I've had similar observations with different behaviors in Safari and Finder. One would think the quality of Apple's software would be increasing with the usage of Swift over Objective-C, but the opposite seems to be true.

Spotlight is also slow and buggy now, on an M3 Pro no less. I loathe the feeling of being faster than my computer and having to wait for it to catch up, something that I haven't felt since the M1 came out.

This was my last straw that caused me to disable Spotlight:

Typing something into Spotlight, having it pull up the right result and highlight it, and me hitting the Enter key, and the search results suddenly updating after and highlighting some new result and then opening that instead.

It’s not just Liquid Glass. It’s bugs like these where I realized Apple software was truly rotten to the core. Whomever is running the show (Craig) can’t do their job.

I’m now noticing the same bug in the latest versions of Windows 11 when I hit the start button and run a search.

This was a solved computer science problem.

Apple software used to exhibit reasonable UX for “edge cases” just like the one you described. This was one of my main reasons for going Mac — they cared about the details. Sad to see that seems to be going away.

It seems to be that these things never last, as company culture inevitably changes.

That laggy behavior plus indexing not appearing to find some obvious files made me switch to Raycast.

Raycast looks really cool, thanks

Same. It’s closed source and has a subscription fee, but I’m all in on Raycast.

You only have to pay for the Pro version. As a replacement for Spotlight the free version does great for me.

The updating input locations under your cursor in particular is so f*ing frustrating.

To be fair, it's not just macOS, but many webpages which load dynamic content as well.

There are like a half-dozen blatant bugs I encounter between daily and weekly in Safari. Text input and textarea editing is buggy in a couple ways, Apple Pay has a positioning bug where sometimes its bottom button is about 1/3 off the screen, certain elements on a couple pages smear when I scroll (but only sometimes). Not even counting ways the keyboard itself is worse now.

I haven’t seen browsing this buggy outside weird niche Linux browsers in… 15+ years?

I’ve highly preferred Safari on Mac OS for a very long time- the bugs and memory leaks are forcing me to Firefox at this point, it’s completely unusable on the betas I’ve been driving lately in the hope they fix the previous bugs.

My issues with Safari have mostly been iCloud-related. The latest one being the iCloud tabs SQLlite database getting corrupted constantly and keeping stale tabs around that I have long closed. 26.2 seems to have fixed it, but it was around at least since Sonoma. I've had similar issues with Reading List, where again, the database gets corrupted and changes that I've made to Reading List get reverted. It is just little stuff like this that adds up and creates poor UX.

What's also telling is how long the bugs stayed around, too. They were reported on Reddit and Apple's forums for awhile with various workarounds, like deleting the phantom entries from the SQLlite database manually and doing some other gymnastics like removing the other devices from iCloud in hopes that everything would sync up nicely. No one at Apple had the time or took the time to chase down the bugs. In a world of Claude Code or Codex you would think they would have at least tried a cursory "fix this".

On a related note, maybe one of these days iCloud will have a force sync option that tells the other devices to trash their copies vs having to remove all devices and re-add to get everything coherently synced.

The lack of a "refresh" option has been a problem with iCloud for years. Back in the iOS 8/9 days, I'd write in Pages on an iPad and then try to open the document on a Mac or the Pages web app. Pages itself was (and is) pretty nice, but iCloud sync was constantly broken. Things didn't appear when I needed them to.

Some designers say that refresh buttons shouldn't exist because the interface should always reflect the current state of reality. They're right, but until the day we get 100% bug-free bidirectional sync with perfect conflict resolution that instantly polls the network whenever it reconnects, refresh buttons are a necessary evil.

I gave up on the normal iCloud tabs for over a decade now. But the Safari Tab Groups implementation is by far the best I've used. If I need to share a window, I just open it in a tab group and those have synced flawlessly for me so far.

I have had Safari syncing bugs since basically 2016. But now I can't be bothered to even use it, no matter how good it gets.

Chrome extensions, functionning ad blocking (without having to pay for a stupid Apple blessed extension) and just generally more usefull feature set is the real reason Google is winning.

Apple can't even be bothered to try making a cross platform browser, because he would cost them too much money or whatever (not that the pile of cash they are sitting on is getting a lot of valuable use).

