It’s been a strict improvement on my computers, which isn’t to say that the author isn’t having problems, just that theirs (or mine!) isn’t the universal experience.
They surely fixed a lot of bugs, but not enough, and they added so many new stupid ones. Mission Control wasn't perfect before, but at least it wasn't buggy. Now there is a bug every two clicks.
Even double-clicking in Finder is broken, many times double-clicks are just ignored.
Thank you for this; this has been driving me nuts the past week and it never once occurred to me it might be a genuine issue with the new OS and not my double-click muscles beginning to fail.
Occasionally drag'n'drop failures —where it just stops working— I experienced already with Yosemite, so it may be a VERY old bug. :) Usually you would see "CoreDragError" codes popping up in the system.log
Rather than rebooting, I just kill "pboard" in Activity Monitor, and afterwards restart a few GUI programs that were directly affected (including Finder and Dock.)
My wild theory is that Firefox is the culprit. At least the issues happened more frequently once I had to switch to Firefox for proper content blocking extensions. Anyway… I have no idea how to prove that, so it's just a guess, not a blame.
Mission Control is unusable in macOS 27. Shortcuts to switch spaces stop working (Dock must be killed to get them to work again), there is a padding between spaces thumbnails and the top of the screen so it's no longer possible to just easily move the mouse at the top to select one, windows rearrange randomly when one is clicked, full screen app spaces breaks each time you try to use them, animations are wonky and you can't reenter mission control while some animations are running, etc…
It sure does feel that way. But I've often maintained that Apple took a look at how people were using features like this on other operating systems and said, "NO! We're gonna 'think different'!" And no one liked their way of "thinking different". But they keep doubling down, believing that once we see the genius, we'll all come around.
I haven't yet come around. Unix had it figured out back in CDE days. i3 was my happy place... now it's Niri. As long as I can get to my workspace with a key combo THAT I DEFINE, I'm probably okay.
Spaces have been nearly unusably bad for a very long time in MacOS. I used them heavily, but in frustration, have simply given up on them completely. They're simply too unreliable and inconsistent, even when they're at their best.
I also genuinely cannot believe how broken Mission Control is. I use it constantly and the flickering, black spaces, and other small issues lead to an overall frustrating experience I did not have in 26. I'm very surprised that these issues didn't come up on HN from all the beta users, many reporting that they're very happy with 27. Is Mission Control a feature that those likely to download the beta are disproportionately unlikely to use?
I’ve been experiencing much of the same as well. There seems to be some kind of oversight over keeping previously stabilized affordances intact through each upgrade, at least in the past couple of years. It’s my theory that it’s likely to do with some kind of newly introduced AI steps in their process which doesn’t care so much about small nuanced ui spots like this but check plenty of other boxes.
Another instance in watch os is the total removal of access to the app switcher And quick jump to precious app. It’s been driving me nuts.
Spaces really needs some attention. It makes me much more productive overall, but it really feels like it's been forgotten. Beyond just making it less buggy, some simple things would make a huge difference, like being able to rename spaces, and not only showing the name of the space when you hover over it.
Edit: Thanks for the tip about killing the dock to get the keyboard shortcuts working. That was driving me mad. Do you have to do that every restart, or will those just work now?
I’ve experienced spaces shortcuts not working suddenly throughout the Tahoe release at least, so I doubt it’s specifically related to Golden Gate. They could have made it worse somehow of course.
I've been running Golden Gate since the first beta was released in June. I've generally been very happy with it. I think it'll take a couple years to unwind the Alan Dye era, but Golden Gate is a significant improvement over macOS 26
I don't know, there are definitely some rough edges (particularly with the menu bar for some reason - big rewrite there?), but overall I'm quite happy with Golden Gate. "Buggy mess" is some serious hyperbole.
Of the issues they report:
- The centering bugs seem... not very important.
- The Mac User Guide looks fine to me. Shows "for macOS 27."
- Network app?
