As far as the Apple TV is concerned, I've completely given up. Its incredible how a product can be ruined through software updates. Forgetting the lack of attention, that thing was good. AirPlay was a good feature. Hardly works anymore. I've more or less completely switched to Amazon Fire TV/Stick. The voice search on that thing is seriously impressive. And even without that, just scrolling through shows doesn't drive you up the wall. Its like someone actually considered how someone would use the device.

I feel like your frustration could be solved with just simply setting up your devices in a way that suits your uses, not the common denominator.

I myself have been hit hard by Yosemite bugs (graphics glitches, slowness, wifi not connecting at all, very slow wifi, Mac not coming out of sleep, AirPlay issues, Airdrop issues, Bluetooth suddenly disappearing etc., all this on a fast, fairly new MBP), but I have never experienced any iOS 8 bugs of note.

The corollary is that when someone complains, we need to take it seriously and not pretend everything is fine. Clearly many people are hit by problems, and the problems are very real.

[1]: http://store.apple.com/us/product/MC461LL/A/apple-60w-magsaf...

I'm right there with you, but the trouble is, I'm not sure anything satisfies that criteria any more. :-(

Not so long ago, I was expecting to go the other way, with our next laptops here having that fruity logo precisely because we expected OS X to Just Work where Windows 8 was just nasty.

However, right now, neither of the major commercial platforms is at all appealing, and anything Linux-based still has the fundamental problem that there aren't enough professional quality applications available to meet our needs yet. Relying on SaaS to break the OS strangleholds is also a questionable business move that we are increasingly glad we haven't made as the stories of broken "upgrades", sharp price increases, and outright cancelled services pile up.

I'm holding out some hope that either MS will come back with the next version of Windows and promote some sort of very-long-term stability and support (which is something they have historically been good at, but it seems unlikely with their new choice of leadership) or the FOSS work will finally start to take over (but this probably requires changes in the law, specifically making clear that patents are not enforceable anywhere that matters on things used for interoperability like data formats, communications protocols, and algorithms necessary to work with them).

Not really inexplicably: different graphics and airport cards (in different Mac models), different wi-fi routers, some have installed BS haxies while others have not, some have updated their OS on top of the previous installation for 3-4 OSes, where others start from a clean slate, etc. Regarding Hangout, it's also different iOS device version, proximity to the phone, etc.

Wintel boxes through the 1990s and 2000s coped with a much more diverse range of hardware and related drivers than the Mac ecosystem has ever had, and while certainly there was the occasional glitch, the track record was dramatically better for a very long time than what we see today.

This idea that widespread failures are somehow acceptable and to be expected is a bizarre change in mindset that seems to have taken hold in the 2010s. It is not in any way inevitable. It is just a result of poor specification and standardisation, bad programming, and rushing junk to market for commercial reasons when it isn't up to the standards we used to expect, often with some vague promise that any flaws will be corrected by on-line updates later.

I'm increasingly of the view that the Internet has actually been the worst thing that has ever happened to the software industry. It should be a huge advantage, but in reality it is often used as an excuse to ship bad code early and to impose unwanted updates, rent-an-app pricing models, and other user-hostile strategies.

If anyone still made software that does an important job well and comes with meaningful long-term support, my businesses would be throwing so much money at them right now. Sadly, hardly anyone making core business software actually does. It appears that I am part of a small minority, and so many people are willing to accept and pay for substandard junk that this has become the dominant software business model of this decade.

The most frustrating thing is that, since apparently there aren't enough of us for our money to swing things back in a more quality-driven direction, it's not clear what any of us can do constructively to make things any better now. Maybe when things reach their logical conclusion and people are actually dying because some 13-year-old script kiddie accidentally crashed their car by remote control, the wider public will finally get the message and start demanding acceptable quality again.

Perhaps rose colored glasses? I've used those Wintel systems and dealing with new and unexpected issues, with drivers, software, peripherals etc, was a day to day occurence.

It still is now, judging from Wintel friends I have, including my parents and siblings. It's just that in Wintel world there so many vendors and combinations of components, that no PC system has a multi-million units production run that a Mac has. Even for a company that pushes lots of units, like Dell, they offer 40+ different configurations at any point in time...

