I wish Apple would separate the updates of their bundleware from their OS. Some of the major updates have meaningful changes to the underlying OS (gatekeeper, SIP, etc.), but others - like this one - are primarily changes to frills like Messages, Notes, Safari and other Apple-native apps that I don't even use.
I have no problem with Apple bundling these apps and making them work seamlessly together, and I don't even mind that they're all updated simultaneously (except for Safari, which I wish I could update independently without relying on the "Technology Preview" beta channel). But I do have a problem with upgrading my entire OS and disabling the new bloatware features just because I want to keep auto-updates enabled. I used to delay updating and then would end up way behind, which is why I enrolled in auto-update. But now it feels like I'm being held hostage to their update schedule.
And for what benefit? There are hardly any useful OS-level changes in this release, but there are a bunch of new features I'll need to disable (while hoping the next auto-update doesn't break my external monitor), all powered by freshly written code contributing to an expanded attack surface. If I had my way, then I'd take the OS updates and skip all the apps. Keep the attack surface small while still meaningfully improving the core. I don't care about the rest.
You know what would be even better? If you could reliably uninstall all this junk or not even install it at all.
Every time I hit some button on my keyboard and the Music app opens asking me to create an account I am reminded how hostile all commercial operating systems are.
It's interesting, I've been using OpenBSD for the past couple years and it has _not once_ enraged me the way Windows and Mac do. I still use Windows for work, and own a ton of Macs (probably getting close to ~30 by now), but OpenBSD is the OS I use for most general computing stuff.
I mean, I'm using a GUI that is really primitive by comparison to Win/Mac (i3wm) but it's actually great. Extremely fast, efficient, and stays out of my way. There is literally no mechanism in the OS to pop up a notification or bounce an icon or blink anything at me. It couldn't interrupt me and piss me off even if some piece of software wanted to. It's amazing. Nothing updates on its own, and the OS runs very very few services or other background stuff -- basically only whatever I have explicitly configured and enabled. Again, awesome. I'm easily aware of every single process that runs on this machine, and if there's one I don't know about, there's comprehensive documentation about it, including how to configure it. That's honestly effectively impossible for someone using Mac or Windows.
Oh, I just installed a security patch in about 20 seconds. Open terminal (winkey->enter), "doas syspatch -c", type pass, see there's a patch, "doas syspatch" to apply it, done in 2 seconds. Once I reboot the newly-patched kernel is active. There is full documentation of the patch, including why it's needed, how the patch resolves the issue, and a diff of the patch is included.
I love OpenBSD…… as a server particularly as a DNS or a network gateway with pf as a firewall.
But, I cannot fathom how using OpenBSD on a Desktop/Laptop for personal computing would NoT enrage me everyday. The things I’d do on my personal computer :
1. Browse all bloated modern websites using a modern web browser - Firefox
2. Work with photos(personal) - edit them, crop them to share with someone, markup screenshots to put in docs etc.
3. Use PDFs without worrying about formats, markup on them as needed, fill forms on PDFs.
4. Media - playback audio and video. Without worrying about whether I have the right codecs or file formats.
Wouldn’t OpenBSD make me constantly fight against its opinionated safety first way of doing things?
Sure, one can run Firefox on OpenBSD, but would it play YouTube and Netflix without making me pull my hair?
I can install ffmpeg, relevant codecs, PDF tools, Darktable or other Unix friendly photo tools, but wouldn’t that be a constant fight and tweaking to keep them running?
I haven't touched OpenBSD for a few years if I'm honest but one of the things that did not enrage me about it was that it didn't nag me to change anything once I'd got it working properly. I suspect that's part of it. There is a clear separation of OS and applications. Regarding all the other stuff I remember it mostly just worked. But of course that is within the realms of the particular package actually working in the first place, which is variable probability.
As for myself I got lazy and just use Windows 10. It doesn't enrage me if you turn off all the cloud shit, treat it like a file manager/window manager shell and run all your open source stuff on it. Again that works because there's a clear separation of OS and applications.
When you start mixing the two (hello Linux) it's where you get problems. I think snaps were an attempt to solve some of that (badly).
On Linux, I enjoy the idea that all the software can be interchanged. So there is no separation between the system and user installed software. For me, it’s difficult to grasp the minimalism of those other systems. When you clearly have your system as a rock that you cannot modify. I have very little experience (some theoretical and none practical) with BSDs, but it pains me there is a base system for macOS with an absolutely unused and not needed software, like Chess.
You can install *BSDs with only the things you want. Same like you can on Linux. However, the question of default packaging holds on both sides.
Trying installing the default .iso of Fedora workstation or Ubuntu-latest and see all the things Gnome brings along.. Maps, Photos, IM client, even a bundled browser (Evolution or something) that is based on Firefox but dependednt on the few Gnome packagers to keep up to date(instead of just letting the user download Firefox on their own or shipping the latest firefox).
