Apple, What Have You Done?
47 points by pzel
47 points by pzel
Why, oh why did Apple take the app launcher away!
I find this fascinating, because I never used that. Since Apple launched Spotlight, that's been how I launch apps: command-space then the prefix of the app. Pretty much any app is 4-5 keystrokes. The app launcher was incredibly clunky and slow in comparison. It was a thing that made sense on mobile (where typing is hard and so a few taps is much faster) but was terrible on the Mac.
Completely agreed on everything else.
This reminds me of this XKCD.
In all honesty, I have the same feeling whenever I try to use my Apple computers. They have become incredibly clunky, and partially very buggy. The biggest upgrade I did for my M1 Macbook Pro was installing Asahi on it. That alone turned my laptop into a usable daily, where I can switch between a usable and fast Fedora and a very powerful audio processing engine on MacOS with one singular reboot.
The sheer amount of 'small' bugs on my iPhone is particularly infuriating. I wish I would protocol these, but in the end nothing would change. A shame really.
I used to use a mix of Spotlight and Launchpad. I liked to have one place which lists all applications (whether they're in /Applications or ~/Applications or wherever else), and I'd learn the locations of some apps so I could remember an app either by location or name.
Now I only use Spotlight (because duh, Launchpad doesn't exist anymore). But Spotlight has become less reliable, I think. I've installed apps and had them not appear in search for a day (they'd show up in the long list of app icons in Spotlight though!). And like before, Spotlight sometimes just randomly decides to get extra useless and get busy indexing for a few days at a time.
Also, can we please talk about the performance??? When you open the app launcher part of Spotlight, if its icon cache or whatever is cold, it takes seconds to populate app icons one by one! Launchpad never showed such jank, it just had all the icons ready from the first frame of the fade in animation.
I agree with you soooo much. Idk how Rofi and co manage to add a Program immediately to their launcher, yet Apple somehow still fails at this. I miss the simpler Spotlight. Almost 100% of what I did with Spotlight was launching apps, but even that seems too hard now for some reason...
just for completeness' sake: if you have tried many launchers (esp on windows) this is not a given or a solved problem. rofi is good with it, I've had to mangle paths on the majority though.
I feel your pain. The current spotlight jank is making it nigh-useless for me. Raycast is working as a temporary fix, but with all the AI and cloud junk it's pushing, I'm not sure I'm comfortable keeping it around. I'm thinking about trying LaunchBar. I don't want to buy something for this, though.
Have you tried Alfred? I prefer it to Raycast, although I did pay for its Powerpack upgrade eventually. You don’t need it, but it does add powerful features.
I don't think I've tried Alfred since back in the day when I wound up sticking with Quicksilver. That's definitely worth a try. Thanks!
There is also Launchbar: https://www.obdev.at/products/launchbar/index.html It's also been around a few days.
Personally I find the free version perfect, the built-in breaks are awesome to enforce built-in break time :)
I remember Launchbar! When James announced that Dragthing would soon not be viable due to the 64-bit transition and the lack of 64-bit Carbon APIs, he'd worked out an offer for Dragthing users to get a discount on Launchbar. I didn't take it because I was using quicksilver to launch things from the keyboard, and the feature I loved about Dragthing was the drawer interface on the bottom of my screen, which was not one of Launchbar's many features.
How often/long are the breaks?
Lasts like 5 or 10 seconds, I don't remember and it hasn't happened recently. I don't use it A LOT, I get hit maybe once or twice a day.
If they get annoying you can always just buy the thing.
If they get annoying you can always just buy the thing.
Of course. And I do buy LittleSnitch. I like these developers. I might just buy the thing.
I just harbor some objection to buying a thing because Apple (seemingly unintentionally) broke the built-in functionality I was using. On some level I'd rather react by moving to a Linux laptop, if it were time for a new laptop and I knew of one with a screen, keyboard, trackpad, on-battery performance and battery life that matched this Macbook.
you could switch between the two with zero reboots using the macos UTM.app from the App Store (to receive updates automatically) or from open source. i stopped using Asahi (reformatting my machine) when i saw that the Apple Silicon hypervisor is exposed through UTM, so installing an arm64 Fedora (or anything) from iso just works.
it's fantastic. when installing a new ISO, if you say it's a Linux, it shows the option to rely on the Apple Silicon hypervisor rather than QEMU emulation. runs fast as greased litghtning
Using Linux on bare metal and using Linux in a VM window aren't remotely the same IMO.
