[HN Gopher] If Apple keeps letting its software slip, the next b...
___________________________________________________________________
If Apple keeps letting its software slip, the next big thing won't
matter
Author : RageoftheRobots
Score : 239 points
Date : 2021-11-15 17:26 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.macworld.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.macworld.com)
| malshe wrote:
| Is it me or HN just upvotes any article critical of Apple without
| much thought? At times it feels like I'm on Reddit
| city41 wrote:
| FWIW, I really want Apple to fix this. I used to be a huge fan,
| yet now I use no Apple products at all. It's pretty damning
| when _MacWorld_ says "It's happened to pretty much any Apple
| device user: You go to use a feature and it just doesn't work."
|
| So I personally like the negative exposure. I really hope it
| lights a fire under Apple.
| neolefty wrote:
| Are the bugs something you've personally experienced?
| travisgriggs wrote:
| I worry it's too late. Once upon a time, Apple built pretty
| cool software with a fraction of the staff that Microsoft
| employed to maintain not-so-cool software.
|
| There were some smart/motivated/creative people at Apple. And
| they did it with this FrankenLanguage called Objective-C.
|
| Apple software doesn't make new/cool things anymore. They
| produce "catch up" features. I can't decide if Swift is
| causal or symptomatic, but I worry it's a little of both.
| Objective C made me groan and giggle in the space of 10
| minutes, but I felt creatively empowered when I did things in
| that ecosystem. With Swift and newer libraries/frameworks
| from Apple, I often just feel like I'm in a computer language
| variant of the line at the DMV. Follow the rules, just try to
| figure out how to get the compiler to grant me a result that
| is close enough to what I want.
|
| Apple is victim to Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy.
| dekhn wrote:
| My belief is that Apple is milking Mac OS X for the last bits
| before finally releasing Xcode (which is basically the only real
| way to make iPhone apps) as a cloud service or porting it to
| Windows. I can't think of anything that, technically speaking,
| couldn't be done on Linux or Windows.
|
| once mac os x is gone, their OS surface is so tiny and locked
| down that they don't really have to worry ever again.
| brodo wrote:
| Highly unlikely. Apple never ever wants to be in the situation
| again that someone else controls their platform like Adobe and
| NXP did in the Mac OS 9 days.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| I wish they would just put their drivers in the package repos and
| ship with Linux installed.
|
| It's ok to just be a device company.
|
| Then again, if they did this my device spending would increase by
| an order of magnitude, so maybe the status quo is for the best.
| jjice wrote:
| I use MacOS for work - I think it's a fine OS. Biggest thing for
| me is that it's UNIX based.
|
| I wouldn't use a MacBook myself though. They certainly are damn
| fine machines for the price (M1), but I really don't like MacOS
| having a bunch of stuff I don't need, like Garage Band. I know
| Windows has a ton of bloat as well, and MacOS's bloat is more
| useful, generally speaking. It's not for most people, but any
| popular user friendly Linux distro like Ubuntu has little bloat.
| Unfortunately, those aren't as user friendly as MacOS or Windows
| (I assume this will garner some opposing opinions).
| warning26 wrote:
| I mean, you can uninstall Garageband. If you do a clean MacOS
| install, Garageband isn't even included (you have to download
| it separately).
| lostgame wrote:
| GarageBand doesn't come pre installed with a Mac, hasn't for
| years; and only came pre installed for a very brief couple
| years.
| thelittleone wrote:
| I'm on a 2020 16" MBP. The screen blinks black as frequently and
| randomly as a human eye. The speakers audio pop frequently
| requiring reboot. Certainly not as bad as my lemon MBP 15" from
| 2018. But whether these continued problems are the fault of
| software or hardware I don't know. And does it matter? One of the
| draw cards of the Mac ecosystem is that the limited number of
| hardware devices should equate to more reliable systems.
|
| An example, Macbook Pro back around 2013 had hardware volume and
| mute switches that worked instantly. Useful when going to a cafe,
| hitting mute as upon opening the lid to avoid blasting the room
| with music. Now with toucbbar, I get to the cafe, open the lid,
| the computer starts playing music and it takes 10-30 seconds to
| respond to touchbar controls.
|
| I moved from PC to Apple back around 2005 for improved
| reliability, quality and simplicity. My first 10 years where
| great but the quality has declined so significantly that I've
| started trying linux distros.
| setpatchaddress wrote:
| That's not a normal experience regardless of what's causing it
| -- you need to take that thing to your nearest Apple store.
| randcraw wrote:
| I've had more problems with Catalina than any earlier MacOS back
| going back past Lion.
|
| Like many others have reported, Catalina drops my ethernet
| connection once or twice every day, regardless what adapter I
| use. (I've tried three different hardware devices so far. All
| fail in the same way.) Apple will not acknowledge the problem so
| there no hope of it being fixed.
|
| If MacOS's services get any worse, I'll be left with a $2500
| pumpkin.
| EamonnMR wrote:
| This morning I plugged in my macbook and tried to turn it on. No
| dice. Hammered the external mouse and keyboard. No luck. Opened
| up the clamshell, started testing USB-C ports to figure out which
| one wants to charge today. Hammered the "on" button. It started
| asking out loud in what to me sounded like an old school
| macintalk voice for a username... I have to assume I provoked
| some sort of accessibility feature. Hammered some more buttons in
| frustration, switched USB ports again, got an apple logo. Then a
| "reset password" screen. Reconnected to power and it finally
| booted up, telling me that there was a problem. This is not an
| unusual experience.
| the_other wrote:
| Maybe don't hammer it so hard?
| threeseed wrote:
| So you clearly have a hardware problem since your USB-C ports
| aren't charging.
|
| And rather than go to Apple you instead randomly press buttons
| and then are surprised when random things happen.
|
| Okay.
| Gys wrote:
| > go to Apple
|
| Is there an easy way to do that in the moment? Genuine
| question.
|
| I (we) have many Apple devices and in my experience 'it just
| works' until it does not. And if not you are out of luck. No
| errors, no warnings, nothing. It 'just does not work'.
| Googling mostly does nog give any usable solutions.
|
| I would love to gave an instant phone or chat service. For
| free, because I feel like like really paying a lot already.
| Tagbert wrote:
| Not sure where you are. In the US Apple stores are open and
| doing support. You just need to schedule a session.
| Gys wrote:
| By 'at the moment' I mean now. Because the problem is
| now. Scheduling a visit to an Apple Store is not a good
| option to deal with my frustration at that moment.
| Besides, I am in Europe, where the prices are higher
| while having far less Apple Stores (pretty sure there is
| none in the country where I live).
| lowercased wrote:
| which... may be days or a week away, if there's anything
| remotely close to you. FWIW, I've _usually_ been able to
| get something 'same day', but not always, and often it's
| "hey, there's a slot in 2 hours, and the next one is in 6
| days".
| gbear605 wrote:
| It's not instant, but Apple phone support/chat support is
| free and the wait times are usually <5 minutes in my
| experience.
| Gys wrote:
| Interesting. Also in Europe? I will try this week. I
| often have problems and am pretty sure a new one will
| turn up soon.
|
| AirDrop is a notoriously returning problem. Sometimes it
| works, sometimes it does not. I consider myself tech
| savvy and understand how it works, but AirDrop is often
| useless.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| "randomly press buttons" is absolutely step 1, this is not a
| nuclear power plant we're dealing with... they got it to work
| didn't they?
| boringg wrote:
| Did you use the wrong charging block? My MBP did that when I
| used the charging block meant for a macbook. It took a lot
| longer to get a charge to start the computer. Sounds a lot like
| my experience. I now make sure I only use the appropriate block
| [deleted]
| Tagbert wrote:
| Yes, that is an unusual experience. Something is wrong,
| probably hardware, and causing this instability.
| RiverBucketShoe wrote:
| Apple's software is full of race conditions. I have the newest
| phone and the newest update and I see them in the settings app,
| notifications pull down etc. unbelievable
| Kye wrote:
| Why does the desktop experience seem to diverge so much from the
| mobile experience? My Windows 11 laptop, iPhone, and iPad are all
| equally reliable: they rarely give me any trouble.
|
| Meanwhile _every_ piece of software Apple ever shipped for
| Windows was hot garbage. It sounds like whatever made their
| Windows stuff bad is afflicting OS X now.
| endisneigh wrote:
| It's interesting to witness basic things that don't work well on
| Macs due to software issues:
|
| - I have a Logitech trackball mouse and occasionally it's
| unresponsive. On Ubuntu and windows no issue. I checked several
| places and it's a known issue
|
| - MST doesn't work. Works on literally every other operating
| system. This isn't a big deal until you want dual monitors with a
| single cable without daisy chaining the monitors, e.g using a
| thunderbolt dock
| phoenixdblack wrote:
| One important thing not mentioned here: Apple should make sure to
| keep up Safari Development. It's by far the worst browser
| available and the web platform is only growing.
| sedeki wrote:
| Care to elaborate?
| makerofspoons wrote:
| Safari is famously behind on supporting PWAs, most notably
| their implementation is missing web push notifications.
| handrous wrote:
| Not having web push _is_ a feature. They 're the 3rd party
| toolbar or BonziBuddy of the modern web--often enabled, but
| rarely wanted--however nice an idea they were in theory.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Firefox lets me simply deny a web page the ability to
| send a notification when it attempts to do so, allowing
| me to only let the apps I want do so, while not bothering
| me about the majority of web sites that don't use it.
|
| Why should apple make this choice for me?
| handrous wrote:
| I'd love some data on what percentage of web-push
| notifications going out are to users who want them,
| versus to users who didn't realize browsers had added a
| feature to let websites shit up their desktop, and, like
| most folks, just click "allow" on everything that pops up
| on a site (as there's rarely any reason, for normal
| people, not to) and don't know why or how some site they
| visited once is sending them stuff.
|
| My experience from my immediate friends and family
| support circle is "0%" and "100%", respectively, but I'd
| be open to data showing that the first number is slightly
| higher than 0%. The "UX" for this feature for normal
| users is, as far as I can tell, exactly like the bad old
| days when people'd accidentally install 3rd party "search
| bars", then not know how to get rid of them.
|
| Historically, browsers have worked to keep web sites from
| doing things that affect the machine outside that site's
| browser pane, that normal users don't want or expect them
| to be able to do.
| [deleted]
| city41 wrote:
| The push API is supported by every major browser except
| Safari. Just because you find them annoying is no excuse
| for not supporting them.
|
| If by chance Apple agrees with your stance, a Safari
| config that disables them is the proper solution, not
| dragging their feet.
| handrous wrote:
| It's a pure loss for non-geek users. It should be
| disabled--no dialog allowed, even--by default, if the
| feature's gonna exist. That hitting "allow" on a pane
| that pops up on a site--something users are conditioned
| to do without thinking by all kinds of shitty but
| extremely common web patterns--affects something
| _outside_ the current site 's browser window is
| unexpected and unwanted by normal users. Cases where it's
| easy for sites to affect the behavior of a machine, or of
| the browser, outside the current session on that site,
| have historically been a big problem for non-geeks, and
| this is no exception.
| city41 wrote:
| That sounds pretty reasonable to me. But that still
| doesn't excuse Apple not implementing it. Apple doesn't
| implement features like this because they want to
| maintain app store sales. They do this for them, not
| their customers.
| handrous wrote:
| I think if Apple _really really_ wanted to implement it
| if not for the risk to app sales, they 'd have it on
| desktop Safari, at least. As it is, I just think they
| don't want to implement it, App Store or no.
|
| From observing non-geeks use the "feature", I think
| that's the right call regardless. It needs to go back to
| the drawing board, or be scrapped. In general, anything
| that expands the reach & capabilities of websites should
| be treated with a ton of suspicion, as a likely
| vulnerability vector (leaking tracking info; social
| engineering/phishing vector; straight-up exploitable
| bugs) or simply a net-negative annoyance for most users.
| bwindels wrote:
| they sort of do, albeit with a custom api and requiring
| you to register as a developer:
| https://developer.apple.com/notifications/safari-push-
| notifi...
| city41 wrote:
| You must feel that way about push notifications from apps
| too then? You seem strongly against push. If you only
| dislike push on websites, why?
|
| If Apple thinks push notifications are annoying, why does
| iOS have them? Again, Apple is protecting their walled
| garden. That's all this is. There really is no other good
| faith argument for this.
| handrous wrote:
| People don't switch between ten just-installed apps in
| under a minute. They do that all the time on the Web.
| There's more focus on what you're doing when you open an
| app for the first time, and installing the app in the
| first place is a _strong signal_ that you 're open to
| entertaining requests to expand permissions, like to
| receive push notifications. Browsing to a website is
| something people do on a whim while barely paying
| attention, which they don't consider any kind of
| commitment at all, and they're used to sites going away
| entirely when they close the tab, not sticking around
| because they clicked "allow" on a dialog that _they don
| 't even remember_ because the action didn't rise to the
| level of conscious thought, since the web bombards them
| with "allow/deny" boxes all day long, where "allow" is
| just the thing that consistently makes the dialog go away
| the fastest so they can get on with looking at the site.
|
| Web notifications _are not_ comparable to app push.
| MawKKe wrote:
| For iPad oh boy they sure added new niceties such as:
|
| - Not being able to click a tab unless you drag it to the
| center of the tab bar
|
| - Make a "drag a link/anchor into a new window" feature;
| except it triggers way too easily from ordinary scrolling,
| forcing you to spend the next 15-30 seconds figuring out how
| the FUCK do you close it with an non-obvious swipe gesture.
| Apparently buttons with "Close" or a big X are too
| complicated.
| evancox100 wrote:
| Oh my god the inadvertent link drag to new window (or just
| overwrite current window) has been killing me, glad I'm not
| the only one, means there's a chance it gets addressed.
| jimbob45 wrote:
| You cannot use anything outside of Safari on iOS [0].
| FireFox/Chrome aren't allowed to have extensions on iOS for
| that reason (Regular Safari can because antitrust is MS-
| only).
