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Comment by weikju | Hacker News Reader

I was following, in my mind going "ha ha, Windows", until the author moved on to ranting about the Mac notifications, and recounted experiences that don't match mine at all.

Or perhaps I just always deny by default notifications from apps, and if I do enable them I deny them sound and usually deny banners, so I rarely get bothered no matter the mode

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MacOS (and iOS) has a subtly different problem in the built-in apps:

Every single fucking Apple app has a shitty first-run experience that nags you about "WATS NEW IN MAPS" or whatnot, the first time you open it after an OS update. Product managers throughout Apple are so worried that their pet features won't get enough adoption, so the solution is to prevent me from using the app at all until I acknowledge the work they did over the past year. And the wording is always so fucking cutesy: You have to press "Start Listening" to dismiss the "What's new in Music" dialog. Why not a "Shut the fuck up" button instead...

Is it too much to ask for the following?

- Provide a "what's new in macOS" somewhere in the Settings app

- Don't have a notification badge for it. Let me browse to it myself when I'm curious.

- The "what's new in macOS" can have an overview of what's changed in _all_ of the apps.

- I can completely ignore what's new if I want. The part of Settings that says what's new should be a simple swipe to dismiss, and after that it should be buried in About (or some other spot) so that I can get to it later if I want, and I can revisit it multiple times if I want to learn more.

>Why not a "Shut the fuck up" button instead...

Distantly related: Vending machines should have a big red button* "just give it to me, i don't care about no change, just fucking give it to me".

*2022 edition. A big red button that has to be pressed three times (for the easily-offended amongst us).

Gas pumps.

Nevermind the Cheddar News of the pump, that's its own separate nightmare, but I just want gas. I put my card in, you give me gas. Skip the receipt prompt, skip the carwash prompt, and no I don't have a rewards card.

I get exactly zero notifications on my Mac computers, except for update notifications. I do mostly use this computer for dev work, I guess the author is just installing random crap? Not sure

You need to look closer at what the author is saying. It's not the app's notifications, it's the notification from the system itself. If you update / install apps with brew, you get the system ask you again each time after the update whether you want the notification or not; the software may be malware download from internet. It is just silly.

It sounds like this author hasn’t even attempted anything other than focus mode. Notifications are highly configurable in Macos. Having Siri enabled while on a conference call is just asking for an interruption.

I agree that notifications can be a nuisance, generally speaking, but my mbp is the quietest of them all.

If a user has to be clever to get a good default experience, that’s a bad default experience.

This. Default to disabling notifications and the problem sorts itself. Or: disable them all immediately, then progressively enable those you « miss ».

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