> But what about security? Are you sure you want to stay on an older version of Mac OS? — Thankfully I’m tech-savvy enough to know what I’m doing. The two Macs I use most are still on High Sierra and Mojave, and haven’t received security updates in quite a while. I haven’t had any security-related problem whatsoever. ...
Lots to unpack here. First, the author is stating a personal preference and won't be swayed. Fair enough.
But the idea that the author would know they "haven't had any security-related problems whatsoever" is debatable at best. The attack surface is enormous.
Even security experts admit they have trouble securing a consumer computer. And it doesn't sound like the author spends much time dealing with the topic in depth.
macOS is much more prevalent than it used to be, but the attack surface is hardly “enormous” considering the prominence of security vulnerabilities on Windows.
Would be more interesting to actually cite examples of high-risk exploits that have been discovered since High Sierra and Mojave.
Yeah, I won't say that I've enjoyed the restrictions that've come with the various security-associated measures added over the years, but I leave them turned on anyway because all it takes is one zero-day on some site you visit that manages to worm its way through your blocking extensions.
I've been using computers for 25+ years and have been technically capable for the better part of that, but that doesn't mean I'm any less vulnerable. I'm not going to be intentionally clicking on fishy links or anything but we all make mistakes, which makes it more a matter of when than if.
How often do ordinary people actually get owned by zero days like you're describing? The majority have got to be malicious links, opening dangerous attachments, etc. Or, back in the day, a misconfigured firewall; I'd still absolutely recommend a strict firewall on the router.
It is not a zero-day if it has been fixed in a newer OS version. I would say, the main risk here are known vulnerabilities, like, bug in a system library which does image rendering, font rendering etc.
Targeting known CVE for old (no longer updated) MacOS versions might actually be quite good targeted attack: probably a bunch of users of such computers are technical folks with access to production servers, cloud credentials etc.
Windows? That's a joke. It's a fine platform for gaming and probably still the most performant platform for web browsing (I personally value that highly), but not really built for development (except for development of games, I guess).
Desktop Linux/Gnome: Excellent for actual development work, but not great elsewhere.
I live in WSL for all my Dev work outside of Mac based apps. WSL allows me not to dual boot, still use "work" required applications w/out having a lot of issues and completing everything I need in one ecosystem.
Agreed strongly. I would rather develop on Linux as my development environment will not be destroyed on updates, and my applications run on Linux based systems. The only thing that saves MacOS from being completely unworkable is that there are so many devs on Macs, so workarounds/fixes to the breakage done to *nix subsystems are plentiful.
What does development mean to you? Working on stuff that lives in the cloud? I think you may be taking a very limited view of what people need from their work machines.
It means mostly backend development. There is a whole lot of reading, a whole lot of real-time audio/video communication (via all possible communication platforms), a whole lot of web browsing, a whole lot of editing, containerization, lots of command line work utilizing my Unix/Linux knowledge from the past 20 years etc.
Sounds like dual booting Linux and Windows is a good solution if you want to develop and play games.
Desktop Linux is pretty serviceable for any tasks that aren't gaming. It may require learning different tools if you are used to Microsoft/adobe products, but the alternatives do exist. If you're doing command line work, it's better on Linux than osx anyway.
Steam's Proton means just about every Windows game of note works well on Linux, now. And yes, it works with non-Steam games; you don't even need to use the Steam Launcher, and can use an alternative (like Heroic Launcher) instead.
Let us not oversell Proton. While the compatibility story now is better than it ever has been, only about 26% of the top 100 games on Steam work without substantial tinkering or other problems. And most of that is going to be due to multiplayer games and developer/publisher anti-cheat obstinance.
Statistically speaking, the games the average person would most likely want to play likely still do not run, or do not run without problems or tinkering required.
Where are you getting that 26% from? PCGamesN reported, last year, that around 70% of the top 100 were supported. It's a different story for SteamDeck, which has further constraints due to its unconventional screen size; but even then, ProtonDB claims at least 48% of the top 100 are playable on the Deck[1]. In my experience, just about any game that didn't work well on my Deck does work well after I switch it to Proton Experimental.
From the ProtonDB dashboard. Top 100, ProtonDB click play ratings system. 26% of those games are tier 1 or tier 2 (no way to give a direct link here).
You could go by the old the medal system, which looks promising at first glance, but "gold" basically means "playable". Platinum is the real metric there, and can be understood to mean "plays as well as it does on its native platform". There are game issues in gold rated titles that would lead to mass complaints and refunds if they existed on the native platform. That is kind of my point. "Playable" is way too low of a bar.
Ah, I think you're being too critical then. ProtonDB's tier 3 rating is still playable, just with obvious issues; like poor performance, configuration required or occasional crashes. Including those bumps it to 59%, and I suspect many of them work fine with Proton Experimental.
But like you said, you think "Platinum" is the metric that matters. A good chunk of my library wouldn't be considered platinum on Windows 11. ;)
Point taken, but I am looking at this from the standpoint of someone who already has a considerable PC game library but is not a big techie (a pretty good stereotype of the average PC gamer). I could not in good faith recommend a Steam Deck to such a person without knowing more about the games they play.
If they spend most of their time in esports titles not made by Valve (anything by Riot, Fortnite, etc.) they would be sorely disappointed.
However, if they are big into emulation or indie games, the picture is a lot rosier. (And not just because that is an easier workload, but because it implies more knowledge on the part of the user)
I think that is the tipping point for Proton and the Steam Deck, when they can be recommended without qualification to the average gamer. We are not there yet and I do not want to see people burned by having their first exposure to Linux gaming being so close yet so far away for their use case.
FWIW, I know a few dozen people who have purchased a Steam Deck and not a single one of them seems to be disappointed; the consensus appears to be that it's causing people to experience their libraries with new eyes. That said, we're all game developers and I don't think very many play sports games; or would think to do so on a handheld, when the alternative is on a couch with friends.
Myself, I'm using mine to power through all the puzzle and adventure games that languished on my PC while my attention was elsewhere.
I'd say desktop Linux is great. To me, it's been better than windows and mac for a while.
Gaming is not great but pretty good. Certainly better than what's possible on a Mac. Updates do break my StarCraft 2 once or twice an year but pretty much everything else I care about works.
If anyone @ Valve is reading this: get back to fixing VR on Linux. My Index is almost useless these days. Fix your vrcomposer
I absolutely detest using Windows, I refuse to work for a company that would have me use Windows, but even a rabid Linux fanboy like myself knows that Windows is suited perfectly fine for a lot of development work, like all that enterprise crap I try to stay away from, but Windows still has a valid use for developing some things.
I develop on Windows every day and have no issues with it. It works great if you primarily use an IDE like Visual Studio Code, and especially if you are working with .NET or Typescript.
With WSL2, Windows is just as good development platform as Linux but with great access to good looking/working consumer software. Way better than macos.
I find windows fantastic for development! Other environments don't seem to have anything you can't do in windows. I get there are a lot of "preferences" people have, but almost none of the preference type things are things that stop you developing. No matter what OS, you are likely to develop certain workflows of developing that can't be replicated exactly in other OSs, but that is minor, but often exaggerated to being a major when someone is super particular. But in general, those kinds of preferences don't stop you doing development and you just develop different workflows.
Article correctly calls out how they are ripping out perfectly good parts of macOS like System Preferences to replace them with an iOS-ified version. Instead of delivering features power users might want (proper window snapping/tiling!), the press release announcing Ventura talks up the new Weather app (from iOS) and Stage Manager, a horrible solution on both macOS and iPadOS.
There are plenty of great third party tools that do power user features (including window snapping/tiling). Apple is better at defining a workflow and toolset for casual users and forcing them to adapt to the Apple way. Power users would naturally push back if Apple did a similar thing for them. So I think it's better that they leave any advanced features to outside developers.
Rectangle Pro has the window throwing feature, which is a game changer. You can use a mouse gesture shortcut to move the window under the mouse to preset locations. There's up to 16 gestures (8 directions, short or long throw), so there's a lot of different options.
They are slowly changing iPadOS and macOS to bring them closer & closer together. I have a feeling that they are going to be one & the same in 3 or so versions.
But what the article doesn't really do at all is clarify why doing this replacement is a bad thing. For the vast majority of MacOS users, this will be a good thing because most of them are using iOS/iPadOS as their first point of content. Making things seamless across all these devices might be, at most, a slight inconvenience for power users but it will be an improvement for literally everyone else.
Hacker News is obviously a different demographic but no tech company is going to cater to power users. There's not enough of us for anyone to take what we say meaningfully.
I have been an Apple user since 1990, and I think you are absolutely right. In my mind iPad OS and iOS are so bad I don't want my Mac taking any inspiration from them, but I bet the average user wants something familiar to those two platforms.
The ideal situation, for me, would be some kind of progressive disclosure or a way to toggle "Advanced" versions of these panels and sections but I totally get why Apple wouldn't want to do that. It's double the work for such a small crowd.
Progressive disclosure can work, but an “Advanced/Expert” type setting does not. Dunning-Kruger kicks in and everyone flips the advanced switch whether they should or not.
That doesn't mean it doesn't work. It just means that some people are going to overestimate their competence to make those changes. I would be happy if it could only be turned on via Terminal, for example.
A huge spend and I don't regret one single purchase. Each subsequent product interfaces extremely well with the ecosystem. I no longer carry my phone with me 80% of the time. I bring my watch and usually have a laptop if needed.
Do you text with friends, family, or colleagues, and if so, is it from the laptop? I find my communication hampered without the phone, but like the idea of leaving it away from me more often.
The texting is actually pretty good from the watch, can use Siri or type into the watch keyboard. Same with phone calls, I use the air pods to connect and its like talking on a regular phone.
Apple pay works very well. Get emails, slack messages, etc. Can easily reply to slack messages from the watch. Cant see conversations but
Basically everything works that I need.
Alot of apps dont work, but thats the point. I dont need those apps all the time.
Yeah iMessage has a pretty great tie in with iPhones to the point that they don’t even have to be on the same network to send an sms from your laptop via your phone.
I actually like the new system settings. Feels much better organized than the previous version, and has space for adding new settings. I even noticed apple using the new space to show things like user groups, and rouge login items (I seriously found a Corel draw login item in there that I immediately discarded).
Agreed, System Settings really needed an update and is better for it. There's a bit of weirdness at the moment since apps/utilities make now-incorrect assumptions about where permissions are, but that'll be a memory soon.
Stage Manager was opt-in for me and doesn't solve a problem that I have, but I think it's a great sign that Apple continues to try new things.
Oof. Just last night I reset one of my personal systems to its original Yosemite. It couldn't access the app store or many modern web sites because of obsolete SSL. I manually upgraded to Sierra. It barely worked with iCloud and keychain. Getting it up to Mojave felt so much better.
I hate that 32-bit got left behind, and I bemoan apparent "planned obsolescence" as much as anyone. But the fact is that these latest OSes are coming with genuine improvements in security posture. The point that the UI changes are sometimes unwelcome is well-taken, and I can see how the changes in security technologies change the experience for the user in sometimes awkward or baffling ways. Totally get it. But when it comes to stuff like this, I'm afraid the only way through it is forward.
As someone who said "My next iPhone might be my last", just go ahead and leave the platform now. I ended up being irritated with so many things about that iPhone, looking longingly at the other side. You can always switch back later if things improve :)
> To me, Stage Manager is as useful and practical an addition to Mac OS as putting a USB numeric keypad inside the packaging of a new MacBook Pro.
Not trying to be silly here. Probably need my brain calibrated here,
I would love the inclusion of a keypad and would find it incredibly useful, especially for accessibility reasons. So I find the idea delightful, which I suspect is not the way it supposed to strike me. I am assuming one is supposed to find that idea exotically stupid and niche?
I think he's trying to say, albeit poorly in my estimation, that adding a USB keypad in the box defeats the purpose of having a portable machine? I'm only assuming that because they're suggesting that Stage Manager is impractical and not useful for them and USB keypads seem impractical for a laptop and would be unused by the majority of people using Macbooks(?) Pro.
Windows: Windows 11 is a mixed bag with some better design and some worse. Currently, it's a bit of a step backwards. Windows 10 is pretty ok though.
Ubuntu: I wouldn't say Ubuntu is in a better place now with Gnome than it was 5 years ago. It works well, but it doesn't have the cool factor that Unity did and is missing a lot of its features. Ubuntu Unity exists, but it's a little buggy and not as polished as back in the 16.04 days. You could always go KDE Plasma (or MATE if you're old school).
There's the rabbit hole of other Linux distributions, my favorite alternative being Arch. But depends on your tolerance for tweaking.
I use opensnitch and eventually found the appropriate blocking rule for every time a snap is launched or appimage from some random mount path for the process.
Not sure what's wrong with using the established package management system instead of reinventing the wheel to distribute an app on your own binary system that you control - why?!?!
The goal is to be distro-agnostic, but I find that Flatpak and Snap both add more bloat than is worth it. Either just use distro packages, or, if you really want cross-platform, get an AppImage and be done with it.
