Right now you have the MacBook Air 13" and 15" in 3 variants and 4 colours, that makes for a total of 24 models. M4 processors only.
The MacBook Pro 14" can be purchased with the M5, M4 Pro, M4 Max in 2 colours for a total of 12 models. Then the 16" with the M4 Pro and M4 Max in 2 colours for a total of 8 models. That makes another 20 models.
That is 56 different models to pick from! And that is before customisation.
Why is there even a MacBook Pro without a Pro chip? And why are you selling M4 and M5 processors at the same time? Why release the M5 non-Pro in a Pro laptop and not put it in the Air, leaving it with an M4? The M5 is sometimes better than the M4 Pro, making it hard for the customer to decide to pick which one.
Don't even get me started on the convoluted mess of the iPhone. Apple sells the iPhone 16 (5 models), iPhone 16 Plus (10 models), iPhone 16e (6 models), iPhone 17 (10 models), iPhone Air (12 models), iPhone 17 Pro (9 models), iPhone 17 Pro Max (12 models). 64 models to pick from!
I remember Apple selling the iPhone 4. You would walk into the store, pick a Black or White model, 16 or 32 gigabyte. If you wanted colours, get a case.
Do you feel the same way about cars? Have you been this fired up looking at a dealership all these years? So many paint options and wheel choices!
Idk, my phone gets hours of use each day, in my hands. Very personal device. I appreciate the options.
I agree with you about the cpu confusion, but I think most consumers largely act on price and many biased towards the lowest or highest ends every cycle. Largely any modern CPU will be enough for regular users.
Unfortunately. Once the money does run out, and they do get someone with Vision, then that Vision takes years to realize, so there would be a big slump in products/money where they could just collapse.
Usually it is a competitor that comes up with the new vision.
Maybe Apple is so big it just buys other people vision.
I like MB Pro with a regular chip: my tasks aren’t hugely parallelisable, the plain chip is plenty fast, but I want the nicer display, sound, and ports, and additional battery life is nice to have.
There is no point in complaining, or worse, enduring Stockholm Syndrome, Apple repeatedly demonstrated its contempt for its customers. I've decided to cut my losses after 25 years of using the modern OSX Mac (and 35 years using the Mac), and iOS since the original iPhone, to go back to Linux, and to GrapheneOS, and the migration is largely complete.
These have been exactly my thoughts for years. Craig Federighi does not have any taste or interest in software quality. And Jony Ive (after Steve Jobs) has been a disaster for UI/UX and industrial hardware design. Tim Cook has been an extraordinary bean counter and hasn’t been hiring useful people (from users’ perspective) under him.
Craig Federighi needs to go when Tim Cook also moves out of his current role this year. Maybe, maybe, there are some old school folks at Apple who can take over and do things better.
Do you have a writeup of that, somewhere? How do you manage without device interoperability (i.e. copy and paste between Mac and iPhone)?
He sold Windows in so many versions that even a developer like me had no idea of what the difference was between them. I could not figure out from the packaging which version I needed.
Windows Vista was available in Starter (32-bit only, Retail and OEM), Home Basic (32-bit and 64-bit, Retail, OEM, and Volume License, plus Home Basic N 32/64-bit, Retail/OEM/Volume, in multiple languages), Home Premium (32/64-bit, Retail/OEM/Volume, Home Premium N 32/64-bit, Retail/OEM/Volume, in multiple languages), Business (32/64-bit, Retail/OEM/Volume, Business N 32/64-bit, Retail/OEM/Volume, in multiple languages), Enterprise (32/64-bit, Volume License only, Enterprise N 32/64-bit, in multiple languages), Ultimate (32/64-bit, Retail/OEM, Ultimate N 32/64-bit, Retail/OEM, in multiple languages), and the Korean-market versions Home Basic K, Home Premium K, Business K, Enterprise K, Ultimate K (all 32/64-bit, Retail/OEM/Volume, in multiple languages), plus Tablet PC editions, Media Center pre-bundled versions, and Embedded/IoT variants, each with additional 32/64-bit and N/K distinctions, creating a combinatorial explosion of literally hundreds of distinct SKUs when factoring in architecture, licensing type, language packs, and region-specific requirements.
