It’s always a bit sad and a little awkward when reality starts hitting long-time fans and users of an operating system, isn’t it? I feel like I’m at least fifteen years ahead of everyone else when it comes to macOS, at least.
Over the last few weeks I’ve been discovering problems that have been eroding confidence in macOS. From text files that simply won’t show up in Spotlight search, to Clock timers that are blank and don’t function, there’s one common feature: macOS encounters an error or fault, but doesn’t report that to the user, instead just burying it deep in the log.
When you can spare the time, the next step is to contact Apple Support, who seem equally puzzled. 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. You know that Apple Support doesn’t understand what’s going wrong, and despite the involvement of support engineers, they seem as perplexed as you.
↫ Howard Oakley
I remember when Mac OS X was so far ahead of the competition it was honestly a little tragic. Around the late PowerPC and very early Intel days, when the iPhone hadn’t yet had the impact on the company it has now, the Mac and its operating system were the star of the company’s show, and you felt it when you used it. Even though the late PowerPC hardware was being outpaced left, right, and centre by Intel and AMD hardware in virtually every sense, Mac OS X more than made up for it being being a carefully and lovingly crafted operating system designed and developed by people who clearly deeply cared.
I used nothing but Macs as a result.
These days, everything’s reversed. By all accounts, Macs are doing amazing hardware-wise, with efficient, powerful processors and solid design. The operating system, however, has become a complete and utter mess, showing us that no, merely having great hardware does not make up for shit software in the same way the reverse was true two decades ago. I’d rather use a slower, hotter laptop with great software than a faster, cooler laptop with terrible software.
I’m not sure we’re going to see this trend reversed any time soon. Apple, too, is chasing the dragon, and everything the company does is designed around their cash cow, and I just don’t see how that’s going to change without a complete overhaul of the company’s leadership.
That’s what happens when you bring in a hardware guy (Tim Cook) to the helm of a company that was once known for its software quality (relative to the rest of the industry).
I mean, everyone made fun of Steve Jobs-era iPhones for their excessive bezels, but even Android fanboys like me recognized the software was refined (sure, it was restrictive in all kinds of ways even dumbphones weren’t, but it was refined).
The decline of Apple’s software quality started long before the AI boom.
> I’d rather use a slower, hotter laptop with great software than a faster, cooler laptop with terrible software.
Well, you have a choice there. You could always use FreeBSD on Intel hardware.
P.S. I wonder why OSNews has no mention of the big scandal between GrapheneOS and the French government.
OSnews has a submit function. If there’s news you think should be there, submit it.
Hmm, I didn’t know that. My English is too poor for writing anyway.
The editor will look over what you submit and rewrite ir. You can just send a link and nothing else for example. Up to editor if they want to publish it, but you simply submitting a link can be worth it!
a_very_dumb_nickname,
I asked the very same question a few days ago (about France):
https://www.osnews.com/story/143922/dell-about-1-billion-pcs-will-not-or-cannot-be-upgraded-to-windows-11/#comment-10454451
My understanding is that they are waiting for it to become a larger story.
The sad part is that for the regular user it’s still the best option.
Windows 11 makes Mac OS look good!
Linux is still too confusing. And no one is paying Mac prices for Windows like laptops. (Like System 76)
And Chrome OS is about to go the way of the DoDo bird.
Apple needs to slow down and just put out fixes and only put out 24 month major releases or longer instead of trying to match IOS with 12 month major releases.
Put out a snow leopard style version to tighten things up! ♂️
Both Jony Ive (as an interface designer) and Alan Dye (also as an interface designer) were both HUGE mistakes. But I 100% agree. I started buying iMacs in 1998 with a Bondi Blue iMac and have bought iMacs up until my current one (late 1998 27″ iMac) and the first ten years things were always getting better. Since then they are steadily been getting worse.
Putting someone that is great at making sure that computers are built and available to be sold is NOT the person to pick to be in charge of operating systems.
The person, in my opinion, who should be running Apple is Craig Federighi because he “gets” what Macs SHOULD be like instead of the increasingly pieces of garbage that the are putting out.
More and more I’m thinking about what to buy for my next computer and it absolutely will NOT be a Windows computer. Talk about pieces of S**T! MS still manages to make Apple look great.
It also won’t be Linux though I’ve spent a few hundred hours with Linux I have never really liked Linux.
People think I’m nuts but I am retired and so I don’t really have to give a s**t about communicating with a lot of people. So I’m more and more thinking about the ONLY OS that I ever really LOVED using and (besides Macs which I only liked a lot but didn’t love) was OS/2. Am I stupid or crazy? Maybe a little of both. But it was literally the only operating system where I felt COMPLETELY empowered. If I couldn’t do it in REXX then I could do it in C. I used to write complex software (at a bank with mortgage software) but I also wrote print drivers for multiple operating systems and a lot of various programs and utilities (I consider them to be unique to each other based on usage) and I always felt that OS/2 helped me be better where Windows and Linux and Mac and 47 other OSs that I tried, all made things harder than they needed to be.
Isn’t that REALLY what we want out of the OSs that we use? Some things I do for a challenge. Other things I don’t just want to work but I want them to INSPIRE me and to HELP me do things easier which means I have more time to do MORE in whatever I’m doing instead of fighting crappy OSs that fight me all the way.
PS: Security is HIGH on my list too.
Sabon,
While I was never a fan of apple – the RDF from jobs himself. was unpalatable for people like me.
