> That was a sensible gamble too, given how unpredictable that sector is five years after it was released.

Define sensible. Apple's B2C margins are peanuts compared to what Nvidia's commanding right now, and they're both ARM retailers competing for the same cutting-edge fab space.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/12/apple-admits-to-...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43003230

Well, I hope I'm not, but yes, I will be quite disappointed if so.

I wasn’t arguing everything be thrown out, just that a competent group be put in charge, and also that they open the HW up so there is competition on the SW side.

If you put third party support under macos leadership or next to it on the org chart, it’d be systematically sabotaged to death. That org hasn’t delivered anything useful in a decade (“useful” == “a user might notice and care”), so there’s no evidence current leadership could ship leadshot from a wet paper bag, even if they wanted to.

Also, they’d nearly double their laptop share overnight if they did this, and it’d cost them 10-20 FTEs.

> we'll end up paying that price when the manufacturers have finally starved the professional capability to compete from the rest of the world

What does this look like, in practice? Once China and India and Vietnam "starve the professional capability to compete" (presumably in the manufacture of smart phones) from the US, what would actually change and why?

Curious what drove you to replace previous ones?

Until you get fascism or welfare reforms, hopefully you aren't on the chopping block by then.

> I'm taking as an axiom that some amount of bribery (tribute, really) had to be done

It didn't.

> In that lens, this bribery, while bad, is the least destructive form it could have taken.

Its not.

> It being so gaudy actually helps this case.

It doesn't.

Normalizing corruption to this level is a bad thing. Period.

The people engaging in this should be in prison. Including Trump.

No, before Trump 2 nobody would’ve taken bribes and gifts so openly like this. It’s not even in the same league and it’s some really self-serving argumentation to pretend otherwise.

Every complicity is another nail in the coffin of our democracy.

Nor does the cop who demands $100 for letting you go without arresting you.

But they're still responsible for their own personal piece of the rot in the system.

Cook stood up to the FBI. He could have stood up to Trump -- he just didn't want to.

> Everyone in the United States is complicit to the horrible things done by the Trump administration by your logic.

This is a ridiculous strawman. I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume ignorance instead of malice.

I wrote that going above and beyond to curry favor with an autocrat in order to protect your profits is collaboration.

And you read, what? Existing under a government means you necessarily support it because there was an election? You do understand an election means some people voted the other way, right?

We don't know what deals Cook and Trump have made with each other, we've just seen the byproduct of their relations on the political stage. Nothing Cook did during his tenure de-risked Apple from the consequences of a worsening political state in the US. When the tides turn towards authoritarianism, Apple turns towards compliance. They've done it for both Trump admins.

Cynically speaking, Cook is wise to keep the DEI and climate commitments as bartering chits for Apple's next leadership to forfeit. He knows that Apple needs leverage to get their druthers from the Fed.

Yet he keeps going to his parties and schmoozing with his cronies. I don't recall Pichai or Nadella giving Trump a gold trinket to save their businesses.

The Apple Vision still needs to get two or three times better preferably with an M6 or M6 processor, whoops, more memory, faster SSD, thunderbolt five etc. oh and it needs to be $1500 Hmm… not possible for another two years? With better software.

And to do that more than likely the engineering and design of memory systems probably needs to come in house. No more outside dependency.

The hardware is best than class in both software and hardware by a mile who is this other company Meta or is it Microsoft with a HoloLens? Long-term iteration is the only way the Apple Vision Pro will get better if it took 13 years to come up with an M1 processor beginning to end and six years to have your first working modem that can be used in a smartphone there are no shortcuts long hard iteration is the only way.

I misread the comment I was replying to; thought they were claiming HW was good, and SW was bad.

No one accused Microsoft of writing good software.

A shell is not useful on a touch screen device.

iOS comes with a text editor built in. Memo.

