In June 2008 Apple announced Mac OS X Snow Leopard, proudly boasting that it would have “no new features”. Instead of piling on new things, Snow Leopard aimed to build on the success of its predecessor, Leopard, opting to focus on under-the-hood performance and stability improvements throughout the system.
18 years later, Apple is taking a similar approach with macOS 27. Golden Gate aims to fix the missteps of last year’s Tahoe, promising an expansive set of improvements and “a more responsive and delightful experience”.
Does it hold up? Here are just some of the bugs I’ve encountered in my daily use over the past couple of weeks.
↫ Chester at SquareOrbits
I’m getting some real Windows 11 vibes from this long list of bugs and issues, further underlining my perception that Apple completely lost the plot when it comes to Mac OS X (in the past) and MacOS (today). These are not the kind of things you’d find in the heydays of Mac OS X, back when I was a devout user, and makes me glad I abandoned ship long, long ago (around the time of the Intel transition). I don’t see stuff like this in GNOME or KDE, and while not nearly as bad as Windows 11, the cracks are obvious.
I am by no means an expert at how Apple is run and how it organises itself, but as a layperson I do wonder if the company is simply trying to do too much – too many different platforms, too many different crucial components it all develops internally, too many different markets to please. Things are going to fall through the cracks when you try to keep this many plates spinning.
Starts out with a section complaining about icon and text misalignment, and then has a section called Nitpicking?
Some people need to go outside and touch grass.
Totally agree. I don’t know what was funnier: complaining about 1-2 px off, or discovering that there are NS classes in App Kit.
Fine to scratch the surface for details. Could we take a look under the hood as well? That’ll be more interesting from an OS perspective I’d say 🙂
macOS has been (primarily) closed source since ≈4.2 releases before it existed
Funny thing is that I had to register to comment this and during registration found the bug 😉
I don’t know what the problem the author of the article has, but there is something wrong with his Mac. Tahoe was buggy, but not as much as some people claimed.
Golden Gate? So far solid as rock for me. Yeah, some things are 1 or 2px off, but that was always normal.
NSTTextView? Lol – NS classes are part of App Kit. So the guy has no idea about Mac OS X ecosystem, but still find some time to write this funny piece.
I tried to recreate all those real bugs mentioned and failed.
I was selling Apple computers in local authorized reseller when Snow Leopard arrived. It was really great, but guess what – there were people visiting our shop complaining that it doesn’t work, and when you took a look under a hood, gosh – it was a mess. Not with the SL, but tonnes of junk installed, incomplete installations, some system files moved to trash by the users…
But you know what is really funny? I have to use Windows 11 8-9 hours per day, and it is still a piece of crap, but it works much better for me, than W10 or W7.
I find this kind of crap unacceptable. I don’t recall at all things off-center or such glaring interface bugs back in the 90s, 2000s. It is really a sign of things rushed out, poorly tested and “it builds, so it works”.
If I could choose one thing to bring back from the past would be the old “new version every X years”, with proper beta testing programs, feedback collection, user interface and experience guidelines, etc.. Yea, sometimes very crappy bugs survive to RTM, but we were given time to upgrade, to plan things out, to choose whether to move on or to wait until the next release.
Our computers are work tools and bugs and downtime cost real money but, alas, no liability, blah blah blah. I don’t want to be beta testing new interfaces anymore (or learning new interfaces for little to no productivity gain). We are a small company of 8 people and I ended up accidentally inheriting the support gig. One of our colleagues is a brilliant salesperson but she is AWFUL at computers (and a bit older) and every time a button or a icon changes place, or something mysteriously fails, she gets irritated and I get interrupted trying to figure out what is going on with her. On top of that, we use quite a lot of SaaS tools, meaning that the cognitive load for her to deal with everything changing all the time is quite high. And I have to become familiar with a bunch of tools I don’t need to be able to help her.
This all has a real cost and we pay for things to, you know, work.
ugh.
Yep.. I’m savvy enough to just reteach myself every two weeks, but I’m getting really irritated that every time I spend a few weekends on a hardware project, when I get on my computer for a minute to flash an EEPROM, it’s rebooted for five updates, each of which shuffled every UI like a deck of cards and now the project is lasting another weekend because the time I had left got used learning an entirely new UI for every app and the OS, with no new functionality added other than more AI I don’t use and has nothing to do with the UI changes (except it probably wrote the new UI)
Now Flight Simulator 2024 does updates on the fly (pun intended) but Flight Simulator 2020 didn’t. Sometimes I’d be like “hey, I got 30-40 minutes to fly a bit” and then a MANDATORY 45GB update. XDDDDD
I am with you – I can learn new UIs, but it’s just a waste of time. Also I feel there’s an increased cognitive load using the computer when each application looks different, has different widgets, etc.. It is just more tiring overall.
The other day I laughed finding out in KDE that the hamburger menu (ugh) is basically in the middle of the window and looks like an anchor for resizing the columns. Crazy. And KDE is quite consistent for our current standards.
quinn,
I’m not sure if you were talking about macos, but I have this gripe with windows too. The forced updates can be a serious usability problem because it leaves the computer unavailable for work – interrupting meetings and such. I strongly dislike not being in control, but it makes it even worse when they are slow. And WTF is up with all the reboots microsoft? I know there are some technical challenges, but not being able to get this right as a leading technology company makes you seem like totally incompetent amateurs. It’s just inexcusable.
Maybe I’m just getting tired of tech companies in general, haha.
Yeah, a lot of desktop UIs have been redesigned around elements that were designed for mobile where space is more of a premium. The issue I have is that scrollbars and window anchor points have gotten hard to hit without micro-adjustments on the mouse and meanwhile whitespace is everywhere. Whitespace is ok but I think it’s bad that it comes at the cost of usability.
I really liked Tiger, and i still use it. It gets booted less often as my Powerbook plays nicer with MorphOS. I boot it in tiger sometimes to do some ppc stuff that morphos does not like. But the 1.67ghz single core cpu is not fast enough to even watch youtube in osx (works fine in morphos)
Old Photoshop in a G4 or G5 still beats my new machines at Levels and dust removal for large files (think 200mp+ TIFFs) for some reason. My ThinkPad P1 G4 with 64GB of RAM and a Xeon chokes (and often crashes without finishing the task) and my dual 1.25 G4 or dual core 2.0 G5 run it in a few seconds. If using Luminar Neo for dust removal, it will use all the RAM and all the swap in a few minutes.
It’s a mystery I will probably take to the grave, as I am probably operating in the niche of the niche of the niche.