just curious since that seems like it'd be the most demanding category. I've actually mostly been missing Battle Brothers which is... not latency sensitive. And it looks like ProtonDB gives it a platinum! Thanks for the pointer to that.
Sadly looks like a lot of the top 10 are in "Borked" status, though.
> Sadly looks like a lot of the top 10 are in "Borked" status, though.
50% of them, but 2 of the 5 broken games are known to be buggy in general (New Worlds anyway, PUBG was years ago, no idea how it fares nowadays so maybe I'm wrong) so dunno how much of that is Proton's fault. The two gold ones seem hit or miss: many people report they work, but some people have issues.
Still, a lot of AAA games work perfectly (eg Sekiro) and many games I play even have native Linux versions (Crusader Kings 3 being the main one, I'm hoping with the steam deck more devs will release Linux versions but maybe that's too optimistic) and most of the indie games I play work well, so for me, I've been pretty happy and haven't looked back.
Not only that but a huge portion of people will simply not swap away from the OS they know under any circumstances.
Windows 12 could require all users to get punched in the face to log in and most people would say, "Yeah, it sucks but it's better than spending $1,800 on a Mac. Plus my video games..."
I feel like running linux is like voting for a 3rd party candidate in the US. FWIW linux is great I just can't convert all the people who aren't developers to linux without an unnecessarily steep learning curve.
I wish we had more options though. Between Windows and Apple there's no other real competition. Linux is cool and all... but not user friendly (not even Ubuntu)
I don't understand this attitude. I spend countless hours trying to keep my wife's work computers working. Getting windows to connect to a printer is a frequent ordeal and fixes seem to always be ephemeral, things soon breaking again. Her Macs are not as bad but still have lots of hiccups.
Meanwhile I've been on Ubuntu for more than a decade and as far as I can remember, for example, printing consists of printer just magically appearing in my apps without me ever having to install anything and I press print and it prints. That's user friendliness to me. At least for my workflows (mostly web browsing, software dev and office stuff), there is vastly less fiddling and head scratching to keep things working on Ubuntu.
My work Linux laptop frequently (several times daily) breaks Bluetooth, breaks audio, does not wake from sleep, wakes from sleep but only shows the mouse pointer on a black screen, stops throttling the CPU down, resets the DHCP-specified DNS server to 0.0.0.0, sends stuff to printers that cause them to just spit out endless blank sheets of paper. The "solutions" to all of these are multi-step manual disasters... uninstall pulse audio, restart cinnamon, reinstall blueman, upgrade Jack, manually create config files from copying some file on a GitHub repo, downgrade to some specific version of CUPS, mess about with apt-get repos to not get the latest version of whatever...wtf?! That is not user friendly.
My personal Windows laptop has never had a single one of those problems. It has been faultless from day 1 without a single issue.
Sounds like a truly broken install. What's the maintenance history of the machine? Have you been patching it from third party repos? Why are you running Jack on a work computer anyway?
Back up your documents and do a fresh install. It'll take you an hour and you'll regain stability.
I mean, I admit you do have to start with known supported hardware. I have no patience for having to install drivers but like I said, for the last decade, it has been easy to find a computer where most everything worked out of the box (Bluetooth maybe the exception but it doesn't seem to work half of the time on any pair of devices/cars regardless or software being open source or not). System76 laptops are great when you want something specifically designed and tested for Linux. Before that, I used to bring a live Ubuntu CD to Bestbuy, pop it in computers to see which one would run everything out of the box. I would say success rate was higher than 50%.
That's annoying. Honestly it sounds like your IT dept is missing some expertise, and maybe tried to be too clever by installing some hacky add-ons, which destabilized things. It seems like something of a ridiculous stretch on their part, for example, to think that Jack would be required for bluetooth.
That said, as long as they're willing to be hacky: bluetooth audio worked reasonably well for me _until_ I got a headset with its own dongle. At that point the original bluetooth dongle stopped pairing reliably with the speakers I was using. That prompted me to switch to pipewire and it's been rock solid since. You might suggest to IT that they experiment with pipewire (since it's the new hotness, they may actually take you up on it.)
I too have had quite an awesome experience with Linux on older devices, everything just works, Many things are actually better than Windows, Unfortunately I feel like there is still a lack of software available on linux. Yes there are alternatives for everything usually, but things like microsoft office would make a great addition.
I would say in some instances driver support is actually better, I had this old logitech wireless keyboard and mouse lying around which worked quite well, unfortunately they came with this older version of unifying receiver which the current version of their official software refused to recognize (on windows, no official linux support). I was having trouble finding a older version of the software too. Somehow I ended up trying to use Solarr [1] (which is made for Linux) and it worked first try.
I remember feeling like it was a full time job - always some issue or inconvenience. Struggled with basic multimedia stuff and of course the biggest issue, almost no apps.
You could say the real issue is not Ubuntu itself but the ecosystem.
I set up Ubuntu with KDE (Kubuntu?) on an old laptop for my wife. Win 10 on the laptop was so slow that the machine was unusable. She uses Firefox, Google Docs, and she uses a printer. She's had zero problems in two years and I've updated the machine twice for her. Of course how usable the machine is will be dependent on what software you need.
I put the boy on an old Dell Vostro running Fedora.
Installation and updates took about 30 minutes.
Updating the machine is a `sudo dnf update` and done.
Though I did get in trouble when I shelled into his machine did and update and rebooted without checking he was using it first - killing his call to his (not)girlfriend in the process.
He's just start secondary (high) school and they are using Google Classroom so all he really needs is a browser and a webcam/mic.
I am thinking of starting the young man with Ubuntu, rather than Windows or OSX. Since his (not) gf only uses iPhone tech, I won't be able to accidentally interrupt any calls.
Is this not true on Mac? Updates in particular take forever on MacOS. I find Windows updates take like 5 minutes usually. MacOS has been a half hour or more for some of the point updates I've done.
Bloatware is still there, iMovie, Garageband, iWork is IMO bloat. Slightly more quality bloat maybe but I don't need 20GB taken up by stuff I'll literally never use.
IMovie, GarageBand and iWork are not installed by default and you can remove them at any time.
Recent Mac OS updates are monolithic signed binaries that load into the protected disk partitions reserved for the OS. This is security feature to limit which processes can modify the OS. The downside is that it can’t do differential updates. I hope that, at some point, Apple will work out how to securely do differential updates and speed this up, but I’m satisfied with slower updates if it maintains security.
I just got a brand new Macbook Air M1 a few days ago. It probably took an hour to update to Monterey out of the box. It failed and I had to reboot a few times and re-install again.
Pages, Numbers, Keynote, Garage Band, and iMovie are pre-installed. I don't use these apps and they are easy to uninstall, but they definitely came pre-loaded.
I'm no fan of Microsoft, but a vanilla Windows 10 install isn't very bloated imo. Did you perhaps start with an image provided by the laptop vendor? It's not Microsoft's fault that they're usually full of trash.
I think perhaps you are in the EU and were using the "N" version of windows 10. I realized that the normal windows 10 installs a LOT of bloatware (Like I don't need candy crush), while the N version did not do that.
Unfortunately it doesn’t really matter who’s fault it is from the perspective of the user.
All the windows computers at the computer shop ship with bloated 3rd party crap. Except the apple computers. It’s also not Google’s fault that most android vendors don’t support old devices for long. Or Linux’s fault that hardware vendors make linux drivers an afterthought.
As a consumer, I don’t care why any of this happens. I just want the things I buy to work properly.
Who decides what's bloat? macOS ships with Apple News, Podcasts, the App Store, Books, Garageband, Stocks, iMovie, Keynote, etc. A lot of their stuff is even pinned to the taskbar by default. Should be consider that bloat? I don't need any of those programs (or prefer alternatives), so it seems like it's bloat for me.
I’m not sure. The bloat meter in my mind certainly goes up when these programs start phoning home to update stocks or whatever. (Despite me never even opening that program).
I should definitely have the option to turn this crap off if I want to - without needing a 3rd party program like little snitch to do so.
Yes it is bloat. But there is a difference in easy to get rid bloat (just delete them in Apple) vs needing to change registry settings, etc and jump over several hoops to remove the bloat that comes with windows
For a fair comparison you have to use an equivalent priced device sold by Microsoft itself (so a premium Surface), and that has none of the problems you described.
Yesterday I finally made the decision to ditch Windows 10 and move to Elementary OS on my desktop computer (my laptop is a Pixelbook).
I was attempting to edit videos. I plug in an external hard drive with my footage, and... nothing. Well, not nothing. It's there in Devices & Printers. It's able to be ejected safely. Troubleshooter has no problems.
But nothing in Explorer or any other obvious place you'd think. Panicking, I plugged the same drive into Chrome OS. Literally three seconds later I was browsing my footage.
That's the point I got up from my desk and said, "I'm done." I'm so over Windows.
They spend how much time and effort shoving a Linux environment into things when they apparently can't even support widely-used filesystems. The fact my external drive is mountable by both Chrome OS (where the code for mounting is open source) and macOS (a closed-source OS used by a minority of the populace) but not Windows is an utter joke. I shouldn't have to spend all this time trying to access my files in 2021. This is something that should Just Work.
This was just the straw that broke the camel's back. I've had several minor and major annoyances with Microsoft's treatment of Windows ever since Windows 8, and none of them have gotten better.
- WTF is "3D Objects" and why does it always bubble up from the pits of hell even when I delete it? Microsoft is very opinionated about the User folder in general, while I think they should be as hands-off as possible. Stop adding folders I didn't ask for and stop resurrecting them after they're deleted. Why is this so hard?
- Obscuring local account creation to a ridiculous degree in Windows 10 (you need to literally disable Wi-Fi or unplug Ethernet to even see the option) has gotten even WORSE in Windows 11. Now you can't even set up a local account at all unless you shell out extra for Windows 11 Pro! They've learned nothing from the Xbox One always-online debacle, and honestly looking back, this should have been the dealbreaker. But I thought, "hey, I don't create accounts that often, this is something I can live with." No longer.
- The amount of analytics and data-gathering in Windows is the worst it's ever been, and worse than any comparable OS. "You can turn it off though." Well, maybe. Until Windows Update decides it knows better and turns it back on.
- This is purely aesthetic, but Windows 8 and 10 looked utterly horrible if you did anything more than look at the desktop and open the Start Menu. Clashing styles and UX edicts from decades of past releases, in very visible places. It gives the impression Microsoft just doesn't give a shit. And don't tell me "it's too hard to update everything in time for release." It's not everything, and Microsoft is a big boy with lots of money and developers. They decided they just don't care.
It's not getting better or even staying the same. Microsoft is actively making Windows worse for their own ends. Thankfully I have the choice and ability to install an alternative, but my heart goes out to those with no choice. It's Orwellian.
