We've gotten a little spoiled by our Macs lately

[Joelist]

Ever since Apple Silicon came to the Mac we've been a little spoiled. OSX/Macos has always been solid but now we have massively powerful SOCs that are also extremely efficient. So our Macs are lightning fast, run cool and get great battery life. Add in the excellent displays and the high build quality and we have darned close to the perfect laptops.

I remember what Windows laptops were/are like, where you had to choose between battery and performance. And inconsistent build quality. My GOAT Windows laptop is no doubt my ThinkPad I had. Built like a tank and they would put BIG batteries in them so you had reasonable performance. But my MBP 14 M4Pro outclasses the ThinkPad beyond any doubt.

 

[Citysnaps]

Ever since Apple Silicon came to the Mac we've been a little spoiled. OSX/Macos has always been solid but now we have massively powerful SOCs that are also extremely efficient. So our Macs are lightning fast, run cool and get great battery life. Add in the excellent displays and the high build quality and we have darned close to the perfect laptops.

I remember what Windows laptops were/are like, where you had to choose between battery and performance. And inconsistent build quality. My GOAT Windows laptop is no doubt my ThinkPad I had. Built like a tank and they would put BIG batteries in them so you had reasonable performance. But my MBP 14 M4Pro outclasses the ThinkPad beyond any doubt.

I've never had a Windows machine, but my two desktop Macs (a 2019 Intel Mini dedicated for 24/7 security cams and home automation, and a Mac Studio for general use), and two AS laptops, are a real joy to use. Even my older M1 MBA. Zero issues on all of them.

The Intel Mini will soon be replaced with an M4 Mini as soon as I figure out how much performance I need. Processing 8 simultaneous video camera feeds with smart motion detection drags the Intel Mini down (and generates lot of heat). I'm expecting the M4 Mini will be loafing along power wise, and with much faster video decoding.

 

[cbum]

I disagree with "lately" ... I've been spoiled ever since I got my IIci and my Pismo...

 

[Yoused]

One thing still annoys me, though. It is not entirely a Mac thing per se, but when I get a system update on my iPad, the device has to give me a big "hello" splash, after which it wants me to upgrade to 2-factor, which I do not use, before I can get back to doing stuff. Even for .point upgrades. My phone is Other, and when it updates, I get a little alert that says "hey, I just updated," and that is that. In that respect, Apple seems more visibly intrusive to me, though I admit, I have never run an update on the Windows machine that I never owned, so I have no clue what that is like

 

[Cmaier]

One thing still annoys me, though. It is not entirely a Mac thing per se, but when I get a system update on my iPad, the device has to give me a big "hello" splash, after which it wants me to upgrade to 2-factor, which I do not use, before I can get back to doing stuff. Even for .point upgrades. My phone is Other, and when it updates, I get a little alert that says "hey, I just updated," and that is that. In that respect, Apple seems more visibly intrusive to me, though I admit, I have never run an update on the Windows machine that I never owned, so I have no clue what that is like

Even i was targeted by russian hackers one time (it was fun watching them remotely control one of my mac’s before i pulled the ethernet cable), so I heartily recommend two-factor.

 

[Nycturne]

One thing still annoys me, though. It is not entirely a Mac thing per se, but when I get a system update on my iPad, the device has to give me a big "hello" splash, after which it wants me to upgrade to 2-factor, which I do not use, before I can get back to doing stuff. Even for .point upgrades. My phone is Other, and when it updates, I get a little alert that says "hey, I just updated," and that is that. In that respect, Apple seems more visibly intrusive to me, though I admit, I have never run an update on the Windows machine that I never owned, so I have no clue what that is like

I have seen the Hello splash a couple times, but mostly only see it ask questions about changes related to the update.

That said, it's not any better on the Windows side. Windows 10 is now hitting people with ads to buy a new machine. Windows 11 has a rather annoying tendency to harass you again and again about OneDrive / 365 / Microsoft Accounts after the quarterly(?) updates as well.

Edit: Kinda on this point, I'm in the middle of installing Bazzite on my Gaming PC. I tried Linux Mint, but apparently Bazzite is based on Valve's Linux distro for the Steam Deck and so is a bit further along when it comes to game support (HDR for example).

 

[Yoused]

I just compared Macs.

An original Macintosh cost about 45% the price of a base model Honda Civic.

For the same raw dollar amount, a new M4 iMac can be configured with 24GB RAM and a 4TB SSD – that is 187,500 times as much RAM and about ten million times as much storage (though you could do the floppy-swap to have more storage, up to a point – no one could realistically function with even a hundred floppies at hand). Not to mention 57 times as many pixels at 16 million times the color depth and a difference in processing power the is profoundly difficult to measure.