I was going to say something similar. The same sort of complaints this author has about Mac OS could be made about Windows 11. Linux desktop environments are worse because they go through the same cycle of changes in half the time.
What we really want is design stability. We do want improvements but we don't want wholesale conceptual changes in our desktop environments every few years.
I switched from Windows to Fedora Linux on all of my machines about 2+ years ago and it's been great! I will never go back. I do keep a totally empty Windows install for one game that I can't play though (Escape from Tarkov).
Fedora deserves a mention as a solid desktop alternative to Ubuntu. It ships very up-to-date packages but doesn't require as much tweaking as, say, Arch. The default 'spin' is GNOME but they provide excellent support for Plasma, Cinnamon, etc.
I also think dnf is a more powerful and easier package manager than apt.
This. Fedora is rapidly turning into what Ubuntu should have been, and is retaking its spot that Ubuntu took shortly after it came around. Ubuntu is turning into a legacy desktop, centered around tailoring Gnome to a Unity-esque desktop every release rather than embracing progress.
When Ubuntu 22.04 was released, I switched to Fedora for good. They get a GNOME distro right.
I'm a SWE, I've been a DBA and a sysadmin, and I've been using Linux on servers for a long time, but on the desktop I'm just a user who doesn't care to understand the inner workings of the stuff that's supposed to just work for me. This KDE, GNOME, XFCE, Cinnamon, X vs Wayland, Unity, MATE, Plasma, whatever GUI stuff is way too confusing and not worth my time. Just sticking to the default in Ubuntu doesn't help much when even that keeps changing a ton, which is unbelievable. Why do they get users accustomed to something only to swap it out?
I feel like I’ve got conflicting desires here. On one hand, I just want everything to work, and everything to stay the same, just like what you describe. On the other hand, there are a dozen or two dozen packages which I want always up to date. Most of them are development tools. Any distro which is good at one is bad at the other.
I'd expect that the most stable distro could run the latest versions of those tools too. Do the tools depend on the latest desktop environment or something?
The stable distro can run those tools, but how do I keep them up to date? I could mix a stable Debian base with specific tools from unstable, but my experience is that this sometimes results in problems.
I got tired of Mac, weird and forced UI choices, inflexibility, so much RAM use, and feeling like it slowed down 50% over a course of 2-3 years despite having a fixed set of software on it
Tried Windows 11, and despite really wanting to like it, it left an impression of utterly unbelievable level of unpolished and unfinished mess, with basic features missing (primarily taskbar related) and still, after all these years, just being a skin over ever-present (and still there) Win95-era dialogs. I understand Windows 8 keeping the old Control Panel and having a weird and weak replacement with a new skin for it in parallel, but come on, we've had Win 10 for years and Win 11 still hasn't moved a bit from that same crap?
Switched to Manjaro (Arch-based distro), and KDE Plasma, spent a couple of days tinkering and customizing and have never been happier with my quick, light, rock-solid, completely customizable and fancy environment, that served me impeccably for 1.5 years until I was too tempted with MBP 14. It is a great device hardware-wise, but Mac OS has been a definite leap back, and I would pay hundreds of dollars to be able to put my Linux on MBP with everything working.
> That trepidation and sinking feeling of “What are they going to break this time?” every time the WWDC’s date approaches, has been wearing me down in the past few years. What one should feel, instead, is: “Apple got this. I’m in good hands. I see no reason not to upgrade straight away.” And I haven’t felt this in a long time.
I haven’t looked forward to a release since Snow Leopard, and High Sierra was the only usable version after that. Mojave and onward have been just dreadful. Mac software hasn’t been fun, exciting, or good in a long time, sadly.
I might agree with the summary if there was any examples given of what they're referring to. If there was even a small list of things that Apple broke every WWDC that anyone besides extreme power users cared about, the point might actually be made. As it stands, it's a lot of "feelings" and not enough substance.
I've been feeling this creeping since roughly the PPC->Intel transition. There was a point where I was turning off more new OS X features than using them. The inescapable fact is that if you do not want to fully jump into the Apple ecosystem, macOS treats you like a second class citizen. I sync my iPhone via lightning cable, use Retroactive to install iTunes (it's better than Apple's "Music" app if you're managing your own library), get my apps via homebrew casks, store my documents locally, and every new release of macOS makes these sort of things a little bit harder.
As far as security posture goes, I'm not too concerned. Little Snitch + Pihole are pretty amazing and I have the skills to stay secure. But it is depressing watching from the Catalina shore as each year another macOS release takes more autonomy from the user.
I'm genuinely curious why you're doing this. What advantages do you get from turning off these features, installing old apps, and storing everything locally? I sync via my own server but still leave the iCloud backups for Documents on and there's no a single reason that I can see to install iTunes that's not already done better by other media players without the addition of Apple Music (which I use heavily in addition to keeping my own music library in Plex).
I feel like making those kinds of concessions means that MacOS doesn't treat you as a second-class citizen but that you've deliberately chosen to make yourself a second-class citizen. In what ways do Linux or Windows (or even older MacOS) treat you like a first-class citizen that the new MacOS doesn't anymore?
I've started a draft to your comment 3 times now and it always becomes a "not your cloud, not your data" rant :) But better writers than me have, and continue to, bang that drum so I will not right now.
I could write 100 blog posts about this but let me give you one good example: Years ago when many people still synced their iPhones via cable, you could sync all the major "iLife" apps -- photos, music, contacts, calendar etc. When Apple released Notes.app, it was around the time the iCloud push got really big and more people started using that. To this day, you cannot sync Notes.app via cable. It would be a trivial thing to implement, but it prevents cloud adoption and is so clearly in the "wontfix" category that the only conclusion is that it's intentionally left out. Want your Mac's notes on your iPhone? Get in the iCloud, citizen, and maybe we'll let you.
Bottom line is that if you go back and look at Steve Jobs' 2001 digital hub strategy, the futuristic view was one where the Mac was the ground truth for your data and your apps. You were in charge. You owned the machine, it did what you wanted, and you bought neat peripherals that interfaced with it like mp3 players and cameras.
But today the "digital hub" is the cloud, and the Mac is just another peripheral. Today by default Macs and iPhones need to be "activated" via internet connection to reinstall the OS, and any peripherals you buy (looking at you, fucking HP/Epson shit) will likely force you to create a cloud account which means they own it, not you.
<insert cloud rant here>
Side note: Windows is a worse offender, you need look no further than Windows 11 and its removal of the local account except via extremely technical/hacky means. This is an intentionally malicious push to their ecosystem, and one I hope Apple does not follow (but essentially has on iOS and I won't be surprised if/when macOS follows suit).
PPS. One of the next big pushes here will be passkeys. If they can tightly couple your online services to their devices for authn then the ease and freedom to migrate systems is reduced further, and "knowing" your credentials for an online service means nothing. The cloud provider decides if you get to access it or not.
I think that you're viewing the past through rose-colored glasses a little. Steve Jobs' entire strategy was a headless system with everything in the cloud. It was the entire push for iTools (which then became .Mac, then MobileMe, and finally iCloud) and those were released in 2000. The idea was that you could sign in on any Mac and always have access to your personal info and, at one point, even sign in and see the desktop of any of your machines ("Back to My Mac", a feature I miss every day). It only started as one machine being the "ground truth", as you say, because there had to be one starting point to sync from.
That being said, I'll give you that it might be trivial to sync Notes (one-way, at least) via cable. I believe, based on nothing other than my interpretation of history, that the reason this stopped is not to force cloud adoption but that it's just not that in-demand of a feature. The biggest issue with cable-based syncing is that you have to resolve conflicts manually and the iCloud solution doesn't need that at all. It's not a trivial thing to implement, in my opinion, especially if you have to factor in anyone that has multiple Macs, iPads, or any other device that could potentially sync Notes.
That being said... I'm doing exactly what you're describing in syncing everything to my own cloud on my NAS but at the expense of getting to use the native apps on MacOS and my other devices. I still use the iCloud stuff for backups of data on a specific account but I feel like the reason these things are going to continue to be "wontfix" (you give away your dev-ness) is because the majority of people love the convenience of simple syncing that they don't have to actively think about. Apple also does just enough on the privacy and security front to make it worthwhile for a good chunk of techies too.
The Notes app is at least sync'd through mail, so you don’t have to go through iCloud if you don’t want to. I… uh, host my own IMAP server… so it’s my data, on my server. And yes, I realize that “just host IMAP yourself” is a preposterous thing to recommend to anyone.
Seems like this kind of syncing just barely works, because notes are kind of like emails. Too bad there isn’t a similar ubiquitous personal file sharing service that could be used for your other iCloud stuff. WebDAV might fit the bill if you hammered it into place.
I don’t think syncing by cable is in the cards, even for Notes. You would want a way to resolve conflicts. When you sync stuff like music by cable, there’s always a host and a client device. With Notes, there are just two peers, which may both have edits to a common anscestor. A chunk of WebDAV is just the ability to make changes and handle conflicts (or at least figure out when they happen).
Oh! I thought of another peak frustration, iOS this time. Years ago when you toggled off WiFi and Bluetooth via the swipe-down control center it disabled the radios at the hardware level. I like this because wifi and bluetooth have become de-facto tracking technologies now.
Now it only "disconnects" for 24 hours. This is because Apple wants your Bluetooth and Wifi on for aiding in maps and the FindMy network etc. It is intentionally misleading and they won't even add a Settings toggle for something like "Control center radio toggles turn off the hardware". You have to go into Settings and then into each WiFi and BT and toggle the radio off there.
Totally agree on this one but have conceded that we're in the minority of people that need to completely turn off their WiFi and Bluetooth radios. That's still one reason I jailbreak my device and something that, although I would never switch based on past experiences, I do like about Android/non-Apple devices.
It's because people forget they turned it off and it breaks their phone. Merely having the radios doesn't let people track you anymore, they have built-in privacy protections.
The inescapable fact is that if you do not want to fully jump into the Apple ecosystem, macOS treats you like a second class citizen.
I don’t find this to be true at all.
I also use Homebrew to install apps and casks, etc. and I’m running on Ventura.
I spend most of my time in WezTerm (was an iTerm user for many years) doing development… but I can use what Gruber calls Mac-assed Mac apps, which are the super useful indie apps which embody the original ethos of macOS apps.
That’s the beauty IMHO of the Mac today—best of breed native (NOT Electron) apps combined with all the power and flexibility of OSS GUI and terminal based apps.
It’s a different experience using apps in a fast, truecolor (16 million colors), GPU-accelerated, with full OpenType support terminal emulator.
What doesn’t get enough attention: the workflows and automations that can be created that aren’t possible on other platforms, since Apple Events are baked into the Cocoa/AppKit layer all the way down to the Unix layer.
Non-developers can use Automator or Shortcuts [1] to create workflows that combine the best features of GUI apps and the command line.
To my lights, we're in a bit of a golden age with the Mac platform; the newest revision of the M1 Macbooks are some of the best they've ever made. I'm not in love with much of the new OS stuff, but I don't need to be; I'm mostly not the audience for it, and I don't need my OS to have whizzy new stuff just for the sake of it.
I have a hard time getting myself wound up over the UI design of the System Preferences app.
TBH the only thing pushing me away from macOS is that there’s a bunch of stuff running on there by default that I don’t understand, and I don’t really trust Apple’s direction wrt respecting user privacy.
When I’ve been using Linux in other contexts lately it’s been awesome being able to fully understand exactly what each process is and why it’s running (and to be able to remove it if I want to). On my macOS (and windows) boxes I end up trusting Apple and Microsoft a lot more than I would actively choose to.
That's quite amusing to me, because when I "ps ax" on my Linux machine I honestly could not swear that i know what half of them were doing. The names look plausible (dbus, systemd stuff, etc) but it would be easy to get one past me.
OpenBSD is a bit of an ice cold shower, but it's the only OS I use regularly where I can point to every process and know exactly what it's doing.
In the past some of these were flaky and would hang using 100% cpu, I’d google “fspind 100% cpu” or whatever and find 20 other people with the same problem and zero info about what the process actually did.
same with netbsd. Not much is running by default and you can quickly figure out what's what. I guess it's kind of true with linux as well....especially as it becomes gnu/linux/systemd......
Agreed. While I loathe the current system preferences app, look at what Microsoft started with Windows 8 with the Settings app. Almost a decade later and there is still stuff strewn between Settings and the original Control Panel. At least Apple ripped the band aid off and for better or worse there is only one for them to focus on, and no "legacy" piece loitering around giving them an excuse to not keep improving the new system preferences.
Also I was amused at his notch hostility - I shared the same view; until I used a new Mac with the notch and discovered that I don't notice it. At all. I thought I would hate it, and I can't remember a single time it surfaced other than it coming up as a topic and then I notice it.
I'm trying to think of any of the recent changes they made and none of them are fatal enough to prevent me from working with macOS as I have for decades now, and can think of none. He doesn't like stage manager? Big deal. Spaces is still there and window management still works the way it always has without it - that one was really telling. It's not like they forced it to be the only way to manage windows.
