I haven’t run Windows since 2014. I got into the Apple ecosystem in 2018-2019 (first Mac, then first iPhone). By 2021, I was completely disenchanted and bought a Framework DIY (now running Ubuntu/GNOME). Honestly, the only thing I truly miss when not using a Mac is easy copy-paste in the terminal. In every other way, GNU/Linux is a superior experience.
The erosion of the Mac experience
271–280 of 490 posts
Re: The erosion of the Mac experience
#272I got my dad a Mac about 10 years ago, and never got into the experience. I mean I got it for him, used a couple of days to tell him where was everything, delivered and then came back to my trusted thinkpad with i3. About a year and a half I got a macbook from my employer even as a replacement from a T480 which was awful because of thermal throttling. After a couple of months, I got the m1 macbook air as my personal…
Yeah… I mean I love the “don’t have to think about anything” experience of all Apple products. That’s the reason why I use their stuff. But at least in the last couple of years before the M1, the number of things that were just plain annoying… it really made me look for an alternative. And really… there isn’t one. Windows is so annoying to use and even the Linux fanatics I work with manage to run into trouble like on…
This is my perspective as well. Apple products are basically out of the box usable for me (short of a couple of helper apps on MacOS) and frankly just do not crash or cause me any downtime.
But…I am admittedly well past my “OS tinkering” days. I finally realized how much unproductive time I spent trying to make whatever OS I was using “productive” and visually “correct” and realized it wasn’t net positive. So I just decided the default options was good enough, short of my couple of must have helper apps (Rectangle and Hiddenbar)
Re: The erosion of the Mac experience
#273Putting myself in Apple's shoes: I just don't see the financial incentive to invest a whole lot in the native GUI story for the Mac in 2022 Regular people mostly use iOS. Many don't have traditional computers at all. That was originally the Mac's core market. It still has a strong professional market- but many of the serious professional tools (Adobe, Blender, IDEA, etc) use their own custom in-house GUI frameworks,…
This. People just are not building, crafting and using desktop apps specifically for Mac anymore. That ship has sailed. They either use their own frameworks and build on all 3 platforms, or use Electron. On a lot of daily things people use iOS. I am thinking what apps I actually use on my Mac the most. It’s Chrome, VSCode, Terminal. I still use Preview a lot though… I hope the Swift pushers won’t touch that . If they…
Yeah... I could totally forgive them for sleeping on the third-party GUI frameworks, but I can't forgive them for neglecting or botching first-party apps/core parts of the OS. And those don't even make business sense to de-prioritize. I don't really know what's happening there but it's not good; the Apple Music app for Mac is one of the buggiest, slowest Mac apps I've ever used. It's distressing that this is the treatment their flagship services are getting.
Re: The erosion of the Mac experience
#274Earlier quoted context omitted.
Apple constantly spams you with popup ads for their cloud services, far worse IMHO than any start menu nonsense. To each their own.
Where? I have several Macs in my office, I might have seen a question on upgrade, but that's it. In Safari?
Not the commenter but macOS regularly spams people with:
- Ads to try Apple Music free for a month.
- Ads to try News+
- Ads to try Fitness+
- Try Safari (if it’s not your default browser)
- Try/log into iCloud if you’re not logged into iCloud.
- Try the latest macOS release if you aren’t on it.
As an aside, you do not want to even log into the Mac App Store with a personal account on a work computer.
Logging into just the Mac App Store effectively logs you into your iCloud on that machine and sensitive personal data is then strewn across various files under ~/Library. The iCloud sysprefs will claim you are not logged into iCloud but ~/Library will show you the truth.
Re: The erosion of the Mac experience
#275Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m a Mac user and have 4 monitors plus my laptop’s screen. I use this https://rectangleapp.com/ to add snappiness to my windows. And it kicks ass
Which is not a stock macOS app. Which is what the point was. Stock macOS sucks with window and monitor management. I run three screens and it's aggravating sometimes.
If you go back to the earliest days of the Mac there have always been third-party apps to improve the functionnality of your sytem. It's what's been expected of users. There used to be a time when third-party Windows style Start Menus and bars were all the rage. I know it's a cultural, not technical, difference, but unless your work restricts what you can install you will be much happier going with the flow. Many window snapping utilities exist and many others who help with multiple monitor setups.
With the great attention to detail of macOS third-party developers, you can be sure those apps will give you a seamless experience.
