alt Hacker NewsLast Week on My Mac: Losing confidence
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I typically jump on the latest macOS with enthusiasm. I once made the mistake to install the beta version of the next os, and well, that didn't go well for me. But typically, within X.1, I'm there.
However something shifted since this "visionOS" melted version of macOS (Tahoe); where I have absolutely no intension to upgrade from Sequoia. I hope they will fix it by the time I'll be forced to upgrade (post support deadline).
It started with the macOS that brought the iOS settings panel. We went from a logical structure of easily findable stuff to a complete mess. Just open the "Keyboard" settings on macOS today and it's bewildering how they could ship this and think this is fine. Steve would roll in his grave.
The process to allow running applications that are unsigned is just a horrible hack. It feels like a last minute "shove it and move on!".
By 2035 I wonder if we'll be all running KDE or WindowMaker and the hell with modern OS GUI.
From a Gestalt standpoint, human relations with desktop computers are not the same as with thumb driven mobile OS or air-pinch driven vision OS, period. The hell with "glass" or "flat" design. Desktop OS should be as forgettable as possible, as it's about having long stints of flow, not giving a feeling of "air" or "play".
In my experience Apple's software has been accumulating small annoying bugs for a couple years.
For a couple years I have been noticing regular new glitches in the Apple TV interface accumulating faster than old ones disappear.
Lately the glitch accumulation syndrome seems to have hit macOS. Notes has started doing random bolding, unbolding, changing text size on only one line, etc. After a restart, a finder window with tabs springs to different screen spaces, depending on which tab is open when I try to drop a file on it. Message sometimes draws a few lines of a message with a few pixels vertical and horizontally offset, so there is actual overlap of message parts.
Then there are chronic ones. Safari's save or print to PDF are notorious for not saving pictures you can see, even from reading mode. How are basic functions in Safari not worth fixing, for years?
Apple's HomePods ... for many years. I could write a blog of interesting Pod behavior. I thought having one or a pair in each room would be nice. No, more of them is not nice. Constant bizarreness.
The noticeable acceleration isn't encouraging.
To Apple: People are complaining because they'd rather you fix it, than them having to leave the platform (moving OSes is annoying, because operating systems have a lot of lock in - data you'd have to move, apps you need to find alternatives for and re-learn).
The iOS / macOS 26 frustration I think is particularly felt by the HN type crowd. Don't want something that looks cool but is less effective/performant/usable. "We" can feel Apple's priorities drifting away from ours.
Side note: I wonder how much easier AI will make it to migrate between operating systems? Perhaps future AI systems that are good at computer-usage could manage migrations/installs well.
Apple hardware is absurdly good. Airpods, amazing, redefined what wireless headphones are. M-series macbooks, amazing, new benchmark in performance per core and battery life. Plenty of older products too that either created the category or completely dominate it.
Apple software, on the other hand, feels like a totally different company. Stuff like Siri is miles behind the ball, things like Airplay (IME) are flaky with little recourse when they don't work, Liquid glass is slower feeling and a noticeable battery hog. Apple music still has more hiccups and random play stoppage than Spotify.
I really, really like the hardware, but apple software needs some competition. Half of the features in the last 2-3 iOS releases were in Cydia over a decade ago.
While I love their hardware, this is why I will always chose a Linux distribution over anything closed source. Being able to retrieve logs of pretty much anything and change pieces of the OS as time goes on is extraordinarily resilient.
Sure it's sometimes not as shiny as MacOS, and it will most likely never be polished enough for the mainstream market share, but there's something really awesome about not being reliant on a support engineer that does not have the financial incentive to spend the correct amount of time solving a one off problem.
It's possible to look at the behavior of a company over time and infer their internal incentive structure. It's been clear for several versions of MacOS recently that Apple spends much more energy adding features than fixing bugs. It seems obvious that there is no incentive within Apple to fix bugs; the only thing that gets one promoted at Apple must be adding new features -- so bugs (at least in MacOS) don't get fixed.
We already know that Apple makes about 51% of its revenue from iPhone sales. Therefore it's reasonable to assume promotion opportunities are mostly centered around iPhone hardware and hardware, rather than MacOS. Those of us who depend on MacOS are likely screwed unless something at Apple changes.
