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Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

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Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#311
post #267

No AI please for the love of the spaghetti monster. I'm so sick of having this shit shoveled into anything I'm trying to do these days. Disabling Siri all these years was bad enough. So far Apple has kept it as a toggle in the settings, but it's easy bloat for it to keep spreading. Does anyone need AI in a text editor? No.

While I appreciate the sentiment, I think the single best use case for LLMs today is drafting text, so a text editor sounds like home for an AI assistant.

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#312
post #273
post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMHO, Mac OS X contributed decisively towards making Apple cool, which was followed by lots of boutique apps and the success of iOS. Loosing that critical mass of developers, even if it's a tiny userbase, would worry me if I was a top leader of Apple.

Apple has had a contemptuous attitude towards developers since.. the App Store? when the iPhone was out? The last two decades? They don't seem to care about this.

And that’s a huge part of the reason why the Vision Pro will never take off.

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#313

Been looking for a windows replacement and probably will just stick to some linux distro. I had hoped Apple was better…

Linux Mint is quite good, I've got it on a few machines. So far it's the most stable, easily-updatable and "gets out of the way" Linux distro I've used in years.

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#314
post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Asahi?

Yeah, I heard good things about it. I do a lot of gamey development stuff and x64 makes that easier. But Asahi seems to be catching up a lot recently, maybe I should look at it again! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41799068

Asahi is an adventure. I am in the same camp where I got a MacBook for the hardware, but am really a Linux guy. I got really excited when the fex/muvm patches came out for Asahi, and switched to mainly booting it for a couple months. 80% of what I needed to do worked, but that 20% still wasn't there. It was mainly the little things too:

1. Display output from USB-C didn't work 2. Couldn't run Zotero 3. Couldn't compile Java bioinformatics tools 4. Container architecture mismatches led to catastrophic and hard-to-diagnose bugs

There were things that worked better, too (better task management apps, and working gamepad support come to mind). Overall, even though I only needed those things once or twice a week, the blockers added up and I erased my Asahi partition in the end.

I really appreciate the strides the Asahi project has made (no really, it's tremendous!), and while I would love to say that Linux lets me be most productive, features like Rosetta2 are really integrated that much better into MacOS so that I can't help but feel that Asahi is getting the worst of both worlds right now. I'll probably try again this summer and see what has developed.

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#315
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…

Indeed. I complained that Apple design gets a free pass while being haunted by Steve from beyond the grave for a decade. Your comments resemble my habits except rusted sway right into cosmic desktop alpha and done.

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#316
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.

Interesting that you think that of 7.5.3 — it worked, sure, but it could be painfully slow. System 6 was preferable as an OS — MultiFinder was better than 7, at least in the first couple iterations — but much of the software I needed demanded 7. 7.6.x was the first bright spot since 7.1 fixed much of what went wrong in 7.0, & there was a ton of waiting after that. 9 just chugged along for me, for the most part, which was nice.

Loved Snow Leopard too, & was shocked by how bad Lion was in comparison. Glad they got back on track after that.

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#317
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…

Spotlight was never useful, because of an absurd and glaring design defect: It doesn't show you WHERE it found stuff. There's no path shown with hits. Same blunder in Finder's search, and you can't even optionally add "path" as a column. WTF. So... when the hits include six identically-named files, you can't eliminate ones that you know are wrong (on a backup volume or whatever). The level of stupidity here is just m…

You hold down command to see the path.

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't have any Macs or iPhones that can even run the latest software anymore. My absolute newest Mac is stuck on Ventura 13.7. On the other hand, I can get the bleeding edge version of any Linux distribution out there and run it on decades-old hardware.

Unfortunately, “decades old hardware” doesn’t give me the combination of speed, quietness, battery life and the ability to use my laptop on my lap without so much heat that it puts me at risk for never having any little Scarfaces. Using an x86 laptop in 2025 is like using a flip phone.

You can at least get 90% of the same experience with modern x86 laptops. Just exclude anything that has a dedicated GPU.

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spotlight was never useful, because of an absurd and glaring design defect: It doesn't show you WHERE it found stuff. There's no path shown with hits. Same blunder in Finder's search, and you can't even optionally add "path" as a column. WTF. So... when the hits include six identically-named files, you can't eliminate ones that you know are wrong (on a backup volume or whatever). The level of stupidity here is just m…

> There's no path shown with hits I guess you do know the path is shown at the bottom of the window if you select the filename in the list of results?

In all fairness, you do need to hold down the command key to show the file location in Sequoia. It is an interesting default behavior to pretend the files location doesn't exist, mobile-centric.

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#320
post #31

This is an interesting idea, and I am actually curious what Apple is going to do going forward. A "Snow Leopard"-esque release would be nice, but I think what would be better is an LTS release. Historically, you get a new Mac and you usually only get 5-6 years before they drop your model from the latest release. This has always made some sense to me, as after 4-6 years, you do start to feel it. I bought an M1 Max tha…

They need to somehow start marketing effectively to gamers, because the GPU in your M1 Max is shit. Sure, it’s fine for mostly-2D UIs and the occasional WebGL widget, but for AAA gaming it’s just dogshit.

M1 Max @ 32 GB. I can run Shadow of the Tomb Raider with max settings at native resolution (3024x1964 px) and get ~60 FPS.
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