10.7 is where they removed Expose (replaced it with Mission Control) and it frustrated me to no end not being able to have rows of workspaces. It go so bad that was around the time I started doing everything in a Linux VM in Parallels. Lion was the last version I used, and at other places I worked, I just heard endless frustration about permissions, root access restrictions and other issues that are pretty specific to developers.
> In my experience in most definitely not "just work"
A lot of stuff doesn't when you need commercial integration, sure. Evolution-ews does mostly just work with Exchange though. You can connect to Docker containers without needing a VPN. Package management in most Linux distros is more straight forward and can update almost everything. You can add 3rd party repos and not be tied to an "App Store."
Linux does require some more work sometime, but I know how to fix things on it. I'm not digging through some Mac or Windows weird subsystem bullshit, trying to figure out why I'm getting permissions errors all over the place.
I agree neglect is probably not the right word. I like the term Marco Arment uses on his ATP podcast: drive-by updates.
> They have been adding several huge components/APIs/tools that they have working for macOS (Metal, APFS, Swift, CoreML, etc),
These all seem to have been developed for iOS first and macOS second.
> they have tons of under the hood improvements (e.g. memory compression), and so on.
Personally I experienced rage-inducing multi-second freezes after updating to Sierra, disabling memory compression solved the problem.
> What exactly did you expect to see, or was seeing before "Snow Leopard"?
Stability, usability, and polish.
I don't think it's controversial to say that all of these have taken a precipitous fall since Snow Leopard.
There are probably many reasons for this. It seems to me the biggest culprit is the yearly release schedule.
They've shown themselves utterly incapable of releasing a quality update each year. The question is, why are they keeping it up? To sync up with iOS releases roughly maybe?
iOS and macOS is basically the same OS.
iOS uses the same kernel and main userland, and was developed just as a spin-off of OS X with more lockdown enabled, some inapplicable services removed, and a profile that fits smaller devices. Otherwise the kernel, fs, userland, etc is 90% the same, minus different APIs (mostly UI) on top (which they also try to unify for several releases now).
macOS+iOS should be seen as the same thing as far as system-level development (kernel, fs, etc) are concerned.
Of course features still need integration to the respective form factors and UI paradigms (e.g. APFS required userland and Disk Utility changes, for one), and Apple has done that for both platforms.
>Stability, usability, and polish
And yet, Snow Leopard was created exactly because people complained Leopard and earlier were not stable enough. It was the release to focus on stability and polish over new features (and they even admitted this was alluded in the name change, "Leopard" -> "Snow Leopard" as opposed to a whole new version-animal).
And if we go back then, we can find tons of complains about instability, lack of polish, the world ending, etc.
>They've shown themselves utterly incapable of releasing a quality update each year.
Given that they ship 100 million or so updates, they have almost immediate adoption (far quicker than new Windows version), and the complains always subdue after 1 point release or so, I don't think so.
Not to mention most complains now are about them deprecating stuff (32 bits for one) -- as opposed to breaking stuff.
Heck, they pushed a whole new FS to hundreds of millions of users (5x+ that with iOS in), and there hardly any issues to write home about -- and that in record time (FS experts said it normally takes 10 years to mature a new FS to do such a conversion and warned of apocalypse which didn't happen).
Sure, but when people talk about "macOS being neglected", they're referring to a neglect of work put into the things that are uniquely macOS: multi-user support (better Fast-User Switching; better Screen Sharing; OpenDirectory et al; AFS back when that was considered a good idea; Server.app features); workstation productivity (evolution of the windowing paradigm seems to have stopped after Mission Control was introduced); fault-tolerance features like Time Machine; treating non-sandboxed (incl. POSIX CLI) apps as first-class citizens; and, well, any updates at all to the natively-desktop apps like Finder and XCode.
When was the last time you saw Apple announce a new feature of an app that exists only on macOS? Or announce a new OS feature that only makes sense, design-wise, on a desktop? They used to do both of these pretty frequently. The only things I can name from the last two releases are tabs (Finder) and dark mode (macOS generally.) Those are pretty small beans.
Oh, and there was also the whole NeXT-y paradigm of document bundles, Spotlight discovering app bundles and registering their file-type handlers and provided components, etc. That seems to have been lost in the shuffle—maybe the people responsible for it have all left. Remember QuickLook plugins? Remember when Preview worked on basically every file-format that you would run into on the internet, rather than not even knowing how to display a WebP?
I'm aware of that. But they are not exactly the same, are they?
> Of course features still need integration to the respective form factors and UI paradigms.
Isn't that what usability and polish are all about?
> And yet, Snow Leopard was created exactly because people complained Leopard and earlier were not stable enough. It was the release to focus on stability and polish over new features (and they even admitted this was alluded in the name change, "Leopard" -> "Snow Leopard" as opposed to a whole new version-animal).
I know, and that's why we all love Snow Leopard. Why the regression since then?
> >They've shown themselves utterly incapable of releasing a quality update each year.
> Given that they ship 100 million or so updates, they have almost immediate adoption (far quicker than new Windows version), and the complains always subdue after 1 point release or so, I don't think so.
They release updates alright, but what about the quality? The fact is overall, macOS has gotten slower, buggier, and uglier with every release.
Yes, in minor ways I already mentioned.
>Isn't that what usability and polish are all about?
Yes, and as I already wrote: "Apple has done that for both platforms.". You don't get a lesser Metal or a lesser APFS on macOS vs iOS, or less UI integration.
>I know, and that's why we all love Snow Leopard. Why the regression since then?