> rush to get the next version of macOS out of the door
That’s the key I think. Apple these days never releases when products are ready, but on a predefined schedule. Point releases that should fix things, are actually delivering more features that were shown on the keynote, but didn’t quite make the main release date.
As a result the systems accumulated some bugs that might never get fixed, unless the code happens to be completely rewritten. The desktop switching animation is hopelessly long when using keyboard shortcuts with ProMotion enabled. On both iOS and macOS the Music app will have an audible click couple of seconds into the first played song when using lossless quality. Stuff like these is known and reported, there’s just seemingly zero bandwidth to handle it.
It must be exhausting and stressful being an OS dev or dev team. I haven't experienced any of the troubles that are referenced here; and, the one complaint I've had over the years was resolved, like, on the very next update.
I use my mac for IntelliJ and Firefox. I guess maybe my usage surface is just really, really small; but I basically never have any problems ... and then others come along and say they're having huge issues.
I see the various updates as they happen and like ... all of them are neutral or minor inconveniences that are resolved next patch, for me.
<rant>I've never had confidence in MacOS or Apple software in general, and especially not in Apple Photos. Photos beachballs constantly, even when I do simple things like creating a new folder or naming a photo. It loses keystrokes almost every time I type a folder or photo name. No other program does this on the same Mac, which is an M4 Pro with 64GB RAM and terabytes of SSD. I know that it's not a problem with the hardware because the previous Mac Mini, which was well equipped, had the same problem for years. Reconstructing the Photos database didn't help.
Don't get me started about how Time Machine drops files — important files like the Photos Sqlite3 database — from backups.
Yes, I should switch from Photos to something else, e.g. Immich.
I barely use the software included with the Mac, and would only use Linux except that there are still just a few programs or bits of hardware that insist on there being a Mac or Windows machine somewhere.
How Apple every got a reputation for high-quality, user-friendly software is beyond me.
Not recommended.</rant>
> Silent failures like these are least likely to be reported to Apple.
They might be, but unfortunately Apple's MetricKit reporting system is extremely primitive when it comes to crashes. It can't even handle C++ exceptions, and important information like thread/queue names, CPU registers, stack area and app state are strangely absent.
The ridiculously bad crash reporting on Apple products is why I wrote KSCrash.
Apple has completely lost the high ground it earned during the OS X high times, paired with the relentless innovation of the iPod and iPhone. If they were smart they would focus on refinement in this era of gradual and boring innovation, so when the next thing is ready, they have a solid and trusted platform to support it. As things stand, if the next thing comes tomorrow, the next generation could easily jump ship. They may have the people who are too lazy to learn something new and will survive like Microsoft has. But at this point there's nothing substantially different about the company that told us to "think different".
I dual boot my M1 Mac Studio with Fedora Asahi Remix (native Linux for Apple Silicon for those unfamiliar). I'm far more comfortable and productive in Linux for development, but wanted to keep macOS there for times when I needed it.
It turns out I haven't needed it, and I honestly don't remember the last time I've booted into macOS on that system.
I like Apple hardware, but the last time I enjoyed using macOS was pre-2010.
“People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.” — Alan Kay
It's ironic after fighting the good fight for so long and finally making their own hardware that Apple should fall on their own sword with software now.
I've been loving Apple since Tiger, I'm still on Sequoia and iOS 18.
Pepe prayge for the 27-releases to be another Snow Leopard as rumored.
I love how both MacOS and Windows users are reaching a point of no return.
Last week I finally decided to jump to Linux. While I realize that I have a few nits and annoying bugs I run in to, its hard to say if linux has any more than the mainstream offerings.
Would love to see them do another OSX 10.6 and just release a version with lots bug fixes and no new features. But instead it'll be a new half-baked LLM tool to help you make new half-baked LLM tools.
My least favorite thing on the Mac is when they have one of their infamous negative number “error codes” in the alert box, and I get my hopes up that at least it must represent a common thread of errors others have had that may be solved in a forum or subreddit somewhere, then when googling that you discover that all forms of failure from disk full to malware result in the exact same oddly-specific error code and that everyone is talking to each other about it and slowly realizing they have nothing in common but being cursed by Tim Cook.
