Updated a bit ago to give Siri AI a go for some basic stuff I've been wanting it to do with personal context. It had some false positives in there, but it's notably better now, pretty fast, and handled context well. It allows you to see where it got the context from, which is great considering that doesn't sound like a very Apple thing to do.
Apple themselves says it's a combination of on device and hosted Gemini models. But it seems Apple is hosting Gemini models themselves with far better privacy than the regular Gemini product.
Same. In addition to UX regression, we’re two major revs in, there’s nothing that’s a compelling enough value-add to be worth the trade-off, let alone the risk of unexpected side effects on any OS upgrade.
On my Xcode dev machine, I’ll be biting the bullet soon out of necessity, but my personal machine will stay Sequoia until they course-correct on “style over substance” (and not holding my breath).
I was at WWDC for the Vision Pro launch and asked someone a technical question about tvOS. He said, 'ah, [Jim] could answer that, but he isn't here today'. When I asked if anyone else from tvOS was here the reply was, '[Jim] is the only person on tvOS' and I am pretty sure he was serious.
I’ve heard this kind of thing about Apple fairly regularly (the iTunes Remote app comes to mind). While there are issues to large teams, I feel like there is a middle ground that doesn’t result in a single point of failure. What happens when Jim wins the lottery?
It seems like Apple could very easily turn the AppleTV into a proper game console, but not with only one person on it. I guess it’s still just a “hobby” for them.
> It seems like Apple could very easily turn the AppleTV into a proper game console
Apple could turn the Mac, iPad or Vision Pro into a proper gaming console, too. It's just not something they are willing to do, no matter how well-positioned they are for it.
Apple wants you to buy your games through the App Store, so they can take the 30%, which means competing with Steam. Which means getting licensed games on the App Store.
Apple already fought one such license war over music and won. They're currently doing Apple TV as well.
However, for the gaming industry they're complete strangers. Unlike music (which is mostly made on Mac) and TV/Movies (which are often made on Mac, at least partly), gamedev is very much Windows focused.
Pushing for ports and licenses is an uphill battle, and probably not one Apple wants to take on. They have plenty of other profitable ventures.
I think you’re responding to “gaming” and thinking of AAA titles which are flashy and splashy but are a smaller market than mobile games. I guess gp might have been thinking of mobile or casual where Apple does have a significant stake and interest but no appreciable focus.
I'm thinking of gaming as in Steam, including indies, AA and AAA.
Of course Apple is doing perfectly fine for mobile gaming, and is giving more than enough tools to developers to implement mobile games perfectly well.
I am talking about PC gaming, and more specifically modern DXVK/Wine support. There's no need for ports, as the Steam Deck showed.
Apple Silicon GPUs are all capable of supporting Vulkan 1.3 and translating DirectX code. Proton 11 supports ARM/FEX natively, which would make Apple Silicon a first-class citizen if you use Asahi drivers. macOS users will be stuck with Game Porting Toolkit and it's lackluster support; iPad/AppleTV/iPhone users have no options whatsoever, presumably to redirect their attention to the App Store that Apple profits from so handsomely.
This is entirely a misleading point. DXVK, Wine and Proton are full of patches that exist to support individual games.
It is not just a translation layer, as much as a great effort of the open source community to force-port every game in existence to Linux. The effort also includes stuff like ntsync that gives the Linux kernel Windows-y APIs for performance.
I doubt Apple has any interest in any of that. I don't really blame them.
And purely in principle, why are we all going through so much effort to save game devs from writing good OS-independent arch-independent code?
That is the point. Valve is maintaining the patches; Apple has to do nothing besides support compliant Vulkan 1.2+ drivers (which their community already does).
Apple doesn't need to implement ntsync to support Proton or DXVK, either. macOS' synchronization primitives do the job just as well as esync or fsync does.
> why are we all going through so much effort to save game devs from writing good OS-independent arch-independent code?
Because Apple doesn't support OS-independent APIs. They also don't support old runtimes, so users will inevitably have to run the Windows version once the native code breaks.
Valve ported several of their games natively to macOS, and almost every single one of them is broken on modern Macs. Valve didn't change the game tech, it's all runtime breakage.
From what I understand you're saying that Apple should provide 2 things: (1) Vulkan drivers and (2) backwards compatibility forever.
I don't really know enough about graphics to discuss point (1). From what I understand, Apple GPUs don't really fit the Vulkan model too cleanly, and the Asahi Vulkan drivers are significantly less performant than Metal (how much of that is due to beta/community status vs. architectural bottleneck I have no idea).
But let's say they provide (1).
Providing (2) would simply be a big mistake. It is a huge mistake of Windows, of the C++ programming language and of the x86 ISA (none of which are very good). Linux distros do not provide this either, beyond the core kernel syscalls and glibc. It is certainly a very big ask and not something trivial.
I'm only asking for (1); Apple can keep breaking APIs forever as long as they support the libraries that enable Proton.
(2) is precisely the reason why nobody can port games to macOS anymore, and largely why ARM is a second-class citizen in PC gaming too. You cannot depreciate things like AVX or 32-bit library execution modes, and then demand native builds get made to 20-year-old games. Apple Silicon's ISA extensions like AMX are not a replacement for x86's SIMD extensions, it's not standardized through ARM or supported in Asahi either. Native Mac games need to incorporate Apple's proprietary and unstable tech like Metal and the Apple Silicon microarchitecture, which makes their games unstable and difficult to support in the long term. Translation is Apple Silicon's only choice for game preservation and mainstream game support.
> Apple GPUs don't really fit the Vulkan model too cleanly
This is a misconception that stems from Metal's preference for tile-based deferred rendering pipelines. Vulkan 1.3 is fully viable even on the M1 onward, which is enough to support DirectX12 translation in Proton. The performance of Asahi's drivers are not any worse than the official Vulkan drivers that ARM provides for TBDR-optimized GPUs like the Mali line.
Games should simply not be written for a particular architecture. The rendering part of the game engine should already be abstracted away from the particular rendering API (there are other significant platforms which do not support Vulkan: PS5 and Xbox, which your game should be capable of targeting). And the math library should have fallbacks to standard C (or standard C++ etc.) and then specialized implementations for AVX, NEON, SVE, etc.
Now, sure, NEON is slower than AVX-256/512. But backending to NEON or even standard C is certainly going to be faster than running stuff over an x86-to-ARM translation layer.
Sooner or later the Steam Deck 2 will release, probably on an ARM platform (if the Steam Frame compatibility layers go well), and millions upon millions upon millions of dollars of electricity will simply be wasted running x86-to-ARM, Win32-to-Linux and Direct3D-to-Vulkan dynamic compatibility layers when, if the games were well written in the first place, they could simply be trivially recompiled.
> 32-bit library execution modes
If your application assumes pointers are 32-bits, or any particular size, or even any set of particular sizes, it's completely broken.
As for (1), if Asahi Vulkan drivers are really good, that just goes to show why Apple isn't supporting Vulkan. Metal applications seem to be faster, and Apple wants to push devs to make their apps for the faster API.
You're welcome to disagree with me about (2), I don't care what macOS picks in this regard. It's not going to help games get ported to macOS or Apple Silicon any faster. There are hundreds of thousands of video games that will never be updated again, macOS will never support these games without translation. Your ideal world where programmers support and recompile games 3 decades after release does not exist in reality. This is why efforts like WoW64 and FEX exist in the first place; you will never recompile the majority of Windows games. Ever.
(1) is just common sense. Go ask your favorite LLM; does hardware-level TBDR optimization degrade basic Vulkan support? No, it doesn't, and we have dozens of mobile GPUs that support Vulkan to prove it. Metal is not "faster" and it's architecture does not preclude high-performance Vulkan drivers in any way. If you don't believe me, ask anyone else.
Why are you deltaing to windows? You should be deltaing to native.
Obviously an IBM 704 program will run faster on an IBM 704 emulator than on a hardware IBM 704. That's not an argument to keep writing apps for the IBM 704 and "just translate them".