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25850091
| rabuse wrote:
| Let's not forget their hold back on push notifications so a
| lot of us can get out of their walled garden.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| Google forked WebKit in 2013 and stopped upstreaming changes.
| Now Google's fork is the one that everyone uses.
|
| Apple launched the WebKit revolution, but Google grabbed the
| ball and ran with it, Apple didn't give chase, and now they
| are behind. A pity.
| FinalBriefing wrote:
| It is always behind on web technologies and hasn't
| implemented may features that have been around for a while.
|
| It only gets updated once a year, so any updates they do make
| are slow to hit users. This wouldn't be so bad if they were
| more up to date with Firefox and Chrome.
| Jcowell wrote:
| Is it behind web technologies or is it behind Google Chrome
| Features ?
| motoxpro wrote:
| Chrome, Firefox, Brave, etc.
| no_way wrote:
| Answer is both
| rabuse wrote:
| Same experience. The amount of css "quirks" I have to work
| around trying to get a site "mobile friendly" is absurd. The
| navbar issue, and the scrolling still not being disabled with
| overflow:hidden makes me bang my head against the wall.
| freediver wrote:
| On a Mac, Safari is the best browser (as defined by being fast,
| battery efficient and native app) by a far margin compared to
| other mainstream choices, only matched by the Orion browser
| (but I may be biased).
| sneak wrote:
| Safari is probably the least secure mainstream browser, as
| things go.
| phoenixdblack wrote:
| Since Internet Explorer is not supported anymore by most
| websites Safari has become the new worst browser in regards
| to having really bad CSS and Web API Support.
| smoldesu wrote:
| ...and bad PWA support, shaky VOIP/WebRTC support, the
| worst codec compatibility in the game, a lack of desktop
| notification options, need we go on?
| nickpp wrote:
| Yeah maybe you as a developer want some fancy CSS and
| bleeding fresh Web API but _I_ as a user don 't.
|
| The web is too bloated as it is, I feel that Apple is on my
| side putting a damper on that.
|
| Safari is powerful enough as it is. You want voip,
| notifications, codecs and so on - do the work and learn to
| write a native app. I'd rather pay for that than paying
| with my attention to ads in your "free" web app.
| smoldesu wrote:
| Yeah, this is the kind of entitled mentality that is
| going to sink the MacOS ship. I'm not writing a native
| app just for basic web browser functionality. If the
| choice comes down to re-writing everything for MacOS or
| dropping support altogether, I have no qualms cutting out
| less than 20% of the desktop market share.
| lghh wrote:
| > do the work and learn to write a native app
|
| Why? I want it to run on all platforms. That's one of the
| best things about the web. I'd rather just not support
| Safari than write and deploy separate MacOS, Windows, and
| Mobile applications.
|
| My and most user-bases agree.
| Anunayj wrote:
| + I don't want my users to download to have download a
| native binary that has unrestricted access to filesystem
| and I need a Apple Device to develop even if it's the
| smallest thing in the world.
|
| Web browsers are the best of both worlds, secure enclaved
| sandboxes, easily reachable by just a link, and powerful
| enough to do many basic tasks, and cross compatible.
| johnsoft wrote:
| I was a web developer in a previous life. You can write
| basic standard code and Firefox/Chrome/even old Edge
| works fine, but Safari has a million little things that
| are buggy or don't work, or break at random in new
| versions. I wasted so much time hacking random bits of
| code to support iPhone. In 2021 now that IE is finally
| dead, I'm sure Apple is singlehandedly keeping
| BrowserStack in business.
|
| The first one that comes to mind is the <input> select
| method doesn't work[1], although MDN claims it does. It
| works _sometimes_, for reasons I couldn't discern. I'm
| not sure about you, but I wouldn't call selecting text a
| fancy or bleeding edge feature.
|
| [1]: https://stackoverflow.com/q/3272089 Don't miss the
| comment about an infinite loop hanging the browser
| Isthatablackgsd wrote:
| As an end user, I felt like Safari should have done
| better. And extension for Safari are gated behind app
| store only (no sideloading the extension).
|
| Also I came across a few sites that Safari couldn't
| render it correctly whereas Firefox and Vivaldi show the
| site just fine. I only use Safari as a last resort and
| only used it for Zoom/Doxy/Whereby/etc.
| no_way wrote:
| Well I as a developer just want a browser which doesn't
| break existing features: localstorage, indexeddb were
| completely broken for months this year.
|
| Like CSS containment is feature that was shipped in
| Chrome in 2016, Firefox 2019 so how many years have to
| pass for Safari to implement it so it isn't just 'some
| new shiny' feature anymore?
| akiselev wrote:
| _> The web is too bloated as it is, I feel that Apple is
| on my side putting a damper on that._
|
| Like how Safari doesn't support WebP?
| freediver wrote:
| Safari/WebKit does support WebP (since June 2020).
| freediver wrote:
| That is a common misconception, CSS support in Safari is as
| good as Firefox, and just a hair worser than Chrome's.
|
| (latest webcompat test results were 96/92/92 for
| Chrome/Firefox/Safari https://paul.kinlan.me/sorry-safari-
| team/ )
| fermentation wrote:
| Does a non-native browser exist?
| freediver wrote:
| Yes - Chrome, Brave, Edge, Firefox... all use non-native UI
| components in their macOS apps (even iOS), which makes them
| look and feel out of place on a Mac.
| jasonlotito wrote:
| It's interesting that your list defining the "best browser"
| doesn't actually include properly rendering web pages and the
| general issues that safari has as a web browser outside what
| you mentioned. "Fast" is interesting, as if something doesn't
| work, is it really fast? I routinely see how Safari fakes
| speed. Being able to read a web page before someone else
| doesn't make it faster if you can't also interact with that
| web page. And while battery efficiency is critical, rarely do
| I know someone who is only using safari. And while being
| "native" is nice, it also means its use is limited to just
| the Apple ecosystem.
| freediver wrote:
| Best means different thing to different people. I have
| opted to define exactly what best means to me, so that we
| can get comments like yours to further the discussion.
| Jyaif wrote:
| By your standards Lynx is the best browser.
| freediver wrote:
| On Linux it may be for some, but I was talking about Mac,
| and on macOS I want a browser app that works and looks in
| a native way.
| dmitriid wrote:
| > It's by far the worst browser available
|
| It's not
| brodo wrote:
| It's not an Apple problem, it's industry-wide. This talk [0] is a
| great warning about the general decline in software quality. I
| think we are at some sort of second software crisis. We need to
| get rid of the OOP and DRY mindset and build things with a focus
| on speed, stability, security and minimal dependencies.
|
| [0]: https://youtu.be/ZSRHeXYDLko
| jamil7 wrote:
| Apple's software quality has certainly slipped. I'm not sure if
| I'm just getting old but I find software quality in general seems
| to have slipped. Or is it just because there's more software
| around?
| acdha wrote:
| > Apple's software quality has certainly slipped.
|
| I've been using and supporting Apple software since the 90s and
| I think this is more an artifact of most bugs not being
| especially memorable than anything else. People have complained
| about bugs after every release, a fair fraction of the
| complaints circulating online will be attribution error or
| overly-generalizing a niche condition as global, etc. and that
| seems to have been basically constant since OS X 10.2 or so.
|
| There is one more interesting discussion, however, which I
| think is probably a legitimate trade-off: the entire industry
| has been moving to faster releases since it's easy to ship
| updates over the internet to huge audiences. When that wasn't
| possible and update cycles were measured in years, teams did
| spend more time on QA so you probably did have a somewhat lower
| chance of seeing bugs of the sort which were caught by that
| kind of process but at the expense of taking much longer to see
| new features or get fixes for bugs which slipped through either
| due to complexity or limited trigger conditions. Since the
| amount and complexity of software has generally been
| increasing, I think that this is generally the right trend with
| the addition of telemetry to collect crash reports, but it does
| seem like this could increase the perceived number of bugs even
| if the duration of time where you're exposed to a particular
| bug decreases.
| Skunkleton wrote:
| I think that the slip in quality we are seeing is a result of
| increased complexity more than anything else.
| ChicagoBoy11 wrote:
| I think this is hard to recognize but almost certainly true.
| I have the Airpod Pro and was recently annoyed at how it
| wasn't quite doing the audio source switching like I wanted.
| Clearly some sort of software issue. Yet, if I honestly take
| a step back, the fact that I can put these in my ear and be
| using one of 3 devices that are right next to me and it
| seamlessly and correctly switches the audio based on what I
| am doing is quite magical. It's easy to be annoyed at the few
| times it doesn't when magic becomes the norm.
| Skunkleton wrote:
| This sort of story always reminds me from a bit in Seinfeld
| where Kramer's phone number is one digit off from the Movie
| Phone number. He would say something like "press 1 for
| Total Recall, Press 2 for...". Of course he would not be
| able to determine which button was pressed, and would say
| "why don't you just tell me the name of the movie you want
| to see?"
|
| I feel like we are creating really unpredictable, and hard
| to implement UIs in the name of "magic". Would a button in
| the UI been better? I think it would have been, at least
| for me.
| rch wrote:
| I'd expand your reasoning to include organizational
| complexity, which sometimes overrides technical factors.
| Skunkleton wrote:
| That's a good point. I've observed in my own work that
| complex organizations have a way of driving out expertise.
| I don't mean that experts quit, as that is an unavoidable
| fact of doing business. Rather the organization is
| structured in such a way it is difficult to build expertise
| in the first place, and many of the experts are the people
| that were around before the organizational complexity
| arose.
| city41 wrote:
| I'm not so sure, at least in the context of Apple because
| they have slipped far more than their competitors. Android is
| way more stable and has far fewer bugs than iOS as a simple
| example.
| Skunkleton wrote:
| Yeah, I agree. Apple has slipped while competitors have
| improved. Android today (especially the Google-only flavor)
| is pretty impressively stable. Even worse is that iOS is
| supposedly more "simple" than Android.
|
| Mostly, my comment was projecting my own experiences with
| complexity on the projects I have been involved with. You
| are right, in this case other factors probably dominate.
| jwagenet wrote:
| There is probably more software written this year than existed
| a couple decades ago and each new app is orders of magnitude
| more complex.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| It feels industry-wide to me. Quality was never a high
| priority, but in the past decade it's fallen that much further.
| Everything has become centered around shoveling as much code as
| possible as quickly as possible, with little to no regard for
| how well it works. Nobody cares if it requires obscene amounts
| of memory, turns laptops into furnaces, and functions correctly
| only half the time so long as it's getting shipped quickly.
| rusk wrote:
| It is industry wide, but I don't think this gets Apple off
| the hook. They sell a premium product so it's not
| unreasonable to expect something a little better.
| dvirsky wrote:
| I think that it has to do mainly with two things: 1. The
| overall complexity of what's possible is growing, so software
| is just becoming much more complex.
|
| The other is the fact that server based software has an almost
| zero time deployment cycle, and even native code for
| desktop/mobile can be shipped really quickly. This makes
| software mostly an iterative process. If fixing bugs on a
| weekly basis in a major mobile app is no biggie, and almost
| nothing gets blocked because of a bug that can be just fixed
| next week, you just get a lot more bugs shipped to users.
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| > Or is it just because there's more software around?
|
| I think there's _less software around_, insofar as there's
| fewer discrete software titles around, but each title has far,
| far more software code behind it.
|
| I remember as a sprog, running my cracked copy of Adobe
| Photoshop 6.0 - that in order to do anything "cool" in PS
| (especially when you _just can 't_ grok how to paint, even with
| a Wacom) you needed a huge smattering of third-party Photoshop
| plug-ins: Alienskin, Kai's Power Tools, Flaming Pear,
| FilterFactory, etc - but nowadays while plug-ins are still a
| thing I find myself getting-by with only Photoshop's stock
| functionality. It certainly doesn't help that Apple continues
| toward completely locking-down their platforms: in-proc and
| binary plug-ins for Photoshop on iOS will never be a thing.
| waylandsmithers wrote:
| I wasn't a dev when I used it but I remember OS 9 being very
| very crappy most of the time and OSX feeling like a massive
| leap forward
| 8f2ab37a-ed6c wrote:
| The good news is that for once we have a precedent of Apple
| listening to what people actually want with the new MBP lineup.
| Whether they'll be able to replicate that magic with their
| software teams remains to be seen, but at least now it feels
| within the realm of possible.
| joemi wrote:
| I'm sure plenty of people will disagree with me, but I don't
| think this is a good precedent. Apple has always been
| opinionated, and that's a lot of what made Apple different.
| Admittedly, sometimes their opinionated takes weren't great,
| but a lot of times they really were great, even when some
| people didn't realize it. That's what allowed Apple to grow and
| soar to the heights it did. I worry that the new MBP line is a
| sign of Apple beginning to loose that quality that made them
| different from so many other companies... I worry that it's the
| start of a fall into mediocrity.
| naravara wrote:
| I'm sure plenty of people will disagree with me, but I don't
| think this is a good precedent. Apple has always been
| opinionated, and that's a lot of what made Apple different.
|
| I agree in principle but in practice Apple made a lot of bad
| bets with the previous generation across the entire product
| line.
|
| Intel failed to meet its targets time and time again, which
| hit Apple's production schedules especially hard since they
| tend to make big updates infrequently rather than
| continuously updating internals to be as fast as possible.
|
| The USB-C ecosystem never got as convenient or extensible as
| they had hoped. Only now do I see a lot of good USB-C docks
| and peripherals coming out and it's still not as robust as
| you would want if you're building your entire product suite
| around it.
|
| Some stuff there just was no good alternative, particularly
| SD cards.
|
| The TouchBar was a dud.
|
| The low-profile switches on their keyboards had big
| reliability issues.
|
| And many more! Part of being a bold innovator is knowing when
| an idea didn't work out. The latest generation shows that
| they're willing to defer to practical needs rather than
| doubling-down on failed ideas.
| loudthing wrote:
| I agree that Apple's hot headedness in the past has helped
| the industry in the long run. For example, eliminating the
| floppy drive with the original iMac, or pushing for open
| alternatives to Flash by not allowing it on iPhones. It is
| concerning that they included a full size sd card reader (22
| year old technology at this point).
