Live data from Hacker News

Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

reviews.ofb.biz

41–50 of 801 posts

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#41
One thing that has been slowly creeping in is a little bit of a Microsoft-like "you will use our feature", like launching apple music every time I hit headphone controls, or nagging me to turn on reactions every time I start a video call. In some ways that's more annoying than the outright bugs, as they could choose not to be that way and market themselves as not being that way.

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#42
post #32

I'm done with macOS, I've migrated to Linux for my general purpose computing. With every new release of macOS, Gatekeeper is becoming harder and harder to bypass, increasing Apple's control over what software can be run on macOS, forcing apps to be signed with an Apple Developer ID. While I'm happy they are taking security seriously, I'm seriously creeped out that macOS sends hashes of every executable I run to their…

My group makes a custom executable to reflash a hardware device we produce. We build it for Linux and Darwin.

Trying to get the program to work with our Mac users has become harder and harder. These are all internal developers.

Enabling developer mode and allowing Terminal execution isn't enough. Disabling the quarantine bit works - sometimes - but now we're getting automated nastygrams from corporate IT threatening to kick the laptops off the network. I'm exhausted. The emergency workaround, which I tell nobody about, is way less secure than if they just let us run our own software on our own computer.

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#43
post #19

Not just their software, the hardware is beginning to be get pretty unwieldily complicated. From an OS / software perspective: Have a "core" macOS that has none of the apps / integrations are baked in at an OS level. You install the things you want, how you want - eg iMessage, Mail, and then iCloud if you want to sync it, and Photos etc. Have a slim, fast, stable OS that I can just turn on and get going with. From th…

I agree. It seems ridiculous that an app like Messages is considered so much part of the OS given what it does. I don’t use it, I don’t care about it, but it seems like it could be a regular app that updates independently of the OS, along with Maps, Notes, and so on. So many macOS “upgrades” nowadays seem to be Apple tinkering with such apps rather than the actual OS experience.

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#44
post #32

I'm done with macOS, I've migrated to Linux for my general purpose computing. With every new release of macOS, Gatekeeper is becoming harder and harder to bypass, increasing Apple's control over what software can be run on macOS, forcing apps to be signed with an Apple Developer ID. While I'm happy they are taking security seriously, I'm seriously creeped out that macOS sends hashes of every executable I run to their…

I don’t know if it’s just me, but i want more Gatekeeper, not less - help me stay safer. Or is it a security theatre? Malware producers can sign things just fine?

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#45
Agree. Apple needs to clean up shop - MacOS has been egregiously worsening year over year. Some features like Universal Control and Continuity Camera are legitimately awesome, but they do not make up for the INSANELY slow System Settings app that gets harder to navigate with each release and which has >2s wait times for the right pane to respond to a change in the left pane. Steve Jobs would have fired the person responsible for that overhaul three years ago, it's embarrassing. Messages too needs a ground-up rewrite. Getting more elaborate emoji tapbacks doesn't make up for fundamental instability and poor syncing behavior. C'mon!

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#46
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> prioritize the results I want (apps, not internet garbage). Settings -> Spotlight -> Websites, UNCHECK

Does not work. I happen to know a fair bit about mdutil and the like and confirmed that does exactly nothing for my particular issue. A full Spotlight index reset works temporarily, but after a while it just conks out again. Also, I vaguely remember there being a way to _order_ results, not just disable them.

I have a vaguely related, kind of interesting story related to search indexes, but on windows instead of mac.

My C drive was was super full for some reason I couldn't understand, and Explorer couldn't tell me where the data was. There was about 100GB just unaccounted for.

I don't even use the search index.

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#47
post #32

I'm done with macOS, I've migrated to Linux for my general purpose computing. With every new release of macOS, Gatekeeper is becoming harder and harder to bypass, increasing Apple's control over what software can be run on macOS, forcing apps to be signed with an Apple Developer ID. While I'm happy they are taking security seriously, I'm seriously creeped out that macOS sends hashes of every executable I run to their…

The hashes are completely anonymized and not that intrusive. I'd rather they do it that way and have a global view of possible malware attacks than the complete free-for-all that other platforms "enjoy".

But here's my (unpopular) take as a GNOME user and using Fedora immutable distros + flatpaks -- I suspect Linux is going to go in a broadly similar direction. Maybe not soon (even flatpaks aren't universally acclaimed), but sometime.

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#48
post #25
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Adding to this, a solution might be enabling continuous releases and leaning into release channels could help in terms of getting more out to users. In practice it's a challenge because the OS bundles a lot of separate things into releases, namely Safari changes are tied to OS changes which are tied to Apple Pay features which are tied to so on and so on. It would require a lot of feature flagging and extra complexit…

I think they’re painted into a corner with WWDC. Everything has to be a crowd pleasing brain busting wow drop each year. I’m certain there are teams that design their entire workflow around the yearly wwdc. It honestly feels like an executive leadership problem to solve.

If that is a significant part of the problem, then moving WWDC from an in-person keynote attended mostly by nerds and glanced at by the media to an overproduced movie geared at the media and ordinary consumers first probably didn't help. They could've gone back to a stage presentation after COVID, but some of that transition had already been happening prior to that (I recall an increase in how many jokes/bits they were doing in the late 2010's, although that could just be my perception).

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#49
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does not work. I happen to know a fair bit about mdutil and the like and confirmed that does exactly nothing for my particular issue. A full Spotlight index reset works temporarily, but after a while it just conks out again. Also, I vaguely remember there being a way to _order_ results, not just disable them.

> Also, I vaguely remember there being a way to _order_ results, not just disable them. Good memory! Apple removed this feature in El Capitan.

I'm ancient by today's AI standards :)

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#50

This is an interesting idea, and I am actually curious what Apple is going to do going forward. A "Snow Leopard"-esque release would be nice, but I think what would be better is an LTS release. Historically, you get a new Mac and you usually only get 5-6 years before they drop your model from the latest release. This has always made some sense to me, as after 4-6 years, you do start to feel it. I bought an M1 Max tha…

> I bought an M1 Max that is now almost 4 years old and it still feels new to me.

How are the keycaps doing? Mine looked awful after about 2 years of relatively light use, developing really obvious ugly shiny patches (particularly bad on the space bar), quite a letdown on an otherwise great machine.

(Realised that you can actually buy replacements and swap them yourself, via the self-service repair store, so have replaced them once, but am starting to notice shiny patches again on the new set)

Post reply on HN