Ssh server doesn't make sense for an iPhone. How would that even work? It wouldn't be able to do anything or be a worse experience than something properly designed for the user rather than trying to force a 50 year old computing model onto a phone.

iSH is a shell for iOS, it has all the common shell tools and you can ssh into it.

I’ve heard this but it doesn’t make much sense to me. People see the shit software, and they think “Apple software is shit.” I don’t think they think “This software is only shit because I’m on Windows, I better switch to Mac and run (basically) the same software there.”

It’s actually not speculation, they have testified in court, under oath, that they had a whole developer team just to fuck up the user experience.

That's an extremely low bar, Windows has been shit for a long time and has basically only degraded. Some people think Windows 10 was good, it wasn't, they just haven't used Windows for long enough.

Apple software isn't bad, but it is often obtuse and buggy. And, with iOS 26, usability has taken a big hit.

at least you can still decide on the software you install

On macOS when I alt-tab to a full-screen app it takes forever. On KDE when I alt-tab to a full-screen app it's instantaneous.

On macOS when I connect or disconnect an external monitor, my applications get all confused on where they should display, especially if I then reconnect a monitor. On KDE when I unplug my monitor everything goes nicely onto one desktop. When I put a monitor back in, everything goes back to where it was before. It just works.

On macOS, every time I install a new program I need to do some dance with System preferences to allow it to run. I tried some command line settings that supposedly disables this, but it never sticks. Every few months, the process is different than it was before. On KDE, I just run my software and it works.

On macOS, I don't have useful window snapping behavior or full-screen behavior, nor am I able to have focus follow my mouse. On KDE, I have these.

macOS just doesn't work for me. But the competitors have a good solution.

In 2003 it was a dog’s dinner. I remember getting kernel panics from pulling out an already ejected USB stick.

Guess what people were saying in 2003…

2003 OS X sucked.

Books can go on it too. No matter the free storage space on my iPad, it relentlessly nerfs stuff to iCloud rendering its utility on long aeroplane journeys completely worthless.

I'll add it once, we need a donor hand to tally the iOS and WatchOS versions.

I would never

Similar experience here, started with the same G4 ("white") iBook. That was an amazing machine. Under the hood it was hard to distinguish many differences with Linux/BSD of the time. The UI on top (OSX Tiger) was peerless -- I recall being very excited for the introduction of Spotlight. I'd say the decline came around 2012-2013 or so. Hardware was still great, but they were no longer updating the GNU stuff and anti-features like SIP made it harder and harder to run the applications I want (gdb for example). I gave up not long after they introduced the touchbar

These days I'm happier (or at least content) without a Mac. My FW13+Linux setup may not be as nice as the latest macbook, but it does exactly what I want and if it doesn't, I have options.

The whole experience you're having with the rain dance is because the cloud does just work. It's a vanishing a tiny percentage of people that don't use it.

> The built-in animations on Apple's software are sometimes hundreds of times slower than on their competitors, in ways which can't be accounted for.

You can turn down the animation times for most of this with "defaults write" commands. Set them to 0 or as small as you want. Here's a good list to get started:

https://gist.github.com/j8/8ef9b6e39449cbe2069a

> I don't need an interface which throbs, wiggles, jiggles, shines, and refracts, I need an interface that's snappy and fast.

System Settings -> Accessibility -> Reduce Motion: Enabled System Settings -> Accessibility -> Display -> Reduce Transparency: Enabled

What saddens me is that a decade and a half ago, Apple led that charge with a reliable and unblockable UI thread on the iPhone.

Now that said iPhone is a thousand times faster, just invoking the keyboard can cause a serious delay with stutters.

I think a big part of this in recent years is SwiftUI just not being fully-cooked and Apple trying to shove it into a bunch of areas without enough attention to performance. Not sure how it is on iOS, but for example, the Settings app feels chuuuunky if you navigate through the panes with up and down arrow keys. I wasn't able to make a selectable list view that worked consistently and didn't feel like a regression compared to an equivalent AppKit view

It's odd to see this comment, since I've always had the opposite experience (at least when comparing Windows and MacOS -- I haven't used desktop linux much in the past 20 years). On MacOS, when I click something, something happens, or at the very least starts to happen (and I get some visual indication). While in Windows I often click on something and get no indication that something happened or started happening, so I click again, and then suddenly perform the action twice. This most often happens when opening programs, but it happens in other places too sometimes.

