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Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

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Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#631

Post by casey2 »

andrepd wrote: post #519
whstl wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple is addicted to growth. It is as big as it should be, but it acts like an early stage startup always trying to build some new flashy thing to attract the next customer.

It's not Apple, it's capitalism. "Unlimited growth is the ideology of the cancer cell", yet for Apple (or any corporation), it's not good enough to sell 100,000,000 phones. Next year you must sell 105,000,000. And the year after 112,000,000 (not even 110 or your growth is stagnating). So you get rid of removable batteries so customers have to toss their phones away more often, you gimp other feature, you spend more m…

I'm sure everyone has seen this 100 times already but it really fits given modern advertising practice of every major company, especially in designing products to fit advertising plans.

There are also entire "industries" designed to shield people who want to find quality content from big 'A' advertising.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGKsbt5wii0 For context John Sculley said "Apple was the marketing company of the decade" in the 80s and Kicked Jobs out of Apple

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#632

Post by ShrimpHawk »

Nextgrid wrote: post #548
microtonal wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple's software quality (either in terms of polish or just plain QA) has steadily decreased I think the decline of software went hand-in-hand with the decline of the native indie Mac app. They still exist, but when I started with the Mac (2007), there was a very rich ecosystem of native Mac apps. Most stood head and shoulders above their Linux and Windows counterparts. Apple has nearly destroyed that ecosystem with:…

> 1Password tried SwiftUI for their Mac app 1Password had a beautiful native Mac app that works to this day. Even assuming SwiftUI is actually bad, why did they have to migrate at all? What was wrong with the existing app? I'm not disagreeing with the opinions on Apple software quality, but I think the 1Password case is more down to their taking of VC money and having to give (JS) devs some busywork to rebuild someth…

1Password is also now subscription only and online only. Gone are the days of a forever license and fully offline encrypted database allowing for 3rd party syncing via iCloud or others. The death of their old app went hand in hand with their race to the bottom subscription payment VC backed ecosystem. It's only time until they suffer a breach like everyone else.

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#633

Post by dsego »

tannhaeuser wrote: post #469

> Yes, they work and are still smoother and less glitchy than Windows 11, but they feel like software developed by people who don’t actually use that software I would have to agree here (and Apple also don't seem to assess feedback for their GUI changes), but unfortunately this thread is already on a software quality meta tangent rather than listing individual annoyances so here's my short list in the hope actual bug…

> window focus management broken

Although I do not mind the way that window management works on macos, recently I had a mildly infuriating situation. I was doing Cmd+Z to undo something, not sure which app and it didn't work so I pressed it a couple of times instinctively. But although my target app was visible and on top, it was Finder that was actually in focus - accidentally I triggered undo in Finder. I think I managed to undelete a file and something else, but I'm not sure. Not sure if there is a way to find a log of actions. That's something I would love to see in all desktop systems, a history of user actions. Also having undo/redo shortcuts in Finder is potentially destructive, what if I move some files from an SD card, reformat it in camera, and then accidentally hit undo in Finder?

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#634

Post by coob »

Yawn, there is some variant of this story after every os release.

The articles specific gripes with macOS are Mail, Messages, and System settings. Fixing those does not require a ‘no new features’ (which was always BS) major release.

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#635

Post by detourdog »

simondotau wrote: post #624
detourdog wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The biggest struggle is that the original Macintosh was so simple to manage. The original concept of system extensions to expand the capabilities and the file structure built on the hierarchy with the desktop as the top level was broken with the shift to Unix. Suddenly the users file hierarchy started wherever the Home folder was located and it became an island of user controlled environment surrounded by complexity…

Simplicity is fine for a hobby project. An operating system having zero concern for any kind of security is a non-starter today. It's amazing the rose tinted glasses people have about the original Macintosh environment. It was insanely janky and (unless you were ruthlessly conservative) insanely unstable by today's standards. By version 10.5 (Leopard) the modern UNIX-based MacOS was unequivocally superior to Classic…

I understand the trade offs and accept them. I was trying to point out where the split is and how it won't go back. I think the point of view expressed in your comment is s distorted as the ones your derding.

I also believe that the simplicity could have security as performant. The real advantage of the Unix layer is compatibility that the Macintosh was missing.

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#636

Post by whompyjaw »

rollcat wrote: post #580
latexr wrote: post #535

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What’s the actual argument that will credibly convince the top leaders of Apple, to push fixing MacOS up the list of priorities? Unrelenting bad press. People talking about nothing else but the decline of their software quality. We can already see that with the recent debacle which caused executive shuffling at the top of the company.

