This is not the first time this has happened in Apple’s history. The transition from the 68k architecture to the PowerPC brought major performance improvements, but Apple’s software didn’t take full advantage of it. If I remember correctly, even after the PowerPC switch, core elements of the classic Mac OS still ran in emulation as late as Mac OS 9. Additionally, the classic Mac OS lacked protected memory and preemptive multitasking, leading to relatively frequent crashes. Taligent and Copland were attempts to address these issues, but they both faced development hell, culminating with the purchase of NeXT and the development of Mac OS X. But by the time Mac OS X was released, PowerPC was becoming less competitive than the x86, culminating with the Intel switch in 2006. At this point it was Apple’s software that distinguished Macs from the competition, which remained the case until the M1 Macs were released five years ago.
> Hardware and software both matter, and Apple’s history shows that there’s a good argument to be made for developing integrated hardware and software. But if you asked me which matters more, I wouldn’t hesitate to say software. All things considered I’d much prefer a PC running Mac OS X to a Mac running Windows.
At the time I'd only been a Mac user for a few years and I would have strongly agreed. But definitely things have shifted— I've been back on Windows/WSL for a number of years, and it's software quality/compatibility issues that are a lot of what keeps me from trying another Mac. Certainly I'm far more tempted by the hardware experience than I am the software, and it's not even really close.
That’s so wild to me - my personal laptop is still a Mac but I’m in windows all day for work. Some of the new direction of macOS isn’t awesome but the basics are still rock solid. Touchpad is perfect, sleep works 100% of the time for days on end, still has UNIX underneath.
Same boat, and 100% agree. I couldn’t find a single example of Windows or Windows software where I think the experience is in any way better. Windows only saving grace, as a developer, is WSL.
For a simple example, no app remembers the last directory you were working in. The keys each app uses are completely inconsistent from app to app. And it was only in Windows 11 that Windows started remembering my window configuration when I plugged and unplugged a monitor. Then there’s the Windows 95-style dialog boxes mixed in with the Windows 11-style dialog boxes; what a UI mess. I spoke with one vendor the other day who was actually proud they’d adopted a ribbon interface in their UI “just like Office” and I verbally laughed.
From a hardware perspective, I still don’t understand why Windows and laptop manufacturers can’t get sleep working right. My Intel MacBook Pro with an old battery still sleeps and wakes and lasts for several hours, while my new Windows laptop lasts about an hour and won’t wake from hibernate half the time without a hard reboot.
I think Windows is the “good enough” for most people.
> I don't think the automation options in MacOS are better than AutoHotKey (even Linux doesn't have something as good).
Did you try Keyboard Maestro https://www.keyboardmaestro.com/main/ (I've never used AutoHotKey and I'd be super curious if there are deficiencies in KM relative to it, but Keyboard Maestro is, from my perspective, a masterpiece, it's hard to imagine it being any better.)
Also I think this statement needs a stronger defense given macOS includes Shortcuts, Automator, and AppleScript, I don't know much about Windows automation but I've never heard of them having something like AppleScript (that can say, migrate data between applications without using GUI scripting [e.g., iterate through open browser tabs and create todos from each of them operating directly on the application data rather than scripting the UI]).
Yeah, the things that AppleScript can do is so crazy.
I've fully automated keeping 1 tab in Chrome logged into a website that insists on logging me out every hour or something. (not banking or anything)
Mac also can't get sleep right. Have you tried to make a macbook consistently be 'awake' when the lid is closed?
You can't, really. Almost everyone resorts to buying an HDMI dongle to fake a display. Apple solved the problem at such a low level, the flexibility to run something in clamshell mode is broken, even when using caffeine/amphetamine/etc etc etc.
So, tradeoffs. They made their laptops go to sleep very well, but broke functionality in the process. You can argue it's a good tradeoff, just acknowledge that there WAS a tradeoff made.
I did for years too, but newer MacBooks no longer allow running with lid-closed unless connected to a monitor, I was disappointed to recently learn this.
If I’m wrong, someone tell me how to do it! On an M4 MacBook Air running latest OSX release.
I don’t mean this to sound like I’m being a jerk, but why would I want my MacBook to be awake with the lid closed? If I want it to be awake doing something, I leave the lid open and let the screen sleep. Maybe I’ve been using a Mac too long, but lid closed means sleep to me. I’ll even do that when I have it plugged into a monitor: close the lid to make it sleep.
> And it was only in Windows 11 that Windows started remembering my window configuration when I plugged and unplugged a monitor.
Oh god, I'm going to have to bite the bullet and switch to 11, huh?
The one thing that has been saving me from throwing my PC out the window in rage has been the monitor I have that supports a "keep alive" mode where switching inputs is transparent to the computers connected to it. So when switching inputs between my PC and laptop neither one thinks the monitor is being disconnected/reconnected. If it wasn't for that, I'd be screaming "WHY ARE YOU MOVING ALL MY WINDOWS?" on a regular basis. (Seriously, why are you moving all my windows? Sure, if they're on the display that was just disconnected, I get you. But when I connect a new display, Windows 10 seems to throw a dart at the display space for every window and shuffle them to new locations. Windows that live in a specific place on a specific display 100% of the time just fly around for no reason. Please god just stop.)
A friend of mine lost a ton of messages when upgrading the OS (and therefore Mail). A number of others were affected by the same issue. There have been show-stopper bugs in the core functionality of Photos as well. I don't get the impression that the basics are Apple's focus with respect to software.
It’s not as if such bugs are unheard of for Windows users, and certainly not Linux users.
But I’ve certainly never struggled with getting WiFi to work on a Mac, or struggled with getting it to sleep/wake, or a host of other problems you routinely have on both Windows and Linux.
I haven't heard about surprise-your-files-are-deleted bugs in core programs of other systems. That's a bigger show-stopper in my opinion.
To compare Apples to apples, you'd have to look at a Framework computer and agree that wifi is going to work out of the box... but here I'm meeting you on a much weaker argument: "Apple's software basics are /not/ rock solid, but other platforms have issues too"
> I haven't heard about surprise-your-files-are-deleted bugs in core programs of other systems. That's a bigger show-stopper in my opinion.
I don't find your original anecdote convincing:
> A friend of mine lost a ton of messages when upgrading the OS (and therefore Mail).
E.g., what does this mean? They lost mail messages? How did they verify they had those messages before and after? E.g., file-system operations? GUI search? How much do they know about how Mail app stores message (e.g., I used to try understand this decades ago, but I expect today messages aren't even necessarily always stored locally)? How are you syncing mail messages, e.g., using native IMAP, or whatever Gmail uses, or Exchange? What's the email backend?
