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If Apple keeps letting its software slip, the next big thing won’t matter

macworld.com

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Re: If Apple keeps letting its software slip, the next big thing won’t matter

#211

Post by nikanj »

makecheck wrote: post #204

While this article focused primarily on things being left unmaintained, etc. there is also a huge problem with things being touched for no reason and making them worse . When handed what must be a mountain of bugs and unfinished items, why the hell did they prioritize things like breaking notifications and Safari tabs, for instance? They’re in a position where engineering resources desperately need to be closing gaps…

Because someone needs to able to point at Thing and say they took iniative in implementing it, for career reasons

Re: If Apple keeps letting its software slip, the next big thing won’t matter

#212

Post by Tagbert »

salamandersauce wrote: post #130
freediver wrote: post #18

Yesterday I prepared a few years old Windows laptop for my daughter to use in school. It took me a few hours just to install updates, remove bloatware (my oh my, the amount is staggering!) and fix privacy settings. And this was for Windows 10 which I hear is a mild version of a mess that Windows 11 is. I was instantly reminded why I appreciate Apple software more.

Is this not true on Mac? Updates in particular take forever on MacOS. I find Windows updates take like 5 minutes usually. MacOS has been a half hour or more for some of the point updates I've done. Bloatware is still there, iMovie, Garageband, iWork is IMO bloat. Slightly more quality bloat maybe but I don't need 20GB taken up by stuff I'll literally never use.

IMovie, GarageBand and iWork are not installed by default and you can remove them at any time.

Recent Mac OS updates are monolithic signed binaries that load into the protected disk partitions reserved for the OS. This is security feature to limit which processes can modify the OS. The downside is that it can’t do differential updates. I hope that, at some point, Apple will work out how to securely do differential updates and speed this up, but I’m satisfied with slower updates if it maintains security.

Re: If Apple keeps letting its software slip, the next big thing won’t matter

#213

Post by joconde »

superasn wrote: post #59
freediver wrote: post #18

Yesterday I prepared a few years old Windows laptop for my daughter to use in school. It took me a few hours just to install updates, remove bloatware (my oh my, the amount is staggering!) and fix privacy settings. And this was for Windows 10 which I hear is a mild version of a mess that Windows 11 is. I was instantly reminded why I appreciate Apple software more.

1. Yes first thing I run if I ever have to use a Windows PC is this little gem called Shutup 10 (1). 2. Then there is another software called 10AppsManager (2) to remove further bloatware like Onedrive, Skype, etc. 3. After that I visit ninite.com (3) to get the usual software without toolbars and spyware. 4. For other software like ffmpeg I use choco or chocolatey (4). I am now a full time linux user but this was th…

Note that Windows now has an official package manager called WinGet (https://github.com/microsoft/winget-cli), which worked very well when I tried it a few months ago; Skype and OneDrive can now be uninstalled without an external tool; and disabling all telemetry also seems to weaken antivirus protection.

Re: If Apple keeps letting its software slip, the next big thing won’t matter

#214

Post by boringg »

EamonnMR wrote: post #79

This morning I plugged in my macbook and tried to turn it on. No dice. Hammered the external mouse and keyboard. No luck. Opened up the clamshell, started testing USB-C ports to figure out which one wants to charge today. Hammered the "on" button. It started asking out loud in what to me sounded like an old school macintalk voice for a username... I have to assume I provoked some sort of accessibility feature. Hammer…

Did you use the wrong charging block? My MBP did that when I used the charging block meant for a macbook. It took a lot longer to get a charge to start the computer. Sounds a lot like my experience. I now make sure I only use the appropriate block

Re: If Apple keeps letting its software slip, the next big thing won’t matter

#215

Post by mattlondon »

BenoitEssiambre wrote: post #147
arthur_sav wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish we had more options though. Between Windows and Apple there's no other real competition. Linux is cool and all... but not user friendly (not even Ubuntu)

I don't understand this attitude. I spend countless hours trying to keep my wife's work computers working. Getting windows to connect to a printer is a frequent ordeal and fixes seem to always be ephemeral, things soon breaking again. Her Macs are not as bad but still have lots of hiccups. Meanwhile I've been on Ubuntu for more than a decade and as far as I can remember, for example, printing consists of printer just…

My work Linux laptop frequently (several times daily) breaks Bluetooth, breaks audio, does not wake from sleep, wakes from sleep but only shows the mouse pointer on a black screen, stops throttling the CPU down, resets the DHCP-specified DNS server to 0.0.0.0, sends stuff to printers that cause them to just spit out endless blank sheets of paper. The "solutions" to all of these are multi-step manual disasters... uninstall pulse audio, restart cinnamon, reinstall blueman, upgrade Jack, manually create config files from copying some file on a GitHub repo, downgrade to some specific version of CUPS, mess about with apt-get repos to not get the latest version of whatever...wtf?! That is not user friendly.

