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Why I Quit OS X – Geoff Wozniak

wozniak.ca

101–110 of 531 posts

Re: Why I Quit OS X – Geoff Wozniak

#101
I haven't quit it, but the problems, annoyances, surprises, seeming ineptitude, and creeping iOSification of OS X that the author describes sure do resonate.

Every new major release of OS X is a day or week spent disabling things, shutting down Spotlight again, trying to restore things back to the way they were instead of the way some Designer with a capital D thinks they should be, for no other reason than, "Beauty."

I just dread the idea of moving to Linux again. I don't want to tinker that much. But I am worried sick that OS X is dying, in the sense that it's becoming a platform to deliver people to Apple's (and partners') cloud services and sharing services and that's it. Screw all of that.

One major shot across the bow was the loss of "Save As..." and the change to "Duplicate". WTF, Apple? I now have to do 10 extra steps just to Save As.

It feels like Apple is abandoning its longtime users, the master users, the users who've climbed the pyramid, who've achieved a lot of game levels. It's just going after that huge base of newbies and midlevel people who don't notice or complain about all the changes that really, truly are not improvements. They're just changes. That's the problem in a nutshell: OS X changes because there's new management that wants to put its stamp on things, regardless of whether it improves the productivity of the user or not.

Re: Why I Quit OS X – Geoff Wozniak

#102
Apple's screwing it up with software. Too bad because they undoubtedly had the best OS ever.

I remember seeing a few posts here and there where people complained about performance degrading each time they upgraded OS X. My last 3 laptops had been Mac's (a White Macbook, then a Macbook Pro from 2010, then a Retina Macbook Pro from these days...) and while I feel 'satisfied' I also kind of noticed that performance is always worse, and somehow the more I upgrade, the more I feel like a pain the ass when I use that computer. Since there are no serious benchmarks on to this (I wonder why) I always thought that it was more of a 'feeling' than something real, or that maybe, sure there was a bit more lag but I'm running more 'advanced' software.

So yeah, that was me dreaming about how $4,000+ dollars on laptops had not gone down the drain when I paid a visit to an old friend. I asked my friend to borrow his computer because I needed to check an email and he did. Old friend's Macbook is one of these [1], that is, a laptop that wasn't even top of the line TEN YEARS AGO. I've opened and became surprised that battery still worked. "Dude, have you ever replaced the battery on this?" "Nope" "Weird, maybe he just doesn't use it too much"... Laptop woke up almost immediately, it had OS X Tiger running... Tiger... not even leopard.

And then I started using it... HOLY F* (excuse the expletives) I WISH MY F* RETINA MACBOOK WORKED LIKE THAT. Everything was smooth, Firefox opened like immediately (no SSD obv. but ok maybe it was already on RAM), I was able to finish my work and read a few articles and I felt really comfortable the whole time, and I want to clarify on this, I didn't felt that I was using a computer to do my work, that was kind of the magic that Apple products used to have (all of them, even iPods...). Now I'm always like, oh I gotta do this, click ... wait ... open this ... wait ... send this ... wait ... change this setting ... wait. Now I can state it for sure, Apple is really screwing it up on its software.

I haven't dropped Apple because fortunately for them, most other laptops feel even worst (at least they haven't screwed the trackpad yet...) but as soon as a well-made Linux notebook appears I'm out.

[1] http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/24/MacBook_P...

Re: Why I Quit OS X – Geoff Wozniak

#103
post #11

It's important to notice that he's switching to a desktop running linux. Running linux on laptops is still a gamble. Sometimes things work great. Sometimes you spend months trying to fix basic stuff like screen brightness[1][2] on hardware certified by Ubuntu.[3] I think there's a market for a linux distro that targets a limited set of premium hardware. I'd gladly pay money for an OS that worked out of the box on any…

I've had incredibly good luck for the last several years with Linux on a laptop. You just have to be a bit careful. Here's what I've found: - Backlight bugs are usually related to ACPI tables in the BIOS. Doing a BIOS upgrade will often fix them. This is especially true on the Thinkpad line where Lenovo explicitly supports Linux in its BIOS. - Be careful with switchable graphics. While they have gotten a lot better,…

For most people, eyes will start glazing around the second paragraph or so, which doesn't bode well for your "you just have to" argument.