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| I love SD cards, theyre like miniature floppy disks, but
| not too miniature - microSD feels very fragile and more
| difficult to handle - what do you have against full size
| SD?
| mulmen wrote:
| The full size SD card slot is awesome for photography.
| wtallis wrote:
| The SD _form factor_ is over two decades old, but the
| technology inside the cards and readers has advanced
| significantly, so you 're effectively complaining that
| nobody has broken backwards compatibility by switching form
| factors.
| ximeng wrote:
| I have a few issues with Apple software, but with AirPods Pro
| they recently added an AI-driven voice isolation mode which was
| an incredible change. Went from the other side barely being able
| to hear you when you were speaking in a noisy environment to
| feeling like you were in a quiet room together. Massive quality
| of life improvement and increased competitive moat from better
| software.
| rabuse wrote:
| My AirPods almost never connect automatically to my phone when
| trying to take a call. I've since just reverted to the wired
| set when talking on the phone. Awful.
| dymk wrote:
| You're probably in the minority there, I've seen complaints
| few and far between about AirPods connectivity, but lots of
| glowing praise for. Personally, AirPods UX is better than any
| other Bluetooth product I've used.
| alphaomegacode wrote:
| I've had similar problems with the UX on AirPods. Here are
| the choices in Bluetooth for AirPods to connect to my Mac:
| 1. Automatically 2. When Last Connected to this Mac
|
| What does #2 even mean? I want my AirPods to connect when I
| last connected?
|
| It's been common for me using my AirPods to take a pause in
| talking and while using my PC for the AirPods to detect
| sound on my PC and then switch.
|
| Yes, definitely better than many other Bluetooth earbuds
| but I think people were hoping Apple's control of the OS
| and hardware would've produced a better, consistent
| experience.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| "connect automatically unless the airpods were recently
| paired to a different device"
| boldslogan wrote:
| was that in software or only the new Pros?
| ximeng wrote:
| It was a recent software addition.
|
| https://www.apple.com/hk/en/ios/ios-15/features/
|
| Another neat new feature is screen sharing in FaceTime. But
| there's a huge list of improvements, it's clear they're
| investing heavily in software.
| oidar wrote:
| Forget about new features, I just want all the old features to
| stop breaking. It sucks having to buy new software every X years.
| At least with Windows, I can run old business stuff with no
| problems. Good luck on Mac.
| spoonjim wrote:
| This is just a guy griping about his bugs. Apple's software
| quality is by far the best among competitors (Facebook's is
| better but not really an Apple competitor).
| neolefty wrote:
| Would their competitors be Microsoft (Windows, Office, etc) and
| Android?
| AlexandrB wrote:
| Whether or not Apple software is better than that of its
| competitors it's getting worse relative to older Apple software
| - at least when it comes to macOS. I just had the experience of
| "upgrading" from Mojave to Big Sur and the number of new
| graphical glitches and bugs I'm seeing is pretty infuriating.
| And this isn't some new x.0 release, Big Sur is on 11.6 at this
| point.
|
| It feels like the macOS desktop experience peaked with Snow
| Leopard and it's been slowly sliding downhill ever since.
|
| Real time update: Now my Bluetooth is acting up in a way I've
| never seen before. Thanks Big Sur!
| nodejs_rulez_1 wrote:
| That OS bubble you are in isn't making you any favours.
| spoonjim wrote:
| I use Windows, Linux, MacOS, and iOS -- only major OS I don't
| use is Android.
| xbar wrote:
| When an Apple feature doesn't work I give up on it for the
| remainder of the software version.
|
| Trying to fix broken Apple bits is always time-consuming and
| almost always fruitless. They have trained me to believe "it just
| works" or it just doesn't and I am just hopeless.
| WolfeReader wrote:
| Upvoted for "fruitless". Subtle, perhaps-unintended puns are
| the best puns.
|
| Everyone posting on the failures of Apple should seriously try
| Linux Mint (in a VM if nothing else). It's a wonderful
| experience.
| sz4kerto wrote:
| The uneven distribution part is interesting, especially because
| it compares Apple Maps to Google Maps.
|
| I think "unevenness" shows what's in the main focus for a
| company: Google Maps are great almost everywhere, but you can't
| buy a Google Pixel phone except in a handful of countries.
| Apple's the opposite: iPhones are available everywhere in the
| world on the same day, but software is spotty.
| aejnsn wrote:
| Apple needs to re-hash their ancient process for handling bugs
| and remove the entrenchment around Radar, internally and
| externally. Stop outsourcing your internal tools overseas and
| telling product engineers 'it is like it is'. That clearly didn't
| work with customers (re: MacBook feature reversals), it also
| doesn't work with engineers. Allow engineers to scratch their own
| itch, and solve these complexity problems in the stack. Fix the
| back-office mechanisms and SIMPLIFY. Stop building features on
| sandcastles to pretend they're concrete.
| mojuba wrote:
| Apple's new Music app absolutely ruined my entire local music
| collection one day, when updating from macOS 11.4 to 11.5 (I
| think).
|
| My music collection traveled with me from OS update to OS update
| for about 13 years with no problem. And now pretty much
| everything is broken, some files can not be played even though
| they are on disk, half of the album covers are gone, syncing with
| the phone gives a ton of errors. What happened to this app and
| why - I have no idea. It was my worst day as a long-time Apple
| user and needless to say how maddening it was. Oh, the backups
| don't help, the new app does the same thing to the backup copy
| too.
|
| Seems like Apple doesn't care about your local music collection
| anymore, nobody even bothered to test.
| alliao wrote:
| seems like a major win for Apple though.. in their ever effort
| to coerce people to spend more through subscription, it might
| not work on you, but I can easily see my less techy friends and
| family succumb to this catastrophe and sign up to some music
| service...
| can16358p wrote:
| Music on macOS is a complete mess, even without a local music
| collection.
| rabuse wrote:
| I've definitely noticed this over the years with working
| professionally as a software dev with Apple products. The random
| freezes, app crashes, clicks stop working in apps until a
| restart, memory leaks bogging the entire system down, etc.
| sebazzz wrote:
| Funny, just yesterday I was troubleshooting Carplay troubles. My
| Opel Ampera-E (Chevvy Bolt) would only recognize my phone as an
| iPod! For live I couldn't figure out the issue: I rebooted the
| infotainment system, I reset the infotainment system, I reset my
| iPhone - yet, on this particular iPhone, Carplay failed to
| launch.
|
| Turns out that at one point "App & privacy limits" were enabled,
| and this _silently_ disabled Carplay!
| freediver wrote:
| Yesterday I prepared a few years old Windows laptop for my
| daughter to use in school.
|
| It took me a few hours just to install updates, remove bloatware
| (my oh my, the amount is staggering!) and fix privacy settings.
| And this was for Windows 10 which I hear is a mild version of a
| mess that Windows 11 is.
|
| I was instantly reminded why I appreciate Apple software more.
| smoldesu wrote:
| You should probably just toss Fedora on it if she only intends
| to browse the web and edit documents.
| sabellito wrote:
| Definitely not defending windows here, but don't you find that
| macs come with bloatware as well? Safari, apple music, maps,
| etc - some of which you cannot uninstall as well.
| rp1 wrote:
| Definitely a difference between first and third party
| bloatware though
| buildbot wrote:
| Sure, but Win 10/11 have had stuff like candy crush and other
| 3rd party apps installed by default for a bit. MacOS only has
| 1st party bloat, which may be a big difference for some.
| sabellito wrote:
| Fair point, I agree there's a difference.
| leucineleprec0n wrote:
| First party bloat is arguably worse.
| irskep wrote:
| The difference is that none of that stuff is running in the
| background when you aren't using it. Maps doesn't take up a
| global menu slot. Apple Music doesn't open unless you
| explicitly open it (unless you happen to hit an Apple Music
| URL on the web). You can ignore it and it doesn't bother you.
| Whereas on Windows, bloatware tends to add a Start menu icon,
| tray icon, background process, startup item, etc.
|
| And Apple's built-in apps aren't _harmful_ , they're just
| unnecessary. In the early 2000s, my parents got me a Mac that
| came with Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2. :-)
| mattlondon wrote:
| Last time I got a fresh Mac, the bloatware all had an icon
| on the dock - so that is a combination of a start menu
| entry AND a tray icon.
| afandian wrote:
| I never found a way of disabling the automatic starting of
| iTunes when you press the play/pause button on the
| keyboard. How do I choose my own music player app?
|
| And my new Mac has things like (can't remember exactly)
| 'musiccreationd'.
|
| These count as 'startup items' to me.
| TYPE_FASTER wrote:
| You can use software like this to customize media keys:
| http://beardedspice.github.io/
| lostgame wrote:
| I believe it's just in System Preferences -> Keyboard,
| but may be mistaken.
| prewett wrote:
| If you're running a non-iTunes music app (including web
| pages, on newer versions of macOS), the play/pause button
| goes to whichever one last grabbed the audio. So if you
| start VLC (or whatever) first thing (or add it to the
| auto-start items), then the play/pause button will always
| go there.
| afandian wrote:
| It always worked as a pause/play for already playing
| media, my complaint was about its use as a launcher. Made
| muscle memory tricky as its behaviour depended on what
| was running at the time.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Little Snitch says otherwise.
| GoodJokes wrote:
| How is Apple Music or Shari considered bloatware. They are
| universally used apps. What?
| [deleted]
| paxys wrote:
| For a fair comparison you have to use an equivalent priced
| device sold by Microsoft itself (so a premium Surface), and
| that has none of the problems you described.
| passivate wrote:
| Sounds like your PC vendor installed a whole bunch of crap. I
| put W10 on a fresh PC just a couple of months back and it was a
| painless process. It was a W10 Pro ISO from Microsoft.
| slownews45 wrote:
| I deploy windows 10 pro.
|
| Loaded down with crap.
|
| What businesses want Xbox companion and xbox game bar running
| on all their work computers - seriously -> if you are on
| Microsoft search for xbox on your work computer.
|
| Does Candy Crush Saga still come on the business pro ISO
| installs? That used to make the office laugh - who is paying
| $200/machine to get candy crush saga pre-installed.
|
| In fact, the trick was they also had a separate app called
| app updater that would reload these things even if you
| uninstalled Candy Crush.
|
| Too funny! The only way to get candy crush to go away was to
| uninstall it, then uninstall app updater - though people
| didn't date do that biz side because they didn't know what
| else app updater supported.
|
| https://answers.microsoft.com/en-
| us/windows/forum/all/candy-...
| passivate wrote:
| I don't have the same experience as you, sorry I am not
| sure why you're facing so many issues with an OS install.
| What does your IT department say? Any troubleshooting
| steps?
| throaway46546 wrote:
| LTSC
| mattferderer wrote:
| Every business should enable & demo Xbox Game bar. The
| video capture is awesome for helping debug things. Just
| record what's happening & send it over with your Help Desk
| ticket.
|
| It's free, easy to use & comes with Windows.
|
| Microsoft could & should also just load that as a stand
| alone tool like the snipping tool. But they haven't, so I
| encourage Xbox Game bar.
| zokier wrote:
| Installed W10 Pro last summer, no candy crush in sight, no
| tricks done.
| [deleted]
| hmrr wrote:
| I did the same. I disagree. It required two rounds of reboots
| even though it was the latest iso and the Ethernet didn't
| work (i219). Then whenever the thing goes to sleep all the
| windows move to the top left of the screen when it wakes up.
| passivate wrote:
| Sorry to hear you're facing issues with the install! I
| simply presented my own experience, I'm not saying anyone
| is right or wrong, so I am not sure what you're disagreeing
| with!
| hmrr wrote:
| Just that it represents a roll of the dice and hardware
| configuration.
| TYPE_FASTER wrote:
| This is the way.
|
| The last time I looked at Windows computers at Best Buy a
| year ago, anything mid-level and below was almost unusable
| because McAfee was using all the CPU.
|
| I bought a Windows laptop (wanted to game with a modern-ish
| GPU). Step 1 was uninstall McAfee, and turn on Windows
| Defender for some modicum of protection. There are error
| popups for software I haven't installed when it boots. My
| parents have a new Windows computer which was showing popups
| advertising an extended warranty when I visited this weekend.
