I really wanted to hear the opinion from Mac diehards about modern MacOS. I've used Windows for decades but bought a Mac M2 a while ago. I really like it so I'm not trying to say "Apple Bad". But I'm yet to see Apple's legendary simplicity, minimalism and attention to detail.
I keep complaining about the fact Mac OS asks me whether I want to allow chrome to access the local network with every update. I tried to dig deeper and discovered a privacy settings UI with dozens of entries written "Google Chrome" with the permission disabled. One for each time I said "No".
This is absolutely embarrassing. I wouldn't call it a bug, but a lazy and incompetent design that I thought could not happen in a Apple product.
I'll give you another example. Lately I've noticed a progress bar under the Apps icon on the dock. At first I didn't even know it was a progress bar because I use the Dock vertically - it looked like a separator - and the progress bar made no progress.
One day, the progress bar actually made progress and stayed stuck at 80%. I thought something had crashed and rebooted the machine. It stayed there. I eventually discovered by trial and error that the problem was that a running WhatsApp app prevented the WhatsApp update process to finish. Since it was always open as I used the computer, that annoying UI element stayed around forever. By closing WhatsApp, the bar unlocked and the update finished.
Pretty horrible. Is Apple learning from Microsoft?
Roughly 2002-2010 that attention to detail was on display and the OS struck an impressive balance between features, ease of use, and power user access.
Since then it’s been straight downhill. First they stopped investing in desktop in favor of mobile. Then they underwent some rewrites to OS and bundled apps that dumbed things down and exploded the defect rate. Then they started setting the stage for a touch experience on desktop at the expense of UI density. Around the same time they started to prioritize short term profit over UX — spamming with notifications to try to get you to sign in, upgrade, etc. And then there’s the travesty that is Tahoe.
Liquid Glass has no place on the desktop (or the phone really).
I migrated to Mac OS X from OpenBSD in like 2002 or so. MacOS has been a steady decline for many years, probably soon after the iPhone. Snow Leopard was probably the height of the MacOS experience. It’s been lots of little things along the way but I agree Tahoe is an inflection point.
Obviously (to me anyway, maybe folk disagree) comparing a new release to the previous versions last release (with years of bugfixing) wasn't totally fair, but my experience with Snow Leopard wasn't great either and I wonder if it wasn't quite the peak everyone thinks of it as.
Depending on your needs. I'm not sure it's that cut and dry. For developer experience I don't find it very good. My System76 laptop provides a better experience.
It is all pretty subjective though. Windows is the best option for some.
I don't get asked about access for Chrome at every update.
I have bigger issues with the way a lot of MacOS apps are just poorly designed.
Like screen capture - I want to be able to save to my choice of destination folder after clicking. But instead you get a selection of preset choices, and the option to select a destination before you capture the file, which is unnaturally distracting.
Finder hasn't changed for decades. It should be possible to have source and destination trees visible in the same window, but it isn't.
Mac Mail has threaded conversations, which means some emails don't appear in searches.
App Store search was designed by cynics, idiots, or both. If you know the exact name of an app, search will probably show it but it probably won't be anywhere near the first hit.
Xcode - I can't even...
Meanwhile a lot of clever and useful features remain hidden or ignored. Automator and AppleScript would have been gamechangers if Apple had promoted them, but they were just left on a shelf to moulder.
I can't imagine ever swapping back to Windows, but these annoyances are an insult to the quality of the hardware, which is on another level.
I highly recommend ScreenFloat for screenshots, it's one of my favourite and most used apps - endless power user features that mostly sit elegantly out of the way until you need them. https://eternalstorms.at/ScreenFloat/
> I don't get asked about access for Chrome at every update.
Is it possible that you clicked "Approve" while the parent clicked "Not now"?
One of my personal issues is that I was using software called "Secretive" which installed a Secretive Agent system service. I later patched and forked it, but reused the name. Despite the app bundle ID being different, and having a different signer, they show up collapsed in the "Login items" panel, with no way to enable one and disable the other: https://i.servepic.com/t5DvVjB0.png
There are also numerous entries for software that has been completely removed from my system for years. I wholeheartedly believe OP's experience.
Somebody has to push back about all the senseless permission boxes as an accessibility problem.
Like my home computer has 12 perfectly good USB charging ports but I'm not 100% happy using them, as opposed to wall wart or a wireless adapter, because I have to clear a dialog on my phone and on my computer when I want to plug it in. And of course the "import pictures" functions on both MacOS and Windows "just don't work" so when I really want to transfer photos I either email them (one at a time) or ftp them to my home server with Photosync.
...and sometimes it stops charging the device when you clear the dialog box. Not always, though, which actually makes it worse because of the uncertainty.
And, yeah, I solve it by having a separate USB hub for charging things - but that's a pain for travelling as I'd rather not have to bring an extra device.
(And it doesn't happen under Linux, so I'm pretty sure it's a MacOS issue rather than something inherent to usb-c)
I went through this around 15 years ago, even migrating my parents from Windows to MacOS on the promise of simplicity and better UI. No, it’s not simpler or more intuitive, instead it has its own world of quirks, issues, and annoyances. And both Apple and Microsoft have become worse since.
> I keep complaining about the fact Mac OS asks me whether I want to allow chrome to access the local network with every update. I tried to dig deeper and discovered a privacy settings UI with dozens of entries written "Google Chrome" with the permission disabled. One for each time I said "No".
IMO the party that should be blamed here is Google. Why do they keep asking you for local network access when you've already denied it? Why do they just prompt for access without first showing a page telling you why they want access along with a button to go through with the prompt? Ironically, this is what Google and the other browser vendors force websites to do when they want to ask users to grant certain permissions.
I use and have used Windows and macOS for decades. I think Windows is better, but both are doing their best to drive users to Linux. Their relentless focus on extracting subscription and "service" revenue from others is fundamentally undermining the user experience in countless ways. Ads. Dark patterns. Nags windows. Auto-bundled games and software. Telemetry. Every year they make their operating systems just a little bit worse.
Apple's days of simplicity out of the box are over. The simplicity is still in there somewhere. Through a combination of turning off a lot of features in settings and using a few defaults shell command it can be made simple.
Apple got complex due to dynamic workspaces that result in windows unexpectedly flying off screen or popping up as one mouses's around and the new security model which no longer trusts defaults to local applications trusting each other.
This security model is why each application needs to be granted local access. I believe Apple encourages all apps to stick to their own sandbox to the extent possible.
I'm currently trying to figure out how to give Image Events access to my local hard disk. My old applescripts using Image Events have broken due to the loss of access.
I'm in the same position ... just got my first mac, love the hardware, but man, I don't know why everyone is so smug about the software - it has a fairly similar number of annoyances as Windows (not qiute as much, but it's close).
I have a massive screen and the right most application has it's menu ... at the very, very left of my screen. It's soo far away it is just crazy. And that menu can't be moved to teh side or turned off or whatever.
Applications that get closed aren't really closed ... you have to quit them. I don't know why. Or if they are minimised, then I can't alt-tab to them .. or I actually can ... but they don't actually OPEN!
Windows insist on opening to some arbitrary width and height instead of neatly snapping to a side etc.
Anyway, at lot of it is fixable with add-ons etc, but it's still annoying. I'll be happier when I can jsut run linux.
> Applications that get closed aren't really closed ... you have to quit them.
This is the classic Mac behavior since the 1980s. Except now some apps are identical with their single window and will exit when that window is closed. So you no longer know what to expect. Sigh.
Why have this behavior ever? It used to be that apps took a while to start up. Switching to an open-but-no-window app was a lot faster than launching it from scratch. That’s not so important now that most apps start quickly.
Now the main advantage is that you can use keyboard shortcuts to make a new window in open apps (CMD-tab, CMD-n gets a new window in the previously used open app, for example)
I have been using macOS for I think fewer than ten years and I think the attention of detail may always have been just about the hardware... macOs and iOS have presented me with some of the clunkiest edge cases and mishandled situations and a lot of them are damn near undebuggable. I think Windows is very tasteless OS making macOS seem good in comparison but in isolation there is a lot that could a should be improved
Think almost all of that is purely visuals. For example, there are many Windows apps with blurry fonts due to poor dpi support, and that's not common on Macs.