> Your ideal world where programmers support and recompile games 3 decades after release does not exist in reality.
Happens in literally every other programming industry though.
The reason this cannot happen in the games industry is that game developers are not good software developers. They are much more akin to physics-numerical-methods people who can write some magic spaghetti-Fortran that runs really fast and does black magic, but no one can maintain, debug or integrate.
For casual kids gaming, Apple TV and Apple Arcade is a fantastic combo. It's been plenty enough to keep my kid occupied, using hardware I already owned.
Especially in the last few years, preservation has been a big topic. Gamers want their purchases to keep working in the future, not being broken by an OS update as it often happens with macOS (compared to Windows)
It streams videos. It works. I'd rather they don't mess with it.
However, the guy who decided to put a useless button on the side of the remote that interrupts whatever you're watching, should get fired immediately. It's almost every day I grab the remote and press it by accident, and have to switch back to what I was watching, and resume playback, because Netflix exits out of the stream.
Sadly, Apple TV is the only Hollywood-approved streaming device that isn't a total trash heap.
No disrespect to you for posting this, but those iOS/iPadOS/MacOS are almost identical launch pages. Feels like a waste of time even having them be separate.
Can we please have a 1 release focus on fixing bugs? not more ai but fixing bugs, 1 release where you can disable AI... 1 release to make it faster again, 1 release to polish... not to push the next "game changing UI design..."
the "upgrade to 18.4" took my iphone to 26.whatever and siri got even worst...
siri set an alarm for 10:40 (creates one at 12:08)... NO, delete that one, 10 40 (does nothing)... hey siri... (ajum), delete the previous alarm... (done!) now set an alarm at 10:40 (alarm at 4pm....)... eventually you get tired... you go to the alarms app.. and then there is the previous "deleted" alarm and the other one...
Usually I wait until december to install the new iOS on my phone, since most of the time I don't care about the upgrades. This time I installed iOS 27 beta on my phone since the public beta was out, and I had 0 new bugs compared to iOS 26, but it hasn't been the big relief that I hoped for.
Now I am worried about what the new versions of iOS will bring us, I hope that the "we removed the crap" wasn't just a thing of this year, and that iOS will go back to high software standards. Phone prices are really high for me now, and I would like for my poor little iphone 13 to survive another couple of years.
No, not exaggerating at all, but I'm not a power user of the phone. I just do really simple stuff, and I didn't find new bugs, just old ones. But obviously that's my experience... The most noticeable stuff was the app launch speed.
Interesting. Bugs on mine were from using core apps, IIRC. I wonder if bugs manifest on some iPhone hardware versions? Or maybe even which iOS version the phone was upgrade from?
I concur with gekoxyz - I've been using the iOS and macOS 27 developer betas since about beta 3 on my personal devices, and had actually forgotten to a large extent that I was running beta software. It's been excellent - a marked difference to the 26 releases.
As a European, and Apple household: no new iPhone Duo, Watch or iPhone 18 Pro Max purchases in this house until Apple desists with its malicious campaign to break the DMA. I'll get by fine with other AI products in the meantime.
My basic point is that the EU DMA is a good idea, but it's still stupid - and I live here.
I do get the point of it, stuff needs to be interchangeable. BUT. Security and privacy need to be taken into account.
Apple has a track record of picking user privacy even if it makes their services objectively worse. Now EU makes them open up the APIs. Cool, I'm all for it.
Now who makes sure that Joe-Bobs Trusty AI is as secure as Apple Private Compute and won't just store my chat transcripts verbatim on an open S3 folder? EU law doesn't say.
The PR flack will 100% hit Apple though, the fact that the user whose data was leaked used JBTAI is buried in the second to last paragraph under the fold between two ads. Apple will be in the headline with all caps.
Same goes for Google, they don't want their AI to be interchangeable with something, because the lack of analytics will hurt their ad revenue. And maybe some lip service to privacy too.
(And my infinite pet peeve, why is Apple App Store bad and needs to be opened up, but Playstation, Xbox and Nintendo app stores are cool and 3rd party options aren't enforced by law?)
Reminder to wait a couple of months before upgrading macOS! Every single time issues are found after a new macOS version, give it a little bit of time before jumping right away on your work machine :)
In theory that makes sense, in practice I've never had any issues with updating on day one and it's often necessary if you want to develop for iOS / macOS anyway unless you have a dedicated developer machine.
I feel pretty good about the 27 series in a way I haven't in the past (I've been running iOS 27 and it's working well), except for one thing, they remove x86 support (no more Rosetta), so just keep that in mind in case that might disrupt anything for you.
The fact that you're nearly faded because people are downvoting you is fucking diabolical. What the fuck is this website now? What you said is an objective and easily verifiable statement of fact lol.
yes. I have been waiting 12 months already because Tahoe didn't convince many people, and I dread the moment I upgrade my mpb m3. Maybe I should just keep the factory OS
I used to always do this but I hate liquid glass with such passion that I even upgraded to an iOS beta just to get any improvements to it. Worst UI update in the history of the company.
But my experience with 26 hasn’t been great. From the top of my head: Random repeated flashing window chrome in the background, notifications that keep on showing while everything is disabled, Finder tooltips from four windows down, tooltips that don’t disappear, Java update interruptions that hijack your flow - just when you where about to hit enter for something else the pop-up shows and bam: you’re installing it. There is nothing right about the update process of Java anyway. Spotlight search has completely stopped working. People I’m mailing with for over a decade are not suggested when drafting a mail. Clicking on the dock icon does not reveal the app. The list goes on and on. It has been a total grueling experience. Worst in all my experiences since System 7.
I’ve shut down the notification system at some point, which alleviated the constant reminders of non-compatibility with the next OS version. Being reminded of that four times a day for months on end is just insulting, even if I used compatible versions. There was no way to shut it off. Notifications are lazily designed and completely uninspired, as they could also adjust the app icons and so on and actually do it right.
I promised myself to update once it came out and then just screen record everything to collect residual garbage to help the Apple team make this stuff work well for everyone.
Sorry to let this all out, but it has been on my mind for a while and I’m happy they say they focussed on quality. Therefore I’m upgrading asap this time.
To refine my statement on lazy or non-design. Notifications can be valuable, for me i'd like backup notifications and find my messages. Only those, ever. When only those are enabled, MacOS has their own secret settings and is allowed to nag about updates, incompatibility and maybe some other things i don't remember. Part of the problem is the illusion of control, and being spammy about self-importance of new OS versions. Great for some users, insulting to me.
This is made even worse by "focus" which still shows notifications but without the text. Then i'm distracted AND i don't know why.
You do you. I backup and install once the RC goes live. Have done for years. Only problem I recall was a few years ago Homebrew got in a tizzy for a day.
One exception maybe is for music producers. For some reason AU/VST/DAW developers don't seem to take part in the beta programs and their software can take a while to get updated. But I've happily been playing with Bitwig (with some Arturia VSTs) over the weekend on Golden Gate without issue.
I'm still on Sequoia (which took me ages to jump to from Ventura). :)
For anyone jumping versions: remember that Apple messed with the login keychain not being able to be backed up in the most recent Tahoe release [1], which means that issue will be around in Golden Gate.
I was on Sequoia as well, and just updated ... first thing I noticed is LaunchPad is gone.
The Tahoe "App View" / Spotlight just lists my 30 installed apps intermingled with Apple System Apps, which I hardly ever use. Hard coded categories, no way to re-order as far as I can tell.
Seems like the closest is dragging ~/Applications to the Dock.
This seems to be the consensus viewpoint but outside of a few highly specific and known-in-advance incompatibilities on work laptops, I have been essentially a day-one adopter since Leopard and I cannot recall any issues that rose above a minor annoyance.
There have certainly been changes like Liquid Glass that were for the worse overall (though the degree of which had been highly overblown). But outside of directional disagreement with a release, I can’t say I’ve ever seen an issue where I’ve regretted pulling the trigger on an update.