Even Archlinux, if you install Gnome-desktop, you get all the cruft. You need to explicitly find a way to install just the minimal gnome desktop without all its apps.
OpenBSD however, for a server usecase, comes with a very cohesive, sane set of tools carefully maintained by the folks who ship OpenBSD. If anything, they are very conservative about adding stuff to that ecosystem.
Oh wow, basically my story! With the difference I have no practical experience with BSDs yet (was eyeing FreeBSD for a while now), so I use very minimal barebones Arch Linux installation with sway wm. Why had you chose OpenBSD?
Oh man, it gets worse than that. After updating to iOS 17 the other day, I said to my phone "play OverCast" (my podcast app). It used to start playing from that app. This time, it started playing a band called Overcast, and told me I had just started a 7 day free trial of Apple Music. What the actual fuck.
It's not a bug, it's a feature. People have done crazier things! Didn't Steve Jobs once say that part of the reason he named the company Apple was because it would be before Atari in the phone book? [1]
I realize it was possible before. My point is that now it's the only way for me to set the lights to be a color other than what my presets happened to be when I upgraded to iOS 17.
iOS has to assume what you mean with play OverCast. Maybe there are other people that wanted the device to play the band? This is such an edge-case which is easily solved by further specifying your prompt.
It knows a) whether you have overcast installed and when was it last used, b) whether you added the overcast band to your favourites or ever explicitly played one of their songs. I'm sure there's some tiny section where the the extra prompt would be useful, but they could be so much better than that.
It's not just playing the wrong band / app. It's signing you up for a subscription. You still have time to cancel before you have to pay. But it's one more thing you have to worry about now.
It should have confirmed that you're fine with subscribing if that's what you have to do to listen to the band. And it's also fine to play the wrong band if you have a subscription already.
Somehow on migrating to a new iPhone the music app decided it needed full notification permissions, apparently because a new Taylor swift album is of the same notification level as an incoming missile strike.
Oh man, I have never loaded music on my phone, so whenever the car starts, it plays the first song on the iPhone. I hate U2! And I hate that they’re receiving money each I do this!
Do they though? It was a gifted digital 'purchase', not a stream.
Anyway, seems you can contact Apple support to permanently remove the album from your account.
Oh yeah, esp. funny if you always hated U2, and suddenly it appears in the middle of your music collection. Same with "Alone at home", not quite my taste.
Reliably removing the U2 album from Apple Music seems impossible. Deleting the album which has helpfully redownloaded itself is now a ritual before I start my car - otherwise it starts playing as soon as bluetooth connects - which is just what I need when I'm pulling away in busy traffic.
I have similar feelings. Apple did a wonderful job with M1/M2, but on the software side, I have mixed feelings. Xcode is a mess, and Swift UI is not a complete replacement for Cocoa.
And on the OS side, I feel like Apple is creating features that I instantly disable because they do the exact opposite of what I want.
Apple's hardware is incredible but the software is increasingly grating for any kind of power usage. Xcode is frustrating, the permissions system is flagrantly designed for Apple's self interest, window, monitor, and app management is rife with ancient bugs and half baked design decisions.
I used to think the same, but I had to sell off the 2016 macbook pro because the keyboard was unusable, my 2019 macbook pro has already gone back for stuck arrow keys a year ago, and now the left command key is randomly sticking, which is really annoying because you never know which shortcut key will be triggered.
Compared to my 2010 macbook pro which was used without any repairs for close to 8 years.
Unless you all are buying new apple devices every year or two, I don't see how the "apple hardware is incredible" claim can be substantiated.
But what's the alternative?
Windows has also become incredibly grating with even more telemetry and commercial offerings embedded in the OS (especially the home versions).
If you think of macOS as 'half baked' I'm curious what you think of Linux distributions with their infighting about everything from the desktop and graphics stack to which tool should start up system services. There's even less internal consistency there.
I bought a 2017 ThinkPad for $100 and installed Linux on it. It's quite good. I would never use it as a daily driver though. I love macOS too much, even with all its flaws. But I try to do as much development in Linux as possible (whether on a device, in a VM or on a remote machine). I feel like every dev tool I install on Mac is more technical debt that I need to pay for each time I update the surrounding OS.
I've had almost 0 problems being a power user with a KDE Plasma Arch Linux. There is internal consistency in distro lineups. Linux is not one OS. You can have the telemetry ridden but more accessible Ubuntu experience to the extremely fast and barebones Xfce Arch experience, it's your choice.
I've been someone who used Windows, MacOS and around 20 Linux distros extensively across many laptops / PCs. Always tempering, endless configuration, customization, frustration with Windows instability, MacOS inflexibility or e.g. needing to spend days so my audio works on Linux.
