Last Week on My Mac: Losing confidence
130 comments
·December 1, 2025keyle
AnonC
> It started with the macOS that brought the iOS settings panel. We went from a logical structure of easily findable stuff to a complete mess.
It’s difficult to pinpoint when exactly the decline started. But one key event before the Settings app was the Catalyst apps that were straight out and dismal ports from their iOS versions. Till date, none of those work well and cannot be navigated properly using the keyboard. Reminders, Messages, Notes and more.
Craig Federighi seems to be increasingly taking on so much authority without having a trusted set of people under him and his leadership (or lack of it) has resulted in neglecting software across device platforms. Some of the Apple apps on tvOS with paid subscriptions are worse, because the bugs in them don’t get any attention at all.
airstrike
Notes straight up crashes if you "open this note in a separate window" and edit from there for prolonged periods of time (minutes, not days)
I think if you minimize the main window it gets even worse
It's completely unacceptable
mrkpdl
I’ve always felt the decline in Mac OS started on the day of the ‘Back To The Mac’ event in 2010. And has continued since. Symbolically this event made clear the iOS first focus of the company. And since then Mac OS updates have continued to be secondary/lesser to iOS.
Mac OS is still my system of choice, but I don’t have as much confidence in it as I would like.
The big thing from around fifteen years ago is the mixed modes for autosave, where they sort of half heartedly changed the language around save/save as and just sort of… left it. Some apps use their new (for the 2010s) auto save system and some don’t. And it’s up the the user to muddle through. Weird. And there are many half baked things like this in the OS now.
Mac hardware, on the other hand, has never been better than it is right now!
venturecruelty
By 2035, I'm not even sure I'll have a computer. (Sort of a joke, but like, at this rate...)
My current OS X update strategy is: I don't, mostly. I'm a few versions behind, and at this point, I'd rather keep an OS that sort of works and just deal with the script kiddies, then upgrade to an OS that doesn't work and have to deal with my OS vendor.
amluto
> It started with the macOS that brought the iOS settings panel.
The ridiculous thing is that Microsoft already made approximately this mistake with the Windows 8 “PC Settings” disaster.
abhinavk
It's still in process. Today's update (KB5070311) added the following:
> Keyboard settings for "character repeat delay and rate", and "cursor blink rate", have moved from Control Panel to Settings.
perryizgr8
Even more ridiculous that the same mistake continues in Windows 11 today!
weaksauce
about 5 months ago i jumped ship to kde plasma and it's been great. took a month or two to get the most prized things working the way i wanted but kde is so configurable that you can get it to work pretty much identical to a mac. toshy gives you all the familiar mac keyboard shortcuts and lets you do per application configs. I can't see going back to a mac unless an employer mandated it. the freedom you have is refreshing. if something doesn't work the way you want it you can change it.
xp84
> if something doesn't work the way you want it you can change it.
This sentence here is my biggest heartbreak with modern “computing.” I came up in the Windows 98/XP days and over about 7 years from 98-05 basically gained full mastery of basically every aspect of Windows and how to change it, and also from 03 on started using Mac OS X daily and found it to be just as customizable or more, in most ways that mattered. I felt that my computer was my own and loved having full control, making it perfect for me.
None of that is possible now. You cannot even select your own notification sound for Messages on MacOS anymore. Only the 20 sounds packaged with the OS. What. The. F%$k.
noduerme
I'm still on Monterey, on a 2021 M1 that works just fine. I'm not buying a new Mac this year specifically to avoid having to spend days dealing with all the potential headaches of updating my dev environments. I hate upgrading. I don't want any of the new stuff. I just want something that works. The first thing I do when I get a new Mac is uninstall every piece of Apple software that can be uninstalled, then use Little Snitch to block all their IP addresses.
That being said, now AWS is forcing all my RDS instances to upgrade to mysql 9 (also: Why???), so I need to get 9 working on my dev box, and tonight I'm up against a wall trying to work through Homebrew issues. There's no way to win.
JKCalhoun
> It started with the macOS that brought the iOS settings panel.
I get that Apple would want to unify the user experience across the two devices. But, seriously, iOS settings have been shit since iPhone 1.
They should have fixed iOS instead.
pbreit
Tahoe is SOOOO ugly! The huge rounded corners are atrocious. The fonts look terrible. The windows keep snapping, expanding and contracting with no obvious pattern. Yuck.
