Apple Needs a Snow Sequoia

Its amazing how bad SMB support is in MacOS. Its not like AFP is still an option.

It's a nice dream, but there's so much bug debt at this point, and seemingly so few people in charge at Apple with any capability to dig the Mac out of it.

As a long time user of macOS and Windows and Linux (to a lesser extent), I fundamentally disagree with the idea that macOS is "still smoother and less glitchy than Windows 11". Just looking at cloud file providers (Dropbox, OneDrive, Nextcloud, Google Drive, etc) on macOS, macOS is today worse than Windows as /ever/ been. I run into far more pain points on macOS than Windows these days.

I will admit that most of those pain points aren't bugs really they are just how Apple has decided to make their computers work. The only reason I've stuck with macOS is third party software + Messages.

If only someone high up at Apple cared. Craig Federighi seems just fine with having Mac OS burn to the ground on his watch. It all started going downhill after Bertrand Serlet left. Why all the emphasis on security at the expense of everything else? I can only assume someone is stalking Tim Cook. (half joking, half not.)

I'm sure insiders are aware of the dismal state of things but their hands are probably tied. Besides, Macs are the new iPod according to the last decade of revenue breakdown graphs (read: the Mac could disappear tomorrow and Apple's bean counters wouldn't even notice).

OTOH the buggy, convoluted state of iOS is completely inexplicable.

Bugfixes will only come after management fixes (cut the top management and a lot of poor middle management).

@billyok
I agree it's more than tech debt; the platforms have gone the wrong direction. iPad being a giant iPhone for 15 years. macOS turning into Vista. App Store gatekeeping. A lost decade hyping the most churn-heavy Homer Car programming language.

Maybe the real bug is that we continue to hold out hope.

We are coming to a sad realization. Cancel or Allow?

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@Hammer you put it better than I did. Some of what I reflexively call a bug -- things that used to work and work in a way that made sense but no longer do -- is there by design and a side effect of company priorities at odds with customer needs.

At what point does macOS software "quality" become an impediment to people purchasing hardware? Been there for years. Moved almost everything over to the Win 10 machine. Lost track of macOS versions and codenames.

Recently upgraded $dayjob MBP to latest macOS (+2 versions) and immediately had more problems than before, obvious every day stuff going wrong. Switching windows and scrolling scrolls the old window. Scrolling bugs! I guess it's Win 11 later this year.

The current state of macOS has me holding off dropping $4k+ multiple times now. Apple's too big and too successful for this to matter these days, sadly.

gildarts:

> As a long time user of macOS and Windows and Linux (to a lesser extent), I fundamentally disagree with the idea that macOS is "still smoother and less glitchy than Windows 11".

I couldn't agree more. I've been using Windows 11 on a Lenovo gaming laptop for almost two years now, and since I also use this machine for other stuff on top of gaming, I've been stressing it quite a bit, but Windows 11 hasn't given me any trouble so far. A surprisingly smooth and stable ride.

And I also have Windows 10 Pro on a couple of other ThinkPads, and apart from one single hard crash on one of them, again, no glaring issues to report. Windows' UI may not be the greatest around, but Mac OS's UI isn't widening the gap at all as time passes. Quite the contrary. As for bugs and unpredictable behaviour, Mac OS is giving me 'old Windows' vibes more and more frequently.

Yeah, at this point, Windows 11 > Mac OS X.

As an aside, Spotlight used to be a huge advantage the Mac had over Windows. But with Everything, Windows now has the best file search tool, period. It just completely blows Spotlight out of the water, particularly the more recent, broken versions. Nothing available on the Mac comes even close. It's genuinely painful to go from Windows to Mac OS X, just based on this alone.

I'm not sure what people are expecting from Apple at this point when it comes to macOS.

You don't even have to log in to find UI/UX issues. The login window in recent macOS versions is the worst of all time from a UX point of view.

Buy Mac for excellent hardware. That's all.

