> Because Apple stuff doesn't "just work" any more.
This is essentially a false statement for all intents and purposes.
Apple software does “just work” with Apple hardware.
This is essentially a false statement for all intents and purposes.
Apple software does “just work” with Apple hardware.
But the software does work. It just doesn't do much interesting stuff anymore.
I'm not blaming them. This shit is hard, even if you control both the hardware and the software. I get why they don't say "it just works" any more.
Or you just fix it yourself and solve anyone else problem too
Apple obviously doesn’t have a lot of unfixed major issues. Many small complaints is another matter.
I still get “me too“ emails from issues ive “me too“ 5+ years ago.
There really is nowhere for everyday consumers to complain about comparable issues in Linux. There is nobody to complain to, and the the only options are self help.
Anyone who fails, fails silently, and there is also the issue that because of all the variation in hardware and software setups it’s hard to even determine that an issue is the same.
On the other side, Apple has more than a billion active users, so a few hundred people with a single issue really doesn’t mean anything at all.
With a billion end-users this is really just noise. In any case this is a meaningless comparison. With Linux there is nowhere and nobody to even ask for this kind of support.
The answer is always some version of RTFM or fix it yourself.
This is not true. Every time I've run into a Linux problem, googling the error has always produced an answer. Often more than one answer. Often mutually incompatible answers. But one of them usually works. In the end.
For Apple, googling the problem often leads to an Apple Support page that has no answers, just an endless stream of "I have this problem too".
> The answer is always some version of RTFM or fix it yourself.
At least you can fix it yourself.
Almost no regular consumers can in fact fix it themselves.
That’s why you see a small number of minor issues being complained about a lot on Mac forums.
This is essentially a false statement for all intents and purposes.
Apple software is far from being immune to bugs, bad UX, etc., even on Apple hardware, as I can personally attest today from using a Macbook Pro daily for work.
This is a total straw man.
“Just works” has never meant free of bugs. It means not having to do a bunch of incidental configuration, tuning, and setup.
Things do just work.
You use this word, "straw man". I do not think it means what you think it means.
No, it is not a straw man to point out that bugs interfere with the notion that something "just works". When bugs interfere with getting things done - as I've found they often do in the course of using macOS daily, like when I can't open firewall ports for development or share my screen via Google Hangouts because the Big Sur update broke the password prompt for editing restricted things like firewall settings or app permissions, or when apps can't present an Open File dialog anymore across the board because God knows why, then it's a complete farce to call that "just working". There is no "just" nor "works" about that. Not to mention all the little paper cuts, like the lock screen taking 30 seconds to unfuck itself before I can actually type in a password, or constantly forgetting which applications I've set to open things by default (meaning that every so often I end up with a cacophony of fan whirring instead of an editor window when I try to open an XML file because macOS yet again decided to reset the default app to fucking XCode). (EDIT: oh, and the Touch Bar stops working if I plug in an external keyboard, which is just dandy)
Also, I love how both comments immediately coming to defend Apple's honor stop at the "bugs" bit and entirely ignore that I'm taking a fat steamy deuce on Apple's UX, too. So on that note:
> It means not having to do a bunch of incidental configuration, tuning, and setup.
Which you have to do anyway, because the macOS UX sucks, and seems to be getting worse with each update. Want to have persistent named workspaces? Nope, gotta install some buggy hack of an extension to do it (which in turn required going through a whole bunch of red tape to bypass a bunch of security checks, because of course it does). Want to control where in which of those workspaces application windows open (or at the very least whichever workspace currently has the selected window)? lol fuck user intent, Workspace 1 Monitor 1, and switching away from whatever workspace was on Monitor 1 because double fuck user intent. Application menus are so far away from application windows that the Ever Given could do a goddamn u-turn between them with room to spare. Forward/back buttons on mice don't inherently set focus, so instead of navigating the history on the window my cursor's actually pointing at said buttons end up doing so for some random window on an entirely different monitor. (EDIT: and how could I forget the arcane screenshot shortcuts! Command-Alt-whatever-4? The fuck?)
I could go on, but this comment's already enough of a deranged rant. A Chromebook has fewer bugs and a better UX. Even the grotesque hackjob that is the average GNU/Linux desktop has fewer bugs and a better UX. The bugginess and UX is maybe better than (modern, non-LTSC) Windows, but that bar is so low that even ants have to duck when crawling under it.
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EDIT:
I will, however, give Apple credit where credit's due: I do like the use of Command instead of Control for the CUA shortcut prefix (and the use of Emacs shortcuts for text navigation), and the touchpad gestures are nice, even if limited in options. It'd be great if more operating systems adopted these things. And the Touch Bar's kinda cool, I guess.
