With Catalina, I'm also not seeing any major benefit to upgrading. The features list is thin and no 32bit programs kills a lot of random stuff that I can't find a quick replacement for. This is the first time I'm not upgrading macOS in 15+ years.

Unfortunately if you want a good keyboard, you don't have a choice - new mbps can't downgrade lower than catalina.

The keyboards are mediocre at best anyway. My MS sculpt is the best keyboard I've used and try to bring it with me even if I'm just using my mbp as a laptop

I love my new Lenovo laptop and it has a great keyboard. There is a choice.

I'm still running Mojave on my desktop (iMac 5k.) I have the occasional 32-bit, obsolete app I run, and don't want to deal with the upgrades right now.

There's Apple Arcade for one benefit

I haven't heard of that! But it sounds like it might be game related, so I probably haven't found it due to lack of interest.

Does anyone know what might have caused this recent downturn in Apple's software quality?

I have never worked at apple but I know a few people that do and did dating back to the 70s. They have a culture of team independence, which is good and bad. Every team gets to choose their own language, tools, and process. This leads to an enormous amount of fragmentation across Apple. Additionally, there's a lot of secrecy and territorial behavior around products and teams. Finally, a lot of Apple's resources are devoted to iOS and mobile hardware and AR and VR and ARM CPUs and all these things that are not macbooks. Then on top Apple management wants regularly scheduled software releases, which is really hard to do with all those cultural and structural barriers in place.

Regularly scheduled software releases makes no goddamn sense to me. Why are MacOS, iOS, iPad OS, and tvOS supposed to ship at the same time? Moreover, does anyone really care if these get updated once per year? Especially tvOS. I really wish Apple would move to releasing new software "about" once every 24 months and just use the extra time to test.

Every year, new tablets and/or phones have to be ready for Black Monday and Christmas.

Every year, the phone OS has to keep up with new tablets and/or phones.

Every year, the laptop OS has to keep up with the phone OS.

That's basically it. At Apple, where the phone goes, everything else follows.

And for image reasons, it must be "major" release instead of minor release for hw support (like many commercial OSes did in the past, I think even macOS)

Not sure myself though I’m sure books will in future be written about “the early signs of Apple’s demise”. My MacbookAir 6,2 (mid-2013) was screwed after the 10.15.4 update (not the supplemental). The SSD was totally not recognised. I’ve tried SMC and NVRAM resets numerous times and remote Recovery. The drive is now invisible. I opened it up to reseat it (cleaning pins and socket) to no avail.

Fortunately I’ve got a 256GB SDXC card which I’ve installed Pop!_OS on - which has convinced me that now’s as good a time as any to extricate myself from the Apple ecosystem (which I’m all in on - iCloud, Apple Music etc). My next laptop will be non-Apple. First non-Apple hardware in this house since 2003.

I’ll try swapping the drive with my daughter’s - she has the same model. At least I’ll know whether it’s the drive or the logic board. Then I can sell the bits.

The screen on my MacbookPro13,1 (late 2016) recently gave out. I needed a replacement but I was not convinced by any of the current Apple offerings -- I can't stand the stupid touch bar on the Pros, and the new MBA didn't sufficiently excite me.

The usual build-to-order options like Dell or Lenovo being backordered due to the pandemic, I walked into a Costco and bought a LG Gram 17[0]. This is the first time I bought a laptop off the shelf, and the first time my primary laptop has not been a Mac, in over a decade. I installed Xubuntu 18.04 LTS on it with no fanfare and have been quite happy with it since.

The early signs of Apple's demise, indeed.

[0] https://www.lg.com/us/laptops/lg-17z90n-r.aac8u1-ultra-slim-...

what did you do with the dead macbook? i'd be interested in purchasing it

Please let me know if replacing the drive works, my friend has the same issue.

Hi Wingy. Sorry this is two weeks late. Life intervened. I swapped mine and my daughter’s SSD’s and it’s definitely the drive and not the logic board in my case. That’s no guarantee for your friend but you never know your luck.

