Live data from Hacker News

The erosion of the Mac experience

twitter.com

331–340 of 490 posts

Re: The erosion of the Mac experience

#331
Back in the 90s when I was doing graphic design work, you had to use a Mac. Windows wasn’t up to the task. Windows postscript support was bad and service bureaus wouldn’t guarantee output. I recall watching three it guys struggling to get a scanner to work right on a pc. Probably a lot of younger folks don’t remember just how crappy Windows used to be. There’s not as much of gap now.

But then, I think the Mac has been in decline since OS 10.6 at least. It’s just more closed, more bloat, less reliable since. Now I prefer to use Linux at home, thought I have a Mac for work.

Re: The erosion of the Mac experience

#332

This guy has no idea what he’s talking about. One language, one gui framework, and one API paradigm - unified across all contextual devices - is exactly what Apple should do. SwiftUI is not it by any means, but to say that the idea of SwiftUI tries to achieve is a bad aim is completely wrong. The aim of UIKit on all Apple devices is 100% correct; and allows developers to go deep into the API forest to create mystical…

No, it's absolutely unacceptable to merge touchscreens and keyboards/mice. These should be separate frameworks where you couldn't reuse any GUI code whatsoever, not a single line. You must design everything from scratch for phones and for computers because of how different the interaction paradigms are.

Re: The erosion of the Mac experience

#333

I feel like I may be the only developer that prefers Windows to MacOs. I really, really just do not get the "Mac Experience". It feels so clunky and counter intuitive. - Why does the alt tab equivalent cycle through applications first, and I need another shortcut to cycle through the windows of that application? When I have an IDE with 5x instances, hosting different projects, it's a pain switching back to the projec…

It’s preferred due to several reasons: - lack of degradation of performance due to bloated registry, fragmented disks (probably out of date but still hurts my soul to think out) - a control panel that doesn’t suck - several things due to its unix heritage which are far better then windows imo (case sensitive file system, bash/zsh terminal) - lack of concern regarding bloatware installed by vendors - don’t have to cra…

I prefer macOS over Windows, but I think a lot of your points are... outdated, or just outright myths to begin with.

I can't find any (non-anecdotal) evidence that a "bloated" registry impacts performance at all on a modern system. If you have benchmarks or something, I would love to see them! (not being a jerk, I really would). If you think macOS applications cleanly uninstall when you drag them to the trash, that definitely is not the case. Check out ~/Library and see the ghosts of applications past.

Disk fragmentation isn't an issue on SSDs. Anybody still running Windows on a spinning drive has worse problems than fragmentation.

The settings situation does suck, that's absolutely true.

APFS and NTFS both allow you to choose case sensitivity depending on your preference, so I'd say they're on equal footing there. PowerShell isn't that bad, but you can still use bash with WSL or cygwin if you really want to.

I've always clean installed Windows, so I don't know about vendor bloatware. The bloatiest thing I can think of are shortcuts in the start menu to install ridiculous things like Candy Crush, but those are just shortcut ads, not actually installed things. Distasteful, sure, but easy enough to wipe out with a script.

Anecdotally, I've had way more kernel panics in macOS than I have blue screens of death in Windows 10. The T2 fiasco alone has caused me more crashes than I can count.

Anyway, I think in 2022, operating system choice is more of a personal preference thing than a technical one. They're all equally bad, just in different ways.

Re: The erosion of the Mac experience

#334
post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, ok, so the OP should, as a consumer, know about all monitor standards before purchasing one. Good to know.

Let's shorten that to: buy reputable monitors, from brand names you recognize. You wouldn't buy a no-name car.

You underestimate my cheapness and lack of caring about my car. Bring me a Chinese cherry car and I'll replace my 10 year old Suzuki

Re: The erosion of the Mac experience

#335

Putting myself in Apple's shoes: I just don't see the financial incentive to invest a whole lot in the native GUI story for the Mac in 2022 Regular people mostly use iOS. Many don't have traditional computers at all. That was originally the Mac's core market. It still has a strong professional market- but many of the serious professional tools (Adobe, Blender, IDEA, etc) use their own custom in-house GUI frameworks,…

You know, actively making stuff worse costs money. Not touching it is free.

Re: The erosion of the Mac experience

#336

I feel like I may be the only developer that prefers Windows to MacOs. I really, really just do not get the "Mac Experience". It feels so clunky and counter intuitive. - Why does the alt tab equivalent cycle through applications first, and I need another shortcut to cycle through the windows of that application? When I have an IDE with 5x instances, hosting different projects, it's a pain switching back to the projec…

> Why does the alt tab equivalent cycle through applications first, and I need another shortcut to cycle through the windows of that application? I guess I’m the opposite a single command+tab switches between apps then command+~ to cycle through the windows in the app is very intuitive to me. Cycling through dozens of windows on Microsoft is laborious a confusing in my experience.

And just to make sure your brain always has to concentrate when switching (beyond the fact that you now need two sets of shortcuts instead of one): Cmd+Tab cycles from most-recently-used (what you would expect) but Cmd+~ blindly switches to the next window in a cycle (not what anyone expects or wants).

Re: The erosion of the Mac experience

#337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m using a windows machine for work and I hate it. Explorer and outlook change application icon depending on what you are doing. I can never find them when I alt-tab. I can never find anything in word or excel or any other application that use windows style menus. On Mac you at least get a real menu. I never got used to macOS’ alt-tab when I switched more than a decade ago, but now that I’m back on windows I find th…

> I never got used to macOS’ alt-tab when I switched more than a decade ago, but now that I’m back on windows I find that their behavior works even worse. So maybe that’s a “don’t ever try to learn another alt-tab behavior than what you already do now” I think the one big benefit I notice of OSX style program management vs Windows style is: with OSX, you have have a program open, but without any windows. Whereas with…

You can right click the browser icon in taskbar or start menu > new incognito window.

Re: The erosion of the Mac experience

#338

I feel like I may be the only developer that prefers Windows to MacOs. I really, really just do not get the "Mac Experience". It feels so clunky and counter intuitive. - Why does the alt tab equivalent cycle through applications first, and I need another shortcut to cycle through the windows of that application? When I have an IDE with 5x instances, hosting different projects, it's a pain switching back to the projec…

because it's easy to manage packages using brew, Windows has the... winget which is all but abandoned. For the longest time there was no such thing as WSL so Mac had a serious advantage for us who migrated between Linux and Mac. And as you've mentioned I've had so many quality control issues with Windows computers including Dell and Asus that eventually I just said fuck it I'd rather spend 3 to 4 grand on a machine t…

Chocolatey makes it very easy.

Re: The erosion of the Mac experience

#340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I never got used to macOS’ alt-tab when I switched more than a decade ago, but now that I’m back on windows I find that their behavior works even worse. So maybe that’s a “don’t ever try to learn another alt-tab behavior than what you already do now” I think the one big benefit I notice of OSX style program management vs Windows style is: with OSX, you have have a program open, but without any windows. Whereas with…

You can right click the browser icon in taskbar or start menu > new incognito window.

That's good to know - thanks.
Post reply on HN