And iOS's transparencies are disastrous. They make so much of the test illegible.
Nevermark
In my experience Apple's software has been accumulating small annoying bugs for a couple years.
For a couple years I have been noticing regular new glitches in the Apple TV interface accumulating faster than old ones disappear.
Lately the glitch accumulation syndrome seems to have hit macOS. Notes has started doing random bolding, unbolding, changing text size on only one line, etc. After a restart, a finder window with tabs springs to different screen spaces, depending on which tab is open when I try to drop a file on it. Message sometimes draws a few lines of a message with a few pixels vertical and horizontally offset, so there is actual overlap of message parts.
Then there are chronic ones. Safari's save or print to PDF are notorious for not saving pictures you can see, even from reading mode. How are basic functions in Safari not worth fixing, for years?
Apple's HomePods ... for many years. I could write a blog of interesting Pod behavior. I thought having one or a pair in each room would be nice. No, more of them is not nice. Constant bizarreness.
The noticeable acceleration isn't encouraging.
JimDabell
> In my experience Apple's software has been accumulating small annoying bugs for a couple years.
They’ve never not been like this. They don’t know how to write software sustainably and don’t seem interested to learn. They add features faster than they fix bugs. Early on, it was masked by less frequent releases, but switching to an annual cadence made it more obvious. They worked around the problem once by focusing Snow Leopard on bug fixing, but they are just letting the bugs accumulate again now.
phantasmish
There were a couple Apple OS releases in the ‘10s where they were like “hey, not many new features and no big redesign, we mostly increased performance and squashed bugs”
It feels like we’re waaaay over due for one or two of those.
xp84
What’s really out of touch is how they don’t seem to think users would be excited for that. Literally nobody is enthusiastic for more complexity. Literally everyone hates the buggy, flaky mess on iOS, iPadOS, macOS. Maybe a working magical Siri would make an impact but Apple has prove definitively that they can’t build that ever. So, rather than ruining all the OSs further, just fire all the PMs and designers and let the engineers fix the bugs for a couple of years.
0x1ch
> Apple's HomePods ... for many years. I could write a blog of interesting Pod behavior. I thought having one or a pair in each room would be nice. No, more of them is not nice. Constant bizarreness.
Yeah, these have quite the DIY / Jailbreak following I've noticed. They look like neat little devices for music and HA stuff, but I've read similar stuff to your comment.
nixpulvis
My current "favorite" bug is how contacts get randomly merged on iOS. I've called the wrong friend multiple times and it's completely unacceptable for such a basic and core function of iOS.
lapcat
> In my experience Apple's software has been accumulating small annoying bugs for a couple years.
A couple? That's the understatement of the last couple years.
coastalpuma
Last weekend I was writing some quick notes in the Notes app, and I could not get it to stop performing nonsensical completions in blinking yellow text. Apple Intelligence disabled, predictive text disabled, various combinations of backspace escape etc. Nothing worked. How hard is it to code a Notes app that doesn't mess with you?
cjbarber
To Apple: People are complaining because they'd rather you fix it, than them having to leave the platform (moving OSes is annoying, because operating systems have a lot of lock in - data you'd have to move, apps you need to find alternatives for and re-learn).
The iOS / macOS 26 frustration I think is particularly felt by the HN type crowd. Don't want something that looks cool but is less effective/performant/usable. "We" can feel Apple's priorities drifting away from ours.
Side note: I wonder how much easier AI will make it to migrate between operating systems? Perhaps future AI systems that are good at computer-usage could manage migrations/installs well.
zamalek
I coincidentally watched BasicallyHomeless's video on his 100+ day Linux experiment and he made a really good point: because everything on Linux can be done with the CLI, it also has a working natural language interface (Claude Code). He ran into several issues, such as sound (allegedly that's no surprise, but not my experience), and Claude fixed them all.
If it doesn't wipe your drive.
Still, interesting thought.
munificent
Response from Apple: We know you have a lot of vendor lock-in, which is why we're doing this. We want shiny features to talk about to get people to buy their first Mac, and don't give a shit about providing a great experience for existing users because we know they won't leave anyway.
devin
The current state does not feel malicious in this way to me at all. It feels bumbling and amateurish. It gives the feeling that the people who kept the product cohesive have left or retired, and that a new generation of overly ambitious careerists have entered positions of leadership.
munificent
I think any organization at Apple's scale has no shortage of skilled workers and ambitious careerists. But at the product level, I do believe that the result you see is generally an honest reflection of the organization's priorities.
