I ignore macOS updates as a self preservation technique until something forces my hand such as buying a new computer or Xcode complaining it only runs on a particular release.
Between macOS, cpu architecture changes, and the fast pace of Electron’s release cycle (node ABI vs native modules), I’m constantly terrified about keeping builds running. Each upgrade … I’m just clenching my chest waiting for the other shoe to drop.
I never thought I’d become a late adopter of technology. But here we are.
There was a time in late high school, early university where OSX updates were like Christmas. I’d be so excited for all these new empowerments. There was such wonder and opportunity to be seized.
But now I’m much like you. I’ve got stuff to do and digital places to be! If I don’t need an update, I don’t want one.
I was on the eagerly checking when this update came out. Wanted that iphone as webcam feature. It's such a huge improvement. My webcam no longer looks like a washed out newspaper printout. Freeform is also a nice new tool I'm looking forward to using as well as Advanced Data Protection for icloud to have end to end encrypted cloud storage at last.
TBF, each update was bringing long expected features and bug fixes, and more than anything dramatic performance improvements.
I started using macs around the 10.3 area, and boy was it slow and clunky. Was still glad it existed in the first place, but it really came a long way forward to the point it’s now faster than windows on ARM.
Yep. I just updated my desktop from 10.14 to 10.15 only because I had to. Best to stay a couple of years behind. Not like the Apple of 15 years ago where their stuff just worked.
I’m still on Mojave because I hate new UI changes and such. Don’t know for how long it’s last but for now it works.
One annoying thing is that an iPhone SE 2020 that I bought now requires a fresher version of iTunes that is not available for 10.14. I guess I’ll just wait until it annoys me too much and eventually switch to some android.
I started using OS X with Snow Leopard (before it reaches 10.6.8), but already then my colleagues were telling me not to rush on the first release of whatever next major versions, and wait for the .1 update instead.
My Mrs is an Astrophysicist and she is exactly the same. In her case she is terrified that Apple will move stuff around and break her paths rendering her EMacs setup unusable. Curious to know how to manage all her pipelines, iraf, python, R, Fortran and general fits processing and sundry as well without it breaking every. Single. MacOS. Upgrade. She only upgrades OS’s every time her funding gets her a new machine. Which is infrequently. Like every three years or so. She uses MacPorts.
Those on the Windows side are just as if not more angered by Windows 11 too. The software industry has become an example of quantity over quality, features over fixes, change and novelty over stability, diversity over excellence.
Instead of gradually approaching perfection as bugs are fixed over time, software gets needlessly rewritten and introduces a bunch of new bugs. Thanks to the wholly misguided focus on "developer experience", the new version is more inefficient and more complex, leading to even more bugs than the previous one. They call it "progress", but it really isn't. It's an increasingly steep decline fueled by an abundance of developers that need to be given something to do.
It’s not even “the quantity over quality.” Early OS X point releases would get big new features like hardware accelerated compositing. What does Ventura even add? The last big new feature was APFS becoming the default back in 2017.
I guess it’s better than Microsoft, where Metro/WinUI/web rewrites of core apps actually remove tons of long-standing features.
Well using the iPhone as a camera on the Mac is pretty awesome. And it’s desk view feature to show what you draw. So there’s no need to take a webcam or camera for better quality with me when I travel for work. Just a mouse, keyboard and clamshelled MacBook hooked up to the hotel TV - still allowing me to make video calls.
I recently switched to Windows because I need some performance-intensive windows-only software. I'm convinced that Microsoft lets marketing write the feature bullet list and then tells product managers to assign arbitrary dates to each bullet entry and use that as their project timeline. Quality is absolute garbage. Microsoft 365 Family is shockingly bad. The 6tb of storage you get for $10/mo (spread out over 6 accounts) might not actually be worth it.
Windows 11 is truly awful. Perhaps windows has always been a clunky mess and I din't quite realize it until I started using MacOS professionally, but I can hardly stand it. That said, I remember feeling Windows 10 was a notable degradation of UX, and Windows 11 only doubled down on that. Windows 7 is the last MS OS that I have any fond memories of, if it was announced that Windows 12 would be designed to more closely resemble that then I would seriously consider buying another Windows machine, until then I'll stick with my Macbook.
> The software industry has become an example of quantity over quality, features over fixes, change and novelty over stability, diversity over excellence.
Well, it is all caused by senior managers counting JIRA tickets and certified scrum masters pushing the sand through the python.