E.g. without deeper evidence this sounds more like a mail message indexing issue rather than a mail-messages-stored-on-disk-issue (in 2025, I'd personally have zero expectations about how Mail manages messages on disk, e.g., I'd expect local storage of message to be dynamically managed like most applications that aren't document-based use a combination of cloud functionality and local caching, e.g., found this in a quick search https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/471801/ensure-maco...), but if you have stronger evidence I'd love to hear it. But as presented your extrapolating much stronger conclusions than are warranted by the anecdote in my opinion.
Mail deleted a large number of messages but not all of them. It was stored in files (which were smaller on disk, so not an indexing issue) and recovery required loading snapshots from Time Machine, converting to a format Thunderbird could import and transitioning to that.
You've only addressed something like 30% of the issues I asked about (although I'm honestly impressed you got that far), e.g., I wouldn't call Apple Mail an application designed to managed a collection of emails on disk. Isn't the important question here whether the emails were still stored on the server? E.g., or were they using POP?
I've been using Mac OS since 10.3 and, whilst it's better now, I've had a memorable number of of wifi connection bugs. And ISTR issues with waking from sleep, but that might have been before the Intel migration. It's never been immune from bugs.
> But I’ve certainly never struggled with getting WiFi to work on a Mac
I want to be able to set different networking options (manual DNS, etc) for different wifi networks, but as far as I can tell, I can only set them per network interface.
There's something like "locations" but last time I tried using that, the entire System Settings.app slowed to a crawl / beachballed until I managed to turn it back off.
> or struggled with getting it to sleep/wake
My m1 MBP uses something like 3-5% of its battery per hour while sleeping, because something keeps waking it up. I tried some app that is designed to help you diagnose the issue but came up empty-handed.
... but yes on both counts, it's light years better than my last experience with Linux, even on hardware that's supposed to have fantastic support (thinkpads).
I come back to my work MBP M2 dead almost everyday and I have to leave it charged or wait 15 minutes for Mac to decide that it is okay to boot even when the power has been connected.
In my case it works roughly ~50% of the time. Probably because of the Thunderbolt monitor connected to power it, idk.
> the basics are still rock solid
The basics like the OS flat out refusing to provide you any debugging information on anything going wrong? It's rock solid allright. I had an issue where occasionally I would get an error "a USB device is using too much power, try unplugging it and replugging it." Which device? Why the hell would Apple tell you that, where is the fun in that?
Key remapping requires installing a keylogger, nor can you have a different scroll direction between mouse and touchpad. There still isn't window management which for the sizes of modern monitors is quite constraining.
> still has UNIX underneath
A very constrained UNIX. A couple of weeks ago I wanted to test something (pkcs11-tool signing with a software HSM), and turns out that Apple has decided that libraries can only be loaded from a number of authorised locations which can only be accessed while installing an application. You can't just use a dynamic library you're linking to, it has to be part of a wider install.
I've been primarily on a Macbook for the past three years, after almost 10 years using Chromebooks as my primary machines (yay work at Google). Until 2015, I had been a rabid defender of Thinkpads (T-series, mostly), and used Windows at work and Linux (mostly Kubuntu) at home, from around 2009-2015.
Long story short, I was very happy with the "it just works" of ChromeOS, and only let down by the lack of support for some installed apps I truly needed in my personal life. I tried a Mac back in 2015 but couldn't get used to how different it was, and it felt very bulky compared to ChromeOS and much slower than the Linux machine I'd had, so I switched to a Pixelbook as was pretty content.
Fast forward to 2023 when I needed to purchase a new personal laptop. I'd bought my daughter a Pixelbook Go in 2021 and my son a Lenovo x1 Carbon at the same time. Windows was such a dumpster fire I absolutely ruled it out, and since I could run all the apps I needed on ChromeOS it was between Linux & Mac. I decided to try a Mac again, for both work & personal, and I've been a very happy convert ever since.
My M2 Pro has been rock solid, and although I regret choosing to upgrade to Sequoia recently, it still makes me feel better than using Windows. M4 Pro for work is amazingly performant and I still can't get over the battery efficiency. The nicest thing, imho, is that the platform has been around long enough for a mature & vibrant ecosystem of quality-of-life utilities to exist at this point, so even little niggles (like why do I need the Scroll Reverser app at all?) are easy to deal with, and all my media editing apps are natively available.
The basics are not rock solid. Even a core feature such as remote management crashes and freezes every 5 minutes when you connect from a non-apple machine, many have reported this over years but Apple just does Apple. Safari is still atrocious when it comes to web api supports. The worst part is, with Apple, we do not know if these are intentional anti-competitive barriers or actual software bugs. I purchased a mac mini simply to compile apps via xcode and can say the core experience is MUCH more buggy than a fresh Windows or Ubuntu install.
Edit: Hard to call intentionally preventing support for web apis a power user thing. This creates more friction for basic users trying to use any web app.
Edit2: lol Apple PR must be all over this, went from +5 to -1 in a single refresh. Flagged for even criticizing what they intentionally break.
Safari adds hours of battery life due to its hyper focus on power consumption. The level to which web API standards are affected is rather immaterial to me. I imagine we’re different consumers though.
Adds hours of battery life to the expense of making your microphone input completely inaudible due to throttling if you background the tab it's running on.
On iOS you cannot even keep a web app running in the background. The second they mutlitask, even with an audio/microphone active, Apple kills it. Are they truly adding battery life or are they cheating by creating restrictions that prevent apps from working?
Being able to conduct a voice call through the browser seems like a pretty basic use case to me.
Breaking things is not extending battery life. Battery life assumes functionality. Breaking functionality to extend it is a scapegoat and the break-whatever-you-want could be provided as a mode instead of one-size fits all, we don't care what breaks approach.
Why would you want to support web APIs? They're all just Google proposing 5000 new ways for advertisers to fingerprint you but doing it through "standards".
Nice strawman. The core of webapis is about opening up lower level functionality from the sandbox/accessibility of the web. Beyond audio and video IO, there's great stuff coming with webgpu and webNN. Web apps are much safer and much more convenient than downloading an app, well in theory they could be if support wasn't regularly sabotaged to protect a corporate interest in walled gardens.
If we dismiss remote management as a non-core feature shouldn't we consider installing a new browser to be advanced usage as well?
I understand that this post is about MacOS, but yes, we are forced to support Safari for iOS. Many of these corporate decisions to prevent web apps from functioning properly spill over from MacOS Safari to iOS Safari.
The best part of MacOS for me is the unix tools. The command line is a real unix command line. And the rest just works. If I need a linux environment I ssh into a VPS.
It doesn't matter for everyone/most. But, yes, having a Unix command line within MacOS is a pretty big win for some of us. Not something I use on a daily basis certainly. And I'd probably set up a Linux box (or ssh into one) if I really needed that routinely. But it's a nice bonus.