I don't understand this viewpoint. So, the release version is 27.0 build 26A428. That build is static, how can it get more stable than it is right now? Lets say 27.1 comes out in 2 weeks - do you update to 27.0 instead of 27.1? When is it snappy enough?
Taking this at face value they say wait for the incremental updates. I think some big rollouts have had fringe issues and they are saying to minimize the probability you get a random bug it's better to wait for a 27.x or 27.0.x before upgrading, and to upgrade to that one, not 27.0
I don’t understand what you mean by snappy. Apple is notorious for releasing buggy macOS major versions. You wait 6 months, then upgrade without having to be their tester. Snappiness has nothing to do with that, any macOS version on apple silicon is snappy
There have been far more buggy iOS releases than stable ones. A few years in particular were absolute disasters until December or January. It is very sound graybeard advice to wait until the .1 release. Apple has not earned the trust to upgrade on day 1.
I finally upgraded to Tahoe a couple weeks ago after putting it off for ages. As soon as it came up, my external monitor (connected by DVI to a caldigit dock) started being flaky af. I have to reconnect 2-3 times to get it to properly detect.
Same. Siri has been so bad for so long, and this announcement gave me a brief glimmer of hope that it would finally get better. However, every phone in my family is a 15 or older, and there is no support for our newer HomePod either. Boooooo Apple, booooo.
I have a 16 Pro, who’s sales pitch was “built for Apple Intelligence”, or something to that effect. I can’t customize the Siri voice. I’m a bit shocked that they would have all the features on the 16 to avoid a class action based on their sales pitch of that phone. Tweaking the voice didn’t seem like it would be all that demanding.
The foundation models run on the device for access to the local graph database and to interact with local actions (intents).
Not everything runs locally, but a local model still needs to run to understand that it needs to recruit help, to package up a subset of data for the external agent, and to perform actions on its behalf as well as return results.
Without the local agent, you are shuttling off all your data to be persisted by an AI cloud provider in case they need it.
I've been using it for several months since the developer beta came out; overall I'm extremely positive on it. One of their better releases that seemingly focused more on quality and refinements than new-features.
Siri is definitely worth using now, even if it remains still a work-in-progress/needs continued refinement. It can surprise you in good ways, but it isn't consistently good yet.
The keyboard remains unfixed, as is tradition. The same issues they've "fixed" like three or four releases now, seemingly are identically broken, and I'm lost faith they CAN fix it.
The iOS Keyboard and Search on Windows, are like the perpetually broken things that both companies have "fixed" every year for the last ten+ years and yet... It is almost farcical as this point.
Any improvements to voice to text? I use iPhone 13 Mini and so keyboard has always been hard to type on. But voice to text..man..it is an absolutly miserable experience that I wish I could swap out for any other competitor.
I normally don't complain that iOS/MacOS isn't customizable because the defaults are good enough to work for me but that voice to text man its like they completely forgot about it.
Hear hear. The insistence upon prioritizing names in my extensive contacts list as well as certain geographic names leads to so many unnecessary manual edits.
> Siri is definitely worth using now, even if it remains still a work-in-progress/needs continued refinement. It can surprise you in good ways, but it isn't consistently good yet.
I really wish we could add our own custom prompts for the new Siri. My most common usage of Siri is "Remind me at XX:00 to do XYZ." The most common response from Siri now is, "Sorry, did you say XYZ or XZY?" Two very similar things, the difference between which is inconsequential. Dealing with this "Sorry" has made reminders take too many steps. Wish I could throw in a "If I'm setting a reminder and you don't quite hear me, just put both things in one line and I'll figure it out myself"
In my experience the new Siri is marginally worse for everything that I used to use Siri for. It's much slower to respond. It asks for obnoxious classifications. It doesn't know that when I say "call Mike" I mean the Mike I call every day vs the other Mike in my contact I have never called in my life. It defaults back to Apple products for everything, old Siri knew I liked Spotify but now if I ask it to play a song it will complain about my Apple Music subscription. I could go on.
My experience with the new Siri is objectively worse. I am on an Iphone 17 Pro Max and all searches are very slow, accessing utilities has slowed down quite a bit, lagginess when settings timers. Failure to make new notes or reminders. Stuff just not working. I've been using the OS since the RC. I give it a flat 0/10
Apple's search is so comically bad. For example, I can click on my applications, and I have an app called Chess. I can often type letters C-H-E-S-S and have it not show the Chess app. This is inside the applications folder!
Many people have complained before. Honestly I ONLY search for app names in spotlight search or application window, it should be trivial to make it actually work. Maybe i just need to vibecode some alternative search bar :(
A common one I hit is "blu" showing bluetooth settings, but "blue" does not. Very frustrating to see the thing you are hoping for popup, but then go away as you type more if its name.
Just tried this on iOS 27 and both blu and blue showed me bluetooth settings. I saw someone in a different thread of this discussion mention resetting dictionaries helping with autocorrect, I wonder if there is something that would apply to this situation which helps.
no he is lying and no one uses it. what a snide smug comment - hopefully you an an orphan i cannot imagine how pathetic your parents must be to have started with a child and end up with a dog.
Seems like someone got updated KPIs and decided to try the most ham-fisted enshittification move to raise registrations. Oh, it is now possible again to see about five top reviews per item. Seems like loss of traffic was rough.
It’s so much worse than that. This happens to me on a daily basis with both MacOS and iOS. Say I’m searching for Chess, I’ll get to the C-H and it’ll show the Chess app, but enter that next -E and it’s totally gone. It feels like the system is designed like “Well, I showed them Chess when they entered CH, but they kept typing, so they must not actually want Chess.” This ends up breaking for me like 95% of the time, and the only way around it is to search like “C”…wait for results…”H”…wait for results…etc. It’s maddening.
This, and then, if you notice, and backspace to remove the 'e', it doesn't put chess back into the search results, since it figures that everything that matches 'che' also matches 'ch', and so doesn't update it. Sometimes, if you add the 'e' again, it _will_ find chess, sometimes you need to type the 's', or even the final 's' before it gives you chess back again.
And sometimes, it finds what you want, but before you can select it, it decides that it has found something better, and places that in the place where you wanted to select, causing you to select the wrong thing. And then it thinks that because you selected this, it must be what you want, and starts to push it to the top…
Weird, the same stupid crap happens with Windows. I’ve had to learn the exact N character search to find the things I use often; any more or less and the result with that name is buried. It’s like Microsoft and Apple are just pip installing same broken search package.
I switched to Everything for search a while ago and haven’t looked back. For the start menu I replace it with Open Shell, which seems to find apps much more reliably.
Firefox's "awesome bar" behaves the same way. I guess it's either inherent to the problem somehow, or else everyone is sharing a library (unlikely), or else everyone just makes the same mistakes.
'calc' used to bring up calculator, but now it becomes some widget to calculate distance inside the spotlight box. The worst thing is you can't even backspace out of it.
I'd take the widget! For me typing "calc" finds the "com.apple.calculator" folder. If I continue to "calcu" etc, it suggests "com.apple.ncplugin.calculator" instead. Brilliant intelligence right there.
For me the big one is whenever I type "sys" to get system settings, it pops up for a half second and then for some reason the top result is like "reset some system setting" and then I invariably get flashbanged because it turns off dark mode and there's no confirmation dialogue lmao. Maddening.
I've deactivated every single type of data in Spotlight except Applications. It goes out of its way to still suggest files like C system files or header files, like "system_library.c". It didn't wait for AI to turn against us.
I was trying to see what happens here. It does give the Sound settings panel as the first hit. But when I then press Return, it opens System Settings, but does not actually go to the Sound settings, but General.
Also, search inside the Settings app has been broken for many releases now. I always wonder if anyone inside Apple is actually using macOS or iOS.
It's worse than this! You Type C-H-E then you go to press enter, and it changes the results as you're pressing it, opening the wrong thing! I've turned off all the search targets, except for applications and folders.
Yes. "UI Speed" should be a configurable thing, so that if the UI changes as you're choosing an item, it acts instead on _what was there_ at a brief moment in the past, e.g. 20-50ms ago.
