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Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

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Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#111

Post by starik36 »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #20

> I am not suggesting Apple has fallen behind Windows or Android. Changing a setting on Windows 11 can often involve a journey through three or four different interface designs, artifacts of half-implemented changes dating back to the last century. Whenever I find myself stuck outside of Appleland, I am eager to return “home,” flaws and all. Hard agree with this. I sometimes have to boot up a windows laptop to play M…

I disagree with that. As an occasional user of MacOS, the new Settings app is quite bewildering. There are just as many dials as in Windows and sometimes requires a trip to ChatGPT.

And for reasons I don't understand, why is the window itself not resizable?

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#112

Post by dmix »

aresant wrote: post #97

It is literally insane that when I search for Photos on iOS I can't zoom in to make the thumbnails bigger. As an approaching mid-40s person this is untenable, even worse that it DOES let you zoom in prior to search.

Photos definitely regressed in last release. I like change and new things (AI searching/tagging photos is extremely useful) but when they changed it I realized how important my muscle memory was for that app and features like pulldown iCloud sync/status seems to be gone and other small things changed in annoying ways.

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#113

Post by devilsdata »

rcarmo wrote: post #95
ToucanLoucan wrote: post #92

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.

Fedora atomic distributions in general are great. I recommend Bluefin-dx over Bazzite (they’re both GNOME-based Fedora Atomic from the same group— universal blue) for developers, because it’s really easy to install the packages that Bazzite gives you, and it comes pre-installed with Docker.

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#114

Post by dmix »

runjake wrote: post #87

It should be noted that Snow Leopard was pretty buggy until several versions in. Our memory is a lot rosier than the reality.

Everyone keeps making this comment but the article’s about the idea of a maintenance release more than about Snow Leopard. It was a good idea that’s stuck around in the dev community, something we’ve been talking about forever, so it’s basically a meme at this point to say “Snow Leopard release”

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#115

Post by detourdog »

rcarmo wrote: 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 have been using a Mac since the 128k came out. System 7.5.3 and Snow Leopard 10.6.8 are in my opinion the high water mark for both OS’s.

I still have some 10.6.8 install media for both server and client. Truly loved them both.

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#116

Post by ryandrake »

rcarmo wrote: post #47
spudlyo wrote: 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 acclaime…

It doesn't matter whether it is anonymized. Apple has no business collecting information about what executables I am running on my own computer, or even whether I'm running executables at all. I don't care what their stated purpose is. I don't care what they want a "global view" of. It's my computer, not theirs.

I don't even mind that they've introduced a level on the totem pole that's above root. But on my computer, -I- should be the one at that level, not Apple.

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#117

Post by ndiddy »

rcarmo wrote: post #47
spudlyo wrote: 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 acclaime…

I think it depends on what distro you're talking about. Corporate distros like RHEL and SLES are absolutely going that way. It takes a lot of effort to backport fixes, and the money's not there in desktop Linux to make it worth their while if containerization is a viable alternative. Red Hat's gotten rid of a bunch of graphical applications for RHEL 10 and stated that users can get them from Flathub as an alternative. I believe there was some consternation when CentOS Stream 10 launched without even a packaged web browser and the advice was to install Firefox from Flathub (there's a lot of use cases where that breaks stuff), but it appears they've walked that back and started providing Firefox as a traditional package.

However, less corporate distros that mostly just ship built upstream software as-is since they don't have to support it for long periods (think Arch, Fedora, Void, etc) don't have that problem, so I expect we'll continue seeing them use traditional packages.

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#118

Post by whalesalad »

detourdog wrote: post #115
rcarmo wrote: 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 have been using a Mac since the 128k came out. System 7.5.3 and Snow Leopard 10.6.8 are in my opinion the high water mark for both OS’s. I still have some 10.6.8 install media for both server and client. Truly loved them both.

I worked at Apple Retail during the Snow Leopard launch. I think I still have a boxed disk somewhere, too. I remember it was not a product I had to sell to customers. People came in asking for it.

Another highlight of that job was selling a green iPod Nano to "John Locke" from LOST

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#119

Post by CuriousRose »

I am totally invested in the Apple ecosystem, which on principle I'm against (closed systems never sat right with me), but at the time (beginning ~2015) the products and services were so well integrated and genuinely improved my life it was hard to see how things could ever get this bad. I'd still never (ever) go back to Windows, and Linux doesn't have the same feel or ease of setup as macOS, but I am genuinely, deeply concerned about this trajectory for Apple. Albeit super opinionated, but I feel that macOS was the saviour of modern aesthetic computing especially when Windows started its rapid decline post 7. I’m fine trading some frustration—like extra steps for untrusted software—if it keeps macOS secure and fast, free of Windows-level adware or telemetry. But right now, macOS has never been in a worse state.

I recently emailed Tim expressing the same concerns as the article and regarding specific issues with Messages and Mail resource usage and was surprised to get a response from Craig requesting more information and sysdiagnose files, but this is where feedback ended unfortunately.

The current state of the macOS UI is atrocious, devices don't all need the same button shape or menu UX flow across all devices as they are inherently interacted with differently. A Mac isn’t an iPad — why force the same rounded buttons and simplified menus on both? They’re interacted with differently: keyboard and mouse versus touch. I have no idea why this is so difficult for execs to understand or important for them to change. Software teams at Apple are so lucky to have the Apple Silicon innovation on the hardware side, Intel Macs would catch fire on boot-up running any of the latest releases given how atrocious the resource usage is.

While I'm here whinging, the iOS swipe keyboard is garbage (almost totally unusable now) where before it was perfect with the innovative predictive hit-box expansion pioneered by Ken Kocienda. I think that's now been replaced with AI prediction which in 2025 I don't understand why it can be so embarrassingly bad. I had to upgrade to the iPhone Max recently to hit the letters properly. Also Apple I never want to tell someone to "duck off".

Initially I was understanding, but quite frankly now I'm just pissed that it has gotten to this stage, and there is no indication of resolution from execs about these issues.

I’m starting to worry that Apple could go off the deep-end - the way of Microsoft - coasting on hardware sales while letting software quality slide (albeit seeming intentional from Microsoft's side of the fence). I get it — software isn’t where the money is, hardware drives the business - but the two are inseparable BY DESIGN. When macOS struggles with basic functionality, it undermines the value of the Mac itself.

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#120

Post by zozbot234 »

ndiddy wrote: post #117
rcarmo wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 acclaime…

I think it depends on what distro you're talking about. Corporate distros like RHEL and SLES are absolutely going that way. It takes a lot of effort to backport fixes, and the money's not there in desktop Linux to make it worth their while if containerization is a viable alternative. Red Hat's gotten rid of a bunch of graphical applications for RHEL 10 and stated that users can get them from Flathub as an alternative…

> I believe there was some consternation when CentOS Stream 10 launched without even a packaged web browser and the advice was to install Firefox from Flathub

Ubuntu does the exact same thing with their snap repository, the Firefox apt package from Ubuntu is fake. At least Flatpak is a community-led project unlike snap.

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