What Happened to Apple’s Legendary Attention to Detail?

Oh wow, I thought I was the only one who experienced the "d" key issue. Usually it starts working again after I quit a couple of apps. Maybe that'll avoid a reboot next time it happens to you.

@Paul I thought it might be an app issue, but I don’t think I have any apps that register hotkeys involving “d.” I’ve tried quitting apps, but that didn’t help.

Creating a comprehensive list of the little paper cuts of macOS is a full time job. I'd love for someone to do it, just so that we can point to it and say, "There! That's why we keep griping about macOS becoming bad."

As for the 'd' key issue, I wonder if restarting the Dock fixes it? I haven't experienced that one specifically, but oftentimes the Dock swallows keystrokes erroneously. There's a bug I've been experiencing since at least macOS 10.13 where my keystroke for switching to desktop #6 doesn't work, until I restart the Dock. I dug into what was going on with event taps and found that the Dock was just swallowing the keystroke for no particularly good reason.

@Bri Hmm, the Dock does have a global shortcut involving “d.” I had a similar issue with desktop switching shortcuts (only one particular shortcut out of the bunch). After several years of not finding a solution I gave up and switched to only using Move Left/Right shortcuts.

My list of macOS annoyances is also growing for quite some time. It's really wearing me down, I'm so tired of everything Apple (and I haven't even installed the OS 26 lineup). Pretty sure I'll leave the platform in the long term, step by step. Today I installed MailMaven (thanks for the recommendation, Michael!) to move away from Apple Mail. I'm still too invested in Apple's ecosystem to completely leave it today, but seeing people raving about Omarchy in the past weeks has triggered something. Feels like I’ve already started packing my boxes.

It's been really sad to watch Apple's software go down the drain in the past decade. They could have done so much more and been so much better. Instead they're becoming just like every other awful software company. Adobe has gone down the toilet too. Their apps are just comically bad now -- AI could probably do a better job than whatever morons work at Adobe these days (Acrobat Pro is particularly ridiculous, nonsensical, and buggy now).

I stopped using Pages and Numbers 8+ years ago. There's really not any reason to use it other than "it's not MS Office". At least with Office, I can understand that a lot of the terrible UI and workflow decisions are due to 3 decades of baggage (same with Windows). Apple doesn't have that excuse. They're happy to break stuff. Unfortunately, they rarely break stuff to make it better.

It really didn't have to be like this.

I noticed today that macOS Safari failed a search for text on a page of Defector.com comments. I don't recall that ever happening before.

Did the Calculator app in iOS have a programmer mode? I don't recall. But it doesn't now.

I seem to have trouble trying to copy and paste text pretty often these days.

(Also, probably not an Apple bug, but I noticed Google search results don't let me select text in the displayed summaries. It selects and then unselects.)

Re: the slowness after boot

When I've seen that it appears to be due to fseventsd or another process (fileproviderd or filecoordinationd) not responding for a while. There are console messages to that effect.

If I repeatedly kill these processes as soon as they respawn, eventually the blockage ends and apps open. But sometimes only a few and I have to repeat the process.

@Jon I have definitely seen (long after boot) apps hang for a long time due to file coordination, but it was obvious that was happening because it showed up in the samples of those apps. I didn’t see any indication that that’s what was happening this time, but if it happens again I’ll take a look those processes. Thanks.

In the early iOS days when there was a software update, you’d get the black screen with the Apple logo and a thin white progress bar. Even as the device would clearly reboot itself during the update process, the progress bar picked up from where it was before, and progressed fairly linearly.

(I remember noticing it because around that time I was working a lot with Windows Installer, where the default UI has a meaningless progress bar that reset a zillion times even during a trivial install.)

The Apple one doesn’t do that anymore (restarts several times, gets stuck at 33% then zooms to 100%). It’s not important and probably no one really cares, but I’m pretty sure that at some point someone did pay attention to that detail, because I swear it used to work better, and it’s another sign of entropy.