- Why are you looking at the Mission Control app icon at 20x zoom? And in any case, doesn't it seem reasonable to simplify the traffic light design to a flat circle for an icon that will be displayed very small 99.9% of the time?
- Firefox bugs are bugs in Firefox. (I also keep experiencing the stuck menu bug, but again, Firefox bug.)
- "You can find references to NeXTSTEP, the ancestor of macOS, in its UI!" No, that's not what that means.
- "I have a folder open in the Dock. If I click on another folder, shouldn't that then open?" Yes, and it does.
NS hasn't had anything to do with NeXTSTEP since, well, NeXTSTEP. The author's wording makes it sound like this is some crazy remnant of forgotten 30-year-old code poking through, but it's really not. It's Swift (most likely) string concatenation being passed a view instance instead of a string by mistake.
- Same for me now. Wasn't when I used it a few days ago.
- ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- Very pedantic, I know. But look at some of the other icons close up, lots contain tiny details very few ever see (try the Mail app, the icon of a text file, or the loupe on the old Preview icon). That obsessive attention to detail feels like it's now in the past.
- Yeah could well be Firefox's fault. But it surfaced in Golden Gate, so I included it.
Yesterday, I tried to fill out a PDF on a MacOS laptop. It was very rough.
I've been a longtime Linux user, but one of the nice things about MacOS is that it comes out of the box with software for common file formats. I remember being a bit happy to skip the step where I search "best pdf editor linux".
This was true in 2022, when I started using MacOS. Around that time, people were complaining about a battery icon that was too skeumorphic or something, which is so trite in comparison to the avalanche of problems today.
But, geeze, it's rough to edit a PDF on MacOS today. The built-in PDF editor has a weird flow to add text (rather than clicking where you want to place the text, you click a button which summons a box with the text "Text" in an arbitrary position on your PDF). You have to click and drag the Text textbox to the position you want it to be in.
Every part of the UI is broken, though. You have to discover this by clicking (all icons, no text), you have to move the textbox by finding the 1px wide click-and-drag target (on a high-DPI display!), and sometimes, the text simply disappears and deletes itself, in a way no amount of cmd+Z (undo) can fix.
It's very frustrating and crazy-making, but the amount of time it took to fill out one page of a PDF precludes me from wanting to take the effort to document it in this way.
So, I very very much appreciate this author for sharing a few of the million papercuts of MacOS. It is really hard to imagine someone being proud of putting this product out.
While generally happy with the speed improvements it brought, I can't back question the presence of testers on Apple side. Sure they are a small niche company (/s) but they can do better.
Major example, desktop switching shortcuts are borked after device comes up from sleep!
>https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/1whtmc3/macos_27_mis...
What gets me is people saying macOs 26 -> 27 is an improvement. Maybe so.
But Sequoia -> 26 -> 27 is still a noticeable downgrade.
So is it really an improvement: making something much worse and then slightly improving it?
Saying 27 is an improvement over 26 is a different statement to the one you’re making about the general trend of macOS.
Nor does it mean that people shouldn’t welcome improvements even if those improvements don’t bring the overall quality back to that of what it used to be.
But I do also agree with you that we shouldn’t be ignoring the fact that Apple have generally been on a downward spiral in terms of software quality for a number of years.
Yes, it is. How can’t you follow this logic? It is an upwards trajectory. Genuinely, what are you missing about this? Two things can be true at the same time. Nobody said that there had been a historical downward trajectory. Well, at least, in your description of what “gets you”. But I’ve never really seen many people arguing that macOS hasn’t degraded over the past ~10-15 years. The fact that’s “getting you” s still worth noting and not every online comment has to be a complete, comprehensive accounting of someone’s entire position. Some things are just left unsaid because there’s a shared understanding. At this point I think that “macOS had generally gotten worse” is easily one of those.