|
| A fresh install of Win10 from the Microsoft ISO is very
| different from the typical factory configuration found on new
| hardware.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| I'm no fan of Microsoft, but a vanilla Windows 10 install isn't
| very bloated imo. Did you perhaps start with an image provided
| by the laptop vendor? It's not Microsoft's fault that they're
| usually full of trash.
| josephg wrote:
| Unfortunately it doesn't really matter who's fault it is from
| the perspective of the user.
|
| All the windows computers at the computer shop ship with
| bloated 3rd party crap. Except the apple computers. It's also
| not Google's fault that most android vendors don't support
| old devices for long. Or Linux's fault that hardware vendors
| make linux drivers an afterthought.
|
| As a consumer, I don't care why any of this happens. I just
| want the things I buy to work properly.
| ziml77 wrote:
| Who decides what's bloat? macOS ships with Apple News,
| Podcasts, the App Store, Books, Garageband, Stocks, iMovie,
| Keynote, etc. A lot of their stuff is even pinned to the
| taskbar by default. Should be consider that bloat? I don't
| need any of those programs (or prefer alternatives), so it
| seems like it's bloat for me.
| [deleted]
| Anunayj wrote:
| I think perhaps you are in the EU and were using the "N"
| version of windows 10. I realized that the normal windows 10
| installs a LOT of bloatware (Like I don't need candy crush),
| while the N version did not do that.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| Oh that's a good point.
|
| I'm in the US, but yes whenever I select the image to
| download I do pick the N version.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| superasn wrote:
| 1. Yes first thing I run if I ever have to use a Windows PC is
| this little gem called Shutup 10 (1).
|
| 2. Then there is another software called 10AppsManager (2) to
| remove further bloatware like Onedrive, Skype, etc.
|
| 3. After that I visit ninite.com (3) to get the usual software
| without toolbars and spyware.
|
| 4. For other software like ffmpeg I use choco or chocolatey
| (4).
|
| I am now a full time linux user but this was the least painful
| way to get my PC running before that. I'm sure things have
| changed or improved since, but this really worked for me 2
| years ago.. hope this helps someone.
|
| (1) https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10
|
| (2) https://www.thewindowsclub.com/10appsmanager-windows-10
|
| (3) https://www.ninite.com
|
| (4) https://chocolatey.org/
| petra wrote:
| Why use ninite instead of chocolatey ? what's the difference?
| dharmon wrote:
| This is great! Thanks!
|
| I am forced to use a Windows machine sometimes for work, and
| to me the unpardonable sin is that Windows seems to randomly
| reboot _without asking me_! I come to my office and all my
| open sessions are gone. How do you turn this off?! I try
| turning off the setting but it randomly turns itself back on.
|
| Also, how do people set up a reasonable dev environment not
| built around Visual Studio? On my Mac I just use Terminal +
| MacVim (with my plugins), so I don't have particularly
| demanding needs. I tried WSL, but its just Linux side-by-side
| with Windows, not integrated with windows. If that's what I
| wanted I would just use Linux, but I need a command-line
| where I can still build Windows apps. Currently I use bash-
| for-git (so I can run `cmake --build ...`) but its so non-
| standard in lots of ways that it drives me a little nutty.
| arghnoname wrote:
| I moved from Linux to Windows for less hassle with hardware
| and sleep. I stopped using windows because of the reboot
| issue (and hassle with sleep...laptops kept waking and
| burning out in my bag). I went to ridiculous lengths to
| avoid it rebooting when I had a bunch of VMs running doing
| long-running computations and it just kept biting me.
| Sometimes the VM disk would get corrupted from this.
|
| Eventually I realized it hated me and wanted me to fail in
| life, or perhaps click on all the crappy games or whatever
| it insisted on installing from time to time.
|
| I don't love everything about macOS, but it's the least bad
| option and to my mind and for my needs, it's not even
| close.
| Arrath wrote:
| > I am forced to use a Windows machine sometimes for work,
| and to me the unpardonable sin is that Windows seems to
| randomly reboot _without asking me_! I come to my office
| and all my open sessions are gone. How do you turn this
| off?!
|
| That's the neat part, you don't! Windows loves to revert
| those settings after every major update, even if you dig
| into the registry and scheduler and change the settings at
| the source. It is one of my biggest gripes.
| marmaduke wrote:
| From (1)
|
| > Some services ... share your WLAN access data with your
| facebook contacts
|
| Is that true? There's no citation but seems a lot more
| flagrant a violation than I'd expected from Windows.
| joconde wrote:
| Note that Windows now has an official package manager called
| WinGet (https://github.com/microsoft/winget-cli), which
| worked very well when I tried it a few months ago; Skype and
| OneDrive can now be uninstalled without an external tool; and
| disabling all telemetry also seems to weaken antivirus
| protection.
| simonebrunozzi wrote:
| Is it named after apt-get ? (loved Debian and always will)
| linuxlizard wrote:
| This is some great stuff. Thank you! I'm definitely going to
| lean into chocolatey. My daily driver is Linux but I still
| need a Windows machine around.
| sneak wrote:
| https://wpd.app
| nathanaldensr wrote:
| They haven't changed. That's nearly the exact process I still
| use for for work and home PCs.
| grumpyprole wrote:
| At least one can remove the bloatware from Windows!
| okareaman wrote:
| Windows in the Ballmer Era, Vista to Windows 8, was a disaster.
| Windows 10 was released a year after Satya Nadella took over
| and was an improvement. Windows 11 of the Nadella era is a big
| improvement. It seems like Microsoft decided to spend the money
| to get it right to create something stable and pleasing. I've
| been running it for a month and highly recommend it. I think a
| big attraction to Mac OS is that the UI hasn't changed much
| over the years. Time will tell if Microsoft is on board with
| that. I don't listen to the Microsoft or Apple haters who are
| always on here telling me one or the other sucks.
| zokier wrote:
| Windows 7 was a disaster?! macOS UI doesn't change over the
| years?! I feel you are living in some alternative universe
| compared to me.
| xattt wrote:
| Common refrain from the fanboys: You're enjoying the things
| you like _wrong_.
|
| Seriously, I am using Windows 11 since official release and I
| am getting to a point where things are just the way I like
| them. I was lucky enough to have a machine that just met the
| TPM/processor requirements cutoff.
|
| There are a few annoyances: I would like to use the
| dashboard/widgets for weather, etc but they force their
| newsfeed on you.
| pas wrote:
| Win11 UI is noticeably bad. Harder to read, harder to notice
| buttons. Useful functionality is hidden behind more clicks,
| etc...
|
| It might have some aesthetic value, but it's not necessarily
| nicer, just different and more trendy. Which quickly wears
| off.
| okareaman wrote:
| I believe Windows 11 is that last desktop machine UI we'll
| see for awhile from Microsoft as they intend to refine and
| improve this one and stop irritating people with changes.
| I'm happy finding work arounds for things that don't work
| for me. For example, I can no longer read the time from the
| task bar from a distance, so I have a browser tab loaded
| with a time service that I like better.
| https://www.clocktab.com/
| pseudalopex wrote:
| > I believe Windows 11 is that last desktop machine UI
| we'll see for awhile from Microsoft as they intend to
| refine and improve this one and stop irritating people
| with changes.
|
| Wasn't Windows 10 supposed to be that?
| underscore_ku wrote:
| why do you people bother with windows? just use linux
| handrous wrote:
| There are lots of hardware configs that don't fully work, or
| are very unstable, under Linux.
| criddell wrote:
| Most people pick the operating system that best runs the
| software they need.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| Windows and linux don't overlap much in use cases. I think
| macos and linux are more interchangeable
| dkersten wrote:
| What are the Windows use cases that Linux doesn't do?
|
| General web browsing type tasks are solid, text
| editing/note taking works. Videos and audio (including
| Spotify) work. Steam and games generally work (even most
| windows games through Proton).
|
| What else does ones daughter need for school? She's not
| video editing or creating music (two use cases where you
| may need windows or OSX; art is more or less covered
| through blender/Inkscape/krita)
|
| Mint or Manjaro are easy to install and setup and come with
| good defaults that should be pretty easy to navigate for
| someone new to Linux.
| criddell wrote:
| > She's not video editing or creating music
|
| In my experience, kids do these things all the time for
| school projects.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| Gaming; general office stuff ; peripherals
| dkersten wrote:
| Dunno what you mean by peripherals, at least ones that
| don't work on Linux, but the other two categories work
| just fine. Gaming has come a long way thanks to Valve and
| their work on Proton.
| ericd wrote:
| I'm guessing you're not someone who would describe
| themselves as a "gamer"?
|
| EDIT: (I don't mean this in a mean way, just to say that
| people who care a lot about being able to play specific
| games probably still won't be satisfied without a Windows
| box).
| idrios wrote:
| Linux Mint looks and feels exactly like Windows 7
| boringg wrote:
| I feel like running linux is like voting for a 3rd party
| candidate in the US. FWIW linux is great I just can't convert
| all the people who aren't developers to linux without an
| unnecessarily steep learning curve.
| noir_lord wrote:
| I put the boy on an old Dell Vostro running Fedora.
|
| Installation and updates took about 30 minutes.
|
| Updating the machine is a `sudo dnf update` and done.
|
| Though I did get in trouble when I shelled into his machine did
| and update and rebooted without checking he was using it first
| - killing his call to his (not)girlfriend in the process.
|
| He's just start secondary (high) school and they are using
| Google Classroom so all he really needs is a browser and a
| webcam/mic.
| clarge1120 wrote:
| I am thinking of starting the young man with Ubuntu, rather
| than Windows or OSX. Since his (not) gf only uses iPhone
| tech, I won't be able to accidentally interrupt any calls.
| onemoresoop wrote:
| Windows is horrible in this regard. And what's worse is that
| the users seem not to care such that this behavior
| proliferates. I have a windows machine that I take it offline
| and want it running at all times. No updates possible, Wi-Fi is
| turned of right? Wrong, windows does restart machine and
| enables Wi-Fi. It pisses me to no end how little control I have
| of this machine
| jaywalk wrote:
| Sounds like you're just using the basic toggle switch to
| "disable" Wi-Fi when that's not really the purpose of the
| switch. If you actually want the Wi-Fi disabled, you have to
| do it right. Do it in the UEFI menu, or disable it in Device
| Manager if that option isn't available. It won't get re-
| enabled if you do it right.
| onemoresoop wrote:
| You're absolutely right if I wanted to disable Wi-Fi
| permanently. The problem is that I want it enabled at times
| without rebooting the system.
| aunty_helen wrote:
| In reality, you just don't realise how much bloatware osx has.
| Install a firewall and watch as studentd or 100 other services
| you never use contacts apple.
|
| Edit: List of most recent and trying not to include things that
| may be useful to me syncdefaultsd, nsurlsessiond, apsd, cloudd,
| transparencyd, mapspushd, cloudphotod, akd, parsec-fbf,
| appstoreagent, AddressBookSourceSync,
| com.apple.iCloudHelper.xpc, familycircled, trustd,
| AssetCacheLocatorService.xpc, imagent, indentyservicesd,
| com.apple.sbd, studentd, airportd, configd, parsecd,
| com.apple.geod.xpc, com.apple.geod.xpc, avconferenced,
| rapportd, trustd, remindd, helpd, syspolicyd
|
| Long list right.... that's from the previous 3 hours.
| arghnoname wrote:
| Does it make a difference if you disable all of the iCloud
| stuff in settings? I let it sync most of my stuff so it moves
| between platforms, but I always assumed it wouldn't phone
| home for services where syncing is disabled. If it does this
| anyway, seems like a mistake.
| gumby wrote:
| Many of those are useful to me even if you don't care about
| them...which proves your point: there's no reasonable (and
| sometimes none at all) way to pick and choose.
| aunty_helen wrote:
| Opt-in is no longer seen as a reasonable solution?
| gumby wrote:
| You're automatically "opting in" whether you want to or
| not, so it's hard to see what's optional here.
| buildbot wrote:
| But that's 1st party vs. 3rd party, big difference!
| Steltek wrote:
| I can't tell if this is a defense or outrage? 1st party
| seems worse as, depending on the purpose, it might be
| harder to remove.
| oopsyDoodl wrote:
| Last I checked even server focused Linux distros ship
| with a firewall.
|
| Bash? Fucking savages! Zsh or gtfo
|
| Not everyone has time to memorize Linux From Scratch and
| git commit a CI/CD pipeline towards the perfect distro
|
| Maybe if programmers were interested in teaching versus
| making bank at big corp.
| kymaz wrote:
| Need big bank to support the home loan and childcare.
| oopsyDoodl wrote:
| As long as corporate banking is our value store that's
| true.
|
| I'd rather see humans themselves as our value store and
| motivate, teach, and mentor each other to do the
| logistics work to that end.
|
| Letting banks gamble with our deposits when we're all in
| the habit of doing these things daily anyway seems like
| pointless extra steps.
|
| I think people are more willing to be a stable mesh
| network of agents for each other than history full of
| feudal warlords will let us believe, we don't need to
| prop up ephemeral tent poles. That's just old story.
|
| Bonobo tribes have been observed killing alphas and then
| developing social harmony. Not saying we should behead
| billionaires, but austerity for elites would be a
| figurative death.
| asiachick wrote:
| I agree with the previous person that Windows has more bloat.
| I don't want the 3-5 3rd party games it pre-installs and
| several other things. I also agree with you though. For me,
| All the Apple software is stuff I don't use so when I get a
| new Mac the first thing is removing Mail, Maps, Contacts,
| Pages, Photos, Calendar, Facetime, Reminders, AppleTV, Music,
| Keynote, and more and then removing the bloat widgets like
| News, Stocks, etc...