I'm not particularly fond of Snow Leopard over other releases, nor I see much "regression since then". There are several legendary Siracusa reviews until Yosemite (after which he passed the torch) here: https://arstechnica.com/author/john-siracusa/
Here's e.g. Mavericks:
Over the past three years, each successive release of OS X has found its way onto all of my Macs in less time than its predecessor. This year, I may have already gone Mavericks-only across my whole household by the time you read this. Barring any unforeseen bugs or compatibility issues, Mavericks seems like a no-brainer upgrade to me.
And here's Yosemite:
Viewed in isolation, Yosemite provides a graphical refresh accompanied by a few interesting features and several new technologies whose benefits are mostly speculative, depending heavily on how eagerly they’re adopted by third-party developers. But Apple no longer views the Mac in isolation, and neither should you. OS X is finally a full-fledged peer to iOS; all aspects of sibling rivalry have been banished.
Do you see much talk about regression there? There are also post-Siracusa reviews on Ars for each macOS release up to and including Catalina.
>They release updates alright, but what about the quality? The fact is overall, macOS has gotten slower, buggier, and uglier with every release.
Uglier is pretty subjective if not downright wrong. The new dark mode is great, and the UI is as good as ever. What was better? The skeuomorphic years? The candy colored Aqua years?
Slower is easy: it's 100% wrong. In fact, can you show any number of it? If anything, memory compression and battery savings in recent releases made the macOS more performant, and dropping 32bit apps (and double-loading of the same libs for 32/64) even more so... And APFS is also a big improvement over HFS, and Metal is faster than the previous stack and has already given significant performance boost to FCPX and other apps.
I'm not sure what exactly you find "slower" then...
Yes I saw it the first time. They certainly did it. But we're talking about how well they did it, aren't we? Usability and polish?
> I'm not particularly fond of Snow Leopard over other releases, nor I see much "regression since then".
You clearly aren't and clearly don't, but quite a few macOS users are, and do.
Here's a sampling of regressions for your perusal:
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/11/macos... https://furbo.org/2015/05/05/discoveryd-clusterfuck/
> Uglier is pretty subjective if not downright wrong.
If you like the new looks, good for you I guess.
> Slower is easy: it's 100% wrong. In fact, can you show any number of it?
I don't have any numbers. What I do have, is the experience running these successive releases on the same laptop. And it has definitely not been positive.
Can you be specific? What exactly is the problem with "usability" and "polish" of said features I've mentioned, like Metal, APFS, Swift, SwingUI, etc? The only credible example I could think of that's unpolished is Catalyst (for porting iOS apps to Mac, unified backend) which is a work in progress...
>You clearly aren't and clearly don't, but quite a few macOS users are, and do.
Bad for them I guess. I, however, linked to a pro and well respected OS X reviewer, so there's that...
>Here's a sampling of regressions for your perusal:
I can give you tons of reports like those for any version you wish. Here's from an article about the myth of the "stable" Snow Leopard:
"Initial experiences with Snow Leopard weren’t as blissful as more recent commentary remembers. The troubled rollout of MobileMe, iCloud’s precursor, was still an open wound. Soon after release, a major bug was discovered in Snow Leopard that would cause the home directories of guest accounts to be wiped completely. The issue was prevalent enough that Apple publicly responded and later issued an update, 10.6.2, to address the problem. Early updates to Snow Leopard were packed with fixes to a long list of bugs. A 2009 article from iLounge on Snow Leopard’s reliability is filled with comments from frustrated users, some considering moving back to Leopard. Time heals all wounds, right?"
https://9to5mac.com/2018/01/31/snow-leopard-became-reliabili...
>If you like the new looks, good for you I guess.
Are there many people on record that they don't like them? I've never read any major complaints about the "new looks" anywhere. In fact the Dark Mode was almost universally praised...
Not to mention the "new looks" are just incremental evolution (and mostly refinement) of how OS X looked since forever. What exactly don't you like? Anything concrete?
Prefer this look? (10.2):
https://zdnet4.cbsistatic.com/hub/i/2014/07/31/deed4628-185f...
Or this (10.4):
http://blandname.com/wp-content/uploads/2006/09/mac-os-x-104...
Or maybe this (Snow Leopard):
https://cdn.arstechnica.net/20090828/snow-leopard-leak.png
I'll take this at any day:
https://media.idownloadblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/m...
(Not to mention the dark mode)
>I don't have any numbers. What I do have, is the experience running these successive releases on the same laptop. And it has definitely not been positive.
Whatever...
What exactly is the evidence behind this? They have been adding several huge components/APIs/tools that they have working for macOS (Metal, APFS, Swift, CoreML, etc), they have had added the Mac App Store, they have tons of under the hood improvements (e.g. memory compression), and so on.
What exactly did you expect to see, or was seeing before "Snow Leopard"?
>I know people like to knock Linux-on-the-desktop, but you know what? I can go buy a Thinkpad, spend 20 minutes putting Debian or Ubuntu on it, and it'll just work, and I'll get software updates forever.
Then don't let the door hit you on your way out.
In my experience in most definitely not "just work" except with very careful selection of laptop/peripherals, and all kind of uses cases break too, including no major creative/office apps like Creative Studio, Pro Tools, Cubase, Premiere, FCPX, MS Office, and so on, which I depend on.
And every now and then this or that project will decide to majorly break stuff in some transition... (Gnome does it, KDE does it, X/Wayland/etc does it, ...).
And I've used Linux (and several UNIX variants) since 1997, and still do professional (as a server OS) everyday, so not exactly new to the game.