The mis-alignment trope is well established, be it in the corners or at the center, but there are bigger design sins:
- wastefully large "zero KB" text to signal nothing
- poor text legibility due too light of a gray color - if you don't want people to read that text, don't add it! Or hide behind some tooltip or something
- tiny font size with a lot of space wasted, that's bigger than small margins
- the useless brightness of persistent window controls, they are way too common and unimportant, especially for keyboard users that never even click on then
> I know my machine's getting old, but does it really need a second to load in the Profiles menu when I open a new Firefox window?
I don't see how age matters here for such primitive low cost operations, so no, it should be instant on a machine older than yours
> Sometimes the search bar in System Settings simply refuses to work.
This continues to be a very frequently highlighted epic fail across various Apple platforms. I wonder, is there any substantive explanation on why it's so bad for so long?
> Perhaps there's hope yet. Snow Leopard had nearly two years of refinements to achieve the level of polish and stability its name has become synonymous with today.
Not really, it's more like it has years of memory loss leading to a bunch of bugs like in this blog to be forgotten and the marketing tag taken over. So definitely there is hope, just wait a decade...
This one really bugs me. Could be my setup (have a few Menu-bar utilities). Anyway... I do Finder Searches a lot to find files in the current directory or system-wide using either find by file name or file contains. Get a list of files fine in response. Then close the search, and my Finder window is blank. Have to click to another folder in the Sidebar, then back to my original folder to get the full folder contents to show. All previous OS versions returned back to list all the files.
Also not a bug, but a bad recession ihmo. I always used to have Finder>Show-Hidden-Files option on. Now it is always off, and one must Cmd+Shift+. to show hidden files each time one opens a directory. Why take that option away ??
If anyone has insights about what might be causing my blank "after search" window, and/or a way to make show hidden files the default please advise. Thx, NSC
My understanding is that Apple has this culture of we must ship things by this date no matter what. They really should slow down and make sure things are fully baked before they get out to the final RC.
It's too slow. Safari crashes too often. But the rather bigger mess for me has been iOS 27 (on my 17) – slowness and the battery drain. Goodness, what have I done on my phone thaat made it into a proper before and after scenario. I had to disable my mission corner hot corner it was so broken. It amazes me how a trillion dollar company manages to break their already broken OS even further. I guess the reason is they know it isn't going to matter. The good hint is the hordes of people (even on hn) finding it necessary to post their polite (of course!) and subtle rebuttals in the form of "been using <certain Apple product> for the last <certain period>, couldn't be happier)".
I do the same thing, except I usually run a version for two-three years and skip some OS releases in-between.
My recent upgrade was from Ventura to Sequoia, and I will likely move to Golden Gate at some point next summer right before Sequoia's support period expires (this happens in July or August). Over years it meant that I avoided some of the famous bugs like the discoveryd fiasco in Yosemite (I went from Maverics to El Capitan).
The one downside is that I sometimes have a to go through a huge app redesigns or big feature changes that have been accumulating over several versions. I ignore most of them and probably don't get as much value from the OS as I could have.
Yeah, I am quite sad that I am packing up and shipping off my nifty little Intel MacBook Pro and for the first time ever, I'm wondering if I can do without a Mac, not even really wanting one.... the one form factor which sort of appeals is a Wacom Movink 13 w/ a Mac Mini (but I hate that the screen is so low resolution and none of the Cintiq Pros use the same stylus as my other stylus devices (Kindle Coloursoft, Samsung Galaxy Note and Book)
I couldn't reproduce the Color Picker bug mentioned at the end.
Just one small thing to add about the Color Picker: I think it's a good example of how native UI apps have changed over the last decade.
The macOS Color Picker is nice. The idea is to have a single color picker for the whole system. It's extensible, so apps can add their own custom pickers (for example, an OKLCH picker), and you can reuse your palettes across applications.
Sounds great! But most of the applications where you might care about those features (customization, sharing your color schemes, etc.) don't work with the native Color Picker: Figma, Adobe apps, all Electron-based apps, and so on. So the Color Picker's features are useless. That component of the system is exactly the same as it was when I got my first Mac in 2007.