Software enthusiasts in sandals loving technology have been replaced by people driven by compensation structures.
> The software industry has become an example of quantity over quality
Yes, and so many other industries have lead the way as well.
On some level I think it’s for the better. I won’t buy perfect, indestructible, 0.1 micron tolerance carrot peeler for the price of a car (nor will buy a car summiting the state of the art technology for the price of a house). I’m for cheap goods striking a good feature/price balance.
But on the other end of the spectrum it all reminds me of John Siracusa’s legendary toaster reviews, every single one of them being so crappy in some specific way. Having overall nice experience for a reasonable price is becoming more the exception than the norm.
I’m still happy we’ve left the Win98 days and kernel level crashes are pretty much a thing of the past.
The new system settings app is painful. It freezes for up to 30 seconds at a time after I take an action.
It often goes completely blank, it flickers a lot and in general it's so hard to find stuff in it - the search is bad and they have just jammed settings in places that don't make sense.
I am on a 2020 MacBook Air with m1 chip, 16GB ram - wouldn't expect performance problems in the settings app, yet here we are.
I also get that issue with Safari where it freezes the entire system, that happens on my work laptop which is an M1 Max with 32GB RAM
Seriously, what was wrong with the old tried and true System Preferences? Everything had a recognizable icon, every icon arranged in simple rows, and every icon lay before me in a single window.
Now, I'm forced to scroll the pane on the left (unclear since scroll bars are invisible by default) to find the outermost setting, and then deal with nested navigation confined inside of the right pane. Also, gone are the recognizable icons, replaced with confusingly similar colored gradients and a hieroglyph icon that is unreadable because the contrast ratio terrible against the gradient. Also, the 'search' causes the entire left navigational pane to go blank and replace itself with search results, rather than 'show me the way' like it used to. Extremely disappointing!
It sort of feels like the only "advantage" to the new one is that it is more like the iOS Settings. Looks very similar in layout. That might be the intent. "Harmonization". Product Managers Gone Wild.
System Preferences was rewritten for Ventura in SwiftUI, which is absolutely not ready for production, especially on Mac. Speaking from personal experience, I recently wrote a simple macOS app using SwiftUI. I found the framework to be slow (why does it use so much cpu/memory when idle??), unintuitive, and awkward to use. Despite being in its 4th year, SwiftUI is still very much beta software, and I wouldn’t recommend using it for anything serious.
As a counterpoint, I’ve done several Mac apps with SwiftUI for internal use and it’s been quite pleasant. Early SwiftUI was definitely rough, but it’s quite nice now as of Monterey and Ventura.
If you’re seeing high CPU use and slow performance, it might be due to high usage of ObservableObject or other things that may be triggering updates under the hood more often than need be.
SwiftUI is very sensitive to the data model structure since it’s a react style setup.
The Windows equivalent also went through a similar and just as horrible change (Control Panel being replaced by Settings), and strangely enough, Windows 11 Settings looks disturbingly similar to the macOS Ventura one.
I don't mind the design. Whenever I want to know where to find something I just ask where would I expect to find it on the iphone and it's usually there.
OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion was the last release of the golden years. You could argue it was actually 10.9 Mavericks, but that's the release that introduced the annoying notification every time you disconnected a USB drive. Either way, OS X 10.10 Yosemite was when shit started hitting the fan- that's when they started rewriting OS X in Swift, an Apple-designed language which is somehow WORSE than Objective-C.
As a software engineer, I find all three ecosystems (macOS, Windows, Linux) far from perfect, but the only one that ALLOWS me to do all the things I want and need to do, is Linux.
As someone who uses XCode with schemes and Android studio with flavors, I have way more issues with Android studio. Having to invalidate caches on Android studio quite frequently and delete derived files in Xcode occasionally.
But with Apple Studio Ultra at least build times on both are amazing compared to a few years ago.
Ventura has serious issues with ExFAT volumes (failing to boot with them connected, Finder or other apps not showing all of the files, inability to empty the trash, etc.) I have several 2 TB external SSD's and ended up migrating them all to APFS because of Ventura. If you google "ventura exfat site:discussions.apple.com" you'll see all sorts of complaints. Pretty terrible situation.
Apple on a good day does just enough to get the basics right. Beyond the basics it's a matter of luck whether something will work and continue to work reliably.
The thing is even Microsoft in the post Win 10 era is reliant on insiders to test Windows releases nowadays so there's not really much competition for desktop market nor is there anything huge at stake.