Don't worry, airdrop does it too! I've accidentally sent airdrop requests to strangers from their profile picture moving under my finger as I'm approaching to touch someone else's. The single most idiotic design I've ever seen in UI. I don't use airdrop for anything sensitive anymore, obviously.
Ah, but hitting enter now takes you to the top result! Therefore it has to search as you type, so there's something to activate as soon as you hit enter! /s
...I've been seeing this search style in more and more places recently, and I hate it. Let me type my search, then hit enter, then you can go find what I asked for. Don't slow everything down by searching on every character I type.
It’s called incremental search and it’s useful, but only when there’s some debouncing involved and the search results is presented at once or the items are sorted by the order they are found.
- Or is the goal to disturb the user and make something impractical like in Google, so that people click on ads? Software has turned into a curse. The machines have risen.
For me search has been that way since the first MacOS 26.0 upgrade and apparently never fixed.
But speaking of quality overall (outside of the search glitch) - I use dual 5k LG monitors with my work MacBook and can get the MacOS Display Manager process to crash if I just enable variable rate refresh and put the computer to sleep, then wake it up. Apparently a known issue for a few years, still not fixed.
I always assumed that was intentional to save you arriving through options. I find that behaviour quite useful as I can hit anything beginning with CHE just by typing more letters.
>> the only way around it is to search like “C”…wait for results…”H”…wait for results…
Some people don’t like that. If the showed Chess for CHE you could still find other apps if you kept typing.
Maybe there are also people who like the lottery of results changing the instant you click on the app you want because ir adds exictment to this lives.
So many platforms with search have a variation of this problem now.
The other issue with Mac search is that it never tells you when it’s done, so you can’t tell if it searched and failed to find something or is still searching.
It's probably asynchronous reranking doing something weird. My guess is that the underlying ranking algorithms in these desktop search bars are very ropey, and they can't debug or diagnose because privacy reasons means the developers don't get to see what results were generated for different query/index combos. Also search is probably just not staffed most of the time.
I can't search for Apples own Notes app. I've tried the name in my local language, I've tried the original english name of the app. Nothing. It will show me OneNote which isn't even installed anymore, but not the Notes app. Very strange.
I had this problem on Spotlight, I solved it once and never happened to me again, there is a setting to reindex all the files, which solves the issue. On iOS however I still have this problem.
I really wish apps stopped doing that "search on type" thing in search boxes. You either need to have only a couple miliseconds of response time, or you need to confirm that you want the search process to start. Or maybe at least have some feedback showing "more content is loading, watch out, don't click".
The amount of misclicks daily because of crappy slow-but-should-be-fast search probably offsets by 10x the amount of time required to hit "enter" for the search to start.
Turn off all the web search and other domains that the index uses. Apple took a really brain dead decision to include web search in the results, and they are the worst. It is completely useless, and even though the recall has expanded, the precision is abysmal.
I struggle daily with Finder's search. It cannot find files in my Downloads folder even if I type the exact name. Do I need to rebuild some index or some other setting?
It couldn't hurt. I don't have problems like that.
mdutil -E -a
That command will erase and rebuild Spotlight index on all volumes.
Since Tahoe, Spotlight has multiple modes. You might have better luck forcing it into folder & files mode. That's command-2. So command-space, spotlight UI appears, keep holding command key, press 2. There's also 1 for applications only, 3 for "actions" and 4 for clipboard history.
The annoying thing with Finder is when you're in a folder, you start to search, and then it defaults to "This Mac" and not the god damn folder you're in.
That's because you have that set in your Finder Settings.
With the Finder open, go to Settings > Advanced, and change the drop-down at the bottom to "Search the Current Folder". This is something I do on the first run of every new Mac I set up.
I’ll have it not show Xcode. It’s apples main developer ide. Most of the time it works. Then it gets into some weird loop. Only shows the Xcode website. Very helpful.
At some point I got the damn Chess app every time I wanted to switch to Chrome. You know, typing cmd-space, ch and enter. I've learned I can't remove Chess from my computer. After numerous incantations of various spells and reboots and updates I think it started working normally again.
Breaking interfaces, Linus Torvalds had something to say about it that Apple should heed.
Alfred is wonderful for launching applications and custom actions, but it’s actually worse than Spotlight search for searching for files and folders. It finds a lot of results but inexplicably it likes to rank partial matches ahead of exact matches.
FWIW, I find if I’m pushing the disk limit, Spotlight search becomes unusable. So I free up ~100GB (easy to do with iOS/Android dev artifacts, emulators, etc.) and then force a Spotlight re-index from the command line:
sudo mdutil -E /
You can check indexing status with:
mdutil -s /
After that it’s usually fine again until I start pushing the disk limit.
Every sibling comment's issues I've experienced. But a reindex after freeing enough disk space seems to be a semi-stable solution for me. If only I could write a tool to remind me to free disk space before it screws up spotlight. It would be nice if MacOS put the index on its own partition.
Search feels like it used to be much better in finding a balance between showing app vs files vs web - feels really broken somehow and I wonder if there’s any setting I can change.
For me it's gotten way better in iOS/macOS 27. It's also way faster. They claim to have rewritten the spotlight index to handle the new Siri integration.
The new Siri UX needs improvement and to match the UX of talking to chatGPT. At least in settings have an option to keep the Siri window always on top (just have a prominent X out to go to the screen below) and always listening ready to continue your conversation like the experience is with chatGPT.
Been running the beta since June -- on the latest beta now and 8 out of ten times to continue the conversation with Siri (most notably in the car) I have to constantly say "Hey Siri."
One thing it's current UX has over chatGPT voice tech as it shows you the text and provides visuals while chatGPT's UI shows no text and or visuals.
Ever since they re-did Spotlight I've had issues. When I type something and press Return it should activate. I shouldn't have to wait for it to populate the results and then press Return a second time. Moreover they've broken the ability for me to use Cmd to locate files quickly. I have to awkwardly Cmd-double-click the result with my cursor because trying to Cmd-Return triggers Ask Siri!
Raycast2 has its own index and it's way more reliable and fast.
I don't understand how Apple does not care about many of the core services of their OS. Searching in Mail is a coinflip
Spotlight worked best in OS X 10.4. It was near instantaneous on what is now considered ancient hardware. It's been steadily downhill from there.
Mostly because people still expect to use it to find "Recipe for Egg Salad.docx" without searching the entire Internet or executing some bizarre natural language query.
I did just that. Took me half a day. I haven't used Spotlight since. I did try alternative launchers, but they are all bloated. I just need an app launcher and simple arithmetic - that's all it does.
Check out TinyStart. It’s 5€, and the best 5€ I’ve spent in ages. It’s super fast, and handles basic math. Even lets you put the results on the pasteboard!
On my incredibly midrange PC that has a midrange SSD in it, the Linux `find` and `grep` commands usually can find stuff much quicker than any 'accelerated' and 'cached' desktop search, even though the only caching they usually get is when the files are in the page cache because I have interacted with them. Even when that's not the case, it's faster AND more accurate that GNOME search or whatever search is in Windows Explorer.
Windows is the same - searching the fs is faster and more accurate than using these 'quick search' tools, which are borderline broken.
I quit Apple Mail (due to its poor handling of Gmail accounts) and started using Mimestream years ago. Truly excellent mail client. Actively and thoughtfully developed.
They did fix it (macOS 27, my experience). I have like 600,000 mail messages - there was a period where Mail search was awful but these days it's fast and accurate. It really comes down to whether you need to rebuild your index.
Spotlight works for me across files and apps on Mac, iOS, visionOS, pretty well - it has failed occasionally but usually it's because my disk is full. I haven't really found anything better (Alfred is good but is just a wrapper around Spotlight)
The good part is you have the source so you can just fork it, fix the code to prioritize results properly, compile and install it to fix Ubuntu, then see if you can get your patch upstreamed. /s
Even weather was/is comically bad. Ask it anything specific and it would fall over, repeating the broadest, least helpful version of weather data, even if all that data is clearly available in the ios weather app. Specifics on wind, precipitation hourly, etc.