Well, kind of.. the commands on Mac OS all just a little bit different and a little bit janky. I still had to relearn all the common commands I use in order to function. I survived 6 months before I went back to a Windows/WSL combo.
Notice the op said Unix not Linux. Gnu made a lot of incompatible changes from the Unix tools it was cloning. Many people in the Linux community prefer the GNU quirks (they are definitely more performance optimized for example). But if you are talking about Unix, the FreeBSD derived userland on a Mac has real Unix lineage.
Or even just containers on the Mac. Unless you need a GPU with specific hardware, or to connect to a cluster, there's ever decreasing need to use remote boxes.
Fully supported Linux + proper suspend-to-RAM are the two things I want out of Apple Silicon and may never quite get. Better online low power states are fine, but I want suspend-to-RAM and suspend-then-hibernate.
If I close my laptop for a few days, I don't want significant battery drain. If I don't use it for two weeks, I want it to still have life left. And I don't want to write tens of gigabytes to disk every time I close the lid, either!
What happens if you enable airplane mode before closing the laptop? That should power down all radios so battery drain should be approximately equivalent to S3 standby.
"Fully supported by whom" is the issue and important one. Apple won't do it and going by support from "most people around here" Hector Martin et al got crumbs for years, nowhere near to support the development.
One can just hand wave "Apple must support Linux and all" but that is not going to get anything done.
I've felt the opposite for more than a decade. On Linux, it's relatively easy for me to choose a set of applications which all use the same UI toolkit. Additionally, the web browser is often called "Web Browser" in the application launcher, LibreOffice Writer "Word Processor", and so on. In general there is far less branding and advertisement and more focus on function. Linux was the first OS with an "app store" (the package manager). CLI utilities available tend to be the full fat versions with all the useful options, rather than minimalist versions there to satisfy posix compatibility. I could go on.
On Linux there is variety and choice, which some folks dislike.
But on the Mac I get whatever Apple gives me, and that is often subject to the limitations of corporate attention spans and development budgets.
> The web browser is often called "Web Browser" in the application launcher, LibreOffice Writer "Word Processor", and so on. In general there is far less branding and advertisement and more focus on function.
Should Emacs and Vim both be called "Editor" then?
To me, this is actually a great example of the problems with Linux as a community, that GUI applications seem to just be treated as placeholders (e.g., all word processors are the same?), but then its inconsistent by celebrating the unique differences between editors like Vim and Emacs. Photoshop, Excel, Logic Pro, Final Cut Pro are, in my opinion, crown jewels of what we've accomplished in computing, and by extension some of the greatest creations of the human race, democratizing tasks that in some cases would have cost millions of dollars before (e.g., a recording studio in your home). Relegating these to generic names like "spreadsheet", makes them sound interchangeable, when in my opinion they're each individual creations of great beauty that should wear their names with pride. They've helped improve the trajectory of the human race by facilitating many individuals to perform actions they never would have had the resources to do otherwise.
I don't mind corporate branding in general, e.g., if a company makes a great app, why shouldn't they be allow to put their name on it (in an appropriate place)? (And I do think great apps should have more memorable names than "Photo Editor".) (And I'm not sure I get the connection branding has to "Freedom of Choice"?)
But, to your point, even I'll admit the fact that the Photoshop is called "Adobe Photoshop 2025" is annoying lol.
Where it's mattered for me has been in supporting family like my Grandmother. She's passed now, but ran Linux on her desktop for web and email for about a decade. I set it up for her after her Windows install got a nasty virus. I appreciated that she didn't have to learn that "Safari" meant "the internet" and so on. She didn't even have to know she was using Linux. Just how to get to the web. And Linux desktops made that a little easier for her, and less work for me.
Got it, yeah that's a very valid use case for a setup like that. But I'm not sure there's much that's OS dependent to support a setup like that? E.g., I could do the same on macOS (e.g., on macOS a wrapper `Web Browser.app` could be made that launches Safari in the Dock [with the Safari icon, or any other, if that's desirable]).
I'm a Linux fan and I like that Apple isn't rubber-stamping the two new web APIs a week that Google comes up with. There are hundreds of them, most of them quite small fortunately.
You are right in saying that discoverability has suffered much, by hiding scrollbar and similar changes. Also, you need to move the mouse precisely
to a particular spot to re-enable the scrollbars, there is little wiggle room,
which may may things harder for handicapped people, older users, or people
on the move (e.g. me on a train).
Yeah, e.g. when you have a very short scrollbar and had to guess where it is for more than 5 seconds...I'm kinda grow past that hype, nada, going back to Winux.
It is SUCH a pity that they have extraordinary hardware (even with the price point I'd still consider it a bargin, especially for the air/mini)...
Or just the way the menus are on apps. Some app implement their own file/edit/view menus at the top of the app, then some will use the apple version at the top of the OS. If you plug in a TV to use as a monitor and cannot adjust the aspect ratio you're forced to blindly activate these menus as they're clipped from the screen.
MacOS folder navigation is a complete pain too, sometimes you see the list of OS folders, sometimes you see only the folder you opened in finder. If the menu is clipped due to the above aspect ratio problem, good luck getting to your home folder... No functionality to easily open a folder in terminal. Lots of basics just counter-intuitive.
Yeah, I found it not easy to go up one level in finder. Actually I had to Google when I tried first time. The way that MacOS wants to conceal information from the users is just insane. I don't know how it is justified. Nevertheless it has a good number of ardent fans.
I don't understand. From a pure visual standpoint OSX beats. Linux is not particularly known for looking good or cohesive. But in basically all matters it beats the pants of OSX.
The UX only sucks if you're unwilling to put in a minimal amount of time and effort. After that, it has no equal; it is, by definition, the opposite of vanity.
To me it's not a MacOS vs Windows thing. It's a hardware build quality thing for sure; but even more importantly it's the integration with the OS. Now, you could say we could get a team together and integrate Windows too, but the problem is this is vastly more effective when the hardware and software are co-designed in the same house with strong feedback loops. As a result Apple's product will inevitably be better than those without such an organizational backbone.
Quoth the Tao of Programming:
8.4
Hardware met Software on the road to Changtse. Software said: "You are Yin and I am Yang. If we travel together, we will become famous and earn vast sums of money." And so they set forth together, thinking to conquer the world.
Presently, they met Firmware, who was dressed in tattered rags and hobbled along propped on a thorny stick. Firmware said to them: "The Tao lies beyond Yin and Yang. It is silent and still as a pool of water. It does not seek fame; therefore, nobody knows its presence. It does not seek fortune, for it is complete within itself. It exists beyond space and time."