Otherwise it's mostly about... the visuals again, but in the hardware side - how the hardware looks better, though, to be fair, that also has a bunch of "doesn't flex like cheap plastic" improvements)
Maybe also the fact that you're less frequently exposed to a garbage sea of complexity like the registry (sure, it exists and is even worse because there is no built in GUI)
But ultimately you're asking about legends, that's the stuff of history, not something you should expect to experience
Both of your examples are software from Meta and Google. Those companies ship what cannot be called anything else than malware. But it is possible to stop Chrome from updating and messing with your system in the background. I forgot which guide I followed, but search and you shall find.
I can tell you that Apple grows closer and closer to Microsoft-level annoying every year. The update situation is just stupid at this point. 10:30am and "hey, we'd like to take your computer offline for 45 minutes? Want to defer until this evening? Yeah? put your password in anyway.
iOS has gotten gross as well. You see that email notification on your lock screen? Wanna see what it says? Tap it. HAHA, that just expands the stack. Tap it again... that reveals a bit.... TAP IT AGAIN - ah, now we're unlocking and revealing it in the app....
I bought an original 128K Mac, and then used them professionally for decades --- Snow Leopard, 10.6.8, which I view as the most perfect Mac OS ever, was the last version I really liked, or found comfortable.
I need to replace a MacBook Pro w/ Touchbar, and am _not_ excited about the options, and I find the OS version numbering/naming baffling (why they couldn't've counted versions, started at the next letter of the alphabet, and then cycled through the alphabet in the California Gazetteer when they switched place names from there on out mystifies me) --- probably I'll end up w/ a hand-me-down iMac, but I'd be a bit more interested if there was a portable Mac tablet w/ a stylus and touch, having preferred that form-factor for portable usage since Go Corp.'s PenPoint on an NCR-3125 (which I paired w/ a NeXT Cube and represents the highwatermark of my GUI experience).
I wish that there was an option to limit the OS to only Cocoa/SwiftUI/equivalent "native" apps, and I really wish that Preferences.app would arrive at a simplified and stable state which makes sense.
I bought my first modern Mac in 2003 to switch from Linux in a (stolen) Compaq to a commercial Unix on supported hardware. Instantly I got it and there was nearly a decade where every update was better.
Last year, for the first time since 2003, I didn’t upgrade to the latest macOS (né OS X) release. I’m hopeful for Golden Gate and continue to love the hardware, but man Tahoe is a low point.
The Swift UI-ification of System Preferences and all of the consistency lost by moving AWS from AppKit drag macOS down to the level of lesser systems and even Electron (that is to say, I’ve used more Mac-like electron apps than some of the first party Swift UI rewrites).
20 years later and desktop Linux still has no consistency. I’m not even sure how people use Windows. Could this be the year Haiku saves the desktop?
I dunno, I kinda stopped tracking BeOS (and derivatives) when I was essentially bodily ejected from a Be user's group meeting/demonstration by asking how the slides were printed (at that time, BeOS lacked printer drivers).
Maybe a distro focused on GNUstep?
I'm planning on trying a Raspberry Pi 5 (Compute Module --- anyone want to trade for a pair of regular Pis?) once the Soulcircuit Pilet I backed on Kickstarter ships. If it seems promising, I'll get a Wacom MovinkPad and see if I can really make it work.
How is the Chrome example an Apple issue and not a Google issue? Chrome in fact likely doesn’t need mDNS-SD in most cases, so why is it asking for that permission (to browse services on your local network, no doubt sending all findings back to Google and closely associating the things it found with your Google account and more) the moment it launches every new copy? Why are they treating updates as unique copies? How would it be the fault of macOS if any app behaved this way? Clearly not all apps behave this way, so how is it an OS level issue?
But it works for other apps, no? I'm no app developer, completely out of my depth here, but it sounds like Google isn't following whatever process Apple has set, as opposed to Apple screwing Google over specifically (which there are many examples of)
It doesn't work for other apps because it's unrealistic to expect that only Google "isn't following"
A non "lazy and incompetent design" would make "non-following" a non-issue unless ... well, that's where you actually need to know what's going on and prove that it's such a special case of non-following that it's hard-to-impossible to design around - in which case yeah, the OS designers are off the hook
Apple is learning from Microsoft, sometimes as counterexample.
You won’t know Apple joy until you replace the one you have with another. If you’re backed up via Time Machine — because you are, right? — then you plug in your new machine, hit “restore” or whatever it’s called, and head off to sleep. In the morning all your data, applications, and settings will be there. Your new machine will be indistinguishable from the old but for the grime.
Here are some things that existed for a long time but still blow my mind (note: this is not "modern macOS", I migrated to Linux long time ago, so forgive me ignoring modern flaws).
- The preview app - document editing at its best
- Apple Mail Search - you can filter by nearly every aspect, even between dates
- the mighty Alt key (alt+click unlocks an extra feature all the time, alt + shift + volume makes smaller steps, etc)
- apple headphone remotes also work on macbooks
- you can turn off the display by setting 0 brightness
Don't get me started on the whole iCloud thing, and apple account sign in (although to be fair to them they've improved this it was way too onerous in the past).
Even the 'own stickers' joke doesn't really apply anymore. I recently saw ads for Apple Fitness+ and Apple Intelligence in the system settings (!, I'll forgive the ads for Apple Care). Apple Creator Studio ads in the former iWork Apps (including abusing toolbar icons for it). Finally (luckily I haven't experienced it), ads for their F1 movie in Apple Wallet.
It is gross and destroys what Apple stood for.
Their introduction of more and more ads shows that they want to optimize the Services category at all cost. Hardware hasn't grown as much as historically and they haven't been able to start new categories in recent history (e.g. AVP failure), plus Services is high-margin. Since they are now on this gravy train, they will increasingly use behavioral data to target ads, etc.
The really annoying thing to me about the "Ads" in the system settings for various things like Apple Music, iCloud, Fitness, etc (other than the fact they're there in the first place) is that they appear after a bit of a delay (around 500 ms?), so other items I actually want have to slide down to make space as I'm about to click something.
Old Apple would never have done that I don't think.
My massive Apple annoyance at the moment is how there's an unremovable nag screen for an Apple Music subscription on the iOS app, when all I ever want to do is sync local music to an iphone like it's an ipod in 2006. They just can't take 'no' for an answer, I'm happy with my current streaming service and I'll never want the hassle of migration.
In my view there really needs to be some 'no means no, not maybe later' legislation against this burdensome dark pattern.
This is something that I find extremely annoying about pretty much everything on computers these days. I have noticed recently that play buttons on pretty much every music player do not work consistently and often show the wrong play/pause state (showing a pause button when there is nothing playing, showing play buttons when something is playing) and obviously that doesn't break any real functionality, but it's just annoying and shows a complete disregard for the quality of the user experience across the board. I honestly don't know of a single audio only app that has a play button that works properly.
IS THERE a name for the phenomenon? You are about to tap / click when the UI changes underneath you. You can end up tapping the wrong thing! I call it bait and switch and I am not sure how to fix it.
It is the most infuriating thing when I'm in a hurry and know what to click. Windows itself doesn't do this much, but, do websites love it. I bet its called hydration or something, that causes the layout shift.
It looks like Apple is literally copying Samsung, and not only in hardware (upcoming foldable iPhone), but in the services and in advertising them inside the UI. Even the names are similar.
This is not a good thing. Not for Apple, and not for Android, as in terms of exerting gravity on the market, Apple is a supermassive black hole. Anything they do instantly becomes normalized as a business practice.
Definitely. But at least on Samsung phones, you can uninstall the packages from the user partition and in that way rip most of that stuff out (like the McAfee scanner in security, Bixby, Gemini, OneDrive, etc.).
So, yeah, they are copying, but by virtue of the ecosystem being less open, you are mostly stuck with it.