If Apple wanted to ship a rock-solid OS, they could. They're just choosing to put those resources elsewhere.
Mistletoe
>the people who kept the product cohesive have left or retired
This is everything post-covid. The competent people that could left and retired early.
lukifer
I feel like it says a lot, when intelligent amorality seems genuinely preferable to blundering incompetence. Many such cases. One wonders how much "enshittification" is intrinsic to networked software and our late-stage-whatever political economy, versus how much is a farcical byproduct of office politics and org chart turf wars.
loloquwowndueo
The alternative for most people is Windows, which Microsoft seems hellbent into making worse and worse (I didn’t think that was possible but hey, here we are). macOS definitely sounds like the least of two evils anyway.
But what do I know - the year of the Linux desktop for me was 1996.
999900000999
Win11 and OSX, and to a limited extent Ubuntu feel like they want to just keep selling you stuff.
You see.
It's not enough.
Buy OneDrive, Gamepass, Copilot Pro. This is a big part of why Microsoft is fine with all the sites selling 10$ Windows keys.
Otherwise you might try Linux to save money.
Buy a Mac, you need Apple Plus Deluxe. You need iCloud, etc.
Ubuntu only tries to upsell you via Ubuntu Pro, I guess it's not as aggressive though.
wpm
Until AI can vibe-code a stable, secure global menu bar for Wayland I'm stuck on macOS for a while.
a-dub
there's some ubuntu/gnome thing that replicates the worst features of the mac.
but here's the real question: why? the global menu bar is literally the most dated and outmoded element in macos. it isn't 1993 anymore. your computer can run more than one program at a time. a globally modal application focus is completely ridiculous. the only thing more ridiculous than a global menu bar is a global spinning beach ball mouse cursor. these are relics of the past and have no place in a modern, multitasking, multiprocessing, multiprocessor, multiscreen computing environment.
moreover, the things that matter, browsers and terminals, don't even have normal menus anyway.
kde plasma is superior in all ways. stop wasting time with weird outmoded 1993 era computer interfaces.
opan
Sounds like the revived Unity/Unity7 still has a global menu bar, and there's a version called UnityX with Wayland support.
https://9to5linux.com/unity-7-7-desktop-environment-to-get-a...
https://unityd.org/unityx-7-7-testing/
https://gitlab.com/ubuntu-unity/unity-x/unityx#manual-instal...
phantasmish
Can AI vibe code a way to get a macOS keyboard layout, basic shortcuts, and macOS-style emacs navigation in gui text boxes across the OS, on Linux? Last I checked all of that is pretty much impossible to achieve without accepting a ton of jank and some parts of the system where it doesn’t work (even the keyboard layout thing!)
rendaw
Are existing menu bars unsecure? Or unstable?
null
dreamcompiler
It's possible to look at the behavior of a company over time and infer their internal incentive structure. It's been clear for several versions of MacOS recently that Apple spends much more energy adding features than fixing bugs. It seems obvious that there is no incentive within Apple to fix bugs; the only thing that gets one promoted at Apple must be adding new features -- so bugs (at least in MacOS) don't get fixed.
We already know that Apple makes about 51% of its revenue from iPhone sales. Therefore it's reasonable to assume promotion opportunities are mostly centered around iPhone hardware and hardware, rather than MacOS. Those of us who depend on MacOS are likely screwed unless something at Apple changes.
hnthrowaway0328
Having read Showstoppers a few times, I wish Apple had a David Cutler that mows on developers' asses if their code is too buggy.
Kinda all large system projects need someone similar to get things done properly.
Paria_Stark
While I love their hardware, this is why I will always chose a Linux distribution over anything closed source. Being able to retrieve logs of pretty much anything and change pieces of the OS as time goes on is extraordinarily resilient.
Sure it's sometimes not as shiny as MacOS, and it will most likely never be polished enough for the mainstream market share, but there's something really awesome about not being reliant on a support engineer that does not have the financial incentive to spend the correct amount of time solving a one off problem.
creata
Plus, resources like the Arch Wiki just don't have alternatives on macOS.
jeroenhd
MSDN used to have some excellent guides for doing all kinds of debugging, configuration, and tweaking of Windows. Somewhere around Windows 8.1 the website got updated and now most resources are either gone or unfindable. I do occasionally come upon some (badly auto-translated) version of those old guides, but download links and links to more information are all 404.