There are multiple nice native features that apps don't use; over time, they become forgotten and barely maintained.
I don't know what the solution is, but at some point, I think Apple should take frameworks like Tauri or Electron into account and build integrations for developers who use them. I know the integrations exists (they are the native APIs), and it's the developers' responsibility to use them, but that's not happening, and it ends up affecting the UX.
in practice, developers will not use them. they think they have better ideas and they don't care about platform or the user as an abstraction over the platform. they could use the existing thing.
it's the same mindset that has automakers not wanting to support CarPlay. they think they can do it better or just as well and it's completely missing the point: the user doesn't want to fuck with their custom one-off UI.
I had this happen after toggling the menu bar background / Liquid Glass transparency settings a couple times. I think a window (from Firefox) somehow got positioned slightly behind the menu bar, which was causing it to take its color from the window instead of my desktop background when it was on top.
Find the window, then Option + maximize button should fix it.
The most glaring regression in macOS 27 for me is random audio popping/crackling in the Spotify client, otherwise it's mostly fine tbh.
It's such an obvious issue that I'm wondering whether I'm the only one experiencing it or whether Apple users just don't use Spotify or whether Spotify simply doesn't test on macOS (and as such I have no idea where even to write a ticket, the macOS Feedback app doesn't even have a category for problems in non-Apple applications).
I think those clicks and pops are a Chromium issue. The Spotify desktop app uses Chromium Embedded Framework (CEF). I use to hear those all the time when using Chrome and they've mostly disappeared now that I mostly use FF.
I’m not in any way aware of how macOS is architected, but aren’t all these inconsistencies (like different app icons, different menu styles, different window corners etc) pointing to bad code design? There should be one shared source of truth for what needs to be consistent.
definitive proof that apple's engineers are using GNOME workstations internally: now MacOS system apps look like any software created using that garbage pile called libadwaita.
Are you crazy? libadwaita looks way, way more polished and consistent than anything I've seen on macos for the last at least 5 years. And only one of these is an open-source project with a limited budget.
Reports like this make it sound like there aren't serious flaws and bugs in MacOS. The things he's listing are trivialities.
I started writing a list of UX and software bugs in Mac OS, but honestly, I don't have the energy or time, there are so many. Mac OS has become an absolute travesty of an OS.
This is a bad faith article. The feel of a "buggy mess" is different from what the author described. Every OS is going to have bugs. On top of that, I cannot reproduce a lot of these issues. It's clear the OP is using multiple third party utilities to manage things like the menubar. Try turn them off and complaining.
I feel like the author wanted to write a post like one of those about Tahoe (menu bar, corner dragging), but the stuff they wrote about was all very "who cares"?
Golden Gate has reversed many of Tahoe's regressions and further updates will continue to do so.
> This one just irks me. Show me one oval camera lens anywhere in the world. I'm waiting.
Well, OP, today is the day you learn about anamorphic lenses
I’ve been having some weird issues since upgrading that I haven’t been able to pinpoint if it’s the apps or the OS.
New since upgrading:
- In telegram messages get stuck sending and the app has to be force quit
- Discord doesn’t pick up audio device changes until the app is restarted
- Soundsource has crashed a few times if I change my AirPods out.
- Selecting a screenshot area is laggy when dragging the selection box
This isn't a new bug, it was present in MacOS Tahoe, but what happened to the tabs in the Maps app? The View menu still has Show Tab Bar and Show All Tabs itms, but they are always greyed-out. Cmd-T doesn't open a new tab, as was the case before Tahoe. (I count this as a bug in that the UI seems inconsistent with the function.) If anyone knows how to regain access to tabs, I'd love to hear it.
