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…
At one point a few years ago, Spotlight improved enough that I could use it instead of relying on Alfred. So I deleted Alfred, and whaddaya know...a few years later Spotlight got worse and worse, making me regret that move.
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.
Sure it's trivial, but it is tacit acceptance that you need permission to make a program on their platform. Permission that needs to be renewed year over year. Permission to earn a living on this platform.
Permission that can be revoked for any reason, including being compelled by someone with more power than Apple.
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…
Regarding Spotlight, one thing that started happening for me on Sequioa was that Finder and other apps started getting very slow to react to file changes. For example, I can save a new file to a directory, and the Finder window takes maybe 10-20 seconds before the file shows up in the list. If I navigate to a different folder and then back, the file is there. I notice the same delay in apps like IntelliJ. I could be…
This KILLS me. It's so frustrating. APFS is supposed to be great at deduping files and such, but in practice it seems like it really sucks. It's bad at both saving a file to the desktop and dumping a million npm files into a directory.
... I'm not sure I've ever found any GUI system search reliable enough that I've used it on-purpose (though accidentally, sometimes) on Windows, Linux, or Mac. I always just use "find" and "grep" (and ripgrep when I remember that exists and realize I just grepped a lot and will be waiting for like an hour if I don't re-run the command with rg instead). Or nothing on Windows, which is fine because I haven't used Windo…
"everything" app on windows works well for me for file search. Incredibly fast.
^^^ this so hard. Voidtools Everything is how I find what I need 90% of the time now.
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 suppo…
Interesting. Apple podcasters frequently rant about what a black hole Apple's Radar bug system is. We're talking hours-long rants in some cases. Luck of the draw, maybe? I'm not doubting you, just surprised to read it.
(It feels similar to how those same podcasters absolutely blast Apple Intelligence, while non-tech users I've heard from seem to love it.)
I have some hope that Framework and AMD can fix some of those issues. Would love to try out their new desktop (because it's a simpler, more tightly integrated thing) and replace my Mac mini -- then wait for Linux power management to improve.
Linux power management is pretty good. The problem is that defaults favor desktop and server performance. On a MacBook Air 11, my custom Linux setup and Mac OS had the same battery autonomy, despite Safari being much more energy efficient. The real problem is that, just like the grandparent post pointed out, Apple's software quality has been declining. The Tiger to Snow Leopard epoch was incredible. Apps were simple,…
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 suppo…
Yes, I am very surprised to hear that you've had such success with reporting bugs to Apple. That is very unlike my experience. I've had exactly one macOS bug that I reported fixed, and that required going to a WWDC lab, talking to a person on the relevant team in person, and having them dig the bug report out of the backlog for a completely unrelated team that it was incorrectly assigned to.
They need a Snow-IOS too. - Ever since I've updated to the latest iOS 18, my watch complications(weather doodad) stop working randomly because they just lose the location services permission. Then in settings, the location services permission list acts like the weather app isn't installed. - The new Mail app now automatically classifies your email, but still gives you the "All Mail" option. But the unread count badge…
my iPhone gets into a state lately where a pane will suddenly lose the the ability to _scroll_. it can happen in any app, but I see it a lot in Safari. Like, what is even happening, this is a fundamental UI interaction. The only way to fix it is to close the tab or force-quit the app. Super weird.
I understand and appreciate the sentiment, but I see the intent very differently. Apple is not employing a frog boiling strategy, but rather being responsive to an increasingly sophisticated adversary. It’s like criticism of the quality of Google search dropping. It has absolutely tanked, but it’s not because the algorithm is worse, it’s because the internet has grown orders of magnitude and most of it uses the same…
It is because the algorithm is worse. So many garbage results are showing up which they continue to allow. Kagi lets me completely block specific domains. If Google cared about quality they’d let you do the same.
You can also block specific subdomains, too. Useful when I want to be able to see finance.yahoo.com items in my search results, but nothing else from the yahoo.com domain.