And the situation was pretty much the same thing for Windows 7
https://blog.codinghorror.com/oh-you-wanted-awesome-edition/
"Open source software only comes in one edition: awesome."
But I’d highly encourage you to have a look into which Apple pencil is compatible to which iPad.
Choice, yes, a mess - no.
The first generation comes with a Lightning adapter and a USB-C to Apple Pencil Adapter (required to pair and charge with iPad (A16) and iPad (10th generation). What are those adapters doing?
It is compatible with the "iPad Pro 9.7-inch" which I presume is the first generation iPad Pro but why does it not state the generation like they do with the iPad Pro 12.9-inch? Why state "iPad (A16)" but not use the 11th generation?
Thanks for raising my blood pressure! But I had fun doing so.
Using a Pencil without an iPad and wanting Apple Care on it is a bit of a niche use case. And do you really need Apple Care on a $79/$99/$129 product?
I occasionally use a macbook pro at £WORK for a few apple specific processes, and it currently has 188.67gb of "system data" that I have no idea how to clean up or remove. It's marked separately from the 11.01gb of macOS in the storage settings, and it constantly complains about the disk almost being full. Updating and restarting don't clear it, I wish I could just rm -rf it all. Does anyone know how I can at least see what it is, and potentially even clean it up?
EDIT: Thanks for the CleanMyMac recommendations, the 57.6gb of xcode caches that didn't show up in the "developer" section of the storage settings might have had something to do with it
I highly recommend Daisy Disk[0], which shows a folder level breakdown of your disk space usage. Hyperspace[1] is pretty nice as well. It works well if you have a lot of duplicate files. It uses APFS clones to reclaim the disk space.
/System/Volumes/Data/Users/<your_user>/Library/Containers/com.apple.Safari/Data/Library/Caches/CloudKit/
I need to `rm` it at least once a month, I ran `du -sh` and it takes 153gb on my machine
If macOS is using 153GB for iCloud cache, that’s only a bad thing if it’s not giving it back up automatically if your filesystem starts getting full. Because it means you have local copies of things that live in iCloud, making the general experience faster. In that sense, you want your filesystem to be “fully utilized”. The disk viewer in macOS that shows you filesystem utilization should even be differentiating this sort of cache from “real” utilization… this cache should (if everything is working right) should logically be considered “free space”.
Now of course, if there are bugs where the OS isn’t giving that storage back when you need it, that all goes out the window. And yeah… bugs like these happen too damned often. But I still say, the idea is actually a good one, at least in theory.
You can go to the folder ~/Library and then delete what you want.
To open the folder from a terminal: cd ~/Library open .
In the Finder, you can enable "Calculate all sizes" from "View options," which will calculate folder sizes to understand what to clean first.
This folder contains data from all apps; sometimes it is cache, sometimes persistent data. You will find all your previous apps taking gigabytes...
You don‘t need to buy the full version, you can just use the info and delete it manually in Finder.
du -hs ~/Library/Caches/*
Tim Cook is more of a regular CEO that wants to make money for the shareholders. He started doing stock buybacks and in general prioritizing making money.
macOS is still the best OS I'd want to use IMO--if you can manage to avoid upgrading to Tahoe--but Apple seems to definitely be on its way down.
Hopefully something changes.
Linux has low-key become a very valid choice for a desktop OS. You can thank a lot of people for that.
Apple and Microsoft for sandbagging.
NixOS for pioneering the immutable Linux concept.
Valve for heavily investing into making games run well.
GitHub for inventing Electron, the eater of RAM and the great equalizer of UX.
Lots and lots of Linux and distro maintainers and contributors, achieving the opposite of the death of a thousand cuts.
There are some still unsolved problems, like power management and device drivers, but I feel like we're over the hump. There's a critical mass of regular people using Linux as their primary desktop OS on modern hardware, so trying to make Linux work on a 2025 laptop no longer feels like empty struggle.
