To Apple: People are complaining because they'd rather you fix it, than them having to leave the platform (moving OSes is annoying, because operating systems have a lot of lock in - data you'd have to move, apps you need to find alternatives for and re-learn).
The iOS / macOS 26 frustration I think is particularly felt by the HN type crowd. Don't want something that looks cool but is less effective/performant/usable. "We" can feel Apple's priorities drifting away from ours.
Side note: I wonder how much easier AI will make it to migrate between operating systems? Perhaps future AI systems that are good at computer-usage could manage migrations/installs well.
Yeah I don’t recall ever seeing this on Windows in fact I can still run Win 95 games (yes, those exist) on Windows 11. Mostly[0] works. I can go and install games from my original CDs which shouldn’t be possible but a bit of toothpaste on them does the trick.
Things just work for the most part because backwards compat is hardwired into the folks at Microsoft. Someone did a YouTube video not too long ago installing MS-DOS all the way through Windows 11, upgrading version by version.
If the error message happens to include a numeric code, OSStatus.com is sometimes helpful if the issue if they didn't bother with a localizable string for it.
While I love their hardware, this is why I will always chose a Linux distribution over anything closed source. Being able to retrieve logs of pretty much anything and change pieces of the OS as time goes on is extraordinarily resilient.
Sure it's sometimes not as shiny as MacOS, and it will most likely never be polished enough for the mainstream market share, but there's something really awesome about not being reliant on a support engineer that does not have the financial incentive to spend the correct amount of time solving a one off problem.
I totally agree with most of the article, but the hallucinations bit puzzles me. If it’s genuinely an unchangeable limitation of the product (as hallucinations are with LLMs) it’s good to set the right expectation rather than making promises you can’t deliver on.
In my experience Apple's software has been accumulating small annoying bugs for a couple years.
For a couple years I have been noticing regular new glitches in the Apple TV interface accumulating faster than old ones disappear.
Lately the glitch accumulation syndrome seems to have hit macOS. Notes has started doing random bolding, unbolding, changing text size on only one line, etc. After a restart, a finder window with tabs springs to different screen spaces, depending on which tab is open when I try to drop a file on it. Message sometimes draws a few lines of a message with a few pixels vertical and horizontally offset, so there is actual overlap of message parts.
Then there are chronic ones. Safari's save or print to PDF are notorious for not saving pictures you can see, even from reading mode. How are basic functions in Safari not worth fixing, for years?
Apple's HomePods ... for many years. I could write a blog of interesting Pod behavior. I thought having one or a pair in each room would be nice. No, more of them is not nice. Constant bizarreness.
No idea if 26 fixed any of this, I've avoided updating because of how poorly received Glass is in all the UI discussions.
I could also add to this that occasionally the status bar gets two not-quite-aligned-with-each-other copies of the time, connectivity icons, and battery percentage.
> rush to get the next version of macOS out of the door
That’s the key I think. Apple these days never releases when products are ready, but on a predefined schedule. Point releases that should fix things, are actually delivering more features that were shown on the keynote, but didn’t quite make the main release date.
As a result the systems accumulated some bugs that might never get fixed, unless the code happens to be completely rewritten. The desktop switching animation is hopelessly long when using keyboard shortcuts with ProMotion enabled. On both iOS and macOS the Music app will have an audible click couple of seconds into the first played song when using lossless quality. Stuff like these is known and reported, there’s just seemingly zero bandwidth to handle it.
I have an on-again-off-again relationship with macOS - the deep integration with Apple hardware is stellar and IMO the new MacBook Airs are tremendous value for money, but otherwise the OS seems to be suffering from some deep technical debt and MBA-brained decision-making.
I'm currently on the "meh hardware but solid OS" phase of the cycle - the battery life isn't as good and waking from suspend still (somehow) isn't as seamless, but my Linux of choice (Silverblue) is predictable and transparent - and ultimately if there's a problem it's in my gift to fix it, which is much more comforting to me.
I wonder what they'll do to woo me back next time..
I couple of months ago, I wasted about 4 hours debugging issues with my app. Command-line scripts didn't work properly for some reason, while my IDE worked fine.
Turned out that I either missed or accidentally denied the permission to access local networks for iTerm. So the `curl` utility installed from Homebrew was silently failing, while the system-provided `/usr/bin/curl` worked fine. Because it has special permission from Apple.
Can I just give the same permission to iTerm? Nope. We are not worthy of that power, and must re-affirm permissions every 30 days for all non-Apple software.
Oh, and these permission popups happen at random moments, including during presentations or meetings. And if you don't accept them, they are silently denied.
I typically jump on the latest macOS with enthusiasm. I once made the mistake to install the beta version of the next os, and well, that didn't go well for me. But typically, within X.1, I'm there.
However something shifted since this "visionOS" melted version of macOS (Tahoe); where I have absolutely no intension to upgrade from Sequoia. I hope they will fix it by the time I'll be forced to upgrade (post support deadline).
It started with the macOS that brought the iOS settings panel. We went from a logical structure of easily findable stuff to a complete mess. Just open the "Keyboard" settings on macOS today and it's bewildering how they could ship this and think this is fine. Steve would roll in his grave.