Re: The erosion of the Mac experience
#276Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don't worry I'm European and 90% of developers I know think exactly like you (and me). It's just that the HN crowd is typically North American, and people tend to like what they have grown with.
I live in Europe and 95% of the engineers I've worked with here in major companies use a Mac. A few use Linux, absolutely no one I know (300+ developers I've interacted/paired with in the past 7 years) had a Windows machine. Not a single one.
Outside iOS projects, and our designers, I have seldom see people use Mac's.
In fact our Java folks get macbooks as option, and eventually many of whom end up migrating to ThinkPads with Red-Hat/Windows, when starting to deal with complex workloads.
On the .NET teams everyone is on Windows ThinkPads.
Re: The erosion of the Mac experience
#277I feel like I may be the only developer that prefers Windows to MacOs. I really, really just do not get the "Mac Experience". It feels so clunky and counter intuitive. - Why does the alt tab equivalent cycle through applications first, and I need another shortcut to cycle through the windows of that application? When I have an IDE with 5x instances, hosting different projects, it's a pain switching back to the projec…
The design choices to be different really grind my gears. For example the window close buttons. There's no reason for a western user group to put action buttons on the top left of the window, but Mac did it, to be different.
The close button was top left since 1984. Working in a left to right language means eyes and pointer spend more time on the left.
Re: The erosion of the Mac experience
#278Windows sucks MacOS is headed towards suck If you want a glimpse of the future of desktops : r/unixporn
As a former moderator of r/unixporn (I went by u/fps_co1ncidence) and a longtime ricer of all types of Linux WMs/DEs, I can most confidentially assure you that there is nothing futuristic about what goes on there, just a lot of pointless tinkering and dotfile copy pasting.
The macOS experience is exponentially more polished and Apple will have to screw up phenomenally even from their current position to feel any threat from the FOSS community.
Re: The erosion of the Mac experience
#279Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly where have you been working? I haven't seen that many macs outside design departments in any big European company I have visited. Some big companies such as Sony actually have Linux as their first choice, windows second.
Large-ish tech companies in Sweden.
Absolutely not my experience from Scandinavian companies (Volvo, Ericsson, Saab, ABB,...)
Re: The erosion of the Mac experience
#280Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not the mystical interactions or feel of widgets, layout, and function that are the problem, it's bad UX paradigms, declining consistency between apps and across versions (a Mac hallmark), buggy software on an aggressive annual schedule, holes and rot in developer documentation, constant treadmill of Xcode and device updates, and general lack of attention to detail in Mac apps. I've been a Mac user and dev for t…
Could you give an example of some “bad UX paradigms”?
Sure. I don't keep a running list of this (and I feel like I've seen some, but can't find them now) so it's a little off the cuff...
- Scrollbars not appearing until you attempt scrolling, so no indication that there is more content to scroll to. If you mouse-wheel scroll, then try to move over to click and drag, sometimes the scrollbar disappears before you can grab it. Yes, you can change this default, but... it's the default. Good examples: Dock & Menu Bar System Preferences sidebar, Spotlight results, Finder windows in list view.
- Having to hover over the more inner portion of a notification to get its close button to appear.
- Unintuitive Finder toolbar buttons for changing types of view, grouping, and 'More...'. Years on I still click the wrong ones routinely.
- Try searching your own music instead of Apple Music in the Music app. And then do it again. You are fighting the system to access your own content.
Here's an example of something that to date still is adhered to pretty well: having dialogs with OK/Cancel/possibly other interactions be ordered such that OK is to the right and the default, non-destructive action is the one that is both visually highlighted and resounds to the Return key. And Cancel responds to the Esc key. If you use another system where you literally have to pause for even a split-second and figure out which button is tied to which key action and whether you are going to lose some work — or read the informative text to parse it out — it drives you batty. Have a browse over https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline... to see the sorts of things I'm talking about.
There are countless little interactions now that, if you've only used other computing systems, just feel like the things you need to do to accomplish tasks. Often they are "intuitive" to pro computer users because those users have gotten used to thinking how the computer wants them to think. But, if you've ever used a Mac thing done well, each use is a delight. Sometimes you can almost reflexively use a new interface and be delighted that the right thing just happened. If you then experience the sorts of degradations that have been happening over recent years, it's a double punch: one, a tedious annoyance and two, a reminder that it used to be — and can be — different.