It's keyboard-centric and its shortcuts are much easier and quicker to use. For instance, CMD + left/right arrow for home vs having to reach for the home/end button. CMD + Q ("quit") vs. (I think?) alt + F4. CMD + C still works in the terminal, shortcuts are always the same across apps, etc.
It's extremely consistent across apps and dialog boxes, which isn't the case with Windows and even less Linux. For instance, from any app browsing for a file will open the file browser with my preferred settings, bookmarks, and position. All apps handle high-DPI correctly and consistently. Most UIs follow Apple-provided guidelines, shortcuts are consistent across apps, etc.
While not required, it focuses on drag and drop vs. clicking, which is much quicker and 100 times easier to use. For instance, dragging a file from a folder to a "Browse" dialog box to select the file vs. clicking 100 times to navigate to it.
Most importantly, most of the times things just work. To install apps you normally just drag an icon into the Applications folder. Windows still makes you restart in certain cases (because it locks files, I think), Linux still has the problem that app developers don't provide easy-to-use installers.
Obviously this comes down to personal preference.
Windows is just a disgrace despite being the most popular OS for 40 years but it's good for gaming. Linux gives you the freedom to do whatever you want and fix things if you don't like them. macOS normally provides a consistent experience if you just want the thing to work and move on.
The only other thing keeping me hooked in is that I use an iPhone and have an iPad and need a bit more time for that to feel like a sunk cost before I pull the plug on it all.
Same with Windows on my gaming PC but I haven't looked into whether I'd encounter any friction with Nix there.
All that would remain after that is getting off of iCloud for storage and email.
Unless you’re using an iPhone and/or iPad. The Continuity feature, seamless copy&paste between devices, notification mirroring, iPhone mirroring, and being able to move my mouse cursor from my macOS onto the iPad are things I’d really miss when switching to a Linux desktop.
Graphic though, yes (I had as much sleep issues on windows than on Linux). Especially the dual graphics intel/Nvidia. I still have to force environment variables to launch my games with the correct GC
My laptops don't kill themselves waking up in my bags so I could argue it's at least 5x better than windows.
Things moved on nicely in 20 years, you should try it for yourself.
I can't figure out why Windows has these crazy bugs that aren't addressed, aren't a huge company with almost infinite resources..?
Why can't they make Windows work properly, it's been 40 years... :-/
But... I will gnaw my left arm off before I go back to Mach or WinNT. (Maybe I'll try using HaikuOS as my daily driver...)
Though... fwiw... I've been running a non-x version of leenucks and then booting into a X and experimental Wayland FreeBSD VM via KVM and it seems to work well. I can halt the machine and save state in about a minute and then turn off the hardware. I come back later and restore. It's not a seamless operation, but I'm happy to live with it. It's also pretty easy to checkpoint the virtual disk before installing the bazillion packages I sometimes have to install to test out various python extensions. So all I have to do is revert to a checkpoint and all that crap is gone. I don't have to worry about remembering which packages I have to manually uninstall.
But... I think the poster above should have said something like "pick any two (for a depressingly large number of laptop models.)" Also see my post above about what seems to be XPS models falling out of support after eight years or so.
That motivated him to look at the long term as he expected to benefit from increases in the value of the business over the long term.
A regular CEO looks more at the short term. The value when the next options vest or the next bonus or whatever.
Tim Cook is an amazing operations guy and only sorta gets the product vision thing. Maybe 650 milli-jobs. [2] But the people in the Apple org who have a gut feeling for what makes a decent product from a customer perspective are lower on the org chart. I'm sure they're doing daily battle with the accountants who know the price of everything but the cost of nothing.
[1] Someday I am going to write a memoir about what it was like to partner with NeXT in the early 90s.
[2] A milli-jobs is a unit of product vision. 1000 mJobs is Steve Jobs. 650 mJobs is Tim Cook. 100 mJobs is Gil Amelio.
He was able to make friends with them instead of treating them like cattle.
