Little Annoyances in macOS 12.0.1
These appear to be part of long-standing problems with Apple’s wireless trackpads and keyboards, which can also occasionally result in the doubling of letters and other glitches. Although these have improved to the level of occasional irritants, I can’t understand how Apple’s own devices can’t be used without these bugs getting in the way.
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Sadly the answer is that they’re still non-functional. Open the Desktop & Screen Saver pane, select the Screen Saver tab, and then preview the Classic, for example. All I can see is a black screen with the time displayed.
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One of the oldest prominent bugs in macOS, which dates back at least eight years to OS X 10.9 if not before, is a flaw in the Finder calculating the width of columns, which I’ve named the Finder column width bug.
The biggest issues for me are:
Storage (both hard drives and SSDs) is slow and unpredictable. Drives do not always mount automatically or eject successfully. Sometimes mounting takes over an hour. Sometimes deleting a volume takes overnight. Sometimes no app can open or save a file (using file coordination) for 10 minutes until a background process becomes unwedged.
Sometimes various apps (Mail, Finder) stop responding to clicks. I can still click in another app to bring it to the front, but clicks within the current app (e.g. to select an item in a list) are ignored or change the selection while leaving the window in the background. This goes on for 10–15 seconds and then mysteriously resolves.
Searching in Mail sometimes doesn’t work. It will either not update the list (i.e. continue showing mailbox contents that don’t match the query) or show no messages even when there should be lots of matches. At first, I thought this was improved from Big Sur, but it seems to be back to its old ways. Rebuilding Spotlight and Mail’s database helps, but only temporarily. Mail’s database still grows over time, as it retains indexing information for messages that have long since been deleted.
Like Catalina and Big Sur, Monterey just bogs down after a few days of use. Activity Monitor doesn’t show any odd CPU or RAM numbers, but Safari starts taking 10 seconds to load a page, Mail searches take forever, Finder shows stale folder contents, etc. I have to restart to make it usable again.
If we’re talking annoyances, rather than bugs per se, the top of my list would have to be the narrow alerts.
Previously:
- Why Won’t That Help Book Open?
- Apple Software Quality in 2021
- Mouse Pointer Memory Leak
- macOS 12 Monterey and User Interface Inconsistencies
- What You See in the Finder Should Always Be Correct
- Big Sur’s Narrow Alerts
Update (2021-12-03): Tyler Hall:
Just piling on to say that 12.0 is the first time I’ve ever consistently shut down my laptop at the end of each work day because I know that will make tomorrow much more performant and glitch free.
Two more bugs I still run into, carried over from Big Sur:
Save panels don’t actually save in the destination folder that’s shown.
Sometimes the “D” key stops responding (on any keyboard) until I restart.
An annoyance, new in Monterey, is that in the evening, when my Mac’s screen is locked and asleep, it will wake itself up—disturbing me by flashing light all around the room—just to show a notification that it’s entering Do Not Disturb mode.
I could pick and choose from the bugs I have filed in the past several months to build a list like these. I seldom find applications outright crashing, but there are plenty of entry-level user interaction problems: in several apps, scroll position is not preserved while using the app or when it is backgrounded; notifications fly in from the bottom edge of the screen when waking my Mac like there is a violent toaster on my desk; Music remains a small tragedy.
In isolation, it would be hard to isolate any of these problems as particularly upsetting or difficult. But they compound. Each one adds unnecessary friction to the tools I use all the time. You can add them all to a list but, for me at least, they multiply my annoyance. From where I am sitting, it is hard to know if these problems are being treated seriously, or if they are falling by the wayside as Apple races to get new features ready in time for WWDC 2022.
There have been a few reports of Macs running recent versions of macOS, particularly 12.0.1, gradually getting slower until they almost grind to a halt. This article suggests a structured way to tackle both diagnosing and dealing with this.
Good tips, but unfortunately they did not lead to a resolution for me. Neither did rebuilding Launch Services.
Apple released MacOS Monterey (V12.0.1) last week, and my upgrade experience was less than stellar. After three days, I’m still dealing with multiple irritating issues.
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When I wake up my Mac, as often as not, my desktop icons have rearranged themselves spontaneously, leaving a jumble of overlapping icons in place of my carefully arranged groups
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Another issue I haven’t yet resolved is that my wired keyboard has become unreliable since the upgrade. Characters don’t appear when I type them, sometimes appearing after a long lag and sometimes not appearing at all. It happens with two different wired keyboards and is so irritating that I’m using the built-in MacBook Air keyboard, which I hate.
While the new MacBook Pro hardware is dreamy, both migrations from my old gear were marred by macOS bugs in Monterey on both ends.
One of my favorites: When Migration Assistant tries to close all the apps on the source Mac end, it it gets held up by an app that won’t close, it just gets stuck in a bad state. You get a back button, but into a “can’t authenticate” state.
Update (2021-12-13): Martin Wierschin:
My own upgrade to Monterey was relatively smooth, but there were some issues. The only potentially critical failure was that Apple Mail did not import all of my emails. Several hundred emails were completely blank and invalid
One of the things I admire most about macOS is how using a Photos as a source of images for the screensaver has been broken for so long (I think since El Capitan) that nobody even mentions it anymore.
See also: What’s happening with Apple?.
Update (2024-12-06): Howard Oakley:
Among those things that never change in the Finder is a prominent bug that has affected its column view for at least the last 11 years, back to OS X Mavericks if not before. During beta-testing macOS Sequoia last summer, I thought for a while that Apple had fixed it, but when I looked for the bug in the release version of macOS 15.0 it hadn’t even gone into hiding, and it’s still there today in 15.1.1.
