If pre-M3 updates were intended to slow down M2s, it would be a big and unwelcome surprise to the community, and a huge scandal. Generally it isn't assumed to be the case.
This also didn't really happen with iPhones. What happened was this:
- Some iPhones started to develop a problem where sometimes, but at quite noticeable moments, the phone would unexpectedly power cycle, interrupting what you were doing.
- Apple tracked this down to a problem in the battery used by those phones. Those batteries, once aged, became unable to meet the maximum power draw of the phone, resulting in the phone losing power when it tried. (This is why the reboots were so noticeable - they happened when you were doing something that required you to push your phone).
- (The controversial part) Apple issued a firmware update that mitigated the issue by throttling the max power draw to something the battery would reliably output, but did so without acknowledging the issue or notifying the user.
- People discovered what was happening (as Apple devices receive a lot of scrutiny in general), and a large media storm played out.
- Apple issued a new firmware update that, this time, told you when your battery was degraded, that the maximum performance of your iPhone was reduced, and you needed to replace the battery to restore the original performance.
- Since then, Apple have added more statistics to tell you about your battery health in general.
These are all reasonable mitigation steps. The issue for me is that this major flaw wasn't noticed during construction - or if it was, passed the bar of "we only care about the first 2 years of use".
Say what you will about Microsoft, but the reason MS software grew so much bloat in its OSes was the impossible backwards compatibility required for each new version. It would have been much, much easier to force upgrades along the way but they made backwards-compatibility an unshakeable requirement at the time.
I think Apple doesn't maliciously force users to upgrade, it simple doesn't put any focus on long term support for its older products. That's always been in the DNA of the company and its products and a major reason for many of their sales.
Regarding the iPhone, Apple's behaviour wasn't that nice:
- The throttling slowed down some devices so much that it made the phone laggy. There was no way to disable the feature.
- If you asked for help in their stores they wouldn't tell you that you needed a new battery and why don't you just buy a new phone btw?
- Apple only added a setting disable the behaviour and started offering cheaper battery replacements after being sued.
It's a useful feature, but without a way to disable it, they essentially forced those most affected to pay them for a new phone. That's when I stopped buying iPhones.
No, that did not happen with iPhones. Apple throttled the CPU once the battery health dropped below a certain threshold to prevent unexpected shutdowns caused by drawing too much current from an old battery. In my view, the only thing they’re responsible for in that occasion is poor communication.
I’m going to put whatever did I or didn’t happen here aside and marvel for a moment at how complicated it must be to coordinate the logistics behind managing release schedules of both hardware and software and preinstalling OSs on all these machines.
Apple's hardware -- especially the M-series processors -- has been excellent lately. On the software side, it feels to me like there's been a large falloff in quality. This story is a good example of that, and I'd really love if we could get a release of macOS that focuses on bug fixes.
I have seen this kind of comment on the web since I switched to macOS in 2007. There were some very bad years, when Apple apparently thought that iPad was the future of computing. But the all the Apple Silicon releases have been rock-solid for me.
Seems like there were some missteps with introducing the M3, but macOS on existing hardware has been pretty good for me.
(Before someone starts about Snow Leopard, the early Snow Leopard releases were also pretty buggy, only near the end of the release cycle did it get good.)
Rock-solid is a little far-- I've not been free of weirdness on M1 Max. But overall I agree-- things feel like they've been better than the vast majority of my tenure on MacOS ("X", all the way back to the original "Mac OS X Server" in 1999).
I don't update to new major releases immediately if I can help it, though.
> Before someone starts about Snow Leopard, the early Snow Leopard releases were also pretty buggy, only near the end of the release cycle did it get good.
This is one of the most misunderstood things about software releases. It's an iron law: major software updates always introduce more bugs than they fix. What you need is a lot of minor bug fix updates between the major updates, and Snow Leopard had about 2 years of bug fixes releases. What people remember fondly is not Mac OS X 10.6.0 but rather 10.6.8 v1.1.
Apple's annual major release schedule is just too rapid to leave any time to fix bugs. They need to go back to 2 years or more between major releases.
Another one: Switching between full screen windows doesn’t swallow keystrokes as such, but sends them to the window you’re switching away from, instead of to the window you’re switching to, while the animation completes. Highly annoying.