So no, you can't really ask a homepod for the weather either - Homepod's weather was more like a shitty version of sticking your head outside and looking up at the sky.
It’s really sad, because they mostly aped search from BeOS and had best in class search for a decade or so. Now indexing frequently breaks or works when an external disk is not attached, but won’t find local files after it’s connected.
It is sad, and as one of the several former BeOS employees who went to Apple to add our experience to OSX, I can say that most of us have moved on. This isn't to say that others can't do what we did; they certainly should be able to. The OSX team back then was much smaller and we all had a maniacal attention to detail. One reason is that we were micromanaged by Steve J. and did lengthy weekly reviews with him and he was direct and brutal. He wasn't always right, but he did have the final say. This is all gone and even though Steve Lemay (now head of UX) was there during this time, he was also present during the overall rot of the user experience.
Now that we are living in The Future, I am dumbfounded how e.g. dynamically populated lists change their content reliably to something I did not want, during the phase of interaction where my finger is descending onto the target. Click! Not what I want.
Feels like a lost art which will be "discovered" again in the next 15 years.
Yes I think that's the guy. He did a talk at an Apple developer event when they released the initial APFS all those years ago after HFS and HFS+ were deprecated. Seems like only yesterday.
/meta let me just say how cool it is to cool it is to make a comment on HN and have responses from folks who worked on legendary teams. Thanks for your work on BeOS.
Why do filesystem indices get stale? The OS can track what files get accessed, isn't inotify watertight?
I know that Windows has some equivalent stuff, that the antivirus uses to disallow opening files before they got scanned, so I'd wager that API is functionally required to not miss any changes.
Yet Windows indexing is one of the worst pieces of software in existence and frequently gets out of sync.
Even with inotify failing, if the system is plugged in and idle, it could quickly do a scan for files with update date > last known indexed time and index those. Like once per day maybe. Wouldn't take much load or memory, IMHO.
You'd be surprised how well a T9 keyboard works on iPhone. You should give Type Nine a shot! https://apps.apple.com/dk/app/type-nine-t9-keyboard/id926008...
Here's some promo codes for anyone interested
XRF4TMKJHTYY
NYX7TELHTAEN
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47X4MR96K6YE
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"""One of their better releases that seemingly focused more on quality and refinements than new-features.""" - Compared to a lot of others, this one have introduced more bugs than I have ever experienced in more than 10 years.
I have stopped submitting bugs because of the tedious bug reporting app, only submit really bad ones. Can't they give some helping functions to finding the correct categories based on problem description?
One pretty bad regression is that the Spotify client now from time to time has pretty bad audio glitches on my M1 Pro Mac (of course this may end up as a typical fingerpointing issue, e.g. whether the bug is in macOS or in Chromium - but it definitely regressed from macOS 26 to 27).
Otherwise macOS 27 is mostly okay-ish though, especially compared to 26.
Search on Mac has been very broken for a while, whatever they use to get the text results from files just can’t handle code, one node_modules folder and that list will just be hundreds of JavaScript files no matter what you type.
What is the issue with the iOS keyboard? The support for third party keyboards is garbage but the default keyboard is reliable for me. Search is horrible on iOS and Mac though
Sure I feel that the Apple bundled apps are better, the design is better, but frankly Golden Gate broke more third-party apps than Tahoe did, including some third-party apps where I had an old perpetual license and had not updated for many years.
Things are or were labeled wrong... I clicked a button for "upgrade to iOS 27" but then follow up dialogue is talking about upgrading to 26.7. When supposedly I'm already running 26.7. It's very weird.
Yep. You could choose "26.7" or "upgrade to iOS27" but after tapping "upgrade to iOS 27", the next option was JUST 26.7 I think it did both upgrades in series though, I don't think I had to manually select 27 again later.
In moments like this I kind of assume that I should do 26.7 first because probably they test incremental transitions more thoroughly? I wish I had more faith in software updates.
There was a bug in my update UI. I selected iOS 27, told it to install, and then it said it was downloading and installing 26.7 the whole time. When it rebooted it did come back up on 27 though.
So if you don't want to use Apple's AI, this brings... faster app launching on iOS? I guess I'll use the Liquid Glass controls, but otherwise this is a dud.
This comment is a dud. The whole point of this update was to focus on fixing bugs and improving stability. They literally rewrote the CPU scheduler to improve UI performance. Safari UI and page rendering is no longer shit compared to how it was on iPadOS 26. There’s an insane amount of under the hood changes for this release, something people have been asking for them to do for a while — focus on making things run better instead of adding endless new half baked features.
Updates don’t always have to bring shiny, flashy new features. Holy shit.
Compare it to 18 before the UI fail and you might have a non-dud of a response. And no, it wasn't the whole point, just read the announcement to see how much space is devoted to other points
The thing that I disliked the most about Tahoe is that they made light mode extremely bright, so it was a lot more uncomfortable to look at than Sequoia. I had to switch the computer to dark mode as a workaround. Did they fix this in Golden Gate or is light mode still too bright?
It's fine on iOS, it's painful on macOS. The "squircle jail" is one of the worst design crimes Apple has shipped in a long time and another step back for Mac iconography.
Unfortunately the slider does not fix Liquid Glass. Notifications are still unreadable even when you go full opaque. You need to also toggle Reduce Transparency to actually get the UI to be opaque enough to be readable.
Jeez, it's an accessibility feature and they just turned it off!
I don't mind liquid glass and can handle the transparency mostly, but the notifications are just god-awful and difficult to read. But reducing transparency is a much harder setting now, I don't like it, the previous setting was just right for me. And I can't find that slider anymore...
Yes it changed, first it reduced the transparency in many places, most notably in notifications, and made the glass dark. Now it makes the glass just a black plastic, but also in the launcher, where dark icons don't pop out anymore.
The old setting was the perfect balance for me. Ah well, iPhone 12 mini is nearly dead, am eyeballing something with GrapheneOS anyway...
> I’ve been happily using the totally frosted look (slider all the way to the right) for a few weeks now. While I didn’t mind Liquid Glass as much as other folks, the frosted setting ensures I can read and see the text, menus and icons properly.
You’ll probably be waiting around a decade, then (about the amount of time Apple has between these refreshes), and won’t be able to upgrade your Mac hardware (because they never support OSs older than what they ship with). For people developing for Apple platforms, there are even more restrictions.
All of that is fine, of course, just as long as you’re aware. I also hate Liquid Glass, but unfortunately don’t think I can avoid it for another year. I just hope that the stuff they rolled back makes it bearable.
Still daily driving the 6s after almost 11 glorious years, and I can't imagine software ever being painfully slow on M series hardware. But if you need, well, are forced, to be on latest MacOS, then you are out of luck and you have my sympathy.
(My relatives iPhone updated and its just bad all around. And with increased font size for accessibility, elements don't cover all the text. Feels rushed and not the promised Apple land.)
I still have no idea how they let it ship. Sure, it's not a productivity killing defect, just a head-scratcher that makes you question the entire software stack.
I’m adding representation to an issue that I hope is fixed:
for the last couple months I’ve been able to record videos and watch those videos but am unable to share them, whether on instagram, whatsapp, airdrop or imessage. some limited luck saving the same video to the file system and sharing from there
searching this issue is notoriously difficult, and there is one partially related thread on Apple support forums talking about spacial h264 and spacial h265 video codecs further complicated by being wrappers, with something suggesting the latter is the issue, the final post having a bewildered user asking for clarification that the iphone can create videos that even it cant use
I looked in my camera settings and there are soooo many switches and file formats now, that its impossible to know which edge case has been run into, and there’s no reset button to put the settings back to their most compatible
Unfortunately, not well suited for stealth use cases for personal automation. Here's a comparison to an mcp tool that allows driving your live safari via osascript:
I've actually never had it trip any bot detection, captchas, or anything like that, and haven't built anything into it for evading detection. If I had to guess, it's because I make sure to manually sign in to my Walmart account before it begins adding things to the cart.