I've had a random annoying bug where a mysterious window with no controls and no menu bar presence appears on top of all of my apps with seemingly no origin, rhyme, or reason, and I can't do anything to get rid of it except restart. It looks suspiciously like one of the "do you want to allow this accessory to connect" dialog boxes but it doesn't have any text. It's really mystifying.
I hoped this update would've made my Mac more stable from the last release, and while maybe the performance is better, I feel like issues like this do randomly occur.
I have this, on Tahoe, and tracked it to Zoom. Still have no clue WHY, but it appears when I join a meeting and stays until I disconnect. It’s very annoying.
It still isn't apparent to me why Apple decided to take their otherwise logical and fine UI, and create Liquid Glass. I guess somebody got a nice new title and bonus, though?
Did they fix the bug where the toolbar of applications would either get stuck open or disappear while in full screen mode, requiring them to be moved to the desktop before returned to fullscreen?
iOS 27 is in the same situation: a little bit less annoying than 26 overall but new bugs all over the place. If that is the Tim Cook farewell, it leaves a very bad impression.
These visual UI problems which are showing some sloppiness in the UI is much better than macOS 26 and honestly I really like Golden Gate for more efficiency and the fact that Siri actually works now and can replace a great deal of things I usually would have googled.
I've noticed some mini AI icon that's sometimes shows up when I select some text on Safari - I've no Siri enabled - and when I click on it nothing happens (when I'm able to click, I need to be fast like Sonic to catch it!!)
Could be a long wait. Mail is the one app I care most about and it's been broken in different ways since Catalina, along with issues in Photos, Music, etc. Might as well go to Linux where it's at least possible to fix the high priority issues.
I personally haven’t noticed any serious bugs yet, but I can’t help but notice how jittery the animations have become compared to just two versions before. It doesn’t feel “smooth” anymore even on new hardware.
I hope that with Opus 5.5 they will be able to fix more bugs in the next version of macos, in the meantime I will stay on Sonoma. This is really disappointing since Golden Gate was supposed to be a bugfix update
I haven't noticed any bigger bugs (Apart from search in System Settings still not working), the main annoyance is the Siri bubble showing up next to text fields.
Commonly held lore is that you do not install a macOS with a minor version of zero. That has been confirmed by shoddy first releases ever since there's a macOS X.
Wait for the next upgrade unless you're forced to go with the first release.
This, this this the gripe list for macOS 27? I guess I'll add on, then:
They've completely broken every experience around minimized windows:
- App Expose doesn't show minimized windows at all
- Cmd-` iterating doesn't iterate through minimized windows.
- I've had times where Cmd-`-ing to another Terminal yanked it from it's workspace onto my current one.
- It will just stop rendering the Mission Control thumbnails. 90% of the time it just shows empty workspaces
- It seems to be doing some stupid optimization where it blanks out my Firefox window until the workspace switch animation has fully finished. Likely it's part of how they finally removed the janky animations from the past 3 releases. But, COME ON Wayland can run on my 5 year old x86_64-linux laptop with perfect animations with none of this jank and compromise.
- It regularly doesn't change focus from Firefox (on my second workspace) to Firefox Nightly (on my first workspace), when swiping. Or even swiping and clicking. Only if you swipe, move the cursor and then click does focus shift to the open, top app on the workspace.
It's hot f****king garbage. Maybe this is my foot peddle but it breaks every basic way I do window management and use the OS.
Breaking minimized windows. Only Apple could manage that.
I don’t understand why System Settings search is such a dumpster fire. It’s up to a couple thousand (probably overestimating) fixed text labels. Even when it’s not bugging out, half or more of deeper labels simply can’t be found even if you enter the exact string; and by deeper I mean simply not top level categories. Who the hell thought this sorry ass search is okay to ship and keep it that way after this many years? I swear even Windows’ settings search is more capable.
Yes, IIRC System Preferences was fine (hopefully not rose-tinted glasses), it became the current piece of shit when it was reborn as iOS-sibling System Settings, in Ventura?
