Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Welcome (back) to Macintosh

take.surf

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 276 posts

Re: Welcome (back) to Macintosh

#41

Post by this-is-why »

freetonik wrote: post #28

My partner’s iMac recently died (seemingly the Radeon graphics card had failed, which is not uncommon on 2017 model). It was frustrating to find out that Time Machine was not operational for 8 last months. It was always connected. There were zero indications of any issues. It just stopped backing up at some point. The disk had enough space. In the past I had problems with network attached Time Machine destinations, b…

This is what worries me. I’ve used Time Machine for almost 20 years and it has provided seamless transitions to new MacBooks. But how do I know if it is currently borked?

Re: Welcome (back) to Macintosh

#42

Post by subterrane »

Tahoe has this really cool clipboard history feature that just does not work on my work laptop. Maybe some corporate keep-me-safe-ware is preventing it from working but my third-party app, Maccy, has no problem at all, so I guess it's just Apple being Apple these days.

I also held out for as long as possible using Safari, but I had to switch to Firefox. Every once in a while I forget the reason I switched and try to switch back and then get reminded. I'm currently in a "I can't remember the reason, but I'm too lazy to go find out" phase. I'm also one of those weirdos that liked the Safari compact tabs and I'm sad they removed it.

Re: Welcome (back) to Macintosh

#43

Post by samdixon »

nsbk wrote: post #35
ordinaryradical wrote: post #6

This is going to be remembered as a comical fumble, in my view. I was fully locked-in to the ecosystem, the phone, the services, the TV, and I am looking for the exits. I’m starting to parallelize to software which will play well on Linux, and when I’m feeling ready (or miserable enough) I will not be looking back. The macOS exodus will be like Hemingway’s line about bankruptcy: very slowly and then all at once.

I’m right where you are. Very happy Apple customer since my first PowerBook G4. Currently have an M1 Max, an iPhone 17 Pro, the iPad Pro, HomePod, Apple TV, and Watch Ultra. All the _just works_ feeling and reliability seem to be gone. Tahoe is so unstable that I now restart the Mac every day, when in the past it happened on software updates only. Apple Music is another huge mess, I can’t comprehend how can it be so…

When even my "boomer" aged and non-tech savvy dad who has always used an iPhone notices the update is bad, I think you are in at least a little bit of trouble if you don't quickly course correct.

Re: Welcome (back) to Macintosh

#44

Post by dgxyz »

Yeah this resonates with me. Every single point.

Every time they fuck something I move the workload over to Linux, not out of enthusiasm or any ideological purity but because I need to do some damn work. Add in the current geopolitical shit show, rising surveillance culture and the constant push for MRR and the whole "ecosystem" idea of computing and cloud becomes quite distasteful and risky.

A monumental moment recently was Reminders which has a horrible bug in it since Tahoe where you are entering several tasks in the scheduled view and you hit enter and carry on typing and it doesn't register the enter until several keypresses later, splitting the last word you typed between two tasks. This is a very very minor but utterly annoying thing which has broken my workflow. I was so fucked off with this happening every day I pulled a sheet of paper out of my printer and just wrote everything on that. And I've been doing that for 4 months now. Reminders is dead. I forget things like I did before, but I get over that.

One day I'll wake up and not use the Mac. The iPad and Apple Watch are already gone.

Re: Welcome (back) to Macintosh

#45

Post by monster_truck »

Writing has been on the wall for some time now. It's completely unsuitable for serious work, or serious play. I had a massive rant written but it isn't worth it. Fuck em

The M2 and M5 minis I have are the nicest drink coasters I've ever owned.

I have unresolved radars old enough to drive, go to war, or even vote at this point. They used to blame Intel's TB controllers. Guess what? They make their own now and the same fucking issues persist! Enjoy the kernel panics

Re: Welcome (back) to Macintosh

#47

Post by MoonWalk »

this-is-why wrote: post #41
freetonik wrote: post #28

My partner’s iMac recently died (seemingly the Radeon graphics card had failed, which is not uncommon on 2017 model). It was frustrating to find out that Time Machine was not operational for 8 last months. It was always connected. There were zero indications of any issues. It just stopped backing up at some point. The disk had enough space. In the past I had problems with network attached Time Machine destinations, b…

This is what worries me. I’ve used Time Machine for almost 20 years and it has provided seamless transitions to new MacBooks. But how do I know if it is currently borked?

I heard in the past that Time Machine backups would inevitably become corrupt because of a fundamental defect. Pretty vague, I realize, but I wouldn't have used it anyway; I rely on Carbon Copy Cloner to back up only what's important.

Re: Welcome (back) to Macintosh

#48

Post by dgxyz »

hedgehog wrote: post #33
freetonik wrote: post #28

My partner’s iMac recently died (seemingly the Radeon graphics card had failed, which is not uncommon on 2017 model). It was frustrating to find out that Time Machine was not operational for 8 last months. It was always connected. There were zero indications of any issues. It just stopped backing up at some point. The disk had enough space. In the past I had problems with network attached Time Machine destinations, b…

I don't know what's happened to Time Machine, with the capabilities available in APFS etc it should be much better if anything. But it's not. Thankfully the failure mode I've experienced didn't lead to data loss but I definitely don't trust it any more.

It was always shit. I have seen horror stories going back since the day it came out.

Think my favourite was a conceptual flaw. The lightning strike. You need a completely offline backup or you don't have a backup.

Edit: using ChronoSync and two external (hard) disks, rotated once a month off site at the moment. That has a nice fat VERIFY button on it.

Re: Welcome (back) to Macintosh

#49

Post by freetonik »

Coincidentally, I had to leave macOS for a Windows 11 pc about a month ago and it’s… fine. There are absurd bugs and ux decisions, but I honestly think there are different but equally bad aspects of macOS. On the other hand, some of the things in windows land are just nicer.

For one, my network samba shares stay connected and mounted through restarts. I could never make this work reliably on macOS.

File explorer is good. Finder always felt clunky and awkward to use. In addition, certain class of software exists for windows and not for macOS. Like FilePilot, Anything, MusicBee, Foobar2000 (Mac version of the latter is not the same as the windows version).

The biggest issue so far for me is keyboard shortcuts for text editing. Cmd-based movements are great and I have very deep muscle memory by now. I could not find a reliable way to recreate this on windows (I can make the cursor movement work, but some selections don’t work the same).

Re: Welcome (back) to Macintosh

#50

Post by wutwutwat »

this-is-why wrote: post #41
freetonik wrote: post #28

My partner’s iMac recently died (seemingly the Radeon graphics card had failed, which is not uncommon on 2017 model). It was frustrating to find out that Time Machine was not operational for 8 last months. It was always connected. There were zero indications of any issues. It just stopped backing up at some point. The disk had enough space. In the past I had problems with network attached Time Machine destinations, b…

This is what worries me. I’ve used Time Machine for almost 20 years and it has provided seamless transitions to new MacBooks. But how do I know if it is currently borked?

test your backups. disaster recovery gamedays shouldn't be optional. you can spin up macos vms on your mac (or in qemu on linux if you want, or in docker, or rent a mac cloud vm) and test the backup restore.
Post reply on HN