| null_object wrote:
| > removing Mail, Maps, Contacts, Pages, Photos, Calendar,
| Facetime, Reminders, AppleTV, Music, Keynote, and more and
| then removing the bloat widgets like News, Stocks, etc
|
| All of the things in your list are just apps that can be
| removed with one click. My partner's PC comes pre-installed
| with masses of hidden spyware. I know the kneejerk reaction
| is to bash Apple for everything - but the two are totally
| not comparable.
| SamuelAdams wrote:
| Hey so I'll be getting my first MacBook Pro in a couple
| weeks, so I'm still learning the details about OS X. I'm
| coming from a windows / Linux background.
|
| I thought the OS shipped with its own firewall? Would you
| recommend using a third party firewall despite having its
| own?
| handrous wrote:
| Windows and Linux user for 25 years [EDIT Windows for 25,
| Linux for 20, to be more precise], heavy macOS user (in
| addition to those) for the last 10 or so.
|
| If it has a firewall of any kind, I've never noticed nor
| interacted with it. I've also never installed a third party
| firewall.
| aunty_helen wrote:
| Get little snitch. This is a firewall that dosen't care
| what apple thinks is useful.
|
| There was some controversy in the previous year because
| apple tried to deprecate the firewall hooks and allow their
| junk passed the replacement they offered.
|
| I'm leaving apple for linux as we speak for two reasons,
| privacy and they can't help but mess with shit every time
| they release an update.
|
| The most recent, this week they released an update and now
| their airport service listens on port 5000 making a
| conflict with running a dev flask service locally.
| azinman2 wrote:
| s/airport/airplay
| MeinBlutIstBlau wrote:
| I left Apple for the same reasons. They want complacent
| morons who pay $2000+ for a glorified email checker. Not
| legitimate developers. Idgaf how much iOS/MacOS users
| pay, I'm not learning Swift or objective C. Apple is the
| farthest thing from a company that wants to encourage
| development. They just want major players to shell out
| large amounts 30% transactions.
| hodgesrm wrote:
| > I'm leaving apple for linux as we speak for two
| reasons, privacy and they can't help but mess with shit
| every time they release an update.
|
| "Mess with shit" was what drove me to Linux by around
| 2015. It seemed like every major MacOS upgrade torched my
| Eclipse-based Java dev environment, generally requiring a
| reinstall.
| callmeal wrote:
| >There was some controversy in the previous year because
| apple tried to deprecate the firewall hooks and allow
| their junk passed the replacement they offered.
|
| Funny how framing something that's true (allowing apple
| software to bypass firewalls) is seen as a controversy.
| See previous discussion on hn:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24838816
| cyberpunk wrote:
| I mean, you can turn that off. Is changing a port such a
| showstopper?
|
| I've flip flopped for years, (I was using freebsd more
| than 20 years ago, genuinely ran Solaris 10 with my own
| build of kde4 on a hp probook, etc) but last time I tried
| to use Linux for work I got defeated by a conference
| suite projector at a client and it cost us a big
| contract. The happy path (for me anyway) is doing all
| actual dev work on Linux vms and using macOS as your
| browser/im/terminal client -- which it's great at.
|
| And it works with those stupid little projector dongles
| at clients when you're trying to pitch them 6 figures of
| consulting ;)
| kccqzy wrote:
| Apple ships the pf fireball by default. It's a powerful
| firewall (same as OpenBSD AFAIK) but the way Apple
| configures it is very permissive. You can use a utility
| like Murus to configure it to your liking, although the
| configuration is rather complicated. It's also a network-
| level firewall, not an application-level firewall.
|
| If you'd like an application-level firewall, you can check
| out Lulu or Little Snitch. Back when Little Snitch still(?)
| installed kernel extensions, it was found to be quite
| insecure--there were talks at DEFCON about it. Lulu is a
| lesser-known alternative.
| krono wrote:
| The OS firewall can only block incoming traffic (but not
| Apple's I believe) and has almost no configuration options.
|
| Some popular third party solutions that are actually useful
| are Little Snitch [0], LuLu [1], and AdGuard [2].
|
| [0] https://www.obdev.at/products/littlesnitch/index.html
|
| [1] https://objective-see.com/products/lulu.html
|
| [2] https://adguard.com/en/adguard-mac/overview.html
| sbuk wrote:
| Mac OS comes with pf installed. This can block inbound
| and outbound traffic. There is a utility called Murus
| that manages this with a GUI,
| https://www.murusfirewall.com
| smoldesu wrote:
| There are multiple firewall options, but it's worth noting
| that Apple can circumvent them at a kernel-level if they
| want to phone home. You should think long and hard about
| how much you trust Apple before switching everything over.
| azinman2 wrote:
| The pf firewall is unaffected and can stop any calls to
| Apple.
| javajosh wrote:
| Little Snitch
| https://www.obdev.at/products/littlesnitch/index.html
| leucineleprec0n wrote:
| Jesus Christ, thank you. People act as if bullshit like TV
| and FaceTime are perfectly innocuous binaries without 6478
| daemons molesting your memory irrespective of deliberate use
| & permissions.
| azinman2 wrote:
| So basically in that list you're suggesting disabling the
| ability to download web content, syncing of address books,
| getting updated security signatures, connecting to iCloud,
| downloading dynamic assets that many apps use to reduce
| initial size and provide non-binary updates, Siri keyword
| suggestions in Safari, Airdrop, Maps integration, push
| notifications for Messages, etc.
|
| Most Apple users will definitively want those on, and will
| break your system in subtle ways if you disable them. I
| wouldn't make such assumptions about whatever you use the
| service or not. If you don't use a service, it typically will
| have very little traffic if any at all.
| sneak wrote:
| > _getting updated security signatures_
|
| AKA phoning-home to Apple what apps you launch in realtime,
| in an unencrypted manner visible to your
| ISP/hotel/government too.
|
| It also connects to all of that crap even if you have LS
| off, analytics off, iCloud/FaceTime/iMessage/AppStore off,
| et c.
|
| Press F8 and your serial number gets transmitted to Apple.
| azinman2 wrote:
| I guarantee you there are no unencrypted communications
| going to Apple.
| aunty_helen wrote:
| Hostname: ocsp.apple.com
|
| IP Addresses: 2600:1402:e::b833:965b
| 2600:1402:e::b833:9661 2600:1402:e::b833:9669
| 2600:1402:e::b833:966a + 17 more
|
| TCP Port: http (80)
|
| Protocol: TCP
|
| Connected: no
|
| Connects: 0 allowed, 7,359 denied
|
| First Activity: 2/11/21, 22:20
|
| Last Activity: 5h 29m ago
|
| Yea sorry, sneak's right, it's still going port 80.
| sneak wrote:
| Wanna bet? Apple still hasn't yet made good on their
| promise of encrypting OCSP (the making of which I would
| like to believe is my fault).
| chris_wot wrote:
| _the making of which I would like to believe is my fault_
|
| How so?
| aunty_helen wrote:
| >If you don't use a service, it typically will have very
| little traffic if any at all.
|
| Like I said this was all from the last 3 hours and I
| haven't used any of those services listed. It's also
| missing the point a bit, I'm not bandwidth poor on a 3G
| connection trying to save my datacap.
|
| I don't want apple turning my laptop into a thinclient for
| their cloud systems. I don't want telemetry and meta data
| going to them every ~30 seconds (the little snitch icon
| flashes a red X every time something is blocked, it's on a
| per minute basis).
|
| Of all those services I use calendarsync. I miss having
| airdrop a little bit but everything else I don't need.
|
| Also, the way you've phrased some of those, especially the
| notarisation
|
| > getting updated security signatures
|
| is a bit disingenuous when there's a massive privacy
| implication in that it allows apple to know every single
| application I run on my computer.
|
| Most Apple users wouldn't agree to that if you stuck it in
| their face and the fact that it breaks the OS in subtle
| ways is a user hostile position to argue from. Hence why
| I'm giving up my Apple addicition.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > Most Apple users will definitively want those on, and
| will break your system in subtle ways if you disable them.
|
| What happened to the good old days of "ask for user consent
| before phoning home"?
|
| I mean, Apple is miles ahead of Windows in that regard, but
| your average Linux or BSD setup won't phone home outside of
| repository downloads unless requested.
| boringg wrote:
| I think you have your target demographics mixed up for
| MacOS and Linux. Once you reframe it in that light,
| you've answered your question. One is a poweruser who
| wants complete control of their environment, the other is
| a much broader user who wants a convenience of experience
| and safe environment. Trade offs to both of them.
|
| The only happy medium I would consider to your approach
| is that if MacOS had two set up routes, one defaulting as
| a power user turning everything off and then initiating
| things are you want and another as a general user. Maybe
| that would solve it (though would be a heavy lift I am
| sure).
| nouveaux wrote:
| This is the Little Snitch[0] problem. If you have ever
| used Little Snitch, you will soon realize that 1) there
| is so much crap phoning home and 2) most people do not
| want to deal with giving permission to each and every one
| of these services.
|
| I have tried giving permission and at the end of the day,
| it's just not worth the time. For me, Little Snitch is
| great as a reporting tool but it's just too much work as
| a firewall.
|
| [0]https://www.obdev.at/products/littlesnitch/index.html
| gcanyon wrote:
| > most people do not want to deal with giving permission
| to each and every one of these services.
|
| It's far worse than just annoying: if people have to give
| permission to a bunch of things they don't understand,
| they will _absolutely_ give permission to something they
| shouldn't.
|
| You want the user to make a few decisions as possible,
| and _every single one_ should be an actual decision:
| where the user knows what the options are, has an actual
| stake, and might legitimately choose either option
| depending on their preferences and circumstance.
|
| The more times they have to click "yes" without thinking,
| the more susceptible to malware they become.
| least wrote:
| I think this is a bit of an odd take, given that the
| alternative is that the computer just silently allows you
| to download content from anywhere. I don't think this
| makes someone any more susceptible to malware than they
| already were. Little Snitch is the sort of software that
| the average person wouldn't install, anyway.
|
| I understand the point, though. Going to just about any
| major website you will be pummeled with prompts to allow
| for a dozen different domains just to view one page, and
| it doesn't really give any indication of what those are
| used for. They have a what seems to be infinitesimally
| small list of connections that they do recognize and
| explain their use, but ultimately it's pretty useless for
| the vast majority of prompts.
|
| I'd like there to be a better way to deal with this, but
| I'm not really sure what the solution to it would look
| like. You can download blocklists and just silently allow
| other connections, but I don't think that's significantly
| better than just using a hosts file.
|
| The most useful thing Little Snitch does is alert me when
| individual applications try to phone home. For browsing
| the web it feels more like a chore.
| josephg wrote:
| Yep. I have a system tray CPU monitor running on both my
| Linux mint and mac computers. On mint when I don't touch
| the computer it just sits at 0% basically all the time.
| On macos there's always some junk flitting around doing
| who knows what. photoanalysisd, or sending telemetry for
| 3rd party apps, or iCloud syncing or something. It's like
| the 2 E cores are there just to run apple's bloaty crap.
| Shame those processes don't limit themselves to E cores.
|
| Is there any way to turn all this stuff off?
| arthur_sav wrote:
| I wish we had more options though. Between Windows and Apple
| there's no other real competition. Linux is cool and all... but
| not user friendly (not even Ubuntu)
| BenoitEssiambre wrote:
| I don't understand this attitude. I spend countless hours
| trying to keep my wife's work computers working. Getting
| windows to connect to a printer is a frequent ordeal and
| fixes seem to always be ephemeral, things soon breaking
| again. Her Macs are not as bad but still have lots of
| hiccups.
|
| Meanwhile I've been on Ubuntu for more than a decade and as
| far as I can remember, for example, printing consists of
| printer just magically appearing in my apps without me ever
| having to install anything and I press print and it prints.
| That's user friendliness to me. At least for my workflows
| (mostly web browsing, software dev and office stuff), there
| is vastly less fiddling and head scratching to keep things
| working on Ubuntu.
| leucineleprec0n wrote:
| Frankly if the drivers didn't suck hot shit I think many of
| us would.
| mattlondon wrote:
| My work Linux laptop frequently (several times daily)
| breaks Bluetooth, breaks audio, does not wake from sleep,
| wakes from sleep but only shows the mouse pointer on a
| black screen, stops throttling the CPU down, resets the
| DHCP-specified DNS server to 0.0.0.0, sends stuff to
| printers that cause them to just spit out endless blank
| sheets of paper. The "solutions" to all of these are multi-
| step manual disasters... uninstall pulse audio, restart
| cinnamon, reinstall blueman, upgrade Jack, manually create
| config files from copying some file on a GitHub repo,
| downgrade to some specific version of CUPS, mess about with
| apt-get repos to not get the latest version of
| whatever...wtf?! That is not user friendly.
|
| My personal Windows laptop has never had a single one of
| those problems. It has been faultless from day 1 without a
| single issue.
| potta_coffee wrote:
| I set up Ubuntu with KDE (Kubuntu?) on an old laptop for my
| wife. Win 10 on the laptop was so slow that the machine was
| unusable. She uses Firefox, Google Docs, and she uses a
| printer. She's had zero problems in two years and I've
| updated the machine twice for her. Of course how usable the
| machine is will be dependent on what software you need.
| salamandersauce wrote:
| Is this not true on Mac? Updates in particular take forever on
| MacOS. I find Windows updates take like 5 minutes usually.
| MacOS has been a half hour or more for some of the point
| updates I've done.