Software and Hardware, ashamed, returned to their homes.
these days i'd rather have macbook running windows than macos running on standard windows laptop of the same form factor, purely for the efficiency of apple silicon.
Seeing my wife have to deal with BSOD and tedious restarts for Windows updates and myriad just to use Teams/Excel makes me think the software issues are far worse on the Windows side.
Not once in 10 years have I had ti troubleshoot while she uses her personal macOS, but a Dell Latitude laptop in 2025 still can’t just “open lid, work, close lid”.
Curiously every big player/vendor doing something remotely relevant to GPU/NPU/APU etc. sees massive growth. Apple's M-processors are much better in terms price/value ratio for current ML pipelines. But Apple do not have server line, which then seems to be super massive problem for their products, even though their products actually compete with NVidia in the consumer market, which is very substantial position, software or not.
AMD was also lagging with drivers, but now we see OpenAI swearing they gonna buy loads of their products, which so many people were not favor of liek just 5-7 years ago.
Software is very easy to bloat, expand scope, and grow to do more than really needed, or just to release apps that are then forgotten about.
Hardware is naturally limited in scope due to manufacturing costs, and doesn't "grow" in the same way. You replace features and components rather than constantly add to them.
Apple needs someone to come in and aggressively cut scope in the software, removing features and products that are not needed. Pair it down to something manageable and sustainable.
macOS has way too many products but far too few features. In terms of feature-completeness, it's already crippled. What OS features can macOS afford to lose?
I would say it's less about losing and more about focus. Identify the lines of business you don't want to be in and sell those features to a third party who can then bundle them for $1/$10/$20. A $2T company just doesn't care, but I would bet that those excised features would be good enough for a smaller software house.
(I have the same complaint about AWS, where a bunch of services are in KTLO and would be better served by not being inside AWS)
If you think hardware can't bloat, I suggest you look into the history of Intels attempt to replace x86. Or the VAX. Not to mention tons of minicomputer companies who built ever more complex minis. And not to mention the supercomputer startup bubble.
Well besides software that runs in data centers/ cloud most other software is turning to crap. And people who think this crap is fine have now reached to position of responsibility at lot of companies. So things would go only worse from here.
The OSS that keeps getting "better" is one that accept lot user feature requests and/or implementation. Else maintainers are hostile to users. And when they do accept most of those requests and code we all know how it goes.
Gimp has generally been getting better and more capable for free, and hasn't launched any cloud-based subscription services, feature gates, ad-funded functionality or done price hikes like almost every one of its commercial competitors.
There's also Krita, which artists love.
That this comment keeps oscillating between upvoted and downvoted (with significant spikes in both directions) is an interesting insight into the span of opinions on HN between the hustler types who hate the idea of software that doesn't turn a quick buck, and the crafters :-)
This right here is moving me back to GrapheneOS and Linux. I was lucky enough to be able to uninstall Liquid glAss before the embargo. I will miss the power efficiency of my M1, but the trade off keep looking better and better.
being poor, I need to sell my Macbook to get money to pay of my 16e, then sell the 16e and use that money to but a Pixel 9, then probably a but a Thinkpad Carbon X1. Just saying all that to show you the lengths I am going through to boycott/battle the enshitification.
It's not talking to an LDAP server, it's the functionality for talking to an LDAP server that is causing the issue. Even if you don't need LDAP you're still vulnerable when a client can inject information in a log message.
Why is this functionality needed in the first place? I want to write log, some kind of string, into some kind of files, with rotation, maybe even send it somewhere that expect logs.
Why parse whatever is in the logs, at all?
Imagine the same stuff in your SSH client, it would parse the content before sending them over because a functionality requires it to talk to some server somewhere, it's insanity.
Log4j contains a very big collection of extensions for just about anything including inserting data from various sources.
Of course it's overkill for lots of situation, but nobody ever uses all functionality. It's just that nobody can agree on which functionality is useless ;)
Indeed a software used by thousands of commercial products and millions of enterprise applications with ZERO dollar support from either must be maintained at perfect, bug free level by lazy volunteers. Because internet demands it.
Would it even be possible to create today's software ecosystems by mandating all libraries are maintained and supported to the strictest standards?
That would be the end of open source, hobbyists and startup companies because you'd have to pay up just to have a basic C library (or hope some companies would have reasonable licensing and support fees).
Remember one of the first GNU projects was GCC because a compiler was an expensive, optional piece of software on the UNIX systems in those days.
That would be the end of the software industry. No company outside of aerospace and medical devices is capable of delivering this and I even have my doubts about those two, though at least they are trying.
It's not really added functionality, more unintended consequences of too much flexibility. Java contains JNDI (Java naming & directory interface), a very unified 'directory' system for all kinds of configuration of which LDAP is just one of the backend implementation options. The key issue is you can call into other objects which is unwise to do when used with untrusted user input.
> The key issue is you can call into other objects which is unwise to do when used with untrusted user input.
This, and while in this case it is specifically unwise on security terms, there are plenty of other example where the feature are completely cosmetic and deviates from the core user requirements/scenario.
I don't think it's the modern Apple, I think that's just Apple.
I remember using iTunes when fixing the name of an album was a modal blocking function that had to write to each and every MP3, one by one, in the slowest write I have ever experienced in updating file metadata. Give me a magnetised needle and a steady hand and I could have done it faster.
A long time ago they had some pretty cool design guides, and the visual design has often been nice, but other than that I don't think their software has been notable for its quality.
Apple makes Logic Pro, Final Cut Pro, Notes, Calendar, Contacts, Pages, Numbers, Keynote, Freeform, just from a "quality" standpoint, I'd rank any of those applications as competitive for the "highest quality" app in their category (an admittedly difficult thing to measure). In aggregate, those applications would make Apple the most effective company in the world at making high-quality GUI applications.
Curious if I'm missing something though, is there another entity with a stronger suite than that? Or some other angle to look at this? (E.g., it seems silly to me to use an MP3 metadata example when you're talking about the same company that makes Logic Pro.)
Of those apps you've listed that I've used, none of them have been notable for being high quality to me, though as you say it's difficult to measure. For me I would rate them somewhere between unremarkable (notes, calendar, contacts!?) and awkward (pages, numbers, keynote). If you asked me to guess what desktop software Apple makes that people rate highly, I never would have guessed any of those, except _maybe_ Logic[1] and Final Cut, though ironically those are two of the three I've never used.
I also think you're confusing what I wrote. It's not a competition.
I have just found that Apple's hardware on desktop has been stronger than their software, in my experience (periodic sporadic use, ~2006->now).
[1] and now from a sibling comment I hear that perhaps people regard that tool as bad, so there you go, they jury is clearly out
What software do you find to be higher quality and why? That's the only valid way of even trying to have this conversation.