There was a time when a fresh install of Windows required over a day to bring up to current, if you didn't have install media with the latest service pack already applied.
MacOS updates are fairly slow, though, so I don't know if it's a clear win. But I also don't think anything has gotten significantly worse in recent years; there have always been good parts & bad parts.
While I will agree that it takes a long time to reach everywhere with new features in Maps, I'd say the recent macOS Monterey update was a major improvement in performance/reliability, so the article doesn't really resonate for me.
I IMMEDIATELY noticed the improvement in application startup times after upgrading and have seen a big difference between my work laptop (macOS Catalina) and my personal laptop (macOS Monterey). Everything has been more stable in Monterey for me personally. I've noticed that the weird occasionally-crash-my-laptop-when-using-a-dock bug has been resolved. Connecting my AirPods has become more reliable and the connection doesn't flake out anymore.
I recently tried to block YouTube ads on an iPad and failed. Equally surprised to see OS updates bring new feature changes that simply cannot be disabled (tab/app groupings). I mean there aren't that many Safari/iOS config options to choose from to begin with! What an insanity.
Samsung still makes cheap tablets that are awesome in terms of hardware, right?
FWIW, I really want Apple to fix this. I used to be a huge fan, yet now I use no Apple products at all. It's pretty damning when MacWorld says "It’s happened to pretty much any Apple device user: You go to use a feature and it just doesn’t work."
So I personally like the negative exposure. I really hope it lights a fire under Apple.
I worry it's too late. Once upon a time, Apple built pretty cool software with a fraction of the staff that Microsoft employed to maintain not-so-cool software.
There were some smart/motivated/creative people at Apple. And they did it with this FrankenLanguage called Objective-C.
Apple software doesn't make new/cool things anymore. They produce "catch up" features. I can't decide if Swift is causal or symptomatic, but I worry it's a little of both. Objective C made me groan and giggle in the space of 10 minutes, but I felt creatively empowered when I did things in that ecosystem. With Swift and newer libraries/frameworks from Apple, I often just feel like I'm in a computer language variant of the line at the DMV. Follow the rules, just try to figure out how to get the compiler to grant me a result that is close enough to what I want.
Apple is victim to Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy.
I've had more problems with Catalina than any earlier MacOS back going back past Lion.
Like many others have reported, Catalina drops my ethernet connection once or twice every day, regardless what adapter I use. (I've tried three different hardware devices so far. All fail in the same way.) Apple will not acknowledge the problem so there no hope of it being fixed.
If MacOS's services get any worse, I'll be left with a $2500 pumpkin.
Apple's software is full of race conditions. I have the newest phone and the newest update and I see them in the settings app, notifications pull down etc. unbelievable
It’s interesting to witness basic things that don’t work well on Macs due to software issues:
- I have a Logitech trackball mouse and occasionally it’s unresponsive. On Ubuntu and windows no issue. I checked several places and it’s a known issue
- MST doesn’t work. Works on literally every other operating system. This isn’t a big deal until you want dual monitors with a single cable without daisy chaining the monitors, e.g using a thunderbolt dock
Apple needs to re-hash their ancient process for handling bugs and remove the entrenchment around Radar, internally and externally. Stop outsourcing your internal tools overseas and telling product engineers ‘it is like it is’. That clearly didn’t work with customers (re: MacBook feature reversals), it also doesn’t work with engineers. Allow engineers to scratch their own itch, and solve these complexity problems in the stack. Fix the back-office mechanisms and SIMPLIFY. Stop building features on sandcastles to pretend they’re concrete.
It's also kinda a pile of garbage. But so is everything else... (actually in many ways it was a lot better than some others, but that's beside the point here). Part of my job at Apple was simply to cache and organize things locally for our team in a way that made sense to us.
Every team is going to want to do this differently. Find good abstractions that are generic enough to let people do with them as they please. Don't force your model down my throat, I'll probably just gag it up and come after you instead.
The issues at Apple stem from the top. Replacing Radar alone solves nothing.
Funny, just yesterday I was troubleshooting Carplay troubles. My Opel Ampera-E (Chevvy Bolt) would only recognize my phone as an iPod! For live I couldn't figure out the issue: I rebooted the infotainment system, I reset the infotainment system, I reset my iPhone - yet, on this particular iPhone, Carplay failed to launch.
Turns out that at one point "App & privacy limits" were enabled, and this _silently_ disabled Carplay!
This kind of problem will continue to happen as long as corporate incentives continue to reward new features more than solidifying existing fetures. It's easier to get promoted for doing "new" stuff.
As an anecdotal example that may be relevant, I wanted to upgrade to Monterey and my Mac Mini said there wasn't enough room.
Hooked up a Western Digital external drive that I had used on previous Macs and launched Time Machine. And that's when it started. Time Machine presented what seemed like a stack of Finder windows in the middle, a timeline with hash marks on the right-side and the only button highlighted was the "Cancel".
No menu, no other actionable buttons, no right-click menu. Nothing. So after hitting various key combos and mouse buttons, I decided that my 30+ minutes trying to use Apple's built-in backup software to backup a few folders was better spent finding 3rd party software.
And that was another user experience fail in my opinion for Apple and any "total quality" experience.
And that's not even talking about Safari or XCode or Pages or Numbers or iBooks not syncing and so many others.
Time Machine has been neglected for so long. The UI was never great for power users, but at least it worked. For a novice computer user it was a pretty good "set it and forget it" experience. In the last 3 years it has become so unreliable (every time it tries to backup it claims the backup is corrupted and needs to be re-created) that I've given up and switched to Carbon Copy Cloner.
At this point, my decision to use a particular piece of software or a specific feature within an OS/App/Website/etc based on perceived risk of that software being neglected.
Usually you can make this call based on features being added, but most of the time it's a gamble.
Ever since they stopped building wireless routers, Apple has forgotten Time Machine in favor of pushing iCloud backups for separate services.
But there’s still no good alternative to Apple’s old routers. I tried to buy a new router for gigabit internet last year, and the interfaces are so piss-poor and the performance so pathetic across the board that I ended up getting the last generation of Airport Extreme instead. I get 800ish down, 500ish up on wifi, so as far as I can tell I’m not missing out on anything aside from 6E, which my devices don’t support anyway.
I really hope Apple starts making routers with Apple Silicon soon. With incorporated Time Capsule backups, too. That’s the only way that they’ll stop neglecting the software.
The home networking scene is so bad. I had a Time Machine and and Airport Extreme, but it was not capable of PPPoE login to Centurylink's network, and I wanted to get rid of the Zyxel router that Centurylink provided.
I ended up getting a Linksys Velop MX8400C 2 pack from Costco for $230, since that was the lowest price I could find for something that did PPPoE login and could be hardwired together. I wanted the ability to do multiple VLANs via wireless like Meraki, but I could not find anything. Even the Meraki Go stuff does not do it.
Most people will just bridge mode the modem from the ISP to their router so that the router itself doesn't have to authenticate, which is probably why most home routers don't have PPPoE.
I can highly recommend Eero. They Just Work, and they work much better than Apple's networking ever equipment did.
I just replaced the previous generation of equipment in my partner's house (1920's plaster and lath construction) with a set of eero6s. A set of four gives full strength signal throughout the entire place (including the basement)s and all of the outside areas. (Not really that impressive though because it's a small lot.)
There's no drop at all as you wander from zone to zone.
Many years ago I worked at a place where we all had external drives plugged into cinema displays that acted as Time Machine drives for our laptops. The backups regularly failed, OSX would suddenly decide it didn't like it and you'd have to clear it and start again. I don't believe Time Machine could reliably cope with drives that were periodically disconnected perhaps. I had the same problem with a NAS device and my personal mac, it would periodically just decide the backups were screwed.
> In the last 3 years it has become so unreliable (every time it tries to backup it claims the backup is corrupted and needs to be re-created)
This bit me and I've not fully recovered yet. I had some stuff backed up manually, but some stuff I just trusted to the time machine backups. Now that some of the backups are unrecoverable I only have easy access to the stuff I backed up manually. I'm interested in trying CCC, but part of the reason things went south for me was apparently due to closing my laptop mid backup to a network TM volume and I'm curious if CCC can handle that any better. Do you use CCC for network backups and have you ever had issues with it?
My condolences. It is an absolute nightmare trying to find any documentation for dealing with time machine issues. I ran into that once and will never do it again if I can avoid it.
I have been super happy with CCC. I use it to back up my Macbooks to my NAS. Sometimes wired, sometimes wireless. And yes, it doesn't break when it gets interrupted. And their documentation is amazing. All the use cases and error cases are documented with solutions and everything.
I think I had two or three recoveries so far and have been happy with it. Even when it didn't work for some reason their documentation had workarounds.
Same here. CCC is several orders of magnitude faster than Time Machine and it just works.
I stopped using Time Machine years ago when they started using hidden permissions on Time Machine backups that made it impossible to "garden" my family's backups on the network backup drive. Even as root, you couldn't delete old backups -- you had to log in to the particular user's computer to delete old backups.
And then they came out with APFS which didn't support the directory hardlinks which Apple invented and Time Machine depended on. WTF Apple?
> I stopped using Time Machine years ago when they started using hidden permissions on Time Machine backups that made it impossible to "garden" my family's backups on the network backup drive. Even as root, you couldn't delete old backups -- you had to log in to the particular user's computer to delete old backups.
You can no longer do that, AFAIK. Not even from the same user account or from root, since TM volumes are set by APFS as read-only except to Time Machine itself.
> every time it tries to backup it claims the backup is corrupted and needs to be re-created
I had that problem repeatedly, but used the same backup drive with Monterey and it worked flawlessly, with better feedback (TM's menu gave a percentage on the pre-copy, "counting file changes" stage), so I was pleasantly surprised.
Time Machine's insane UI isn't an example of Apple's software quality slipping; it's basically unchanged since it first shipped 14 years ago. It's more of just an example of how Apple's software never was as good as some people would like to pretend.
When I was at apple, we did this thing people called "keybote-driven development" where everything was made to look great in and keynote presentation to an exec. If it looked great you got the go ahead to finish it and ship it, and if not it got skipped. There are a lot of things to like about this approach. However, Time machine's UI to me feels like a quintessential blind spot of this incentive structure, where it looks visually striking and cool but actually using it for real use cases it often falls flat quickly. To update it you would need to fit the motivation and payoff in a keynote presentation and it's hard to do so.
Remember that the 2007 iPhone demo had showed AT&T reception at full strength? That was hardcoded for the purpose of the Keynote. I recall iPhones having iffy phone reception for at least the first couple of years.