If you switch Safari’s tab bar mode to bottom (i.e. restoring the sort-of-one-touch controls that existed before iOS 26), textareas become utterly and completely broken. It’s almost impossible to reply to an HN message, for example.

This bug is so blatant that I assumed my would have been fixed by now, but no.

Swift was the worst thing that happened to Mac OS, because we’re now suffering second system syndrome.

I completely agree. I saw the writing on the wall the moment they started boosting swiftUI as a UI library of the future where it was only half done and not even compatible with existing frameworks.

I think it's worse than that: we're now suffering being a "supported but deprioritised platform" for a cross platform GUI.

AppKit was developed for the Mac from the ground up. All effort that went into it was to make the Mac as good as possible. Experience from that went into making UIKit, which was made to be as good as possible for iPhone. Focus on iPhone made the Mac suffer somewhat from a lack of resources, but AppKit was still a rock solid foundation.

Swift UI is primarily made for iPhone. It's secondarily made for iPad. I'm willing to bet that almost all the effort that goes into it is focused on making iPhone and iPad apps better. And it is succeeding there, to some degree (though not without its own issues; especially now with iOS 26). Mac support, however, is clearly an afterthought. Yet it's now the foundation of everything in macOS.

It's not too dissimilar from what it would look like if Apple had decided to rewrite large swathes of the system in GTK when the GTK developers only really care about how well GTK works in a GNOME desktop.

  > Swift UI is primarily made for iPhone. It's secondarily made for iPad. I'm willing to bet that almost all the effort that goes into it is focused on making iPhone and iPad apps better.

i think there is also another issue at play; i think with swiftui being "data based" for lack of a better term, you can easily end up with ui that matches underlying data models but doesn't match the users model/expectation... you can see this really clearly with the settings app vs the old preferences; its pretty obvious (imo) they are looping over underlying data and just spitting out endless lists and dialogs etc instead of mapping it to a presentation in a user-first way...

I still don't understand who actually use iOS/iPadOS apps heavily.

Everyone I know just try to do stuff with them and at some point go find a computer to actually get shit done, frustrated with how backward everything is on those platforms.

Now they want to make the Mac the same. What the fuck.

Maybe the sharper edges of objective-C lead to a programming practice that was more careful, which has been abandoned under the impression of Swift's increase default safety.

I think it has to do with frameworks like SwiftUI.

It is akin to some military operations doomed to fail, and everyone ends up dying because of the chain of command no one is willing to speak against.

That is how the current chaos feels like.

Apple employees should have kidnapped Alan Dye from his office and deposited him on Facebook's doorstep wrapped up in a straightjacket with ribbons and a bow years ago before he finally left voluntarily.

Like the Hong-Kong guy in The Dark Knight!

Using Dye as a scapegoat feels like cope. The rest of the executives were fully content with this effort, and in the end he wasn't even forced out. There's no evidence that Apple will correct its course without him.

I agree that it’s a mark of shame that he left voluntarily, but I do think a lot of this traces back to Apple being more of a hardware company at heart. Jony Ive pulled off some industrial design which looked really nice and I think his history there meant that when he promoted the packaging designer to be in charge of UI people gave it too much credence, forgetting that Jony Ive also wasn’t experienced in that area and, as the history of UX botches shows, was about as good at it as a software developer would be at winging hardware design. People who’ve been successful at one thing just aren’t guaranteed to be successful somewhere else and loyalty to the company shouldn’t overshadow that.

Sort of in agreement here.

In-between not paying attention to general software quality and not voicing concern, Craig Federigi should not get a free pass.

In-between kissing the boots of Kings, and dining with Murderers, and posting AI slop on Twitter, Tim Cook ought to have been more involved.

There is enough blame to pass around at Apple today among the leadership, but the specific shitty UI buck stops with Dye. Dye is putting his signature on it and is the face of the Liquid Glass demo, if he wants the primary fame, he can have the primary blame.

Yes, there is: Lemay, who replaced him, is a career UI guy.

Regardless of whether the C-suite recognized the problem or made a conscious decision to replace Dye with Lemay, it is likely that this outcome will, indeed, result in improved UI.