E.g., I'd rank something like VS Code "lower quality" because when I launch VS Code, I can see each layer of the UI pop in as it's created, e.g., first I see a blank window, then I see window chrome being loaded, then a I see a row of icons being loaded on the left. This gives an impression of the software not being solid, because it feels like the application is struggling just to display the UI.
> I also think you're confusing what I wrote. It's not a competition.
> I have just found that Apple's hardware on desktop has been stronger than their software, in my experience (periodic sporadic use, ~2006->now).
I disagree with this, the only way to make an argument that Apple has deficiencies in their software is to demonstrate that other software is higher quality than Apples. Otherwise it could just be Apple's quality level is the maximum feasible level of quality.
> unremarkable (notes, calendar, contacts!?) and awkward (pages, numbers, keynote).
This is laughable, Notes is unremarkable? Give me a break, and Keynote is awkward? Have you ever Google'd how people feel about these applications?
I'd argue a critic only has value if they're willing to offer their own taste for judgement.
Do you regularly use the alternatives to these programs? Admittedly I'm not cut out to judge the office suite, but the consensus in the music world seems to be that Logic Pro is awful. It lacks support for lots of plugins and hardware, and costs loads for what is essentially a weaker value prop than Bitwig or Ableton Live. Most bedroom musicians are using Garageband or other cheap DAWs like Live Lite, and the professional studios are all bought into Pro Tools or Audition. Don't even get me started on the number of pros I see willingly use Xcode...
It's not exactly clear to me what niche Apple occupies in this market. It doesn't feel like "native Mac UI" is a must-have feature for DAWs or IDEs alike, but maybe that's just my perspective.
> It lacks support for lots of plugins and hardware, and costs loads for what is essentially a weaker value prop than Bitwig or Ableton Live.
This is an obviously silly statement, not only is Logic Pro competitively priced ($200, relative to $100-$400 for Bitwig, $99-$750 for Live), but those applications obviously have different focuses than Logic Pro (sound design and electronic music, versus the more general-purpose and recording focus of Logic Pro, also you'd be hard pressed to find anyone who doesn't think Logic Pro comes with the best suite of stock plugins of any DAW, so the value prop angle is a particularly odd argument to make [i.e., Logic Pro is pretty obviously under priced]).
But all this isn't that important because many of these applications are great. DAWs are one of the most competitive software categories around and there are several applications folks will vehemently defend as the best and Logic Pro is unequivocally one of them.
> Most bedroom musicians are using Garageband or other cheap DAWs like Live Lite, and the professional studios are all bought into Pro Tools or Audition.
> We can see that Pro Tools for music is the most popular choice, with Logic for music second and Pro Tools for post coming third.
Note that I'd say Logic Pro's popularity is actually particularly notable since it's not crossplatform, so the addressable market is far smaller than the other big players. It's phenomenal popular software, both in terms of raw popularity and fans who rave about it. E.g., note the contrast in how people talk about Pro Tools vs. Logic Pro. Logic Pro has some of the happiest users around, but Pro Tools customers talk like they feel like their hostages to the software. That difference is where the quality argument comes in.
That is an awfully large amount of text for what amounts to an admission that Logic Pro is lower quality software than Pro Tools. Your comment reeks of all the hallmarks of Reality Distortion Syndrome, while I'm willing to argue on merits you simply sound smitten by Apple's (rapidly degenerating) accumen for visual design. In the other response, you're telling off a perfectly valid criticism of Apple software because they won't fulfill your arbitrary demand for a better-looking DAW. Are you even engaging with the point they're trying to make?
I'm sorry to say it, but I genuinely think you're detached from the way professionals evaluate software. While I enjoyed my time on macOS when Apple treated it like a professional platform, I have no regrets leaving it behind or it's "quality" software. Apple Mail fucking sucks, iCloud is annoying as sin, the Settings App only got worse year-over-year and the default Music app is somehow slower than iTunes from 2011. Ads pop up everywhere, codecs and filesystems go unsupported due to greed, and hardware you own gets randomly depreciated because you didn't buy a replacement fast enough.
If that's your life, go crazy. People like you helped me realize that Macs aren't made for people like me.
> That is an awfully large amount of text for what amounts to an admission that Logic Pro is lower quality software than Pro Tools.
I definitely didn't say this. Pro Tools likely has higher marketshare than Logic Pro, but I don't think anyone would conflate that with quality. I only brought up marketshare because you framed Logic Pro as being unpopular, which is just objectively not true.
> I'm sorry to say it, but I genuinely think you're detached from the way professionals evaluate software.
Note that how professionals evaluate software is tangential to what "quality" means in the context of software. E.g., I don't think anyone would argue Adobe is the paragon of software quality, but they're arguably the most important GUI software there is for creative professionals.
Both topics are very interesting to me, what software professionals use and why, and what constitutes quality in software.
> In the other response, you're telling off a perfectly valid criticism of Apple software because they won't fulfill your arbitrary demand for a better-looking DAW. Are you even engaging with the point they're trying to make?
I'm not sure what this means, who's talking about a "better-looking DAW" and which point am I not engaging with?
Apple has always been a hardware company first - think of how they sell consumers computers with the OS for free, while Microsoft primarily just sells the OS (when comparing the consumer business; I don’t want to get into all the other stuff Microsoft does).
Now that they own the SoC design pipeline, they’re really able to flex these muscles.
It is true that Apple’s major software products like iOS and MacOS are only available on Apple’s own hardware. But the Steve Jobs justification for this (which he said in a different interview I can’t find right now so I will paraphrase) is that he felt Apple made the best hardware and software in the world so he wanted Apple’s customers to experience the best software on the best hardware possible which he felt only Apple could provide. (I wish I could find the exact quote.)
Anyway according to Steve Jobs Apple is a software first company.
Not really. Back in the day you wouldn't buy a MacBook because it was powerful. Most likely it had a very shitty Intel CPU with not a lot of cores and with thermal challenges, and the reason you bought it was because macOS.
Apple is extremely dumb with power management and power supply. That's because they pretended to innovate all the way back at the start and want to pretend, they still have the expertise.
But I have had 2 iMac power supply die one me, the grounding problem on a MBP and a major annoyance with power noise leaking from a Mac Mini (makes for some nasty audio output, hilarious when you consider they supposedly target creative who clearly need good audio output).
You always find people raving about Apple's engineering prowess but my experience is that it's mostly a smoke show, they make things look good, miniaturise/oversimplify beyond what is reasonable and you often end up with major hardware flaws that are just a pain to deal with.
They always managed to have good performance and a premium feeling package but I don't think their engineering tradeoffs are actually very good most of the time.