My reasons for getting off of Macs were ~100% OS-related. I still think they're making the best hardware out there, but most days of the year I want to open my computer and use it. Having weird busted shit, prompts for 3 month free trials of Apple Music, accidentally closing things because of command+q (Why is a shortcut to close things, something that you do literally once per application run, bound do something so easy to hit? [0]). Then a lot of incidental stuff in the ecosystem (brew breaking things when I would boot up), the bundling of bug fixes and security updates into application updates with the OS upgrade model...
I would still recommend Macs to people in general, but I think for people trying to get work done, the OS upgrade strategies that Apple chose in particular are extremely disruptive and lead to many team members at a previous job just breaking their setups over and over again. It's not fun to be using software beholden to marketing timelines, if you're fiddly with your machine.
[0]: I switch between QWERTY and AZERTY. "Select All" becomes "Quit App". My solution was to bind Spotlight to Command+Q , which would almost always work.
>Why is a shortcut to close things, something that you do literally once per application run, bound do something so easy to hit?
This doesn't seem weird? I find it really useful. There are similarly simple keyboard shortcuts assigned to functionality of most applications that I use much less than quitting. To quote you, I quit the application every time I use it! It's also the default on Linux.
It's unfortunate that some of what made MacOS great for developers is now being phased out in favor of features that are lifted out of iOS. Apple has made developer-hostile moves over the years that seem out of line with it's old 'think different' ethos. I hope Apple takes this customer segment seriously and reverses course here, but I'm not super hopeful.
The real problem is that there isn't a reasonable alternative. Windows is out of the question for me due to not being a POSIX-based OS. WSL isn't integrated deeply enough and is still a pain in the ass to use coming from MacOS. I experimented with using a mostly stock Xubuntu setup for a bit and also found the user experience to be really subpar. Call me old, but I have no interest in dealing with the amount of configuration and tweaking necessary to be productive in a Linux environment.
Ultimately, I'm just going to stick it out with MacOS.
Windows also has some unfortunate papercuts like font rendering that's still optimized for super low rez displays all these years later, with bad hinting and kerning. Seriously, this drives me nuts. It's better when DPI scaling is above 1.0 but it's still not as good as that of macOS or any Linux desktop environment.
Also, if you want an application-centric desktop management style, macOS is the only game in town. Practically everything else follows Win9X conventions in that regard, even the iPadOS-reminiscent GNOME. While global menubars can be enabled in KDE and added to XFCE, they're only functional in some apps because a lot of apps (those built with GTK, mostly) have eschewed menubars entirely in favor of that infernal hamburger button.
I have been using HIDPI displays on Windows for years and have zero issues with the font rendering. It is _different_ from macOS and Linux, sure, but I can’t see any reason to diss it today.
I've always found Windows's font rendering to be subjectively "off" in a way I couldn't really articulate. I'm not enough of a typography expert to explain what I'm seeing. Text display just seems beautiful on Mac and a half-assed afterthought on Windows.
My big problem with Windows HiDPI support is that they still can't seem to handle multiple monitors with different DPI sensibly. I have a 5120x2880 display as my main display and 2560x1440 displays on either side of it. Dragging windows from one display to the other is janky and sized wrong during the dragging. Doing the same thing on Mac just works as you'd expect. How can Microsoft still get this so wrong?
I'm talking more about things like you can't use apps that haven't been blessed by Apple without jumping through hoops, you can't easily install some third party OSS without installing XCode clutils, for a while you seemed not to be able to use sudo without booting into recovery mode and flipping some switch. Those kinds of things are 'developer-hostile' in my mind because they just make your life harder as a developer, and to what end?
I haven't upgraded and used Stage Manager yet so I don't have any opinion on it.
You can use sudo, you just can’t modify OS files without disabling SIP which you can do from recovery mode.
This seems fine to me. The problem is regular users follow some instructions that say paste in to the terminal and then the OS asks for a password like it always does, and now you have malware embedded in your OS.
With the new model, you’d have to guide the user through getting in to recovery mode which is either too confusing or sets off alarm bells for the user.
As a developer I can’t really see why you’d want to touch these OS files unless you are hacking on the OS itself and at that point you should be smart enough to know how to turn it off
That seems backwards. Linux distro's come with mostly reasonable defaults and a decent set of apps. Windows PCs come with loads of crapware and no useful apps to speak of.
Windows 11 is full of Microsoft crap I’ll give you that.
But configuring a brand new MacBook or new Linux install for development is pure hell. It’s a bloody nightmare. Linux is, for better and worse, an endless stream of configuration. The upside is you CAN configure it. The downside is you have to, constantly.
> Call me old, but I have no interest in dealing with the amount of configuration and tweaking necessary to be productive in a Linux environment.
I was responding to this statement. Do you want constantly and carefully configure your machine? Use Linux and be happy! Do you want something that works out of the box? Windows is pretty darn good.
I do game development which is Windows through and through. YMMV.
I teach a software development undergraduate programme. We have our students use Linux for all development. We have them do no configuration whatsoever, unless you count installing a couple of packages from the package manager and a few vscode extensions. Works just fine out of the box.
MacOS is a great platform but I find all their apps terrible. Luckily there is a very active development community and I don't have to use any of them.
* Finder -> Path Finder
* Spotlight -> Alfred
* Stage Manager/Snapping -> Moom
* Safari -> Chrome/Firefox
* Mail/Calendar/Contacts -> Outlook
* Photos -> Google Photos
* Maps -> Google Maps
* Weather -> Weather Channel
* System Sound -> SoundSource
* System Screen Shots -> Clean Shot X
* System Menu Bar -> Bartender
* Terminal -> iTerm2
* Preview (I actually use this one)
I've never been able to get a good grip on what people find bad about Finder. Once View > Show Path Bar and View > Show Status Bar have been selected and current folder searching has been enabled in Preferences I don't find it any worse than Windows Explorer, GNOME Files, or any of the numerous derivations of GNOME Files (Nemo, Thunar, etc).
I have something that serves a similar purpose - a shell script that calls out to AppleScript to get the path of the most recently used Finder window and returns it as a string:
#!/usr/bin/env bash
####################
# Description: Get the path of the most recently used Finder window
# Author: Ancapistani
# Version: 1.0.0
####################
osascript -e 'tell application "Finder"'\
-e "if (${1-1} <= (count Finder windows)) then"\
-e "get POSIX path of (target of window ${1-1} as alias)"\
-e 'else' \
-e 'get POSIX path of (desktop as alias)'\
-e 'end if' \
-e 'end tell';
One problem I have with the finder is there is no "loading files" animation when browsing through folders. So if open a folder and it looks empty, its not clear if it is really empty, or if the finder is still trying to get a folder listing. Hard to look through and organize/delete files on external and network drives.
The most ridiculous missing feature is there’s no refresh button for the current folder. Sometimes to show new files created by an external process I have to relaunch the whole finder process just to have my files appear as it caches the stale view
That's a gripe I share, but I run into it so infrequently that it's not much of a bother. Most likely when browsing network shares and such, which I tend to use something like Transmit or Forklift for instead.
Finder should show changes immediately except on certain external filesystems. It gets kernel events on directory and file changes (the same mechanism Spotlight and Time Machine use).
This bites me on fake FAT filesystems over USB for hardware development kits, and I usually just turn those features off. The heuristics there are often terrible, and I'd rather create a build system that writes a new image, instead of doing manual drag-and-drops.
One thing that really makes Finder terrible is I can't copy path easily like I can in windows and even going to certain folder requires steps like clicking on Go To Folder etc.
Gnome File and Finder both have such issue. Gnome file manager at least provide ctrl + L.
If you enable the path bar, you can right click on the path bar and "Copy as Pathname" on whatever is down there (which will be the current folder if nothing is selected, or whatever is selected).
If the path bar is showing a folder, you can right click it and select "Open in terminal".
The Finder has an equivalent with Command-Shift-G, and if that key shortcut is too cumbersome it (along with all other Mac menu items) can be re-bound in System Preferences under the Keyboard prefpane.
Most of the things mentioned in this comment chain are easily discoverable in the Finder's menus… it really pays to peruse menus in Mac apps when searching for a function.
FYI, holding option key with a directory or file selected and choosing "copy" will copy the path to the selected item. With nothing selected, it will copy the path to the location of the open finder window.
The copy operation (⌘C) has an optional variant (⌥⌘C) which copies the pathnames to the clipboard as text rather than copying file references.
This will copy either the directory (if no selection) or the selected file(s).
If you enable the path bar, I believe this is also a copyable element.
Finally, dropping a file or directory into a plain text control that cannot take file or folder references (like this HN comment box) will fall back to the path name.
The main job of the Finder is finding files. Unfortunately the interface for doing that is the worst I've seen in any OS. Let's compare it with Windows 3.1's File Manager (which was the first GUI file manager I used).
1. Defaults to the columnar format. It's crazy - to move from a parent to child you've to move the mouse the whole width of the column. Whereas in Windows 3.1 File Manager, you'd have to move less than 10 pixels.
2. Now you could switch to the List View. But in Windows 3.1 File Manager, I can see a tree of directories on the left, and the directory contents on the right. That IMO is way cleaner than a single pane. Navigating to a child directory in the right pane also synchronizes the tree on the left pane. I can't be sure about the last one though because Win 3.1 was nearly 3 decades back, but I that's how it works today.
I remember using a version of Explorer that had collapsable hierarchical navigation on the left, as well as similar non-filesystem programs with a similar design and do not recall being fond of it. Especially on smaller screens it was easy for the left pane to become too small to fit the names of deeply nested directories, and then become too wide when collapsing them. To me at least that style is somewhat awkward and fiddly.
* Moving files is unintuitive. It should be [cmd+x] then [cmd+v]. Instead it's [cmd+c] then [option+cmd+v], and this behavior is not afforded in the UI, you just have to look it up somewhere.
* Search within finder does not search the current context by default, it searches your entire computer. "But you can change this setting!" You shouldn't have to change this setting, and most people don't know it's even there.
* Renaming multiple files is a chore. You expect to rename a file, then press tab to highlight the next file, and begin typing. Instead, you... do some combination of enter, tab, then enter again, except it never quite works the way you expect, and sometimes the file moves because the sorting changes after you pressed enter the first time, and for some reason pressing tab actually moves you to the next folder.
* Speaking of pressing [enter] on files, that should open them, not rename them.
* For that matter, pressing [delete] should delete files. You just have to know that the key for that is [cmd+delete], and that deleting things is called moving them to the trash.
* In general, the number of contextual commands you just have to discover by trial and error, or by looking them up on the internet, because they are hidden in the UI. Even the right-click menu doesn't list things like "open in slideshow", because the right click menu has a secret menu of its own which you have to press [cmd] to see.
* There is no preview panel visible by default, that's another option you have to turn on, like showing the file path. This stuff should all be on by default.
* You have to view file info in a separate window.
* It's not clear to me why I can't close Finder by pressing [cmd+q]. Quitting finder is usually all I want to do when it's open.
> Moving files is unintuitive. It should be [cmd+x] then [cmd+v]. Instead it's [cmd+c] then [option+cmd+v], and this behavior is not afforded in the UI, you just have to look it up somewhere.
That's discoverable by holding down Option while the Edit menu is open. This pattern of "revealing" additional functions with modifiers in menus has existed on macOS for a very long time.
> Speaking of pressing [enter] on files, that should open them, not rename them.
> For that matter, pressing [delete] should delete files. You just have to know that the key for that is [cmd+delete], and that deleting things is called moving them to the trash.
Adding a modifier to these functions helps prevent accidental irritating (opening 500 selected files) or potentially destructive (moving selected files to the trash) actions due to fat fingering, which is a particularly likely occurrence on laptops where edge keys like delete and return are easy to accidentally hit just moving around one's laptop. The accidental opening by hitting return one is something I've done several times over the years and it's never not infuriating.
On Windows, deleting a file moves it to the Recycle Bin which is functionally equivalent to what macOS does. In fact off the top of my head I don't know of a modern desktop environment that just directly deletes files without recourse.
> It's not clear to me why I can't close Finder by pressing [cmd+q]. Quitting finder is usually all I want to do when it's open.
Because the Finder powers the desktop too and its windows are not separate processes. In fact no application on macOS spawns additional windows as separate processes, that's a Windows/Linux thing.
> That's discoverable by holding down Option while the Edit menu is open. This pattern of "revealing" additional functions with modifiers in menus has existed on macOS for a very long time.
Ironically, holding down "Option" to see hidden menu items is not discoverable at all. Most people will only ever do it by accident. The point is that anything commonly desired should not be hidden like that.
There use to be MacWorld and MacUser for discovering these tips, conveniently scattered around the Math Dept tea room, or a very reasonable subscription. These days I've no idea how people discover these tips. TikTok? By chance on Twitter? Searching would be impossible.
> Because the Finder powers the desktop too and its windows are not separate processes. In fact no application on macOS spawns additional windows as separate processes, that's a Windows/Linux thing.
That Finder and the desktop are a single process is an implementation detail that should be hidden from UI mechanisms like this.