> The rest of the executives were fully content with this effort, and in the end he wasn't even forced out

Tim Cook, by all accounts, can be very micromanaging and demanding when it comes to logistics underlings, but has been extremely hands-off with all his other underlings, doesn't insert himself into their loops or require his approval, doesn't decide by decree like Jobs which forces underlings to fight the bureaucracy on their own, leaves them to resolve conflicts among themselves on their own. He treats Apple like a machine or system where his role is to keep things running smoothly.

It's not "the rest of the executives", that's how Cook's Apple is run. Reportedly.

Such laissez-faire attitude should lead to teams that feel something’s great but it doesn’t connect. Like a product that’s an amazing feat of engineering but feels convoluted to the end user.

The thing is, when glass was presented the very first to cry in disbelief were designers. It is very much at odds with many industry standards.

So I really have nothing on how this came to pass. At this point, the tinfoil hat view that this design was a resource hogger as a feature for obsolescence sounds reasonable. At least there would be a method to the madness.

Corporations are more boring than that. Reportedly, Jony Ive (who was given oversight of Apple's UIs), in turn put Dye in charge of the iOS 7 redesign. Dye and Ive then presented it internally. Here's how journalist Tripp Mickle reported it back in 2022, long before Liquid Glass came about:

> Ive’s focus on visual styling vexed the software design team. Though they obsessed over colors and shapes, they prioritized how people interacted with the phone and often built demonstrations of the software they planned to introduce so they could experience how intuitive it would be for users and adjust as needed. Many of them believed that design was how the software behaved and thought that Ive was myopically focused on how it looked. [...] At Ive’s direction, they shifted from demonstrating how an app worked to making paper printouts that showed how an app looked. They became more like graphic designers than software savants.

The book then details a big talent drain from the design team.

Fast forward to the Liquid Glass release, reportedly many Apple designers hated the direction. Fast forward to last week, John Gruber says Ive hates Liquid Glass and Dye, and heavily implies that he heard this either from Ive himself or a close associate.

When you leave a moron in charge and a chunk of the talent leaves, Liquid Glass is what you get. It's ultimately Cook's fault. Dye was under Jeff Williams (operations, now gone) who was under Cook. Operations dictates everything under Cook, I doubt anyone else could say no to him.

  > The book then details a big talent drain from the design team.

is this the book you are referring to?

https://www.amazon.com/After-Steve-Became-Trillion-Dollar-Co...

Yes

Cook is just a major idiot. It's actually surprising he didn't completly fuck everything over. But it just shows how strong the fondation and initial strategy was.

I'm always annoyed by random idiots arguing that since Cook made Apple a shit ton of money, he must be good. By the same standard, cartel head drug dealers are extremely good and an asshole who inerhit a business with a captive market and just manages to make more money by raising price is just as good.

Outside of Apple Silicon, much of what Apple has produced in the last 10 years isn't really good. And even Apple Silicon has major tradeoffs that do not look like they'll improve meaningfully.

> The thing that amazes me most is that everyone on the teams responsible is probably using their Apple devices and running into these same bugs!

This is what surprises me the most to be honest. CarPlay seemingly still suffers from a (sometimes deadly) issue of covering the entire map on your dashboard with the avatar/number of the person calling, so if you're actively using it for navigation (since, you know, there is a map there and all) someone calling you is a highly stressful moment and more than not you need to hang up because otherwise the call is in the way.

I've had my iPhone 12 Mini for so many years now, and this is still an issue, the only conclusion I can take from this is that people at Apple actually all have Android phones.

The Apple release schedule is unremitting. We know that bugs are reported to Apple by developers, and we know that reported bugs get ignored for years, or forever. I suspect that every Apple engineer has a mountain of bugs in their queue.

If Apple leadership doesn't care about software quality, then Apple engineers can't care about software quality. They use the same buggy crap that we do, because they have no choice.

Often it is that people who use the devices learn how to work around bugs and then they forget they exist.

There is also subconscious resistance to create an action that will uncover a bug and then remind of personal failure.

Then once whole teams get used to this, it's not possible to get it fixed as it gets deprioritised always.

I think parts of Liquid Glass on macOS looks pretty bad. But I don't care that much about how things look, so it doesn't offend me.