For one, I don't think you can get macOS to forward all trackpad gestures to the VM guest... GPU performance and garphics API support is also still an issue, isn't it? And you have all the typical networking in a VM issues; will other devices see the VM through mDNS? Can you host a server? And you for sure can't put the WiFi card in STA mode from within the guest.
I never have occasion to kick such tires, so to speak, so I'd say hey it's simple to test all you're thinking of.
I do believe that, when setting up the Apple Silicon hypervisor 'bindings' one option is use of (or lack of use of) graphics acceleration, and I've not tried testing that.
The vm is visible from outside at its IP address but not sure if it's plumbed into mDNS. So can definitely host a server though.
Whilst I appreciate the workflow, I find it nice using the excellet hardware of the Macbook withouit having to even look at MacOS. I use MacOS on my laptop maybe 3 times per year, so I am very very happy with how it works. Still, I didn't know that this workflow existed.
The way my mind works, I am good at remembering locations but very poor at remembering names. When I want to launch something like OmniGraffle what I used to do was flip to the third screen and look for the icon on the second row at the right.
What I do now is think "I want that drawing program". I don't remember it's name. (Note: to write the name in the previous paragraph I had to spend 4 minutes performing searches before I found one that actually named it.) So I can't search, and instead I scroll through the list looking for an icon I recognize. Typically it takes about 2 full passes through the list. Launching a program used to take half a second; now it can easily take 2 to 3 minutes.
I am not suggesting everyone should work the way I do. Offering choice would be a great idea. But removing the way it had worked with no easy way to replace it was quite harmful to some users.
Interesting. This is how launching applications works traditionally in MacOS: you organise things in your applications folder into the hierarchy that you want (including aliases for things that you want to have in more than one category) and then use the Finder in spatial mode (which was the only mode prior to OS X) for spatial memory.
I've just checked and this still works. In the context menu for the folder, select 'Sort by -> None' and the folder reverts to spatial mode. Drop the applications folder in the dock (or an alias to it on the desktop) and you can open it and navigate in your spatial mode quickly. And, unlike the launcher, this doesn't involve have two completely different spatial models for the same thing with totally different UIs and sets of affordances (on iOS, apps don't show up in the Files app, so this isn't a concern there).
This is how launching applications works traditionally in MacOS Yes. Until the latest update.
I've just checked and this still works. [...] Drop the applications folder in the dock [...] I'm not sure what I'm doing differently — when I tried adding my Applications folder to the dock I was no longer able to view it with icons in positions I had placed them. The icon view sorted things alphabetically (which means they move every time I install a new application). I WAS able to do this by creating another folder containing aliases to my applications.
Also annoyingly, spotlight doesn't use app descriptions / tags / whatever. So if you want to scan something? That's "image capture" of course - better remember the name. Want to change display settings? Go to the main settings app manually. Want to use a spreadsheet? It's not excel, sheets, spreadsheet, cells - got to remember Apple chose "numbers".
I'm not sure if that's overall better or worse than windows search where "apps" doesn't find "add/remove apps", but "aps" does; and "sql" doesn't find "sql server managememt studio", but "ssms" does. They're competing for the last place hard right now.
Want to change display settings? Go to the main settings app manually
The settings app integrates with Spotlight and exposes all of the settings as searchable things. This has worked from the very first release of Spotlight: it was one of the things that Steve Jobs showed in the first public demo of the feature.
Except it doesn't half the time because the new search input isn't reflected in the UI if you already had something open in the settings. Or it doesn't come to foreground, no matter how many times I do it.
Or the settings simply start hanging when you try to switch panels (this a brand new macbook).
My favorite is how the scroll on the left is persistent. So if you have two searches with enough entries it will keep being scrolled down. While also having this blurry background for the text input and the results behind it.
I just tested and adding a Finder comment to an app makes it show up in Spotlight if I search for that same comment (though not the first result), but it only does this in the overall Spotlight search and not in the app-focused search. Same thing if I add a named tag. This feels like an oversight in the app-specific search. That mode also won't find apps by category, e.g. doing the app-specific search for "Music" won't find GarageBand.app. That said, doing a more general Spotlight search for "Music" does find it; it's sorted below a bunch of documents for me, but typing Music kind:app finds it. But of course that only works if you know the correct category name, searching for Instruments kind:app doesn't find it even though that's a word I associate with the app. I'm not sure how to solve that part though, short of having the app developer add metadata for any relevant keywords (mdls lists a kMDItemKeywords but it's empty for all apps I tested).