I've met so many business people that think talking to nerds is a total let down, a degradation of social status.
What I learned working with (not for) NeXT in the early 90s was "Steve is not your friend."
So, I guess our only hope is to get Woz back..?
The vibe I got from him was he was very happy doing what he's doing and was happy to let Apple be the company it evolved into rather than the company it was in 1977.
Another thought. You said "macOS is still the best OS I'd want to use IMO". That is all they need. As long as you (and other users) feel that they do not switch it does not affect their sales or profits. It helps that Windows is getting worse.
There is something seriously wrong with system data in iOS 26.
Two days ago, I finally upgraded. Liquid Glass is one of the worst things I've ever seen in terms of design. It reminds me of when I personalized old cheap android phones or Linux distros just "to look cool". Cool-looking: yes. Unusable: also yes. Tasteful design: almost absent.
Just the increase of the border-radius in all elements makes it hideous. Apps with a search bar on a scrollable list look like a CSS bug when the search bar is on top of the elements. Neither the search bar nor the element underneath are visible. Although this applies to most transparency effects on Liquid Glass. Neither the elements above nor below the "glass" are visible. And the extra value added is zero.
The thing is, I can still adapt to it, or tweak transparency and contrast. But I've seen elderly relatives struggle just because WhatsApp decided to add the "Meta AI" floating button. I can't imagine what this "inaccessible" UI changes can do.
The battery sometimes randomly drains within less than a day. There are absolutely no benefits of the new visual effects.
The watch was my favorite apple device because it helps me to reduce screen time on the phone. Now it is a source of anger.
What’s the point of using application databases if the application cannot even query items by size and other attributes?!
I know that's not the solution that we want, but at least you should be able to look into the sqlite database it's using under the hood (https://github.com/RhetTbull/osxphotos/wiki/Understanding-th...)
It's that the basic shit is now so broken. Safari is unusable with too many tabs because it won't suspend them. The Tahoe app launcher will randomly remove apps from the list, and you need to open Finder to get it. Apple Books is unusable; the book keeps blanking out, it displays random error messages, search is slow and cumbersome because you need to scroll the search results list each time.
There's a collapse in basic functionality where it's obvious they don't use their own products.
Yes, one. On Tahoe there’s thirty. The scale of complaints is definitely higher this time around.
As long as their competition is what it is, they don't have to put much effort in.
I agree, Apple needs a focus on quality. Plenty of Apple fans have been asking, for years, for a bug-fix release of all the OS's.
I don't know where the buck stops. I would point to Craig Federighi, but no doubt if Tim Cook told him he had to pivot to quality over features, Craig would do as Tim asked.
(I went to one Federighi feature meeting where engineers from the various teams show up with a demo ready to show and Craig goes round robin within the conference room watching each demo, asking questions, and then generally giving a thumbs up or not. It is done very rapid fire though—we were expected to show up "ultra-prepared". I watched him go from team to team before getting to us and my impression of his capabilities and understanding of the OS as a whole was in no way diminished by the experience. Craig is a capable guy. I want him and Apple to succeed.)
Your plan seems like a good one, but remember, your mileage may always vary.
And there are days I keep thinking I want to go back to my Commodore 64. It didn't really do much, but at least it didn't bug me every 15 minutes to upgrade.
I've been in the apple ecosystem for 20 years at this point, because the ecosystem delivered real value for me. But that value has declined sharply - hardware is still good, but software quality has cratered while the drive for services revenue has become so relentless that I've now got one foot out the door.
- Big Sur did a redesign which wasn't really needed, but it wasn't that much of a downgrade. Wish they focused on fixing bugs rather.
- Monterey had live text, which has come in handy, otherwise I haven't used any of its headline features (such as shortcuts or universal control).
- Ventura: haven't used any headline features (Stage manager, continuity camera, Freeform)
- Sonoma: still nothing (Desktop widgets?, Game mode)
- Sequoia: Passwords app is cool, but have been using 1Password for a decade by this point, so had little interest in switching. (Everything else: Apple Intelligence was a joke, iPhone mirroring seems too clunky to be practical).