Either way, it would be a strange experience to hit Command-Q to “quit” (close all windows) the Finder only to land right back in the Finder (desktop) again.
You want Apple to break a lot of things Mac users are used to because you’re not used to them. You are clearly a Windows user and would benefit from buying a Mac user guide. Do they still update The Macintosh Bible? That sort of thing would help you a lot.
"This stuff should all be on by default" is also completely eschewing the notion that Apple's stuff is the result of decades of user-experience testing by now. It's that way because Apple users expect it to be that way.
If you want it different, you want Linux or a BSD.
I was replying to a comment asking what people found bad about Finder. I replied with some things I find bad about Finder. If the response is "yer doin' it wrong" then I don't know how to proceed: what could possibly be wrong with Finder if it’s current formulation is defined as exactly the way it should be?
I guess I could also question the proposition that Apple doesn't change things people like about Macs. I could list a few examples of them doing that, too.
Most of your criticisms can be explained by unfamiliarity with longstanding Mac conventions. But this is fair:
> Search within finder does not search the current context by default, it searches your entire computer. "But you can change this setting!" You shouldn't have to change this setting, and most people don't know it's even there.
The default behavior used to be great, ~10 years ago (extremely snappy search scoped to the current folder). The change to searching the whole computer with significant lag was an absurd and mysterious regression.
It might be worth excluding certain directories from Spotlight to prevent it from indexing node_modules etc which tend to be massive but mostly useless from a Spotlight search perspective.
I’ve been surprised by all the behaviors you listed after migrating from Linux and Windows to Mac years ago, but honesty this is just a different logic and it only took a few days to get used to it. Except for your point about search where I still don’t understand the logic today.
> Moving files is unintuitive. It should be [cmd+x] then [cmd+v]. Instead it's [cmd+c] then [option+cmd+v], and this behavior is not afforded in the UI, you just have to look it up somewhere.
Apologies, but what do you expect to happen to the file in-between the cut and the paste? Cut content exists only on the pasteboard. If I cut a sentence from a document and then cut another sentence, the first sentence is effectively gone (without an additional clipboard manager).
This is why they went with the select-and-copy and select-and-move operations instead, and mapped them onto the copy/paste system. A true 'cut' would be too destructive.
> Apologies, but what do you expect to happen to the file in-between the cut and the paste?
I'd expect that nothing will happen, Cut will wait for paste operation. It's not delete, where content is gone immediately. If no paste will follow, then Cut is not executed. Cut marks file for move operation, if no move is executed, then nothing will be lost.
> If I cut a sentence from a document and then cut another sentence, the first sentence is effectively gone (without an additional clipboard manager).
We're talking about files here, not text. Text behaves differently. I'd argue that Cut operation as it is in text editors, is not logical but it is what it is and people are used to it. For deleting there's Delete operation, Cut should not be equal to Delete in some occasions.
You are arguing that "copy and paste" and "cut and paste" in the context of a file manager actually behave as "mark, then copy" and "mark, then move" operations.
Well, that's exactly how Finder works, isn't it? Cmd+C marks files, Cmd+V copies them, Cmd+Opt+V moves them.
Fair question! Windows does it pretty much the same way under the hood: the file is not affected until you paste it in the new location. If you never complete the paste, the cut command does nothing. The difference is the interaction maps to another, better-known one that is much easier to discover if you've used a text editor or word processor. I recall the default Ubuntu file manager working the same way, but I don't have an installation running at the moment.
On Windows, the cut file is dimmed out after you press [cmd+x] to indicate something has happened.
Also, the Mac way lets the user change their mind between copying the file or moving it without first navigating back to the source and restarting the process from scratch, since that decision sits on the pasting end.
In my mind the only advantage the Windows way has is that it belongs to the more popular platform.
If the preference to use System 7-style spatial Finder worked consistently I’d be happy. Unfortunately new media (DMGs, USB drives, network connections etc) still open in browser windows by default. I wonder how many times I’ve pressed cmd-option-T over the years.
* Keyboard Maestro (automation)
* BetterTouch Tools (trackpad + mouse + shit tons of improvement of Destop Experience)
* Curio (The best of The bests note taking App by the worst greedy dev in the world)
* PopClip.
* Fantastical (calandar app)
You still miss a lot of the potential brought by mac desktop develloper API and might as well be better off with a chromebook ou a Ubuntu Mate on an old lenovo thinkpad from ebay.
Huh, I strongly prefer the Apple option in all those cases. Usually when I'm on other platforms I wish I had Apple's programs there (OMG, the "office"-type apps like Pages and Numbers when I'm on Linux especially—plus Preview, of course, which is excellent). Apple's first-party programs are a huge part of why I'd have trouble leaving the platform—not so much because of lock-in, but because I find them excellent compared to most of the competition, free or commercial, and would hate to have to switch to the programs I have to use when I'm on those platforms.
I did use iTerm2 for a long time until it dawned on me I was using zero features that Terminal didn't support, so I stopped. Terminal's lighter and has lower input latency and it's one less thing to install.
I might start using Firefox again if they fixed a couple integration/UI issues and got their power use to roughly what Safari's is. Until then, it's Safari all the way.
I agree a lot here - Apple's first party apps are a big part of what keeps me on macOS & in Apple's ecosystem. Preview alone is a superb app, Terminal.app is fast and reliable (I have had a lot of performance issues with iTerm2), Mail.app is my preferred mail client (I haven't found any other that I like as much on any platform!), Safari is my browser of choice (although I wish it could still run uBlock Origin), Keynote & Pages are by far my preference over Powerpoint/Word or Slides/Docs.
There are some apps that are less impressive though - Photos is merely okay but I haven't found anything else that does the job better, and Numbers is quite sluggish with larger sheets.
Have you tried Kitty? It blows iTerm2 and Terminal.app out of the water in performance. It's also feature rich, if you have wild terminal feature needs. I'm mostly in it for the speed, though.
I for one have long since memorised all the keyboard shortcuts for screenshots. And for everything else there’s command-shift-five.
I haven’t personally used clean shot X, but a tool has to be way, way, way better than the built-in default to get me to change. It doesn’t matter what clean shot X can do better; clean shot X loses because se it isn’t going to be on every Mac I sit in front of.
Marking up images, being able to blur out certain areas of an image, OCR, Visual indicator of keys pressed in screen recording mode. Cleanshot is really just a screenshot tool with some minor but useful editing tools.
OCR's built in to macOS these days. Works pretty well. Would have been a notable feature not that long ago, though, true.
Better screen recording would be nice but I do it rarely enough that Quicktime is fine. If I did it more I'd definitely have to find some other solution.
All the marking up and such—well, there are many reasons that Preview is possibly my favorite single program on Macs.
Have you tried Orion? WebKit based, privacy focused + chrome or firefox extensions.
It is my main browser, and works for almost everything I do. My last employer used Office365 and using Orion didn't work well, but that was the only site I had to use another browser.
I hear this a lot. Or that Leopard or Snow Leopard was peak Mac. That part of the debate doesn't interest me.
What does interest me is that pre-Lion software is well understood. The behaviors and expectations and commands are re-implementable. Isn't it time someone just made SwiftUI-Tiger or somesuch?
Heck yeah, I love using my 10.4.11 Macs. 10.6.8 as well, of course. To me those two were real high points in the life of OS X, thus far. The computers themselves were still super cool and had a lot of character, too -- another thing that has gradually faded over time, IMO.
Mac Mail is probably the worst application I've used on Mac (+ the one on the iOS is not far behind). Search is atrocious - like unusably so, it constantly has syncing issues (even with iCloud) when trying to get new mail, it's incredibly slow, and I don't care for the design.
Raycast has a lot going for it, but it has one showstopper flaw for me: too much of it is slow, multi-step, wizard style, when I want the equivalent of a GUI shell one-liner, like Alfred.
I actually like some of Apple’s own apps. Particularly - Apple Notes and Preview.
I couldn’t yet find a notes app that would let me drag and drop whatever (screenshots, images, Unicode) into a note and move on with my active work, and later search for what I need easily. Even text that is on one of the screenshots. As a bonus, I can write on my iPhone, and continue on my Mac. All the while not paying some subscription fee to a company that I need to worry about not jacking up the price or simply vanishing.
Preview is nice to quickly view whatever doc, markup etc. It gets out of the way.
These two apps are actually the ones that would make it hard for me to move away from Mac.
I absolutely agree. I had to use Windows as my daily driver for a few weeks at work, and I missed a lot Apple Notes and Preview. They are fantastically well designed and implemented applications.
It is much more than a sticky notes feature set. It is a full blown notes system that allows you to create notes organised by tags or folders. Each note may contain rich text, images, Apple Pencil sketches or just about anything. They are synced by iCloud to other Apple devices(iPhone, iPad). My wife and I both being part of the Apple walled garden, we share a few common notes like “to do for home”, “things to know” etc and keep adding relevant things like screenshots or copy paste important emails. We each get notified if the other adds anything. They are all indexed and searchable.
I'm quite sick of having a laptop that heats up on my lap especially in summer so considering getting a Macbook Pro 14" M2, and more curious if all my stick notes will sync over so I don't lose them as I have them on my iPhone/iPad at the moment.
Can’t comment on sticky notes as I haven’t used them. But have the 14” MBP with M1Pro, and it is easily the best portable computer I’ve had. It is great for work. I never even carry my power brick with me because at work I connect to a monitor via USB-C and it charges the thing. While on the go, believe it or not my phone charger charges the Mac albeit slowly. The Mac itself lasts seemingly forever so it eliminated my battery anxiety. Totally worth it.
I have a brand new MacBook Pro M1 14" since a few days and I can also say this is the best laptop I've ever had. Coming from an Intel-based MacBook Pro 15", I've been hesitating between the 14" and 16" versions. My 15" was a bit too big and heavy, and I was concerned about that with the 16". On the other hand, I was concerned the 14" display could be too small. It happens this is actually a really good tradeoff. The 14.2" display is actually slightly bigger than the 13.3" display on MacBook Airs, which is making it comfortable enough on the go. And as mentioned by the parent, the autonomy is amazing.
Same here. I've been a mac user for about 14 years now but never bought into all the Apple software. Just never cared for any of it. Before that I used Windows and Dos for many years. The reasons I left that behind me are still true: Windows is worse. Much worse. The endless mandatory reboots, the bundled crapware, the instability, dreadful performance, etc.
I had that experience last year when my mac died and I decided to get a cheap laptop. It came with windows 10. Two hours into the process of feeling disgusted with the whole setup (and myself), I installed Linux on it (Manjaro) and have been pretty happy with that since.
It even runs Steam!, which is something that barely works on macs since they dropped 32 bit support. The point here is that because I never bought into the whole Apple universe in terms of software, switching to Linux was actually easy for me. All the OSS tools I use are there. I was up and running with my Linux laptop before I had a meeting with one of my clients the next day. I wouldn't recommend this to non technical users but if you know what you are doing and buy the right hardware, Linux is pretty nice to use these days. And most of the commonly used stuff in companies (Slack, Zoom, Skype, MS Live, Webex, etc.) you can actually get to work on Linux. Snap takes care of most of that and I was able to get webex going with a community package.
I now have a shiny new macbook 14" again for work and I still use the Linux laptop for private stuff. The new mac has the notch and while annoying, you get used to it. But it kind of destroys the case for full screen mode because all that does is replace the menu bar with a black bar. You can't use the pixels for anything else. But otherwise it runs circles around my Linux laptop. Build speeds are about 2.5x better on that machine. The M1 is just a really nice laptop processor. Apple hardware is great. I might another one to run Linux on it if the GPU support keeps on improving.
I use Gmail for probably close to twenty years (2004ish?). Before that, I used Thunderbird and Outlook for work. The last ten years, all my work email has been on gmail as well. So I've never used Apple's offline calendar and office apps that come with Macs. I left MS Office behind about ten years ago. For the same reason the lack of decent alternatives for any of that is a non issue for me on Linux because I can do all of that from my browser. I actually started using Darktable on a mac years ago because it's awesome for raw processing. And of course that runs way better on Linux as this is originally a native linux thing. So, that's nice. And it actually runs well on the M1, which is something I was worried about. No hw acceleration but the fast CPU compensates for that.
The thing I miss most on Linux from my mac is a non Apple product: iterm2. I've not found anything that comes close on Linux. Most alternatives are either too bare bones or just lack UI for any of the settings and are way too fiddly to setup. Kind of sad because you really spend a lot of time on the command line with Linux. But of course there are plenty of adequate terminals for Linux. So, a bit of a downgrade but it works. I have my dotfiles synced via git so, both sides are pretty similar.
Saying that you'd rather use Outlook than Mail kind of makes your entire comment suspicious. Outlook is the poster child for over-engineered software. I could write all day about how objectively bad it is, from every angle. It was my belief that no one used Outlook by choice, but, hey, I guess there are, in fact, 7 billion people on the planet, and the law of averages is at work here.
> Windows is out of the question for me due to not being a POSIX-based OS.