> Although I believe that Cingular was gone by the time the iPhone actually launched.
It was “gone” in the sense that it was renamed “AT&T Mobility”. (Cingular Wireless bought AT&T Wireless before the iPhone deal, but its parent company [SBC] later bought AT&T, adopted the AT&T name, and rebranded Cingular as AT&T Mobility.)
> When I was at apple, we did this thing people called "key[n]ote-driven development"...
> Big yikes.
If Apple's products are essentially sold via a "keynote", it makes sense to have a keynote presentation as the internal hurdle as well. If it can't be presented in way that looks like something people want to buy, there's no point in moving forward with the project.
Yeah but this is the classic type of bureaucratic effort-justification hurdle that leads to tech debt or just general crappiness never getting improved.
I've used it since 2013. Every time I've bought a new MBP, I simply use time machine to restore and my new one looks exactly like my old one. Never had an issue.
I find it far easier to use than Duplicity, Iron Mountain ConnectedBackup, or Carbonite, all of which I've used at other jobs. (All of those require fine-grained backup tweaking that requires a lot of diligence to check boxes and set policies, and then fuss with awkward dialogs when trying to recover... duplicity is so effing weird... Time Machine just works and the time scroll seems very clever compared to the other three.)
I'd be interested to hear your problem(s) with it?
The specific complaint was "the insane UI," if I read the comment correctly. Time Machine's UI is possibly the last holdover from Apple's peak sizzle-and-flash design days, the era of brushed metal and skeuomorph-all-the-things even when there isn't exactly a real-world analogue to emulate.
To be fair, it's less insane in Monterey than it used to be. No wooshy space background, faster to launch, easier to scroll. But do we really need the "stacked window" view, for instance? Was that chosen originally because it's clearer than choosing a backup date from a dropdown menu, or was it chosen originally because we wanna look like we're using a sci-fi machine to GO BACK IN TIME woooo? I mean, we know the answer here, right?
If you rotate your wallpaper every week or so it actually ends up being a pretty cool visual indicator that's probably more memorable for some people than a drop-down menu would be.
Ideally we'd have both obviously. The big issue with it for me is that it has a timeline on the right with each backup by date so you don't have to do the stacked windows, but there's no labels to indicate the span of dates. It only has a label on dates when you had backups but there are no labels to orient yourself in time when you start rolling back.
Ah that's fair. The "Space Rolodex" theme is a bit motion-sickness inducing.
I find that useful because I can navigate to a folder where it used to live, and then flip back until the file I was looking for appears.
Compared to the alternatives: Connected Backup and Carbonite require me to manually enter dates until I find the file, and for a while Carbonite would keep closing the folder tree requiring me to re-expand every branch each time the date changed. However, duplicity requires me to dump the entire log and grep, which is a power user solution one could argue.
I think duplicity wins here because I can grep for the filename. But barfing Mac Rolodex can be helpful if I don't know the filename.
I think your difficulties may stem from thinking of Time Machine as a backup application, when the UI is designed around treating it as a core system component. The configuration is all handled through System Preferences, and the UI you entered was solely for viewing and restoring files from your backup archive. You probably also missed a prompt to use the drive for Time Machine backups when you first plugged it in.
Also, Time Machine is intended for full system backups, and using it for just a handful of folders not as easy as using it for everything.
Yea, the mistake encountered by the OP is that they were approaching the Time Machine UI with the intent of "I want to back up some folders".
The TM UI is solely about recovery. It backs up "everything" not on the "skip list". And out of the box it defaults to just the system drive (vs the system and external drives).
And that's an interesting facet here. This is a case of going in to a bookstore and scanning up and down the shelves and not finding what you want, and being frustrated, because you don't realize that you're simply in the wrong section. The TM UI in this case was frustrating because it had no options to do what the person wanted to do. And by design, it would not do what they wanted to do.
It's not a UI fault of TM per se, specifically this aspect of the TM experience. TM excels at full drive recovery, and recovering "a few, select" files. In the middle, it's not so good.
It's worked great for me. I've recovered from it several times, both entire systems and a few files. I use it solely on my main drive, and I use BackBlaze for the entirety of it all as a hat tip to offsite DR.
Over the years, I've lost a couple of TM volumes to strange corruption. Not that much of a crisis, I just reset it and start over.
This morning I plugged in my macbook and tried to turn it on. No dice. Hammered the external mouse and keyboard. No luck. Opened up the clamshell, started testing USB-C ports to figure out which one wants to charge today. Hammered the "on" button. It started asking out loud in what to me sounded like an old school macintalk voice for a username... I have to assume I provoked some sort of accessibility feature. Hammered some more buttons in frustration, switched USB ports again, got an apple logo. Then a "reset password" screen. Reconnected to power and it finally booted up, telling me that there was a problem. This is not an unusual experience.
Is there an easy way to do that in the moment? Genuine question.
I (we) have many Apple devices and in my experience ‘it just works’ until it does not. And if not you are out of luck. No errors, no warnings, nothing. It ‘just does not work’. Googling mostly does nog give any usable solutions.
I would love to gave an instant phone or chat service. For free, because I feel like like really paying a lot already.
Interesting. Also in Europe? I will try this week. I often have problems and am pretty sure a new one will turn up soon.
AirDrop is a notoriously returning problem. Sometimes it works, sometimes it does not. I consider myself tech savvy and understand how it works, but AirDrop is often useless.
By 'at the moment' I mean now. Because the problem is now. Scheduling a visit to an Apple Store is not a good option to deal with my frustration at that moment. Besides, I am in Europe, where the prices are higher while having far less Apple Stores (pretty sure there is none in the country where I live).
which... may be days or a week away, if there's anything remotely close to you. FWIW, I've usually been able to get something 'same day', but not always, and often it's "hey, there's a slot in 2 hours, and the next one is in 6 days".
I am not aware of any other way to wake up a MacBook with the clamshell closed. Step 1: plug it in. If it doesn't turn on step 2 is to hit keys, right?
Did you use the wrong charging block? My MBP did that when I used the charging block meant for a macbook. It took a lot longer to get a charge to start the computer. Sounds a lot like my experience. I now make sure I only use the appropriate block
Forget about new features, I just want all the old features to stop breaking. It sucks having to buy new software every X years. At least with Windows, I can run old business stuff with no problems. Good luck on Mac.
Apple's new Music app absolutely ruined my entire local music collection one day, when updating from macOS 11.4 to 11.5 (I think).
My music collection traveled with me from OS update to OS update for about 13 years with no problem. And now pretty much everything is broken, some files can not be played even though they are on disk, half of the album covers are gone, syncing with the phone gives a ton of errors. What happened to this app and why - I have no idea. It was my worst day as a long-time Apple user and needless to say how maddening it was. Oh, the backups don't help, the new app does the same thing to the backup copy too.
Seems like Apple doesn't care about your local music collection anymore, nobody even bothered to test.
seems like a major win for Apple though.. in their ever effort to coerce people to spend more through subscription, it might not work on you, but I can easily see my less techy friends and family succumb to this catastrophe and sign up to some music service...
This is so upsetting to me, especially considering that my intro to the Apple ecosystem ~15 years ago was an iPod and how glorious that thing was.
Listening to my own local library has been a continually worse experience over the last 2 years. Not to mention, I use wired headphones with a lightning adapter 70% of the time, which somehow causes even more issues. Disconnects. Will refuse to play unless I unplug/replug or restart my phone altogether, increasing/decreasing the sound now has occasional lag that can take upwards of 5 seconds (and you have to unplug or restart to fix).
If I thought I had a shot of whatever job is in charge of this, I’d apply in a heart-beat just to fix all of this for my own needs.
I recently moved from Mojave to Big Sur and I sure am feeling this. My Wacom tablet keeps on not being recognized when I wake from sleep. Safari's constantly using a huge chunk of my CPU and typing stuff into a text box in it is often painfully slow. There's a bunch of little constant aggravations and really nothing that's improved my life beyond "the latest version of Illustrator wouldn't work on Mojave". Which I haven't even upgraded to because I'm waiting for the .1 release of that.
Apple keeps on moving shit around on OSX for no good reason and it's just annoying.
The latest Safari is by far the buggiest thing I've seen out of Apple in some time. It fucking crashed on me the other day! That in addition to multiple bad behaviors and glitches.
But then, I don't do betas and usually wait until the first big patch to update the OS.
I dug around and found a fix for the "constantly eats all my CPU" issue: Turn on "compact" tab layout.
Which then creates the problem that now I'm using the "compact" tab layout that everyone in the betas screamed bloody murder about until they added that switch, god this layout is really annoying if you have any extensions up in the toolbar and/or more than about four tabs. But at least I don't have to deal with using fucking Chrome or losing all my text expansion shortcuts because Firefox refuses to support those.
My inner paranoid wonders if this is a deliberate tactic to boost the numbers of people using the "compact" layout by someone whose next performance review is riding on that layout: "see, boss, look at what the telemetry says - everyone's switching to Compact! We should just drop the old look and give me a major bonus!".
Look at the mess that is Apple Home. They added it because Google and Amazon were doing it - and, that's about it. Hey, I can add some lights that I can change color to any color I want! Too bad if I want a thermostat, a doorbell, or...
Okay, what about Apple Wallet? It'd be really nice to add my digital driver's license, health insurance cards, auto insurance card, frequent shopping cards - basically make it so I don't have to carry my phone and wallet. Can I do that? Not really.
Alright, so what about their iWork suite? On second thought, forget about it. People are using Google Docs or Office 365. Next...
That's the problem with Apple software. It all feels kind of half baked and neglected. Apple built their reputation on It Just Works and now it feels like it sorta kinda works, I guess.
If Apple's software were a tenth as dazzling as their new hardware then it would be awesome. It's not even close. Their software division needs help.
> Alright, so what about their iWork suite? On second thought, forget about it. People are using Google Docs or Office 365. Next...
I'm only able to get away with it because I don't have to send anything other than PDFs to other people very often, but Apple's office-type apps are the only ones of their sort that I don't hate, aside from a few less-integrated and less-stable open source alternatives (Abiword, Gnumeric, that kind of thing—and I'm not even 100% sure those are still around). Google docs and Office 365 are terrible and I pity people who have to use them.
You're wrong. You can definitely add thermostats, doorbells, cameras etc. to Home (I've done it). And you can definitely add health insurance cards, frequent shopping cards, etc. to Wallet (I've done that too). Please don't state things that are just factually incorrect.
> Alright, so what about their iWork suite? On second thought, forget about it. People are using Google Docs or Office 365. Next...
For collaboration, yeah, you're stuck with what everyone uses. But considering the actual software itself, iWork is very nice in my experience. Fast, reliable, and the interface isn't a total shitshow like every other office app out there.