The process to allow running applications that are unsigned is just a horrible hack. It feels like a last minute "shove it and move on!".
By 2035 I wonder if we'll be all running KDE or WindowMaker and the hell with modern OS GUI.
From a Gestalt standpoint, human relations with desktop computers are not the same as with thumb driven mobile OS or air-pinch driven vision OS, period. The hell with "glass" or "flat" design. Desktop OS should be as forgettable as possible, as it's about having long stints of flow, not giving a feeling of "air" or "play".
KDE is so good. Every release they make tangible UX improvements to the point where now most subsystems are almost perfect. There's always been things where I think "oh well that could be better". The notification center, the kickoff menu, krunner, the desktop overview. And then it just got better and better.
I have updated as soon as possible and I if you asked me, I couldn't tell you what is different now. Everything I do on a daily basis still works exactly the same. If there are some weird more rounded corners somewhere now, I don't consciously notice them. The glassy effects look cool but after a week you don't even think about them any more.
Would love to see them do another OSX 10.6 and just release a version with lots bug fixes and no new features. But instead it'll be a new half-baked LLM tool to help you make new half-baked LLM tools.
The irony is that we all independently decided QA was a “process smell” around the same time. The logic seemed airtight: developers should own quality, shift left, test in prod with feature flags, move fast. Every tech blog and conference talk said the same thing.
What nobody mentioned is that QA teams weren’t just finding bugs—they were the institutional memory of how things break.
When you dissolve QA and tell developers “you own quality now,” that knowledge just evaporates. Each developer tests the happy path for their feature and calls it done. The edge cases? The interaction effects? The weird state machines? Those all ship to prod.
The really insidious part is the metrics looked great. Velocity up, deployment frequency up, cycle time down. We were measuring output, not outcomes. Exec dashboards showed green across the board while user experience quietly degraded.
Now we’re in the equilibrium state: software ships fast and breaks often, every deploy is a dice roll, and we’ve normalized “hotfix Friday” as just how things work. The velocity gains were real, but we were measuring distance traveled, not value delivered.
Turns out “everyone owns quality” means nobody owns quality. Who knew.
<rant>I've never had confidence in MacOS or Apple software in general, and especially not in Apple Photos. Photos beachballs constantly, even when I do simple things like creating a new folder or naming a photo. It loses keystrokes almost every time I type a folder or photo name. No other program does this on the same Mac, which is an M4 Pro with 64GB RAM and terabytes of SSD. I know that it's not a problem with the hardware because the previous Mac Mini, which was well equipped, had the same problem for years. Reconstructing the Photos database didn't help.
Don't get me started about how Time Machine drops files — important files like the Photos Sqlite3 database — from backups.
Yes, I should switch from Photos to something else, e.g. Immich.
I barely use the software included with the Mac, and would only use Linux except that there are still just a few programs or bits of hardware that insist on there being a Mac or Windows machine somewhere.
How Apple every got a reputation for high-quality, user-friendly software is beyond me.
Storing photos in a database was the first design mistake. These should be files in a folder. I know why they did it, to fuck over iPhone users who don't have a mac, but the added complexity of that is just absolutely not worth it.
I dual boot my M1 Mac Studio with Fedora Asahi Remix (native Linux for Apple Silicon for those unfamiliar). I'm far more comfortable and productive in Linux for development, but wanted to keep macOS there for times when I needed it.
It turns out I haven't needed it, and I honestly don't remember the last time I've booted into macOS on that system.
I like Apple hardware, but the last time I enjoyed using macOS was pre-2010.
Apple has completely lost the high ground it earned during the OS X high times, paired with the relentless innovation of the iPod and iPhone. If they were smart they would focus on refinement in this era of gradual and boring innovation, so when the next thing is ready, they have a solid and trusted platform to support it. As things stand, if the next thing comes tomorrow, the next generation could easily jump ship. They may have the people who are too lazy to learn something new and will survive like Microsoft has. But at this point there's nothing substantially different about the company that told us to "think different".
“People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.” — Alan Kay
It's ironic after fighting the good fight for so long and finally making their own hardware that Apple should fall on their own sword with software now.
I've been loving Apple since Tiger, I'm still on Sequoia and iOS 18.
Pepe prayge for the 27-releases to be another Snow Leopard as rumored.
59 comments
[ 5.9 ms ] story [ 67.4 ms ] threadI switched away from MacOS at that time.
My last job we were given MacOS machines, I didn't experience anything that made me want to reconsider my decision to ditch MacOS as my daily driver.
The iOS / macOS 26 frustration I think is particularly felt by the HN type crowd. Don't want something that looks cool but is less effective/performant/usable. "We" can feel Apple's priorities drifting away from ours.
Side note: I wonder how much easier AI will make it to migrate between operating systems? Perhaps future AI systems that are good at computer-usage could manage migrations/installs well.
Things just work for the most part because backwards compat is hardwired into the folks at Microsoft. Someone did a YouTube video not too long ago installing MS-DOS all the way through Windows 11, upgrading version by version.
[0] Mostly.