I've been using Macs in various forms since the 80s and I've carried a Mac laptop with me nearly full time since the early 2000s. While I don't think quality is necessarily overall worse than a decade or two ago I have run out of patience for rewrites with major regressions of most of the apps I care about. For the first time in a lot of years I have a Linux laptop along side my Mac and, if all works out, I'm planning to shift all my important workflows over.
Yeah I don’t recall ever seeing this on Windows in fact I can still run Win 95 games (yes, those exist) on Windows 11. Mostly[0] works. I can go and install games from my original CDs which shouldn’t be possible but a bit of toothpaste on them does the trick.
Things just work for the most part because backwards compat is hardwired into the folks at Microsoft. Someone did a YouTube video not too long ago installing MS-DOS all the way through Windows 11, upgrading version by version.
[0] Mostly.
The irony is that we all independently decided QA was a “process smell” around the same time. The logic seemed airtight: developers should own quality, shift left, test in prod with feature flags, move fast. Every tech blog and conference talk said the same thing. What nobody mentioned is that QA teams weren’t just finding bugs—they were the institutional memory of how things break.
When you dissolve QA and tell developers “you own quality now,” that knowledge just evaporates. Each developer tests the happy path for their feature and calls it done. The edge cases? The interaction effects? The weird state machines? Those all ship to prod. The really insidious part is the metrics looked great. Velocity up, deployment frequency up, cycle time down. We were measuring output, not outcomes. Exec dashboards showed green across the board while user experience quietly degraded.
Now we’re in the equilibrium state: software ships fast and breaks often, every deploy is a dice roll, and we’ve normalized “hotfix Friday” as just how things work. The velocity gains were real, but we were measuring distance traveled, not value delivered. Turns out “everyone owns quality” means nobody owns quality. Who knew.
I totally agree with most of the article, but the hallucinations bit puzzles me. If it’s genuinely an unchangeable limitation of the product (as hallucinations are with LLMs) it’s good to set the right expectation rather than making promises you can’t deliver on.
I started experiencing this several years ago with MacOS including file copies that failed with no notification from the finder.
I switched away from MacOS at that time.
My last job we were given MacOS machines, I didn't experience anything that made me want to reconsider my decision to ditch MacOS as my daily driver.
This guy nailed exactly what’s wrong with macOS IMHO.
I've been on Apple since the 1980s. Apple IIc was my first Apple.
Since a few years ago, I've chosen to stay at least 1 full version behind the current version and I've never regretted that.
Last weekend I was writing some quick notes in the Notes app, and I could not get it to stop performing nonsensical completions in blinking yellow text. Apple Intelligence disabled, predictive text disabled, various combinations of backspace escape etc. Nothing worked. How hard is it to code a Notes app that doesn't mess with you?
It's pretty depressing as well as frustrating, watching something pretty solid get flushed in real time. This post puts words on it I hadn't really, but fading "confidence" is a really succinct foundation. There's no single massive thing just completely fubar'd, but the cumulative effect of hundreds to thousands of mysterious cuts combined with that now familiar sinking feeling of watching GUI bikeshedding accelerate with each new version, every more miserable, less useful, no more Feelings Of Delight at seeing some cool little attention to detail or nice new thing that clearly had some real thought and testing behind it. It all really eats away at one's day. I'm seeing this HN post and article literally right as I'm watching Activity Monitor and trying to figure out WTF is going on with mysterious ApplicationsStorageExtension (a plugin buried in the StorageManagement.framework) tasks spawning 4x on a Sequoia Mini M4 Pro and doing constant disk churn to no discernable purpose and introducing massive latency to certain file system access patterns. This started up out of nowhere in the last few weeks, almost exactly 1 year after getting this machine and with no major system upgrades. Why!? Who knows! Force quit them all and other stuff like MailStorageManagement goes nuts for a bit and then it settles down for an indeterminate period of time. Restart the computer and it goes away for awhile. No FS corruption issues found, seem to be no issues with spotlight. Sigh.
After decades using macOS and significant investment the barrier to change is significant too, even if there was some ideal thing to jump to which there is not. But like others I am chipping away at it where I can, slowly divorcing from the Apple ecosystem, going ever more heterodox. I can see people reaching tipping points at various places, might take quite awhile but the thing is once someone jumps ship you're probably never getting them back and eventually that can add up to them taking others with them. It's just such a damned waste too.