That is what I was alluding to, though I recommend people to use UAD-ng, since it explains what each package is and they are separated in safety-based categories.
One note though: removal of system apps with adb is blocked in Android 17. You can only disable system apps on Android 17:
Using an Apple device these days is to be spoken to in a weird language that invites you become one of those people who lives at the genius bar, if you are so lucky to live within range of one. Like the touch id failed on my iPad and I got some really strange messages. I also get weird dialogs about failing things on my Mac (like some "widget" having to do with Find My) that usually center Apple brand names. It just makes those brands sound shoddy. [1]
I was delighted with my iPhone when I first got it but about six months later I was always getting important phone calls... and it wouldn't ring, I was getting important texts... some of which would appear on my iPhone, some of which would appear on my Ipad, some of which would never appear at all, I was getting important notifications... and I couldn't find them, or they would disappear before I could tap on them, it was like my phone was possessed by the devil.
I turned off filtering and grouping for notifications and went through the menus, deleted every app that I didn't use, turned off notifications for apps unless I absolutely needed them, etc. After spending an hour digging through the settings my phone now rings when people call.
And don't get me started on AirPods; like they sorta kinda work if you stay in the Apple ecosystem, but if you pair them with Windows they will do everything in their power to punish you, including force you to reboot your phone so you can talk on the microphones.
The most amusing thing is that so many of the ads and nags in MacOS use the Liquid Glass refresh of the 2001 Mac OS X version of the dialog box from the 1984 Mac Classic. Microsoft nags are based on web technology and look kinda appealing, but Apple nags are a blast from the past.
[1] ... if only your XBOX could show a Playstation logo when it is acting like an ADHD kid rather than an XBOX logo!
The minimalist approach is great until it isn't. You can cover 98% of use cases with a single button is a great motto, until you are in the other 2%. I often fail to find basic functionality in software today, because some smart product manager decided that nobody really needs it. For example, it is now often impossible to load all elements from a list and filter/sort it along basic properties.
I would say I'm about 90% satisfied. Yesterday I just did a bunch of batch graphic conversations by opening multiple images in Preview. Selecting all the images in the sidebar. I could then batch process manual using preview.
It was an awesome experience and the first really exciting improvement I have seen in a long time.
I always want to either copy and delete or save and forget, so I'd select those two options (or rather have the old behaviour) and ignore the rest. You can choose other things.
Same with adverts. I would select "zero adverts", but you could select "upto six adverts" or whatever. After all adverts are for the benefit of the customer right - that's what advert apologists say.
I wouldn’t call Apple style minimalist. It was more focused on being approachable, in a way that works for both beginners and advanced users. That means something consistent, discoverable. It looks easy to get started, but has depth when needed.
If you look at or used macOS 9 and the early OS X none of that expresses minimalism
yeah like i do find apple software is now full of ads, bugs and often feels very unpolished. but i also think they have recently increased complexity in a bunch of places and i like that a lot haha...
like being able to customize your homescreen more or even the screenshot example! i def use like 3 of those options at least weekly...
this is a discussion we often have where I work, where we're debating removing a feature due to difficulties maintaining it and few people needing it. I usually fight to keep it, with the argument "we aren't doing it for the people that don't need it, but for the ones that do." But at the end of the day, I'm not the one who has to pay for it.
This is good, but I think it's missing a discussion of the business logic, which is IMO the mechanism behind the gravity we're discussing here. And really it's just about the fact that you always get more positive attention in an org (and therefore a better shot at promotion etc.) for suggesting and implementing new stuff than pruning what's already there. Pruning only becomes possible when there's a coherent vision, for which you need a small-to-medium team (at most) and one person with the vision in charge of it.
Yeah. This is something that existed in pro software forever. You can have unlimited toolbars and all the buttons you want. But don’t have to. Web and mobile apps just removed the UI customization altogether.
Having the menu exist at all is already well onto the slippery slope - once upon a time the screenshots went directly into the photo library, without any interstitial at all...
And at the time, everyone was perfectly fine with opening the photo library to access the options that are now in that menu
I disagree. It was annoying to always have to delete the screenshot photos that you really only wanted to have on the clipboard to paste somewhere, or only wanted to extract text out of. I was very pleasantly surprised when the new options were added, and I regularly make use of the different available choices.
Instead, what I dislike is that you can’t keep the screenshot dialog open in the background. It would be fine for screenshots to go straight to photos if the screenshot dialog was still available from there for each individual screenshot taken (including the options under discussion).
As I wrote, it could be integrated into Photos. Or they could make a Clipboard app that integrates it. Apple isn’t foreign to turning OS-wide functionality into apps, like Files and Passwords and Preview. There’s also functionality made statefully available via Control Center and Notification Center, which do “draw UI elements on top of other apps”. There’s various ways this could be accomplished.
Screenshot and share functionality get massively overloaded on iOS, but it's not because a product person / designer lacks the necessary taste, vision or "courage". It's because the OS is not capable of composing apps well: "I want to X, but with Y". As a result, functionality like screenshots, sharing, clipboard get overloaded with all kinds of adhoc half-baked workflows to work around the single app mindset.
I kind of agree with what you're saying, in that screenshot and share functionality is increasingly overloaded with options and things that just don't make any sense in that context. I disagree that this isn't because a product designer lacks vision, Apple control the entire stack on iOS, and there's nothing stopping them from rethinking things so that "Share" isn't a weird synonym for "Junk drawer menu".
There is no justifiable reason that Safari's find in page option is under the share menu, hidden underneath a View More button. Finding within a page has nothing to do with sharing, and even if somehow a user guessed that it might be in that menu without searching the web for it, they're probably going to dismiss it because they haven't expanded the view more menu.
iOS and macOS are riddled with illogical decisions like this. The menu bar is an unusable mess of icons that things have added, a problem that Windows (kind of) solved about a decade ago by allowing me to select which icons appear by default. The Dock seems to choose at random whether an app remains pinned or not, with particular confusion brought by apps updating themselves. Shortcuts is a wonderful idea in principle while in practice anytime I try to do something with it some part is missing.
I used to be a huge proponent of macOS in particular, and I would like to be one again, but currently its incredibly hard to do that.
Totally agreed; I was talking from the POV of someone designing an iOS app. Apple could fix a lot of this jank with better design, individual apps less so.
I daily drive linux (arch btw) with all the adblocking bells and whistles and I was dumbfounded when I saw my grandma's PC with all the clutter and ads. Really makes you miss the old era.
You don't even need add blocking for most open source software: the threat of forking backs a culture where the software is just there to to its job and not to sell something.
I started using the f-droid app "store" recently and it's amazing: bare bones stuff that just does what you want.
I meant user experience as a whole including browser and proprietary apps. The amount of ads I perceive a day using my PC can be counted on my fingers.
And it's not just something we would consider calling ads, but just the clutter on the web.
- Limited offer modals
- "Hey we have a useless AI chatbot" popups
- Cookie banners
- Newsletter popups
- 3 tiered subscription offers for everything
- Sign in to XYZ with google
- This site wants to know your position
And don't even get me started on things you can't change as a user like really bad full text searches and stuff.
And I'm still yet to find that hot single in my area.
I know that "Great Man" theory is considered debunked.
That being said, it seems a LOT of drops in quality trace back to some very senior person who cared about quality and put resources behind delivering quality and then either:
- stops caring
- leaves (retires, switches jobs or gets pushed out).
Jobs is the classic example of this but I'm sure if you are reading this then you have an example from your own career history.
I would call this the "bus factor" theory. If a process (here, quality control) revolves around one person, and then that person stops doing the work, the work stops getting done.
The article has a link to a previous Gruber article that mentions things falling to the ground because of "gravity" as an analogy for asking about seemingly basic questions about "why things happen".
It's an article that inadvertently confuses readers with too many layers of indirection and requires reading another article to get the prerequisite "Insider Baseball" knowledge to connect all the metaphors together.
So... asking "why not Intel stickers on MacBooks?" ... analogous to asking about gravity. And "too many confusing options on GUIs" ... lines of code to enable extra options has a gravity.