Not fixing bugs, not even responding to DTS support incidents anymore, punting to the dev forums and then never answering. They can’t be bothered talking to devs. They can’t be bothered writing documentation. They can’t be bothered with anything except evangelizing Swift and all its “virtues”

Two main programming languages. - neglect the one that’s good and stay obsessed with the one that sucks. Obsess over Swift so much that they actually started pissing off the people who like it with Swift concurrency. Ohh they ruining your shit are they?

Three UI frameworks on Mac. They recommend the UI framework that is obviously the worst of the three the strongest. It’s clear management is obsessed with themselves and stroking their own egos. Quality doesn’t matter they feel untouchable and want to be the “godfather”. You aint the Godfather Chaef. You bozo the clown

Liquid glass icy frosty window just stick that shit under everyone’s views because why not? Put ya filthy fingers on app icons that aren’t yours to touch. They got a God complex. Management got it cushy but they’re fucking with devs lives and they could care less. They fucking fiddle while it all burns

macOS has had display assignment issues ever since Apple introduced the stupid "displays have separate spaces" solution to wanting to have the macOS menubar on more than one display.

The *good* solution, would have been for menubars to just have multiple instances, that way on portrait displays you could, for example, not have all your right aligned menubar apps.

KDE Plasma gets this right - you can build your menu. Manytricks' Menuwhere is an even better solution to having a menu on each screen.

Also Displays Have Separate Spaces doesn't allow display spanning, who thought that was a good idea?

Apple got multiple displays perfect and reliable in Classic MacOS, and they've been making it worse ever since.

I never ever managed to lose my d. I have a butterfly keyboard here on the Air. But a bit of brutal force usually fixes problematic keys.

My old iMac always took a couple of minutes to settle down after a reboot.

I didn't want to spend lots of money on upgrades for a new iMac so I got a refurbished one in pink. There are 4 (in words: four) different variations of pink. The front isn't too bad. But the back is a hideous dark strawberry pink. The discolored orange iPhones have a similar shade.

My pet peeve is opening rtf files. Why do they show me the rtf code instead of the styled text? Another fun stupidity is that contacts flash black when I step through them.

Attention to detail? How about Apple Contacts on MacOS where the ‘First’ and ‘Last’ names do not display if ‘Company’ is toggled?

Example:
First: John
Last: Smith
Company: Smith’s Plumbers

Instead (with Company toggled) you see “Smith’s Plumbing” where you would expect to see “John Smith”. So, you see “Smith’s Plumbing” twice on the contact!
However, searches for First and Last name still work though.

If you un-toggle ‘Company’ you will see both First and Last name and Company when you exit Edit mode.

This as very poor software testing from Apple.

I posted this with screenshots at https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/contacts-app-is-a-nightmare-on-tahoe.2465399/post-34237310

@Nicholas Yup. It really is just neglect. Apple no longer care.

When I first set up a MacBook 2008 at home, running Leopard, I was very, very impressed by the delightful way that if you configured the network interface with a static IP address (my network was using public IPv4 space, but had no working DHCP server, so this was mandatory for me at the time), it would guess that the gateway/router address would be the first numbered node in a subnet, so you only had to enter the IP address and subnet mask and it would automagically fill in the router address. Lovely. I don't know if that feature is still there, but it made it very clear to me, then, that Apple cared about delighting the user; this wasn't just a commercial UNIX box with a UI that just so happened to run some commercial software. It was just a little bit special.

Same goes for the Mail app, which for all that diehard Eudora fans criticised it, was ultimately a genuinely featureful mailer to come standard with any OS. Now look at it. Just hideous, a vestigial shell of what it once was, at best, error-prone and flaky, and missing functionality that power-users care about. Just sad.

But this is Apple now. Try not to go mad. It's not you. Just retreat from the hope that things will get better, do your best with what you have, and keep looking for alternatives. Supremacy on the desktop is largely a forgotten battle, anyway; you're aiming for the lesser of evils until the FLOSS world get their shit together. Meanwhile, smile in the face of Apple's incompetence, just as Windows users have been doing for a long time now. It's much more comforting than the stress and self-flagellation of expecting better things, anyway.