Sure it's sometimes not as shiny as MacOS, and it will most likely never be polished enough for the mainstream market share, but there's something really awesome about not being reliant on a support engineer that does not have the financial incentive to spend the correct amount of time solving a one off problem.
For a couple years I have been noticing regular new glitches in the Apple TV interface accumulating faster than old ones disappear.
Lately the glitch accumulation syndrome seems to have hit macOS. Notes has started doing random bolding, unbolding, changing text size on only one line, etc. After a restart, a finder window with tabs springs to different screen spaces, depending on which tab is open when I try to drop a file on it. Message sometimes draws a few lines of a message with a few pixels vertical and horizontally offset, so there is actual overlap of message parts.
Then there are chronic ones. Safari's save or print to PDF are notorious for not saving pictures you can see, even from reading mode. How are basic functions in Safari not worth fixing, for years?
Apple's HomePods ... for many years. I could write a blog of interesting Pod behavior. I thought having one or a pair in each room would be nice. No, more of them is not nice. Constant bizarreness.
The noticeable acceleration isn't encouraging.
No idea if 26 fixed any of this, I've avoided updating because of how poorly received Glass is in all the UI discussions.
I could also add to this that occasionally the status bar gets two not-quite-aligned-with-each-other copies of the time, connectivity icons, and battery percentage.
That’s the key I think. Apple these days never releases when products are ready, but on a predefined schedule. Point releases that should fix things, are actually delivering more features that were shown on the keynote, but didn’t quite make the main release date.
As a result the systems accumulated some bugs that might never get fixed, unless the code happens to be completely rewritten. The desktop switching animation is hopelessly long when using keyboard shortcuts with ProMotion enabled. On both iOS and macOS the Music app will have an audible click couple of seconds into the first played song when using lossless quality. Stuff like these is known and reported, there’s just seemingly zero bandwidth to handle it.
I'm currently on the "meh hardware but solid OS" phase of the cycle - the battery life isn't as good and waking from suspend still (somehow) isn't as seamless, but my Linux of choice (Silverblue) is predictable and transparent - and ultimately if there's a problem it's in my gift to fix it, which is much more comforting to me.
I wonder what they'll do to woo me back next time..
This saves the individual files of the site in standard format, html, js, css, etc., much like Chrome does with Webpage, Complete.
Turned out that I either missed or accidentally denied the permission to access local networks for iTerm. So the `curl` utility installed from Homebrew was silently failing, while the system-provided `/usr/bin/curl` worked fine. Because it has special permission from Apple.
Can I just give the same permission to iTerm? Nope. We are not worthy of that power, and must re-affirm permissions every 30 days for all non-Apple software.
Oh, and these permission popups happen at random moments, including during presentations or meetings. And if you don't accept them, they are silently denied.
However something shifted since this "visionOS" melted version of macOS (Tahoe); where I have absolutely no intension to upgrade from Sequoia. I hope they will fix it by the time I'll be forced to upgrade (post support deadline).
It started with the macOS that brought the iOS settings panel. We went from a logical structure of easily findable stuff to a complete mess. Just open the "Keyboard" settings on macOS today and it's bewildering how they could ship this and think this is fine. Steve would roll in his grave.
The process to allow running applications that are unsigned is just a horrible hack. It feels like a last minute "shove it and move on!".
By 2035 I wonder if we'll be all running KDE or WindowMaker and the hell with modern OS GUI.
From a Gestalt standpoint, human relations with desktop computers are not the same as with thumb driven mobile OS or air-pinch driven vision OS, period. The hell with "glass" or "flat" design. Desktop OS should be as forgettable as possible, as it's about having long stints of flow, not giving a feeling of "air" or "play".
it's time for a clean slate.
When you dissolve QA and tell developers “you own quality now,” that knowledge just evaporates. Each developer tests the happy path for their feature and calls it done. The edge cases? The interaction effects? The weird state machines? Those all ship to prod. The really insidious part is the metrics looked great. Velocity up, deployment frequency up, cycle time down. We were measuring output, not outcomes. Exec dashboards showed green across the board while user experience quietly degraded.
Now we’re in the equilibrium state: software ships fast and breaks often, every deploy is a dice roll, and we’ve normalized “hotfix Friday” as just how things work. The velocity gains were real, but we were measuring distance traveled, not value delivered. Turns out “everyone owns quality” means nobody owns quality. Who knew.
Don't get me started about how Time Machine drops files — important files like the Photos Sqlite3 database — from backups.
Yes, I should switch from Photos to something else, e.g. Immich.
I barely use the software included with the Mac, and would only use Linux except that there are still just a few programs or bits of hardware that insist on there being a Mac or Windows machine somewhere.
How Apple every got a reputation for high-quality, user-friendly software is beyond me.
Not recommended.</rant>
It turns out I haven't needed it, and I honestly don't remember the last time I've booted into macOS on that system.
I like Apple hardware, but the last time I enjoyed using macOS was pre-2010.
It's ironic after fighting the good fight for so long and finally making their own hardware that Apple should fall on their own sword with software now.
I've been loving Apple since Tiger, I'm still on Sequoia and iOS 18.
Pepe prayge for the 27-releases to be another Snow Leopard as rumored.