"Mr. Jobs reportedly asked the assembled engineers and other MobileMe team members, “Can anyone tell me what MobileMe is supposed to do?” When one of those employees then volunteered a satisfactory answer, Mr. Jobs followed up with, “So why the fuck doesn’t it do that?”
(source - https://www.businessinsider.com/steve-jobs-mobileme-failure-...)
If the error message happens to include a numeric code, OSStatus.com is sometimes helpful if the issue if they didn't bother with a localizable string for it.
Latest MacOS made my laptop speakers unusable
I feel his pain. Some of those error alerts make me want to sob.
Reporting problems to Apple is downright demoralizing. Most of the time, the bugs remain unassigned, unread, and unsolved. The few that do earn a response, are usually gaslighting.
I suspect that Apple may have hired a whole bunch of less-than-stellar people, and it’s showing. That’s depressing, because I always considered them to be the gold standard.
Isn't there a rumor that the next MacOS/iOS update are going to focus on reliablilty and fixing bugs? I think everyone would like that.
I have an on-again-off-again relationship with macOS - the deep integration with Apple hardware is stellar and IMO the new MacBook Airs are tremendous value for money, but otherwise the OS seems to be suffering from some deep technical debt and MBA-brained decision-making.
I'm currently on the "meh hardware but solid OS" phase of the cycle - the battery life isn't as good and waking from suspend still (somehow) isn't as seamless, but my Linux of choice (Silverblue) is predictable and transparent - and ultimately if there's a problem it's in my gift to fix it, which is much more comforting to me.
I wonder what they'll do to woo me back next time..
There's actually a better format than Safari web archives hidden in the Safari Debug menu: Save Page Complete.
This saves the individual files of the site in standard format, html, js, css, etc., much like Chrome does with Webpage, Complete.
I know this might seem stupid as I don't own a Mac, but does Darwin use systemd? Can the author use journalctl, syslog or check /var/log?
macos feels dated these days to me.
it's time for a clean slate.
> You’re eventually advised to reinstall macOS or, in the worst case, to wipe a fairly new Apple silicon Mac and restore it in DFU mode, but have no reason to believe that will stop the problem from recurring.
This isn't new. Back in GPU-gate days, I had a MBP that I could very reliably kernel panic due to that issue. But it'd pass Diagnostics so "no fix for you!"
Even when I was there with a Genius, we did this, and on a brand new install - look, here, can replicate this KP (which was basically some of the same steps people had for identifying the GPU (and everything else matched up).
Tahoe has been giving spinning wheel on Firefox browser since updating it. You switch from spotlight to Firefox, there's the wheel; leave computer alone for sometime and comeback there's the wheel. I want this mess fixed.
Similarly on iOS, Safari bookmarks don't expose all folder names but only "Bookmarks" and "Favourites" as default. Why do I have to do another extra tap to expose a single folder that I have to save bookmark in? Why cannot at least five folder names be exposed? Another absurdity is while saving a fullpage screenshot after cropping it, you have to click the checkmark "emoji" which is otherwise blank with no description, and then comes a sub-menu to save as pdf or photo; why cannot those four options be presented as is on the main menu?
I couple of months ago, I wasted about 4 hours debugging issues with my app. Command-line scripts didn't work properly for some reason, while my IDE worked fine.
Turned out that I either missed or accidentally denied the permission to access local networks for iTerm. So the `curl` utility installed from Homebrew was silently failing, while the system-provided `/usr/bin/curl` worked fine. Because it has special permission from Apple.
Can I just give the same permission to iTerm? Nope. We are not worthy of that power, and must re-affirm permissions every 30 days for all non-Apple software.
Oh, and these permission popups happen at random moments, including during presentations or meetings. And if you don't accept them, they are silently denied.
[dead]
Not 100% related, but I remember when OS...8? came out with balloon help, and one of the guidelines for it was that it should provide specific messages for when a menu item or control is disabled, to explain why the feature was disabled. e.g. on the Copy menu, "Not available because nothing is selected"
Reporting an error is a good thing.