Not on macOS but have my own browser extension basically doing the same with Firefox, for use with agents.
It's using a clone of my real Firefox profile, and can "ping" me if it encounters a page that needs my human input, like a login page (as I don't give it access to my password manager) or captcha page. Although sometimes it "bypasses" the captcha page by itself, even though I've instructed it not to...
Given that Safari needs the most debugging and automation tooling for Safari was hardest to come by, this is a welcome change. I wonder if it works with pages on a connected iPhone though? Anyone tried it? Because debugging on iOS Safari is the most maddening. (No responsive design mode doesn't cut it, iOS Safari has its own special bugs that don't manifest in desktop Safari merely emulating a phone viewport.)
676 comments
[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 162 ms ] threadOn my Xcode dev machine, I’ll be biting the bullet soon out of necessity, but my personal machine will stay Sequoia until they course-correct on “style over substance” (and not holding my breath).
* iOS 27: https://www.apple.com/os/ios/
* iPadOS 27: https://www.apple.com/os/ipados/
* macOS: https://www.apple.com/os/macos/
* watchOS: https://www.apple.com/os/watchos/
* visionOS: https://www.apple.com/os/visionos/
* tvOS 27: no link.
* Overview: https://www.apple.com/os/?version=no-hero
It seems like Apple could very easily turn the AppleTV into a proper game console, but not with only one person on it. I guess it’s still just a “hobby” for them.
Apple could turn the Mac, iPad or Vision Pro into a proper gaming console, too. It's just not something they are willing to do, no matter how well-positioned they are for it.
Gaming is a license game, not a hardware game.
Apple wants you to buy your games through the App Store, so they can take the 30%, which means competing with Steam. Which means getting licensed games on the App Store.
Apple already fought one such license war over music and won. They're currently doing Apple TV as well.
However, for the gaming industry they're complete strangers. Unlike music (which is mostly made on Mac) and TV/Movies (which are often made on Mac, at least partly), gamedev is very much Windows focused.
Pushing for ports and licenses is an uphill battle, and probably not one Apple wants to take on. They have plenty of other profitable ventures.
Of course Apple is doing perfectly fine for mobile gaming, and is giving more than enough tools to developers to implement mobile games perfectly well.
Apple Silicon GPUs are all capable of supporting Vulkan 1.3 and translating DirectX code. Proton 11 supports ARM/FEX natively, which would make Apple Silicon a first-class citizen if you use Asahi drivers. macOS users will be stuck with Game Porting Toolkit and it's lackluster support; iPad/AppleTV/iPhone users have no options whatsoever, presumably to redirect their attention to the App Store that Apple profits from so handsomely.
It is not just a translation layer, as much as a great effort of the open source community to force-port every game in existence to Linux. The effort also includes stuff like ntsync that gives the Linux kernel Windows-y APIs for performance.
I doubt Apple has any interest in any of that. I don't really blame them.
And purely in principle, why are we all going through so much effort to save game devs from writing good OS-independent arch-independent code?
Apple doesn't need to implement ntsync to support Proton or DXVK, either. macOS' synchronization primitives do the job just as well as esync or fsync does.
> why are we all going through so much effort to save game devs from writing good OS-independent arch-independent code?
Because Apple doesn't support OS-independent APIs. They also don't support old runtimes, so users will inevitably have to run the Windows version once the native code breaks.
Valve ported several of their games natively to macOS, and almost every single one of them is broken on modern Macs. Valve didn't change the game tech, it's all runtime breakage.
I don't really know enough about graphics to discuss point (1). From what I understand, Apple GPUs don't really fit the Vulkan model too cleanly, and the Asahi Vulkan drivers are significantly less performant than Metal (how much of that is due to beta/community status vs. architectural bottleneck I have no idea).
But let's say they provide (1).
Providing (2) would simply be a big mistake. It is a huge mistake of Windows, of the C++ programming language and of the x86 ISA (none of which are very good). Linux distros do not provide this either, beyond the core kernel syscalls and glibc. It is certainly a very big ask and not something trivial.
(2) is precisely the reason why nobody can port games to macOS anymore, and largely why ARM is a second-class citizen in PC gaming too. You cannot depreciate things like AVX or 32-bit library execution modes, and then demand native builds get made to 20-year-old games. Apple Silicon's ISA extensions like AMX are not a replacement for x86's SIMD extensions, it's not standardized through ARM or supported in Asahi either. Native Mac games need to incorporate Apple's proprietary and unstable tech like Metal and the Apple Silicon microarchitecture, which makes their games unstable and difficult to support in the long term. Translation is Apple Silicon's only choice for game preservation and mainstream game support.
> Apple GPUs don't really fit the Vulkan model too cleanly
This is a misconception that stems from Metal's preference for tile-based deferred rendering pipelines. Vulkan 1.3 is fully viable even on the M1 onward, which is enough to support DirectX12 translation in Proton. The performance of Asahi's drivers are not any worse than the official Vulkan drivers that ARM provides for TBDR-optimized GPUs like the Mali line.
Games should simply not be written for a particular architecture. The rendering part of the game engine should already be abstracted away from the particular rendering API (there are other significant platforms which do not support Vulkan: PS5 and Xbox, which your game should be capable of targeting). And the math library should have fallbacks to standard C (or standard C++ etc.) and then specialized implementations for AVX, NEON, SVE, etc.
Now, sure, NEON is slower than AVX-256/512. But backending to NEON or even standard C is certainly going to be faster than running stuff over an x86-to-ARM translation layer.
Sooner or later the Steam Deck 2 will release, probably on an ARM platform (if the Steam Frame compatibility layers go well), and millions upon millions upon millions of dollars of electricity will simply be wasted running x86-to-ARM, Win32-to-Linux and Direct3D-to-Vulkan dynamic compatibility layers when, if the games were well written in the first place, they could simply be trivially recompiled.
> 32-bit library execution modes
If your application assumes pointers are 32-bits, or any particular size, or even any set of particular sizes, it's completely broken.
As for (1), if Asahi Vulkan drivers are really good, that just goes to show why Apple isn't supporting Vulkan. Metal applications seem to be faster, and Apple wants to push devs to make their apps for the faster API.
(1) is just common sense. Go ask your favorite LLM; does hardware-level TBDR optimization degrade basic Vulkan support? No, it doesn't, and we have dozens of mobile GPUs that support Vulkan to prove it. Metal is not "faster" and it's architecture does not preclude high-performance Vulkan drivers in any way. If you don't believe me, ask anyone else.
Obviously an IBM 704 program will run faster on an IBM 704 emulator than on a hardware IBM 704. That's not an argument to keep writing apps for the IBM 704 and "just translate them".
> Your ideal world where programmers support and recompile games 3 decades after release does not exist in reality.
Happens in literally every other programming industry though.
The reason this cannot happen in the games industry is that game developers are not good software developers. They are much more akin to physics-numerical-methods people who can write some magic spaghetti-Fortran that runs really fast and does black magic, but no one can maintain, debug or integrate.
Gaming is also a software support game.
Especially in the last few years, preservation has been a big topic. Gamers want their purchases to keep working in the future, not being broken by an OS update as it often happens with macOS (compared to Windows)
so much better framing than typical truck hit :))
love it
However, the guy who decided to put a useless button on the side of the remote that interrupts whatever you're watching, should get fired immediately. It's almost every day I grab the remote and press it by accident, and have to switch back to what I was watching, and resume playback, because Netflix exits out of the stream.
Sadly, Apple TV is the only Hollywood-approved streaming device that isn't a total trash heap.
the "upgrade to 18.4" took my iphone to 26.whatever and siri got even worst... siri set an alarm for 10:40 (creates one at 12:08)... NO, delete that one, 10 40 (does nothing)... hey siri... (ajum), delete the previous alarm... (done!) now set an alarm at 10:40 (alarm at 4pm....)... eventually you get tired... you go to the alarms app.. and then there is the previous "deleted" alarm and the other one...