@Someone Also Displays Have Separate Spaces doesn't allow display spanning, who thought that was a good idea?

I’m not sure what you mean—you can turn it off and get one, big spanned space.

@MichaelTsai You have to log out and log back in to change between all displays sharing a space, and displays have separate spaces. But, when in the latter mode, you can't span a window across displays.

My issue isn't with the 'd' key per se, it's with the keyboard in general both built in on my Air and external USB with my Studio. I will be typing and suddenly the cursor stops. I notice this after the letters stop appearing on the screen. Wait a second, type the next letter and suddenly all 3 or 4 will land on the screen. I haven't figured out what is doing this as it happens across apps.

That said, I've had problems with the keyboard dropping letters for years now. I'm not a slow typist but certainly not the fastest either but either way the Mac can't apparently keep up.

If it wasn't for the third party apps I would've quit Mac a few years ago because the OS quality is ... wanting ... and it doesn't seem to get better.

@Someone Right. I guess I don’t see a problem with that since you can still turn it off and have it work like before. (And I actually prefer separate spaces so I can switch spaces on my displays independently.)

@MichaelTsai Individual preferences notwithstanding, the introduction of that feature marks the point at which OS X display management became less robust - for reasons I suspect come down to there no longer being a single canonical "main" display (especially with displays have separate spaces being the default, such that App developers assume it, and from there to the culture of making single-window iPad-like apps, with no consideration that a user may want palettes torn off to a different display from the document).

You might notice, for example, that when you add an extra display to your system, all your existing display config is mixed up and rearranged, and you have to go through your whole display setup, rotations, positions etc, because macOS no longer has the ability to simply add a new display to an existing display set.

Once you've come up with an arrangement which includes that display, it will keep it in its config if it's unplugged and re-plugged. But, when you're in 3-6 display territory, adding a new one is 10 minutes work on reconfiguring, and repositioning your app windows etc.

Somewhat related, I lose characters on things that animate or delay for interprocess reasons. Finder search and anything NSOpenPanel get me a lot. A lot of dumb animations I have to wait for on iOS, too.

@Anonymous Agreed on all points. I find no joy or stability in the Swift stack. If they just add a few dozen more keywords and forced-refactorings they might finally solve Safe Code.

@Sebby Apple's lost the institutional discipline and knowledge. They hired too many LeetCodes, too many Anyone Can Codes.

I fear Sequoia will be the modern Snow Leopard not because it's refined, but because everything newer is increasingly shitty in ways that matter to me.

@Someone I would agree that multi-display stuff started degrading around the time that option was added. I’m working on a post about that, but IMHO a lot of this stuff never worked great; I’ve been working around some of the issues using Moom for many years. I haven’t personally seen problems with adding extra displays, though I rarely do that and almost always use just 2. In some ways, I think switching display arrangements got better with Apple Silicon.

Looking back on it, COVID really was the right time for Apple to take a breather and do a year of OS updates without any new features across all its platforms and fix all the niggling little problems that have crept in over the years.

Given the breakneck pace of AI development and Apple lagging behind, all their focus now, rightly or wrongly, is going to be to be on how to navigate these turbid waters.

A year of no new features is highly unlikely in the current scenario.

LOL. Are you noticing only now?

No surprise since that clown has been in charge of SW at Apple.

There’s little hope things will change until Cook is gone and then only if someone with balls will take over and do a shake out.

What needs to happen:
- macOS major releases every 5 years only. Each macOS release supported with security fixes for 10 years
- Objective C as primary language
- UI return to the famed original human interface guidelines, everything is measured by efficiency metrics (how many clicks it takes to do a task)
- focus on fixiing bugs
- focus on professional, power users (like the readers of this blog)
- new features that improve productivity and users actually want (liquid glass, my ass)
- iOS becomes a true multi-user OS

OK, back to reality, I see it’s probably wise to switch to Linux in the long run