Beyond that, I don't really have much praise for macOS. It's overrated, and "just works" is a myth in this day and age. It was arguably a lot more true back in the PowerPC days (even if OpenBSD is my current preference for my PowerPC Macs), but it's been getting worse and worse over the years. Maybe the switch to ARM will be an inflection point re: software quality. Fingers crossed.
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EDIT 2:
And even just now, doing an SMC reset (to fix that password issue in System Preferences) broke the UI, giving me no background, no dock, and no workspaces. Rebooted to find that no input devices worked until I unplugged my docking station. Background loaded briefly, then back to brokenness. System logs say that the dock is crashing due to a SIGILL. Here goes another night of troubleshooting macOS again instead of getting work done. "Just works" alright...
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/straw%20man
Being ‘immune from bugs’ is an obvious straw man.
> A Chromebook has fewer bugs and a better UX
If by ‘better UX’ you mean doesn’t even try to do things.
> Application menus are so far away from application windows that the Ever Given could do a goddamn u-turn between them with room to spare.
Have you considered why? There are good UX reasons for this. It uses less screen real estate, and leverages Fitt’s law because you don’t have to be accurate in the vertical dimension. It’s fine to have a preference for menus in windows. There are some arguments in favor of that, but you are just articulating a preference here.
Really your comment has nothing to do with whether MacOS *just works(, you have articulated a list of preferences and desires for it to work more like other things you have more familiarity with.
You just want it to work differently - I.e. you just don’t like it.
I increasingly don’t like it either for various reasons, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t just work.
You know what is a strawman? Cherry picking only some minor weaker points you want to attack while entirely ignoring the ones that you don't, and then trying to pass that off as a substitute for addressing all points in their entirety. If you actually understood what a "strawman" is, you would recognize immediately that your behavior in this discussion is much closer than mine to that definition you cited, and then you'd kindly refrain, thanks.
> You just want it to work differently - I.e. you just don’t like it.
I "just don't like it" specifically because it does not "just work". It is tolerable usability-wise only after extensive fiddling and tweaking and troubleshooting, and that's only on good days when those aforementioned bugs ain't actively preventing me from using basic OS functionality.
And that's fine - I do enjoy fiddling with things on my Linux and OpenBSD desktops - but those Linux and OpenBSD desktops don't advertise themselves as "you shouldn't ever need to fiddle with things because everything just works" the way macOS does, and therefore I'm a lot less frustrated with that fiddling because those systems are designed for it and encourage it and make it easy and friendly and fun. Nothing about customizing macOS is easy or friendly or fun; it is not designed for it, and it does not encourage it. It is Apple's way or the highway - and given the evolution of Apple's way lately, the highway doesn't look so bad after all.
> and leverages Fitt’s law because you don’t have to be accurate in the vertical dimension
Right, let's watch users spend multiple seconds dragging a cursor to a window toward the bottom-right, clicking, and then dragging that cursor all the way back to the top-left just to save fractions of a second on vertical positioning in a specific spot.
Fitt's law is hardly useful here. If the window ain't maximized, then you need some degree of vertical precision to select the window in order to make its menu visible anyway. And if it is maximized, then it literally doesn't matter what owns the menu 'cause it'll be in approximately the same place either way.
That is:
> There are good UX reasons for this.
There were good UX reasons for this, back in the days of m68k Macs where mice were some newfangled invention and displays were tiny. In those days that unintuitive disconnection was a fair tradeoff to make if it meant conserving that tiny amount of vertical real estate and helping people figure out those newfangled rodents.
Now? It's been, what, 40 years? People know how to use mice (or, if not, can figure it out with a bit of practice - Microsoft understood this and opted to encourage that practice with games like Minesweeper and Solitaire instead of paternalistically assuming users will remain permanently inept), and even the absolute lowest screen resolution Apple sells on a Macbook has multiple times the amount of vertical and horizontal screen space. That tradeoff is far less useful now.
Here’s where I addressed the entirety of your argument:
> Really your comment has nothing to do with whether MacOS *just works(, you have articulated a list of preferences and desires for it to work more like other things you have more familiarity with. You just want it to work differently - I.e. you just don’t like it. I increasingly don’t like it either for various reasons, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t just work.
As for cherry picking. I don’t need to refute every point you made - they all fall under this umbrella.
> And no, neither does linking some dictionary entry as if it actually proves you understand what that dictionary entry is saying.
It does. If it didn’t you’d have addressed it, but you didn’t.
Your entire argument boils down to “Mac OS doesn’t work like linux”.
