I long for a modern NeXTStep-like OS. A polished, consistent, solid operating system that is lean, clean and simply focused on getting things done. It should be predictable in every way and never get in your way. None of this SwiftUI bullshit, Animoji, AI or blurry UI. sigh
Apple needs a Snow Sequoia
341–350 of 801 posts
Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia
#342There 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 generally agree it’s decreased steadily but I also remember macOS 9 and early X versions especially being pretty buggy and having awful performance.
Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia
#343Earlier quoted context omitted.
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,…
What’s the actual argument that will credibly convince the top leaders of Apple, to push fixing MacOS up the list of priorities? Because right now it’s clearly so far down, beneath dozens of other priorities, that expecting it to just happen one day seems futile.
The actual argument would be people voting with their wallets and moving away from the Apple ecosystem, but this something impossible at least in the USA due to these bullshit "blue bubbles"
Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia
#344There 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 personally think that it is reasonable to "want" an Apple notebook. They have great hardware, great battery life and an ecosystem where every device integrates. Only on macOS you can nicely develop software for iOS. Furthermore most vendors release software for macOS, while they don't for Linux (not only Adobe). BTW the apps I miss most on Linux is the Preview App and Apple Mail. However I'm done with Apple. I thin…
Apple delivered on Steve Jobs' vision of an "appliance computer".
You might not want one though.
Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia
#345Power Mac G5 systems sold in 2006 were abandoned by Snow Leopard in 2009.
Apple could conceivably abandon intel Mac Pro systems sold in 2023 by releasing an Apple Silicon-only macOS in 2026, but three years still seems a bit aggressive.
Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia
#346Great post. BTW, there is an (earlier) example of Snow Leopard in the Microsoft ecosystem -- that would be Windows XP, which similarly avoided major new subsystems and new applications built-into-the-OS, but was remarkably fast and stable for its time.
I think you mean XP SP2?
I never tried the pre-SP XP, but even SP1 wasn't too terrible compared to what it was competing against (there was a lot of perfectly-usable 95/98/ME still around with their lack of privilege separation, and 2K was mostly better only if comparing at the same amount of RAM but XP machines were newer and often had more).
For me, service packs were largely a question of "do we want to tie up the phone line for however many hours just because Microsoft wants to rearrange a UI layout?"
Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia
#347As 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 n…
Yup. Well-said. I experienced exactly this type of thing during every NMOS planning/brainstorming session I was a part of.
Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia
#348I know it doesn’t affect a lot of people, but pasting in hex mode in Calculator broke in Sequoia. Previously, any number pasted in hex mode was treated as hex (as expected) even if the number consisted only of decimal characters (say 20, which would be decimal 32). Now numbers pasted with only decimal characters are treated as decimal (pasting “20” turns into 0x14) and numbers with with at least one alpha hex char is treated as hex. The workaround is to prefix the number with “0x”, but that’s not always practical.
Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia
#349There 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…
Did you know, you can set your wallpapers to be continuously updating and make macs use terabytes of your network in hours or days depending on speed? https://discussions.apple.com/thread/255329956
I also wish I could preview the wallpapers without triggering a 100MB download. There's nothing in between the 320x240 thumbnail, and the 4k video.
And so many tiny thumbnails wedged into the too-narrow System Settings window.
Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia
#350Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
There's extensive documentation. Examples: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/security/code-sign... https://developer.apple.com/documentation/security/notarizin... There are dedicated sections of the developer web forums: https://developer.apple.com/forums/topics/code-signing-topic https://developer.apple.com/forums/topics/code-signing-topic... ...and there's an apple developer support person, Quinn, who appea…
As someone who actually signs, notorizes and distributes desktop apps for macOS, I can safely say their documentation is less than ideal.
Maybe because I'm using Electron framework which makes things more complicated, but I don't really understand why there's is a difference between different types of certificates (Developer ID, Apple distribution, macOS distribution) and I had to guess which one to use everytime I set it up.
Also why is notorization a completely different process from code signing, and requires completely different set of credentials from it. Seems odd to me.