At this point I as a regular non-enterprise customer can't even pay for a churn free, ads free, forced apps free security updates only OS like Windows 7 - unexpectedly fast descent into sadness.
(Where possible I run Linux and thankfully it has worked fine so far but some work things still require Windows or Mac.)
I always felt that mantra of Apple simplicity was a cop out for lack of desire or inability to write rich complex software at scale and not get subsumed by bugs and QA load. It is a matter of prioritization too, the non sexy stuff doesn’t sell nor lead to promotions so many fundamental things just stagnate it feels.
I joke with my wife that being in the Apple ecosystem is sometimes like being married to this inconsistent and erratic spouse who oscillates between a few extremes. They bring out all this high romance show off blingy stuff that elicits high emotions and surprise and delight. But when it comes to the more mundane stuff like cleaning up and daily chores and keeping the socks and underwear off the floor they become lazy bums sleeping on the couch who can’t be bothered. They then try to make it up to you with a “hey babe check this out I can now do fancy thing xyz, see?” all the while ignoring the honeydo list of 125 things that have made no progress in the last three years. The funny thing is I’m still on the fence for determining which ratio the behaviors skew and how it all rolls up in net.
I've recently bought my macbook air m2 (and also my first apple device), so far I've encountered some issues listed below:
- WiFi driver crashed after I've turned off the wifi, causing kernel to panic, rebooting my device. That happened twice already.
- Plugging TV via HDMI via a USB-C hub, switching to HDMI sound output, causes all media to jump to +8-300 hours (even if given media length is smaller than that...),
strangely enough changing audio output back to macbook's fixes the problem.
- Activity monitor (macos task manager) takes FOREVER to load, if top/htop can load in mere miliseconds, why not the native app?
- Sometimes app bar won't hide in fullscreen mode (don't really know if that's intended), hovering mouse over it will fix that.
While I love the overall build quality, battery life and hardware, the software has some measurable "jank" in it, to the point I'm seriously considering not to buy apple stuff again. I've considered those devices to work out-of-the-box and after sitting on barely working linux as my daily driver I've decided to go for it and buy one. Now I've lost all hope for "just works" system, they do not exist.
Most of these frankly seem like small beer and to be expected in an early release of an OS. I also am not sure how a Git Tower issue is a Ventura problem.
That said, I'm still running Monterey, having amended my practice of waiting until the after the first point release to now waiting until the 2nd to do a full version update because of Apple's tendency in recent years to introduce major bugs which are not compensated by major functionality improvements. Updating System Settings to look like iOS serves Apple's needs, not mine.
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Between macOS, cpu architecture changes, and the fast pace of Electron’s release cycle (node ABI vs native modules), I’m constantly terrified about keeping builds running. Each upgrade … I’m just clenching my chest waiting for the other shoe to drop.
I never thought I’d become a late adopter of technology. But here we are.
But now I’m much like you. I’ve got stuff to do and digital places to be! If I don’t need an update, I don’t want one.
I started using macs around the 10.3 area, and boy was it slow and clunky. Was still glad it existed in the first place, but it really came a long way forward to the point it’s now faster than windows on ARM.
One annoying thing is that an iPhone SE 2020 that I bought now requires a fresher version of iTunes that is not available for 10.14. I guess I’ll just wait until it annoys me too much and eventually switch to some android.
Instead of gradually approaching perfection as bugs are fixed over time, software gets needlessly rewritten and introduces a bunch of new bugs. Thanks to the wholly misguided focus on "developer experience", the new version is more inefficient and more complex, leading to even more bugs than the previous one. They call it "progress", but it really isn't. It's an increasingly steep decline fueled by an abundance of developers that need to be given something to do.
I guess it’s better than Microsoft, where Metro/WinUI/web rewrites of core apps actually remove tons of long-standing features.
I like the native support for 32:9… But that’s about it.
that's why opensource platforms are so important, general computing is kind of screwed when apple or microsoft get distracted by something shiney
Well, it is all caused by senior managers counting JIRA tickets and certified scrum masters pushing the sand through the python.
Software enthusiasts in sandals loving technology have been replaced by people driven by compensation structures.
Yes, and so many other industries have lead the way as well.
On some level I think it’s for the better. I won’t buy perfect, indestructible, 0.1 micron tolerance carrot peeler for the price of a car (nor will buy a car summiting the state of the art technology for the price of a house). I’m for cheap goods striking a good feature/price balance.
