I appreciate your frustration, but at the same time what is Apple supposed to do? If it's affecting only a tiny number of users, and you just happen to be an unlucky one, and they don't know how to reproduce it, and you can't help them reproduce it, then what? I think they just have to wait until somebody (such as yourself) is able to figure out with some kind of logging what is happening. E.g. the first question to answer is probably what actually gets the focus, if anything? To produce a bug report that at least suggests which area of code might be responsible.

I had a similar problem at one point, then finally figured out it was when I accidentally hit the fn button which triggered the emoji picker window and moved focus to it (IIRC), but it was off-screen because I'd previously used it on a secondary monitor. Reconnecting the monitor and moving the window back to my primary display fixed it. (Obviously, it's a bug to show a picker window outside of visible coordinates, and I think it got fixed eventually.)

But it also might not be Apple at all, if it's some third-party background utility with a bug. E.g. if that were happening to me, my first thought would be that it might be a Logitech bug or a Karabiner-Elements bug. Uninstalling any non-Apple background processes or utilities seems like a necessary first step.

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eloisius 18 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

They could throw some small portion of their billions of dollars into proper quality control and reproduce it themselves if they wanted to. It’s an industry-wide malaise, but it isn’t inevitable. It’s amazing that every year it becomes more and more economically unviable for basic shit to meet the modest standards of usability, yet we can use the power consumption of a small country to have Copilot in Notepad.

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JoBrad 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Windows has had a “prevent apps from stealing focus” option for at least a decade. It was one of the things that I still dislike the most about macOS, and Apple can absolutely address this.

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Someone1234 an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Windows has no such option, and regularly steals focus, particularly Visual Studio/Debug tools/applications loading. It had an option for a short period with the original TweakUI, but Microsoft removed support for it even in the registry.

No OS should steal focus, Windows absolutely is guilty of it.

	▲	pixelpoet an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Windows itself isn't guilty of this in my experience (lifetime of use until Linux switch last year), but other apps like shitty Akamai. Some years ago a coworker wrote this blog post and a simple tool to find out which programs are doing it: https://forwardscattering.org/post/30
	▲	AnyTimeTraveler an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Many Linux display managers let you chose what to do, when a window requests focus. For me on Sway, it just turns the border red. I chose what happens after. Can recommend. I wasn't even aware of my privilege.

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jdiff an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Where's that hiding? Discord is horrifically guilty of this across every OS, so I'd love a way to quash that on at least one.

	▲	WD-42 35 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		GNOME on Linux prevents it. You get a notification "Discord updater is ready" instead which you can activate if you want to give it focus - which I never do. F the Discord updater.

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tw04 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I can tell you bartender 6 has been perpetually broken since release and does this. I finally gave up on it after the devs sent me “fixes” that never fixed anything.

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nazgul17 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Dunno, not deleting the posts would be a good start.

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m0llusk an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

> ... what is Apple supposed to do? ...

This seems like an example of a situation that modern machine learning could help with. Take bug reports permissively and look through all of them for patterns. Loss of focus should be the kind of thing that would stand out and could be analyzed for similarities and recurring features. Making sense of large amounts of often vague and rambling reports has been a problem for a long time and seems like a domain that machine learning is well set for.