The text quoted in a sibling comment implies the author is describing an effect whereby poor ux decisions - even if seemingly small - serve as a foundation to "attract" further negative patterns, gravity being the analogy.
Ditto. It's not a reference to anything that I can find, and the concept of gravity is sort of mentioned once but never expanded upon enough for me to really understand what they mean.
No, if add something, it's gravity will increase and start pulling in more shit. Then the death spiral begins, and before you know it, you have a black hole of crap, like Windows 11 Home Edition or Android.
They reference gravity in this paragraph and I have no idea what it’s supposed to mean
> Not only is it very hard to create interfaces that have limitations, but a bad decision is not just precedent – it’s code that can be copied and reused. Existing code always had tons of… well, gravity, even before LLMs.
It makes a lot of sense to me. You go in to a code base and start looking for the ways things are done. You copy the precedent. LLMs do that, even harder, they don't really have taste like a human might.
I am struck by the resemblance between this logic and the logic behind drinking. I remember back in my 20s one of the devs would come over at the end of the day and go, "Coming to the pub?" The standard answer was, of course, "I might come for one." The word "one" was a kind of punchline all on its own of course, a running joke.
Regarding stickers on PCs, once one PC manufacturer added a sticker for feature X, they would have an advantage in physical stores over the other manufacturer’s PC next to it, because consumers overwhelmed by the available choices would rather buy the PC with the indicated feature over the one that might not have it. If Macs were available from different manufacturers and displayed in stores side by side, I’m not sure that Apple could escape that mechanism.
You can read up the history here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel#Intel_Inside. Nowadays the considerations aren’t exactly the same anymore as 20-30 years ago, but by some measure Intel CPUs are still the most interoperable x86 CPUs, due to their market share.
I'm not sure this explains anything? It is the story of one successful marketing campaign in the 90s. Intel's reputation in the 2020s is not what it was then.
Yup. GNOME 2.0 was a little rough because they swung far enough the other way, but it was still a huge improvement to remove all the "unbreak me" obvious preferences that only had one sensible answer. A few versions later, it was a delight to use.
And yet, VSCode has ~70% developer share, largely because it can be everything to everyone, but no more than what you personally need. Just put a search bar in your preferences dialogue, it ain't that hard.
And yet, KDE Plasma is so more usable than Gnome these days, because they swung too far into removing settings. You needed to install a separate Gnome Tweak tool to even be able to change font antialiasing settings last I looked, which is preposterous. I get literal headaches from the defaults.
You can't change font antialiasing on macos either. It might be the case that majority people wouldn't even touch whats in gnome tweaks. I use gnome on two machines and don't touch it. The font antialiasing seems fine?
It might be fine for some, but it is an accessibility issue. Just like some people can't deal long term with either light mode or dark mode (and some are fine with both).
The worst thing about Apple AppStore ads is they create a who-can-pay-more rises to the top situation, where previously it was more based on merit.
And In order to make an ad campaign make financial sense, you MUST have a subscription app. Because just getting one download will cost you at least $3 which is already over the cost an app used to cost.
and your conversion rate to paid might be only 10 or 20:1. So you need to make $30 per customer
So as well as being annoying at the moment of seeing them, ads in the AppStore are directly contributing to the general enshitification of apps.
> So as well as being annoying at the moment of seeing them, ads in the AppStore are directly contributing to the general enshitification of apps.
You can even cut the word "apps" from the analysis here, the appstore just gets most of its money from games which are pretty much slot machines.
That's exactly why every time they promote the appstore somewhere, they put a productivity app as an example, they would like to avoid to be classified with gambling regulations, which is essentially what they are.
The same people who want minimalism here in the comments are angry at Microsoft for removing half the features in any control panel inside Windows with every release.
Shows how difficult it is to design and build software at scale.
I think the real issue is that they have a clean, pretty window with five options and then a "more options" button--which, when clicked, brings up the exact settings pane from Windows NT 4 with no improvements. So we have to endure two parallel implementations, each flawed in its own way.
> angry at Microsoft for removing half the features in any control panel inside Windows
Tbf, I'm not sure anyone is any at Microsoft for removing things. They are angry because Microsoft does not actually remove those settings, they just don't allow them to be changed from the new UI, and instead hide them away somewhere in the same classic control panel that has existed since Windows NT...
I always read it so it is not a fallacy, just so I dont argue.
My change: "where are the people who are against X now that the proponents of X are posting"
However it only makes sense in places like HN that have a "tone".
I think arguments in general get downvoted, or at least not upvoted, so perhaps people (other than me) are less likely to give a different opinion than the current thread.
I really wanted to hear the opinion from Mac diehards about modern MacOS. I've used Windows for decades but bought a Mac M2 a while ago. I really like it so I'm not trying to say "Apple Bad". But I'm yet to see Apple's legendary simplicity, minimalism and attention to detail.
I keep complaining about the fact Mac OS asks me whether I want to allow chrome to access the local network with every update. I tried to dig deeper and discovered a privacy settings UI with dozens of entries written "Google Chrome" with the permission disabled. One for each time I said "No".
This is absolutely embarrassing. I wouldn't call it a bug, but a lazy and incompetent design that I thought could not happen in a Apple product.
I'll give you another example. Lately I've noticed a progress bar under the Apps icon on the dock. At first I didn't even know it was a progress bar because I use the Dock vertically - it looked like a separator - and the progress bar made no progress.
One day, the progress bar actually made progress and stayed stuck at 80%. I thought something had crashed and rebooted the machine. It stayed there. I eventually discovered by trial and error that the problem was that a running WhatsApp app prevented the WhatsApp update process to finish. Since it was always open as I used the computer, that annoying UI element stayed around forever. By closing WhatsApp, the bar unlocked and the update finished.
Pretty horrible. Is Apple learning from Microsoft?
Roughly 2002-2010 that attention to detail was on display and the OS struck an impressive balance between features, ease of use, and power user access.
Since then it’s been straight downhill. First they stopped investing in desktop in favor of mobile. Then they underwent some rewrites to OS and bundled apps that dumbed things down and exploded the defect rate. Then they started setting the stage for a touch experience on desktop at the expense of UI density. Around the same time they started to prioritize short term profit over UX — spamming with notifications to try to get you to sign in, upgrade, etc. And then there’s the travesty that is Tahoe.
> And then there’s the travesty that is Tahoe.
Liquid Glass has no place on the desktop (or the phone really).
I migrated to Mac OS X from OpenBSD in like 2002 or so. MacOS has been a steady decline for many years, probably soon after the iPhone. Snow Leopard was probably the height of the MacOS experience. It’s been lots of little things along the way but I agree Tahoe is an inflection point.
It's sad how much faster and cooler my phone runs with the accessibility feature that turns off parts of Liquid Glass.
The Liquid Glass thing is a migraine trigger for my mum, and everyone I know with an iPhone has turned as much of it off as possible.
Towards the end of it's dev cycle I think Snow Leopard got pretty good.
I do think about this article though: https://www.rubenerd.au/the-myth-of-snow-leopard/
Obviously (to me anyway, maybe folk disagree) comparing a new release to the previous versions last release (with years of bugfixing) wasn't totally fair, but my experience with Snow Leopard wasn't great either and I wonder if it wasn't quite the peak everyone thinks of it as.
And the worst part? It's still the best option.
Depending on your needs. I'm not sure it's that cut and dry. For developer experience I don't find it very good. My System76 laptop provides a better experience.
It is all pretty subjective though. Windows is the best option for some.
> Roughly 2002-2010 that attention to detail was on display
I think steve jobs had common sense... from the user's perspective.
He could throw a little nonsense or a lot of nonsense (and the entire department that created it) out the window.
Oh my god for the love of all is holy why can’t I remove Apple Music.
I don't get asked about access for Chrome at every update.
I have bigger issues with the way a lot of MacOS apps are just poorly designed.
Like screen capture - I want to be able to save to my choice of destination folder after clicking. But instead you get a selection of preset choices, and the option to select a destination before you capture the file, which is unnaturally distracting.