Cygwin.
> I experimented with using a mostly stock Xubuntu setup for a bit and also found the user experience to be really subpar.
Did you try any other DE such as Cinnamon, mate, KDE or one of the many others?
Though I feel my recommendations will fall on deaf ears as I have the feeling you're one of those devs that doesn't want to put in the effort to learn a new platform and thus will ignore any and all advice and go back to whatever abusive platform they are familiar with. I get it, time is precious and you just want to get work done. But you cant complain about alternatives when you aren't willing to put in the effort to learn how to use them and help make them better. This isn't an insult mind you, just an observation.
I think if I were to try to make any DE work the way I'd like it to it would have to be my full-time job for a while for there to be any hope of it being finished any time this decade. The list of changes is huge irrespective of the DE used as a starting point, and the changes large enough that upstream probably wouldn't want them which brings the overhead of maintaining a fork.
Unfortunately, though it's a goal I'm working on, I'm not going to be in any shape to quit my job and start full-time tinkering on FOSS any time soon.
Time is very precious. As someone who's done the investment into both desktop Linux (Openbox) and MacOS, the level of effort required to get something useful is way different. MacOS has a very gentle learning curve so it's easy to switch and be back in business, getting work done. Linux OTOH is less of a learning curve and more of a learning cliff. I've got the exact right monitor setup I want on Linux, but it required learning xrandr and writing a shell script because none of the GUI frontends could get it right. With MacOS I kinda just have to accept whatever it gives me as good enough. Thankfully it usually is though.
Point is, because desktop Linux isn't a little bit of effort, it's a lot a bit of effort, so I can't fault anybody for not putting in the effort to learn it whilst there are viable alternatives. Which includes ChromeOS these days, to throw a curve-ball in there.
> I experimented with using a mostly stock Xubuntu setup for a bit and also found the user experience to be really subpar. Call me old, but I have no interest in dealing with the amount of configuration and tweaking necessary to be productive in a Linux environment.
Forget what everyone says. Just use Ubuntu (like, regular Ubuntu, not some stupid derivative) with everything default. It's what you're looking for. It takes zero configuration, is super easy to use and is a nice environment.
Same here. I (for reasons) set up new Linux distros with abandon and just go with Ubuntu and its defaults (swapping control and CapsLock is mostly all I change).
The #1 thing that holds me to macOS is family sharing with iCloud (and Messages). If I could access that from Linux ...
Yeah, feels like the obvious option missing. I don't use Ubuntu any more, but it's the popular Linux, so it serves plenty of people just fine. Makes it the sane generic recommendation without letting my personal preference slip in.
Sure, they might still not like it, but if you haven't even tried Ubuntu yet, it feels like it's a bit early to say that there isn't a reasonable alternative.
I think what happens is for basically anyone trying an OS that isn’t their daily driver, they hit a few things which don’t work the same or that they don’t quite understand and immediately come to the conclusion that it’s bad/broken/hostile/unproductive.
I’m a long time linux user and just switched to macOS for work at the start if the year and in that first month I could rattle out a long list of complaints but now I don’t really care about any of that. Most of it was just me applying my expectations of Linux on to another OS. When there are other ways to skin the cat and none of them are really better than the others.
There are also some things that are actually just bad like full screen mode but that you learn to deal with to the point you forgot it was even bad. I can think of these kinds of things for every OS.
WSL not deeply integrated? When was the last time you used it? I can't imagine a use case where you need your core OS to be posix based, and WSL with whatever linux VM isn't good enough as a dev environment. VScode in windows with WSL is the perfect dev combo.
I don't need to have my OS be posix-based, but I do need it to have a decent auto-tiling setup and a checksummed filesystem with fast snapshots and rollbacks.
by checksummed filesystem, do you mean a filesystem that maintains integrity? don't all modern file systems do that? I have little to no idea about how mac and windows compare with snapshots. I have never needed that in my OS. Do you use that for test environment replication or something?
* make automatic snapshots that you can recover data from as necessary, and have them be created every time the system updates (I've needed to use this once)
* have those automatic snapshots be auto synced to my NAS, creating a backup (also used this once when my hardware failed)
Practical answer? when was the last time you heard about someone having file corruption on their local OS due to using a bad filesystem technology? I've been an enterprise developer for storage companies for more than 15 years, I'm very familiar with different file systems, and I've never cared what filesystem was on my local PC because it's basically irrelevant with modern tech. I feel like I'm being trolled on technical points that have nothing to do with the topic I was trying to discuss. I guess I should have learned my lesson that even on HN, don't feed the trolls.
> when was the last time you heard about someone having file corruption on their local OS due to using a bad filesystem technology?
Quite frequently. It's not that uncommon at all. Bad disk cables, defective disks, etc it's not all that rare. The filesystem is in a place to either detect and/or correct these problems. Only some do.
> I've never cared what filesystem was on my local PC because it's basically irrelevant with modern tech.
I'm glad you've been lucky but silent file corruption is not an "irrelevant" problem as data densities increase.
Filesystems with data checksums include btrfs, ZFS, ReFS, NILFS. But very commonly used filesystems, xfs, ext4, NTFS, APFS, exFAT do not have this feature (some of them do have metadata support).
> it's basically irrelevant with modern tech.
Unnecessary e-peening aside - Why do you think this is the case? What specifically about modern tech makes it irrelevant?
Been a few months since I last checked but there didn't seem to be a way to get to your WSL (VM? Instance?) from outside the windows environment (ie via ssh) without setting up a bunch of firewall rules using Powershell to query the IP and create the rules from there. (Except that doesn't always work correctly because PS seems to get a different IP because it's starting up a new WSL? I dunno, I gave up a while back.)
> I can't imagine a use case where you need your core OS to be posix based, and WSL with whatever linux VM isn't good enough as a dev environment
Maybe as "web dev environment" it is enough, but this is the main reason why I absolutely detest these "cmdline/scripting only inside a sandboxed VM" approach that the major commercial platforms seem to be trying to sell us these days.
It really is not enough for general purpose computing. I want true integration with the operating system, not sandboxed crap. I want to be able to do almost anything the host OS is capable of doing from my command line, including receiving and sending SMS, filtering incoming phone calls with a script, renaming files en-masse (from _other_ programs, not just files from inside the sandbox itself), recording and playing sounds, access hardware that I have plugged in like USB serial ports or whatever, access hardware that I have not plugged in like diagnosing bluetooth device pairing, be able to fully backup/restore the "host OS" to my medium of choice, partition and format external OR internal filesystems, etc.
I want to do this stuff quite frequently and WSL is just NOT cut for that. The same applies to ChromeOS/Android sandboxed linux approaches. They are a joke designed for the user who is mostly going to simply run ssh into a real machine from within such a sandbox or perhaps run some programs that were so portable they already had win32 versions to begin with. This was not the case for macOS which until very recently was still a very command line centric OS.
Once you're there, you may as well run Linux on your old Apple laptop.
Sometimes I seriously suspect the only things keeping me from doing that are SublimeText and Pixelmator. I have not yet gotten annoyed enough with macOS to relearn all my finger macros that've been driving Sublime for a decade and getting up to speed with a different text editor, or to have leaned how to drive Gimp well enough to be reasonably able toi use it to replace Pixelmator in a productive fashion. Oh, and _maybe_ OmniGraffle, but I'm not sure I've even opened that yet this year.
Sublime has a Linux build which works perfectly! I switched from MacOS to Ubuntu as a daily driver two years ago.
Keyboard shortcuts generally were the biggest annoyance, however I can’t speak to Sublime shortcuts specifically, as I have all my editors set to use Emacs style bindings.
>Once you're there, you may as well run Linux on your old Apple laptop.
I mean, frankly... no.
I live in the terminal on my Mac, but I still need a browser to deal with everything else. The battery life on a MacBook alone will kick the everloving hell out of most non-Apple laptops currently. Scrolling is always smooth, and I don't even hear a fan these days with the M1.
Living in the terminal on macOS affords you relative consistency; while yes, Apple has changed things in releases (or held back due to licensing stuff), it all mostly works as expected and will generally not break between OS releases. That's the important bit here.
I haven't seen 13th gen extremely closely. It'll get very, very complicated though.
The performance per watt at the top of the voltage frequency curve for the performance cores, is very different to the voltage frequency curve for the idle cores at base clock.
Especially at low queue depth, infrequent operations.
Apple really should just phase out MacOS and replace it with iOS and a touchscreen interface (including for desktop systems). They can call it being "brave", and if you don't like it, they can tell you that you're just using it wrong.
I've been using Macs exclusively since 2010, and I basically feel the same way. The hardware is still fantastic. I still plan to replace my 2015 MBP with an M2 Max MBP when they become available. But I am intensely frustrated by unnecessary and inferior UI changes that would frankly never have passed muster when Steve Jobs was alive. I know it's trite to say, but I honestly think the current Apple UX team doesn't have the same philosophy and understanding of the Apple UX teams of yore.
I say this as someone that has pretty much entirely shifted my tech to Apple over the last 5 years. I don't see me going elsewhere at the moment, but I do see a shift towards turning Mac devices into walled gardens that don't give the user actual control similar to iOS devices. I'm fine with that for my phone, not for my laptop, end of story.
I don't love everything about MacOS, but the IMO the Apple ecosystem is worlds ahead of everything else when it comes to amount of time spent using it vs maintenance/tweaking/updating.
As I've gotten older, I have 0 tolerance for spending time fiddling with hardware or OS issues. (I've reinstalled/tweaked Windows so many times just to keep it running well, let alone sitting through install wizards or messing with drivers).
I don't need to shop around for the most reliable hardware, I trust Apple that it will be fast enough, ergonomics will be better than most, and most importantly - will just work.
I dunno. MacOS point releases take longer than entire Linux/Windows reinstalls. I clocked some at over 40 minutes.
I find I need a lot more 3rd party utilities to make it usable (why is there no HDMI/DP sound control? Why is window snapping so bad? Why no MTP? etc.) Then you have all the new "security" features that have made doing what I need to do way harder than it needs to be.
macOS updates happen overnight when the machine is idle unless you disable that. I've not witnessed a mac update in years now, it happens automatically, and when I open my laptop it's done and everything is exactly as I left it.
Same with Windows. And it can be done on Linux. Sometimes you may need to update manually, like if you turned off the computer while transporting it, you need to do something at 2 a.m. etc.
And everything is exactly as you left it except not really. Your REPL is now dead, Emacs has lost all its buffers, etc. I just have all the programs I had open but they all lost their state and so it's completely utterly useless. But hey they're all open and technically in the same position...
This is particularly true if you use external audio hardware. Will it work? Has Apple changed something underneath that stops the drivers loading? Do I need to buy the software again to use it reliably (eg. Parallels)?
I ended up ditching macos after over a decade of use and going back to Linux running Ubuntu Mate with a macos theme and switching to Windows for my audio hardware since I want to still use the same hardware longer than the 3 years Apple considers a "lifetime". It's kept my 2012 Macbook in service and maybe I'll get another 10 years out of it!
I sometimes feel like Apple is catering to me: A convert of the last 3/4 years. Used Windows forever, dabbled in Linux for a while, saw everyone at conferences presenting from a Mac, so why the heck not. It's the 2018+ crowd that seems to be adopting at rates high enough that it's making the 2018- crowd feel their OS is getting ripped up.
It is getting ripped up, but all the new people on the platform are unaware of how much better it was before. I don't think anybody has issues changing things to make them better for newcomers as long as Apple doesn't throw out all of their design principles to do it (which is what they have been doing).
Sometimes I wonder if such blogs are written just because the author needs/wants to publish a blog at some frequency for whatever reason.
I fail to take a blog that talks about how their "next" Mac "might" be the last, seriously.
I would have paid some attention if the blog was about how their current Mac "might" be the last, and definitely more if their current Mac would "most definitely be" the last.
I guess I should work on my next blog: My next space travel might be the last ..
For me I have to look at the battery life to performance tradeoff, and Apple hardware seems to win that game against Intel and AMD. I hope that a more open perhaps RISC-V SoC thing appears and a company like Framework could put it into modules or I could hack it into my Frakenpads, but until then it's Apple Silicon.
OS wise Asahi has you covered for a hobbyist grade Linux experience. Probably get something ARM or x86 if using an open source operating system is important.
Am I the only one here who finds the title and central message of this post totally ridiculous? Like “I don’t like what Apple are doing so I’m only going to give them a few more thousand bucks, but then in a few more years I’m probably gonna switch to another OS!!!”
While we're getting things off our chest I wanted to share something.
I'm still using the original iPhone SE (you know, the small phone with bezels). The design of Safari for iOS used to be perfect. The + sign to open a new tab was right in the middle. Switching to incognito was 1 tap away. The open tabs were stacked open behind another.
Apple redesigned Safari in iOS 15 to accommodate it for the bigger all-screen iPhones. The address bar was moved to the bottom for better reachability. The + sign was moved away not to be so close to that horizontal line that replaced the home button. Incognito was hidden away. The stack of open tabs become a grid.