That shuffling was caused by Apple utterly failing to deliver a major feature, that was a key selling point for the latest generation of their hardware. "Bad press" for their declining software quality is like people complaining there's no iPhone mini/SE anymore. Apple just doesn't give a fuck. They've joined the rest of the flock at chasing fads and quarterly bottom lines.

What was the major feature? The complete uselessness of “AI” on macOS? I updated and enabled all the AI features and I would ask Siri from my M1 and it failed every time. Would just continuously try with its annoying ping sound and never work. Blew my mind that they let this out.

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#637

Post by WD-42 »

troupo wrote: post #526
mythz wrote: post #483

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Weird flex, most commands, utilities, server software and remote tools are going to be run are going to be from the command-line. All our System Administration of remote servers uses the command-line as well since exclusively deploying to Linux for 10+ years. Sure you can happily avoid the command-line with a Linux Desktop and GUI Apps, although as a developer I don't see how I could avoid using the terminal. Even on…

> Weird flex, most commands, utilities, server software and remote tools are going to be run are going to be from the command-line. It's not a weird flex. Weird flex is this: "The command-line is also super charged in Linux starting with a GPU-accelerated Gnome terminal/ptyxis and Ghostty running Oh My Zsh" and then listing a bunch of obscure personal preference tools that follow trends du jour.

None of those tools are obscure, they might just seem like it from the perspective of mouse dependent vscode users.

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#638

Post by whywhywhywhy »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #66
spudlyo wrote: post #32

I'm done with macOS, I've migrated to Linux for my general purpose computing. With every new release of macOS, Gatekeeper is becoming harder and harder to bypass, increasing Apple's control over what software can be run on macOS, forcing apps to be signed with an Apple Developer ID. While I'm happy they are taking security seriously, I'm seriously creeped out that macOS sends hashes of every executable I run to their…

> Gatekeeper is becoming harder and harder to bypass sudo spctl —-master-disable

Frustrating thing is the earlier versions worked well, it protected you from accidental things but the way to force it was clear and obvious. Now bypass is obtuse and requires enough work arounds people advise just disabling it which is also bad to normalize.

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#639

Post by rollcat »

gr_norm wrote: post #256
scarface_74 wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes because everything in Linux is completely intuitive and you never have to know anything obscure to use it to your liking…

The difference: in Linux it is a usability issue to be fixed, whereas on macOS it is a feature and explicit design goal to make it that way. In general, I have found that things which are difficult on Linux are so because the problem is difficult, not because the people who make my computer have paternalistic attitudes about my usage of it.

> In general, I have found that things which are difficult on Linux are so because the problem is difficult [...].

Hard disagree. Audio mixing is not difficult[1]. The Linux kernel guys were right - it does not belong in the kernel. The userspace story however, has been a complete shitshow for decades. I think Pipewire mostly fixed that? Not sure, sometimes I still have to log out and back in to fix audio.

The funniest part? It's been working in the BSDs all along. I recommend reading the source of sndiod[1].

[1]: https://cvsweb.openbsd.org/src/usr.bin/sndiod/>

What's even worse? Probably systemd. I try not to hold a strong opinion - I tolerate it, the way I tolerate traffic when taking a walk. The technical issue however is several orders of magnitude simpler - again, the BSDs come to mind, but you can also write a complete PID1 program in about 20 lines of straightforward C[2]. I don't mind the commands being unfamiliar (they're already all different in almost every OS family); it's that the entire package is dreadfully large in scope, opaque, and I find it more difficult to interact with than anything else in this landscape.

[2]: https://ewontfix.com/14/>

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#640

Post by gessha »

nottorp wrote: post #475
dijit wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an actual dyed in the wool game developer. There’s no such thing as “native”, all the things you’re talking about are translation layers for hardware instructions themselves, and the overhead for doing software based translation is significantly less than hardware accelerated virtual machines- and we as an industry love those. The reason for this is because the translations are very cache friendly and happen in us…

> and the scheduler on Windows is so poor compared to Linux ones that it’s even common for games to perform better on Linux than on Windows.. I play most of my games in a window and switch away a lot. A million years ago when I was still playing world of warcraft, the system overall was much more responsive on the same hardware with wow on wine on linux than with wow natively running on windows :) > it’s actually Sta…

OP is talking about Google (Stadia) throwing money at the problem and incentivizing game engine companies to better support Linux. They’re not talking about pro or anticonsumer the tech was.
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