This I think toes up to that saying - we've always done things this way so we'll continue to, even since OS X came out. These yearly releases are kind of drab for OS X I think. I want a huge focus on integration between my devices, I wish they'd go all in in icloud and make it where my stuff is just whatever device i'm on. Almost like how good they've made Bluetooth work on my airpod pro's work on whatever device I'm using.
Did it annoy anybody else that during the whole event they compared M3 to M1 as if M2 didn't exist? Guess they didn't think 5-10% improvement would market well? But does anybody in their target audience even care or do they just buy the new hardware anyway?
Maybe I’ve been lucky but I haven’t noticed a deterioration of software quality in MacOS. Things have been stable, perhaps even improved overall. Also the UI overall is extremely snappy, but likely that’s because of the M-series architectures.
I recall 10 years ago (circa 2012) I’d purchase a brand new MacBook Pro and things would have a small but frequent lag in many UI across the OS. And no, not only during initial sync. It would be a normal part of the “experience”.
Haven’t noticed any such thing especially with M-series in recent years.
Same! I don't get why there are so many complains about macOS? It works very well for me; as a programmer or as a simple media consumer user. In fact I switched to Safari for web browsing a few years ago and have not looked back. I use Chrome only for debugging web apps.
It’s because macOS used to be made with an inordinate (and I cannot emphasize this enough) amount of care for the user experience for the sake of the user experience.
Now that Apple has an existential crisis for growth and has become a services company, almost all Apple effort in software is aimed at maximizing recurring revenue and subscriptions. The UX for fitness, iCloud, IAPs, Apple TV, Arcade, Apple Pay, etc is top notch, because it makes them more money on an ongoing basis.
The Finder, not so much.
Also, a lot of the people who used to care deeply on a philosophical level about the UX of a computer for its own sake have either retired or moved on to other companies. Apple is not the same culture as it was fifteen years ago. A lot of younger people that work there don’t understand the Apple-ness of the Jobs era, and the products speak more to DJI than vegan counterculture hippies.
There is also obviously a lot of product-manager-career-driven-design going on, same as any other hip modern tech company in no danger of going out of business (cf Slack, Dropbox, etc).
Apple was, in many ways, an outgrowth of the obsessive nature of Jobs. He’s gone and it is perfectly natural that Apple would regress toward the mean of any well funded hip tech company.
One need only look at Apple’s attention to packaging design or audio quality to know they’re still a head and shoulders above any other consumer electronics company.
Sony stopped innovating in consumer products many years ago, as far as I can tell. Maybe the days of the Walkman were different but I was too young to know what it was like then.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 96.7 ms ] threadThis also didn't really happen with iPhones. What happened was this:
- Some iPhones started to develop a problem where sometimes, but at quite noticeable moments, the phone would unexpectedly power cycle, interrupting what you were doing.
- Apple tracked this down to a problem in the battery used by those phones. Those batteries, once aged, became unable to meet the maximum power draw of the phone, resulting in the phone losing power when it tried. (This is why the reboots were so noticeable - they happened when you were doing something that required you to push your phone).
- (The controversial part) Apple issued a firmware update that mitigated the issue by throttling the max power draw to something the battery would reliably output, but did so without acknowledging the issue or notifying the user.
- People discovered what was happening (as Apple devices receive a lot of scrutiny in general), and a large media storm played out.
- Apple issued a new firmware update that, this time, told you when your battery was degraded, that the maximum performance of your iPhone was reduced, and you needed to replace the battery to restore the original performance.
- Since then, Apple have added more statistics to tell you about your battery health in general.
Say what you will about Microsoft, but the reason MS software grew so much bloat in its OSes was the impossible backwards compatibility required for each new version. It would have been much, much easier to force upgrades along the way but they made backwards-compatibility an unshakeable requirement at the time.
I think Apple doesn't maliciously force users to upgrade, it simple doesn't put any focus on long term support for its older products. That's always been in the DNA of the company and its products and a major reason for many of their sales.
- The throttling slowed down some devices so much that it made the phone laggy. There was no way to disable the feature.
- If you asked for help in their stores they wouldn't tell you that you needed a new battery and why don't you just buy a new phone btw?
- Apple only added a setting disable the behaviour and started offering cheaper battery replacements after being sued.