|
| Bloatware is still there, iMovie, Garageband, iWork is IMO
| bloat. Slightly more quality bloat maybe but I don't need 20GB
| taken up by stuff I'll literally never use.
| Tagbert wrote:
| IMovie, GarageBand and iWork are not installed by default and
| you can remove them at any time.
|
| Recent Mac OS updates are monolithic signed binaries that
| load into the protected disk partitions reserved for the OS.
| This is security feature to limit which processes can modify
| the OS. The downside is that it can't do differential
| updates. I hope that, at some point, Apple will work out how
| to securely do differential updates and speed this up, but
| I'm satisfied with slower updates if it maintains security.
| salamandersauce wrote:
| When did they stop including them because they were
| absolutely included on both the Macs I bought a few years
| ago...
| moralestapia wrote:
| Yeah that sucks, but on OSX side I have to restart my computer
| every week or so because of forced updates.
|
| Restarting really is a big deal for me as my workspace consists
| of several dozen open windows, some of them I have to login,
| navigate to a particular place, etc... also you lose your train
| of thought. It has gotten that bad for me, that I have to take
| screenshots before restarting every time, so I don't lose track
| of where I was.
|
| I understand not everybody has my same use case but for me it
| truly is a PITA.
|
| Of course, the alternative is to just click on "Install Later"
| every 8 hours for the rest of your life, and then the one time
| you miss that button for a few pixels and click on "Install
| Now" everything gets closed and obliterated in an instant. But
| yeah, at least now I have the latest version of Safari which I
| haven't used in 10 years.
| valine wrote:
| MacOS Monterey added an option to disable automatic updates.
| It's been the biggest annoyance for years, now it's just a
| checkbox in settings.
| moralestapia wrote:
| Thank you, I didn't know that. That's actually a big
| incentive for me to update.
| null_object wrote:
| > MacOS Monterey added an option to disable automatic
| updates. It's been the biggest annoyance for years, now
| it's just a checkbox in settings
|
| The ability to disable automatic updates goes back far more
| years than I can remember - possibly even a decade.
| valine wrote:
| You could disable the auto install, but not the nag.
| mnadkvlb wrote:
| Of course its better to have a system which will not install
| the updates automatically and will just be stuck at restart
| (windows 10 wink).
|
| If i disable apple updates on a macbook, it will show the
| notification but will never update without my permission,
| good luck doing that on windows.
| handrous wrote:
| > Yeah that sucks, but on OSX side I have to restart my
| computer every week or so because of forced updates.
|
| Huh? I think I restart my Mac for updates perhaps _quarterly_
| , and I can't recall it ever being forced.
| moralestapia wrote:
| Perhaps we live in different realities that happen to be
| connected through Hacker News.
|
| In my timeline, Apple users have to deal with this ->
| https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201222
| prewett wrote:
| But you don't _have_ to update. The consequence is that
| every day you have to choose "Ask me later" on the
| notification that pops up once a day, but that's a lot
| easier than restoring everything I have open. I only
| update when I have to reboot for some reason.
| moralestapia wrote:
| Sure, read the last paragraph of my original comment.
| ericd wrote:
| This nagging is currently my #1 reason for considering
| switching away from OS X.
| makecheck wrote:
| While this article focused primarily on things being left
| unmaintained, etc. there is also a huge problem with things being
| touched _for no reason_ and making them _worse_.
|
| When handed what must be a mountain of bugs and unfinished items,
| why the _hell_ did they prioritize things like breaking
| notifications and Safari tabs, for instance? They're in a
| position where engineering resources desperately need to be
| closing gaps, not creating huge new ones.
|
| There seems to be a prioritization problem at the very least.
| Which I get, on some level who wants to work on the broken
| things? But if they threw some money at this they could fix it.
| koyote wrote:
| > there is also a huge problem with things being touched for no
| reason and making them worse.
|
| I have never been a big fan of Apple's software, but I must say
| that this is not just an Apple problem, it's a software
| industry problem.
|
| The amount of software I use daily that has actually improved
| in the last 5 years as opposed to getting worse is getting
| frustratingly low as the years go on.
|
| I have just upgraded to the latest version of Android and
| pretty much every UX change is worse than what it used to be,
| and I've felt the same way since 3 or 4 versions ago. Same with
| Windows, Spotify, YouTube, FB, Twitter, even Google search has
| gone downhill (not being able to get to the source image from
| an image search; although apparently that was due to a legal
| compliance reason).
|
| We have come to a point where we have large companies employing
| thousands of people who need a purpose. Engineers re-writing
| the app in the most fashionable language/framework, designers
| deciding the UI isn't "fresh" anymore, PMs on a crusade to
| "simplify" the experience by removing features. These changes
| happen so frequently that the software barely has a chance to
| live up to its prior version before the next change happens.
| 2muchcoffeeman wrote:
| _We have come to a point where we have large companies
| employing thousands of people who need a purpose._
|
| Fix your bugs. There are plenty. It's not that they have no
| purpose. They want to add things to their resume so the next
| place will give them a pay bump or get that promotion.
|
| If your strategy was to hop around between jobs every 12+
| months or climb the ladder, would you bother making things
| better? You'll be gone soon and it will be the next persons
| problem.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I don't use my iphone for email because I get 200-300 emails
| per day, and there's no way to mass delete the inbox. I have to
| select-delete for every email.
| 1123581321 wrote:
| In the Mail app, tap Edit, then select the empty checkbox to
| the left of the top email, then drag from the second email
| down to the bottom of the view (it'll autoscroll.) Then you
| can move or trash the emails all at once.
| noneeeed wrote:
| The current UX of notifications is _terrible_. After months of
| using it I still don 't understand the mental model. A
| notification comes up, I hover and wait for the cross to appear
| and click it. But then some time later I unlock my machine or
| something happens and apparantly all my notifications are still
| there for some reason and I have to clear them again, only this
| time they are in groups and I have to clear multiple groups.
|
| Somehow Apple took a UX flow that was _fine_ and made something
| that regularly makes me feel stupid because I don 't understand
| what I'm supposed to do to make it behave in a way that makes
| sense.
|
| Notifications are such a simple thing, but they somehow made
| them complex.
| laurent92 wrote:
| The new generation (some young employees/interns) are awesome
| about notifications. I arrive on their screen and tell them
| they have a notification pending. And then they showed me:
|
| They ignore them. Red dot? Ignore. Blinking red dot jumping
| in the docker? They live with it. They say macOS is terrible
| because it has red dots, sometimes worse than Windows. One is
| colorblind which helps, but really, they got used to Windows
| nagging them, Youtube nagging them, websites where the cookie
| banner and the consent form. They try to deactivate as many
| notifications as they can, but they tend to avoid the cross
| itself, or they avoid clicking on the Slack icon to remove
| the dot. They just let it jump on the sidebar.
| cmckn wrote:
| The way macOS notifications hover in the corner...forever,
| until you address them is maddening. The way they obscure UI,
| and in Monterrey, all the actions are hidden behind hover
| states, so even something simple like accepting a Calendar
| invite is buried in a context menu, hidden behind a hover.
|
| Notification Center being all iOS-y is something no one asked
| for, and they took away the calculator for Christ's sake!
| That's the only thing I used NC for.
| philg_jr wrote:
| As a new iOS user, this is the #1 thing that makes me want to
| sell my 12 Mini and go back to vanilla Android. Notifications
| are a total mess in iOS.
| tomtheelder wrote:
| Unquestionably it's the biggest gap. Having also switched
| recently, notifications on iOS feel like stepping literally
| 10 years into the past.
| drewg123 wrote:
| I wish there was some way to look at the last N
| notifications, see what apps generated them, etc.
|
| My biggest pet peeve right now is that my iPhone bongs when
| charging. Not when the charger is plugged or unplugged (its a
| different sound). It seems to happen when the charge passes
| 20% and then again when it passes 80%. But there is never a
| notification on screen, just a sound. Googling for this is
| impossible, since you wind up with a million questions about
| the sound the phone makes when a charger is plugged in.
| laurent92 wrote:
| At 20% iOS deactivates the powersaving mode, I think.
|
| At 80% iOS notifies that it is charged enough, so you can
| unplug if you want to avoid supercharging it.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| I feel like users don't actually want notifications; they
| want Kafka with a nice UI.
|
| On the other hand, developers (and specifically, ones with
| engagement KPIs) want as disposable notifications as
| possible.
| bredren wrote:
| MacOS notifications is terrible. Whatever it was before was
| better. I'm inclined to turn it off completely and just take
| what I get on iOS.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Don't get me started on the new iOS podcast app. I used to
| know how to use it. Now I need to click five times at random
| to get anywhere, and still don't understand where I am. All
| the views look similar, but different. I just want to hear
| the oldest first and see if episodes are downloaded, that's
| it. Cue... "you had one job!"
|
| Yes, been about six months.
| cmckn wrote:
| The Apple Podcasts app is pretty awful -- check out
| Overcast[1]! It's always been a joy to use, and has unique
| features like "smart speed" that I can't live without these
| days.
|
| [1]: https://overcast.fm
| crooked-v wrote:
| Also, while this isn't so much a macOS as an iOS thing, there
| are a huge number of apps that take advantage of wanting
| functional notifications turned on ("your food has arrived")
| to constantly spam the user with marketing notifications
| ("sign up for FoodPass, 50% off!").
| cmckn wrote:
| Of course, this is against the rules of the App Store, but
| is rarely enforced (hell, Apple even does it with their own
| apps).
| gcanyon wrote:
| For me the issue is notifications that appear, then
| disappear, and I can't find them again, or what they refer
| to. If it's important enough to do a notification, it's
| important enough to keep in a notification log that I can go
| through chronologically, search, group, sort, etc. I will
| high five the person who tells me how that feature exists and
| I've just missed it.
| have_faith wrote:
| This happens to me a lot. Somehow I miss the initial
| notification but catch it as it animates away and I don't
| know how to find out what it was or what app caused it.
| jjice wrote:
| This is something so many big companies do, and I hate it.
| Every 6 months it seems Spotify has to change their UI and make
| it harder to find what I want. Just make a decent UI and stick
| to it. I don't understand why there are redesigns over and over
| and over. My assumption is that it keeps people employed, even
| if they aren't necessarily needed. It at least takes away from
| more important issues being taken care of.
| throaway46546 wrote:
| Maybe making it harder to find what you want makes you more
| likely to find what they want.
| Philadelphia wrote:
| Twitter has been so bad with this lately. It feels like the
| app is different in some irritating and pointless way every
| time I open it.
| jonplackett wrote:
| Yet every time the UI is still horrific. It's like they're
| trying the Edison way and trying to find the 99 ways not to
| do it.
| yosito wrote:
| > why there are redesigns over and over and over
|
| Because they aren't building UIs to be useful for pleasant
| for users anymore. Once these data-driven companies have
| enough users locked in, they begin optimizing the user
| interface to manipulate user behavior for profit. They shift
| from helping you do what you want to manipulating you into
| doing what they want you to do.
|
| It's actually gotten so bad that open source software with
| it's notoriously unpolished interfaces is actually starting
| to be the better, more useful and more aesthetic option,
| without having improved much at all.
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| Spotify is an ever-evolving trash fire. It's become very
| difficult or impossible to get it to display a list of
| albums created by a given artist, and then play album X.
| "Oh no" Spotify says. "I think what you really want to do
| is play <random popular song Y by that artist> and then a
| whole bunch of random songs by other artists you've never
| heard of, right? That's what I'm going to do for you."
|
| I realize it's still actually possible to get Spotify to do
| what I want, but that stuff is increasingly buried beneath
| dark patterns.
| nineplay wrote:
| > My assumption is that it keeps people employed, even if
| they aren't necessarily needed.
|
| I'd say more that they keep people relevant, particularly
| architects and CTOs. You can't go in front of the board and
| say "Everything is great and we're keeping it just the same!"
| You can't say that in front of the CEO, you can't say that in
| front of the investors. You have to keep selling the idea
| that Big Changes Are Coming and Our Userbase Will Increase.
|
| So you add bloat that nobody wanted and credit anything good
| that happens to it.
|
| I work for a company based in a foreign land and while there
| are downsides, one of my biggest reliefs was to find that
| there is very little interest in 'change for the sake of
| change'.
| moosedev wrote:
| > Just make a decent UI and stick to it. I don't understand
| why there are redesigns over and over and over.
|
| It gets people (in your example, designers, but the same
| organizational disease affects engineers and product managers
| too) promoted. Perhaps somebody got promoted this cycle for
| "making a decent UI", but you're not gonna get promoted next
| cycle for "sticking to it".
|
| And managers get promoted by "growing" teams to build stuff.
|
| When performance and promotion criteria incentivize "having
| impact", which is understood to mean "launching stuff", this
| is what results. It's a analog of "teaching to the test" [0],
| or a special case of "gaming the metrics" [1] or "you are
| what you measure" [2]. I don't know if there's a term for the
| general phenomenon.
|
| I agree it sucks, but while I'm invoking cliches, I should
| remind myself: don't hate the player(s), hate the game.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teaching_to_the_test
|
| [1] https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/gaming-metrics
|
| [2] https://hbr.org/2010/06/column-you-are-what-you-measure
| kemayo wrote:
| I can understand Safari tabs. I assume that it all came about
| because they decided to change the location bar on iOS Safari,
| moving it to the bottom of the screen.