Finder hasn't changed for decades. It should be possible to have source and destination trees visible in the same window, but it isn't.
Mac Mail has threaded conversations, which means some emails don't appear in searches.
App Store search was designed by cynics, idiots, or both. If you know the exact name of an app, search will probably show it but it probably won't be anywhere near the first hit.
Xcode - I can't even...
Meanwhile a lot of clever and useful features remain hidden or ignored. Automator and AppleScript would have been gamechangers if Apple had promoted them, but they were just left on a shelf to moulder.
I can't imagine ever swapping back to Windows, but these annoyances are an insult to the quality of the hardware, which is on another level.
I highly recommend ScreenFloat for screenshots, it's one of my favourite and most used apps - endless power user features that mostly sit elegantly out of the way until you need them. https://eternalstorms.at/ScreenFloat/
This is great, thank you!
thank you, drcongo, I really appreciate your shout-out : ) So happy you like my app! Cheers, – Matthias
Thank you sir. It's indispensable.
> I don't get asked about access for Chrome at every update.
Is it possible that you clicked "Approve" while the parent clicked "Not now"?
One of my personal issues is that I was using software called "Secretive" which installed a Secretive Agent system service. I later patched and forked it, but reused the name. Despite the app bundle ID being different, and having a different signer, they show up collapsed in the "Login items" panel, with no way to enable one and disable the other: https://i.servepic.com/t5DvVjB0.png
There are also numerous entries for software that has been completely removed from my system for years. I wholeheartedly believe OP's experience.
Somebody has to push back about all the senseless permission boxes as an accessibility problem.
Like my home computer has 12 perfectly good USB charging ports but I'm not 100% happy using them, as opposed to wall wart or a wireless adapter, because I have to clear a dialog on my phone and on my computer when I want to plug it in. And of course the "import pictures" functions on both MacOS and Windows "just don't work" so when I really want to transfer photos I either email them (one at a time) or ftp them to my home server with Photosync.
...and sometimes it stops charging the device when you clear the dialog box. Not always, though, which actually makes it worse because of the uncertainty.
And, yeah, I solve it by having a separate USB hub for charging things - but that's a pain for travelling as I'd rather not have to bring an extra device.
(And it doesn't happen under Linux, so I'm pretty sure it's a MacOS issue rather than something inherent to usb-c)
I went through this around 15 years ago, even migrating my parents from Windows to MacOS on the promise of simplicity and better UI. No, it’s not simpler or more intuitive, instead it has its own world of quirks, issues, and annoyances. And both Apple and Microsoft have become worse since.
iPad with attachable keyboard is perfect for the elderly. Change your parents to one or two of those instead.
> I keep complaining about the fact Mac OS asks me whether I want to allow chrome to access the local network with every update. I tried to dig deeper and discovered a privacy settings UI with dozens of entries written "Google Chrome" with the permission disabled. One for each time I said "No".
IMO the party that should be blamed here is Google. Why do they keep asking you for local network access when you've already denied it? Why do they just prompt for access without first showing a page telling you why they want access along with a button to go through with the prompt? Ironically, this is what Google and the other browser vendors force websites to do when they want to ask users to grant certain permissions.
No, Google should be blamed for asking, Apple should be blamed for poorly designing permission system
That's reasonable, I agree there.
I use and have used Windows and macOS for decades. I think Windows is better, but both are doing their best to drive users to Linux. Their relentless focus on extracting subscription and "service" revenue from others is fundamentally undermining the user experience in countless ways. Ads. Dark patterns. Nags windows. Auto-bundled games and software. Telemetry. Every year they make their operating systems just a little bit worse.
I really want a Linux laptop. The problem is that Apple's M series CPUs are too good.
Reviews of the Framework Pro 13 seem pretty good, if you're not too price sensitive: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQb9eGeclQw
Have you looked at Asahi?
Bear in mind that Asahi only really supports M1 and M2 based macs for now, with M3 being worked on (I'm unsure how complete):
https://asahilinux.org/docs/platform/feature-support/overvie...
So it's probably going to be a while before there's support for the recent generations. :(
Thanks for the callout. My mac mini runs M5
I have not, but I am looking into it now. Thanks!
Apple's days of simplicity out of the box are over. The simplicity is still in there somewhere. Through a combination of turning off a lot of features in settings and using a few defaults shell command it can be made simple.
Apple got complex due to dynamic workspaces that result in windows unexpectedly flying off screen or popping up as one mouses's around and the new security model which no longer trusts defaults to local applications trusting each other.
This security model is why each application needs to be granted local access. I believe Apple encourages all apps to stick to their own sandbox to the extent possible.
I'm currently trying to figure out how to give Image Events access to my local hard disk. My old applescripts using Image Events have broken due to the loss of access.
I'm in the same position ... just got my first mac, love the hardware, but man, I don't know why everyone is so smug about the software - it has a fairly similar number of annoyances as Windows (not qiute as much, but it's close).
I have a massive screen and the right most application has it's menu ... at the very, very left of my screen. It's soo far away it is just crazy. And that menu can't be moved to teh side or turned off or whatever.
Applications that get closed aren't really closed ... you have to quit them. I don't know why. Or if they are minimised, then I can't alt-tab to them .. or I actually can ... but they don't actually OPEN!
Windows insist on opening to some arbitrary width and height instead of neatly snapping to a side etc.
Anyway, at lot of it is fixable with add-ons etc, but it's still annoying. I'll be happier when I can jsut run linux.
> Applications that get closed aren't really closed ... you have to quit them.
This is the classic Mac behavior since the 1980s. Except now some apps are identical with their single window and will exit when that window is closed. So you no longer know what to expect. Sigh.
Why have this behavior ever? It used to be that apps took a while to start up. Switching to an open-but-no-window app was a lot faster than launching it from scratch. That’s not so important now that most apps start quickly.
Now the main advantage is that you can use keyboard shortcuts to make a new window in open apps (CMD-tab, CMD-n gets a new window in the previously used open app, for example)
With Apple, the stuff I want to do just works. I actually like the granularity in permissions, because I only give them out sparingly.
Having said that, the OS felt better a few years ago. I feel like they have less attention to detail and don’t care for Liquid Glass.
Still blazingly fast machines compared to my intel windows corporate workstation though.
I have been using macOS for I think fewer than ten years and I think the attention of detail may always have been just about the hardware... macOs and iOS have presented me with some of the clunkiest edge cases and mishandled situations and a lot of them are damn near undebuggable. I think Windows is very tasteless OS making macOS seem good in comparison but in isolation there is a lot that could a should be improved
I've been using macbooks since 2015 and I feel like every single update has made it worse somehow
Think almost all of that is purely visuals. For example, there are many Windows apps with blurry fonts due to poor dpi support, and that's not common on Macs.
Otherwise it's mostly about... the visuals again, but in the hardware side - how the hardware looks better, though, to be fair, that also has a bunch of "doesn't flex like cheap plastic" improvements)
Maybe also the fact that you're less frequently exposed to a garbage sea of complexity like the registry (sure, it exists and is even worse because there is no built in GUI)
But ultimately you're asking about legends, that's the stuff of history, not something you should expect to experience
Both of your examples are software from Meta and Google. Those companies ship what cannot be called anything else than malware. But it is possible to stop Chrome from updating and messing with your system in the background. I forgot which guide I followed, but search and you shall find.
I can tell you that Apple grows closer and closer to Microsoft-level annoying every year. The update situation is just stupid at this point. 10:30am and "hey, we'd like to take your computer offline for 45 minutes? Want to defer until this evening? Yeah? put your password in anyway.
iOS has gotten gross as well. You see that email notification on your lock screen? Wanna see what it says? Tap it. HAHA, that just expands the stack. Tap it again... that reveals a bit.... TAP IT AGAIN - ah, now we're unlocking and revealing it in the app....