What does offend me are all the bugs, as you say. It's still utterly broken all these months after the public release. Spotlight is a mess; I've seen it take DAYS before it has made an app in '/Applications' findable through search (even as the app shows up in Spotlight's long scrollable list of apps), and the animation where it comes in as a result of the four finger gesture has so many bugs I won't go through them all here. The most annoying is that it can end up in a state where Spotlight is not on screen, but you need to do the "make Spotlight go away" gesture before the "make Spotlight appear" gesture works again. It also often loads icons slowly; sometimes loading them in one by one over time, sometimes all at once after thinking for a second. It's arguably better from a UX design perspective than Launchpad was, but Launchpad was so much more polished and better performing.

There's also just constant minor graphical glitches. Things which pop in, things which load in with the wrong background color, that sort of stuff. The Settings app sometimes loads in stuff gradually and parts of the app jump around for a second before it settles, like a bad web app. It feels janky.

Mac OS X used to feel like a solid operating system. It has been going downhill for a while, but macOS 26 is the biggest leap in a long time.

> I think parts of Liquid Glass on macOS looks pretty bad. But I don't care that much about how things look, so it doesn't offend me.

I don't care overmuch about the purely cosmetic side of it, but Liquid Glass looks absolutely terrible from an ergonomics point of view. It's just plainly, objectively bad UX.

Tip: in accessibility , enable High Contrast and disable transparency. Optionally disable animations. Decent experience imo. I can now see what areas are clickable.

Nb I see tons of rendering bugs across a bunch of apps and I suspect it’s because I disabled as much animation and transparency as I could. Things like the keyboard opening slightly off the screen to the right then jumping into place, some apps going black when certain overlays are open, stuff like that.

I did basically that on my iPhone. My laptop was needing a cleanup, so I just wiped it and re-installed Sequoia. the Mac Studio never got the upgrade at all. If at some point I find there's something in Tahoe that I particularly need, I'll revisit upgrading.

Doing a fresh install of Sequoia was the best move for me, too. I had an unnecessary amount of third party apps installed for no reason. I don't even use Ice for the menu bar anymore, I realized the icons that I had hidden I didn't need in the first place so I completely disabled them, in whichever apps it's possible.

This year I've had to perform many hard resets on my MacBook, iPhone and even Apple Watch because they've locked up. And they're all relatively new devices. Apple needs to get its shit together. I already expect to move away from their mobile ecosystem when it comes time to upgrade.

It's Apple itself that needs a hard reset. Maybe if we all at the same time collectively hold our power buttons down for sixty seconds, Apple Park will reboot.

I recently upgraded (downgraded?) from an iPhone 15PM to a smaller iPhone 17P, and I have found myself wondering if I got a glitchy piece of hardware or if it's just iOS 26 bugs. I hardly had any problems with the previous phone, but on the 17 it's pretty routine that I have to close apps (including native Apple ones) which have become non-responsive. Frustrating, for sure.

Nope, that's iOS (I'm on a 16 Pro). I routinely have apps I can switch into but are entirely dead. They're not chewing CPU cycles, the phone is "cold". But very much so.

So very frustrated.

the one I've noticed being the worst for lock ups is the camera / photos app, which is frankly very surprising given how central the photography usecase appears to be to iPhone sales and therefore Apple's bottom line.

I'm talking, I pull up the camera and try to take literally 4-5 shots quickly and by the 6th there's what feels like seconds of lag between the button press and the photo being taken.

It feels like I'm using an ancient camera phone, or a more modern phone but in extreme heat when the CPU is just throttling everything. But instead, this is a 2 year old iPhone at room temperature.

Interesting, likewise, the Camera app. And other camera apps, I use Halide too.

And Photos. Will it sync? Yes. When? Who the fuck knows? Doesn't matter whether you're on Ethernet or Wifi, gigabit internet. You can quit Photos on both devices, you can then keep Photos open foreground... so what? Photos will sync when it wants to, not what when you want it to.

you're right! The photo syncing is comically bad, again given the alleged importance of photos in the Apple marketing material. That said I've rarely used it in the past and so wasn't sure if it was a newly degraded experience or had always been that poor.

> But I don't care that much about how things look, so it doesn't offend me.

So I'm guessing you use some default Mac editor (Xcode?)? You don't change your color scheme, you don't change your font, etc?