Even though the redesign made sense for the bigger bezel-less phones it was a regression for phones like the iPhone SE. I would have loved if they introduced the changes only to newer models but I can also understand that maintaining 2 different UIs would've been more work.
I'm nursing a Mojave install that I intend to keep around for a long time, even though there are newer devices and operating systems in my houshold for everyday online stuff.
In terms of the Mac experience, it was quickly downhill from Mojave in my opinion (though I'm more fond of Snow Leopard or possibly Mavericks aesthetically), plus the 32 bit cutoff which kills important backwards compatibility for me.
I already leverage some of the really nifty Mac features like Target Disk Mode, cloning and booting from external drives etcetera, to enable some hardware agnostic behavior, and will eventually move to virtualization, probably through Proxmox.
Not having upgrades introduce breaking changes (Notes.app, I'm looking at you!) is such a relief.
System Settings is now vertical instead of rows. Big deal - how much time does he spend in System Settings? In command line I prefer "ls -la" over "ls". Vertical is faster to read.
An article says Stage Manager can be turned off. I'm using AltTab.app to customize my multi-tasking.
It's not about System Settings being vertical now. Just look at any of the panels and tell me how the new version is an improvement on the old? The panels in System Preferences were meticulously designed and the new ones are just a list of checkboxes.
So far none of the recent changes to macOS have been any kind of deal-breaker to me. But there has been a lot of changes that are just... odd.
Catalyst apps suck and don't feel right. For some reason Messages just loses typing focus at weird times. I'm sure it's nice for Apple to share codebases but for the end user it feels like a weird mobile app that had some desktop functionality tacked on at the last second.
And the little control center they added to the right of the menu bar is just weird cause it's doubled-up implementations of menu items I already have. Volume control is already there. Media controls are already there. Wifi toggle is already there. Bluetooth switcher is already there. Why does this thing exist? So it can have bigger controls that look designed for a touch screen even though Macs don't have touchscreens (which I'm personally fine with)
Thankfully they backtracked on the dumb Safari tab changes where they tried to make the web page and browser chrome bleed together which was just confusing.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 400 ms ] threadLots to unpack here. First, the author is stating a personal preference and won't be swayed. Fair enough.
But the idea that the author would know they "haven't had any security-related problems whatsoever" is debatable at best. The attack surface is enormous.
Even security experts admit they have trouble securing a consumer computer. And it doesn't sound like the author spends much time dealing with the topic in depth.
Would be more interesting to actually cite examples of high-risk exploits that have been discovered since High Sierra and Mojave.
I've been using computers for 25+ years and have been technically capable for the better part of that, but that doesn't mean I'm any less vulnerable. I'm not going to be intentionally clicking on fishy links or anything but we all make mistakes, which makes it more a matter of when than if.
Targeting known CVE for old (no longer updated) MacOS versions might actually be quite good targeted attack: probably a bunch of users of such computers are technical folks with access to production servers, cloud credentials etc.
Windows? That's a joke. It's a fine platform for gaming and probably still the most performant platform for web browsing (I personally value that highly), but not really built for development (except for development of games, I guess).
Desktop Linux/Gnome: Excellent for actual development work, but not great elsewhere.
With WSL, I actually find Windows a better backend development platform than Mac.
Desktop Linux is pretty serviceable for any tasks that aren't gaming. It may require learning different tools if you are used to Microsoft/adobe products, but the alternatives do exist. If you're doing command line work, it's better on Linux than osx anyway.
Statistically speaking, the games the average person would most likely want to play likely still do not run, or do not run without problems or tinkering required.
0: https://www.pcgamesn.com/steam-deck/top-100-games-proton-com...
1: https://www.protondb.com/
You could go by the old the medal system, which looks promising at first glance, but "gold" basically means "playable". Platinum is the real metric there, and can be understood to mean "plays as well as it does on its native platform". There are game issues in gold rated titles that would lead to mass complaints and refunds if they existed on the native platform. That is kind of my point. "Playable" is way too low of a bar.
But like you said, you think "Platinum" is the metric that matters. A good chunk of my library wouldn't be considered platinum on Windows 11. ;)
If they spend most of their time in esports titles not made by Valve (anything by Riot, Fortnite, etc.) they would be sorely disappointed.
However, if they are big into emulation or indie games, the picture is a lot rosier. (And not just because that is an easier workload, but because it implies more knowledge on the part of the user)
I think that is the tipping point for Proton and the Steam Deck, when they can be recommended without qualification to the average gamer. We are not there yet and I do not want to see people burned by having their first exposure to Linux gaming being so close yet so far away for their use case.
Myself, I'm using mine to power through all the puzzle and adventure games that languished on my PC while my attention was elsewhere.
Gaming is not great but pretty good. Certainly better than what's possible on a Mac. Updates do break my StarCraft 2 once or twice an year but pretty much everything else I care about works.
If anyone @ Valve is reading this: get back to fixing VR on Linux. My Index is almost useless these days. Fix your vrcomposer
Virtualization and containers are still very very finicky on wsl.
But it's 95% of the way there. And I don't mind using it.
On the flip side, all these electron apps make it so lots of stuff just works on Linux as well.
https://rectangleapp.com/
It does have a paid upgrade, but i've not found it necessary
Hacker News is obviously a different demographic but no tech company is going to cater to power users. There's not enough of us for anyone to take what we say meaningfully.
16 inch M1 Max ~4k
Apple Watch Ultra ~800
Air pods pro 2 ~250
13 inch M1 16 GB ~2000
= 7000 dollars.
A huge spend and I don't regret one single purchase. Each subsequent product interfaces extremely well with the ecosystem. I no longer carry my phone with me 80% of the time. I bring my watch and usually have a laptop if needed.
Apple pay works very well. Get emails, slack messages, etc. Can easily reply to slack messages from the watch. Cant see conversations but
Basically everything works that I need.
Alot of apps dont work, but thats the point. I dont need those apps all the time.
I keep throwing money at Apple and they almost never disappoint.
Stage Manager was opt-in for me and doesn't solve a problem that I have, but I think it's a great sign that Apple continues to try new things.
I hate that 32-bit got left behind, and I bemoan apparent "planned obsolescence" as much as anyone. But the fact is that these latest OSes are coming with genuine improvements in security posture. The point that the UI changes are sometimes unwelcome is well-taken, and I can see how the changes in security technologies change the experience for the user in sometimes awkward or baffling ways. Totally get it. But when it comes to stuff like this, I'm afraid the only way through it is forward.
Not trying to be silly here. Probably need my brain calibrated here,
I would love the inclusion of a keypad and would find it incredibly useful, especially for accessibility reasons. So I find the idea delightful, which I suspect is not the way it supposed to strike me. I am assuming one is supposed to find that idea exotically stupid and niche?
Windows: Windows 11 is a mixed bag with some better design and some worse. Currently, it's a bit of a step backwards. Windows 10 is pretty ok though.
Ubuntu: I wouldn't say Ubuntu is in a better place now with Gnome than it was 5 years ago. It works well, but it doesn't have the cool factor that Unity did and is missing a lot of its features. Ubuntu Unity exists, but it's a little buggy and not as polished as back in the 16.04 days. You could always go KDE Plasma (or MATE if you're old school).
There's the rabbit hole of other Linux distributions, my favorite alternative being Arch. But depends on your tolerance for tweaking.
Rock solid. Fast.
I use opensnitch and eventually found the appropriate blocking rule for every time a snap is launched or appimage from some random mount path for the process.
Not sure what's wrong with using the established package management system instead of reinventing the wheel to distribute an app on your own binary system that you control - why?!?!
What we really want is design stability. We do want improvements but we don't want wholesale conceptual changes in our desktop environments every few years.
Although tech savvy, I opted for Linux Mint because it was the most reliable distro out there that required minimal babysitting.
Then I switched to Pop OS for OOTB NVIDIA GPU support, and it has been working seamlessly.
I might get a Mac in the future. But Windows is out of consideration.
Linux experience is seamless for me (apart from some fan issues).
I also think dnf is a more powerful and easier package manager than apt.
To anyone reading this - dnf is much slower than apt, on the flip side.
https://dnf.readthedocs.io/en/latest/automatic.html
When Ubuntu 22.04 was released, I switched to Fedora for good. They get a GNOME distro right.
Pop!_OS. Its Ubuntu at its core, but somehow is better.
It took me a bit to get over not having MS Office, but honestly as a development box, it works much better.
Tried Windows 11, and despite really wanting to like it, it left an impression of utterly unbelievable level of unpolished and unfinished mess, with basic features missing (primarily taskbar related) and still, after all these years, just being a skin over ever-present (and still there) Win95-era dialogs. I understand Windows 8 keeping the old Control Panel and having a weird and weak replacement with a new skin for it in parallel, but come on, we've had Win 10 for years and Win 11 still hasn't moved a bit from that same crap?
Switched to Manjaro (Arch-based distro), and KDE Plasma, spent a couple of days tinkering and customizing and have never been happier with my quick, light, rock-solid, completely customizable and fancy environment, that served me impeccably for 1.5 years until I was too tempted with MBP 14. It is a great device hardware-wise, but Mac OS has been a definite leap back, and I would pay hundreds of dollars to be able to put my Linux on MBP with everything working.
I think most of that stuff is from Win7, not Win95.
If you want to pay for Linux on Mac, the Asahi project could always use some support: https://asahilinux.org/support/
> That trepidation and sinking feeling of “What are they going to break this time?” every time the WWDC’s date approaches, has been wearing me down in the past few years. What one should feel, instead, is: “Apple got this. I’m in good hands. I see no reason not to upgrade straight away.” And I haven’t felt this in a long time.
I haven’t looked forward to a release since Snow Leopard, and High Sierra was the only usable version after that. Mojave and onward have been just dreadful. Mac software hasn’t been fun, exciting, or good in a long time, sadly.
As far as security posture goes, I'm not too concerned. Little Snitch + Pihole are pretty amazing and I have the skills to stay secure. But it is depressing watching from the Catalina shore as each year another macOS release takes more autonomy from the user.
I feel like making those kinds of concessions means that MacOS doesn't treat you as a second-class citizen but that you've deliberately chosen to make yourself a second-class citizen. In what ways do Linux or Windows (or even older MacOS) treat you like a first-class citizen that the new MacOS doesn't anymore?
I could write 100 blog posts about this but let me give you one good example: Years ago when many people still synced their iPhones via cable, you could sync all the major "iLife" apps -- photos, music, contacts, calendar etc. When Apple released Notes.app, it was around the time the iCloud push got really big and more people started using that. To this day, you cannot sync Notes.app via cable. It would be a trivial thing to implement, but it prevents cloud adoption and is so clearly in the "wontfix" category that the only conclusion is that it's intentionally left out. Want your Mac's notes on your iPhone? Get in the iCloud, citizen, and maybe we'll let you.
Bottom line is that if you go back and look at Steve Jobs' 2001 digital hub strategy, the futuristic view was one where the Mac was the ground truth for your data and your apps. You were in charge. You owned the machine, it did what you wanted, and you bought neat peripherals that interfaced with it like mp3 players and cameras.
But today the "digital hub" is the cloud, and the Mac is just another peripheral. Today by default Macs and iPhones need to be "activated" via internet connection to reinstall the OS, and any peripherals you buy (looking at you, fucking HP/Epson shit) will likely force you to create a cloud account which means they own it, not you.
<insert cloud rant here>
Side note: Windows is a worse offender, you need look no further than Windows 11 and its removal of the local account except via extremely technical/hacky means. This is an intentionally malicious push to their ecosystem, and one I hope Apple does not follow (but essentially has on iOS and I won't be surprised if/when macOS follows suit).
PPS. One of the next big pushes here will be passkeys. If they can tightly couple your online services to their devices for authn then the ease and freedom to migrate systems is reduced further, and "knowing" your credentials for an online service means nothing. The cloud provider decides if you get to access it or not.
That being said, I'll give you that it might be trivial to sync Notes (one-way, at least) via cable. I believe, based on nothing other than my interpretation of history, that the reason this stopped is not to force cloud adoption but that it's just not that in-demand of a feature. The biggest issue with cable-based syncing is that you have to resolve conflicts manually and the iCloud solution doesn't need that at all. It's not a trivial thing to implement, in my opinion, especially if you have to factor in anyone that has multiple Macs, iPads, or any other device that could potentially sync Notes.
That being said... I'm doing exactly what you're describing in syncing everything to my own cloud on my NAS but at the expense of getting to use the native apps on MacOS and my other devices. I still use the iCloud stuff for backups of data on a specific account but I feel like the reason these things are going to continue to be "wontfix" (you give away your dev-ness) is because the majority of people love the convenience of simple syncing that they don't have to actively think about. Apple also does just enough on the privacy and security front to make it worthwhile for a good chunk of techies too.
Seems like this kind of syncing just barely works, because notes are kind of like emails. Too bad there isn’t a similar ubiquitous personal file sharing service that could be used for your other iCloud stuff. WebDAV might fit the bill if you hammered it into place.