They still sell Honda Civics, for about 4 times the 1984 price. But, I should concede that the iMac as configured above is $4 more that the original Macintosh.

 

[theorist9]

Compared to older Macs, the hardware may spoil us, but the OS does not. Yes, the new OS's have far more features. But I find the older OS's had more intuitive design choices—in using the older OS's (circa Snow Leopard), I had the sense that smart, serious people spent a lot of time trying to do clear thinking about interface design, a feeling that I don't get as strongly today—and more user control.

And long gone are the days when I never experienced a kernel panic. Though maybe the latter is as much hardware as software, since the last Mac that didn't give me kernel panics was my 2003 PowerMac G5, which had dual PPC processors.

 

[Nycturne]

But I find the older OS's had more intuitive design choices—in using the older OS's (circa Snow Leopard), I had the sense that smart, serious people spent a lot of time trying to do clear thinking about interface design, a feeling that I don't get as strongly today—and more user control.

This seems accurate. That was about the point where even large projects were migrating away from waterfall development models. One thing I miss from that era was the fact that we'd take time to do early planning. This would be explorations, prototypes, etc. Then those would inform what we actually did.

These days, there's never any time allowed. Adopting "agile" has meant many teams flat out forgo this type of planning, and there's few opportunities for teams working on similar features to align and look at the space holistically. I feel that very keenly at the moment as I work in a space where everyone is expected to deliver on AI, but the deadlines are so tight that communication just doesn't happen. It's a bunch of tiny teams delivering tiny pieces of a larger puzzle while being unable to step back and see the whole thing.

 

[theorist9]

This seems accurate. That was about the point where even large projects were migrating away from waterfall development models. One thing I miss from that era was the fact that we'd take time to do early planning. This would be explorations, prototypes, etc. Then those would inform what we actually did.

These days, there's never any time allowed. Adopting "agile" has meant many teams flat out forgo this type of planning, and there's few opportunities for teams working on similar features to align and look at the space holistically. I feel that very keenly at the moment as I work in a space where everyone is expected to deliver on AI, but the deadlines are so tight that communication just doesn't happen. It's a bunch of tiny teams delivering tiny pieces of a larger puzzle while being unable to step back and see the whole thing.

One obvious change is that Tiger, Leopard, Snow Leopard, and Lion were each released two years after the previous OS, while the release interval for all subsequent OS's has been one year.

I suppose Apple believes marketing considerations require that, but I would have preferred if they kept with the two-year release intervals. It's not as if they need to update MacOS annually to remain competitive with Windows, which has much longer release intervals.

I don't know if the increasing integration between MacOS and iOS, and the rapid progression in LLM's, precludes a 2-year release cycle today.

 

[Yoused]

I do have issues with some macOS ergonomics, mosty with menus. The menu system is all but outmoded.

One thing that slows me down is submenus: they always appear at the edge of the parent menu, which often means that I have to travel across a wide menu item to get to the submenu and adjust my position because I wandered into the next line, causing the submenu to disappear. It would be better if submenus appeared in response to obvious lateral movement on a line, right under the cursor. I believe such behavior would be much more efficient for the user.

Also, I often find myself using contextual menus, but those are pretty aggravating. In the olden days, CMs were awesome because they only had six or eight items, but now I find myself looking at CMs that have some fifteen or twenty items. All the items are nicely unambiguous descriptions of actions, which means they are all a lot of text, so I have to scan the wall of text to find what I want, which is not always the same (e.g., "delete thing" or "delete selected things"). It might be no big deal except for the fact that the CMs are so large that they often align inconveniently because of the edge of the screen, so muscle memory is hard to develop.

There has to be a way to improve the menu system – I have my ideas, but no one seems to like my ideas, and changing the way things work would inconvenience people who have gotten used to how things work, unless you go the extra step of making the changes optional.

 

[Herdfan]

The early WIN 10 machines had an annoying habit of just installing an update whenever it felt like it.

I was Meet Ref for a large HS swim meet and right in the middle of it the scoring computer decided it was going to update.

So we opened the pool for warmups and sat there for 15 minutes while it did it.

So I’ll take the splash screen.

 

[Nycturne]

One obvious change is that Tiger, Leopard, Snow Leopard, and Lion were each released two years after the previous OS, while the release interval for all subsequent OS's has been one year.

I suppose Apple believes marketing considerations require that, but I would have preferred if they kept with the two-year release intervals. It's not as if they need to update MacOS annually to remain competitive with Windows, which has much longer release intervals.

Windows currently releases one feature release a year, and used to do two. They just don't talk it up with a new name every year. But fundamentally the development model of the two OSes are very similar.