Same. I currently have a HomeKit thermostat, doorbell, and cameras in my house. Not really sure where GP is getting his info. They all work really well.
> Okay, what about Apple Wallet? It'd be really nice to add my digital driver's license, health insurance cards, auto insurance card, frequent shopping cards - basically make it so I don't have to carry my phone and wallet. Can I do that? Not really.
Your comments on Apple Home are factually incorrect.
I have lights, cameras, smart blinds, thermostats, temperature/humidity/air quality sensors, my eero6 router and even my Roku added into Home.
Apple Wallet also supports some forms of ID, transit cards and even vaccine certificates.
I use Apple home and want to like it, but it mostly sucks.
I think the main cause of this isn't so much Home, but the available third party hardware. I wish Apple would make a smart switch (I know that's fairly out of scope for them), but one high quality smart switch that actually worked reliably would resolve 90% of home tech issues.
Homepods are similarly bad with basic actions. I have five of them in multiple rooms. If you want to adjust the volume on all of them and say "make volume 50% everywhere" it fails. I have to whisper the command to my phone so the homepods don't hear me and then it can adjust volume on all of them.
Volume and playing on homepods generally from the phone is a shitty experience. Often the homepods lose the phone connection and then I can no longer control them from the device. Really it feels like nobody at Apple actually uses these things in their personal life.
I also have a gigabit network connection with a stupidly fast access point in a two bedroom apartment so it's not an issue of network speeds or signal.
In my experience, it's been pretty okay. Not amazing, but I can't really complain.
I've got 2 HomePods in a small apartment, and they typically work okay in what I need them to do, and automatons always work.
I sometimes have to close the app and open it again to get devices to respond IF I'm in not on my home network. Kind of annoying.
What's funny is that I've noticed that it's been better since I bought an eero 6 and added into into Home.
Most importantly, it works for my girlfriend who isn't the most keen on new technology. That's the most important part for me, rather than what I want.
I have two smart switches attached to lights (since our apartment has no overhead lighting) and after a nightmare of setting them up (probably the hardware's fault, but homekit couldn't recognize them via normal pairing method) they worked for a few months.
Randomly though they fail to work in Home and I have to manually reset them by holding in the button on the device and redo the entire process. This isn't workable at any scale (it's even annoying with just the two that I have).
I was really excited for a stereo pair of homepods but have similar issues and worse - even tho they still appear as grouped, music will often only happen on one or the other. If I was playing music from the phone, and then later ask siri to play something, it will play different music on each speaker - in a stereo pair! plus I have to shout for them to hear my command over the music, very bad experience, back to ebay they go…
When cooking we'll tell the one in the kitchen to set a timer. Then we'll ask what time is left. If another one hears the question it yells "there are no timers set" so we have to whisper to the closer one.
Another thing that to me suggests nobody at Apple is really using these things.
what was simultaneously aggravating and hilarious was when trying to set up a stereo pair of Alexas, trying to whisper to one, and Alexa whispered right back!
I remember a funny story of a dad putting his very young kid to bed and whispering “play classical music” in order to use that feature and the Alexa screamed back at full volume “ALEXA IS HAVING TROUBLE CONNECTING TO THE INTERNET RIGHT NOW”.
And the worst part is that their software division used to be great. Aperture was really good when it came out, Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro were great. Eveh talking about iwork suite, numbers and page used to be better than they are now. Even Quicktime regressed.
It's frankly both puzzling and saddening how much Apple has lost in term of QA, user interface and vision in the last 10 years. I always feel that Tim Cook doesn't have a clue about what made Apple special and is slowly destroying it by not making sure to keep those qualities
EDIT: I do recognize Tim Cook's qualities, he is amazing at managing supply chain and apple does this better than anybody with very little impact in terms of chip shortage. He's original decision to target privacy as a marketing argument was on point (unfortunately the csam controversy kind of destroyed this) and under his tenure Apple has done tremendously well financially.
But the issue, is that Apple also benefits from its reputation and in the last few years, they've destroyed it by producing shoddy software, by having major hardware issues over multiple revisions (keyboards, staining screens)...
>Tim Cook doesn't have a clue about what made Apple special and is slowly destroying it by not making sure to keep those qualities
Well their shares have never been higher so as long as that's the metric by which a CEO's performance is judged then you can forget about Apple caring about SW QA and other such "nonsense".
Also, before Jobs passed away, Cook was Apple's supply chain mastermind so it makes sense his strengths are with the HW side of things, which, during the current silicon shortage, is an absolutely killer skillset to have, as proven by how little Apple was affected by it in comparison to other companies.
When it comes to quality SW, Cook might not be the ideal CEO for the job (like notifications on the new MBP can get hidden behind the notch; WTF, how did this pass QA?! Pretty sure Jobs would have sent them back to the drawing board) but Apple can always rely on the faithful developer base building great quality SW instead of them and then taking a 30% cut on their sales on the Apple store. Basically another win for Apple.
Oh I don't disagree with you that he is great at managing the supply chain. World class even.
The thing is, there's inertia, Apple made great products and still have a great reputation, Amazon was a great place to buy online and while it has a counterfeit problem, it's still doing great, I'm sure it's possible to find a few examples of companies that have been doing great stock wise but that are slowly eroding their reputation. It doesn't show yet in the sales, but the narrative has changed.
The thing is, look at the threads in HN, they used to be very very positive of apple and now they're much more critical. Things no longer just work. People complaining about stability issues on a mac are common. Macworld which has always tended to be extremely positive about Apple complains, Ars Tecnica too, even Daring Fireball is less overwhelmingly positive than it used to be.
Apple relies on those power users to recommend their friends to buy their stuff and I no longer recommend buying an iphone to my friends and I know I'm not the only one.
> look at the threads in HN, they used to be very very positive of apple and now they're much more critical.
Agree, but the thing is, the HN userbase is only a tiny fraction, and not representative of the entire more lucrative consumer base that Apple is targeting. I think Apple will be fine, even if it looses the super picky stickler developer HN userbase that is proficient in linux anyway.
Apple kinda stopped caring about the Mac SW quality as that's not its main cashcow anymore for a long time. iOS and app store subscriptions and fees are where the real money's at.
Why does the desktop experience seem to diverge so much from the mobile experience? My Windows 11 laptop, iPhone, and iPad are all equally reliable: they rarely give me any trouble.
Meanwhile every piece of software Apple ever shipped for Windows was hot garbage. It sounds like whatever made their Windows stuff bad is afflicting OS X now.
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[ 0.15 ms ] story [ 308 ms ] thread[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25850091
Apple launched the WebKit revolution, but Google grabbed the ball and ran with it, Apple didn't give chase, and now they are behind. A pity.
It only gets updated once a year, so any updates they do make are slow to hit users. This wouldn't be so bad if they were more up to date with Firefox and Chrome.
Why should apple make this choice for me?
My experience from my immediate friends and family support circle is "0%" and "100%", respectively, but I'd be open to data showing that the first number is slightly higher than 0%. The "UX" for this feature for normal users is, as far as I can tell, exactly like the bad old days when people'd accidentally install 3rd party "search bars", then not know how to get rid of them.
Historically, browsers have worked to keep web sites from doing things that affect the machine outside that site's browser pane, that normal users don't want or expect them to be able to do.
If by chance Apple agrees with your stance, a Safari config that disables them is the proper solution, not dragging their feet.
From observing non-geeks use the "feature", I think that's the right call regardless. It needs to go back to the drawing board, or be scrapped. In general, anything that expands the reach & capabilities of websites should be treated with a ton of suspicion, as a likely vulnerability vector (leaking tracking info; social engineering/phishing vector; straight-up exploitable bugs) or simply a net-negative annoyance for most users.
If Apple thinks push notifications are annoying, why does iOS have them? Again, Apple is protecting their walled garden. That's all this is. There really is no other good faith argument for this.
Web notifications are not comparable to app push.
- Not being able to click a tab unless you drag it to the center of the tab bar
- Make a "drag a link/anchor into a new window" feature; except it triggers way too easily from ordinary scrolling, forcing you to spend the next 15-30 seconds figuring out how the FUCK do you close it with an non-obvious swipe gesture. Apparently buttons with "Close" or a big X are too complicated.
The web is too bloated as it is, I feel that Apple is on my side putting a damper on that.
Safari is powerful enough as it is. You want voip, notifications, codecs and so on - do the work and learn to write a native app. I'd rather pay for that than paying with my attention to ads in your "free" web app.
Like CSS containment is feature that was shipped in Chrome in 2016, Firefox 2019 so how many years have to pass for Safari to implement it so it isn't just 'some new shiny' feature anymore?
Like how Safari doesn't support WebP?
The first one that comes to mind is the <input> select method doesn't work[1], although MDN claims it does. It works _sometimes_, for reasons I couldn't discern. I'm not sure about you, but I wouldn't call selecting text a fancy or bleeding edge feature.
[1]: https://stackoverflow.com/q/3272089 Don't miss the comment about an infinite loop hanging the browser
Why? I want it to run on all platforms. That's one of the best things about the web. I'd rather just not support Safari than write and deploy separate MacOS, Windows, and Mobile applications.
My and most user-bases agree.
Web browsers are the best of both worlds, secure enclaved sandboxes, easily reachable by just a link, and powerful enough to do many basic tasks, and cross compatible.
As an user, I do not mind downloading and installing slim and fast native application which take advantage of the hardware my devices provide and integrate nicely with my OS.
What I like about web is how "safer" it is compared to well running binaries on the OS, me visiting a site would not give it access to all my private photos, and potentially allow it to add itself to startup everytime I open the OS without my permission.
Also I came across a few sites that Safari couldn't render it correctly whereas Firefox and Vivaldi show the site just fine. I only use Safari as a last resort and only used it for Zoom/Doxy/Whereby/etc.
(latest webcompat test results were 96/92/92 for Chrome/Firefox/Safari https://paul.kinlan.me/sorry-safari-team/ )
It's not
I feel like we are creating really unpredictable, and hard to implement UIs in the name of "magic". Would a button in the UI been better? I think it would have been, at least for me.
Mostly, my comment was projecting my own experiences with complexity on the projects I have been involved with. You are right, in this case other factors probably dominate.
Bad software is more due to needing to ship stuff ASAP for marketing, the board of directors, and for the investors. This decline in software can really be matched up with the increase of startup culture.
I would also argue that complexity is developers own doing, trying to strap every new fangled library, engine, tool, API ,buzzword of the day, etc. to their program...when there is zero reason to. Nothing about what modern software does is more complex than it was in the 2000s
The other is the fact that server based software has an almost zero time deployment cycle, and even native code for desktop/mobile can be shipped really quickly. This makes software mostly an iterative process. If fixing bugs on a weekly basis in a major mobile app is no biggie, and almost nothing gets blocked because of a bug that can be just fixed next week, you just get a lot more bugs shipped to users.