I don’t think syncing by cable is in the cards, even for Notes. You would want a way to resolve conflicts. When you sync stuff like music by cable, there’s always a host and a client device. With Notes, there are just two peers, which may both have edits to a common anscestor. A chunk of WebDAV is just the ability to make changes and handle conflicts (or at least figure out when they happen).
Now it only "disconnects" for 24 hours. This is because Apple wants your Bluetooth and Wifi on for aiding in maps and the FindMy network etc. It is intentionally misleading and they won't even add a Settings toggle for something like "Control center radio toggles turn off the hardware". You have to go into Settings and then into each WiFi and BT and toggle the radio off there.
I don’t find this to be true at all.
I also use Homebrew to install apps and casks, etc. and I’m running on Ventura.
I spend most of my time in WezTerm (was an iTerm user for many years) doing development… but I can use what Gruber calls Mac-assed Mac apps, which are the super useful indie apps which embody the original ethos of macOS apps.
That’s the beauty IMHO of the Mac today—best of breed native (NOT Electron) apps combined with all the power and flexibility of OSS GUI and terminal based apps.
It’s a different experience using apps in a fast, truecolor (16 million colors), GPU-accelerated, with full OpenType support terminal emulator.
What doesn’t get enough attention: the workflows and automations that can be created that aren’t possible on other platforms, since Apple Events are baked into the Cocoa/AppKit layer all the way down to the Unix layer.
Non-developers can use Automator or Shortcuts [1] to create workflows that combine the best features of GUI apps and the command line.
[1]: https://support.apple.com/en-in/guide/automator/welcome/mac
I have a hard time getting myself wound up over the UI design of the System Preferences app.
When I’ve been using Linux in other contexts lately it’s been awesome being able to fully understand exactly what each process is and why it’s running (and to be able to remove it if I want to). On my macOS (and windows) boxes I end up trusting Apple and Microsoft a lot more than I would actively choose to.
OpenBSD is a bit of an ice cold shower, but it's the only OS I use regularly where I can point to every process and know exactly what it's doing.
Also I was amused at his notch hostility - I shared the same view; until I used a new Mac with the notch and discovered that I don't notice it. At all. I thought I would hate it, and I can't remember a single time it surfaced other than it coming up as a topic and then I notice it.
I'm trying to think of any of the recent changes they made and none of them are fatal enough to prevent me from working with macOS as I have for decades now, and can think of none. He doesn't like stage manager? Big deal. Spaces is still there and window management still works the way it always has without it - that one was really telling. It's not like they forced it to be the only way to manage windows.
I would still recommend Macs to people in general, but I think for people trying to get work done, the OS upgrade strategies that Apple chose in particular are extremely disruptive and lead to many team members at a previous job just breaking their setups over and over again. It's not fun to be using software beholden to marketing timelines, if you're fiddly with your machine.
[0]: I switch between QWERTY and AZERTY. "Select All" becomes "Quit App". My solution was to bind Spotlight to Command+Q , which would almost always work.
This doesn't seem weird? I find it really useful. There are similarly simple keyboard shortcuts assigned to functionality of most applications that I use much less than quitting. To quote you, I quit the application every time I use it! It's also the default on Linux.
The real problem is that there isn't a reasonable alternative. Windows is out of the question for me due to not being a POSIX-based OS. WSL isn't integrated deeply enough and is still a pain in the ass to use coming from MacOS. I experimented with using a mostly stock Xubuntu setup for a bit and also found the user experience to be really subpar. Call me old, but I have no interest in dealing with the amount of configuration and tweaking necessary to be productive in a Linux environment.
Ultimately, I'm just going to stick it out with MacOS.
Also, if you want an application-centric desktop management style, macOS is the only game in town. Practically everything else follows Win9X conventions in that regard, even the iPadOS-reminiscent GNOME. While global menubars can be enabled in KDE and added to XFCE, they're only functional in some apps because a lot of apps (those built with GTK, mostly) have eschewed menubars entirely in favor of that infernal hamburger button.
My big problem with Windows HiDPI support is that they still can't seem to handle multiple monitors with different DPI sensibly. I have a 5120x2880 display as my main display and 2560x1440 displays on either side of it. Dragging windows from one display to the other is janky and sized wrong during the dragging. Doing the same thing on Mac just works as you'd expect. How can Microsoft still get this so wrong?
I have a sudden flashback of 2012
I haven't upgraded and used Stage Manager yet so I don't have any opinion on it.
This seems fine to me. The problem is regular users follow some instructions that say paste in to the terminal and then the OS asks for a password like it always does, and now you have malware embedded in your OS.
With the new model, you’d have to guide the user through getting in to recovery mode which is either too confusing or sets off alarm bells for the user.
As a developer I can’t really see why you’d want to touch these OS files unless you are hacking on the OS itself and at that point you should be smart enough to know how to turn it off
> Call me old, but I have no interest in dealing with the amount of configuration and tweaking necessary to be productive in a Linux environment.
Exactly why I prefer Windows development to macOS and Linux!
But configuring a brand new MacBook or new Linux install for development is pure hell. It’s a bloody nightmare. Linux is, for better and worse, an endless stream of configuration. The upside is you CAN configure it. The downside is you have to, constantly.
> Call me old, but I have no interest in dealing with the amount of configuration and tweaking necessary to be productive in a Linux environment.
I was responding to this statement. Do you want constantly and carefully configure your machine? Use Linux and be happy! Do you want something that works out of the box? Windows is pretty darn good.
I do game development which is Windows through and through. YMMV.
Is that standard now, or did I add it long ago and forget?
https://github.com/Ji4n1ng/OpenInTerminal
This bites me on fake FAT filesystems over USB for hardware development kits, and I usually just turn those features off. The heuristics there are often terrible, and I'd rather create a build system that writes a new image, instead of doing manual drag-and-drops.
Gnome File and Finder both have such issue. Gnome file manager at least provide ctrl + L.
If the path bar is showing a folder, you can right click it and select "Open in terminal".
The resulting path input modal even supports tab completion.
The Finder has an equivalent with Command-Shift-G, and if that key shortcut is too cumbersome it (along with all other Mac menu items) can be re-bound in System Preferences under the Keyboard prefpane.
Most of the things mentioned in this comment chain are easily discoverable in the Finder's menus… it really pays to peruse menus in Mac apps when searching for a function.
This will copy either the directory (if no selection) or the selected file(s).
If you enable the path bar, I believe this is also a copyable element.
Finally, dropping a file or directory into a plain text control that cannot take file or folder references (like this HN comment box) will fall back to the path name.
1. Defaults to the columnar format. It's crazy - to move from a parent to child you've to move the mouse the whole width of the column. Whereas in Windows 3.1 File Manager, you'd have to move less than 10 pixels.
2. Now you could switch to the List View. But in Windows 3.1 File Manager, I can see a tree of directories on the left, and the directory contents on the right. That IMO is way cleaner than a single pane. Navigating to a child directory in the right pane also synchronizes the tree on the left pane. I can't be sure about the last one though because Win 3.1 was nearly 3 decades back, but I that's how it works today.
* Moving files is unintuitive. It should be [cmd+x] then [cmd+v]. Instead it's [cmd+c] then [option+cmd+v], and this behavior is not afforded in the UI, you just have to look it up somewhere.
* Search within finder does not search the current context by default, it searches your entire computer. "But you can change this setting!" You shouldn't have to change this setting, and most people don't know it's even there.
* Renaming multiple files is a chore. You expect to rename a file, then press tab to highlight the next file, and begin typing. Instead, you... do some combination of enter, tab, then enter again, except it never quite works the way you expect, and sometimes the file moves because the sorting changes after you pressed enter the first time, and for some reason pressing tab actually moves you to the next folder.
* Speaking of pressing [enter] on files, that should open them, not rename them.
* For that matter, pressing [delete] should delete files. You just have to know that the key for that is [cmd+delete], and that deleting things is called moving them to the trash.
* In general, the number of contextual commands you just have to discover by trial and error, or by looking them up on the internet, because they are hidden in the UI. Even the right-click menu doesn't list things like "open in slideshow", because the right click menu has a secret menu of its own which you have to press [cmd] to see.
* There is no preview panel visible by default, that's another option you have to turn on, like showing the file path. This stuff should all be on by default.
* You have to view file info in a separate window.
* It's not clear to me why I can't close Finder by pressing [cmd+q]. Quitting finder is usually all I want to do when it's open.
That's discoverable by holding down Option while the Edit menu is open. This pattern of "revealing" additional functions with modifiers in menus has existed on macOS for a very long time.
> Speaking of pressing [enter] on files, that should open them, not rename them.
> For that matter, pressing [delete] should delete files. You just have to know that the key for that is [cmd+delete], and that deleting things is called moving them to the trash.
Adding a modifier to these functions helps prevent accidental irritating (opening 500 selected files) or potentially destructive (moving selected files to the trash) actions due to fat fingering, which is a particularly likely occurrence on laptops where edge keys like delete and return are easy to accidentally hit just moving around one's laptop. The accidental opening by hitting return one is something I've done several times over the years and it's never not infuriating.
On Windows, deleting a file moves it to the Recycle Bin which is functionally equivalent to what macOS does. In fact off the top of my head I don't know of a modern desktop environment that just directly deletes files without recourse.
> It's not clear to me why I can't close Finder by pressing [cmd+q]. Quitting finder is usually all I want to do when it's open.
Because the Finder powers the desktop too and its windows are not separate processes. In fact no application on macOS spawns additional windows as separate processes, that's a Windows/Linux thing.
Ironically, holding down "Option" to see hidden menu items is not discoverable at all. Most people will only ever do it by accident. The point is that anything commonly desired should not be hidden like that.
There's also the 'Help' menu in Finder that has the manual, tips, and menu search functionality.
That Finder and the desktop are a single process is an implementation detail that should be hidden from UI mechanisms like this.
So, not discoverable at all.
If you want it different, you want Linux or a BSD.
I guess I could also question the proposition that Apple doesn't change things people like about Macs. I could list a few examples of them doing that, too.
Thanks for the suggestion that I read a book.
> Search within finder does not search the current context by default, it searches your entire computer. "But you can change this setting!" You shouldn't have to change this setting, and most people don't know it's even there.
The default behavior used to be great, ~10 years ago (extremely snappy search scoped to the current folder). The change to searching the whole computer with significant lag was an absurd and mysterious regression.
It’s like the difference between US vs. UK spelling conventions. A British person saying “Americans are bad at spelling words” is just trolling.
Apologies, but what do you expect to happen to the file in-between the cut and the paste? Cut content exists only on the pasteboard. If I cut a sentence from a document and then cut another sentence, the first sentence is effectively gone (without an additional clipboard manager).
This is why they went with the select-and-copy and select-and-move operations instead, and mapped them onto the copy/paste system. A true 'cut' would be too destructive.
I'd expect that nothing will happen, Cut will wait for paste operation. It's not delete, where content is gone immediately. If no paste will follow, then Cut is not executed. Cut marks file for move operation, if no move is executed, then nothing will be lost.
> If I cut a sentence from a document and then cut another sentence, the first sentence is effectively gone (without an additional clipboard manager).
We're talking about files here, not text. Text behaves differently. I'd argue that Cut operation as it is in text editors, is not logical but it is what it is and people are used to it. For deleting there's Delete operation, Cut should not be equal to Delete in some occasions.
Well, that's exactly how Finder works, isn't it? Cmd+C marks files, Cmd+V copies them, Cmd+Opt+V moves them.
On Windows, the cut file is dimmed out after you press [cmd+x] to indicate something has happened.
In my mind the only advantage the Windows way has is that it belongs to the more popular platform.
* Keyboard Maestro (automation) * BetterTouch Tools (trackpad + mouse + shit tons of improvement of Destop Experience) * Curio (The best of The bests note taking App by the worst greedy dev in the world) * PopClip. * Fantastical (calandar app)
You still miss a lot of the potential brought by mac desktop develloper API and might as well be better off with a chromebook ou a Ubuntu Mate on an old lenovo thinkpad from ebay.
I did use iTerm2 for a long time until it dawned on me I was using zero features that Terminal didn't support, so I stopped. Terminal's lighter and has lower input latency and it's one less thing to install.
I might start using Firefox again if they fixed a couple integration/UI issues and got their power use to roughly what Safari's is. Until then, it's Safari all the way.
There are some apps that are less impressive though - Photos is merely okay but I haven't found anything else that does the job better, and Numbers is quite sluggish with larger sheets.
I haven’t personally used clean shot X, but a tool has to be way, way, way better than the built-in default to get me to change. It doesn’t matter what clean shot X can do better; clean shot X loses because se it isn’t going to be on every Mac I sit in front of.
Better screen recording would be nice but I do it rarely enough that Quicktime is fine. If I did it more I'd definitely have to find some other solution.
All the marking up and such—well, there are many reasons that Preview is possibly my favorite single program on Macs.
https://browser.kagi.com/
Everything about it verifiably worse than the separate apps Apple ships with macOS, from data storage to integration.
That said, MacOS 10.6 was the pinnacle of Calendar, and it's been on the way down since...