It's a useful feature, but without a way to disable it, they essentially forced those most affected to pay them for a new phone. That's when I stopped buying iPhones.
FTFY
Seems like there were some missteps with introducing the M3, but macOS on existing hardware has been pretty good for me.
(Before someone starts about Snow Leopard, the early Snow Leopard releases were also pretty buggy, only near the end of the release cycle did it get good.)
I don't update to new major releases immediately if I can help it, though.
This is one of the most misunderstood things about software releases. It's an iron law: major software updates always introduce more bugs than they fix. What you need is a lot of minor bug fix updates between the major updates, and Snow Leopard had about 2 years of bug fixes releases. What people remember fondly is not Mac OS X 10.6.0 but rather 10.6.8 v1.1.
Apple's annual major release schedule is just too rapid to leave any time to fix bugs. They need to go back to 2 years or more between major releases.
If you don't count all the shitty Catalyst and Swift UI first party apps. If you don't count things like even switching keyboard layouts is a second-long animation that swallows keystrokes. If you don't count things like this: https://twitter.com/krzyzanowskim/status/1707684940337283563 or this: https://mjtsai.com/blog/2022/05/12/the-apple-services-experi... or this: https://mjtsai.com/blog/2022/12/27/ventura-issues/ or...
(Although I don’t think most M1 owners will be interested in upgrading yet. Maybe they should just compare to Intel chips.)
I recall 10 years ago (circa 2012) I’d purchase a brand new MacBook Pro and things would have a small but frequent lag in many UI across the OS. And no, not only during initial sync. It would be a normal part of the “experience”.
Haven’t noticed any such thing especially with M-series in recent years.
Now that Apple has an existential crisis for growth and has become a services company, almost all Apple effort in software is aimed at maximizing recurring revenue and subscriptions. The UX for fitness, iCloud, IAPs, Apple TV, Arcade, Apple Pay, etc is top notch, because it makes them more money on an ongoing basis.
The Finder, not so much.
Also, a lot of the people who used to care deeply on a philosophical level about the UX of a computer for its own sake have either retired or moved on to other companies. Apple is not the same culture as it was fifteen years ago. A lot of younger people that work there don’t understand the Apple-ness of the Jobs era, and the products speak more to DJI than vegan counterculture hippies.
There is also obviously a lot of product-manager-career-driven-design going on, same as any other hip modern tech company in no danger of going out of business (cf Slack, Dropbox, etc).
Apple was, in many ways, an outgrowth of the obsessive nature of Jobs. He’s gone and it is perfectly natural that Apple would regress toward the mean of any well funded hip tech company.
- Yes, Finder is no good but it's not like it has regressed from circa 2011 - it's always been kinda non-intuitive to search for anything
- Music app is probably the worst of all
- definitely can find more
... That being said, overall performance has increased and most other parts have improved:
- the recently redesigned settings menu is better than before
- Safari has improved (I use it every day)
- misc. useful features have been added, like using an iPad as an external display
- crucially, overall stability is better than ever, in my experience
Overall, MacOS mostly "stays out of the way" and lets various apps do the work, which is arguably what a good OS should be doing.
- the iOSification of the desktop OS
Yes, that includes the incredibly shitty new preferences app. Compare what they did with the design guidelines they used to have: https://marioaguzman.github.io/design/layoutguidelines/
- Forcing shitty mobile-first Catalyst and SwiftUI apps
Prime example... Well, all of Apple's recent first-party apps: from Messages to Home to Books to...
- Hiding and removing useful functionality for the sake of "clean interface"
- The insane amount of notifications by default, and the gazillion ways to deliver them
- Shitty support of external displays
- Bloated, unstable developer tools that get worse every year
- Superfluous half-baked "solutions" like Stage Manager. Also, mobile-first
- Superfluous half-baked untested abominations like language switchers, or Caps Lock indicator
A billion other things large and small.
I remember when Jobs died I thought "Apple - Jobs = Sony". I don't think I was too wrong.
One need only look at Apple’s attention to packaging design or audio quality to know they’re still a head and shoulders above any other consumer electronics company.
Sony stopped innovating in consumer products many years ago, as far as I can tell. Maybe the days of the Walkman were different but I was too young to know what it was like then.