But on the other end of the spectrum it all reminds me of John Siracusa’s legendary toaster reviews, every single one of them being so crappy in some specific way. Having overall nice experience for a reasonable price is becoming more the exception than the norm.
I’m still happy we’ve left the Win98 days and kernel level crashes are pretty much a thing of the past.
It often goes completely blank, it flickers a lot and in general it's so hard to find stuff in it - the search is bad and they have just jammed settings in places that don't make sense.
I am on a 2020 MacBook Air with m1 chip, 16GB ram - wouldn't expect performance problems in the settings app, yet here we are.
I also get that issue with Safari where it freezes the entire system, that happens on my work laptop which is an M1 Max with 32GB RAM
Now, I'm forced to scroll the pane on the left (unclear since scroll bars are invisible by default) to find the outermost setting, and then deal with nested navigation confined inside of the right pane. Also, gone are the recognizable icons, replaced with confusingly similar colored gradients and a hieroglyph icon that is unreadable because the contrast ratio terrible against the gradient. Also, the 'search' causes the entire left navigational pane to go blank and replace itself with search results, rather than 'show me the way' like it used to. Extremely disappointing!
Old: https://i.imgur.com/sZY9dUw.png
New: https://i.imgur.com/NGj7I69.jpg
If you’re seeing high CPU use and slow performance, it might be due to high usage of ObservableObject or other things that may be triggering updates under the hood more often than need be.
SwiftUI is very sensitive to the data model structure since it’s a react style setup.
Design wise...is a different story of course
As a software engineer, I find all three ecosystems (macOS, Windows, Linux) far from perfect, but the only one that ALLOWS me to do all the things I want and need to do, is Linux.
But with Apple Studio Ultra at least build times on both are amazing compared to a few years ago.
More relevant would be the death of Steve Jobs...
The thing is even Microsoft in the post Win 10 era is reliant on insiders to test Windows releases nowadays so there's not really much competition for desktop market nor is there anything huge at stake.
At this point I as a regular non-enterprise customer can't even pay for a churn free, ads free, forced apps free security updates only OS like Windows 7 - unexpectedly fast descent into sadness.
(Where possible I run Linux and thankfully it has worked fine so far but some work things still require Windows or Mac.)
I joke with my wife that being in the Apple ecosystem is sometimes like being married to this inconsistent and erratic spouse who oscillates between a few extremes. They bring out all this high romance show off blingy stuff that elicits high emotions and surprise and delight. But when it comes to the more mundane stuff like cleaning up and daily chores and keeping the socks and underwear off the floor they become lazy bums sleeping on the couch who can’t be bothered. They then try to make it up to you with a “hey babe check this out I can now do fancy thing xyz, see?” all the while ignoring the honeydo list of 125 things that have made no progress in the last three years. The funny thing is I’m still on the fence for determining which ratio the behaviors skew and how it all rolls up in net.
- WiFi driver crashed after I've turned off the wifi, causing kernel to panic, rebooting my device. That happened twice already.
- Plugging TV via HDMI via a USB-C hub, switching to HDMI sound output, causes all media to jump to +8-300 hours (even if given media length is smaller than that...), strangely enough changing audio output back to macbook's fixes the problem.
- Activity monitor (macos task manager) takes FOREVER to load, if top/htop can load in mere miliseconds, why not the native app?
- Sometimes app bar won't hide in fullscreen mode (don't really know if that's intended), hovering mouse over it will fix that.
While I love the overall build quality, battery life and hardware, the software has some measurable "jank" in it, to the point I'm seriously considering not to buy apple stuff again. I've considered those devices to work out-of-the-box and after sitting on barely working linux as my daily driver I've decided to go for it and buy one. Now I've lost all hope for "just works" system, they do not exist.
That said, I'm still running Monterey, having amended my practice of waiting until the after the first point release to now waiting until the 2nd to do a full version update because of Apple's tendency in recent years to introduce major bugs which are not compensated by major functionality improvements. Updating System Settings to look like iOS serves Apple's needs, not mine.
This is not a beta OS. It’s been out for months. Having things randomly freeze because you decided to connect an external drive is not really OK.
> I also am not sure how a Git Tower issue is a Ventura problem.
Presumably it used to work, which means AppKit broke something.
Neither was it written from scratch in a few months. It inherits the effort of two decades of work on what was originally OS X.
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