Fwiw, you can change how notifications work and change the 'stack' style to a standard 'list'
Not sure if you can get the entire email in the notif, I think the only stock options are 'previews' or nothing
I bought an original 128K Mac, and then used them professionally for decades --- Snow Leopard, 10.6.8, which I view as the most perfect Mac OS ever, was the last version I really liked, or found comfortable.
I need to replace a MacBook Pro w/ Touchbar, and am _not_ excited about the options, and I find the OS version numbering/naming baffling (why they couldn't've counted versions, started at the next letter of the alphabet, and then cycled through the alphabet in the California Gazetteer when they switched place names from there on out mystifies me) --- probably I'll end up w/ a hand-me-down iMac, but I'd be a bit more interested if there was a portable Mac tablet w/ a stylus and touch, having preferred that form-factor for portable usage since Go Corp.'s PenPoint on an NCR-3125 (which I paired w/ a NeXT Cube and represents the highwatermark of my GUI experience).
I wish that there was an option to limit the OS to only Cocoa/SwiftUI/equivalent "native" apps, and I really wish that Preferences.app would arrive at a simplified and stable state which makes sense.
I bought my first modern Mac in 2003 to switch from Linux in a (stolen) Compaq to a commercial Unix on supported hardware. Instantly I got it and there was nearly a decade where every update was better.
Last year, for the first time since 2003, I didn’t upgrade to the latest macOS (né OS X) release. I’m hopeful for Golden Gate and continue to love the hardware, but man Tahoe is a low point.
The Swift UI-ification of System Preferences and all of the consistency lost by moving AWS from AppKit drag macOS down to the level of lesser systems and even Electron (that is to say, I’ve used more Mac-like electron apps than some of the first party Swift UI rewrites).
20 years later and desktop Linux still has no consistency. I’m not even sure how people use Windows. Could this be the year Haiku saves the desktop?
I dunno, I kinda stopped tracking BeOS (and derivatives) when I was essentially bodily ejected from a Be user's group meeting/demonstration by asking how the slides were printed (at that time, BeOS lacked printer drivers).
Maybe a distro focused on GNUstep?
I'm planning on trying a Raspberry Pi 5 (Compute Module --- anyone want to trade for a pair of regular Pis?) once the Soulcircuit Pilet I backed on Kickstarter ships. If it seems promising, I'll get a Wacom MovinkPad and see if I can really make it work.
How is the Chrome example an Apple issue and not a Google issue? Chrome in fact likely doesn’t need mDNS-SD in most cases, so why is it asking for that permission (to browse services on your local network, no doubt sending all findings back to Google and closely associating the things it found with your Google account and more) the moment it launches every new copy? Why are they treating updates as unique copies? How would it be the fault of macOS if any app behaved this way? Clearly not all apps behave this way, so how is it an OS level issue?
The failure of the OS is not identifying those updates as a single app and applying the same permissions
But it works for other apps, no? I'm no app developer, completely out of my depth here, but it sounds like Google isn't following whatever process Apple has set, as opposed to Apple screwing Google over specifically (which there are many examples of)
It doesn't work for other apps because it's unrealistic to expect that only Google "isn't following" A non "lazy and incompetent design" would make "non-following" a non-issue unless ... well, that's where you actually need to know what's going on and prove that it's such a special case of non-following that it's hard-to-impossible to design around - in which case yeah, the OS designers are off the hook
Apple is learning from Microsoft, sometimes as counterexample.
You won’t know Apple joy until you replace the one you have with another. If you’re backed up via Time Machine — because you are, right? — then you plug in your new machine, hit “restore” or whatever it’s called, and head off to sleep. In the morning all your data, applications, and settings will be there. Your new machine will be indistinguishable from the old but for the grime.
I doubt you will get many long term Mac users disagreeing that the attention to detail has got consistently worse every year since Lion.
Trying to push poorly done, rushed UI frameworks to match iOS in the wrong form factor has trashed the OS.
> the progress bar actually made progress and stayed stuck at 80%.
> the problem was that a running WhatsApp app prevented the WhatsApp update process to finish.
Oh so that’s what it is. Thought it was a desync between UI state and software logic.
Here are some things that existed for a long time but still blow my mind (note: this is not "modern macOS", I migrated to Linux long time ago, so forgive me ignoring modern flaws).
- The preview app - document editing at its best
- Apple Mail Search - you can filter by nearly every aspect, even between dates
- the mighty Alt key (alt+click unlocks an extra feature all the time, alt + shift + volume makes smaller steps, etc)
- apple headphone remotes also work on macbooks
- you can turn off the display by setting 0 brightness
- Printing just works - everywhere
- the trackpad integration
- brew is just awesome
Don't get me started on the whole iCloud thing, and apple account sign in (although to be fair to them they've improved this it was way too onerous in the past).
I think they could remove most of what they have added to the OS in the past 6-7 years and I wouldn’t even notice or miss it.
Wait until you have to exit the video call because you haven't yet granted screenshare permissions to the current app, and it needs a restart.
Even the 'own stickers' joke doesn't really apply anymore. I recently saw ads for Apple Fitness+ and Apple Intelligence in the system settings (!, I'll forgive the ads for Apple Care). Apple Creator Studio ads in the former iWork Apps (including abusing toolbar icons for it). Finally (luckily I haven't experienced it), ads for their F1 movie in Apple Wallet.
It is gross and destroys what Apple stood for.
Their introduction of more and more ads shows that they want to optimize the Services category at all cost. Hardware hasn't grown as much as historically and they haven't been able to start new categories in recent history (e.g. AVP failure), plus Services is high-margin. Since they are now on this gravy train, they will increasingly use behavioral data to target ads, etc.
The really annoying thing to me about the "Ads" in the system settings for various things like Apple Music, iCloud, Fitness, etc (other than the fact they're there in the first place) is that they appear after a bit of a delay (around 500 ms?), so other items I actually want have to slide down to make space as I'm about to click something.
Old Apple would never have done that I don't think.
My massive Apple annoyance at the moment is how there's an unremovable nag screen for an Apple Music subscription on the iOS app, when all I ever want to do is sync local music to an iphone like it's an ipod in 2006. They just can't take 'no' for an answer, I'm happy with my current streaming service and I'll never want the hassle of migration.
In my view there really needs to be some 'no means no, not maybe later' legislation against this burdensome dark pattern.
I think a lot of people don't really understand consent. Tech companies don't because to understand is to lose money.
This is something that I find extremely annoying about pretty much everything on computers these days. I have noticed recently that play buttons on pretty much every music player do not work consistently and often show the wrong play/pause state (showing a pause button when there is nothing playing, showing play buttons when something is playing) and obviously that doesn't break any real functionality, but it's just annoying and shows a complete disregard for the quality of the user experience across the board. I honestly don't know of a single audio only app that has a play button that works properly.
IS THERE a name for the phenomenon? You are about to tap / click when the UI changes underneath you. You can end up tapping the wrong thing! I call it bait and switch and I am not sure how to fix it.
Google calls it "layout shift" in its web tools.
It is the most infuriating thing when I'm in a hurry and know what to click. Windows itself doesn't do this much, but, do websites love it. I bet its called hydration or something, that causes the layout shift.
No they would not. This is probably biggest betrayal of Apple users I have experienced. Apple should never confuse their OS's as ad delivery systems.
Not even if it means an exec can get the yacht with a helipad?
That is the point. They used to hold the user experience in higher regard than their need for a helipad.
It looks like Apple is literally copying Samsung, and not only in hardware (upcoming foldable iPhone), but in the services and in advertising them inside the UI. Even the names are similar.
This is not a good thing. Not for Apple, and not for Android, as in terms of exerting gravity on the market, Apple is a supermassive black hole. Anything they do instantly becomes normalized as a business practice.
Definitely. But at least on Samsung phones, you can uninstall the packages from the user partition and in that way rip most of that stuff out (like the McAfee scanner in security, Bixby, Gemini, OneDrive, etc.).
So, yeah, they are copying, but by virtue of the ecosystem being less open, you are mostly stuck with it.
You can disable Samsung's system apps using adb as well. The command is `adb uninstall --user 0 com.package.name`
That is what I was alluding to, though I recommend people to use UAD-ng, since it explains what each package is and they are separated in safety-based categories.