The only other big drop in compatibility that I can remember from recent years was when MS effectively moved to a different model for handling device drivers with Windows 7, which broke backward compatibility with some older devices whose vendors didn't always issue new Windows 7 drivers to replace the broken ones.

Still, considering that this was the first such change for many years and it's hardly reasonable to expect an OS developer to support the drivers for every hardware peripheral ever used on that OS, I don't think that's a bad track record.

Yeah, imagine that, multiple complaints: 1. Software updates made Apple TV AirPlay incredibly unreliable for me. And its not just me, lots of people have had this happen. I btw still think Airplay is a stellar feature and if it ever got fixed it would continue to make me stick with Apple TV. 2. The UI sucks:...

> And of all things, scrolling.

Navigating episodes/content/movies/whatever on the Apple TV is a very bad experience. Its hard to explain without first using a good experience. On Apple TV, if I'm on the last episode of a show on Season 1 that I own, getting to episode 1 of Season 2 which I don't yet own is very difficult. I have to go all the way up to "more on iTunes", then choose a season, then get to that episode. On Amazon Fire TV, its just the next episode on the list. Apple TV also strangely sorts episodes you don't own earliest to latest, but episodes you DO own latest to earliest. If I go to purchased Tv shows > all, I have no idea what the sort order is. I think it might be most recent, but then the very first show on the list I bought over a year ago, so that can't be it. And as far as I can tell I can't search the purchased section anyways, so I have to literally scroll down some non-alphabetical list of 220 shows in my case if there's a show I'm pretty sure I bought but I can't quite remember the exact name. I'm not sure how to properly describe this mess, which is why I just said "scrolling", because thats what the experience feels like on the Amazon Fire TV: you just scroll through content and don't find yourself endlessly going in and out of menu "sections". It sounds to me that you don't use the actual Apple TV UI but instead use Plex (on a jailbroken Apple TV?), which is fine, but it says nothing of the Apple TV experience.

Edit: BTW, your mention of Plex reminded me of another (long overdue) failing of Apple TV. I happen to also use Plex on my Amazon Fire TV. The install process was tapping the voice button on my remote, saying "plex", then selecting install from the app store. The process on Apple TV is either jailbreaking, running an app that pretends to be the the trailers server (which may break on any upgrade of Apple TV) or accessing your plex content somewhere else and airplaying it.

Mom/Dad/Wife/Girlfriend/Boss: "Hey! Pick up your phone!"

"Can't. No phone calls where I live."

"Oh. Where do you live?"

"Yosemite."

"Oh. Sorry."

0: http://xfce.org/about/screenshots

https://github.com/vivaserver/MoonLion

take a simple example: usually Ctrl Q (cmd q on os x) means quit. try doing on os x will quit the app 9 out of 10 times. on ubuntu? not really.

Hardware: Thinkpads (T41, X60, X200) and Dell Latitude (E5420), currently Debian Sid.

Soon thereafter, I did a tour of the usual window manager suspects and ended up with i3 <3

So I agree that any distro + pantheon would be great for those looking for an OSX-like experience in Linux, but it seems the reality is not as straightforward. PantheonDE doesn't seem to be developed like KDE/Gnome/XFCE are -- i.e. with a distro-agnostic approach. Hence you're sort of tied to eOS if you want to keep any level of sanity while getting it to "just work". That was counterproductive in my experience.

I still remember when people were impressed by the speed and smoothness of the UI with Tiger or Snow Leopard on my first Mac, a white MacBook. Good times. Now we have faster computers, SSDs instead of hard disks, but slower interfaces.

This will probably be my last mac hardware purchase... I like the screen and the touchpad so much better than any other laptop, but don't really use it that much, and even then I could have gotten something with similar hardware for half the price... I've thought about installing Ubuntu on it, but haven't taken the plunge just yet... I spend almost 2/3 of my time on my laptop in either a windows or linux vm, so it's kind of a wash.

Probably this could be related to hardware config. I have a mac book pro at work with 8GB ram and it works fine. My personal mac book pro has 4GB ram and it has problem.

Oh wait...