But both companies paths do seem very similar in that both Windows and MacOS fans liked these platforms more in the past and the opinions even from within the fanbases have taken a sour turn from around 2010. It just seems like industry leaders collectively decided to stop focusing on what makes a platform great for consumers and to rely more k on enshitification as the driving business model 🙁
It was never a fantasy for me. My like (MacOS), or LOVE (OS/2; BeOS), not a fan (Linux – I’ve tried about a dozen different distributions over 10 years) or HATE (Windows) is totally based on what the OS could do for me both with the ability to write programs but also to use scripting to build things that I liked or loathed.
OS/2 is EASLY the most flexible for me because of REXX. If you’ve never used it with an OS that takes FULL advantage of REXX like OS/2 you will never understand REXX’s appeal to someone like me. On the other hand, Windows does everything it can to get in the way or making things SIGNIFICANTLY harder to script/program (visual basic – lower case on purpose).
Keep in mind that I worked at a mortgage company than one of the largest national banks writing/debugging/fixing programs in over eight programming languages. That’s not a boast but just something to keep in mind as far as whether or not I know what I’m talking about.
The MAIN thing that I care about when programming/scripting is both ease of use and security. Both are equal. Both either cause me to LOVE using a certain OS, like it though not “IN like”, or HATE (not just very much dislike).
I’ve also did my best to do things in parallel with quite a few OSs at the same time to see which OS helped me and which did their best to get in my way and which had the most or worst security.
THAT is how I came to my opinion. I wasn’t inside some kind of force field.
Sabon,
I understand that it wasn’t a fantasy for you. Liking macs was a fair opinion, and lots of people liked windows then too. I don’t take issue with people’s opinions about tech 🙂
The RDF speaks more towards the crowds of Jobs idolizers treating him as a prophet than anything to do with the merits of actual apple products. If Jobs had gone into politics, the Jobs administration would likely look a lot like Trump’s administration: authoritarianism down to the bone. treat everyone else as sub-servant, don’t work with others, punish those who defy him, ban the media critics, etc, Both Jobs and Trump are guilty of these things and these traits describe Trump and Jobs equally. Just as not all Republicans are gullible enough to believe all of Trump’s nonsense, not all Mac users fell under the Jobs RDF either. But in both instances, there are many fans who do/did become absolutely irrational and treat all criticism as sacrilegious. I suspect some will take offense to the comparison for tarnishing Jobs’ image, but there’s no denying that both had extremely similar god complexes and behaved as demagogues. I dislike these traits, but some people are drawn to it. *Shrug*
Even if you weren’t under Job’s RDF, You have met the types who were right?
> The person, in my opinion, who should be running Apple is Craig Federighi because he “gets” what Macs SHOULD be like instead of the increasingly pieces of garbage that the are putting out.
I could not disagree more: Federighi returned to Apple in 2009, after Snow Leopard was released. So he’s more associated with the decline of quality in macOS, mostly because of its progressive facade merging with iOS and its derivates.
Maybe I am biased (because I am French), but the last good VP of Software Engineering at Apple was Bertrand Serlet.
At that time Mac OS X was praised by both mainstream and advanced users. The former were using the Mac as the “center of their digital life” with the most intuitive user interface ever. The latter enjoyed a powerful and stable UNIX system (remember the “Sends other UNIX boxes to /dev/null.” ad).
I remember enjoying both sides of the coin: jumping from Computer Science research tools in the Terminal to making the nicest presentations in Keynote, while enjoying music on iTunes. This would not be achievable on other operating systems for more than a decade!
Now Apple is trapped in the nonsense of trying to give the exact same interface to all its products albeit them serving different purposes. They made fun of Microsoft when they made Surface tablets because the Windows UI was not designed for it. But today they lean towards using the same interface on iPads and MacBooks while refusing to make give the latter touch screens. In In the process, they sacrificed the stability of their founding block (Mac OS X) and also forgot everything they wrote in their own HIG in the process, just because applications have to be the same on all platforms.
Before that, they brilliantly managed to have different hardware with consistant but different user interfaces integrated in a cohesive ecosystem. This was, in my opinion, more efficient than what we have today.
I was basing my opinion on who is __current__ at Apple. I agree whole heartedly that Bertrand Serlet was THE BEST that Apple (and NeXT ever had).
MacOS is still the best option for music production, because it has stable low latency out of the box while remaining power efficient. Windows is plagued with bad drivers with massive DPC latency issues, and it’s much worse on modern hardware than on older. Modern laptops are especially problematic because of their aggressive power saving tricks at all layers of the system.
A main reason is that reviewers only ever benchmark throughput tasks and don’t care about the otherwise unnoticable micro-freezes that cause low latency audio chains to crackle at random. To get to 5ms stable latency you have to tweak 20+ settings in various semi-hidden places and disable most of the power saving options and pray that your particular computer didn’t come with some non-optional component that overstay its interrupt every now and then. Then it will eat battery and get hot but at least its performance will be consistent at all 100ths of every second.
While Linux can be even better than macOS in this regard, the lack of commercial plugins makes it a non-starter for most.
It is the same cycle over and over and over again with some “tech” enthusiasts writers/commenters.
if Mac/Windows/iOS/Android/etc version = New
then Sky = Falling
I swear have read the same narrative about each new Mac version even back in the Classic days. Meanwhile 99% of the rest of the world manages to get their work done, move on with their lives.
True, but are you just as satisfied with computers than you were five years ago?