> It's free, what is there to buy?!

Yes, that was my point. The idea was to poke fun at your expressed disappointment at this free update. However, I forgot that to attempt sarcasm on the internet is never a good idea. And that also my comment was poor contribution either way. Sorry.

As a fellow Apple power user, I share your sentiment regarding the sarcasm. It seems like a change happened in the past few years that to love something, means to love it unconditionally, to the point that you must be blind to it's weaknesses and flaws. Blind to the point that to acknowledge them or, gasp, speak of them, is sacrilege. That's a movement I simply can't buy into. How can anything improve if it can't even acknowledge and be honest with itself about what it's weaknesses and failings are?

Introspection isn't always pleasant, but it's quite often the path toward becoming something better.

The irony is that if Apple had simply said "there will be no update this year", people would probably say "fine, the current OS is good enough for now". But when they do make an fairly small update, it is "disappointing" because it didn't add much. It's neophilia - always wanting "new stuff" for its own sake, even though what we have is pretty good.

A useful criticism would point out exactly what desired additions or changes were missing from the update. However, I'm mainly seeing a lot of general disappointment vaguely around "lack of newness".

No, I wouldn't say it's fine and haven't been - my HN comment history will attest to that. OSX is showing it's age more and more every year. Yosemite. El Capitan. Sierra. You may as well have labeled them iOS integration package 1.0, 1.1, and 1.2.

I have to install at minimum 10+ 3rd-party apps on a clean OSX install just to reach baseline feature parity with other modern operating systems these days.

I install Chrome, Keepingyouawake, spectacle, f/Lux, littlesnitch, MSOffice, atom, iterm2, Xcode and a few others. Many are either done via homebrew or the App Store. Be cool to have a new thread for people's "must have" apps.

Sure, here's the entire list from my last clean install:

http://pastebin.com/raw/hrYYMJPi

Curious as to what other operating systems come with that bevy of tools, since you said "I have to install at minimum 10+ 3rd-party apps on a clean OSX install just to reach baseline feature parity with other modern operating systems these days."

Oh, no, definitely not. You're right, that would be absolutely ridiculous. The base 10+ apps or so I mentioned earlier are listed a bit further down in this thread here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12555847

That said, Linux is looking more and more appealing every OSX release and with how much I use it already via docker containers, virtual machines and the like, that will probably be my next move if Apple continues removing power user features from OSX while letting software release quality continue it's decline. There are some amazing open source alternatives available for the vast majority of apps on that list that I've been testing for months now as I honestly don't believe Apple really wants to change to meet the needs of yesterdays power users anymore.

And thank goodness for that. Who says I want those 10 things handled the same way you do?

Which 10 apps would that be, if I may ask??

This is the entire list from my last install: http://pastebin.com/raw/hrYYMJPi

The base apps I almost always start with are:

- Moom (advanced window management)

- Hyperdock (window previews when hovering over dock apps)

- Amphetamine (stop mac from sleeping)

- Alfred (app launcher on steroids)

- FormatMatch (fast toggle copy/paste behavior to include or not text formatting)

- TotalTerminal (drop-down terminal like Quake's console)

- TotalFinder (dual-pane functionality in Finder)

- Radio Silence (simple outgoing app firewall, less annoying than Little Snitch)

- 1Password (everything OSX's keychain should be)

- Parallels (virtualization, it's still a Windows world)

If Apple hadn't released an upgrade, we wouldn't all have to go through the time of upgrading, fixing apps that are broken (or finding new versions, etc). There is a cost to all of Apple's users from OS upgrades, and we can be annoyed that we are spending that time / energy and getting nothing of value back.

I started the upgrade this morning, took a shower and when I came back it was done. Logged in and clicked a couple of buttons (activate Siri etc) and everything was just like I left it when I started the upgrade. I could jump right back in. Perfect.

Fair point that.

> It's free, what is there to buy?

A new Mac for those on an unsupported one.