I think there's _less software around_, insofar as there's fewer discrete software titles around, but each title has far, far more software code behind it.
I remember as a sprog, running my cracked copy of Adobe Photoshop 6.0 - that in order to do anything "cool" in PS (especially when you just can't grok how to paint, even with a Wacom) you needed a huge smattering of third-party Photoshop plug-ins: Alienskin, Kai's Power Tools, Flaming Pear, FilterFactory, etc - but nowadays while plug-ins are still a thing I find myself getting-by with only Photoshop's stock functionality. It certainly doesn't help that Apple continues toward completely locking-down their platforms: in-proc and binary plug-ins for Photoshop on iOS will never be a thing.
I've been using and supporting Apple software since the 90s and I think this is more an artifact of most bugs not being especially memorable than anything else. People have complained about bugs after every release, a fair fraction of the complaints circulating online will be attribution error or overly-generalizing a niche condition as global, etc. and that seems to have been basically constant since OS X 10.2 or so.
There is one more interesting discussion, however, which I think is probably a legitimate trade-off: the entire industry has been moving to faster releases since it's easy to ship updates over the internet to huge audiences. When that wasn't possible and update cycles were measured in years, teams did spend more time on QA so you probably did have a somewhat lower chance of seeing bugs of the sort which were caught by that kind of process but at the expense of taking much longer to see new features or get fixes for bugs which slipped through either due to complexity or limited trigger conditions. Since the amount and complexity of software has generally been increasing, I think that this is generally the right trend with the addition of telemetry to collect crash reports, but it does seem like this could increase the perceived number of bugs even if the duration of time where you're exposed to a particular bug decreases.
I agree in principle but in practice Apple made a lot of bad bets with the previous generation across the entire product line.
Intel failed to meet its targets time and time again, which hit Apple's production schedules especially hard since they tend to make big updates infrequently rather than continuously updating internals to be as fast as possible.
The USB-C ecosystem never got as convenient or extensible as they had hoped. Only now do I see a lot of good USB-C docks and peripherals coming out and it's still not as robust as you would want if you're building your entire product suite around it.
Some stuff there just was no good alternative, particularly SD cards.
The TouchBar was a dud.
The low-profile switches on their keyboards had big reliability issues.
And many more! Part of being a bold innovator is knowing when an idea didn't work out. The latest generation shows that they're willing to defer to practical needs rather than doubling-down on failed ideas.
What does #2 even mean? I want my AirPods to connect when I last connected?
It's been common for me using my AirPods to take a pause in talking and while using my PC for the AirPods to detect sound on my PC and then switch.
Yes, definitely better than many other Bluetooth earbuds but I think people were hoping Apple's control of the OS and hardware would've produced a better, consistent experience.
https://www.apple.com/hk/en/ios/ios-15/features/
Another neat new feature is screen sharing in FaceTime. But there’s a huge list of improvements, it’s clear they’re investing heavily in software.
It feels like the macOS desktop experience peaked with Snow Leopard and it's been slowly sliding downhill ever since.
Real time update: Now my Bluetooth is acting up in a way I've never seen before. Thanks Big Sur!
Trying to fix broken Apple bits is always time-consuming and almost always fruitless. They have trained me to believe "it just works" or it just doesn't and I am just hopeless.
Everyone posting on the failures of Apple should seriously try Linux Mint (in a VM if nothing else). It's a wonderful experience.
I think “unevenness” shows what’s in the main focus for a company: Google Maps are great almost everywhere, but you can’t buy a Google Pixel phone except in a handful of countries. Apple’s the opposite: iPhones are available everywhere in the world on the same day, but software is spotty.
It took me a few hours just to install updates, remove bloatware (my oh my, the amount is staggering!) and fix privacy settings. And this was for Windows 10 which I hear is a mild version of a mess that Windows 11 is.
I was instantly reminded why I appreciate Apple software more.
Edit: List of most recent and trying not to include things that may be useful to me syncdefaultsd, nsurlsessiond, apsd, cloudd, transparencyd, mapspushd, cloudphotod, akd, parsec-fbf, appstoreagent, AddressBookSourceSync, com.apple.iCloudHelper.xpc, familycircled, trustd, AssetCacheLocatorService.xpc, imagent, indentyservicesd, com.apple.sbd, studentd, airportd, configd, parsecd, com.apple.geod.xpc, com.apple.geod.xpc, avconferenced, rapportd, trustd, remindd, helpd, syspolicyd
Long list right.... that's from the previous 3 hours.
Bash? Fucking savages! Zsh or gtfo
Not everyone has time to memorize Linux From Scratch and git commit a CI/CD pipeline towards the perfect distro
Maybe if programmers were interested in teaching versus making bank at big corp.
I’d rather see humans themselves as our value store and motivate, teach, and mentor each other to do the logistics work to that end.
Letting banks gamble with our deposits when we’re all in the habit of doing these things daily anyway seems like pointless extra steps.
I think people are more willing to be a stable mesh network of agents for each other than history full of feudal warlords will let us believe, we don’t need to prop up ephemeral tent poles. That’s just old story.
Bonobo tribes have been observed killing alphas and then developing social harmony. Not saying we should behead billionaires, but austerity for elites would be a figurative death.
All of the things in your list are just apps that can be removed with one click. My partner’s PC comes pre-installed with masses of hidden spyware. I know the kneejerk reaction is to bash Apple for everything - but the two are totally not comparable.
I thought the OS shipped with its own firewall? Would you recommend using a third party firewall despite having its own?
If it has a firewall of any kind, I've never noticed nor interacted with it. I've also never installed a third party firewall.
There was some controversy in the previous year because apple tried to deprecate the firewall hooks and allow their junk passed the replacement they offered.
I'm leaving apple for linux as we speak for two reasons, privacy and they can't help but mess with shit every time they release an update.
The most recent, this week they released an update and now their airport service listens on port 5000 making a conflict with running a dev flask service locally.
"Mess with shit" was what drove me to Linux by around 2015. It seemed like every major MacOS upgrade torched my Eclipse-based Java dev environment, generally requiring a reinstall.
I’ve flip flopped for years, (I was using freebsd more than 20 years ago, genuinely ran Solaris 10 with my own build of kde4 on a hp probook, etc) but last time I tried to use Linux for work I got defeated by a conference suite projector at a client and it cost us a big contract. The happy path (for me anyway) is doing all actual dev work on Linux vms and using macOS as your browser/im/terminal client — which it’s great at.
And it works with those stupid little projector dongles at clients when you’re trying to pitch them 6 figures of consulting ;)
It takes about one time of "this didn't work and it's your fault for using Linux" in a business context to break one of using Desktop Linux (or BSD, et c.), I think. I doubt similar stories are uncommon. I've got one, certainly.
At least if MacOS or Windows breaks, you're not the asshole. And it doesn't hurt that they in fact do break less often (well, Win10 with its abrupt, unexpected, and slow forced updates was a real problem for a while, but otherwise)
Funny how framing something that's true (allowing apple software to bypass firewalls) is seen as a controversy. See previous discussion on hn: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24838816
If you'd like an application-level firewall, you can check out Lulu or Little Snitch. Back when Little Snitch still(?) installed kernel extensions, it was found to be quite insecure—there were talks at DEFCON about it. Lulu is a lesser-known alternative.
Some popular third party solutions that are actually useful are Little Snitch [0], LuLu [1], and AdGuard [2].
[0] https://www.obdev.at/products/littlesnitch/index.html
[1] https://objective-see.com/products/lulu.html
[2] https://adguard.com/en/adguard-mac/overview.html
Most Apple users will definitively want those on, and will break your system in subtle ways if you disable them. I wouldn’t make such assumptions about whatever you use the service or not. If you don’t use a service, it typically will have very little traffic if any at all.
What happened to the good old days of "ask for user consent before phoning home"?
I mean, Apple is miles ahead of Windows in that regard, but your average Linux or BSD setup won't phone home outside of repository downloads unless requested.
The only happy medium I would consider to your approach is that if MacOS had two set up routes, one defaulting as a power user turning everything off and then initiating things are you want and another as a general user. Maybe that would solve it (though would be a heavy lift I am sure).
I have tried giving permission and at the end of the day, it's just not worth the time. For me, Little Snitch is great as a reporting tool but it's just too much work as a firewall.
[0]https://www.obdev.at/products/littlesnitch/index.html
It’s far worse than just annoying: if people have to give permission to a bunch of things they don’t understand, they will absolutely give permission to something they shouldn’t.
You want the user to make a few decisions as possible, and every single one should be an actual decision: where the user knows what the options are, has an actual stake, and might legitimately choose either option depending on their preferences and circumstance.
The more times they have to click “yes” without thinking, the more susceptible to malware they become.
I understand the point, though. Going to just about any major website you will be pummeled with prompts to allow for a dozen different domains just to view one page, and it doesn't really give any indication of what those are used for. They have a what seems to be infinitesimally small list of connections that they do recognize and explain their use, but ultimately it's pretty useless for the vast majority of prompts.
I'd like there to be a better way to deal with this, but I'm not really sure what the solution to it would look like. You can download blocklists and just silently allow other connections, but I don't think that's significantly better than just using a hosts file.
The most useful thing Little Snitch does is alert me when individual applications try to phone home. For browsing the web it feels more like a chore.
How many times have you been asked to approve a download? How many of those times have you said "no"?
If the answer is "hundreds" and "zero," what's the point? If the answer "hundreds" and "ten just in the past week," then that's exactly the point, and it serves a valuable purpose.
I agree broadly with your point that prompt fatigue or decision fatigue is problematic and should be avoided when possible. I think this is a problem in particular with Little Snitch even, which doesn't do enough to provide. However, the point of Little Snitch is to allow someone to monitor and control the traffic at a granular level and the consequence of providing that utility is the frequent prompts whenever you're visiting a new site. To Obdev's credit, silent mode exists and you can set it to deny or allow all traffic without a prompt (and evaluate the traffic at your leisure).
Is there any way to turn all this stuff off?
Like I said this was all from the last 3 hours and I haven't used any of those services listed. It's also missing the point a bit, I'm not bandwidth poor on a 3G connection trying to save my datacap.
I don't want apple turning my laptop into a thinclient for their cloud systems. I don't want telemetry and meta data going to them every ~30 seconds (the little snitch icon flashes a red X every time something is blocked, it's on a per minute basis).
Of all those services I use calendarsync. I miss having airdrop a little bit but everything else I don't need.