Aside: Software devs are very weird, they spend all this time crafting their dev setup and but when it comes to their OS they just give up and whatever Tim Cook feeds them their in. Makes no sense. Anyway, off to Linux land. See ya'll!

My IDE provides 98% of the pixels on my screen and provides 90% of the overall experience. That’s why it gets all the attention. If the OS is able to show my IDE on one screen and a web browser and UNIXy terminal on the other, it’s working.

So you don't use the built-in Terminal? What about Finder, Safari, Mail, Spotlight, System Settings, etc? If someone doesn't care about how they look, they should use all the built-in stuff right?

I don't understand this reasoning. Someone who doesn't care how things look may still have strong preferences based on how things work, no?

I spend a lot of my time in Neovim in a terminal. I have spent a lot of time on the setup, but everything (including the theme and colors) is optimised for legibility, not aesthetics. Most of the rest of my time is spent in Firefox (well, Waterfox these days) with the default dark theme.

This is true whether I'm on my laptop running macOS or my desktop running Fedora.

Incidentally, if I was using some native-ish editor like Xcode and a native-ish browser like Safari, I would probably care way more since I'd be interacting with Liquid Glass more as a primary UI. Now it only really touches the stuff surrounding what I care about, while my terminal, editor and browser are all blissfully non-native.

> It also often loads icons slowly; sometimes loading them in one by one over time, sometimes all at once after thinking for a second.

This is frequent, if not constant, on iOS for me. I never witnessed it before the 26 update.

How can it take an entire second or more to display an icon in list in the settings application? It was literally a solved problem for every iOS version I've ever used.

Indeed - the system as a whole is starting to feel bloated. Today’s macOS design is akin to the cosmetic mufflers/exhaust pipes in cars, which serve only to justify the “Sport” badge. I long for the days past.

It's felt bloated for a while. Everytime I setup a new Mac I have to remove all of the icons from the doc. A new Dell isn't that bloated.

> a new Dell isn’t that bloated.

At least a new Mac doesn’t try to serve you ads in the app launcher.

what about iCloud and News?

I was specifically referring to ads for third party applications in the start menu, so you’re technically correct and I should have been more specific. I’d argue that those are upsells for the OS to enhance existing apps and systems. Not my favorite, but preferable to windows telling me to install candy crush in the start menu.

A new ${computer_brand} with Linux doesn't show you any ads, doesn't add more bloat than you let it, doesn't insist on you creating any iCloudy or Microsofty accounts, doesn't try to police what software you run on the thing, doesn't try to upsell you to some ${precious_metal} plan, doesn't insist your 5 year new computer is obsolete, doesn't spy on you, etcetera.

What are you waiting for?

Oh I 100% agree, but what consumer-grade Dell comes with Linux out of the box?

Well, they do have a couple, in theory (if they were in stock)...

https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/dell-laptops/sr/all-products...

They often seem to go out of stock over the holidays - sometimes it's worth checking other countries to see what's normally available.

Generally, it's the Precision workstation and laptop lines, the Pro Max desktops & laptops, and the XPS laptops. They've recently started to offer RHEL on the Precisions, too.

(And all their servers, too, of course)

Proper sleep.

If your computer fails to sleep, or fails to wake up correctly after sleeping, when running Linux then the problem is almost always the hardware manufacturer’s fault. Many motherboards come with frankly broken ACPI tables that should never have made it out of QA. Remember this (<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45271484>) recent story? This is just the tip of the iceberg. For every well–researched story we have about ACPI problems there are a dozen more that are quietly fixed by Linux kernel developers (who instruct the kernel to simply ignore the broken ACPI tables and write a custom kernel driver to do the work instead) and an unknown but presumably large number that never come to the attention of a kernel developer.

It's not that Linux is "bad" when the hardware is incompatible, it's not "Linux's fault". It's that, at a certain age, I don't want to spend my precious few hours of free time working _on_ my computer, I just want it to work.

(big fan of MacOS, and esp. third-party Mac software, the quality of which simply does not exist on any other platform)

(Also, I have huge affection for Linux. I used Linux exclusively for years personally, and any place I could sneak it into my work environment)

Sure. But if it doesn’t work then _return the hardware_. It’s the manufacturer’s fault.