It's a real shame.
venturecruelty
The Arch Wiki is an amazing resource! A hat tip to anyone who edits that. In fact, I think it's worth kicking a few bucks their way this holiday season: https://archlinux.org/donate/
null
exitb
> rush to get the next version of macOS out of the door
That’s the key I think. Apple these days never releases when products are ready, but on a predefined schedule. Point releases that should fix things, are actually delivering more features that were shown on the keynote, but didn’t quite make the main release date.
As a result the systems accumulated some bugs that might never get fixed, unless the code happens to be completely rewritten. The desktop switching animation is hopelessly long when using keyboard shortcuts with ProMotion enabled. On both iOS and macOS the Music app will have an audible click couple of seconds into the first played song when using lossless quality. Stuff like these is known and reported, there’s just seemingly zero bandwidth to handle it.
jonhohle
20 years ago, I was excited to get OS X updates and each one made the system better. When Software Update showed something new, it was always going to be good.
At the same time, Windows Update was an anxiety engine.
Now Software Update has mostly become what Windows Update was. Uninteresting security patches. Each new major update makes the interface worse and adds new bugs or drops old hardware.
hnthrowaway0328
Actually Windows would be much more lovely if MSFT keeps the Windows 7 core and just release security fixes and bug fixes. In the forseeable future, 64-bit should be enough. And I already had everything I need on Windows 7.
aag
<rant>I've never had confidence in MacOS or Apple software in general, and especially not in Apple Photos. Photos beachballs constantly, even when I do simple things like creating a new folder or naming a photo. It loses keystrokes almost every time I type a folder or photo name. No other program does this on the same Mac, which is an M4 Pro with 64GB RAM and terabytes of SSD. I know that it's not a problem with the hardware because the previous Mac Mini, which was well equipped, had the same problem for years. Reconstructing the Photos database didn't help.
Don't get me started about how Time Machine drops files — important files like the Photos Sqlite3 database — from backups.
Yes, I should switch from Photos to something else, e.g. Immich.
I barely use the software included with the Mac, and would only use Linux except that there are still just a few programs or bits of hardware that insist on there being a Mac or Windows machine somewhere.
How Apple every got a reputation for high-quality, user-friendly software is beyond me.
Not recommended.</rant>
linguae
Apple’s reputation for user-friendly software comes from the 1980s, when Windows was very primitive and when the Mac’s biggest competitor was MS-DOS, which was never known for user-friendliness. To be fair to Apple, Apple worked very hard to establish well-conceived UI guidelines and to ship representative software such as MacWrite and MacPaint to show how Mac software should behave.
In the 1990s Windows gradually improved, and Windows 95 was on par with Macintosh System 7.5 in terms of features and ease of use. It even had its own UI guidelines. Windows 95 was one of the factors that led to Apple’s troubles in the mid-1990s.
Even though it took over four years for the purchase of NeXT to lead to the first client release of Mac OS X in 2001, Apple distinguished itself from Windows PC vendors in other ways, such as ease of installation and Apple’s pursuit of the “digital hub” where the Mac was the center of a digital lifestyle involving music, digital cameras, and digital camcorders. This was the era of the iPod, iPhoto, iMovie, GarageBand, and related software.
Of course, Mac OS X solved the Mac’s long-standing stability issues, and Mac OS X also came of age when the Windows world was suffering with malware and security issues.
In my opinion, the Mac peaked in the mid-to-late 2000s, where Mac OS X provided users a solid operating system that was easy to use, and where Macs came bundled with a variety of apps from Apple that made it easy to do a lot of tasks many computer users care about, such as organizing music and photos, as well as editing music and videos.
Then came the iPhone and the tremendous profits that came from the iOS ecosystem, and with it came Apple’s shift in strategy, from the Mac being the digital hub to a hub focused increasingly on iOS and Apple’s cloud services. The Mac hasn’t been the main focus, and in my opinion the decline of Mac software is a reflection of Apple’s focus shift.
radicality
Photos is definitely not great, though I still try and deal with it for the easy iCloud syncing. Some examples off top of my head for Photos crappiness, all on my top of the range 128GB macbook m4 max
- doing 'cmd-R' (rotate) on a standard few-megabyte image might beachball the app for a few seconds. Rotating a small image file...