I was kind of hoping it would be the logic board to self-justify a new laptop. Now I’m thinking I’ll get the cheapest 256 I can get and nurse the laptop along for as long as I can.

But I’m committed to switching to Linux. Still exploring distros.

The iPad’s software keyboard is still buggy as hell. The software keyboard, the part of the OS that the user will interact with the most, and the part of the OS that is required to be the most stable, frequently just completely breaks and requires a full device reboot to fix.

That, to me, is insane. It shows how shit the project management must be if they cannot even prioritize fixing critical bugs in the most important parts of the OS over releasing some useless feature that most users will never touch.

I'll qualify this by saying I haven't owned an iPad since the 2nd gen, but how are the 3d party keyboards on iOS? Do they limit them like they do with non-Safari browsers?

I remember one of the main reasons I "jailbroke" my iPad was so I could install an improved/alternate software keyboard, but I remember reading they added the option officially a while back.

I'm curious: are they artificially limited or do they all just suck?

What bugs do you see in the iPad software keyboard?

iOS keyboard input and text selection has been wonky for quite a while, and from what I've tried of Android, it doesn't feel much better on the other side of the fence either. Why can't Apple -or- Google get such basic interactivity right?

Recently moved from android to an iPhone. The one that gets me while typing: I can’t tap and place the cursor in the middle of a word! Say you mistype a word, you cannot edit that word. You have to delete the entire word or tap and hold to get highlighting and then drag the highlight together to cover one letter on the word and then you can delete and get your cursor in the middle of the word. Insane.

Press and hold on the spacebar. Wait a second. Then you can move the cursor left/right from the spacebar.

iOS is generally quite good at these things. Like any new platform, you can't expect it the UX to be identical to an old platform that you're more familiar with.

I think my gripes so far are around discoverability. How did you know to click and hold the space bar? Now that I know, I like it. Never would have know otherwise. Drag from the bottom left and up to dismiss an app, do the same but go sideways to get to history of apps, etc.

They have most of this in onboarding tips as well as the Tips app.

Not sure what to tell you. I did not dismiss any tips that I can recall. I recall how to create folders and drag apps to it from onboarding. Mostly, I have to ask someone or search Google to find out how to do the most basic of things.

Thanks. It’s a shame they couldn’t display left and right arrows if you click into the middle of the previously entered text, though.

But if the UX is objectively worse, requiring additional unnecessary steps, it’s super annoying.

that's subjective. It's not an additional step, it's a different way of doing it. I personally feel like it's better. I dont have to worry about not placing the cursor at the right place. I just click it and move the cursor around where I want.

Wow, thanks. I had no idea this was a thing. How did you discover this?

Is there a similar trick for selecting text? What about selecting text from another source like an email or website?

That’s not a bug. It’s worse: it used to work the way you describe but that functionality was removed.

Next time: tap the cursor and hold. You’ll see it get bigger and you can drag it where you want.

there are a really large number of things i can no longer accomplish with ios 13 text selection model that i used to be able to do ... the easiest test case for finding all the flaws is trying to edit a url in safari.

ios 13 wants you to "grab" the text insertion cursor and drag it around -- but what are you supposed to do when the text cursor is not visible? and what are you supposed to do when an entire text region gets auto selected as in the url area ...

i would really love for someone to fix this issue

-- or if anyone knows how to do it ... here's the problem: say you have a long url that ends with a number -- and you want to change that number or select it to copy and paste it elsewhere. how do you do this on iphone in safari after ios 13?

Yep, this is an iOS 13 feature. Prior to this, hard-pressing the space bar was the correct solution (although it still works on devices with 3D Touch, and long-touch works on newer models).

Before that we had the magnifying glass, but I guess that wasn’t considered “good UX”.

tap/hold spacebar then drag.

For me the keyboard will sometimes not load properly. The keyboard just shows up as an empty pane. And that's a sign that my iPad is going to be all grindy and slow until I reboot it.