Spotlight does use tags and Finder comments — and probably other metadata too, but I just tested with those two, and it worked instantly. The problem is that Image Capture, and I checked with mdls has no metadata that says anything about it being a scanner.
I also only used Spotlight until the latest macOS. Now Spotlight is so bad (way too slow, not showing app first, etc...), I finally moved to Raycast.
And I am really happy with Raycast now.
For a while I used quicksilver because spotlight was slow for that. Then I switched to spotlight for launching apps when it got fast. For the past month or so (even though I'm still on Sequoia) spotlight refuses to launch any apps at all. It's maddening. I have been using raycast for the past week, and it's a bit nicer than spotlight used to be, but I'm not comfortable with certain aspects of it. I'd really like the old spotlight behavior back.
I think this is not only about apple.
There seem to be people who use their machines in the same way, all the time. Like you say "I don't need any icons, I can type, and I remember what I need to type without losing my train of thought".
And then there are other people, like me for example. For the last 15 months I've been using: A mac at work, a windows PC for games and surfing, and several linux machines with different window managers for random tasks. Some are tiling, some are not.
Let me put it this way: when I am in "work mode", I only use alt-tab (still hate it on macOS) and spotlight, and on linux it's usually super-t or super-p to bring up dmenu, same thing, and super-(1-9) to switch desktops on a tiling wm
but on windows... I do have a launcher and yet I find myself in enough situations that I just click icons on the desktop as I'm busy holding a glass in my left hand or just idly resting my head on it or even worse: have something in front of the keyboard and no free space to type.
And yes, part of this is self-inflicted (many machines, many OSes, many different keybinds) and some of it is not (alt-tab being weird on macos, not being able to bind a hyper key with karabiner due to work machine disallowing kernel modules)
TLDR: Typing can be hard if you're not in focus mode :P
I do that all the time. Except I sometimes don't remember the name of an app - and then it's one where I never remember the name. Though I'm just fine with the new Apps thingamabob.
iOS and iPadOS don’t seem too bad to me but Tahoe on my M1 MBP is a buggy mess, easily the worst version of MasOS I’ve ever used. (And I still have the OSX beta CDs somewhere in my office!). It drives me nuts, and I have to remember to reboot it weekly or it “runs out of memory”, something that has never happened to me until now, and when this happens it totally hoses my system.
It’s a complete mess, I don’t know what they were thinking, but I suspect they planned to launch AI and when that didn’t happen it was a mad scramble to “do something!”
I've upgraded from Tahoe to Sequoia last Saturday, and it's much better. Try that! Remember to make a Time Machine backup before, you probably can squeeze the newly-installed OS on the same APFS container if you have enough free space, move files over, and delete the older one.
It's funny when it informs me that the next OS upgrade will be done whether I like it or not, without my consent. Then when the time comes, it pops up a dialog for me to input my password and thereby authorize the OS upgrade. Ha, nice try, I ain't authorizing shit!
Feels like I'm at war with my own computer. Fuck Apple, fuck Microsoft. Employees need to strike and take back control of the engineering process. I don't want to hear any more excuses about how The Man is too powerful and you just have to cower and do what you're told because you need healthcare for your family or whatever.
I see posts like this for every single macOS release. and they always seem to frame it as everything was fine up until the latest release. Every major release from Apple will include regressions in some areas, and different users are impacted by these differently, this is definitely not a new problem. Sometimes they get fixed, sometimes they don't and people adapt. And yeah it's really frustrating when a release impacts your own experience in a way previous releases didn't. But it's still weird to frame this as a recent problem, to say "Apple software no longer feels like it just works", when that's the exact same thing other people have been saying every single year since forever. I suppose to be fair, the sentiment could be accurate with the addition of "for me", though as a lifelong Apple user who's been experiencing this cycle countless times, I don't think there's anything actually genuinely different about this release versus the past 5 releases at least, if not more. I do agree that if you go far enough back, Apple paid a little more attention to some of the UX stuff that they seem to not care as much about these days, but that was probably because of Steve Jobs, and without someone like him who cares passionately about the actual experience of the product at the very top, things start slipping.