Also, the way you've phrased some of those, especially the notarisation
> getting updated security signatures
is a bit disingenuous when there's a massive privacy implication in that it allows apple to know every single application I run on my computer.
Most Apple users wouldn't agree to that if you stuck it in their face and the fact that it breaks the OS in subtle ways is a user hostile position to argue from. Hence why I'm giving up my Apple addicition.
AKA phoning-home to Apple what apps you launch in realtime, in an unencrypted manner visible to your ISP/hotel/government too.
It also connects to all of that crap even if you have LS off, analytics off, iCloud/FaceTime/iMessage/AppStore off, et c.
Press F8 and your serial number gets transmitted to Apple.
How so?
IP Addresses: 2600:1402:e::b833:965b
TCP Port: http (80)Protocol: TCP
Connected: no
Connects: 0 allowed, 7,359 denied
First Activity: 2/11/21, 22:20
Last Activity: 5h 29m ago
Yea sorry, sneak's right, it's still going port 80.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202491 (bottom)
What data is actually going over OCSP? I thought it was only ever checking for revocation and not actually sending app data, and I believe only ever happens when you want to take an app out of quarantine versus every app launch. You can always disable gatekeeper if you so please.
OCSP over unencrypted http has not yet been replaced. I believe that the constellation of apps (identified by proxy by their developer IDs which are transmitted) can in a lot of cases uniquely identify a system, given a sufficient number of apps installed/used.
Restarting really is a big deal for me as my workspace consists of several dozen open windows, some of them I have to login, navigate to a particular place, etc... also you lose your train of thought. It has gotten that bad for me, that I have to take screenshots before restarting every time, so I don't lose track of where I was.
I understand not everybody has my same use case but for me it truly is a PITA.
Of course, the alternative is to just click on "Install Later" every 8 hours for the rest of your life, and then the one time you miss that button for a few pixels and click on "Install Now" everything gets closed and obliterated in an instant. But yeah, at least now I have the latest version of Safari which I haven't used in 10 years.
The ability to disable automatic updates goes back far more years than I can remember - possibly even a decade.
If i disable apple updates on a macbook, it will show the notification but will never update without my permission, good luck doing that on windows.
Huh? I think I restart my Mac for updates perhaps quarterly, and I can't recall it ever being forced.
In my timeline, Apple users have to deal with this -> https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201222
And Apple's built-in apps aren't harmful, they're just unnecessary. In the early 2000s, my parents got me a Mac that came with Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2. :-)
And my new Mac has things like (can't remember exactly) 'musiccreationd'.
These count as 'startup items' to me.
I guess I’m not really seeing what I’m supposed to be outraged about, here. Modifying the stuff in the dock on OSX isn’t difficult or unintuitive at all? Just grab the stuff you don’t want on there and drag it out, and grab the stuff you do want on there and drag it in? It’s just using the standard desktop metaphor and interface, and you’re in no danger of breaking fragile uninstall scripts like you would be if you manually removed a program’s entry from the start menu on Windows. It really isn’t comparable at all.
Same thing with Windows too.
The last time I looked at Windows computers at Best Buy a year ago, anything mid-level and below was almost unusable because McAfee was using all the CPU.
I bought a Windows laptop (wanted to game with a modern-ish GPU). Step 1 was uninstall McAfee, and turn on Windows Defender for some modicum of protection. There are error popups for software I haven't installed when it boots. My parents have a new Windows computer which was showing popups advertising an extended warranty when I visited this weekend.
A fresh install of Win10 from the Microsoft ISO is very different from the typical factory configuration found on new hardware.
Loaded down with crap.
What businesses want Xbox companion and xbox game bar running on all their work computers - seriously -> if you are on Microsoft search for xbox on your work computer.
Does Candy Crush Saga still come on the business pro ISO installs? That used to make the office laugh - who is paying $200/machine to get candy crush saga pre-installed.
In fact, the trick was they also had a separate app called app updater that would reload these things even if you uninstalled Candy Crush.
Too funny! The only way to get candy crush to go away was to uninstall it, then uninstall app updater - though people didn't date do that biz side because they didn't know what else app updater supported.
https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/candy-...
It's free, easy to use & comes with Windows.
Microsoft could & should also just load that as a stand alone tool like the snipping tool. But they haven't, so I encourage Xbox Game bar.
2. Then there is another software called 10AppsManager (2) to remove further bloatware like Onedrive, Skype, etc.
3. After that I visit ninite.com (3) to get the usual software without toolbars and spyware.
4. For other software like ffmpeg I use choco or chocolatey (4).
I am now a full time linux user but this was the least painful way to get my PC running before that. I'm sure things have changed or improved since, but this really worked for me 2 years ago.. hope this helps someone.
(1) https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10
(2) https://www.thewindowsclub.com/10appsmanager-windows-10
(3) https://www.ninite.com
(4) https://chocolatey.org/
I am forced to use a Windows machine sometimes for work, and to me the unpardonable sin is that Windows seems to randomly reboot _without asking me_! I come to my office and all my open sessions are gone. How do you turn this off?! I try turning off the setting but it randomly turns itself back on.
Also, how do people set up a reasonable dev environment not built around Visual Studio? On my Mac I just use Terminal + MacVim (with my plugins), so I don't have particularly demanding needs. I tried WSL, but its just Linux side-by-side with Windows, not integrated with windows. If that's what I wanted I would just use Linux, but I need a command-line where I can still build Windows apps. Currently I use bash-for-git (so I can run `cmake --build ...`) but its so non-standard in lots of ways that it drives me a little nutty.
That's the neat part, you don't! Windows loves to revert those settings after every major update, even if you dig into the registry and scheduler and change the settings at the source. It is one of my biggest gripes.
One way I dramatically reduce the amount of random reboots is I have a thing that looks like a USB flash drive but it has a few switches on the side - one of them, when activated, randomly moves the mouse every 1-5 minutes (there is also a hardware wheel knob that lets you customize the duration). It was meant to be a practical joke thing - slip it onto the back of a friends PC and drive them nuts, but it works great at tricking Windows to think the computer is being actively used. It doesn't stop all reboots caused by Windows updates, but it dramatically reduces them.
I also use it to keep my work PC awake when attending online meetings, or especially when I'm presenting. We have mandatory screen saver timeouts and for some reason I can't convince the IT overlords to tweak group policy to allow non-admins the ability to enable presentation mode. Oh well. At least they haven't resorted to only allowing whitelisted USB devices to run so my little joke USB fob still does its thing. I got it from Think Geek in their heyday but there are tons of similar devices on Amazon.
Eventually I realized it hated me and wanted me to fail in life, or perhaps click on all the crappy games or whatever it insisted on installing from time to time.
I don't love everything about macOS, but it's the least bad option and to my mind and for my needs, it's not even close.
This has worked flawlessly for almost two years and multiple Windows feature updates.
0: https://lazyadmin.nl/it/how-to-stop-automatic-restart-win-10...
You’re not safe from reboots even if you’re actively using the machine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ReHafyiDTR0
> Some services … share your WLAN access data with your facebook contacts
Is that true? There’s no citation but seems a lot more flagrant a violation than I’d expected from Windows.
I like it far more than Ninite and it is a good way to find some open source software that you may not have heard about or used before, quickly install the programs, and keep them up to date with only a few clicks.
Perhaps I should spend more time figuring this out. Meh.
Seriously, I am using Windows 11 since official release and I am getting to a point where things are just the way I like them. I was lucky enough to have a machine that just met the TPM/processor requirements cutoff.
There are a few annoyances: I would like to use the dashboard/widgets for weather, etc but they force their newsfeed on you.
It might have some aesthetic value, but it's not necessarily nicer, just different and more trendy. Which quickly wears off.
Wasn't Windows 10 supposed to be that?
General web browsing type tasks are solid, text editing/note taking works. Videos and audio (including Spotify) work. Steam and games generally work (even most windows games through Proton).
What else does ones daughter need for school? She’s not video editing or creating music (two use cases where you may need windows or OSX; art is more or less covered through blender/Inkscape/krita)
Mint or Manjaro are easy to install and setup and come with good defaults that should be pretty easy to navigate for someone new to Linux.
In my experience, kids do these things all the time for school projects.
EDIT: (I don't mean this in a mean way, just to say that people who care a lot about being able to play specific games probably still won't be satisfied without a Windows box).
Would you say it’d satisfy for twitch shooters?
Sadly looks like a lot of the top 10 are in "Borked" status, though.
50% of them, but 2 of the 5 broken games are known to be buggy in general (New Worlds anyway, PUBG was years ago, no idea how it fares nowadays so maybe I'm wrong) so dunno how much of that is Proton's fault. The two gold ones seem hit or miss: many people report they work, but some people have issues.
Still, a lot of AAA games work perfectly (eg Sekiro) and many games I play even have native Linux versions (Crusader Kings 3 being the main one, I'm hoping with the steam deck more devs will release Linux versions but maybe that's too optimistic) and most of the indie games I play work well, so for me, I've been pretty happy and haven't looked back.
Windows 12 could require all users to get punched in the face to log in and most people would say, "Yeah, it sucks but it's better than spending $1,800 on a Mac. Plus my video games..."
Meanwhile I've been on Ubuntu for more than a decade and as far as I can remember, for example, printing consists of printer just magically appearing in my apps without me ever having to install anything and I press print and it prints. That's user friendliness to me. At least for my workflows (mostly web browsing, software dev and office stuff), there is vastly less fiddling and head scratching to keep things working on Ubuntu.
My personal Windows laptop has never had a single one of those problems. It has been faultless from day 1 without a single issue.
Back up your documents and do a fresh install. It'll take you an hour and you'll regain stability.
Jack is apparently needed to get Bluetooth to emit audio reliably... but I would not put much trust in that since it didn't fix Bluetooth not working.
That said, as long as they're willing to be hacky: bluetooth audio worked reasonably well for me _until_ I got a headset with its own dongle. At that point the original bluetooth dongle stopped pairing reliably with the speakers I was using. That prompted me to switch to pipewire and it's been rock solid since. You might suggest to IT that they experiment with pipewire (since it's the new hotness, they may actually take you up on it.)
I would say in some instances driver support is actually better, I had this old logitech wireless keyboard and mouse lying around which worked quite well, unfortunately they came with this older version of unifying receiver which the current version of their official software refused to recognize (on windows, no official linux support). I was having trouble finding a older version of the software too. Somehow I ended up trying to use Solarr [1] (which is made for Linux) and it worked first try.
[1] https://github.com/pwr-Solaar/Solaar
I remember feeling like it was a full time job - always some issue or inconvenience. Struggled with basic multimedia stuff and of course the biggest issue, almost no apps.