So nothing that exactly made me excited to upgrade, but at least things didn't get drastically worse.
But Tahoe seems like a disaster I don't want to touch. For one, it looks ridiculous. But also there seems to be a number of objectively bad design decisions all over the place. This is Apple - good design is what they got famous for. If they don't maintain an edge in UI design, then it's not the same company anymore as far as I'm concerned.
I run NixOS, it's incredibly easy to do anything I want by just pointing Claude at my dotfiles and telling it "I want this", applying, and then reverting if I don't like the results.
The switch came more from a realisation that Apple devices are becoming media/slop consumption devices, rather than devices that run my workflows for me.
Otherwise, I guess I'll be buying an Android.
Not for lack of trying. Heard the wife scream that they updated her to 26 2 days ago. And she had been warned. Not by me, she may not trust the conservative geek, but by our daughter who is cursing at iOS 26 right and left.
So far I've managed to protect all my iOS and MacOS devices, but who knows what they sneak in next...
By the way, ages ago I had to pull over on a road and wait for an iOS upgrade because Apple deemed to display the "upgrade now" dialogue over my navigation app and of course i touched the screen in the wrong place to get rid of it because i was driving.
She has an old MacBook and old iPhone (circa 2017?). Apple no longer updates these OS’ even the bundled Safari.
One of the bureaus, Experian I think, has a TLS cert that is not compatible with the old OSs so all the “don’t trust this site” warnings come up.
How many people have incomplete credit freezes because of this? Apple is of a size that this hurts society.
They share the same trait of “it works on my machine, I like it, therefore it’s my identity and everything else is wrong”
I use Linux regularly as a second OS for more than 15 years. Driver compatibility improved, software design and quality didn’t, in fact it suffers more or less the same problems of other mainstream OSs.
Linux on the desktop has been winning because the others got bad at a faster pace, I’m not sure there is anything to be celebrated.
I can’t believe I’m suggesting this, but… you could install a bunch of apps to get your phone storage to <10GB free, which should block it being able to update to iOS 26.
I've been asking myself the same for a couple of years now.
Assuming Tim Apple uses an iPhone, does he just throw it in the garbage and pull out a fresh one every time the battery reaches 20%? Is no one at Apple irked by the low battery notification modal that blocks all interactions until you dismiss it, the same way it has for 19 freaking years now? It even covers the PIN entry form and makes the device unusable. I honestly think it's more reasonable to assume they're all on Android.
Life on the outside is really nice. You can just... do things.
for the rest of the migration I had to take it piece by piece, luckily my iPhone had enough storage, I got iCloud to download everything to my iPhone, then syncthing-ed everything to another machine. I then backed up everything that I just downloaded from iCloud to a Hetzner Storage Box via restic.
I run into this daily. I don't understand how this got through QA
I am eyeing a few tutorials on building my own cloud.
(Oh man. That came out super smug. Imagine the non-smug version of that message. Maybe it should have been something like "I went on a project to reduce the amount of screen time over the last couple of years and generally feel healthier and happier. Pick your own level of engagement with tech, but I encourage you to think about if you're spending too much time on your phone (or commenting on threads at ycombinator.com) at least every couple of months.")
https://derlien.com/ "Disk Inventory X"
regularly to find stuff to clean up.
The answer, unfortunately, is that features need to be sunsetted/removed, the engineering org shrunk, and for a smaller group to concentrate on a reliable product core.
You can hire the best, but coordination among a group of people scales quadratically.
Try building a graphics editor in SwiftUI. This is not really possible in 2026 in SwiftUI. I build a zoomable pannable page setup was incredibly difficult but possible.
Then try adding WYSIWG text editing to that. I got halfway to building one using CoreText to render to Canvas which works but then there's this fight with their NSAttributedString which is opaque and horrible, making it impossible to store CMYK colours alongside the text runs. There's also no way to capture iPad keyboard input in SwiftUI.