As for the specific things laid out in this post:
If I delete some apps or data to free up room, the system data then takes it!
System Data includes a bunch of purgeable stuff, of course it takes up more space if you have more space to take up, because it shrinks if you run out of space. It is a failure of the storage UI that it doesn't say how much of the system data is purgeable, though that's not a recent issue, but also, 35GiB doesn't seem like a ton of space unless you're on the absolute smallest disk size option (and if you are then I'm surprised you have 35GiB of System Data, I'd expect less, and also I'm surprised you picked that storage option at all).
And more generally, iOS offers multiple ways to free up space, including offloading photos to iCloud, and offloading unused apps. Falling back on the old trope of "this bad behavior is intentional to force me to upgrade" is lazy and dishonest.
Random restarts
This one annoys me too. The saving grace is these days a respring doesn't kill apps, it used to actually kill all running apps any time springboard had to reboot but at some point a few years ago they seem to have changed that. Still, it bothers me that it's happening more often now, that definitely feels like the sort of problem they should have ironed out by a 26.0.2 release at the very least.
The search box in the App Store doesn't auto-focus - when you bring it up, you immediately want to type, but Apple makes you tap into it as well. That's shoddy UI design.
Ehh, I disagree here. The model in iOS 26 is that a persistent search bar lives at the bottom of the screen for relevant apps and tapping it starts search. In the App Store, there is no persistent search bar at the bottom, instead there's a search button that switches the UI over to the search mode, and this mode presents the search bar. I admit that on the very first tap of this button I might plausibly expect it to begin the search, but it immediately becomes obvious that this button is akin to tapping a tab bar button, since that's basically what it is. This model is consistent with other apps too, e.g. the Bluesky app has a tab bar with a magnifying glass button, tapping that brings up the search UI but does not put focus on the search field. My biggest complaint with the App Store search is that tapping on the search button then puts the search field dictation icon under my thumb, so if I tap again in the exact same spot I get dictation instead of typing my search, though it's easy enough to just tap slightly further over and arguably the positioning of the dictation button there is good for the folks that actually prefer to dictate their searches (which is to say, it means both dictation users and non-dictation users have a predictable location for the second tap without having to wait for the animation to finish).
Why, oh why did Apple take the app launcher away!
That's funny, I didn't even realize Launchpad was gone until this post, because I never use it.
My Magic Keyboard sometimes loses connection with the iPad and I have to detach/reattach it.
This one annoys me too, but I think it actually started with the previous OS release? I seem to recall having this issue prior to installing iPadOS 26 on it. I'm not positive though. Also sometimes if I haven't used my iPad in a while then my Magic Pencil won't work until I reattach it to the iPad and give it a few seconds to reconnect. I'm not sure if this is at all related to the iPad rebooting after a few days without use, or something else. Also again I think this problem started with the previous release rather than iPadOS 26. Both issues are mildly annoying though, and I do wonder why the magic keyboard one especially hasn't been fixed yet.
I generally agree with your sentiment. But Tahoe is on a different level. Things are broken.
The worst one was the Sequoia-> Tahoe upgrade that hosed my kid’s laptop and required a restore from backup. I’ve bought dozens of Macs, this has never happened before.
Maybe that’s bad luck, but here are some more bugs:
I normally ignore the complaints but these are all serious bugs that impact my day (or several days in the case of Time Machine), and they haven’t been fixed despite new releases.
I have been using Tahoe pretty much since the day it became available, and have not run into anything resembling any of these issues. I think it's worth asking whether your experience, though frustrating to you personally, is truly representative.
(signed, someone who's worked on multiple large open-source projects which taught me that people can get quite vocal about bugs that, while real and very serious to them, do not affect enough users severely enough to be drop-everything-right-now-and-fix-it priorities)
I’m not complaining about a specific bug, but that there are so many, and that they are so serious. As I said, I started with the MacOS X beta. I have a high tolerance for problems in early releases.
I don’t expect it all to be fixed at once. But I’m a decades long MacOS user and all my problems started with Tahoe. And the big ones (Time Machine and OOMs) have happened on other devices too.
I don't doubt that you have encountered these issues. I'm just asking you whether you think they are representative of the typical macOS Tahoe experience, because as annoying as they must be for you, I don't think they are representative.
