Comment by keyle

> 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.

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!

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.

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.

Just a data point, in case it’s useful to anyone: I saw the screenshots and blog posts about Liquid Glass and thought it looked miserable. But then I had a hardware issue and had to upgrade.

I swear after the first 3 days, I’ve only even noticed the new UI maybe a dozen times. If I stop and really pay attention to it, I think the old UI was a bit better, but strangely I don’t really seem to notice the new UI. If it’s worse, I rarely notice.

Then again I spend most of my time in jetbrains IDEs, iterm2, and Firefox (none of which have changed much). So I might be a special case.

> 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.

> 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!".

If you're talking about the process that just says "Foo.app is damaged and can’t be opened." and the only way around that is to manually remove the com.apple.quarantine extended attribute, that's arguably working as intended. Apple doesn't want users to run untrusted apps period. They want only apps approved by them.

As a dev and open source dev I don't like it. But, I can't totally be against it I think. It is safer for some users and experts can learn how to remove the attribute with `xattr -d com.apple.quarantine filename`

I have updated as soon as possible and I if you asked me, I couldn't tell you what is different now. Everything I do on a daily basis still works exactly the same. If there are some weird more rounded corners somewhere now, I don't consciously notice them. The glassy effects look cool but after a week you don't even think about them any more.

> 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.

KDE is so good. Every release they make tangible UX improvements to the point where now most subsystems are almost perfect. There's always been things where I think "oh well that could be better". The notification center, the kickoff menu, krunner, the desktop overview. And then it just got better and better.

"macOS encounters an error or fault, but doesn’t report that to the user, instead just burying it deep in the log."

This is another huge facet of the problem. Not only does it hide glaring problems from the user and prevent him from taking action, but it prevents him from reporting it to Apple for potential redress.

Apple loves to hide information, with the excuse that it's "too scary" for the "average user." This has always been bullshit. If "the average user" is put off by information he receives, he can at least use it to consult someone who isn't.

iOS Mail is a great example. It can utterly fail to access your mail server because of wrong credentials or whatever, but it won't tell you. In fact, it'll claim, "Updated just now." So a day or two goes by and you've missed important work or personal E-mails before you even decide to investigate. This is obviously offensive, because Apple has decided that your work and your communications are less important than hiding their defects... which might not even have been to blame!

When you combine the glaring QA failures piling up with the obnoxious douchebaggery and law-flouting that Apple has engaged in with its app store, it's pretty clear that the company needs a major management housecleaning.

Apple loves to coddle and promote certain pets, who are often incompetent but for some reason curry favor with management. Look at the "Liquid Glass" fiasco and hideous UI regressions in Mac OS and iOS. This is what happens when you put an unqualified packaging designer in charge of UI at a company that's held out as the paragon of "elegant" design. Jony Ive was a pompous hack with one idea... or actually two: 1. "Thinner" 2. Less useful

We had a brief respite with his departure, but now... things might be even worse. And at a time when Windows has been degraded into unredeemable garbage... it's a grim outlook for popular computing.

> By 2035 I wonder if we'll be all running KDE or WindowMaker and the hell with modern OS GUI

I love Linux, but I doubt that will happen. If anything, by then Linux will be a feature of a workstation OS running in a hypervisor, just like it is with Windows and ChromeOS today.

> 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".

There's nothing stopping you from running a Linux desktop with a minimalist tiling window manager - I have for years and found it does exactly what you say.

But it sounds like it's more that you don't like that there aren't many product offerings like that. That is true. Even computers with Linux pre installed use "bouncy" desktop environments like Gnome/KDE by default.

My preference - ChromeOS - comes the closest but is still nowhere near as stripped down as i3 tiling window manager (which I also think is great).

Yea im even worse, i was on mojave until last year.

Update frustration has long set in.

Im gonna buy the new macbook pro with the M5 max when it comes out in a couple of months (from an intel 2019) and this will probably be my last mac, im giving them one last chance before i move to Linux.

I dont have big hopes though…

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.

> By 2035 I wonder if we'll be all running KDE or WindowMaker and the hell with modern OS GUI.

That is what I wished for back in the 2000's, eventually I went back to Windows starting with Windows 7, because I got fed up with laptop support.

As the main laptop OS, I never stopped having UNIX based systems on servers across many customer projects, or trying out the flavour of the month via local VMs, since hardware virtualization became a commodity.

> where I have absolutely no intension to upgrade from Sequoia

Beware of not upgrading accidentally, like i did... (dark pattern):

"The Software Update UI for Upgrading to MacOS 26 Tahoe Is Needlessly Confusing" : https://daringfireball.net/2025/11/software_update_tahoe_con...

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.

  > 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".

its almost as if apple doesnt want to sell "trucks" anymore (as steve would say) and would prefer to morph macos slowly into a sedan like the ipad (cause that is where the money is)

  > By 2035 I wonder if we'll be all running KDE or WindowMaker and the hell with modern OS GUI.

On the other hand, presumably Steve was happy with the insanity of the iOS settings app, where applications had their settings only accessible in another application.

It's basically a "when to rip the band-aid off" type of situation.

Briefly poked around w/ linux again for the first time in years (Omarchy, DHH's tune of Arch + hyprland), and hoo boy, it's come a long way! Nothing like the KDE/Gnome+X jankery of the olden times. Very polished, very slick, very nice.

I like “intension” it’s like “intention” + “tension.” The act of planning something, but anxiously.

> By 2035 I wonder if we'll be all running KDE or WindowMaker and the hell with modern OS GUI.

Ironically, it was all downhill since KDE2.

[dead]

> Steve would roll in his grave.

Steve understood better than anyone that having a finite amount of time to build means you can't please everyone. The vast majority of Apple's customers just do not care about the Keyboard settings UI or the clarity of unusual error messages.