|
| This is a _good_ change -- it makes Safari much easier to use
| on iPhones with current screen sizes. But then they said
| "okay, we're making one big change to Safari... let's see if
| there's any other changes we can roll in, since we're making
| people learn new UI anyway". So they made all those other
| changes to how tabs behave in iOS Safari. And then kept on
| going and updated iPadOS Safari and MacOS Safari -- gets them a
| whole "we're improving Safari this year" slide in the keynote,
| etc etc etc.
|
| ...and then, to their credit, they listened to beta feedback
| and rolled back most of the poorly considered UI changes.
| nikanj wrote:
| Because someone needs to able to point at Thing and say they
| took iniative in implementing it, for career reasons
| notpachet wrote:
| I worked with a developer at <household ecommerce company>
| whose main claim to fame was that she'd deleted more features
| than she'd added. We need more people like her.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| What? No. Not if people used those features and found them
| valuable.
| notpachet wrote:
| You're right. Dead or dying features that were bloating
| up the rest of the codebase, I should say.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| eBay has deleted a lot of features that made my life
| better. There was no replacement -- things just suck more,
| now.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Delete code yes, features only if obnoxious.
| tomc1985 wrote:
| > who wants to work on the broken things?
|
| So much of whats wrong with modern SWE right here in this
| sentence
| hintymad wrote:
| This seems the problem of every big company. Eventually they
| become slow and their priority becomes puzzling to people
| outside of the companies. Complexity aside, my theory is that
| as a company grows, the headcount always grows faster than the
| quantity of work, and more people become obsessed with
| visibility and promotion, which leads to promotion-oriented and
| visibility-oriented project planning. Consequently, product
| quality deteriorates over time, first slowly and then suddenly.
| taylodl wrote:
| Look at the mess that is Apple Home. They added it because Google
| and Amazon were doing it - and, that's about it. Hey, I can add
| some lights that I can change color to any color I want! Too bad
| if I want a thermostat, a doorbell, or...
|
| Okay, what about Apple Wallet? It'd be really nice to add my
| digital driver's license, health insurance cards, auto insurance
| card, frequent shopping cards - basically make it so I don't have
| to carry my phone and wallet. Can I do that? Not really.
|
| Alright, so what about their iWork suite? On second thought,
| forget about it. People are using Google Docs or Office 365.
| Next...
|
| That's the problem with Apple software. It all feels kind of half
| baked and neglected. Apple built their reputation on _It Just
| Works_ and now it feels like it sorta kinda works, I guess.
|
| If Apple's software were a tenth as dazzling as their new
| hardware then it would be awesome. It's not even close. Their
| software division needs help.
| applgo443 wrote:
| > Okay, what about Apple Wallet? It'd be really nice to add my
| digital driver's license, health insurance cards, auto
| insurance card, frequent shopping cards - basically make it so
| I don't have to carry my phone and wallet. Can I do that? Not
| really.
|
| As far as I know, things like driving license need user
| adoption. It's getting there -
| https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2021/09/apple-announces-first...
| fellellor wrote:
| I thought the software division had help. In the form of many
| many developers making apps for the platform. What happened to
| them?
| AMD_DRIVERS wrote:
| Your comments on Apple Home are factually incorrect. I have
| lights, cameras, smart blinds, thermostats,
| temperature/humidity/air quality sensors, my eero6 router and
| even my Roku added into Home.
|
| Apple Wallet also supports some forms of ID, transit cards and
| even vaccine certificates.
| fossuser wrote:
| I use Apple home and want to like it, but it mostly sucks.
|
| I think the main cause of this isn't so much Home, but the
| available third party hardware. I wish Apple would make a
| smart switch (I know that's fairly out of scope for them),
| but one high quality smart switch that actually worked
| reliably would resolve 90% of home tech issues.
|
| Homepods are similarly bad with basic actions. I have five of
| them in multiple rooms. If you want to adjust the volume on
| all of them and say "make volume 50% everywhere" it fails. I
| have to whisper the command to my phone so the homepods don't
| hear me and then it can adjust volume on all of them.
|
| Volume and playing on homepods generally from the phone is a
| shitty experience. Often the homepods lose the phone
| connection and then I can no longer control them from the
| device. Really it feels like nobody at Apple actually uses
| these things in their personal life.
|
| I also have a gigabit network connection with a stupidly fast
| access point in a two bedroom apartment so it's not an issue
| of network speeds or signal.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| I was really excited for a stereo pair of homepods but have
| similar issues and worse - even tho they still appear as
| grouped, music will often only happen on one or the other.
| If I was playing music from the phone, and then later ask
| siri to play something, it will play different music on
| each speaker - in a stereo pair! plus I have to shout for
| them to hear my command over the music, very bad
| experience, back to ebay they go...
| fossuser wrote:
| Another annoying issue is with timers.
|
| When cooking we'll tell the one in the kitchen to set a
| timer. Then we'll ask what time is left. If another one
| hears the question it yells "there are no timers set" so
| we have to whisper to the closer one.
|
| Another thing that to me suggests nobody at Apple is
| really using these things.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| what was simultaneously aggravating and hilarious was
| when trying to set up a stereo pair of Alexas, trying to
| whisper to one, and Alexa whispered right back!
| fossuser wrote:
| I remember a funny story of a dad putting his very young
| kid to bed and whispering "play classical music" in order
| to use that feature and the Alexa screamed back at full
| volume "ALEXA IS HAVING TROUBLE CONNECTING TO THE
| INTERNET RIGHT NOW".
| AMD_DRIVERS wrote:
| In my experience, it's been pretty okay. Not amazing, but I
| can't really complain.
|
| I've got 2 HomePods in a small apartment, and they
| typically work okay in what I need them to do, and
| automatons always work.
|
| I sometimes have to close the app and open it again to get
| devices to respond IF I'm in not on my home network. Kind
| of annoying.
|
| What's funny is that I've noticed that it's been better
| since I bought an eero 6 and added into into Home.
|
| Most importantly, it works for my girlfriend who isn't the
| most keen on new technology. That's the most important part
| for me, rather than what I want.
| fossuser wrote:
| I have two smart switches attached to lights (since our
| apartment has no overhead lighting) and after a nightmare
| of setting them up (probably the hardware's fault, but
| homekit couldn't recognize them via normal pairing
| method) they worked for a few months.
|
| Randomly though they fail to work in Home and I have to
| manually reset them by holding in the button on the
| device and redo the entire process. This isn't workable
| at any scale (it's even annoying with just the two that I
| have).
| taylodl wrote:
| It's the dearth of 3rd party hardware that I find
| frustrating. It's not apparent that Apple has done much to
| flesh out that ecosystem.
| greedo wrote:
| Is it Apple's job to flesh it out, or is it better if
| they come up with a spec for HomeKit and have third
| parties create devices?
| fossuser wrote:
| It's not their job, but third parties have failed.
|
| It'd be nice for them to make one base level device (like
| a smart switch) which supports most of the use cases.
| gommm wrote:
| And the worst part is that their software division used to be
| great. Aperture was really good when it came out, Final Cut
| Pro, Logic Pro were great. Eveh talking about iwork suite,
| numbers and page used to be better than they are now. Even
| Quicktime regressed.
|
| It's frankly both puzzling and saddening how much Apple has
| lost in term of QA, user interface and vision in the last 10
| years. I always feel that Tim Cook doesn't have a clue about
| what made Apple special and is slowly destroying it by not
| making sure to keep those qualities
|
| EDIT: I do recognize Tim Cook's qualities, he is amazing at
| managing supply chain and apple does this better than anybody
| with very little impact in terms of chip shortage. He's
| original decision to target privacy as a marketing argument was
| on point (unfortunately the csam controversy kind of destroyed
| this) and under his tenure Apple has done tremendously well
| financially.
|
| But the issue, is that Apple also benefits from its reputation
| and in the last few years, they've destroyed it by producing
| shoddy software, by having major hardware issues over multiple
| revisions (keyboards, staining screens)...
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| _> Tim Cook doesn't have a clue about what made Apple special
| and is slowly destroying it by not making sure to keep those
| qualities_
|
| Well their shares have never been higher so as long as that's
| the metric by which a CEO's performance is judged then you
| can forget about Apple caring about SW QA and other such
| "nonsense".
|
| Also, before Jobs passed away, Cook was Apple's supply chain
| mastermind so it makes sense his strengths are with the HW
| side of things, which, during the current silicon shortage,
| is an absolutely killer skillset to have, as proven by how
| little Apple was affected by it in comparison to other
| companies.
|
| When it comes to quality SW, Cook might not be the ideal CEO
| for the job (like notifications on the new MBP can get hidden
| behind the notch; WTF, how did this pass QA?! Pretty sure
| Jobs would have sent them back to the drawing board) but
| Apple can always rely on the faithful developer base building
| great quality SW instead of them and then taking a 30% cut on
| their sales on the Apple store. Basically another win for
| Apple.
| doubled112 wrote:
| > notifications on the new MBP can get hidden behind the
| notch; WTF, how did this pass QA?!
|
| Developer and QA team tester were using older MBPs? So it
| worked on their machines?
|
| Rendered fine in the automated test?
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| Those all sound like terrible mistakes for a 2 trillion
| dollar company.
| gommm wrote:
| Oh I don't disagree with you that he is great at managing
| the supply chain. World class even.
|
| The thing is, there's inertia, Apple made great products
| and still have a great reputation, Amazon was a great place
| to buy online and while it has a counterfeit problem, it's
| still doing great, I'm sure it's possible to find a few
| examples of companies that have been doing great stock wise
| but that are slowly eroding their reputation. It doesn't
| show yet in the sales, but the narrative has changed.
|
| The thing is, look at the threads in HN, they used to be
| very very positive of apple and now they're much more
| critical. Things no longer just work. People complaining
| about stability issues on a mac are common. Macworld which
| has always tended to be extremely positive about Apple
| complains, Ars Tecnica too, even Daring Fireball is less
| overwhelmingly positive than it used to be.
|
| Apple relies on those power users to recommend their
| friends to buy their stuff and I no longer recommend buying
| an iphone to my friends and I know I'm not the only one.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| _> look at the threads in HN, they used to be very very
| positive of apple and now they 're much more critical. _
|
| Agree, but the thing is, the HN userbase is only a tiny
| fraction, and not representative of the entire more
| lucrative consumer base that Apple is targeting. I think
| Apple will be fine, even if it looses the super picky
| stickler developer HN userbase that is proficient in
| linux anyway.
|
| Apple kinda stopped caring about the Mac SW quality as
| that's not its main cashcow anymore for a long time. iOS
| and app store subscriptions and fees are where the real
| money's at.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| the things you complain about, in your comment, work here fine.
| pertymcpert wrote:
| Are you posting from 2014 or something?
| handrous wrote:
| > Alright, so what about their iWork suite? On second thought,
| forget about it. People are using Google Docs or Office 365.
| Next...
|
| I'm only able to get away with it because I don't have to send
| anything other than PDFs to other people very often, but
| Apple's office-type apps are the only ones of their sort that I
| don't _hate_ , aside from a few less-integrated and less-stable
| open source alternatives (Abiword, Gnumeric, that kind of thing
| --and I'm not even 100% sure those are still around). Google
| docs and Office 365 are terrible and I pity people who _have_
| to use them.
| marcellus23 wrote:
| You're wrong. You can definitely add thermostats, doorbells,
| cameras etc. to Home (I've done it). And you can definitely add
| health insurance cards, frequent shopping cards, etc. to Wallet
| (I've done that too). Please don't state things that are just
| factually incorrect.
|
| > Alright, so what about their iWork suite? On second thought,
| forget about it. People are using Google Docs or Office 365.
| Next...
|
| For collaboration, yeah, you're stuck with what everyone uses.
| But considering the actual software itself, iWork is very nice
| in my experience. Fast, reliable, and the interface isn't a
| total shitshow like every other office app out there.
| spiderice wrote:
| > I've done it
|
| Same. I currently have a HomeKit thermostat, doorbell, and
| cameras in my house. Not really sure where GP is getting his
| info. They all work really well.
| buitreVirtual wrote:
| This kind of problem will continue to happen as long as corporate
| incentives continue to reward new features more than solidifying
| existing fetures. It's easier to get promoted for doing "new"
| stuff.
| nixpulvis wrote:
| My favorite example of this was how, just after quitting my job
| on the iPhone hardware team, I needed to buy a new phone. So I
| went to the local Apple store back home in Colorado and got
| myself a shiny new iPhone X. It didn't take long for the winter
| to start rolling in and the outside temperature to start to drop.
| I suddenly began to notice that my fingers weren't registering on
| the touchscreen anymore, even with warm hands.
|
| A few days went by and more and more people were reporting the
| same issue. It took a quick update to fix, but I still find it
| hilarious to think about all my ex-colleagues walking around in
| 65 degree weather all the time, never even thinking about this
| issue.
| ogjunkyard wrote:
| While I will agree that it takes a long time to reach everywhere
| with new features in Maps, I'd say the recent macOS Monterey
| update was a major improvement in performance/reliability, so the
| article doesn't really resonate for me.
|
| I IMMEDIATELY noticed the improvement in application startup
| times after upgrading and have seen a big difference between my
| work laptop (macOS Catalina) and my personal laptop (macOS
| Monterey). Everything has been more stable in Monterey for me
| personally. I've noticed that the weird occasionally-crash-my-
| laptop-when-using-a-dock bug has been resolved. Connecting my
| AirPods has become more reliable and the connection doesn't flake
| out anymore.
| [deleted]
| amelius wrote:
| > the next big thing won't matter
|
| What next big thing? The only thing I've seen so far is
| evolutionary updates, where the evolution goes really as slow as
| it sounds.