In the end, I have to build things that fit within platform constraints if I want to use SwiftUI.
The fact that e.g. Canva and Figma bypass almost all their APIs and draw to canvas should be a wake-up call for them.
Also PDF generation is painful enough that I'm considering a Java based web-service for document export on macOS.
User: I will be so happy if Foo doesn't keep changing its UI and focuses on fixing bugs for a few versions
Foo's devs: Keep changing its UI and adding more bugs
Also, here's Tim kissing fascist ass on the same day ICE shot an unarmed man: https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/tim-cook-attended-melani...
Now we're all going to have to pay for Gemini model storage, probably 2 to 4 GB.
That means we're probably paying $10 per-device for the storage required to have Google's model on "our" devices. Which we never asked for.
They could just make it an optional part of the install. Does anyone really care about the on-board "intelligence"?
Gemini FFS.
AI is changing at a rapid pace ( still ) and OpenAI is no longer the only game in town at the top, plus their finances are.. something we’ll hear about the next year and Sam Altman is an incredible unscrupulous person with past actions and decisions catching up to him. Not exactly the situation you want to partner with.
At this point you don’t need your AI on Apple devices to be revolutionary, it needs to work and be better than the current situation which is not difficult.
Gemini 3 is quite good for the general public, Google has the money to keep playing the AÍ games and also played ball with Apple, OpenAI only has 1 or 2 of those going for them.
Possibly. Until online features are added, marking a slow decline into the everything-as-a-subscription-service world (E-ASS). Look at Apple vs Google stock price for the carrot.
Even if I turn it off, how to I remove it and reclaim the space I paid for?
It really does seem like nobody at Apple is actually using any of the software they're releasing. Its just such shoddy quality control!
> try to do my own manual photo backups
As a Linux desktop user but Apple phone user, I do the same thing, so I can save the photos to my NAS, using ipairdevice/libimobiledevice/ifuse et al. to do it. Best part? Apple still spams me that my photos aren't backed up, because I'm not using iCloud. Is there a way of disabling that? Nope, they'll forever bother me about this, thanks.
> It really does seem like nobody at Apple is actually using any of the software they're releasing. Its just such shoddy quality control!
I think this is the crux, there are no humans with brains doing QA anymore. Since I got my iPhone 12 Mini, up until yesterday when I last used it, CarPlay still feels like it's worth risking my life every time someone calls me while I use the navigation. Not a single person could have tried this at Apple, because who would think it's a great idea showing a large avatar across the screen, over the navigation, as soon as someone calls? Absolutely bananas the direction Apple went as soon as Jobs disappeared, shame really.
This kind of BS has become very common with Apple. There's a very pretty happy path, and a very ugly muddy trail if you fall off the scenic route.
But I did it nonetheless and system data reduced! So crazy is real.
But then you have to buy an extra app to fix Apple's mess.
Personally I don't mind because I use it to clear my personal crap and it's made its money back countless times already, but to get it just for the purge...
Endless restart loop. No recovery possible, even with a second iPhone and mac. It’s a known bug for years.
a. Apple is not the same company it was 40 years ago. Or 20 years ago. Or 5 years ago.
b. Apple quality varies greatly over time. I'm typing this on an 8 year old Dell XPS laptop. I've never had an Apple product I bought new last more than about 4 years. People tell me they've had Apple products last 6-8 years before dying. Clearly there's a distribution, but the central tendency of the apple curve is lower than the central tendency of Dell or Lenovo.
c. Apple is filled with <insert epithet I can't repeat here>. Without exception, everyone I've met in the product group is actively trying to figure out how to get you to buy a new iProduct. And they seem to hire only sociopaths. Engineering doesn't seem to be overrun with sociopaths. I think because at the end of the day they have to build things that work for at least a few months after you unbox them.
My personal laptop is a 7 year old Dell G5 running Linux Mint.
My experience using that on a daily basis is actually pretty decent. Very smooth sailing. It is good enough that I keep postponing my decision to get a new machine.
So, no. This is an Apple problem, not "everyone else in the industry".