Now I am worried about what the new versions of iOS will bring us, I hope that the "we removed the crap" wasn't just a thing of this year, and that iOS will go back to high software standards. Phone prices are really high for me now, and I would like for my poor little iphone 13 to survive another couple of years.
I'll probably switch to Android once my phone and watch batteries degrade enough to annoy me
They need to similarly make Gemini hot-swappable to anything on Android and don't want to.
Apple was just first because they're a bigger and more visible target.
Guess also don't give money to Google (and other privacy-invading, usually US companies)?
disclaimer: I only use Siri for voice dial (worked on my Ericsson T20!), and it is extremely unreliable, and setting kitchen timers.
I do get the point of it, stuff needs to be interchangeable. BUT. Security and privacy need to be taken into account.
Apple has a track record of picking user privacy even if it makes their services objectively worse. Now EU makes them open up the APIs. Cool, I'm all for it.
Now who makes sure that Joe-Bobs Trusty AI is as secure as Apple Private Compute and won't just store my chat transcripts verbatim on an open S3 folder? EU law doesn't say.
The PR flack will 100% hit Apple though, the fact that the user whose data was leaked used JBTAI is buried in the second to last paragraph under the fold between two ads. Apple will be in the headline with all caps.
Same goes for Google, they don't want their AI to be interchangeable with something, because the lack of analytics will hurt their ad revenue. And maybe some lip service to privacy too.
(And my infinite pet peeve, why is Apple App Store bad and needs to be opened up, but Playstation, Xbox and Nintendo app stores are cool and 3rd party options aren't enforced by law?)
macOS 27 itself won't run on Intel chips, just Apple Silicon
but it does still have Rosetta (macOS 28 will drop it completely though)
Gotta say, a massive downgrade.
But my experience with 26 hasn’t been great. From the top of my head: Random repeated flashing window chrome in the background, notifications that keep on showing while everything is disabled, Finder tooltips from four windows down, tooltips that don’t disappear, Java update interruptions that hijack your flow - just when you where about to hit enter for something else the pop-up shows and bam: you’re installing it. There is nothing right about the update process of Java anyway. Spotlight search has completely stopped working. People I’m mailing with for over a decade are not suggested when drafting a mail. Clicking on the dock icon does not reveal the app. The list goes on and on. It has been a total grueling experience. Worst in all my experiences since System 7.
I’ve shut down the notification system at some point, which alleviated the constant reminders of non-compatibility with the next OS version. Being reminded of that four times a day for months on end is just insulting, even if I used compatible versions. There was no way to shut it off. Notifications are lazily designed and completely uninspired, as they could also adjust the app icons and so on and actually do it right.
I promised myself to update once it came out and then just screen record everything to collect residual garbage to help the Apple team make this stuff work well for everyone.
Sorry to let this all out, but it has been on my mind for a while and I’m happy they say they focussed on quality. Therefore I’m upgrading asap this time.
launchctl disable "gui/$(id -u)/com.apple.notificationcenterui" killall NotificationCenter 2>/dev/null || true
launchctl disable "gui/$(id -u)/com.apple.usernoted" killall usernoted 2>/dev/null || true
To refine my statement on lazy or non-design. Notifications can be valuable, for me i'd like backup notifications and find my messages. Only those, ever. When only those are enabled, MacOS has their own secret settings and is allowed to nag about updates, incompatibility and maybe some other things i don't remember. Part of the problem is the illusion of control, and being spammy about self-importance of new OS versions. Great for some users, insulting to me.
This is made even worse by "focus" which still shows notifications but without the text. Then i'm distracted AND i don't know why.
One exception maybe is for music producers. For some reason AU/VST/DAW developers don't seem to take part in the beta programs and their software can take a while to get updated. But I've happily been playing with Bitwig (with some Arturia VSTs) over the weekend on Golden Gate without issue.
For anyone jumping versions: remember that Apple messed with the login keychain not being able to be backed up in the most recent Tahoe release [1], which means that issue will be around in Golden Gate.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49651046
The Tahoe "App View" / Spotlight just lists my 30 installed apps intermingled with Apple System Apps, which I hardly ever use. Hard coded categories, no way to re-order as far as I can tell.
Seems like the closest is dragging ~/Applications to the Dock.
iOS 27 is pretty good though.
There have certainly been changes like Liquid Glass that were for the worse overall (though the degree of which had been highly overblown). But outside of directional disagreement with a release, I can’t say I’ve ever seen an issue where I’ve regretted pulling the trigger on an update.
cool beans.
I imagine they wouldn't shift as much hardware that way though.
The foundation models run on the device for access to the local graph database and to interact with local actions (intents).
Not everything runs locally, but a local model still needs to run to understand that it needs to recruit help, to package up a subset of data for the external agent, and to perform actions on its behalf as well as return results.
Without the local agent, you are shuttling off all your data to be persisted by an AI cloud provider in case they need it.
I'm aware of the privacy implications. I'm talking about Apple's "private cloud". All of this data is already on iCloud anyway.
>The foundation models run on the device for access to the local graph database and to interact with local actions (intents).
This does not require an on-device model.
Siri is definitely worth using now, even if it remains still a work-in-progress/needs continued refinement. It can surprise you in good ways, but it isn't consistently good yet.
The keyboard remains unfixed, as is tradition. The same issues they've "fixed" like three or four releases now, seemingly are identically broken, and I'm lost faith they CAN fix it.
The iOS Keyboard and Search on Windows, are like the perpetually broken things that both companies have "fixed" every year for the last ten+ years and yet... It is almost farcical as this point.
Un-enrolling from the beta fixed it.
— I'm sorry, OptionOfT. I'm afraid I can't do that.
I normally don't complain that iOS/MacOS isn't customizable because the defaults are good enough to work for me but that voice to text man its like they completely forgot about it.
Some stuff, as you can see, isn’t perfect :-)
I don’t think it is parakeet v2 level, but it’s good enough to not be frustrating
The best workaround is a third party app that lets you run Parakeet V3 or Whisper on your phone. There are quite a few.
I really wish we could add our own custom prompts for the new Siri. My most common usage of Siri is "Remind me at XX:00 to do XYZ." The most common response from Siri now is, "Sorry, did you say XYZ or XZY?" Two very similar things, the difference between which is inconsequential. Dealing with this "Sorry" has made reminders take too many steps. Wish I could throw in a "If I'm setting a reminder and you don't quite hear me, just put both things in one line and I'll figure it out myself"
Many people have complained before. Honestly I ONLY search for app names in spotlight search or application window, it should be trivial to make it actually work. Maybe i just need to vibecode some alternative search bar :(
Aah those were the days.
These are too, but those were as well.
And it offers me THREE different chess games I could install!
Search 'True', you'll get True Detective and True Blood show up as the top results. That seems to work well.
But then if you add a space making it 'True ', 'Bill Hader' is the top result!
And sometimes, it finds what you want, but before you can select it, it decides that it has found something better, and places that in the place where you wanted to select, causing you to select the wrong thing. And then it thinks that because you selected this, it must be what you want, and starts to push it to the top…
Search is definitely frustrating.
Also, search inside the Settings app has been broken for many releases now. I always wonder if anyone inside Apple is actually using macOS or iOS.
It also has some strange behaviour when it’s not in focus, but hasn’t been closed.
I just leave every application open and command tab to them now.
Q: For those amongst us who are UI experts, what is it called when dynamic lists populate unpredictably while a finger-tap is in-progress?
a) start query and see initial results
b) start finger-navigation, moving finger over initial results
c) start finger-tap descent
d) underlying list is updated, replacing future finger-tap destination's UI element with another
e) finger-tap meets different element than intended
...I've been seeing this search style in more and more places recently, and I hate it. Let me type my search, then hit enter, then you can go find what I asked for. Don't slow everything down by searching on every character I type.
- Do "normies" perform better with this behavior?
- Or is the goal to disturb the user and make something impractical like in Google, so that people click on ads? Software has turned into a curse. The machines have risen.