As far as I can tell, the new Mac Mini design still has grounding issues, and you will get humming issues, which is beyond stupid for a product of that caliber. At this point I don't care about having the power supply inside the dam box, just use a brick if you must to prevent that sort of problem. This is particularly infuriating since they made the iMac PSU external, which is beyond stupid for an AiO.
But common sense left Apple a long time ago and now they just chase specs benchmarks and fashionnable UIs above everything.
> very shitty Intel CPU with not a lot of cores and with thermal challenges
Very often the intel chips in macbooks were stellar, they were just seriously inhibited by Apples terrible cooling designs and so were permanently throttled.
They could never provide decent cooling for the chips coupled with their desire to make paper thin devices.
> They could never provide decent cooling for the chips coupled with their desire to make paper thin devices.
Curiously they managed to figure this out exactly when it became their silicon instead (M1 MacBook Pros were notably thicker and with more cooling capacity than the outgoing Intel ones)
I presume they were just playing it safe to not let the M1 migration flop.
If you're dragging your users through a big migration the last thing you need is complaints about the new hardware...
Nope, many bought it in spite of macOS because it was a durable laptop with an excellent screen, good keyboard, and (afaik still) the only trackpad that didn't suck.
Apple has always been a software first company, and they only sell the hardware as a vehicle to their software. They regularly say this themselves and have always called themselves a software company. Compare their hardware revenues with that of the app store and icloud subscriptions, you will see where they make most of their money.
EDIT: I seem to be getting downvoted, so I will just leave this here for people to see I am not lying:
I did that comparison and they make the vast majority of their money on hardware. Half of their revenue is iPhone, a quarter is services, and the remaining quarter is divided up among the other hardware products.
Regardless of revenue, Apple isn't a hardware company or a software company. It's a product company. The hardware doesn't exist merely to run the software, nor does the software exist merely to give functionality to the hardware. Both exist to create the product. Neither side is the "main" one, they're both parts of what ultimately ships.
I think he's saying software is essential, not that it's the only thing. He contrasts the iPod with products from Japanese companies, which tend to make great hardware with crap software, and that software difference is why the iPod beat them.
Modern Apple is also quite a bit more integrated. A company designing their own highly competitive CPUs is more hardware-oriented than one that gets their CPUs off the shelf from Intel.
> Compare their hardware revenues with that of the app store and icloud subscriptions, you will see where they make most of their money.
Yes, it's $70B a year from iPhones alone and $23B from the totality of the Services org. (including all app store / subscription proceeds). Significantly more than 50% of the company's total profits come from hardware sales.
In addition, making money off the software that others develop and sell on the app store doesn't make Apple more of a software company, it makes them a middle man.
IMO a middle man means you are in between 2 other services, taking a cut off the top.
In this instance, apple not only created and curate the app store, but also invented the concept. In this case they are definitely not a middle man, they are a software company selling access to their software to developers.
Yeah, everyone says stuff like this but nobody can actually produce any reliable sources to show how much profit it actually makes. So until you can, its all guess work.
The numbers are literally right there. Did you click the link? In the last quarter, they had $67B in hardware sales, with $45B as costs for that division. That’s a profit margin (hardware only) of about 33%. They are not losing money on hardware.
Look, I totally understand making an off-hand comment like you did based on a gut feeling. Nobody can fact-check everything they write, and everyone is wrong sometimes. But it is pretty lazy to demand a source when you were just making things up. When challenged with specific and verifiable nubmers, you should have checked the single obvious source for the financials of any public company. Their quarterly statements.
Steve Jobs may have said that, but in 2006 I quite by accident ran into some mid-level Apple people at a guest house breakfast. I expressed my dismay at the poor manufacturing quality of my new Mac Book compared to my previous T-series IBM Think Pads. The Apple people politely explained that Apple was a consumer electronics company[1] and I should not expect business-grade products from Apple.
[1] They used that exact term, and it has stuck with me ever since.
Apple has always? Sure, maybe today with collection % of sales from apps it looks like a software company. If there was no iDevcies, there'd be no need for app store. Your link is all about Cook, yet he was not always the CEO. Woz didn't care what software you ran, he just wanted the computer to be usable so you could run whatever software. Jobs wanted to restrict things, but it was still about running the hardware. Whatever Cook thinks Apple is now does not make it always been as you claim
You know you might just have a point if you werent completely making that all up.
Steve Jobs consistently made the point that Apples hardware is the same as everyone elses, what makes them different is they make the best software which enables the best user experience.
Here see this quote from Steve Jobs which shows that his attitude is the complete opposite of what you wrote.
I dunno, didnt they already crack the 400GB/s memory bandwidth some years ago? This seems like just another small bump to handle latest OS effects sludge.
Now the M1 range, that really was an impressive 'outperform' moment of engineering for them, but otherwise this is just a clock-work MBA driven trickle of slightly better over-hyped future eWaste.
To outperform during this crisis, hardware engineers worth their salt need to designing long lived boxes with internals that can be easily repaired or upgraded. "yeah but the RAM connections are fiddly" Great, now that sounds like a challenge worth solving.
But you are right about the software. Installing Asahi makes me feel like I own my compter again.
It was coherent, (relatively) bug free, and lacked the idiot level iOSification and nagging that is creeping in all over MacOS today.
I haven't had to restart Finder until recently, but now even that has trouble with things like network drives.
I'm positive there are many internals today that are far better than in Snow Leopard, but it's outweighed by user visible problems.
It shouldn't surprise you I think that Android Jelly Bean was the best phone OS ever made as well, and they went completely in the wrong direction after that.
You mean programs could access the file system normally? They were absolutely isolated as standard unix processes.
This is what I mean about iOSification - it's trending towards being a non serious OS. Linux gets more attractive by the day, and it really is the absence of proper support of hardware in the class of the M series that prevents a critical mass of devs jumping ship.
The only Unix security boundary is between users. There isn't a standard boundary between "a web browser tab" and "the file with your credit card info in it".
There were a few things on that page that made me excited for the future of where computing is going, but I do think we're going to hit a "lull" in terms of exciting new features until some of the really futuristic stuff comes to pass.
Who knows, maybe the era of "exciting computing" is over, and iteration will be a more pleasant and subtle gradient curve of improvements, over the earth-shattering announcements of yore (such as the advent of popular cellular phones).
True. I would like to hijack this thread and wante d to discuss what we want for software that is not present.
For me. All i can think of is ondevice , al/ml ( photo editing, video editing etc ) and not the ones the current companies are trying hard shove down our throats.
May be steve is true. We don't know what we want until some one shows it .
This seems to be pretty true in general. SBC companies are not competing with Raspberry Pi because their software is quite a bit behind (boot loaders, linux kernel support, etc). Particle released a really cool dev board recently, but the software is lacking. Qualcomm struggled with their new CPU launch with poor support as well. It sometimes takes a while for new Intel processor features to be supported in the toolchains, kernel, and then get used in software.