Works fine for me, on Fruit Factory hardware even. Close the thing, it goes to sleep. Open it, it wakes up. Leave it closed for a very very long time and it hibernates. Open it again and it comes back to life. Your experience may vary depending on what hardware you run it on but for me it works fine on the mentioned machines, on a HP Spectre 360, another HP Elitebook and on a really ancient Toshiba Satellite. I've had problems with sleep on a Thinkpad P50 with a discrete NVidia Quattro GPU, it goes to sleep but won't wake up so I have that machine set to hibernate as soon as the lid is closed. This takes a bit longer (but not that long, SSD is fast) but it would have been more pleasant to use if normal sleep worked as intended.

It's funny that you say that, given that since S3 was effectively killed, I can't say I experienced proper sleep in Windows or macOS either. Linux so far is closest to my expectations.

Same. Windows just stopped going to sleep across multiple laptops. I gave up and run "shutdown /h" when I really want to guarantee it doesn't drain the battery. MacOS in theory sleeps, but I can't get rid of the periodic wakeups that drain a lot over a longer time.

It's a weird time when Linux has the best sleep support overall.

Last time I looked at it on macOS, you had to disable keeping the TCP connections or something like in the network stack. Which incidentally disables Find My, sadly.

My recent experience switching from Windows to Linux (NixOS) suggests otherwise.

I use a ThinkPad P1 Gen 3. My dGPU actually died due to overheating caused by Windows failing to sleep properly. On Windows, the fans were always noisy and temperatures stayed above 60°C.

Since switching to Linux, the fans are very quiet and temperatures sit between 40–50°C. What surprised me most is that sleep mode works much better on Linux than on Windows, where the frequent failures eventually killed my GPU.

Hm, I see a fruit factory fanboi has been downvoting my recent posts again. Tiring but that's the price you pay for daring to speak up here. This place would be so much more tolerable if that down-vote arrow came with some price, e.g. 'you have X down-votes left for this week, use them wisely' or if the down-voter had to give a reason (visible to all) for the downvote in combination with a meta-moderation system like Slashdot of old (and maybe of today, no idea since I left that place aeons ago). The way it currently works it is far too easy to do the Wikipedia thing here, i.e. downvote into oblivion any voice outside of some accepted narrative. In combination with the virtual ban on discussing downvotes - the first rule of the Lumber Cartel is 'never discuss the Lumber Cartel' [1] - this makes HN more welcoming to knee-jerk downvoters and less welcome to free and open discussion. A shame, really, the place would be more interesting with more of the latter and fewer of the former.

[1] http://www.catb.org/esr/jargon/html/L/Lumber-Cartel.html

Every macOS update I have installed this year is followed by a full-screen intrusive advertisement for Apple "Intelligence" which has to be dismissed before I am granted access to my own computer and files.

This is my shining moment! I just happened to setup a new Dell. It was far more cumbersome than dealing with a new Mac.

Here's some of the stuff I had to do on my new Dell, from memory:

- Uninstall all the bloatware apps that come installed with Windows 11. They nag and beg you not to uninstall them, but after several prompts, they mostly seem uninstalled?

- Remove the trial offers from the Start menu.

- Remove the third-party stub apps from the Start menu (eg. TikTok).

- Remove the O365 stub apps.

- Remove the McAfee antivirus payware.

- Remove Dell SupportAssist from the laptop.

- Then, just reinstall Windows 11 from scratch, because of all the remaining detritus left after performing the above steps. And uninstalling SupportAssist caused some instability and weird errors upon login.

- Uninstall all the bloatware apps the come installed with Windows 11 again.

- Remove the trial offers from the Start menu.

- Remove the third-party stub apps from the Start menu (eg. TikTok).

- Remove the O365 stub apps.

Compared to on my Mac:

- Remove apps from the Dock

- Go into /Applications and uninstall about 6 Apple apps I don't use.

> Here's some of the stuff I had to do on my new Dell, from memory:

Or, you know, just format the disk and install Linux.

