Roughly 2002-2010 that attention to detail was on display and the OS struck an impressive balance between features, ease of use, and power user access.

Since then it’s been straight downhill. First they stopped investing in desktop in favor of mobile. Then they underwent some rewrites to OS and bundled apps that dumbed things down and exploded the defect rate. Then they started setting the stage for a touch experience on desktop at the expense of UI density. Around the same time they started to prioritize short term profit over UX — spamming with notifications to try to get you to sign in, upgrade, etc. And then there’s the travesty that is Tahoe.

I don't get asked about access for Chrome at every update.

I have bigger issues with the way a lot of MacOS apps are just poorly designed.

Like screen capture - I want to be able to save to my choice of destination folder after clicking. But instead you get a selection of preset choices, and the option to select a destination before you capture the file, which is unnaturally distracting.

Finder hasn't changed for decades. It should be possible to have source and destination trees visible in the same window, but it isn't.

Mac Mail has threaded conversations, which means some emails don't appear in searches.

App Store search was designed by cynics, idiots, or both. If you know the exact name of an app, search will probably show it but it probably won't be anywhere near the first hit.

Xcode - I can't even...

Meanwhile a lot of clever and useful features remain hidden or ignored. Automator and AppleScript would have been gamechangers if Apple had promoted them, but they were just left on a shelf to moulder.

I can't imagine ever swapping back to Windows, but these annoyances are an insult to the quality of the hardware, which is on another level.

I can tell you that Apple grows closer and closer to Microsoft-level annoying every year. The update situation is just stupid at this point. 10:30am and "hey, we'd like to take your computer offline for 45 minutes? Want to defer until this evening? Yeah? put your password in anyway.

iOS has gotten gross as well. You see that email notification on your lock screen? Wanna see what it says? Tap it. HAHA, that just expands the stack. Tap it again... that reveals a bit.... TAP IT AGAIN - ah, now we're unlocking and revealing it in the app....

I went through this around 15 years ago, even migrating my parents from Windows to MacOS on the promise of simplicity and better UI. No, it’s not simpler or more intuitive, instead it has its own world of quirks, issues, and annoyances. And both Apple and Microsoft have become worse since.

Apple's days of simplicity out of the box are over. The simplicity is still in there somewhere. Through a combination of turning off a lot of features in settings and using a few defaults shell command it can be made simple.

Apple got complex due to dynamic workspaces that result in windows unexpectedly flying off screen or popping up as one mouses's around and the new security model which no longer trusts defaults to local applications trusting each other.

This security model is why each application needs to be granted local access. I believe Apple encourages all apps to stick to their own sandbox to the extent possible.

I'm currently trying to figure out how to give Image Events access to my local hard disk. My old applescripts using Image Events have broken due to the loss of access.

I use and have used Windows and macOS for decades. I think Windows is better, but both are doing their best to drive users to Linux. Their relentless focus on extracting subscription and "service" revenue from others is fundamentally undermining the user experience in countless ways. Ads. Dark patterns. Nags windows. Auto-bundled games and software. Telemetry. Every year they make their operating systems just a little bit worse.

I have been using macOS for I think fewer than ten years and I think the attention of detail may always have been just about the hardware... macOs and iOS have presented me with some of the clunkiest edge cases and mishandled situations and a lot of them are damn near undebuggable. I think Windows is very tasteless OS making macOS seem good in comparison but in isolation there is a lot that could a should be improved

With Apple, the stuff I want to do just works. I actually like the granularity in permissions, because I only give them out sparingly.

Having said that, the OS felt better a few years ago. I feel like they have less attention to detail and don’t care for Liquid Glass.

Still blazingly fast machines compared to my intel windows corporate workstation though.

I bought an original 128K Mac, and then used them professionally for decades --- Snow Leopard, 10.6.8, which I view as the most perfect Mac OS ever, was the last version I really liked, or found comfortable.

I need to replace a MacBook Pro w/ Touchbar, and am _not_ excited about the options, and I find the OS version numbering/naming baffling (why they couldn't've counted versions, started at the next letter of the alphabet, and then cycled through the alphabet in the California Gazetteer when they switched place names from there on out mystifies me) --- probably I'll end up w/ a hand-me-down iMac, but I'd be a bit more interested if there was a portable Mac tablet w/ a stylus and touch, having preferred that form-factor for portable usage since Go Corp.'s PenPoint on an NCR-3125 (which I paired w/ a NeXT Cube and represents the highwatermark of my GUI experience).