The refrain that we need a new Snow release isn't new, of course. I actually thought things had settled down by 10.6.2, at least for my needs. But, ultimately, Apple needs to care and right now they clearly don't. Voting with your wallet is only something you can do in theory. So you just have to determine what your priorities are and leap accordingly. IMO, macOS does still have some distinction—but it's evaporating quickly, and eventually it's reasonable to ask when it really doesn't matter how shitty the UI of the other guys are, because ultimately that's not what actually matters. It's shit, but it works fine, so take your pick. Win11 has problems, like not respecting your privacy, but the software does work well enough to be useful, so I won't be replacing my 2020 iMac with a machine that can only run macOS, that's for sure.

Macrotrends: from 37k to 164k employees 2010-2024. In the timeframe it added many new silicon designs, new and updated software platforms. Namely sepOS, Secure Kernel, new XProtect, multiple iterations of Swift, SwiftUI, WebKit, CloudKit, managed the deprecation of Carbon APIs and openGL and much more. My feeling is embedded and professional parts kept steadily improving while consumer centered applications followed consumer marketing.

I'm still using Ventura and have no plan to upgrade. It's already bad enough, and in my experience Sonoma is worse, and Sequoia is a lot worse.

I'm still on a 2019 iMac as well, and also have no plan to upgrade. My work frequently requires doing development in x86_64 Windows, and right now I can virtualize it.

At some point I'm going to make the switch to Linux, because I've had enough of Apple. But since I can no longer have one computer for doing all of my work, I'm going to need some kind of convoluted workstation setup where I can switch between macOS, Windows, and Linux between two or perhaps even three different computers.

Maybe it'll be a KVM switch, or maybe I'll use some kind of screen streaming solution so that I can still have one system be the "main" one, I can pick which monitors are displaying which operating systems, and I can still have conveniences like shared clipboards and dragging and dropping files between the systems. But I'm not looking forward to setting that up!

I have been screaming for a Snow Leopard-esque release for quite some time now. The buggy state of macOS is what has pushed me into the arms of linux, at least for my personal dev environment. Out of pure frustration, I threw the latest Ubuntu on a 10-year-old ThinkPad and in many ways, it's more performant than my 6-year-old MBP with half the RAM and slower disk capabilities. The IDE is snappy, Docker is much faster, and the workflow is smooth. The ONLY issues I have in the linux environment is the crappy hardware I'm using.

I now find myself at a crossroads of purchasing a new laptop, as I'm overdue. I DO enjoy the new Apple Silicon machines I use at work. They are light and last all day on battery. But the OS is just... ugh. I simply don't care about all the new whiz-bang features that I don't use. It just adds to overhead. I want the OS to be speedy, work as expected, and get the heck out of my way. More and more I find myself stubbing my toes on Mac OS and that's a damned shame.

As a life-long Apple power user, I'm now leaning toward buying a PC laptop for linux. Anyone who knows me knows how out-of-character that truly is. (Yes I know of the Asahi linux efforts but I'm hesitant to spend that kind of money on an experiment at this point.) I have also been courting Mac developers to think about developing on linux, because it truly could use people sweating the pixels like Mac devs do. It is a fertile field waiting to be cultivated, with a user base to boot which would be greatly appreciative of the efforts.

I’d kill for a bunch of Apple developers to come to Linux and actually polish the UX.

I love the Linux folks, but most of them couldn’t make a good UI if their life depended on it.

>Maybe it'll be a KVM switch

I don't like KVM switches; they never work quite reliably enough and tie you to a specific location. I put a bunch of computers in my basement connected to a switch, all running Tailscale and RDP (xrdp) and/or RustDesk. I've also now connected a NanoKVM to each of them (and I'm waiting for my JetKVMs to replace the NanoKVMs).