You could say the real issue is not Ubuntu itself but the ecosystem.
Installation and updates took about 30 minutes.
Updating the machine is a `sudo dnf update` and done.
Though I did get in trouble when I shelled into his machine did and update and rebooted without checking he was using it first - killing his call to his (not)girlfriend in the process.
He's just start secondary (high) school and they are using Google Classroom so all he really needs is a browser and a webcam/mic.
[1]: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212619
Bloatware is still there, iMovie, Garageband, iWork is IMO bloat. Slightly more quality bloat maybe but I don't need 20GB taken up by stuff I'll literally never use.
Recent Mac OS updates are monolithic signed binaries that load into the protected disk partitions reserved for the OS. This is security feature to limit which processes can modify the OS. The downside is that it can’t do differential updates. I hope that, at some point, Apple will work out how to securely do differential updates and speed this up, but I’m satisfied with slower updates if it maintains security.
Pages, Numbers, Keynote, Garage Band, and iMovie are pre-installed. I don't use these apps and they are easy to uninstall, but they definitely came pre-loaded.
I'm in the US, but yes whenever I select the image to download I do pick the N version.
All the windows computers at the computer shop ship with bloated 3rd party crap. Except the apple computers. It’s also not Google’s fault that most android vendors don’t support old devices for long. Or Linux’s fault that hardware vendors make linux drivers an afterthought.
As a consumer, I don’t care why any of this happens. I just want the things I buy to work properly.
I should definitely have the option to turn this crap off if I want to - without needing a 3rd party program like little snitch to do so.
I was attempting to edit videos. I plug in an external hard drive with my footage, and... nothing. Well, not nothing. It's there in Devices & Printers. It's able to be ejected safely. Troubleshooter has no problems.
But nothing in Explorer or any other obvious place you'd think. Panicking, I plugged the same drive into Chrome OS. Literally three seconds later I was browsing my footage.
That's the point I got up from my desk and said, "I'm done." I'm so over Windows.
They spend how much time and effort shoving a Linux environment into things when they apparently can't even support widely-used filesystems. The fact my external drive is mountable by both Chrome OS (where the code for mounting is open source) and macOS (a closed-source OS used by a minority of the populace) but not Windows is an utter joke. I shouldn't have to spend all this time trying to access my files in 2021. This is something that should Just Work.
This was just the straw that broke the camel's back. I've had several minor and major annoyances with Microsoft's treatment of Windows ever since Windows 8, and none of them have gotten better.
- WTF is "3D Objects" and why does it always bubble up from the pits of hell even when I delete it? Microsoft is very opinionated about the User folder in general, while I think they should be as hands-off as possible. Stop adding folders I didn't ask for and stop resurrecting them after they're deleted. Why is this so hard?
- Ditto the last point for OneDrive.
- Windows 11-specific, but adding ads to the taskbar? In a paid OS that the OEMs are already footing the bill for and bundling whatever extra crapware they want? https://betanews.com/2021/09/04/microsoft-crowbars-ads-into-...
- Obscuring local account creation to a ridiculous degree in Windows 10 (you need to literally disable Wi-Fi or unplug Ethernet to even see the option) has gotten even WORSE in Windows 11. Now you can't even set up a local account at all unless you shell out extra for Windows 11 Pro! They've learned nothing from the Xbox One always-online debacle, and honestly looking back, this should have been the dealbreaker. But I thought, "hey, I don't create accounts that often, this is something I can live with." No longer.
- The amount of analytics and data-gathering in Windows is the worst it's ever been, and worse than any comparable OS. "You can turn it off though." Well, maybe. Until Windows Update decides it knows better and turns it back on.
- This is purely aesthetic, but Windows 8 and 10 looked utterly horrible if you did anything more than look at the desktop and open the Start Menu. Clashing styles and UX edicts from decades of past releases, in very visible places. It gives the impression Microsoft just doesn't give a shit. And don't tell me "it's too hard to update everything in time for release." It's not everything, and Microsoft is a big boy with lots of money and developers. They decided they just don't care.
And today, I read this:
"Microsoft to Block Windows 11 Browser Workarounds" https://www.thurrott.com/windows/windows-11/259208/windows-1...
It's not getting better or even staying the same. Microsoft is actively making Windows worse for their own ends. Thankfully I have the choice and ability to install an alternative, but my heart goes out to those with no choice. It's Orwellian.
MacOS updates are fairly slow, though, so I don't know if it's a clear win. But I also don't think anything has gotten significantly worse in recent years; there have always been good parts & bad parts.
I IMMEDIATELY noticed the improvement in application startup times after upgrading and have seen a big difference between my work laptop (macOS Catalina) and my personal laptop (macOS Monterey). Everything has been more stable in Monterey for me personally. I've noticed that the weird occasionally-crash-my-laptop-when-using-a-dock bug has been resolved. Connecting my AirPods has become more reliable and the connection doesn't flake out anymore.
Samsung still makes cheap tablets that are awesome in terms of hardware, right?
So I personally like the negative exposure. I really hope it lights a fire under Apple.
There were some smart/motivated/creative people at Apple. And they did it with this FrankenLanguage called Objective-C.
Apple software doesn't make new/cool things anymore. They produce "catch up" features. I can't decide if Swift is causal or symptomatic, but I worry it's a little of both. Objective C made me groan and giggle in the space of 10 minutes, but I felt creatively empowered when I did things in that ecosystem. With Swift and newer libraries/frameworks from Apple, I often just feel like I'm in a computer language variant of the line at the DMV. Follow the rules, just try to figure out how to get the compiler to grant me a result that is close enough to what I want.
Apple is victim to Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy.
Like many others have reported, Catalina drops my ethernet connection once or twice every day, regardless what adapter I use. (I've tried three different hardware devices so far. All fail in the same way.) Apple will not acknowledge the problem so there no hope of it being fixed.
If MacOS's services get any worse, I'll be left with a $2500 pumpkin.
- I have a Logitech trackball mouse and occasionally it’s unresponsive. On Ubuntu and windows no issue. I checked several places and it’s a known issue
- MST doesn’t work. Works on literally every other operating system. This isn’t a big deal until you want dual monitors with a single cable without daisy chaining the monitors, e.g using a thunderbolt dock
Every team is going to want to do this differently. Find good abstractions that are generic enough to let people do with them as they please. Don't force your model down my throat, I'll probably just gag it up and come after you instead.
The issues at Apple stem from the top. Replacing Radar alone solves nothing.
Turns out that at one point "App & privacy limits" were enabled, and this _silently_ disabled Carplay!
Hooked up a Western Digital external drive that I had used on previous Macs and launched Time Machine. And that's when it started. Time Machine presented what seemed like a stack of Finder windows in the middle, a timeline with hash marks on the right-side and the only button highlighted was the "Cancel".
No menu, no other actionable buttons, no right-click menu. Nothing. So after hitting various key combos and mouse buttons, I decided that my 30+ minutes trying to use Apple's built-in backup software to backup a few folders was better spent finding 3rd party software.
And that was another user experience fail in my opinion for Apple and any "total quality" experience.
And that's not even talking about Safari or XCode or Pages or Numbers or iBooks not syncing and so many others.
At this point, my decision to use a particular piece of software or a specific feature within an OS/App/Website/etc based on perceived risk of that software being neglected.
Usually you can make this call based on features being added, but most of the time it's a gamble.
I gave up and wrote a Python script that calls Borg Backup. At least it's more customisable.
But there’s still no good alternative to Apple’s old routers. I tried to buy a new router for gigabit internet last year, and the interfaces are so piss-poor and the performance so pathetic across the board that I ended up getting the last generation of Airport Extreme instead. I get 800ish down, 500ish up on wifi, so as far as I can tell I’m not missing out on anything aside from 6E, which my devices don’t support anyway.
I really hope Apple starts making routers with Apple Silicon soon. With incorporated Time Capsule backups, too. That’s the only way that they’ll stop neglecting the software.
I ended up getting a Linksys Velop MX8400C 2 pack from Costco for $230, since that was the lowest price I could find for something that did PPPoE login and could be hardwired together. I wanted the ability to do multiple VLANs via wireless like Meraki, but I could not find anything. Even the Meraki Go stuff does not do it.
I guess the apple time capsule and airports were too old to get that VLAN capability, since they stopped being made 5+ years ago.
A lot of the new home routers have the ability to PPPoE with VLAN tagging though.
I just replaced the previous generation of equipment in my partner's house (1920's plaster and lath construction) with a set of eero6s. A set of four gives full strength signal throughout the entire place (including the basement)s and all of the outside areas. (Not really that impressive though because it's a small lot.)
There's no drop at all as you wander from zone to zone.
This bit me and I've not fully recovered yet. I had some stuff backed up manually, but some stuff I just trusted to the time machine backups. Now that some of the backups are unrecoverable I only have easy access to the stuff I backed up manually. I'm interested in trying CCC, but part of the reason things went south for me was apparently due to closing my laptop mid backup to a network TM volume and I'm curious if CCC can handle that any better. Do you use CCC for network backups and have you ever had issues with it?
I have been super happy with CCC. I use it to back up my Macbooks to my NAS. Sometimes wired, sometimes wireless. And yes, it doesn't break when it gets interrupted. And their documentation is amazing. All the use cases and error cases are documented with solutions and everything.
I think I had two or three recoveries so far and have been happy with it. Even when it didn't work for some reason their documentation had workarounds.
I stopped using Time Machine years ago when they started using hidden permissions on Time Machine backups that made it impossible to "garden" my family's backups on the network backup drive. Even as root, you couldn't delete old backups -- you had to log in to the particular user's computer to delete old backups.
And then they came out with APFS which didn't support the directory hardlinks which Apple invented and Time Machine depended on. WTF Apple?
You can no longer do that, AFAIK. Not even from the same user account or from root, since TM volumes are set by APFS as read-only except to Time Machine itself.
I had that problem repeatedly, but used the same backup drive with Monterey and it worked flawlessly, with better feedback (TM's menu gave a percentage on the pre-copy, "counting file changes" stage), so I was pleasantly surprised.
With the help of therapy and psilocybin I got over that in 2016.
It was “gone” in the sense that it was renamed “AT&T Mobility”. (Cingular Wireless bought AT&T Wireless before the iPhone deal, but its parent company [SBC] later bought AT&T, adopted the AT&T name, and rebranded Cingular as AT&T Mobility.)
> Big yikes.
If Apple's products are essentially sold via a "keynote", it makes sense to have a keynote presentation as the internal hurdle as well. If it can't be presented in way that looks like something people want to buy, there's no point in moving forward with the project.
I've used it since 2013. Every time I've bought a new MBP, I simply use time machine to restore and my new one looks exactly like my old one. Never had an issue.