One note though: removal of system apps with adb is blocked in Android 17. You can only disable system apps on Android 17:
https://github.com/Universal-Debloater-Alliance/universal-an...
It's an opinion that always gets downvoted but...
Using an Apple device these days is to be spoken to in a weird language that invites you become one of those people who lives at the genius bar, if you are so lucky to live within range of one. Like the touch id failed on my iPad and I got some really strange messages. I also get weird dialogs about failing things on my Mac (like some "widget" having to do with Find My) that usually center Apple brand names. It just makes those brands sound shoddy. [1]
I was delighted with my iPhone when I first got it but about six months later I was always getting important phone calls... and it wouldn't ring, I was getting important texts... some of which would appear on my iPhone, some of which would appear on my Ipad, some of which would never appear at all, I was getting important notifications... and I couldn't find them, or they would disappear before I could tap on them, it was like my phone was possessed by the devil.
I turned off filtering and grouping for notifications and went through the menus, deleted every app that I didn't use, turned off notifications for apps unless I absolutely needed them, etc. After spending an hour digging through the settings my phone now rings when people call.
And don't get me started on AirPods; like they sorta kinda work if you stay in the Apple ecosystem, but if you pair them with Windows they will do everything in their power to punish you, including force you to reboot your phone so you can talk on the microphones.
The most amusing thing is that so many of the ads and nags in MacOS use the Liquid Glass refresh of the 2001 Mac OS X version of the dialog box from the 1984 Mac Classic. Microsoft nags are based on web technology and look kinda appealing, but Apple nags are a blast from the past.
[1] ... if only your XBOX could show a Playstation logo when it is acting like an ADHD kid rather than an XBOX logo!
The minimalist approach is great until it isn't. You can cover 98% of use cases with a single button is a great motto, until you are in the other 2%. I often fail to find basic functionality in software today, because some smart product manager decided that nobody really needs it. For example, it is now often impossible to load all elements from a list and filter/sort it along basic properties.
Does it satisfy 98% of users always? Or does it satisfy each user 98% of the time?
I would say I'm about 90% satisfied. Yesterday I just did a bunch of batch graphic conversations by opening multiple images in Preview. Selecting all the images in the sidebar. I could then batch process manual using preview.
It was an awesome experience and the first really exciting improvement I have seen in a long time.
You can make something customisable
"links to show with screenshots"
I always want to either copy and delete or save and forget, so I'd select those two options (or rather have the old behaviour) and ignore the rest. You can choose other things.
Same with adverts. I would select "zero adverts", but you could select "upto six adverts" or whatever. After all adverts are for the benefit of the customer right - that's what advert apologists say.
I wouldn’t call Apple style minimalist. It was more focused on being approachable, in a way that works for both beginners and advanced users. That means something consistent, discoverable. It looks easy to get started, but has depth when needed.
If you look at or used macOS 9 and the early OS X none of that expresses minimalism
yeah like i do find apple software is now full of ads, bugs and often feels very unpolished. but i also think they have recently increased complexity in a bunch of places and i like that a lot haha... like being able to customize your homescreen more or even the screenshot example! i def use like 3 of those options at least weekly...
this is a discussion we often have where I work, where we're debating removing a feature due to difficulties maintaining it and few people needing it. I usually fight to keep it, with the argument "we aren't doing it for the people that don't need it, but for the ones that do." But at the end of the day, I'm not the one who has to pay for it.
The adage that nobody uses more than 25% of MS Word’s features — but it’s a different 25% for each user.
This is good, but I think it's missing a discussion of the business logic, which is IMO the mechanism behind the gravity we're discussing here. And really it's just about the fact that you always get more positive attention in an org (and therefore a better shot at promotion etc.) for suggesting and implementing new stuff than pruning what's already there. Pruning only becomes possible when there's a coherent vision, for which you need a small-to-medium team (at most) and one person with the vision in charge of it.
This reminded me of a 20 year old 'viral' video "Microsoft Designs the iPod Package":
https://youtube.com/watch?v=EUXnJraKM3k
> This is why it’s important to hire and recognize people who will understand that those limitations have to be imposed arbitrarily
Better get the folks that recognize users exist and are different, so instead of arbitrary mistakes UI should be tailored to a user.
Case in point:
> five options I have to choose from, every time, even if I never touch four of them:
So the way out is to allow you to remove those 4 rather than arbitrarily stop at 3 where you don't need 2 instead of 4?
There is no good middle. Either have no options, or have many and make them configurable.
I use 4 of those 5 options all the time. But there are other places where options make me slow because I need to was through them.
Some people, when they want to hide an option, think: "I know, I'll use an option."
Well, now they have two options.
Options are pretty nice, it's being forced to always have a long list of options you never want to see that sucks.
Yeah. This is something that existed in pro software forever. You can have unlimited toolbars and all the buttons you want. But don’t have to. Web and mobile apps just removed the UI customization altogether.
It’s good to have options.
Having the menu exist at all is already well onto the slippery slope - once upon a time the screenshots went directly into the photo library, without any interstitial at all...
And at the time, everyone was perfectly fine with opening the photo library to access the options that are now in that menu
I disagree. It was annoying to always have to delete the screenshot photos that you really only wanted to have on the clipboard to paste somewhere, or only wanted to extract text out of. I was very pleasantly surprised when the new options were added, and I regularly make use of the different available choices.
Instead, what I dislike is that you can’t keep the screenshot dialog open in the background. It would be fine for screenshots to go straight to photos if the screenshot dialog was still available from there for each individual screenshot taken (including the options under discussion).
That would turn it into an app, but on iOS there’s no way to draw UI elements on top of other apps.
As I wrote, it could be integrated into Photos. Or they could make a Clipboard app that integrates it. Apple isn’t foreign to turning OS-wide functionality into apps, like Files and Passwords and Preview. There’s also functionality made statefully available via Control Center and Notification Center, which do “draw UI elements on top of other apps”. There’s various ways this could be accomplished.
> everyone was perfectly fine
This was never true, of course. You've slipped way down the slope of the mythical golden past.
But also, having the option not to show an empty menu is a trivial part of customization, so this is also solved in my suggested approach.
Screenshot and share functionality get massively overloaded on iOS, but it's not because a product person / designer lacks the necessary taste, vision or "courage". It's because the OS is not capable of composing apps well: "I want to X, but with Y". As a result, functionality like screenshots, sharing, clipboard get overloaded with all kinds of adhoc half-baked workflows to work around the single app mindset.
I kind of agree with what you're saying, in that screenshot and share functionality is increasingly overloaded with options and things that just don't make any sense in that context. I disagree that this isn't because a product designer lacks vision, Apple control the entire stack on iOS, and there's nothing stopping them from rethinking things so that "Share" isn't a weird synonym for "Junk drawer menu".
There is no justifiable reason that Safari's find in page option is under the share menu, hidden underneath a View More button. Finding within a page has nothing to do with sharing, and even if somehow a user guessed that it might be in that menu without searching the web for it, they're probably going to dismiss it because they haven't expanded the view more menu.
iOS and macOS are riddled with illogical decisions like this. The menu bar is an unusable mess of icons that things have added, a problem that Windows (kind of) solved about a decade ago by allowing me to select which icons appear by default. The Dock seems to choose at random whether an app remains pinned or not, with particular confusion brought by apps updating themselves. Shortcuts is a wonderful idea in principle while in practice anytime I try to do something with it some part is missing.
I used to be a huge proponent of macOS in particular, and I would like to be one again, but currently its incredibly hard to do that.
Totally agreed; I was talking from the POV of someone designing an iOS app. Apple could fix a lot of this jank with better design, individual apps less so.
I daily drive linux (arch btw) with all the adblocking bells and whistles and I was dumbfounded when I saw my grandma's PC with all the clutter and ads. Really makes you miss the old era.
You don't even need add blocking for most open source software: the threat of forking backs a culture where the software is just there to to its job and not to sell something.