But speaking of quality overall (outside of the search glitch) - I use dual 5k LG monitors with my work MacBook and can get the MacOS Display Manager process to crash if I just enable variable rate refresh and put the computer to sleep, then wake it up. Apparently a known issue for a few years, still not fixed.
Some people don’t like that. If the showed Chess for CHE you could still find other apps if you kept typing.
Maybe there are also people who like the lottery of results changing the instant you click on the app you want because ir adds exictment to this lives.
It "works" exactly the same on Windows. How is that even possible?
The other issue with Mac search is that it never tells you when it’s done, so you can’t tell if it searched and failed to find something or is still searching.
Maybe they are overthinking it.
The amount of misclicks daily because of crappy slow-but-should-be-fast search probably offsets by 10x the amount of time required to hit "enter" for the search to start.
mdutil -E -a
That command will erase and rebuild Spotlight index on all volumes.
Since Tahoe, Spotlight has multiple modes. You might have better luck forcing it into folder & files mode. That's command-2. So command-space, spotlight UI appears, keep holding command key, press 2. There's also 1 for applications only, 3 for "actions" and 4 for clipboard history.
Bloody daft.
With the Finder open, go to Settings > Advanced, and change the drop-down at the bottom to "Search the Current Folder". This is something I do on the first run of every new Mac I set up.
"Search this Mac" should be confined to Spotlight OR as a fallback if the local folder doesn't return anything.
Breaking interfaces, Linus Torvalds had something to say about it that Apple should heed.
Check out Raycast / Alfred.
Also enjoying Rectangles WM.
sudo mdutil -E /
You can check indexing status with:
mdutil -s /
After that it’s usually fine again until I start pushing the disk limit.
Every sibling comment's issues I've experienced. But a reindex after freeing enough disk space seems to be a semi-stable solution for me. If only I could write a tool to remind me to free disk space before it screws up spotlight. It would be nice if MacOS put the index on its own partition.
Been running the beta since June -- on the latest beta now and 8 out of ten times to continue the conversation with Siri (most notably in the car) I have to constantly say "Hey Siri."
One thing it's current UX has over chatGPT voice tech as it shows you the text and provides visuals while chatGPT's UI shows no text and or visuals.
https://www.alfredapp.com/
Mostly because people still expect to use it to find "Recipe for Egg Salad.docx" without searching the entire Internet or executing some bizarre natural language query.
https://github.com/askielboe/lightning-launcher
https://tinystart.app/
Windows is the same - searching the fs is faster and more accurate than using these 'quick search' tools, which are borderline broken.
There needs to be more rage at search in Mail.app.
It’s quicker to rollback through them all than it is to use search, but when you get tens or hundreds a day it’s excruciating.
Please Apple, fix email search.
Paid but worth every penny.
It is so incredibly bad that for years I have assumed it must be me or my specific laptop. And then the years go by I just accept it.
Anytime Apple is mentioned "comically bad search" should be mentioned. It is the association I have in my mind.
Use EasyFind for no-nonsense file search: https://www.devontechnologies.com/apps/freeware
https://imgur.com/a/pmtihO1
That's a user error, you simply had "This Mac" selected (preselected) instead of narrowing scope to be Applications.
I typed "printer" so I can get to my printer settings and the first three are printer icons/emoji. I cant imagine why these would be more important
Even weather was/is comically bad. Ask it anything specific and it would fall over, repeating the broadest, least helpful version of weather data, even if all that data is clearly available in the ios weather app. Specifics on wind, precipitation hourly, etc.
So no, you can't really ask a homepod for the weather either - Homepod's weather was more like a shitty version of sticking your head outside and looking up at the sky.
Now that we are living in The Future, I am dumbfounded how e.g. dynamically populated lists change their content reliably to something I did not want, during the phase of interaction where my finger is descending onto the target. Click! Not what I want.
Feels like a lost art which will be "discovered" again in the next 15 years.
I know that Windows has some equivalent stuff, that the antivirus uses to disallow opening files before they got scanned, so I'd wager that API is functionally required to not miss any changes.
Yet Windows indexing is one of the worst pieces of software in existence and frequently gets out of sync.
I have stopped submitting bugs because of the tedious bug reporting app, only submit really bad ones. Can't they give some helping functions to finding the correct categories based on problem description?
Otherwise macOS 27 is mostly okay-ish though, especially compared to 26.
siri: do you mean livingroom, […] or everywhere?
i rest my case. i can reproduce this every time. siri is the biggest pos software apple ever made (followed closely by the ios keyboard).
Just tried it this morning after my shower:
- Siri, what's the weather like?
- I don't know where you are
- ... use the the geolocation??
- You need to unlock first
So yeah, still unusable to me even for the most basic shit
Except when it was done it really had done 27.
Lots and lots of Reddit posts with the same bug. It’s not just you.
Out of the gate, that isn't a good sign.
This comment is a dud. The whole point of this update was to focus on fixing bugs and improving stability. They literally rewrote the CPU scheduler to improve UI performance. Safari UI and page rendering is no longer shit compared to how it was on iPadOS 26. There’s an insane amount of under the hood changes for this release, something people have been asking for them to do for a while — focus on making things run better instead of adding endless new half baked features.
Updates don’t always have to bring shiny, flashy new features. Holy shit.
I don't mind liquid glass and can handle the transparency mostly, but the notifications are just god-awful and difficult to read. But reducing transparency is a much harder setting now, I don't like it, the previous setting was just right for me. And I can't find that slider anymore...
I've been running it since 18 (first thing I do is go into accessibility and turn off any animations and screen effects that take GPU cycles)
The old setting was the perfect balance for me. Ah well, iPhone 12 mini is nearly dead, am eyeballing something with GrapheneOS anyway...
> I’ve been happily using the totally frosted look (slider all the way to the right) for a few weeks now. While I didn’t mind Liquid Glass as much as other folks, the frosted setting ensures I can read and see the text, menus and icons properly.
https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/ive-been-usi...
Wow.
All of that is fine, of course, just as long as you’re aware. I also hate Liquid Glass, but unfortunately don’t think I can avoid it for another year. I just hope that the stuff they rolled back makes it bearable.
(My relatives iPhone updated and its just bad all around. And with increased font size for accessibility, elements don't cover all the text. Feels rushed and not the promised Apple land.)
Waiting 10 years for the next major overhaul seems like a bad plan.
I still have no idea how they let it ship. Sure, it's not a productivity killing defect, just a head-scratcher that makes you question the entire software stack.
for the last couple months I’ve been able to record videos and watch those videos but am unable to share them, whether on instagram, whatsapp, airdrop or imessage. some limited luck saving the same video to the file system and sharing from there
searching this issue is notoriously difficult, and there is one partially related thread on Apple support forums talking about spacial h264 and spacial h265 video codecs further complicated by being wrappers, with something suggesting the latter is the issue, the final post having a bewildered user asking for clarification that the iphone can create videos that even it cant use
I looked in my camera settings and there are soooo many switches and file formats now, that its impossible to know which edge case has been run into, and there’s no reset button to put the settings back to their most compatible
I hope this OS refresh fixed that
What does "unable" mean?
(while IOS 26.7 did not)
Web Driver
New Features
- Allow your agent to connect to a Safari browser for development and debugging via the Safari MCP server. (176038457)
Related:
Introducing the Safari MCP server for web developers
https://webkit.org/blog/18136/introducing-the-safari-mcp-ser...
(§) https://developer.apple.com/documentation/safari-release-not...
This is how to enable: chrome://inspect/#remote-debugging
[1]: https://github.com/achiya-automation/safari-mcp#vs-apples-of...
It's using a clone of my real Firefox profile, and can "ping" me if it encounters a page that needs my human input, like a login page (as I don't give it access to my password manager) or captcha page. Although sometimes it "bypasses" the captcha page by itself, even though I've instructed it not to...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48769639
Thanks for checking. What a mess. I'm so sick of the workarounds that have to make.