alt Hacker NewsI grew up with this animation so I didn't consider it annoying until I bought a new Macbook a couple years ago.
I noticed sometimes I would press keyboard shortcuts before my system's focus had switched. Just little stumbles here and there, some inoffensive, some annoying, but who knows maybe I didn't catch enough sleep.
Over time it happened often enough that I decided to google it, and it turns out my muscle memory wasn't failing me; the animation speed did change ever so slightly and was slower in new Macs with 120Hz displays [1][2] (newer MacBooks, 2021+). If you switch your screen to 60Hz it goes back to the faster animation.
Why is this animation slower now, and why does it depend on screen refresh rate? I have some technical theories but can't think of an organizational reason it happened and hasn't been fixed 5 years later at a 3.82 trillion market cap company. If you Google it there's plenty of discussions online about this. It's noticeable and annoying to people who have used the feature often enough.
[1]: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/256124324?sortBy=rank
Replies
Don't know about customizability on MacOS but I've always been very accustomed to animations and recently I just turned them off on Android and Linux and I... Don't miss anything. Turned out they don't add anything other than an initial wow factor.
I noticed this immediately when I first used a 120Hz macbook in 2021. As a vanilla MacOS UI feature that I'm sure many people use, I can't believe it hasn't been fixed yet.
I would assume it’s something based around whatever deacceleration animation it is calculating? So in the inverse of what you would see in games that don’t support uncapped framerates. It would at least explain why the refresh rate has an inverted relationship
This is such an insane bug to still have around all these years.
Are apple engineers not using macOS?