Source: using 16GB here

Especially when the default RAM they sell with is usually too small.

https://twitter.com/Doomlaser/status/538539277978972160

Yosemite breaks rounded rect corners in UI overlays, like the ones triggered by volume and brightness changes. The masking is broken when the translucent blur shaders aren't applied.

You'd think that'd something they would easily catch in QA before 10.10 shipped, but it's still broken even in 10.10.1.

The file manager (gnautilus) is now called "files". The video player (totem) is now called "videos". This is so obviously broken for people who are trying to web-search for answers to problems that they're having.

Whats worse os that the renaming is inconsistent - software will get one name in the menu, another name in the help > about, and another name on the Internet.

Gnome - and I say this as politely as I can - makes me fucking hate using a computer.

http://support.apple.com/kb/PH14222?viewlocale=en_US

Even if security updates still come for what...usually 20-30 months with Apple...they still don't care about any other kind of backward compatibility and happily break their own file formats at will.

http://support.apple.com/en-us/HT1222

Same thing.

Who was the joker who kept insisting that iOS 7 was really better and very few complained? I warned about this, post-Jobs Apple design and attention to detail.

The majority of the population?

Personally, we're still pre-v7 on our iPad here, after reading way too many reviews about severe performance drops on this device after the "upgrade" and learning that there is no way to go back once you've done it. We literally ignore any updates for the system from Apple and just carry on happily enjoying the product as we bought it, making us almost uniquely satisfied among iPad purchasers we know.

My own experience of Yosemite has been the polar opposite of many here; better stability, faster, longer battery life etc. All on a 2011 MacBook Air. I never had any kind of issue with iOS 7 either. The odd reset over the last year on my iPhone 5, but the significant majority of the time (99% at least) it worked and it worked well. Sorry to rock your world view, but have you at least posited that these people vociferously complaining are not representative of the whole? Ditto iOS? I know you will chalk me up as another "fanboy"...

Stability is not "completely lost"

I didn't see much problems besides it. I like new design, animations are smooth enough for me and everything works well enough.

Not saying it is Flux's fault but I'm curious if you're running Flux and get the same result when exiting.

For PHPStorm JetBrains has also released a version with a bundled JDK 1.8 which fixes the flickering for me [2].

[1] https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IDEA-131593 [2] http://blog.jetbrains.com/phpstorm/2014/12/phpstorm-8-0-2-bu...

this wasn't a choice of blocking older Macs. The fact is that continuity requires Bluetooth LE (or you would be complaining about greatly reduced phone battery life) and your old iMac doesn't have BT-LE capable hardware (BT-LE and BT only share the name - aside of that they are quite disimilar)

It really does feel like Apple blacklisted older machines from using Continuity; only third-party kext hacking can get things started again.

[1] https://github.com/dokterdok/Continuity-Activation-Tool/

For example, if you buy Windows 8.1 you have downgrade rights to every earlier version. All you do is speak with a person, say "I would like to activate windows" and they say ok. Its not a hassle unless you do it daily.

Also pricing is an issue: all recent desktop versions of MacOSX are either free or very inexpensive ($30 or less).

You could likewise say that filing an insurance claim is easy... sure, but for some folks even knowing to make the call is an undue burden - exactly how the vendor wants it.

I don't know why WindowServer keeps crashing in this fashion.

Ha! No one cares about desktop any more.

When you're ready you can try Windows 8, a surprisingly mature and stable OS that runs on a hardware ecosystem several orders of magnitude more complex.

You get used to the fact that it was clearly designed to run on a tablet. The metro start page is actually quite good, even on desktop.

But if you were serious, I'd look for a non-prism-compromised OS.

Also the capitalism of today with all of its lust for profits, sales, budgets, and deadlines its kind of luddite, can have a predatory behaviour for innovation and advancements in technology in general.

I think if tech companies want to survive for more than 10/20 years, they will need to get into the core of the system, of THE machine, and figure it out better ways to survive by really delivering good tech and innovation, and not by just promissing a world with rainbows and unicorns

Which company would you say has a greater engineering footprint across technologies and business sectors than Apple? There are a few tech companies that actually do one or two things that Apple doesn't, but I can't think of any that do everything that Apple does.

creepy..