That doesn’t mean it doesn’t just work. It means it isn’t a good choice for you.
> It is tolerable usability-wise only after extensive fiddling and tweaking and troubleshooting,
Almost nobody does this. Most people find it very usable as is. As I said - this is just about your preferences and nothing more.
> and that's only on good days when those aforementioned bugs ain't actively preventing me from using basic OS functionality.ugh
This is also something almost nobody experiences.
Perhaps your attempts to make MacOS work differently from how it was designed are causing you these problems.
What is odd to me is that you continue to use an operating system that is so ill suited to your preferences.
...except for the usability-hindering bugs. Hardly meaningful to reduce those to "user preference"; like, no shit I'd prefer it if basic devices like keyboards and mice worked on boot without extra fiddling.
> This is also something almost nobody experiences.
The Big Sur upgrade breaking the password prompt in System Preferences, as one especially annoying example, is pretty well documented online - and was documented for Catalina upgrades, too. It's exactly where I got the troubleshooting step of "reset SMC". I'm far from alone there.
> Perhaps your attempts to make MacOS work differently from how it was designed are causing you these problems.
Most of them were an issue long before I felt the need to tweak things. And all of them are far outside the scope of said tweaks.
> What is odd to me is that you continue to use an operating system that is so ill suited to your preferences.
It's a work machine. My own computers all run Linux or OpenBSD (with a few exceptions, like the old laptop running Haiku).
In particular the UI became a dumpster fire. I won't go into the Playmobil interface of Big Sur, let's just say that's a question of (acquired?) taste.
However, the interface is much too big. Most of my computer screen (a 15" MBP) is taken up by empty space.
Then you have all kinds of weird behavior in Apple apps that just wasn't there before. And I'm talking "Apple apps as shipped with MacOS", in particular Safari and Mail.
If I have Mail running in full screen, Safari in full screen also (different "virtual desktop") and I click on a link in Mail it will attempt to open it in safari on the same screen as Mail. No, it won't attempt to tile the windows, just stack them. Yeah, that's not supposed to work and it doesn't. In order to get back to Safari, I have to un-fullscreen Mail. If I try to reach Safari via Expose or Mission Control or whatever it's called today, it will select it, then when the animation finishes zooming in, it instantly switches back to Mail.
Speaking of Safari, my "favorite": try to open a new tab. Wait around for an hour while it spins the beach ball. Tried removing the history, the "smart" thingies on the new tab page had already been disabled, etc. This keeps on happening from time to time.
Then for some reason, sometimes in dark mode, the active button of dialog boxes is fully white. If I click outside the window and come back, it gets its regular color so I can read the text.
Also, auto light / dark mode used to work as it says on the tin. Now it randomly doesn't and gets stuck in one mode or the other. Fun fact: if I go to settings, switch from Auto to the one it's stuck it, nothing happens. Switch back to Auto, and now it knows how to change. No, it's not timezone related, as I don't change those and haven't since 2019. The clock is always on time.
I also use a USB drive for time machine. Sometimes, for some reason, the time machine icon in the menu bar becomes white on light grey. (In Big Sur the menu bar doesn't change color in dark mode, so why does the icon even have a light mode?). In Finder, the "eject" button is not aligned with the name of the drive until I click on it. Fun side effet: I have to click it twice to actually do something useful. You might argue that aligning the icon is useful (happens after the same click) but I'd rather I didn't have to do that. Even on my dinky file manager in Linux this doesn't happen and have never seen it happen.
Then, there's the App Store. For some reason, sometimes it won't update the apps. The progress goes all the way to almost full. Then it does something for a while. Then it says it needs to close the app. I say ok. Then it says "yeah, actually, I can't update it". Why? Won't say. Then after a while, it manages to update it somehow. This has happened with multiple apps, including Numbers (Apple app).
Now all these (except for the Safari beach ball) first started happening when I updated to Big Sur. I figured my mac may have accumulated cruft or incompatible settings during the years. It's a 2013 MBP that got the "transfer your data" from my older one and it also went through a bunch of public betas. So I figured might as well try the Windows treatment and do a clean install. Nope, none of the issues went away even without copying over anything from the previous install.
So even on "Apple hardware", there still are issues. And I really don't think any of those issues can be attributed to my particular hardware being old. And all of those issues are new issues in functionality that had been in MacOS for years and that worked well.
Now my MBP is gathering dust because it's just irritating to use. I find Linux (on Arch with i3 of all things) is getting out of my way and being less of a hassle to actually get my work done. Of course, I hate the hardware (some cheap HP probook from work that rubs my wrists when I type) but sitting at a desk all day it doesn't matter since I'm not physically touching it.