I also have this bug, and a couple more. When you use the smaller floating keyboard at some point the keyboard starts to jump to the lower left corner. Swipe to type doesn’t work anymore.

I also have a bug with their hardware keyboard. After a couple days of usage the keyboard can get unresponsive and the § key starts to magically appear in the next text field that gets focus, at least 10–20 times, as it would be stuck. Reconnecting the hardware keyboard usually fixes this issue, but it’s still annoying. The restarts that are required for software keyboard bugs are worse, though.

I had that problem during 13 beta, 13.0 and maybe 13.1 and 13.2 (the rapid fire updates immediately after 13.0), but never since.

I suspect it’s the need to deliver a new OS every year.

Apple used to maintain a 2 year (or longer) cadence earlier.

I suspect the first few months after each release used to be focused on hardening it. With the yearly release cycle they probably have to shift over to working on the next release almost immediately.

According to HN threads within the lifetime of any given MacOS release, the last acceptable MacOS was System 8.

I'm running a 6-year old MB Pro, updated within the first week of every releases' public beta availability, never reinstalled. I use sudo far too liberally to be good for system health, including (as long as it was possible) deleting all sorts of files in /System, /private, etc. when I run out of space and believe they're superfluous via cursory inspection ( i. e. sudo rm -rf /System/<asterisk>/{AMD,<asterisk>SCSI}<asterisk>).

And... it just works? I've never lost any data. I've typed in my WIFI password once and not changed anything since. Time Machine recently stopped working, and I had to follow the cable because I didn't remember where the HD actually was (taped beneath a cupboard, as it turns out; the power cable had somehow unplugged). Catalina did throw up a few permission dialogs after installation, but that took less than five minutes, even though I run a few low-level utilities (karabiner etc).

There are certainly some annoying UI bugs or inconsistencies. When you open an ePub in Books and immediately press cmd+f, for example, the search field loses focus repeatedly while the book opens. And why is cmd+f the shortcut for search almost everywhere, but not Keychain?

I recently installed Linux on a Desktop for some Cuda work, for the first in 15 years or so. Based on what I had read (mostly on HN), I expected Linux on the desktop to have made vast progress over that time. I'm sorry to say that it is, still, a complete disaster by almost any measure. I have no idea why the popular narrative sees the two anywhere close to each other.

Case in point: My installation of Ubuntu, using defaults, had an application menu with categories "Preferences", "Setting", "Utilities, and "System". Those all mean (almost) the same thing! There are two package managers now (apt and I forgot the new one's name), each with abpout five GUI and three CLI applications for installing packages. But both sometimes installed three year old versions of standard software (calibre, I believe). Good thing Homebrew is now available for Linux, because somehow they have no trouble keeping up.

Font sizes, margins, and contrast are all over the place. There are dozens of color schemes, yes. But much like unhappy families, each one fails in its own manner: with both a dark and a light one, I encountered parts of the UI where you'd suddenly have light buttons with light (invisible) text. Or, IIRC, light text on dark backgrounds. Which works -- until there's a link in the text.

There seem to be five different subsystems between my mouse and the desktop. None of seemed to allow adjusting scroll wheel acceleration. (Even pointer acceleration felt wrong to me. And even though I found the system of partial differentials that seems to be the official interface for adjustments, I failed to find the sweet spot. But this might be an issue of familiarity more than objective quality).

>deleting all sorts of files in /System, /private, etc. when I run out of space and believe they're superfluous via cursory inspection ( i. e. sudo rm -rf /System/<asterisk>/{AMD,<asterisk>SCSI}<asterisk>)

Good luck with that.

Steve picked the wrong guy. Again.

They're also not doing us any favors with the way they're building their hardware these days. If a firmware update was to brick the system board in a Mac from 15 years ago (or most PCs from today), replacing the system board might cost 10% of the total value of the machine.

If the same thing happens today where everything is soldered and epoxied together, you practically lose the whole machine and all the data on it. Woof.