Aside from that, I think of Apple as a hardware company that must write software to sell their devices, maybe this isn't true anymore but that's how I used to view them. Maintaining and updating as much software as Apple owns is no small task either.
I really liked the energy of the guy who announced the iPhone Air this past WWDC or whatever it's called now. John Ternus. Hopefully he makes it there (CEO) one day; I'd like to see it.
There has to be a whole different mindset with hardware though. Every change has to necessarily be more considered, cross-checked. And I don't say this in any way to disparage software engineers (hold up hand) but I suspect there's a discipline in hardware design that is ... less rigidly adhered to in software design. (And a software update containing a revert, though undesirable, is always a solution.)
It does feel like Apple is firing on all cylinders for their core competencies.
Software (iOS26), services (Music/Tv/Cloud/Apple Intelligence) and marketing (just keep screaming Apple Intelligence for 3 months and then scream Liquid Glass) ---- on the other hand seem like they are losing steam or very reactive.
No wonder John Ternus is the widely anticipated to replace Tim Cook (and not Craig).
Modern ARM C1 Ultra Core is only 10% slower than M5, likely even less when you factor in system level cache and memory. So the gap isn't as wide as most people think it is.
The hardware team has always shined, but how about one example of this:
The PowerBook from the mid 1990’s were hugely successful, especially the first ones, which were notable for what we now take for granted: pushing the keyboard back allowing space for palm rests. Wikipedia says at one time Apple had captured 40% of the laptop market. All the while the ’90s roared on, Apple was languishing, looking for a modern OS.
In a sense, hardware's job is easier, because the goals are more clear. Make it faster, and more power efficient. Vast amounts of complexity within those goals. But try to summarize the north-star vision for a complex software project like an OS in terms anywhere close as simply as this.
As a FW engineer, i can say i have been in both sides. The thing is, many time software has to do some nasty hacking just to work around hardware bug. But i've never seen hardware does the same thing.
I pretty much see the Macbook as some fancy toys with mediocre software. Maybe the kernel is solid but other software are very meh, even comparing to Windows. But I'm definitely biased as a Windows/Linux user, and my hobby is system programming so naturally a Linux box is more suitable.
Biggest grief with MacOS software:
- Finder is very mediocre comparing to even File explorer in Windows
- Scrollbar and other UI issues
Unfortunately I don't think Asahi is going to catch up, and Macbook is so expensive, so I'll probably keep buying second hand Dell/Lenovo laptop and dump a Linux on top of it.
> - Finder is very mediocre comparing to even File explorer in Windows
It really is awful. Why the hell is there no key to delete a file? Where's the "cut" option for moving a file? Why is there no option for showing ALL folders (ie, /bin, /etc) without having to memorize some esoteric key combination?
For fuck's sake, even my home directory is hidden by default.
> - Scrollbar and other UI issues
Disappearing scrollbars make sense on mobile where screen real estate is at a premium and people don't typically interact with them. It does not make sense on any screen that you'd use a mouse to navigate.
For years, you couldn't even disable mouse acceleration without either an esoteric command line or using 3rd party software. Even now, you can't disable scroll wheel acceleration. I hate that I can't just make a consistent "one click = ~2 lines of text" behavior.
I could go on and on about the just outright dumb decisions regarding UX in MacOS. So many things just don't make sense, and I feel like they were done for the sole purpose of being different from everyone else, rather than because of a sense of being better.
You know IMHO Apple doesn't have any 'Pro' machines. A 'Pro' machine isn't about hardware (although it helps), it comes mainly from the software.
MacOS doesn't have enough 'openness' to it. There's no debug information, lack of tools etc. To this day I can still daily drive a XP or 98/2000 machine( if they supported the modern web) because all the essentials are still intact. You can look around system files, you customize them edit them. I could modify game files to change their behaviour. I could modify windows registry in tons of ways to customize my experience, experiment lot of things.
As a 'Pro' user my first expectation is options, options in everything I do , which MacOS lacks severely.
All the random hardware that we see launching from time to time have drivers for windows but not for Mac. Even linux has tons of terminal tools and customisation.
MacOS is like a glorified phone OS. It's weirdly locked down at certain places that drive you crazy. Tons of things do not have context menus(windows is filled with it).
Window management sucks, there's no device manager! Not even cli tools! (Or maybe I'm not aware?)
Why can't I simpy cut and paste?
There's no API/way to control system elements via scripting, windows and linux are filled to the brim with these!
Even though the UI is good looking I just cannot switch to an Apple device (both Mac and iPhone) for these reasons. I bought an iPad pro and I'm regretting. There's no termux equivalent in iPadOS/iOS , there are some terminal tools but they can't use the full processing power, they can't multi thread. They can't run in background, it's just ridiculous. The iPad Pro is just a glorious iPhone. Hardware doesn't make a device 'Pro' software does. Video editing isn't a 'Pro' workflow in the sense that it can be done in any machine that has sufficient oomph. An iPad Pro from 5 years ago will be slower than an iPad Air of today, does that make the air a 'Pro' device? No!
I'm always mystified reading these kinds of posts on HN because it literally always starts out as "macOS is an OS for babies" and turns out to mean "macOS doesn't have a tiling window manager". Like, cmon man, who cares.
> there's no device manager! Not even cli tools!
`ioreg -l` or `system_profiler`. Why does this matter?
> There's no API/way to control system elements via scripting
> I'm always mystified reading these kinds of posts on HN because it literally always starts out as "macOS is an OS for babies" and turns out to mean "macOS doesn't have a tiling window manager". Like, cmon man, who cares.
The tiling window manager thing is epidemic on Hacker News, and I think the explanation is two fold: Hacker News obviously leans towards programmers, programmers in general don't like the mouse, tiling window managers, as a general rule, are about avoiding needing to manage windows with the mouse.
The problem with that viewpoint, to me, is that, programming is literally the only complex modern computing task I can think of that isn't mouse-centric. E.g., if you're doing CAD, spreadsheet work, media editing, 3D, audio editing, all of those tasks are mouse-centric and the tiling thing just feels silly to me in that context (like I'm going to put Cinema 4D in a tile?). So it solves a problem I don't have (managing, what, my IDE and terminal windows? this isn't even something I think about) and makes seems like it would make things I think are hard today, even harder (arranging the Cinema 4D Redshift material graph, render preview, object manager, and geometry view where I can see the important parts of each all at the same time, which I do by arranging overlapping windows carefully).
> I'm always mystified reading these kinds of posts on HN because it literally always starts out as "macOS is an OS for babies" and turns out to mean "macOS doesn't have a tiling window manager". Like, cmon man, who cares.