I wish that there was an option to limit the OS to only Cocoa/SwiftUI/equivalent "native" apps, and I really wish that Preferences.app would arrive at a simplified and stable state which makes sense.

I've been using macbooks since 2015 and I feel like every single update has made it worse somehow

Both of your examples are software from Meta and Google. Those companies ship what cannot be called anything else than malware. But it is possible to stop Chrome from updating and messing with your system in the background. I forgot which guide I followed, but search and you shall find.

> the progress bar actually made progress and stayed stuck at 80%.

> the problem was that a running WhatsApp app prevented the WhatsApp update process to finish.

Oh so that’s what it is. Thought it was a desync between UI state and software logic.

Don't get me started on the whole iCloud thing, and apple account sign in (although to be fair to them they've improved this it was way too onerous in the past).

I doubt you will get many long term Mac users disagreeing that the attention to detail has got consistently worse every year since Lion.

Trying to push poorly done, rushed UI frameworks to match iOS in the wrong form factor has trashed the OS.

Does it satisfy 98% of users always? Or does it satisfy each user 98% of the time?

yeah like i do find apple software is now full of ads, bugs and often feels very unpolished. but i also think they have recently increased complexity in a bunch of places and i like that a lot haha... like being able to customize your homescreen more or even the screenshot example! i def use like 3 of those options at least weekly...

I wouldn’t call Apple style minimalist. It was more focused on being approachable, in a way that works for both beginners and advanced users. That means something consistent, discoverable. It looks easy to get started, but has depth when needed.

If you look at or used macOS 9 and the early OS X none of that expresses minimalism

this is a discussion we often have where I work, where we're debating removing a feature due to difficulties maintaining it and few people needing it. I usually fight to keep it, with the argument "we aren't doing it for the people that don't need it, but for the ones that do." But at the end of the day, I'm not the one who has to pay for it.

You can make something customisable

"links to show with screenshots"

I always want to either copy and delete or save and forget, so I'd select those two options (or rather have the old behaviour) and ignore the rest. You can choose other things.

Same with adverts. I would select "zero adverts", but you could select "upto six adverts" or whatever. After all adverts are for the benefit of the customer right - that's what advert apologists say.

There is no good middle. Either have no options, or have many and make them configurable.

I use 4 of those 5 options all the time. But there are other places where options make me slow because I need to was through them.

Having the menu exist at all is already well onto the slippery slope - once upon a time the screenshots went directly into the photo library, without any interstitial at all...

And at the time, everyone was perfectly fine with opening the photo library to access the options that are now in that menu

I kind of agree with what you're saying, in that screenshot and share functionality is increasingly overloaded with options and things that just don't make any sense in that context. I disagree that this isn't because a product designer lacks vision, Apple control the entire stack on iOS, and there's nothing stopping them from rethinking things so that "Share" isn't a weird synonym for "Junk drawer menu".

There is no justifiable reason that Safari's find in page option is under the share menu, hidden underneath a View More button. Finding within a page has nothing to do with sharing, and even if somehow a user guessed that it might be in that menu without searching the web for it, they're probably going to dismiss it because they haven't expanded the view more menu.

iOS and macOS are riddled with illogical decisions like this. The menu bar is an unusable mess of icons that things have added, a problem that Windows (kind of) solved about a decade ago by allowing me to select which icons appear by default. The Dock seems to choose at random whether an app remains pinned or not, with particular confusion brought by apps updating themselves. Shortcuts is a wonderful idea in principle while in practice anytime I try to do something with it some part is missing.

I used to be a huge proponent of macOS in particular, and I would like to be one again, but currently its incredibly hard to do that.

The "Great Man" theory of history is considered debunked.

The idea that visionary leadership in a single organization can make a difference is very true.

Blizzard changed as soon as Morhaime left.

I would call this the "bus factor" theory. If a process (here, quality control) revolves around one person, and then that person stops doing the work, the work stops getting done.

You don't even need add blocking for most open source software: the threat of forking backs a culture where the software is just there to to its job and not to sell something.