Maybe Apple ported the Spotlight algorithm over for the System Settings search? Spotlight has, well, unique properties that take extra effort to achieve in a search system.
Considering Apple is one of the most profitable companies in history I hold it to a high standard...which it isn't living up to. I find that deeply disappointing. You'd think with the money they're earning they could at least find some talented developers. To me it looks like they're fishing up trash from the gutter and putting them to work on its operating system. Also, it seems they're more interested in visual polish than day-to-day functionality.
This isn't new of course, it's old news. Mac OS X has been buggy since I developed for it more than two decades ago.
The Mac User Guide on the site was updated to Golden Gate on launch day. There were lingering server-side cache issues that would occasionally display the Tahoe version to some users.
These should have been fixed as of a couple weeks now.
Anyone still seeing Tahoe? If so, please reply with the URL you are visiting.
Private deployed instances of Claude models at Apple has been reported written majority of their code. Perhaps these visual bugs are the manifest of Claude's weakness in vision in the past 6-12 months? Admittedly Claude's vision has gotten better this year.
Well, even ignoring Claude’s capabilities, you would expect human testers (whether Apple employees or external beta testers) to be creating bug reports for all these things. It’s embarrassing if your self-proclaimed bug-fix/stability release is buggy and unstable. If the bugs are filed, then Claude should be able to help fix them.
What I notice is that the entire OS feels very laggy. Many interactions just don’t feel as snappy anymore as before. The worst candidate for this is definitely Mission Control, it has become a total dumpster fire in my opinion. (BTW: running on an M4 Pro MBP)
Every release of MacOS is a mess. Then it gets slightly better and you find workarounds just in time for the next release. That's just how it has always been.
MacOS has felt like AI slop since before there was AI. I'm a decades long mac user, and there's simply no excuse for how sloppy their releases have become
At this point you gotta think Apple is not using AI, or using too much AI, or using AI incorrectly. But then again, it’s not just them —- it’s everyone, really.
A friend who quit Apple a month or two ago left mostly because the whole company was utterly AI-pilled and they couldn’t take being a meat proxy talking to other meat proxies any more.
I sure ain’t upgrading my Mac any time soon if I can help it.
10.5 Leopard was my peak. 10.6 Snow Leopard improved on its stability but had a touch of visible regretion (in my opinion). After that, I haven't really been happy with any release. Obviously some things have improved but... 10.5 was branded Unix, the UI was beautiful. It felt solid.
I was chatting with a friend about The Decline and Fall of Apple over the weekend. We both miss Steve Jobs.
For all that Steve was batshit he was willing to do hard things that were "bad for business." I heard so many legendary stories over the years of Steve Jobs holding up releases at the last minute because they weren't up to par. That takes guts in a corporate environment where there is so much pressure to go along and say "well, we have to ship something." No, you don't have to ship something. You can take your time to do it right and ship things that are high quality.
Apple shouldn't assume that just because they are the incumbent that they will be around forever. Today's Steve Jobs could already be alive and plotting...
Every AppKit and Foundation type uses the NS prefix, and will keep doing so for any foreseeable future. New NS types are added to these frameworks each macOS release.
Mission control is not supposed to print the name of the control/window visible to the user though, surely, which is what the article is talking about.
Objective-C doesn't have namespaces (like C), so people use two-letter prefixes on their types to prevent name clashes. The NS prefix is used by Apple's Foundation and AppKit frameworks, that originated from NeXTSTEP, hence NS.
And they’ve finally fixed some annoying, long-endured audio bugs: https://weblog.rogueamoeba.com/2026/09/24/macos-27-fixes-mul...
Even double-clicking in Finder is broken, many times double-clicks are just ignored.
Rather than rebooting, I just kill "pboard" in Activity Monitor, and afterwards restart a few GUI programs that were directly affected (including Finder and Dock.)
My wild theory is that Firefox is the culprit. At least the issues happened more frequently once I had to switch to Firefox for proper content blocking extensions. Anyway… I have no idea how to prove that, so it's just a guess, not a blame.