A couple of years ago, I picked up Thinkpad P1 (Ryzen 4800U) and got settled with Arch + Plasma. I've never before had such a snappy, quiet, stable, 3 monitors, all hardware and software just working, fully customized, and empowering experience of using a computer and went years without needing to touch anything - as it was perfect.
It ended when I couldn't resist a new MBP 14, but I've been slowly accumulating nostalgia for my Linux setup since and will surely get back to it, hopefully when Asahi Linux completes support for external monitors.
XCode is refusing to install. Fails with some error, and asks me to download XCode again. Also now the system needs 70-80 GB of free space to install XCode. One of the funny upgrades so far
There is definitely something buggy going on there. It took 2 attempts for it to install for me! No errors, it just stopped installing somewhere around 90%. Plenty of free disks space and RAM.
Are you sure it actually stopped installing? When I installed XCode for the first time a few months ago, there was a 20-30 minute period where it was completely silent. Ultimately I was able to tail some syslog from the app store daemon that indicated it was actually doing something (downloading dependencies and validating their signatures, IIRC). But I almost restarted the computer thinking it wasn't working.
It is not, yet, a full replacement. You can use Swift UI for some kinds of apps but there are UIs that are still harder in it. Apple acknolwedges that some people still need to use Appkit. It’s clear that their long term plan is to build out Swift UI to be enough to fully replace the older libraries.
Xcode is a mess in many fronts. For example my Xcode updated automatically to a version which couldn't support Ventura anymore, the OS I'm still running. I had to uninstall the app store version and manually download older one to fix the situation.
> I wish Apple would separate the updates of their bundleware from their OS.
In a way it's a bit of a philosophical standpoint: macOS is the whole indivisible thing developed, built, and released in lockstep, kinda like FreeBSB base is the whole indivisible thing developed, built, and released in lockstep (and the rest is ports). In a way, removing tcsh from a FreeBSD install because you only ever use bash from ports does not make sense and may break things; so you just ignore it and pretend it doesn't exist.
So what do you do when
- previous bundle exists, you upgrade raw OS, but the previous bundle is not compatible
- you try to install new bundle, but did not install new raw OS
I am sure this can be managed, but someone else may say they do not want to do it.
I guess the OS installer could have a checkbox "upgrade Apple Apps bundle" and if you uncheck it but have the previous version installed, it could have a disabled, pre-selected checkbox saying "Uninstall Apple Apps bundle (previous version incompatible)"
Something cool however is you can actually build the open-source WebKit browser engine yourself and make closed-source Safari use your locally built version.
For tech minded folk, the upgrade-everyting-or-nothing is indeed unwanted.
But I love the facts that I can tell my family to upgrade and they will have all the new stuff at once, like with an iPhone or iPad. That is for most users what they want and/or need.
Maybe Apple should consider dev editions for MacOS that allows more customization during setup. MacOS is still heavily used by web and mobile developers, so I'm sure this would be received well.
I do end up removing many of the Apple apps, but recently started using Safari, Notes, and Reminders more. Apple does an excellent job making their apps work seamlessly within the Apple ecosystem.
Wow, so much unwarranted hate. It's one download and you have everything updated. If you believe you do not need a new OS version for your laptop for whatever reason, you can always keep using Ventura or whatever you're running now and update that until it is end of support.
I don't think you understand how helpful it is for "normal" users to push a button and have a brand new version of everything. And being afraid of new features that you don't use... pretty irrational.
It is by no means irrational to hesitate on a new major release of an Apple operating system. MacOS upgrades have caused many people all kinds of issues, for instance a Big Sur update broke a metric fuckton of USB-C hubs and they didn't address it for 6 months.
I updated from High Sierra to Catalina and it broke a lot of things. Ultimately sold it in the used goods market and switched it for a new laptop. Installed Linux on it and haven't felt the need to go back to Mac since.
I have no problem with Apple bundling these apps and making them work seamlessly together, and I don't even mind that they're all updated simultaneously (except for Safari, which I wish I could update independently without relying on the "Technology Preview" beta channel). But I do have a problem with upgrading my entire OS and disabling the new bloatware features just because I want to keep auto-updates enabled. I used to delay updating and then would end up way behind, which is why I enrolled in auto-update. But now it feels like I'm being held hostage to their update schedule.
And for what benefit? There are hardly any useful OS-level changes in this release, but there are a bunch of new features I'll need to disable (while hoping the next auto-update doesn't break my external monitor), all powered by freshly written code contributing to an expanded attack surface. If I had my way, then I'd take the OS updates and skip all the apps. Keep the attack surface small while still meaningfully improving the core. I don't care about the rest.