I started using the f-droid app "store" recently and it's amazing: bare bones stuff that just does what you want.

When was the ad-free era on Windows (Home)? I don't remember it.

The article has a link to a previous Gruber article that mentions things falling to the ground because of "gravity" as an analogy for asking about seemingly basic questions about "why things happen".

It's an article that inadvertently confuses readers with too many layers of indirection and requires reading another article to get the prerequisite "Insider Baseball" knowledge to connect all the metaphors together.

So... asking "why not Intel stickers on MacBooks?" ... analogous to asking about gravity. And "too many confusing options on GUIs" ... lines of code to enable extra options has a gravity.

The text quoted in a sibling comment implies the author is describing an effect whereby poor ux decisions - even if seemingly small - serve as a foundation to "attract" further negative patterns, gravity being the analogy.

Some decisions, once made, exert a noticeable pull on others, so exceptions quickly turn into standard practice.

Ditto. It's not a reference to anything that I can find, and the concept of gravity is sort of mentioned once but never expanded upon enough for me to really understand what they mean.

The context for that is in Gruber’s original post, I believe.

I think they mean inertia, not "gravity"

Is "Intel inside" even a feature? It's not like the other laptop will be lacking a CPU.

Yup. GNOME 2.0 was a little rough because they swung far enough the other way, but it was still a huge improvement to remove all the "unbreak me" obvious preferences that only had one sensible answer. A few versions later, it was a delight to use.

And yet, KDE Plasma is so more usable than Gnome these days, because they swung too far into removing settings. You needed to install a separate Gnome Tweak tool to even be able to change font antialiasing settings last I looked, which is preposterous. I get literal headaches from the defaults.

And yet, VSCode has ~70% developer share, largely because it can be everything to everyone, but no more than what you personally need. Just put a search bar in your preferences dialogue, it ain't that hard.

> angry at Microsoft for removing half the features in any control panel inside Windows

Tbf, I'm not sure anyone is any at Microsoft for removing things. They are angry because Microsoft does not actually remove those settings, they just don't allow them to be changed from the new UI, and instead hide them away somewhere in the same classic control panel that has existed since Windows NT...

I think the real issue is that they have a clean, pretty window with five options and then a "more options" button--which, when clicked, brings up the exact settings pane from Windows NT 4 with no improvements. So we have to endure two parallel implementations, each flawed in its own way.

The same people? Who are they? And since when is Microsoft removing half the features in "any control panel" in every release?

> So as well as being annoying at the moment of seeing them, ads in the AppStore are directly contributing to the general enshitification of apps.

You can even cut the word "apps" from the analysis here, the appstore just gets most of its money from games which are pretty much slot machines.

That's exactly why every time they promote the appstore somewhere, they put a productivity app as an example, they would like to avoid to be classified with gambling regulations, which is essentially what they are.

Slapping ads on a tool doesn't improve the functionality of the tool.

My massive Apple annoyance at the moment is how there's an unremovable nag screen for an Apple Music subscription on the iOS app, when all I ever want to do is sync local music to an iphone like it's an ipod in 2006. They just can't take 'no' for an answer, I'm happy with my current streaming service and I'll never want the hassle of migration.

In my view there really needs to be some 'no means no, not maybe later' legislation against this burdensome dark pattern.

IS THERE a name for the phenomenon? You are about to tap / click when the UI changes underneath you. You can end up tapping the wrong thing! I call it bait and switch and I am not sure how to fix it.

No they would not. This is probably biggest betrayal of Apple users I have experienced. Apple should never confuse their OS's as ad delivery systems.

This is something that I find extremely annoying about pretty much everything on computers these days. I have noticed recently that play buttons on pretty much every music player do not work consistently and often show the wrong play/pause state (showing a pause button when there is nothing playing, showing play buttons when something is playing) and obviously that doesn't break any real functionality, but it's just annoying and shows a complete disregard for the quality of the user experience across the board. I honestly don't know of a single audio only app that has a play button that works properly.

Definitely. But at least on Samsung phones, you can uninstall the packages from the user partition and in that way rip most of that stuff out (like the McAfee scanner in security, Bixby, Gemini, OneDrive, etc.).

So, yeah, they are copying, but by virtue of the ecosystem being less open, you are mostly stuck with it.