This setup is much less work, much cheaper, and much more reliable than in the past. It just works 99% of the time, and for the 1% of the time when a Windows update shuts down the system instead of bringing it back up, I can bring it back up remotely using the NanoKVM. RDP, in particular, is also super responsive and reliable. Microsoft doesn't get enough credit for how well it works.

>most of them couldn’t make a good UI if their life depended on it.

There are a bunch of real stinkers, like Gimp, but I feel like a lot of newer Linux apps are not substantially worse than their counterparts on other operating systems. One issue is the many different desktop environments, so apps that are designed for one often look a bit out of place in another. On the other hand, so do web apps, and I don't really mind that.

> most of them couldn’t make a good UI if their life depended on it

This has been one of the major things stopping me from jumping to Linux. Sure part of it is having to spend all of the time setting it up just right and learning every little bit of knowledge I need to do it, but then once that's done, it basically stays done. Whereas using software with crappy UI is something that never stops, so long as you're using the software.

That said... the proliferation of Electron apps has narrowed that gap a bunch. Now most apps on macOS have crappy UIs, and then they have basically the same UI on Windows or Linux.

@Plume I'm almost certainly not going with a KVM switch either. How is the latency and picture quality of your setup? I'd definitely need a near full quality picture for doing graphics or UI design, and I'm quite sensitive to latency. So far the only apps I've found that feel like I'm controlling a computer locally (at least when over a local network) are either Parsec or Moonlight + Sunshine.

@Plume: I'm not going to hold up Microsoft's Office suite as the paragon of design, but they are leaps and bounds better than than OpenOffice or LibreOffice. I've tried to get used to Google Docs/Sheets/Slides or Nextcloud's offering, but they are all inferior to Microsoft office, as much as it pains me to say that.

Also FreeCAD is terrible compared to Fusion 360, Shapr3D or many other CAD software options.

KVMs aren't great, but do work better than they used to. I've had a good experience with Level1Tech's offerings. https://www.store.level1techs.com/products/hardware

@Bri: Have you tried Rust desk? I've been trying it recently and it works well for my needs for remote access. I'm self hosting the server piece.

@gildarts I did give it a try recently, and found it worked okay, but was still a lot less responsive compared to using a computer locally. Somehow Parsec and Moonlight do things different so that it practically feels like you're not screen sharing at all. I want to see the other remote desktop offerings catch up.

>like I'm controlling a computer locally

It's not like that when I connect from my notebook to my local network over wifi. It's close, but I wouldn't want to use something like Photoshop over it. It might be different if you use a wired connection, but I don't.

>they are leaps and bounds better than than OpenOffice or LibreOffice

I don't find LibreOffice to be that much worse than Microsoft Office. That said, I don't use LibreOffice. I either use the web version of Microsoft Office or AbiWord, which I quite like because it reminds me of Claris Works 4, objectively the best office suite ever made.

>Also FreeCAD is terrible

I'm torn on this one. I don't like FreeCAD, but I also don't like Fusion 360. They're both pretty terrible. At least FreeCAD is getting better over time. They're trying!

I don't really like any of the current CAD tools. All of the ones I liked were killed, mostly by the ghouls at Autodesk. So, now I use OpenSCAD. At least then I don't have to learn another shitty user interface. I just tell it what to draw.

>I've had a good experience with Level1Tech's offerings

Yes, if you go that route, those are the only ones I would consider.

>I'm self hosting the server piece

FWIW, you don't need the server to connect to your own computers. You can just enter their IP instead of the remote ID.

> I don't really like any of the current CAD tools

Yeah, I kind of agree with that, but Shapr3D is actually great for use on iPads, but only so so on the desktop, imo. My hate of FreeCAD should not be viewed as wholesale endorsement of the other options. :)

Hit Submit too quickly...

> FWIW, you don't need the server to connect to your own computers. You can just enter their IP instead of the remote ID.

Yeah, I'm aware. I mostly setup the server to make it easier to punch through random firewalls when I'm out and about.