- Rotating a video seems to re-encode the whole video, instead of setting some metadata flags. Imagine you have, say, a 20GB video recording, and rotate it. That will now be a separate new 20GB file on your mac drive.
- If i view the album of some specific person that has many pictures with location metadata, and I scroll to the bottom where the map is, it almost immediately starts allocating >100GB memory, beachballs, starts gigabytes of memory paging, and you gotta kill the app asap.
jonhohle
The good news is that recently Photos has stopped beachballing for me (≈170GB library). It now just crashes instead.
jasoneckert
I dual boot my M1 Mac Studio with Fedora Asahi Remix (native Linux for Apple Silicon for those unfamiliar). I'm far more comfortable and productive in Linux for development, but wanted to keep macOS there for times when I needed it.
It turns out I haven't needed it, and I honestly don't remember the last time I've booted into macOS on that system.
I like Apple hardware, but the last time I enjoyed using macOS was pre-2010.
dreamcompiler
I do the same thing on my M2 Air. But it's still annoying that Asahi drains the battery so fast when the computer sleeps.
hnthrowaway0328
What does Asahi lack for M1 boxes? I bought a used M1 pro and is itchy to try it out!
nntwozz
“People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.” — Alan Kay
It's ironic after fighting the good fight for so long and finally making their own hardware that Apple should fall on their own sword with software now.
I've been loving Apple since Tiger, I'm still on Sequoia and iOS 18.
Pepe prayge for the 27-releases to be another Snow Leopard as rumored.
linguae
This isn’t the first time Apple’s been in this situation. The first PowerPC Mac was released in 1994, but core elements of the classic Mac OS remained written for the Motorola 68000. Pink/Taligent and Copland never panned out. It took until Mac OS X to be released in 2001 for PowerPC Macs to receive an operating system that was fully made for it, and even then Mac OS X undergone successive performance improvements. By then, it was time for the Intel switch. Snow Leopard’s was Intel-only, so PowerPC Macs cannot go beyond Leopard.
hnthrowaway0328
Is it true there is a rumor about the next release being mostly a bug/perf fix?
hedgehog
I've been using Macs in various forms since the 80s and I've carried a Mac laptop with me nearly full time since the early 2000s. While I don't think quality is necessarily overall worse than a decade or two ago I have run out of patience for rewrites with major regressions of most of the apps I care about. For the first time in a lot of years I have a Linux laptop along side my Mac and, if all works out, I'm planning to shift all my important workflows over.
xp84
My least favorite thing on the Mac is when they have one of their infamous negative number “error codes” in the alert box, and I get my hopes up that at least it must represent a common thread of errors others have had that may be solved in a forum or subreddit somewhere, then when googling that you discover that all forms of failure from disk full to malware result in the exact same oddly-specific error code and that everyone is talking to each other about it and slowly realizing they have nothing in common but being cursed by Tim Cook.
koito17
If I recall correctly, many of those are "Carbon-related" errors and mostly represent legacy baggage of Mac OS.
Not defending the design, but this website is sometimes useful for disambiguating OSStatus error codes: https://www.osstatus.com/
I typically jump on the latest macOS with enthusiasm. I once made the mistake to install the beta version of the next os, and well, that didn't go well for me. But typically, within X.1, I'm there.
However something shifted since this "visionOS" melted version of macOS (Tahoe); where I have absolutely no intension to upgrade from Sequoia. I hope they will fix it by the time I'll be forced to upgrade (post support deadline).
It started with the macOS that brought the iOS settings panel. We went from a logical structure of easily findable stuff to a complete mess. Just open the "Keyboard" settings on macOS today and it's bewildering how they could ship this and think this is fine. Steve would roll in his grave.
The process to allow running applications that are unsigned is just a horrible hack. It feels like a last minute "shove it and move on!".
By 2035 I wonder if we'll be all running KDE or WindowMaker and the hell with modern OS GUI.
From a Gestalt standpoint, human relations with desktop computers are not the same as with thumb driven mobile OS or air-pinch driven vision OS, period. The hell with "glass" or "flat" design. Desktop OS should be as forgettable as possible, as it's about having long stints of flow, not giving a feeling of "air" or "play".