| oogabooga13 wrote:
| I think about the Apple Watch (Series 3) and software and am
| pretty impressed. It's one of the few "heavy use" devices that I
| only restart between updates all these years. I'm looking for
| that kind of stability elsewhere...
| alphaomegacode wrote:
| As an anecdotal example that may be relevant, I wanted to upgrade
| to Monterey and my Mac Mini said there wasn't enough room.
|
| Hooked up a Western Digital external drive that I had used on
| previous Macs and launched Time Machine. And that's when it
| started. Time Machine presented what seemed like a stack of
| Finder windows in the middle, a timeline with hash marks on the
| right-side and the only button highlighted was the "Cancel".
|
| No menu, no other actionable buttons, no right-click menu.
| Nothing. So after hitting various key combos and mouse buttons, I
| decided that my 30+ minutes trying to use Apple's built-in backup
| software to backup a few folders was better spent finding 3rd
| party software.
|
| And that was another user experience fail in my opinion for Apple
| and any "total quality" experience.
|
| And that's not even talking about Safari or XCode or Pages or
| Numbers or iBooks not syncing and so many others.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| Time Machine has been neglected for _so long_. The UI was never
| great for power users, but at least it worked. For a novice
| computer user it was a pretty good "set it and forget it"
| experience. In the last 3 years it has become so unreliable
| (every time it tries to backup it claims the backup is
| corrupted and needs to be re-created) that I've given up and
| switched to Carbon Copy Cloner.
| vanilla_nut wrote:
| Ever since they stopped building wireless routers, Apple has
| forgotten Time Machine in favor of pushing iCloud backups for
| separate services.
|
| But there's still no good alternative to Apple's old routers.
| I tried to buy a new router for gigabit internet last year,
| and the interfaces are so piss-poor and the performance so
| pathetic across the board that I ended up getting the last
| generation of Airport Extreme instead. I get 800ish down,
| 500ish up on wifi, so as far as I can tell I'm not missing
| out on anything aside from 6E, which my devices don't support
| anyway.
|
| I really hope Apple starts making routers with Apple Silicon
| soon. With incorporated Time Capsule backups, too. That's the
| only way that they'll stop neglecting the software.
| gabea wrote:
| Keyword here: Neglected.
|
| At this point, my decision to use a particular piece of
| software or a specific feature within an OS/App/Website/etc
| based on perceived risk of that software being neglected.
|
| Usually you can make this call based on features being added,
| but most of the time it's a gamble.
| noneeeed wrote:
| Many years ago I worked at a place where we all had external
| drives plugged into cinema displays that acted as Time
| Machine drives for our laptops. The backups regularly failed,
| OSX would suddenly decide it didn't like it and you'd have to
| clear it and start again. I don't believe Time Machine could
| reliably cope with drives that were periodically disconnected
| perhaps. I had the same problem with a NAS device and my
| personal mac, it would periodically just decide the backups
| were screwed.
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| Same here. CCC is several orders of magnitude faster than
| Time Machine and it just works.
|
| I stopped using Time Machine years ago when they started
| using hidden permissions on Time Machine backups that made it
| impossible to "garden" my family's backups on the network
| backup drive. Even as root, you couldn't delete old backups
| -- you had to log in to the particular user's computer to
| delete old backups.
|
| And then they came out with APFS which didn't support the
| directory hardlinks which Apple invented and Time Machine
| depended on. WTF Apple?
| joconde wrote:
| It's too bad, because it could be a set-it-and-forget-it
| solution if it were more reliable.
|
| I gave up and wrote a Python script that calls Borg Backup.
| At least it's more customisable.
| memco wrote:
| > In the last 3 years it has become so unreliable (every time
| it tries to backup it claims the backup is corrupted and
| needs to be re-created)
|
| This bit me and I've not fully recovered yet. I had some
| stuff backed up manually, but some stuff I just trusted to
| the time machine backups. Now that some of the backups are
| unrecoverable I only have easy access to the stuff I backed
| up manually. I'm interested in trying CCC, but part of the
| reason things went south for me was apparently due to closing
| my laptop mid backup to a network TM volume and I'm curious
| if CCC can handle that any better. Do you use CCC for network
| backups and have you ever had issues with it?
| plorkyeran wrote:
| Time Machine's insane UI isn't an example of Apple's software
| quality slipping; it's basically unchanged since it first
| shipped 14 years ago. It's more of just an example of how
| Apple's software never was as good as some people would like to
| pretend.
| mattnewton wrote:
| When I was at apple, we did this thing people called
| "keybote-driven development" where everything was made to
| look great in and keynote presentation to an exec. If it
| looked great you got the go ahead to finish it and ship it,
| and if not it got skipped. There are a lot of things to like
| about this approach. However, Time machine's UI to me feels
| like a quintessential blind spot of this incentive structure,
| where it looks visually striking and cool but actually using
| it for real use cases it often falls flat quickly. To update
| it you would need to fit the motivation and payoff in a
| keynote presentation and it's hard to do so.
| loudthing wrote:
| Big yikes.
| rchaud wrote:
| Remember that the 2007 iPhone demo had showed AT&T
| reception at full strength? That was hardcoded for the
| purpose of the Keynote. I recall iPhones having iffy
| phone reception for at least the first couple of years.
| jaywalk wrote:
| Not AT&T, but Cingular. Although I believe that Cingular
| was gone by the time the iPhone actually launched.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Although I believe that Cingular was gone by the time
| the iPhone actually launched.
|
| It was "gone" in the sense that it was renamed "AT&T
| Mobility". (Cingular Wireless bought AT&T Wireless before
| the iPhone deal, but its parent company [SBC] later
| bought AT&T, adopted the AT&T name, and rebranded
| Cingular as AT&T Mobility.)
| CharlesW wrote:
| > _Remember that the 2007 iPhone demo had showed AT &T
| reception at full strength?_
|
| With the help of therapy and psilocybin I got over that
| in 2016.
| throwvirtever wrote:
| > When I was at apple, we did this thing people called
| "key[n]ote-driven development"...
|
| > Big yikes.
|
| If Apple's products are essentially sold via a "keynote",
| it makes sense to have a keynote presentation as the
| internal hurdle as well. If it can't be presented in way
| that looks like something people want to buy, there's no
| point in moving forward with the project.
| skrtskrt wrote:
| Yeah but this is the classic type of bureaucratic effort-
| justification hurdle that leads to tech debt or just
| general crappiness never getting improved.
| SavantIdiot wrote:
| What do you hate about Time Machine?
|
| I've used it since 2013. Every time I've bought a new MBP, I
| simply use time machine to restore and my new one looks
| exactly like my old one. Never had an issue.
|
| I find it far easier to use than Duplicity, Iron Mountain
| ConnectedBackup, or Carbonite, all of which I've used at
| other jobs. (All of those require fine-grained backup
| tweaking that requires a lot of diligence to check boxes and
| set policies, and then fuss with awkward dialogs when trying
| to recover... duplicity is so effing weird... Time Machine
| just works and the time scroll seems very clever compared to
| the other three.)
|
| I'd be interested to hear your problem(s) with it?
| chipotle_coyote wrote:
| The specific complaint was "the insane UI," if I read the
| comment correctly. Time Machine's UI is possibly the last
| holdover from Apple's peak sizzle-and-flash design days,
| the era of brushed metal and skeuomorph-all-the-things even
| when there isn't exactly a real-world analogue to emulate.
|
| To be fair, it's less insane in Monterey than it used to
| be. No wooshy space background, faster to launch, easier to
| scroll. But do we really _need_ the "stacked window" view,
| for instance? Was that chosen originally because it's
| clearer than choosing a backup date from a dropdown menu,
| or was it chosen originally because _we wanna look like we
| 're using a sci-fi machine to GO BACK IN TIME woooo_? I
| mean, we know the answer here, right?
| SavantIdiot wrote:
| Ah that's fair. The "Space Rolodex" theme is a bit
| motion-sickness inducing.
|
| I find that useful because I can navigate to a folder
| where it used to live, and then flip back until the file
| I was looking for appears.
|
| Compared to the alternatives: Connected Backup and
| Carbonite require me to manually enter dates until I find
| the file, and for a while Carbonite would keep closing
| the folder tree requiring me to re-expand every branch
| each time the date changed. However, duplicity requires
| me to dump the entire log and grep, which is a power user
| solution one could argue.
|
| I think duplicity wins here because I can grep for the
| filename. But barfing Mac Rolodex can be helpful if I
| don't know the filename.
| naravara wrote:
| If you rotate your wallpaper every week or so it actually
| ends up being a pretty cool visual indicator that's
| probably more memorable for some people than a drop-down
| menu would be.
|
| Ideally we'd have both obviously. The big issue with it
| for me is that it has a timeline on the right with each
| backup by date so you don't have to do the stacked
| windows, but there's no labels to indicate the span of
| dates. It only has a label on dates when you had backups
| but there are no labels to orient yourself in time when
| you start rolling back.
| wtallis wrote:
| I think your difficulties may stem from thinking of Time
| Machine as a backup application, when the UI is designed around
| treating it as a core system component. The configuration is
| all handled through System Preferences, and the UI you entered
| was solely for viewing and restoring files from your backup
| archive. You probably also missed a prompt to use the drive for
| Time Machine backups when you first plugged it in.
|
| Also, Time Machine is intended for full system backups, and
| using it for just a handful of folders not as easy as using it
| for everything.
| whartung wrote:
| Yea, the mistake encountered by the OP is that they were
| approaching the Time Machine UI with the intent of "I want to
| back up some folders".
|
| The TM UI is solely about recovery. It backs up "everything"
| not on the "skip list". And out of the box it defaults to
| just the system drive (vs the system and external drives).
|
| And that's an interesting facet here. This is a case of going
| in to a bookstore and scanning up and down the shelves and
| not finding what you want, and being frustrated, because you
| don't realize that you're simply in the wrong section. The TM
| UI in this case was frustrating because it had no options to
| do what the person wanted to do. And by design, it would not
| do what they wanted to do.
|
| It's not a UI fault of TM per se, specifically this aspect of
| the TM experience. TM excels at full drive recovery, and
| recovering "a few, select" files. In the middle, it's not so
| good.
|
| It's worked great for me. I've recovered from it several
| times, both entire systems and a few files. I use it solely
| on my main drive, and I use BackBlaze for the entirety of it
| all as a hat tip to offsite DR.
|
| Over the years, I've lost a couple of TM volumes to strange
| corruption. Not that much of a crisis, I just reset it and
| start over.
| egypturnash wrote:
| I recently moved from Mojave to Big Sur and I sure am feeling
| this. My Wacom tablet keeps on not being recognized when I wake
| from sleep. Safari's constantly using a huge chunk of my CPU and
| typing stuff into a text box in it is often painfully slow.
| There's a bunch of little constant aggravations and really
| nothing that's improved my life beyond "the latest version of
| Illustrator wouldn't work on Mojave". Which I haven't even
| upgraded to because I'm waiting for the .1 release of that.
|
| Apple keeps on moving shit around on OSX for no good reason and
| it's just annoying.
| handrous wrote:
| The latest Safari is by far the buggiest thing I've seen out of
| Apple in some time. It fucking _crashed_ on me the other day!
| That in addition to multiple bad behaviors and glitches.
|
| But then, I don't do betas and _usually_ wait until the first
| big patch to update the OS.
| brodo wrote:
| Today Apple Mail crashed on me while sending ab E-Mail. And
| I'm still on Big Sur.
| egypturnash wrote:
| I dug around and found a fix for the "constantly eats all my
| CPU" issue: Turn on "compact" tab layout.
|
| Which then creates the problem that now I'm using the "compact"
| tab layout that everyone in the betas screamed bloody murder
| about until they added that switch, god this layout is really
| annoying if you have any extensions up in the toolbar and/or
| more than about four tabs. But at least I don't have to deal
| with using fucking Chrome or losing all my text expansion
| shortcuts because Firefox refuses to support those.
|
| My inner paranoid wonders if this is a deliberate tactic to
| boost the numbers of people using the "compact" layout by
| someone whose next performance review is riding on that layout:
| "see, boss, look at what the telemetry says - everyone's
| switching to Compact! We should just drop the old look and give
| me a major bonus!".
| the_other wrote:
| The new Safari design looks 100x worse than the fake leather
| ever did. The UI team should be ashamed of themselves.
|
| It wouldn't have happened under Joni.
| nodejs_rulez_1 wrote:
| I recently tried to block YouTube ads on an iPad and failed.
| Equally surprised to see OS updates bring new feature changes
| that simply cannot be disabled (tab/app groupings). I mean there
| aren't that many Safari/iOS config options to choose from to
| begin with! What an insanity.
|
| Samsung still makes cheap tablets that are awesome in terms of
| hardware, right?
| SavantIdiot wrote:
| Today on HN:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29227450
|
| TL;DR: Certain Accessibility features relating to the pointer can
| cause your Mac to run out of memory on certain apps.
|
| I bring this up because something as simple as the MOUSE POINTER
| can bring the system to its knees if not implemented correctly,
| and they expect all this heavily integrated functionality (AR,
| Siri, iCloud scanning) to work flawlessly? I fear even if Apple
| stopped adding new features entirely, they'd have a decade of
| corner cases to clean up.
|
| I work on Mac, Win and Ubuntu all day. Mac & Win are neck-and-
| neck for crazy weird bugs I encounter as an every day, non-super
| user that are un-googlable (or return SEO garbage).
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