Package management, too. I recently got a MacBook for work, but it’s sitting on my desk and I’m continuing to use my Lenovo. Managing software updates is much better on Linux. As is managing windows (via Niri in my case). macOS really feels like a downgrade.

I find using non-Apple pointing device to have drastically improved the latency.

I plug a Mac into a 120hz monitor with a high refresh rate mouse and it is gloriously snappy, snappier than any Windows PC I’ve ever used.

>The thing where Linux (and Android, and Windows at least circa 2023) blows Apple out of the water is in UI latency.

I wouldn't expect that of Android because it's Java and Kotlin parts run in a VM and there's a garbage collector pausing the execution at times.

This is the biggest thing that irks me after coming from windows. Everything feels so sluggish. I wonder why the internet ist full of people complaining about that. I guess they just dont work fast enough to be bothered by that?

Yes, I hate how slow it is to swipe between desktop workspaces, for example.

A major reason Snow Leopard was well received was because of how performant it felt along with the bug fixes. What isn't mentioned anywhere near as much is that it dropped a lot of hardware (PPC). The last G4 Powerbook got about 1.5y of OS support before it was dropped.

iOS 26 is slated to drop a bunch of iPhone models. macOS is dropping all all macs with Intel CPUs.

A Snow Leopard release isn't great news for a lot of people.

Great... yet more attention on iOS

I miss Steve :((

I use macos for dev. Not even install xcode tools, neither most apps via apple store.

not the op but for me safari has been deteriorating for years:

1. ios performance in scrolling and loading (especially on my ipad pro m2) is unbearably slow, just stutters everywhere when loading a page in the background

2. tap-and-hold to open a link menu is so strange; sometimes it highlights text instead of showing the menu, sometimes it works ok, there is some kind of strange ui timing issue at work

3. on ipad and ios the tab overview display scrolling is absolutely appalling like 4fps level slow... completely unbearable to scroll through tab previews

4. developer tools are abysmal compared to chrome

5. on desktop performance is also extremely slow compared to chrome, its night and day

6. battery usage is so bad on ipad, just leaving some tabs open they run down the battery and chug memory (i know this is more a web thing, but they should at least freeze tabs in the background or make it an option)

7. just strange bugs on ipad, when tapping a text field the keyboard pops up, then suddenly disappears and the pops up again... just a terrible app

etc etc lots of paper cuts, but the performance issues are the biggest for me... i like the tab groups + auto save and icloud sync and built-in spellcheck, but its getting harder and harder to resist the alternatives

Apple nuked all 3rd party extensions unless they go through their bureaucracy.

Code-signing to force updates should be illegal (including iOS versions)

I have many MANY grievances with Safari:

1. Mandating all browsers on iOS/iPadOS to be powered by Safari (excluding in the EU). This doesn't sound bad, but wait until #3 below...

2. Safari's many bugs. Too many bugs. Oh so many bugs. Damn that's a lot of bugs.

- See: https://webventures.rejh.nl/blog/2024/history-of-safari-show...

- Also see the State of CSS developer survey where Safari makes up such a large portion of pain reports that "Safari" is its own category: https://2025.stateofcss.com/en-US/usage/#css_general_pain_po...

- And again in the State of JS developer survey: https://2025.stateofjs.com/en-US/features/#browser_apis_pain...

3. Grievance 1 and 2 compound together. Whenever Safari (or a Safari update) breaks a feature, you cannot inform a user that they can use another browser as a work around (because all browser engines are forced to use Webkit on iOS/iPadOS)

4. Bad dev tools. This has been seeing much needed improvements (e.g. being able to type an entire word in the css pane instead of a new character on each line), but it still feels 7 years behind.