My personal Windows laptop has never had a single one of those problems. It has been faultless from day 1 without a single issue.

Re: If Apple keeps letting its software slip, the next big thing won’t matter

#216

Post by gbear605 »

Gys wrote: post #195
threeseed wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you clearly have a hardware problem since your USB-C ports aren't charging. And rather than go to Apple you instead randomly press buttons and then are surprised when random things happen. Okay.

> go to Apple Is there an easy way to do that in the moment? Genuine question. I (we) have many Apple devices and in my experience ‘it just works’ until it does not. And if not you are out of luck. No errors, no warnings, nothing. It ‘just does not work’. Googling mostly does nog give any usable solutions. I would love to gave an instant phone or chat service. For free, because I feel like like really paying a lot al…

It’s not instant, but Apple phone support/chat support is free and the wait times are usually <5 minutes in my experience.

Re: If Apple keeps letting its software slip, the next big thing won’t matter

#217

Post by cyberpunk »

aunty_helen wrote: post #77
SamuelAdams wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey so I’ll be getting my first MacBook Pro in a couple weeks, so I’m still learning the details about OS X. I’m coming from a windows / Linux background. I thought the OS shipped with its own firewall? Would you recommend using a third party firewall despite having its own?

Get little snitch. This is a firewall that dosen't care what apple thinks is useful. There was some controversy in the previous year because apple tried to deprecate the firewall hooks and allow their junk passed the replacement they offered. I'm leaving apple for linux as we speak for two reasons, privacy and they can't help but mess with shit every time they release an update. The most recent, this week they releas…

I mean, you can turn that off. Is changing a port such a showstopper?

I’ve flip flopped for years, (I was using freebsd more than 20 years ago, genuinely ran Solaris 10 with my own build of kde4 on a hp probook, etc) but last time I tried to use Linux for work I got defeated by a conference suite projector at a client and it cost us a big contract. The happy path (for me anyway) is doing all actual dev work on Linux vms and using macOS as your browser/im/terminal client — which it’s great at.

And it works with those stupid little projector dongles at clients when you’re trying to pitch them 6 figures of consulting ;)

Re: If Apple keeps letting its software slip, the next big thing won’t matter

#218

Post by [deleted] »

EamonnMR wrote: post #79

This morning I plugged in my macbook and tried to turn it on. No dice. Hammered the external mouse and keyboard. No luck. Opened up the clamshell, started testing USB-C ports to figure out which one wants to charge today. Hammered the "on" button. It started asking out loud in what to me sounded like an old school macintalk voice for a username... I have to assume I provoked some sort of accessibility feature. Hammer…

[deleted]

Re: If Apple keeps letting its software slip, the next big thing won’t matter

#219

Post by Tagbert »

EamonnMR wrote: post #79

This morning I plugged in my macbook and tried to turn it on. No dice. Hammered the external mouse and keyboard. No luck. Opened up the clamshell, started testing USB-C ports to figure out which one wants to charge today. Hammered the "on" button. It started asking out loud in what to me sounded like an old school macintalk voice for a username... I have to assume I provoked some sort of accessibility feature. Hammer…

Yes, that is an unusual experience. Something is wrong, probably hardware, and causing this instability.

Re: If Apple keeps letting its software slip, the next big thing won’t matter

#220

Post by CharlesW »

rchaud wrote: post #198
loudthing wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Big yikes.

Remember that the 2007 iPhone demo had showed AT&T reception at full strength? That was hardcoded for the purpose of the Keynote. I recall iPhones having iffy phone reception for at least the first couple of years.

> Remember that the 2007 iPhone demo had showed AT&T reception at full strength?

With the help of therapy and psilocybin I got over that in 2016.

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