I find it far easier to use than Duplicity, Iron Mountain ConnectedBackup, or Carbonite, all of which I've used at other jobs. (All of those require fine-grained backup tweaking that requires a lot of diligence to check boxes and set policies, and then fuss with awkward dialogs when trying to recover... duplicity is so effing weird... Time Machine just works and the time scroll seems very clever compared to the other three.)
I'd be interested to hear your problem(s) with it?
To be fair, it's less insane in Monterey than it used to be. No wooshy space background, faster to launch, easier to scroll. But do we really need the "stacked window" view, for instance? Was that chosen originally because it's clearer than choosing a backup date from a dropdown menu, or was it chosen originally because we wanna look like we're using a sci-fi machine to GO BACK IN TIME woooo? I mean, we know the answer here, right?
Ideally we'd have both obviously. The big issue with it for me is that it has a timeline on the right with each backup by date so you don't have to do the stacked windows, but there's no labels to indicate the span of dates. It only has a label on dates when you had backups but there are no labels to orient yourself in time when you start rolling back.
I find that useful because I can navigate to a folder where it used to live, and then flip back until the file I was looking for appears.
Compared to the alternatives: Connected Backup and Carbonite require me to manually enter dates until I find the file, and for a while Carbonite would keep closing the folder tree requiring me to re-expand every branch each time the date changed. However, duplicity requires me to dump the entire log and grep, which is a power user solution one could argue.
I think duplicity wins here because I can grep for the filename. But barfing Mac Rolodex can be helpful if I don't know the filename.
Also, Time Machine is intended for full system backups, and using it for just a handful of folders not as easy as using it for everything.
The TM UI is solely about recovery. It backs up "everything" not on the "skip list". And out of the box it defaults to just the system drive (vs the system and external drives).
And that's an interesting facet here. This is a case of going in to a bookstore and scanning up and down the shelves and not finding what you want, and being frustrated, because you don't realize that you're simply in the wrong section. The TM UI in this case was frustrating because it had no options to do what the person wanted to do. And by design, it would not do what they wanted to do.
It's not a UI fault of TM per se, specifically this aspect of the TM experience. TM excels at full drive recovery, and recovering "a few, select" files. In the middle, it's not so good.
It's worked great for me. I've recovered from it several times, both entire systems and a few files. I use it solely on my main drive, and I use BackBlaze for the entirety of it all as a hat tip to offsite DR.
Over the years, I've lost a couple of TM volumes to strange corruption. Not that much of a crisis, I just reset it and start over.
And rather than go to Apple you instead randomly press buttons and then are surprised when random things happen.
Okay.
Is there an easy way to do that in the moment? Genuine question.
I (we) have many Apple devices and in my experience ‘it just works’ until it does not. And if not you are out of luck. No errors, no warnings, nothing. It ‘just does not work’. Googling mostly does nog give any usable solutions.
I would love to gave an instant phone or chat service. For free, because I feel like like really paying a lot already.
AirDrop is a notoriously returning problem. Sometimes it works, sometimes it does not. I consider myself tech savvy and understand how it works, but AirDrop is often useless.
That's the cost of not living in a big city. Life is full of choices.
My music collection traveled with me from OS update to OS update for about 13 years with no problem. And now pretty much everything is broken, some files can not be played even though they are on disk, half of the album covers are gone, syncing with the phone gives a ton of errors. What happened to this app and why - I have no idea. It was my worst day as a long-time Apple user and needless to say how maddening it was. Oh, the backups don't help, the new app does the same thing to the backup copy too.
Seems like Apple doesn't care about your local music collection anymore, nobody even bothered to test.
Listening to my own local library has been a continually worse experience over the last 2 years. Not to mention, I use wired headphones with a lightning adapter 70% of the time, which somehow causes even more issues. Disconnects. Will refuse to play unless I unplug/replug or restart my phone altogether, increasing/decreasing the sound now has occasional lag that can take upwards of 5 seconds (and you have to unplug or restart to fix).
If I thought I had a shot of whatever job is in charge of this, I’d apply in a heart-beat just to fix all of this for my own needs.
Apple keeps on moving shit around on OSX for no good reason and it's just annoying.
But then, I don't do betas and usually wait until the first big patch to update the OS.
Which then creates the problem that now I'm using the "compact" tab layout that everyone in the betas screamed bloody murder about until they added that switch, god this layout is really annoying if you have any extensions up in the toolbar and/or more than about four tabs. But at least I don't have to deal with using fucking Chrome or losing all my text expansion shortcuts because Firefox refuses to support those.
My inner paranoid wonders if this is a deliberate tactic to boost the numbers of people using the "compact" layout by someone whose next performance review is riding on that layout: "see, boss, look at what the telemetry says - everyone's switching to Compact! We should just drop the old look and give me a major bonus!".
It wouldn't have happened under Joni.
Okay, what about Apple Wallet? It'd be really nice to add my digital driver's license, health insurance cards, auto insurance card, frequent shopping cards - basically make it so I don't have to carry my phone and wallet. Can I do that? Not really.
Alright, so what about their iWork suite? On second thought, forget about it. People are using Google Docs or Office 365. Next...
That's the problem with Apple software. It all feels kind of half baked and neglected. Apple built their reputation on It Just Works and now it feels like it sorta kinda works, I guess.
If Apple's software were a tenth as dazzling as their new hardware then it would be awesome. It's not even close. Their software division needs help.
I'm only able to get away with it because I don't have to send anything other than PDFs to other people very often, but Apple's office-type apps are the only ones of their sort that I don't hate, aside from a few less-integrated and less-stable open source alternatives (Abiword, Gnumeric, that kind of thing—and I'm not even 100% sure those are still around). Google docs and Office 365 are terrible and I pity people who have to use them.
> Alright, so what about their iWork suite? On second thought, forget about it. People are using Google Docs or Office 365. Next...
For collaboration, yeah, you're stuck with what everyone uses. But considering the actual software itself, iWork is very nice in my experience. Fast, reliable, and the interface isn't a total shitshow like every other office app out there.
Same. I currently have a HomeKit thermostat, doorbell, and cameras in my house. Not really sure where GP is getting his info. They all work really well.
As far as I know, things like driving license need user adoption. It's getting there - https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2021/09/apple-announces-first...
Apple Wallet also supports some forms of ID, transit cards and even vaccine certificates.
I think the main cause of this isn't so much Home, but the available third party hardware. I wish Apple would make a smart switch (I know that's fairly out of scope for them), but one high quality smart switch that actually worked reliably would resolve 90% of home tech issues.
Homepods are similarly bad with basic actions. I have five of them in multiple rooms. If you want to adjust the volume on all of them and say "make volume 50% everywhere" it fails. I have to whisper the command to my phone so the homepods don't hear me and then it can adjust volume on all of them.
Volume and playing on homepods generally from the phone is a shitty experience. Often the homepods lose the phone connection and then I can no longer control them from the device. Really it feels like nobody at Apple actually uses these things in their personal life.
I also have a gigabit network connection with a stupidly fast access point in a two bedroom apartment so it's not an issue of network speeds or signal.
I've got 2 HomePods in a small apartment, and they typically work okay in what I need them to do, and automatons always work.
I sometimes have to close the app and open it again to get devices to respond IF I'm in not on my home network. Kind of annoying.
What's funny is that I've noticed that it's been better since I bought an eero 6 and added into into Home.
Most importantly, it works for my girlfriend who isn't the most keen on new technology. That's the most important part for me, rather than what I want.
Randomly though they fail to work in Home and I have to manually reset them by holding in the button on the device and redo the entire process. This isn't workable at any scale (it's even annoying with just the two that I have).
It'd be nice for them to make one base level device (like a smart switch) which supports most of the use cases.
When cooking we'll tell the one in the kitchen to set a timer. Then we'll ask what time is left. If another one hears the question it yells "there are no timers set" so we have to whisper to the closer one.
Another thing that to me suggests nobody at Apple is really using these things.
It's frankly both puzzling and saddening how much Apple has lost in term of QA, user interface and vision in the last 10 years. I always feel that Tim Cook doesn't have a clue about what made Apple special and is slowly destroying it by not making sure to keep those qualities
EDIT: I do recognize Tim Cook's qualities, he is amazing at managing supply chain and apple does this better than anybody with very little impact in terms of chip shortage. He's original decision to target privacy as a marketing argument was on point (unfortunately the csam controversy kind of destroyed this) and under his tenure Apple has done tremendously well financially.
But the issue, is that Apple also benefits from its reputation and in the last few years, they've destroyed it by producing shoddy software, by having major hardware issues over multiple revisions (keyboards, staining screens)...
Well their shares have never been higher so as long as that's the metric by which a CEO's performance is judged then you can forget about Apple caring about SW QA and other such "nonsense".
Also, before Jobs passed away, Cook was Apple's supply chain mastermind so it makes sense his strengths are with the HW side of things, which, during the current silicon shortage, is an absolutely killer skillset to have, as proven by how little Apple was affected by it in comparison to other companies.
When it comes to quality SW, Cook might not be the ideal CEO for the job (like notifications on the new MBP can get hidden behind the notch; WTF, how did this pass QA?! Pretty sure Jobs would have sent them back to the drawing board) but Apple can always rely on the faithful developer base building great quality SW instead of them and then taking a 30% cut on their sales on the Apple store. Basically another win for Apple.
The thing is, there's inertia, Apple made great products and still have a great reputation, Amazon was a great place to buy online and while it has a counterfeit problem, it's still doing great, I'm sure it's possible to find a few examples of companies that have been doing great stock wise but that are slowly eroding their reputation. It doesn't show yet in the sales, but the narrative has changed.
The thing is, look at the threads in HN, they used to be very very positive of apple and now they're much more critical. Things no longer just work. People complaining about stability issues on a mac are common. Macworld which has always tended to be extremely positive about Apple complains, Ars Tecnica too, even Daring Fireball is less overwhelmingly positive than it used to be.
Apple relies on those power users to recommend their friends to buy their stuff and I no longer recommend buying an iphone to my friends and I know I'm not the only one.
Agree, but the thing is, the HN userbase is only a tiny fraction, and not representative of the entire more lucrative consumer base that Apple is targeting. I think Apple will be fine, even if it looses the super picky stickler developer HN userbase that is proficient in linux anyway.
Apple kinda stopped caring about the Mac SW quality as that's not its main cashcow anymore for a long time. iOS and app store subscriptions and fees are where the real money's at.
Developer and QA team tester were using older MBPs? So it worked on their machines?
Rendered fine in the automated test?
Meanwhile every piece of software Apple ever shipped for Windows was hot garbage. It sounds like whatever made their Windows stuff bad is afflicting OS X now.