But that change came about by moving away from waterfall to something that likes to call itself "agile". The idea being that once you are "agile", you can just release on a calendar schedule and ship whatever you got done that year. But the shift also means you do work in smaller chunks with smaller deliverables and smaller scope. On one hand this is good because you can more accurately measure where you are at. On the other, it means you have fewer opportunities to think of things in larger scales because these corporations are constantly in "get it done" mode. Ask me how I know.

I don't know if the increasing integration between MacOS and iOS, and the rapid progression in LLM's, precludes a 2-year release cycle today.

The catch is that web apps in particular are churning on weekly cadences, and mobile apps aren't far behind that to keep up with the back end. Two years means you can very quickly fall behind the general market. Personally, I would love it if the whole industry took a chill pill and stop trying to build on top of constantly shifting sands.

This "constantly be releasing" mentality is one of the reasons release notes are so useless, as each release is a hodge podge of changes from a couple weeks prior, and getting a system in place to keep up with and document these changes properly is overhead that nobody seems to want to devote time to address. The main benefit is that if a feature does miss a release, you only lose a week or whatever your cadence is.

One thing that slows me down is submenus: they always appear at the edge of the parent menu, which often means that I have to travel across a wide menu item to get to the submenu and adjust my position because I wandered into the next line, causing the submenu to disappear. It would be better if submenus appeared in response to obvious lateral movement on a line, right under the cursor. I believe such behavior would be much more efficient for the user.

What about requiring click to expand submenus (which would also let the system know to lock the submenu in place)? I'm tempted to get out my old laptops to see how they handle this, because I think this was painful even in the System 6/7 days, but my memory may be lying to me that it was better in MacOS 8/9?

Also, I often find myself using contextual menus, but those are pretty aggravating. In the olden days, CMs were awesome because they only had six or eight items, but now I find myself looking at CMs that have some fifteen or twenty items. All the items are nicely unambiguous descriptions of actions, which means they are all a lot of text, so I have to scan the wall of text to find what I want, which is not always the same (e.g., "delete thing" or "delete selected things"). It might be no big deal except for the fact that the CMs are so large that they often align inconveniently because of the edge of the screen, so muscle memory is hard to develop.

Yeah, I'm not a fan of the Windows-esque explosion of commands in context menus and "more" menus. Not sure what the solution is.

Don't get me started on how Electron apps re-invent the context menu...

 

[Joelist]

Interesting discussion.

On Macos I think the expanding horizontal menus are probably the only practical way to surface all of the necessary commands in our applications. And yes the Windows Update method is beyond annoying.

As to the oddball release cycles I unfortunately have to contend with Agile at work. As a method it has good intentions but usually the way it is executed just makes it annoying.

 

[Yoused]

One obvious change is that Tiger, Leopard, Snow Leopard, and Lion were each released two years after the previous OS, while the release interval for all subsequent OS's has been one year.

Back in those days, as Apple was on PPC/Intel, the processors were not changing very much over time. The increased cadence seems to correspond to Apple's entry into SoC design. Especially now, An does not have all the same stuff as An+1, and the same is largely true of Mx vs Mx+1. The yearly cadence of hardware changes almost necessitates yearly OS versions to take advantage of the new SoC bugs featues.

 

[Cmaier]

Back in those days, as Apple was on PPC/Intel, the processors were not changing very much over time. The increased cadence seems to correspond to Apple's entry into SoC design. Especially now, A does not have all the same stuff as An+1, and the same is largely true of Mx vs Mx+1. The yearly cadence of hardware changes almost necessitates yearly OS versions to take advantage of the new SoC bugs featues.

i think it’s more driven by iOS. Phones require an annual cadence of OS updates with new features, and many of Apple’s new features each year are “ecosystem” features that require changes to macOS.

 

[Nycturne]

Back in those days, as Apple was on PPC/Intel, the processors were not changing very much over time. The increased cadence seems to correspond to Apple's entry into SoC design. Especially now, An does not have all the same stuff as An+1, and the same is largely true of Mx vs Mx+1. The yearly cadence of hardware changes almost necessitates yearly OS versions to take advantage of the new SoC bugs featues.

In addition to what Cmaier said, Apple was perfectly willing to push out minor updates to support new hardware in those days, including new drivers.

 

[Yoused]

i think it’s more driven by iOS.

That was what I was saying. Apple needed consistency between the platforms, if only to make maintaining two versions of the OS easier side-by-side. It was all but obvious when they released the iPad Air that ARM would eventually become the Mac platform down the road. So, they had to keep macOS current with iOS in order to streamline the Mac transition.

 

[Joelist]

I do miss Tiger. It was my first OS on a Mac and I still like it the best - even if dated now it had personality.

 

[MacPoulet]

I do miss Tiger. It was my first OS on a Mac and I still like it the best - even if dated now it had personality.

Panther was my personal favourite. It was the first release that I found was truly stable and got me to switch out of OS9.