5. No way to report bugs. There is a "bug reporter" at bugs.webkit.org, however each bug is auto-tagged with a link to an internal bug tracker within Apple. This means that those who are trying to fix bugs and those are trying to report bugs have a wall between them. There is no way to have a discussion to try to narrow down what the bug is, why the bug happens in one case but not another, what's really the cause of the issue, or why the bug matters more than whoever is assigned it might realise. When reporting a bug to Apple, it's more useful to talk to an actual wall because it might fall on you giving you an actual response.

6. Performing incorrectly is more important than getting the performing correctly. This one takes some explanation, but it's a little tricky. I'll give three examples then show how they're all the same issue:

Example 1: The cool homepage.

I was working on a website. Two months before launch I decided to spend a month of time juicing up the homepage, then one more month on polish.

On the homepage I decided to use the brand's pre-existing graphics and turning them into a parallax animation (inspired by: https://www.firewatchgame.com/)

It had:

- Regular content on the page

- Parallax layers with simple vector graphics inside them so that when the user scrolled down the page, the user saw a parallax animation of the landscape changing. (e.g. far clouds, far mountains, close clouds, close mountains, hill, foreground, simple bubble particles closer than the regular content on the sides to strengthen the depth of field illusion, etc...)

- Other vector graphics following a motion path animation

- This was done in 2017, so before CSS got scroll driven animation support, or motion-path support. It was also done without JS.

- Everything worked brilliantly, until we discovered that one particular iPhone model rendered an empty blank white page.

- I lost the last month trying pulling the effect apart trying to diagnose the bug (and with Safari's buggy dev tools being no help I had to do it in the dark). I was able to determine when the bug would trigger, and had to tear down my whole homepage and rebuild it with 2 fewer parallax layers before launch and 3 days of polish for the rest of the website before launch.

(you can see the final result at https://myobrace.com, but I really would have liked the extra time for polish, if you're wondering how I achieved the effects without JS and/or scroll-driven animations, I used css's perspective and transform rules to position the elements back in the z-axis then scaled them up so they appeared the correct size with the regular page content so as the page scrolled, the elements further back appeared to scroll at a different speed. I then used SMIL for the motion paths in the SVG elements).

Example 2. The texture

I wanted to add a repeating texture to buttons so they didn't feel so flat without needing a separate network request to download an image.

I tried generating one with SVG but the SVG 1.1 filter effects implementations aren't all hardware accelerated.

I tried generating one with CSS which worked everywhere but Safari.

You can see a texture here where the texture is generated entirely within CSS, and it doesn't work in Safari (but I didn't hide the seams because the result looks like a cool mosaic and I wanted to share the technique): https://codepen.io/spartanatreyu/pen/Yzbmvbr

(if you're curious about the actual texture I used, I hand drew a minimal noise texture in photoshop that could be repeated without showing seams, then base64 encoded it and inlined it within the CSS file so it could be loaded without needing an extra network request. You can see my development version here: https://codepen.io/spartanatreyu/pen/YzoexGg?editors=1100 (the final version is locked behind a login wall in a child-friendly education webapp))

Example 3. Asset downloading

I made a webapp for kiosk machines that downloads 100mb+ of video assets when logging in for the first time. iPads have a kiosk mode so I supported iPadOS' Safari mode so that the iPads could be used in commercial settings as kiosk machines.

When the final assets were added, the iPad machines would randomly crash during the asset downloading process.

With Safari's completely broken debugging experience, I eventually learned that as Safari downloads a video, as soon as it tries to put that downloaded data somewhere, it has to copy it across to the new place it's being stored, and if you're copying more than 3mb, it crashes the browser.

The fix was to download and store each video in 1mb chunks. This slowed down the installation speed by a bit over 300%, but at least Safari didn't crash any more.