Sorry, yes, I think they are somewhat representative. I experienced the OOM issue on two Macs (mine and my partner’s), and Time Machine/APFS issues on another two (mine and my kid’s). There is also a lot of UI jank generally, which has improved with the new updates but seems well documented.
I appreciate your point, but it’s not just my machine.
It’s possible that our usage patterns are different, eg if you shut down every day or if you have 64GB RAM then maybe would wouldn’t hit the OOM for example.
I appreciate your point, but it’s not just my machine.
Your household has encountered these issues. Mine has not. What basis does either of us have to say "mine is the true representative experience, yours is an anecdotal outlier"?
The answer is: neither of us has grounds to say that based just on our own experiences and anecdotes. But if the issues you have run into were as widespread as you seem to believe they are, I think we would see vastly different coverage of macOS in the tech press, and we don't. The negative coverage of Tahoe has been laser-focused on the UI refresh; if it were the case that (for example) regular OOM crashes were the typical experience, it would likely get at least as much attention in the tech press. On that basis, I believe it is possible to assert yours is probably not the typical/representative experience.
You might be right, but OOM issues related to Tahoe have been widely discussed.
I feel that you’re being overly aggressive, and I don’t want to interact with you any more.
I don't think they are representative.
Anecdata - none of these (or any of the others mentioned) have happened on any of the three Tahoe Macs in this house (with uptimes of 22 days on 64GB, 53 days on 32GB, 17 days on 16GB.)
I'm just hoping I can stay on Sequoia until they fix this. I already had to update my iPhone because others in my family did and as the tech support person in my family I had to help them out with stuff 26 broke. At least with my laptop I control when I want to update it.
iOS 26 simply broke my iPhone experience. On the bright side, it’s become so frustrating to use that I’m using it less!
The watchOS 26 experience is even worse.
I could easily operate my previous watch w/ watchOS 18 with one finger while doing something else (like, for instance, starting a bicycle ride recording while jumping on said bicycle).
With watchOS 26 starting a recording in the "Workouts" app is a 15-second task that requires concentration and using the entire palm of the hand to steady it against the frame of the watch while you are carefully rotating the control wheel to avoid the god-awful inertial effect or trying to aim with your finger at the smallest touch screen button known to man. Oh, and you have to wait for each non-cancelable jello ripple animation to go to completion because the buttons are simply unresponsive during animations.
I am very salty that my watch died and I was forced to upgrade to wOS 26 that came with the new one I bought.
Here's what burns my cookies about Tahoe Spotlight: they broke the backspace key! (How basic can you get?) If you're looking for Chrome and type cht, hit backspace and type r, you're now searching for chtr. You have to hit backspace twice to delete the last character. Sometimes I end up with chtrrr before I slow down enough to remember it's broken.
What the first backspace does is delete the new…I don't know what to call it, "autocompletion signal flag"…to the right of what you typed. It's not adding actual text, so backspace isn't deleting anything; it seems to be just a signal to remove that weird thing on the right.
It sounds bonkers. At the same time they could have communicated it better to user by putting a selection on the autocompleted text on the right. Still clunky, but at least one could understand it better right away. But they prefer to be confusing, because selected text in this situation wouldn't look good.
I wonder if that's how word-wise autocompletion worked before on LibreOffice Writer, I remember seeing selected text appear on the right, but I don't remember what did happen after pressing backspace.
I am not a macOS user.
Mac OS X died for me last week. A family member was constantly receiving links to (probably) malware through Safari notifications. They came like once every 10 minutes or so. With Safari not running.
They said "N viruses found, click here to fix". Accepting a request for permissions by mistake, because you are in the process of doing something and are concentrated: it happens. Luckily the phish trap didn't snap, no "antivirus" installed.
I didn't even imagine that this was possible at all (I didn't use Mac OS X recently).
The other Apple device, the iPhone is annoying infrastructure for the mandatory apps. I'll survive. Had to install the AdGuard DNS profile to get rid of in-app ads, the transparent search bar makes access to UI elements beneath sometimes impossible, Safari paints a set of icons, waits a second, than repaints; every time I open it. I'll survive.
There was one Steve Jobs who was building and selling perfectly designed and perfectly functioning things. Designed in all aspects: physical object's industrial design, useability and aesthetics. We miss him.