For some reasons I can’t stop thinking about “AI”.
Today I ran out of ram, the "teams" desktop app was taking 2 gigs just standing there doing nothing, you can run four whole windows Xp on the same amount of ram, comfortably. My inactive chatgpt chrome tab alone was taking 900mb
And the web is the most advanced and open OS in the world. That all those features can be packaged into a 100MB binary is magic
This predates AI, eg recall Windows was gnarly before the third Service Pack, etc.
Personally I blame outsourcing and its cousin offshoring. Not because Indians can't code or any such racist nonsense, but because relentless pressure to be the lowest bidder, no universal measurable standard of what quality actually means, and, above all, no practical way to exercise meaningful managerial control over a team you don't control or are ten timezones away makes quality impossible.
I suspect that in the Wide World of Software, away from the 10x people here on HN who write SQLite clones for fun and send Fabrice PRs to fix his bugs, vibe coded software might actually be approaching the quality of what they get from their vendors today. That doesn't make it good, but it's at least equally meh. It's the Visual Basic era of 1994 all over again. We'd better get used to it, fast.
Hard though from the idea initially too.
The main stack is reasonably web, as broad as that is
For example all modal windows on iOS have a close button on the right, except the weather app that has a close on the left.
Spaces... the windows don't layer right. So I can't always move them to a new space. When I bring up the various desktops, some windows just freeze at the original size and refuse to move.
Similarly, the desktop previews for other desktops don't work. They start out working, but as soon as I resize a window, the previews in the virtual desktops go blank, so I can't see which desktops have files and applications running.
Also, probably the most annoying, my laptop (M4 Max MBP) battery life is just gone from what it was a week ago. It used to last a day; now it's maybe 4 hours -- I've noticed the fan is on a lot more which is likely the cause.
The laptop went from always being quiet, cool, to being warm when I pick it up.
And yeah, I've tuned all the settings, fixed what I could, but Spaces and virtual desktops are just broke.
As someone who has been using virtual desktops for as long as Apple has had this feature... man, it's just a total drain on productivity to try and shoehorn everything into one desktop. I hate it. Might as well be using a computer that isn't my own.
And as someone who has used Mac for 40 years at this point... I'm just not used to Apple breaking this much. They were sticklers for detail, and that's why I love their products. But this latest OS feels untested. Do they only care about users using one application at a time? Feels like they just gave up on advanced users. Anyone running Spaces / virtual desktops would have noticed all these bugs.
The last OS added a ton of bullshit transparent glitter; this one broke how I use my computer. It sucks knowing that even Apple can't get things right today. Flat out just sucks.
Wish I could just roll back. Left waiting for them to maybe, hopefully, someday put in a patch to fix all the stuff they just broke. Just maddening.
It's pretty much the same as Sonoma besides the apple intelligence which is optional.
macOS Tahoe (26) was the one where they introduced transparent everything, and it flat out sucked from a usability standpoint.
Design was busy for the sake of being busy, glossy for the sake of being glossy. And no attention at all was paid to usability.
* It’s hard to justify Tahoe icons @ tonsky.me // https://tonsky.me/blog/tahoe-icons/
Anyway stay on Sonoma mate, upgrading has killed my productivity and that just makes me way too angry. Ha.
But seriously, the real advantage to open-source software I think will be that you can just tell Claude, "Make this work the way I want it!" and boom it does.
I have loved Apple products for so long, and I can't imagine a world where I don't love their hardware, but since they shat the bed on usable design, and shat the bed on testing, I am starting to fantasize about a world where we could just send our PRs to fix MacOS. =P
On the other hand, I'm not sure people would have read or upvoted this submission if they knew it was merely a "Try These Tips" article. The HN submission title is vague comment-bait.