The myth of Snow Leopard is strong (while in reality a lot of fundamental things people still complaint about weren't fixed), so Apple can just as well do nothing better and hope a new myth will emerge sticking to some other current name...
Apple needs a Snow Sequoia
281–290 of 801 posts
Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia
#282There 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…
> and there is no longer any way to effectively prioritize the results I want (apps, not internet garbage) OMG this one drives me bonkers. If anyone out there knows how to turn off internet results, please share!
Open Settings, scroll down to Spotlight. Unselect the things you don’t want.
You’re welcome :-)
Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia
#283[dead]
Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia
#284There 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…
Spotlight is unbelievable bad, especially on iOS. If I type a substring of the name of an installed app, it should find it effectively instantly (say, within 1-2 frames of the input showing up). Instead, it finds it sometimes. On occasion I need to hit backspace (removing a letter that should match) to get it to find it.
I struggle to imagine the software design that works so poorly.
Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia
#285Apple needs to make all of the accessory apps (photos, music, news, maps, mail, etc..) uninstallable and able to be added later if needed through their app store.
Every MacOS update brings along this bloatware that is not easily removed.
Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia
#286As a former Apple employee that left in part due to declining software quality (back in 2015!), and the relentless focus on big flashy features for the next yearly release cycle, I could not agree more.
I recently had to do a full reinstall of macOS on my Mac Studio due to some intermittent networking issue that, for the life of me, I could not pin down. Post-reinstall, everything's fine.
Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia
#287There 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…
> Most of the other examples in the article also apply, but to be honest I've been using GNOME in parallel for years now and I consider it to be my "forever desktop" if PC hardware can ever match Apple Silicon (or, most likely, if I want something that is _just a computer_). I'm there as well. I've been really enjoying desktop Linux lately, but I can't go back to a non-Apple laptop at this point. There's just nothing…
The newer XPS 13 comes with snapdragon x elite now (Qualcomm's answer to Apple silicon). Curious if anybody here runs Linux on one of those
Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia
#288Earlier quoted context omitted.
Using search as a UI means you can only find things that you know exist, but there are plenty of important settings that I've only discovered by actually navigating through the UI.
Just type "settings" then and you go to the main menu.
The point of this comment thread is that important Windows settings are scattered throughout many different interfaces beyond just the Settings app, and you can never be sure where to find what you're looking for, which results in a poor user experience. Off the top of my head, you have the Settings app, Control Panel, Device Manager, System Configuration, and Network and Sharing Center.
Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia
#289The first thing I do when I reinstall macOS is to disable most of the ”features”, services, and apps Apple added over the last decade. I can’t imagine how cluttered my digital life would be if I’d depend on all those useless toys Apple stuffed into the OS and abandons a few years later (looking at you, Dashboard).
My initial wish for Apple was to make macOS as bulletproof, lightweight, and bug-free as possible. But now I just want to use Linux on my M1 MacBook because of all the bullshit that’s going on in the US right now. It’s only a matter of time until the Trump administration will start to dismantle the American technology sector, beginning with the softening of encryption and the death of Advanced Data Protection I currently rely on on iCloud. Mark my words.
Like I’ve said in a couple of comments before in other threads, I’d love to switch to Asahi but without native disk encryption I just can’t. If my laptop gets stolen, all my files would be visible to the thief, and that’s a risk I’m not willing to make.
Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia
#290As a former Apple employee that left in part due to declining software quality (back in 2015!), and the relentless focus on big flashy features for the next yearly release cycle, I could not agree more. I recently had to do a full reinstall of macOS on my Mac Studio due to some intermittent networking issue that, for the life of me, I could not pin down. Post-reinstall, everything's fine.
Also as a former Apple engineer....
I've explained in another thread how this kind of thing happens. It may be the same at other large companies.
Bugs come in (via Radar) and are routed to the team responsible. Ever since Jobs came back (and Apple became valuable again) it has also become very much top-down with the engineers, for better or worse, not calling the shots.
Just an obvious example — there are of course no engineers in the decision to make a "Snow Leopard" release or not. That is a "marketing" decision (well, probably Federighi). But further, even for an engineering team, they're probably not going to be able to make that decision even for their own component(s) either. Again, marketing.
So meetings are held and as it gets close to time to think about the NMOS (next major OS) the team is told what features they will implement. Do you think fix bugs is a feature? How about pay down technical debt? Nope, never.
Fixing bugs is just expected, like breathing I guess. And technical debt ... do what you can given your workload and deliverables. Trust me, many engineers (perhaps especially the older ones) want to both fix bugs and refactor code to get rid of technical debt. But there is simply not the cycles to do so.
And then what is even more insipid, the day the OS ships, every single bug in Radar still assigned to a team, still in Analyze, becomes a much much harder sell for the next OS. Because, you know, you already shipped with it ... must not be that bad.
I'd love to see a bug-fix-only Mac OS release. But I suspect that every time the possibility has come up, something like, I don't know, LLMs burst on the scene and there's a scramble.