10.4 Tiger
They started to ruin the iCal user interface in 10.5 Leopard.
In general, 2006 was peak Mac. When it was Apple main product, before iPhone.
What does interest me is that pre-Lion software is well understood. The behaviors and expectations and commands are re-implementable. Isn't it time someone just made SwiftUI-Tiger or somesuch?
Mac Mail is probably the worst application I've used on Mac (+ the one on the iOS is not far behind). Search is atrocious - like unusably so, it constantly has syncing issues (even with iCloud) when trying to get new mail, it's incredibly slow, and I don't care for the design.
I was agreeable until that point. Outlook did/does more to ruin email and discussion on the internet than any other app in that realm.
I actually like some of Apple’s own apps. Particularly - Apple Notes and Preview.
I couldn’t yet find a notes app that would let me drag and drop whatever (screenshots, images, Unicode) into a note and move on with my active work, and later search for what I need easily. Even text that is on one of the screenshots. As a bonus, I can write on my iPhone, and continue on my Mac. All the while not paying some subscription fee to a company that I need to worry about not jacking up the price or simply vanishing.
Preview is nice to quickly view whatever doc, markup etc. It gets out of the way.
These two apps are actually the ones that would make it hard for me to move away from Mac.
Thanks for the valuable feedback, good to know its worth it.
I had that experience last year when my mac died and I decided to get a cheap laptop. It came with windows 10. Two hours into the process of feeling disgusted with the whole setup (and myself), I installed Linux on it (Manjaro) and have been pretty happy with that since.
It even runs Steam!, which is something that barely works on macs since they dropped 32 bit support. The point here is that because I never bought into the whole Apple universe in terms of software, switching to Linux was actually easy for me. All the OSS tools I use are there. I was up and running with my Linux laptop before I had a meeting with one of my clients the next day. I wouldn't recommend this to non technical users but if you know what you are doing and buy the right hardware, Linux is pretty nice to use these days. And most of the commonly used stuff in companies (Slack, Zoom, Skype, MS Live, Webex, etc.) you can actually get to work on Linux. Snap takes care of most of that and I was able to get webex going with a community package.
I now have a shiny new macbook 14" again for work and I still use the Linux laptop for private stuff. The new mac has the notch and while annoying, you get used to it. But it kind of destroys the case for full screen mode because all that does is replace the menu bar with a black bar. You can't use the pixels for anything else. But otherwise it runs circles around my Linux laptop. Build speeds are about 2.5x better on that machine. The M1 is just a really nice laptop processor. Apple hardware is great. I might another one to run Linux on it if the GPU support keeps on improving.
I use Gmail for probably close to twenty years (2004ish?). Before that, I used Thunderbird and Outlook for work. The last ten years, all my work email has been on gmail as well. So I've never used Apple's offline calendar and office apps that come with Macs. I left MS Office behind about ten years ago. For the same reason the lack of decent alternatives for any of that is a non issue for me on Linux because I can do all of that from my browser. I actually started using Darktable on a mac years ago because it's awesome for raw processing. And of course that runs way better on Linux as this is originally a native linux thing. So, that's nice. And it actually runs well on the M1, which is something I was worried about. No hw acceleration but the fast CPU compensates for that.
The thing I miss most on Linux from my mac is a non Apple product: iterm2. I've not found anything that comes close on Linux. Most alternatives are either too bare bones or just lack UI for any of the settings and are way too fiddly to setup. Kind of sad because you really spend a lot of time on the command line with Linux. But of course there are plenty of adequate terminals for Linux. So, a bit of a downgrade but it works. I have my dotfiles synced via git so, both sides are pretty similar.
Cygwin.
> I experimented with using a mostly stock Xubuntu setup for a bit and also found the user experience to be really subpar.
Did you try any other DE such as Cinnamon, mate, KDE or one of the many others?
Though I feel my recommendations will fall on deaf ears as I have the feeling you're one of those devs that doesn't want to put in the effort to learn a new platform and thus will ignore any and all advice and go back to whatever abusive platform they are familiar with. I get it, time is precious and you just want to get work done. But you cant complain about alternatives when you aren't willing to put in the effort to learn how to use them and help make them better. This isn't an insult mind you, just an observation.
Unfortunately, though it's a goal I'm working on, I'm not going to be in any shape to quit my job and start full-time tinkering on FOSS any time soon.
Point is, because desktop Linux isn't a little bit of effort, it's a lot a bit of effort, so I can't fault anybody for not putting in the effort to learn it whilst there are viable alternatives. Which includes ChromeOS these days, to throw a curve-ball in there.
Forget what everyone says. Just use Ubuntu (like, regular Ubuntu, not some stupid derivative) with everything default. It's what you're looking for. It takes zero configuration, is super easy to use and is a nice environment.
The #1 thing that holds me to macOS is family sharing with iCloud (and Messages). If I could access that from Linux ...
Sure, they might still not like it, but if you haven't even tried Ubuntu yet, it feels like it's a bit early to say that there isn't a reasonable alternative.
Could you give some examples?
I’m a long time linux user and just switched to macOS for work at the start if the year and in that first month I could rattle out a long list of complaints but now I don’t really care about any of that. Most of it was just me applying my expectations of Linux on to another OS. When there are other ways to skin the cat and none of them are really better than the others.
There are also some things that are actually just bad like full screen mode but that you learn to deal with to the point you forgot it was even bad. I can think of these kinds of things for every OS.
* make automatic snapshots that you can recover data from as necessary, and have them be created every time the system updates (I've needed to use this once)
* have those automatic snapshots be auto synced to my NAS, creating a backup (also used this once when my hardware failed)
Define this.
But the simple, practical answer is no.
Quite frequently. It's not that uncommon at all. Bad disk cables, defective disks, etc it's not all that rare. The filesystem is in a place to either detect and/or correct these problems. Only some do.
> I've never cared what filesystem was on my local PC because it's basically irrelevant with modern tech.
I'm glad you've been lucky but silent file corruption is not an "irrelevant" problem as data densities increase.
Filesystems with data checksums include btrfs, ZFS, ReFS, NILFS. But very commonly used filesystems, xfs, ext4, NTFS, APFS, exFAT do not have this feature (some of them do have metadata support).
> it's basically irrelevant with modern tech.
Unnecessary e-peening aside - Why do you think this is the case? What specifically about modern tech makes it irrelevant?
Been a few months since I last checked but there didn't seem to be a way to get to your WSL (VM? Instance?) from outside the windows environment (ie via ssh) without setting up a bunch of firewall rules using Powershell to query the IP and create the rules from there. (Except that doesn't always work correctly because PS seems to get a different IP because it's starting up a new WSL? I dunno, I gave up a while back.)
Maybe as "web dev environment" it is enough, but this is the main reason why I absolutely detest these "cmdline/scripting only inside a sandboxed VM" approach that the major commercial platforms seem to be trying to sell us these days.
It really is not enough for general purpose computing. I want true integration with the operating system, not sandboxed crap. I want to be able to do almost anything the host OS is capable of doing from my command line, including receiving and sending SMS, filtering incoming phone calls with a script, renaming files en-masse (from _other_ programs, not just files from inside the sandbox itself), recording and playing sounds, access hardware that I have plugged in like USB serial ports or whatever, access hardware that I have not plugged in like diagnosing bluetooth device pairing, be able to fully backup/restore the "host OS" to my medium of choice, partition and format external OR internal filesystems, etc.
I want to do this stuff quite frequently and WSL is just NOT cut for that. The same applies to ChromeOS/Android sandboxed linux approaches. They are a joke designed for the user who is mostly going to simply run ssh into a real machine from within such a sandbox or perhaps run some programs that were so portable they already had win32 versions to begin with. This was not the case for macOS which until very recently was still a very command line centric OS.
Sometimes I seriously suspect the only things keeping me from doing that are SublimeText and Pixelmator. I have not yet gotten annoyed enough with macOS to relearn all my finger macros that've been driving Sublime for a decade and getting up to speed with a different text editor, or to have leaned how to drive Gimp well enough to be reasonably able toi use it to replace Pixelmator in a productive fashion. Oh, and _maybe_ OmniGraffle, but I'm not sure I've even opened that yet this year.
Keyboard shortcuts generally were the biggest annoyance, however I can’t speak to Sublime shortcuts specifically, as I have all my editors set to use Emacs style bindings.
I mean, frankly... no.
I live in the terminal on my Mac, but I still need a browser to deal with everything else. The battery life on a MacBook alone will kick the everloving hell out of most non-Apple laptops currently. Scrolling is always smooth, and I don't even hear a fan these days with the M1.
Living in the terminal on macOS affords you relative consistency; while yes, Apple has changed things in releases (or held back due to licensing stuff), it all mostly works as expected and will generally not break between OS releases. That's the important bit here.
I wish the Thinkpad wasn't so awful. Unfortunately, the screen, silicon AND power management software of a Thinkpad + Linux is miles behind MacOS.
I haven't seen 13th gen extremely closely. It'll get very, very complicated though.
The performance per watt at the top of the voltage frequency curve for the performance cores, is very different to the voltage frequency curve for the idle cores at base clock.
Especially at low queue depth, infrequent operations.
Apple is still great for Apple ecosystem developers.
I say this as someone that has pretty much entirely shifted my tech to Apple over the last 5 years. I don't see me going elsewhere at the moment, but I do see a shift towards turning Mac devices into walled gardens that don't give the user actual control similar to iOS devices. I'm fine with that for my phone, not for my laptop, end of story.
As I've gotten older, I have 0 tolerance for spending time fiddling with hardware or OS issues. (I've reinstalled/tweaked Windows so many times just to keep it running well, let alone sitting through install wizards or messing with drivers).
I don't need to shop around for the most reliable hardware, I trust Apple that it will be fast enough, ergonomics will be better than most, and most importantly - will just work.
I find I need a lot more 3rd party utilities to make it usable (why is there no HDMI/DP sound control? Why is window snapping so bad? Why no MTP? etc.) Then you have all the new "security" features that have made doing what I need to do way harder than it needs to be.
And everything is exactly as you left it except not really. Your REPL is now dead, Emacs has lost all its buffers, etc. I just have all the programs I had open but they all lost their state and so it's completely utterly useless. But hey they're all open and technically in the same position...
I ended up ditching macos after over a decade of use and going back to Linux running Ubuntu Mate with a macos theme and switching to Windows for my audio hardware since I want to still use the same hardware longer than the 3 years Apple considers a "lifetime". It's kept my 2012 Macbook in service and maybe I'll get another 10 years out of it!
I fail to take a blog that talks about how their "next" Mac "might" be the last, seriously.
I would have paid some attention if the blog was about how their current Mac "might" be the last, and definitely more if their current Mac would "most definitely be" the last.
I guess I should work on my next blog: My next space travel might be the last ..
I'm still using the original iPhone SE (you know, the small phone with bezels). The design of Safari for iOS used to be perfect. The + sign to open a new tab was right in the middle. Switching to incognito was 1 tap away. The open tabs were stacked open behind another.
Apple redesigned Safari in iOS 15 to accommodate it for the bigger all-screen iPhones. The address bar was moved to the bottom for better reachability. The + sign was moved away not to be so close to that horizontal line that replaced the home button. Incognito was hidden away. The stack of open tabs become a grid.
Even though the redesign made sense for the bigger bezel-less phones it was a regression for phones like the iPhone SE. I would have loved if they introduced the changes only to newer models but I can also understand that maintaining 2 different UIs would've been more work.
In terms of the Mac experience, it was quickly downhill from Mojave in my opinion (though I'm more fond of Snow Leopard or possibly Mavericks aesthetically), plus the 32 bit cutoff which kills important backwards compatibility for me.
I already leverage some of the really nifty Mac features like Target Disk Mode, cloning and booting from external drives etcetera, to enable some hardware agnostic behavior, and will eventually move to virtualization, probably through Proxmox.
Not having upgrades introduce breaking changes (Notes.app, I'm looking at you!) is such a relief.
System Settings is now vertical instead of rows. Big deal - how much time does he spend in System Settings? In command line I prefer "ls -la" over "ls". Vertical is faster to read.
An article says Stage Manager can be turned off. I'm using AltTab.app to customize my multi-tasking.
AFAIK it’s off by default and you have to explicitly enable it.
Catalyst apps suck and don't feel right. For some reason Messages just loses typing focus at weird times. I'm sure it's nice for Apple to share codebases but for the end user it feels like a weird mobile app that had some desktop functionality tacked on at the last second.
And the little control center they added to the right of the menu bar is just weird cause it's doubled-up implementations of menu items I already have. Volume control is already there. Media controls are already there. Wifi toggle is already there. Bluetooth switcher is already there. Why does this thing exist? So it can have bigger controls that look designed for a touch screen even though Macs don't have touchscreens (which I'm personally fine with)
Thankfully they backtracked on the dumb Safari tab changes where they tried to make the web page and browser chrome bleed together which was just confusing.
There's too many icons taking up space from menu items on laptop screens, it's always been a problem.