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Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

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101–110 of 801 posts

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#101
Apple needs to restore primacy to the UI. MacOS and iOS used to feel non-blocking with a UI that would always respond regardless of how long a remote or long-running background task required.

Now iOS and MacOS feel sluggish and slothlike, waiting on IO, typically from a remote call. The webdevs have taken over.

Yes they need to remove cruft, and also re-hire the ruthless UI Nazis who would enforce 120hz responsiveness at all cost.

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#102
post #10

There are some factual "gaps" there about how good Snow Leopard was, but I understand the sentiment. As someone who's been a Mac user since System 6 and has been consistently using Macs alongside PCs _daily_ for over 20 years I can say that Apple's software quality (either in terms of polish or just plain QA) has steadily decreased. It's just that me and other old-time switchers have stopped complaining about it and…

If only there was a good Linux version of Alfred.

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#103
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also while Apples software quality has definitely diminished over the years, Windows in the same period has utterly CRATERED. Like I get along fine with 11 for my gaming PC but with every single update one feature or another becomes notably broken.

One word: Bazzite.

That’s not a word

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#104
I don't think it's just an Apple thing. I think it's just a big company thing. For example, the YouTube app has so many errors in the very common path, such as opening comments on channels and so on. I think after a while big companies simply become hollow from the inside and self-combust. Just like large animals have a cancer protection gene, I think there is a max size companies can get before they sell combust and they do not have a cancer preventing gene.

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#105

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 rep…

If you have AppleCare they will basically rebuild your MacBook for ~$200. I got MBP M1 Max usb ports and top case replaced and a bunch of other stuff I didn’t even ask for but they replaced with new stuff. Felt like a new machine when I got it back.

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#106

I don't think that's quite right. Snow Leopard was a lot of changes to a lot of the OS code base and wasn't great out of the gate, taking multiple dot releases, like all large-scale software updates do, to stabilize and bugfix enough to be "good." There is no silver bullet, just a lot of lead ones and the answer to Apple's quality problem is to begin baking QA back into the process in a meaningful way after letting i…

I think some people would be surprised how effective reaching out to apple is for squashing bugs. Three times now I've been assigned an engineer to pin point the bug I was experiencing, after which it was fixed in the next dot release.

By all means people should complain on forums (why not?), but a forum post complaining about some years-old bug isn't going to be anywhere near as effective as contacting apple's support or filing a bug report.

I'm not a developer, I'm just a regular user - so if I can get all this special treatment, so can you.

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#107
post #10

There are some factual "gaps" there about how good Snow Leopard was, but I understand the sentiment. As someone who's been a Mac user since System 6 and has been consistently using Macs alongside PCs _daily_ for over 20 years I can say that Apple's software quality (either in terms of polish or just plain QA) has steadily decreased. It's just that me and other old-time switchers have stopped complaining about it and…

I just wanted to say that I've been a keen reader of your blog for ... I guess, decades. I appreciate your work. Thank you.

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#108
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I understand that you're doing it on principle, but for a software development team, 99$/year is a really minuscule price to pay to be able to build / notarise / distribute software. Developers pay exorbitant amount of money for much lesser value, and the idea of putting your teammates at risk to stick it to apple is kind of sad bordering with negligence from a business POV.

The principle is what matters. The amount is not the issue. The issue is that there is a cost at all. "It's so cheap" is never an excuse for charging for something that should be free. In this case, running software you have no intent to charge for, on your computer. It's as if someone started charging $0.01/month for breathable air. "But $0.01 is trivial," would not excuse it.

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#109
Great post.

BTW, there is an (earlier) example of Snow Leopard in the Microsoft ecosystem -- that would be Windows XP, which similarly avoided major new subsystems and new applications built-into-the-OS, but was remarkably fast and stable for its time.

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#110
post #10

There are some factual "gaps" there about how good Snow Leopard was, but I understand the sentiment. As someone who's been a Mac user since System 6 and has been consistently using Macs alongside PCs _daily_ for over 20 years I can say that Apple's software quality (either in terms of polish or just plain QA) has steadily decreased. It's just that me and other old-time switchers have stopped complaining about it and…

Apple (at least current leadership) is programmatically degrading it's products so people would buy a new one. Who expects anything good from such a team.

That statement makes no sense, as the new products are worse than the old ones
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