If it were my choice…

How is it you could reinstall Windows, but not Linux? Or is it just mandatory to run Windows, but nobody cares if you reinstall it? My wife’s Windows laptop won’t allow me to even run Logitech Connect Utility, to reconnect some devices (pair a keyboard to the mouse). It surely won’t allow the full reinstall, it’s locked entirely. Hence, I’m curious what’s up with your work (I assume) laptop.

Mandatory to run Windows for this device as it was going to a C-level person.

I haven't used Windows in years, but surely a clean install addresses some of that? I don't think I've ever used whatever default OS was preinstalled on a laptop or PC that I bought.

Or is the default Windows 11 just that full of shite?

Home edition comes with a few offers.

> Remove the third-party stub apps from the Start menu (eg. TikTok).

It comes with... TikTok?!?

It's time to buy a new phone then! Surely that new phone won't feel so bloated, rinse and repeat.

I agree with bugs, you can't even scroll through settings with touchpad without permanently enabling scroll bars.

>I don't mind how Liquid Glass looks at all.

I do, and the fact that it isn't even optional is crazy.

Windows Vista vibes where they first looked at what the could technically pull off on todays' hardware. And mind you: Liquid Glass is very impressive!.

It's just not necessary.

Although outright opt-out isn't possible, it seems like heading to Accessibility -> Motion -> Reduce Motion (on) and Prefer Cross-Fade Transitions (On) reduces the effect.

I'm not sure if this reduces the buggy artifacts though.

Who decided things that slide in place need to jiggle like jello?!

I've been describing it as if the ui has been covered in corn syrup; like it has been drizzled in a slow and sticky and slightly blurry layer of transparent obfuscation.

Necessary has never been the deciding factor for Apple’s decisions, especially when it comes to design. Nor has “optional” ever really been part of that discussion. They know, like most people, supporting multiple interface simply creates more BS to maintain for the few resistant people who don’t accept change. Like it or hate, you bought an Apple.

I don’t particularly like it either — reality is what it is and if I don’t like it that much, there are other phones I can buy when I upgrade.

I can't remember windows vista actually making content illegible or reduced the content area in a focused window like Apple has done.

I have these insane bugs where my apple tv will connect to my mbp even tho my mbp has blutooth disabled. I'll be listening to a podcast on my mbp with airpods while my wife is watching some show on the apple tv. It will still randomly connect to my airpods when my wife never tries to connect them.

Apple is quickly becoming a trash company and we're seeing the effects of an industry writ large when you only hire leetcode monkeys.

You can disable the automatic handoff in the Apple TV settings. That drove me crazy as well.

> Unacceptable for the premium you pay for Apple software. Unacceptable for any software one is paying for.

You don't pay anything for the software, so the quality matches

This is not an argument that works for the company proudly pairing hardware and software as their core business.

Funny, last time I used macos there were so many annoyances and every suggestion was to use some paid third party app. I finally caved and used hammerspoon to write everything I needed myself.

You pay for it in lots of ways, including an obscene premium on minor hardware upgrades, not to mention you have to buy their hardware to even use the software itself.

I don’t mind Liquid Glass either to be honest. I kind of like it even. I also completely agree regarding software quality, which is abysmal (I am sufficiently aware of the internals of a lot of things on macOS to know most of the time why it’s like this, but it’s still unacceptable).

I'll bite. Why is it like this (in your opinion of course)?

Mostly the failing events (e.g. the Messages app failing to keep the first word of a message when typing rapidly after sending a message) are, I think, due to Apple using Catalyst for these apps.

Catalyst was an ambitious project, which works… mostly. But in the details, it has a lot of rough cuts. I fully expect Apple to end up rewriting Messages and co completely in SwiftUI eventually, but that will take many years, if they ever do it.

For the rest, most of the time my wild guess would be that Apple is constantly migrating their frameworks, or creating new ones, and the engineers developing apps are using ever moving frameworks. The framework stabilizes at the end of the release cycle (or sometimes even later…), which leaves no time for the front devs to truly finish quality control on their part.

Basically, to summarize, the release cycle is too small. Apple should do releases every two years instead of every year. Or drop the cycle altogether and just release when ready.

> The thing that amazes me most is that everyone on the teams responsible is probably using their Apple devices and running into these same bugs!

Would be funny if devs @Apple were using Surface machines when developing the newest MacOS, just like MS devs were using Apple hardware when developing Windows.