I started using the f-droid app "store" recently and it's amazing: bare bones stuff that just does what you want.
I meant user experience as a whole including browser and proprietary apps. The amount of ads I perceive a day using my PC can be counted on my fingers.
And it's not just something we would consider calling ads, but just the clutter on the web.
- Limited offer modals - "Hey we have a useless AI chatbot" popups - Cookie banners - Newsletter popups - 3 tiered subscription offers for everything - Sign in to XYZ with google - This site wants to know your position
And don't even get me started on things you can't change as a user like really bad full text searches and stuff.
And I'm still yet to find that hot single in my area.
When was the ad-free era on Windows (Home)? I don't remember it.
My memory of 24 years ago is a bit fuzzy, but I don't recall any ads on XP; the main complaint at the time was the UI was "fisher price".
Jellybean start menu
XP had crapware trial versions but you could disable them and there were never ads on the actual UI.
I know that "Great Man" theory is considered debunked.
That being said, it seems a LOT of drops in quality trace back to some very senior person who cared about quality and put resources behind delivering quality and then either:
- stops caring
- leaves (retires, switches jobs or gets pushed out).
Jobs is the classic example of this but I'm sure if you are reading this then you have an example from your own career history.
The "Great Man" theory of history is considered debunked.
The idea that visionary leadership in a single organization can make a difference is very true.
Blizzard changed as soon as Morhaime left.
I would call this the "bus factor" theory. If a process (here, quality control) revolves around one person, and then that person stops doing the work, the work stops getting done.
That's not the great man theory that's called having a user advocate in the C Suite.
I don't understand what the title has to do with the content.
The article has a link to a previous Gruber article that mentions things falling to the ground because of "gravity" as an analogy for asking about seemingly basic questions about "why things happen".
It's an article that inadvertently confuses readers with too many layers of indirection and requires reading another article to get the prerequisite "Insider Baseball" knowledge to connect all the metaphors together.
So... asking "why not Intel stickers on MacBooks?" ... analogous to asking about gravity. And "too many confusing options on GUIs" ... lines of code to enable extra options has a gravity.
The text quoted in a sibling comment implies the author is describing an effect whereby poor ux decisions - even if seemingly small - serve as a foundation to "attract" further negative patterns, gravity being the analogy.
Some decisions, once made, exert a noticeable pull on others, so exceptions quickly turn into standard practice.
Ditto. It's not a reference to anything that I can find, and the concept of gravity is sort of mentioned once but never expanded upon enough for me to really understand what they mean.
It might be the term "financial gravity" I've seen used sometimes. That makes sense in this context.
The context for that is in Gruber’s original post, I believe.
I think they mean inertia, not "gravity"
No, if add something, it's gravity will increase and start pulling in more shit. Then the death spiral begins, and before you know it, you have a black hole of crap, like Windows 11 Home Edition or Android.
They reference gravity in this paragraph and I have no idea what it’s supposed to mean
> Not only is it very hard to create interfaces that have limitations, but a bad decision is not just precedent – it’s code that can be copied and reused. Existing code always had tons of… well, gravity, even before LLMs.
I assume this is just LLM nonsense?
It makes a lot of sense to me. You go in to a code base and start looking for the ways things are done. You copy the precedent. LLMs do that, even harder, they don't really have taste like a human might.
I am struck by the resemblance between this logic and the logic behind drinking. I remember back in my 20s one of the devs would come over at the end of the day and go, "Coming to the pub?" The standard answer was, of course, "I might come for one." The word "one" was a kind of punchline all on its own of course, a running joke.
Fyi this article is not about gravity.
Regarding stickers on PCs, once one PC manufacturer added a sticker for feature X, they would have an advantage in physical stores over the other manufacturer’s PC next to it, because consumers overwhelmed by the available choices would rather buy the PC with the indicated feature over the one that might not have it. If Macs were available from different manufacturers and displayed in stores side by side, I’m not sure that Apple could escape that mechanism.
Is "Intel inside" even a feature? It's not like the other laptop will be lacking a CPU.
You can read up the history here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel#Intel_Inside. Nowadays the considerations aren’t exactly the same anymore as 20-30 years ago, but by some measure Intel CPUs are still the most interoperable x86 CPUs, due to their market share.
I'm not sure this explains anything? It is the story of one successful marketing campaign in the 90s. Intel's reputation in the 2020s is not what it was then.
That's part of the philosophical change that led to GNOME 2.0
https://ometer.com/preferences.html
Yup. GNOME 2.0 was a little rough because they swung far enough the other way, but it was still a huge improvement to remove all the "unbreak me" obvious preferences that only had one sensible answer. A few versions later, it was a delight to use.
GNOME 2 was lovely.
Then GNOME 3 came and I switched to Mac.
My experience with GNOME 3 was exactly the same as with GNOME 2: GNOME 3.0 was a little rough, but a couple of versions in, it felt great.
Interesting because i kept reading that people dislike GNOME 3 because it's like Mac.
And yet, VSCode has ~70% developer share, largely because it can be everything to everyone, but no more than what you personally need. Just put a search bar in your preferences dialogue, it ain't that hard.
And yet, KDE Plasma is so more usable than Gnome these days, because they swung too far into removing settings. You needed to install a separate Gnome Tweak tool to even be able to change font antialiasing settings last I looked, which is preposterous. I get literal headaches from the defaults.
You can't change font antialiasing on macos either. It might be the case that majority people wouldn't even touch whats in gnome tweaks. I use gnome on two machines and don't touch it. The font antialiasing seems fine?
It might be fine for some, but it is an accessibility issue. Just like some people can't deal long term with either light mode or dark mode (and some are fine with both).
https://youtu.be/P4VBqTViEx4?si=JkqbTRS0NxOhYn9B
Steve Jobs talking about Apple of the future. (His comments on product people running a company vs sales)
“the moment you open the door to One, Infinity starts exerting its pull”
Reads like it’s from some esoteric medieval Philosphy/theology book.
The worst thing about Apple AppStore ads is they create a who-can-pay-more rises to the top situation, where previously it was more based on merit.
And In order to make an ad campaign make financial sense, you MUST have a subscription app. Because just getting one download will cost you at least $3 which is already over the cost an app used to cost.
and your conversion rate to paid might be only 10 or 20:1. So you need to make $30 per customer
So as well as being annoying at the moment of seeing them, ads in the AppStore are directly contributing to the general enshitification of apps.
> So as well as being annoying at the moment of seeing them, ads in the AppStore are directly contributing to the general enshitification of apps.
You can even cut the word "apps" from the analysis here, the appstore just gets most of its money from games which are pretty much slot machines.
That's exactly why every time they promote the appstore somewhere, they put a productivity app as an example, they would like to avoid to be classified with gambling regulations, which is essentially what they are.
The same people who want minimalism here in the comments are angry at Microsoft for removing half the features in any control panel inside Windows with every release.
Shows how difficult it is to design and build software at scale.
I think the real issue is that they have a clean, pretty window with five options and then a "more options" button--which, when clicked, brings up the exact settings pane from Windows NT 4 with no improvements. So we have to endure two parallel implementations, each flawed in its own way.
> angry at Microsoft for removing half the features in any control panel inside Windows
Tbf, I'm not sure anyone is any at Microsoft for removing things. They are angry because Microsoft does not actually remove those settings, they just don't allow them to be changed from the new UI, and instead hide them away somewhere in the same classic control panel that has existed since Windows NT...
The same people? Who are they? And since when is Microsoft removing half the features in "any control panel" in every release?
This is a fallacy and needs a name.
I always read it so it is not a fallacy, just so I dont argue.
My change: "where are the people who are against X now that the proponents of X are posting"
However it only makes sense in places like HN that have a "tone".
I think arguments in general get downvoted, or at least not upvoted, so perhaps people (other than me) are less likely to give a different opinion than the current thread.
It's easy to get so caught up in the false moat of minimalism that you forget you are selling a tool.
Slapping ads on a tool doesn't improve the functionality of the tool.
Yeah that's the hard part
Broken Windows Theory works.
Good catch