---

Now back to: "Performing incorrectly is more important than getting the performing correctly."

It turns out Safari on iOS/iPadOS has an invisible time/performance budget. Anytime Safari hits that budget, the browser stops what its doing.

- Drawing texture to screen? How about we stop drawing all textures to the screen, including text. Websites don't need to draw any text right?

- Rendering a texture in CSS? How about you have the color white covering everything else instead.

- Downloading a video that's more than 3mb? How about I crash the browser when the download completes.

Compare this to Firefox and Chrome, as they run out of their budget, they stop starting new work so they old work can finish before starting their next task. The page may take a few milliseconds longer to get to the correct result on slower devices, but the result IS correct.

Even worse:

- Safari has no way of informing the code how close it is to the budget.

- The budget can only be found by trial and error.

- If the iOS/iPadOS device has other apps in the background, the budget is smaller.

- Each device has a different budget, so you have to penalize all Safari devices to the smallest supported budget of the oldest supported device.

- If you hit the budget on the most basic functionality (e.g. a homepage, a button, downloading required assets), then your website / webapp may as well not exist to those Apple users.

The alt tab implementation on macos is awful.

There are so many basic gaps in functionality and so many underbaked & poorly designed Mac OS features that I end up papering over with paid 3rd party applications.

I used 20+ years ago as a guideline, not an absolute. Of course the intel MBP came out in 2006 (or 2007?) and was an absolute dream setup where hardware caught up with Windows while the software was pretty good as well (I was using a Mac since 2004 or so).

I don't think software is improving today, which is why I have to be nagged to upgrade. I don't think it worse, but my computer usage probably varies greatly from yours.

Same here. Two decades ago, I was excited to install updates to commercial software I used because they fixed bugs and brought useful new features. These days I fear updates because they introduce new bugs, remove features I care about, and come with new anti-features that I actively do not want.

The macOS Tahoe release is a great example of this. I can't think of a single thing I prefer about it and could easily name ten things I hate about it.

Amarok was way better than iTunes in that era. Massively better UI, separation of playback queue from collection browsing, plugin ecosystem, better metadata fetching including lyrics support... And its dynamic playlists were way more capable too.

I had an iPod in those days and Apple's firmware updates that periodically broke third-party sync (while bringing no improvements) is the reason that to this day I've never bought Apple hardware for myself from Apple since that time. Used hardware only.

Every time I had to use iTunes was regrettable. The app was an insanely massive download for the time. It tried to install fucking Safari on Windows for no reason. The UI was somehow simultaneously a sprawling mess and feature-deprived.

Maybe there was a brief period where iTunes was genuinely an interesting app, but even by the mid-aughts, it had been totally surpassed by a number of open-source music players.

But Amarok at that time was only available on Linux. I assume most iTunes fans of the time never got to try it.

Google has so far allowed installing apps without their explicit permission. So it's much higher on freedom index, imo. And there's no obligation to use Google cloud apps. There's alternative for every Google cloud app.

Bugs in the OS I encounter as a developer.

Yes. I generally don't have to deal with the mess Microsoft has put on top of their bloated but solid kernel / base OS.

If you're interested, it's to reduce cost. It's incredibly expensive to build something like Music or Maps. If each version is tied to an OS version, it keeps you from having to explode your testing and fixing cycle over time.

It's a deal when they stop updating. It is true they provide OS updates for longer than most, but many people use devices, especially ipads for way longer than the OS supported period. And those people are stuck on an old unsupported browser without being able to update or install a 3rd party one.

Unlike Android indeed, when you maintain a perfectly working phone that happens (by accident or force of nature) to live longer than the official lifetime some executives in a remote office had decided to grant it, the web browser cannot be updated any more. Just the single most security sensitive piece of software of any computer. Who would have guessed people were going to complain!

Never understood that if statement style, it seems to only exist to create subtle bugs.

iOS (and MacOS) now use Google’s BoringSSL instead and have for many years