Re: Why I Quit OS X – Geoff Wozniak

#104
post #98

FYI this was not posted by 'the Woz', but rather by the unrelated Geoff Wozniak. I imagine many others may have clicked through owing to the domain.

Part of me thinks this is a bit sleazy. He knows how recognizable the name "Wozniak" is, and doubly so if he's going to be running a tech blog and posting about Aplle related things. Would gregwozniak.ca or gwozniak.ca been that much worse? It would be infinitely less confusing and link-baity.

If his last name is in fact Wozniak, I'm not sure I see a problem.

Re: Why I Quit OS X – Geoff Wozniak

#106
post #74

I'm sure this guy is savvy but I think that he gets much more credence due to his last name being Wozniak. Sorry but any post saying "why I did ____" seems to rub me the wrong way. I would have much more respect for a post that outlined issues found and how to reproduce them than a "I'm tired of this so you should be too" kind of post. personally I don't ca if you know or like/dislike what I use to work. If I wanted…

How do you fix complaints like "Apple aren't forthcoming with information about updates"? Get hired at Apple, work your way up the chain until you're a bigwig, and implement a new policy contrary to their current corporate culture? It's not like people aren't already begging them for more info. Filing a bug report isn't going to improve that.

Seems like a bit of a high bar you've set there for the author.

Re: Why I Quit OS X – Geoff Wozniak

#107
post #11

It's important to notice that he's switching to a desktop running linux. Running linux on laptops is still a gamble. Sometimes things work great. Sometimes you spend months trying to fix basic stuff like screen brightness[1][2] on hardware certified by Ubuntu.[3] I think there's a market for a linux distro that targets a limited set of premium hardware. I'd gladly pay money for an OS that worked out of the box on any…

I've tried Ubuntu on a Dell XPS 13, certified for 12.04. It was acceptable, resume didn't work. But Webex doesn't work and GitLab BV customers use it, so I bought a MPB yesterday.

Re: Why I Quit OS X – Geoff Wozniak

#108
post #98

FYI this was not posted by 'the Woz', but rather by the unrelated Geoff Wozniak. I imagine many others may have clicked through owing to the domain.

Part of me thinks this is a bit sleazy. He knows how recognizable the name "Wozniak" is, and doubly so if he's going to be running a tech blog and posting about Aplle related things. Would gregwozniak.ca or gwozniak.ca been that much worse? It would be infinitely less confusing and link-baity.

I definitely clicked and read the entire article only because I thought it was written by Woz. I agree, it is link-baity and misleading.

EDIT: Holy down votes. Don't know what to say. I thought it was Woz, sosume. All I did was agree with the less-downvoted parent.

EDIT 2: Hive mind crit axotty for 9999.

Re: Why I Quit OS X – Geoff Wozniak

#109
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't seen you mention it anywhere, so did you try a BIOS / firmware update? I've had similar bugs on multiple Thinkpads before and they were universally cured by an update.

Thanks for the suggestion, but I've updated the BIOS multiple times. It didn't fix anything.

What version of Ubuntu? If it's 12 then you might need to do what I did for my new PC a year ago to get the latest drivers:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Kernel/LTSEnablementStack

That fixed the only issue I had which was with the 1 Gig ethernet. Now I'm on stock 14 and of course it has all the newer drivers already.

Re: Why I Quit OS X – Geoff Wozniak

#110
post #98

FYI this was not posted by 'the Woz', but rather by the unrelated Geoff Wozniak. I imagine many others may have clicked through owing to the domain.

Part of me thinks this is a bit sleazy. He knows how recognizable the name "Wozniak" is, and doubly so if he's going to be running a tech blog and posting about Aplle related things. Would gregwozniak.ca or gwozniak.ca been that much worse? It would be infinitely less confusing and link-baity.

Why would the Woz have a .ca domain? That tipped me off that this might not be him.
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