For me, not so much the window management, but task management. I very strongly believe that the task bar (I guess the Dock bar in MacOS) should have a separate item for each open window of an app. If I have 3 Firefox windows open, that should be 3 entries in the task/dock bar so I can switch between them in a single click. I can do this in Windows, can't do it in MacOS.
One of the problems I have with MacOS is that it's not obvious how to start a second instance of an app. Sure, some apps will have a "New Window" option. But what about apps that don't, like Burp Suite? If I bring up the launcher, then click Burp Suite when one is already loaded, it just shows me the existing one.
You can't start a second instance of an app. Or rather you can (run the app binary from the Terminal) but apps are not required to expect you to do this, and it would probably lead to data corruption from them writing to shared files.
A weakness of this is you can duplicate apps and launch the duplicate, even though they have the same bundle ID, so they might still fight over things.
No your problem is you brought over your expectations from non-macOS systems and the. expected the Mac to be similar. That isn’t how it works. Do you complain that Windows doesn’t have a bash or that Linux doesn’t support ACLs easily?
Even as kids we were fiddling with batch/bash scripts, how many kids do you see using apple script or whatever? It's the ease of accessibility.
Powershell now is lot more powerful than what Apple can dream to offer. MacOS is an opinionated OS for people who want to do simple tasks. MacOS apart from good looks offers nothing else.
> Do you complain that Windows doesn’t have a bash or that Linux doesn’t support ACLs easily?
Don't both of those exist now?
The reason the Mac is more "app-centric" is Conway's law; developers own apps so it's thought if you tried breaking apart an app it would fail, since previous "document-centric" efforts like OpenDoc failed.
All of that is exactly the opposite of what a Pro machine should be. Pros want hardware that works without fiddling to get their real job done. They know that configuring the OS or adjusting the GUI or discussing File Explorer differences is just a waste of time that has nothing to do with their job.
Cmd+delete? I don't really want it to be a single key as it's too easy to accidentally trigger (say I try to delete some text in a filename but accidentally bump my mouse and lose focus on the name)
What makes Mac great is/was the ecosystem of 3rd party tools with great UI and features. Apple used to be good enough at writing basic 1st-party apps that would mostly just disappear into the background and let you do your thing, but they are getting increasingly "louder" which... may become a problem.
I still agree that second hand Thinkpads are ridiculously better in terms of price/quality ratio, and also more environmentally sustainable.
I have to admit, every time I looked into screenshots of earlier Macs, like the 68K and PPC ones, I felt I loved the UI and such. I even bought a PPC laptop (I think it's a maxed out iBook with 1.5GB of RAM) to tinker with PPC assembly.
But I could be wrong. Maybe the earlier Macs didn't have great software either -- but at least the UI is better.
Having lived through those days... well, it was good for the time, mostly. MacOS was definitely better than Windows 3.11, and a lot more whimsical, both the OS and Mac software in general, which I miss. The featureset, though, was limited. Managing extensions was clunky, and until MacOS 10, applications had a fixed amount of RAM they could use, which could be set by the user, but which was allocated at program start. It was also shared memory, like Windows 3.11 and to some extent Windows 95/98, so one program could, and routinely did, take down the whole OS. With Windows NT (not much adopted by consumers, to be fair), this did not happen. Windows NT and 2000 were definitely better than MacOS, arguably even UI-wise.
I do miss window shading from MacOS 8 or 9, though. I think a whimsical skin for MacOS would be nice, too. The system error bomb icon was classic, the sad-Mac boot-failure icon was at least consolation. Now everything is cold and professional, but at least it stays out of my way and looks decent.
Interesting. I thought the new MacOS was unix-y? But I never owned a Mac back then so not sure. For me Windows 2000 is the pinnacle. It doesn't crash (often), supports most of the games I played then, and I like the UI design.
OS X and later are derived from NeXT Step, which makes it derived from BSD. And thus, UNIX-y. Macintosh system software versions less than 10 are Apple original development. The earliest versions were designed for hardware with only 512 or 128 kilobytes of RAM and without physical support for protected memory.
Unfortunately, backwards-compatibility requirements prevented the addition of process memory isolation before OS X. One result of not having this protection was that an application with a memory bug could overwrite memory location zero(the beginning of a critical OS-only area), or any other memory area, and then all bets were off. Some third-party utilities, such as Optimem RAMCharger, gave partial protection from this by using the processor's protected mode, and also removed the occasional need for users to manually set the amount of memory allocated to a program. However, many programs were not compatible with these utilities.
I've been thinking whether it could be a reasonable move for Apple to launch a cheaper secondary brand, one that offers devices capable of running Linux or Windows to reach a broader market without cannibalizing its own.
I don't know. I used apple notes for quite a while, several years. And I got increasingly frustrated by it's countless bugs and inconsistent or weird behaviours, especially with check lists which I use a lot. I even have a folder with tens of screencasts capturing these bugs which I want to compile and publish in a blog post one day. I ended up with my own web-based solution on top of Lexical, which I wrapped in a Tauri app, which I very much enjoy using. I don't need it to sync to other devices so all notes and images rest in a filesystem.
But just once, I'd love to hear someone reply to this and say they really love something like OneNote, and list out why they think it's a "higher quality" piece of software than Apple Notes. Personally, while I observe a lot of bugs in Apple's software, really that's true of all the (GUI in particular) software I use. If I go across all the software I use, Apple's offerings are almost universally on the top end by the metrics I'd measure for quality compared to similar offerings (e.g., something like OneNote is directly comparable to Apple Notes, whereas a custom built notes app that doesn't sync across devices most certainly is not). Apple's apps are usually well-designed, performant, bug free (relatively speaking, there are always bugs in software, but if I put, say, OmniFocus and Reminders next to each other [two apps that have the same purpose that I use every day, Reminders overall has less bugs than OmniFocus]), and they're mostly consistent with each other.
Putting all that together, the breadth of Apple's software offerings, and they're consistent high quality relative to similar offerings from other companies, makes Apple seem to me like the best company in the world today at making GUI software! Which doesn't mean they're perfect, and doesn't mean they can't do better, but is still super impressive.
Buggy. Random slowness in the UI going well below 120hz. Massive battery drain for no reason. UI elements just looking out of place, big print, random places.
The UI itself is supposed to be intense to render to some degree. That's crazy because most of the time it looks like an Android skin from 2012.
And on top of this all -- absolutely nobody asked for this. No one asked for some silly new UI that is transparent or whateveer.
Apple relies heavily on H1-B slave labor. They don’t pay their software teams enough to be competitive and they run with only about a third of the headcount they need to polish the software. Thus, they have mediocre talent and not enough of it. Penny-wise, pound foolish.