I haven't yet come around. Unix had it figured out back in CDE days. i3 was my happy place... now it's Niri. As long as I can get to my workspace with a key combo THAT I DEFINE, I'm probably okay.
Another instance in watch os is the total removal of access to the app switcher And quick jump to precious app. It’s been driving me nuts.
Edit: Thanks for the tip about killing the dock to get the keyboard shortcuts working. That was driving me mad. Do you have to do that every restart, or will those just work now?
Of the issues they report:
- The centering bugs seem... not very important.
- The Mac User Guide looks fine to me. Shows "for macOS 27."
- Network app?
- Why are you looking at the Mission Control app icon at 20x zoom? And in any case, doesn't it seem reasonable to simplify the traffic light design to a flat circle for an icon that will be displayed very small 99.9% of the time?
- Firefox bugs are bugs in Firefox. (I also keep experiencing the stuck menu bug, but again, Firefox bug.)
- "You can find references to NeXTSTEP, the ancestor of macOS, in its UI!" No, that's not what that means.
- "I have a folder open in the Dock. If I click on another folder, shouldn't that then open?" Yes, and it does.
- The rest, sure.
Anywhere else on macOS, you can't do that. Even better, you can activate them with Enter.
Search this document for "Historical Note" for the canonical explanation:
https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Co...
NS hasn't had anything to do with NeXTSTEP since, well, NeXTSTEP. The author's wording makes it sound like this is some crazy remnant of forgotten 30-year-old code poking through, but it's really not. It's Swift (most likely) string concatenation being passed a view instance instead of a string by mistake.
- Centring _is_ important! How dare you!
- Same for me now. Wasn't when I used it a few days ago.
- ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- Very pedantic, I know. But look at some of the other icons close up, lots contain tiny details very few ever see (try the Mail app, the icon of a text file, or the loupe on the old Preview icon). That obsessive attention to detail feels like it's now in the past.
- Yeah could well be Firefox's fault. But it surfaced in Golden Gate, so I included it.
- You can trace anything NS* back to NeXTSTEP
- Not for me!
- :)
I've been a longtime Linux user, but one of the nice things about MacOS is that it comes out of the box with software for common file formats. I remember being a bit happy to skip the step where I search "best pdf editor linux".
This was true in 2022, when I started using MacOS. Around that time, people were complaining about a battery icon that was too skeumorphic or something, which is so trite in comparison to the avalanche of problems today.
But, geeze, it's rough to edit a PDF on MacOS today. The built-in PDF editor has a weird flow to add text (rather than clicking where you want to place the text, you click a button which summons a box with the text "Text" in an arbitrary position on your PDF). You have to click and drag the Text textbox to the position you want it to be in.
Every part of the UI is broken, though. You have to discover this by clicking (all icons, no text), you have to move the textbox by finding the 1px wide click-and-drag target (on a high-DPI display!), and sometimes, the text simply disappears and deletes itself, in a way no amount of cmd+Z (undo) can fix.
It's very frustrating and crazy-making, but the amount of time it took to fill out one page of a PDF precludes me from wanting to take the effort to document it in this way.
So, I very very much appreciate this author for sharing a few of the million papercuts of MacOS. It is really hard to imagine someone being proud of putting this product out.
Nor does it mean that people shouldn’t welcome improvements even if those improvements don’t bring the overall quality back to that of what it used to be.
But I do also agree with you that we shouldn’t be ignoring the fact that Apple have generally been on a downward spiral in terms of software quality for a number of years.
- wastefully large "zero KB" text to signal nothing
- poor text legibility due too light of a gray color - if you don't want people to read that text, don't add it! Or hide behind some tooltip or something
- tiny font size with a lot of space wasted, that's bigger than small margins
- the useless brightness of persistent window controls, they are way too common and unimportant, especially for keyboard users that never even click on then
> I know my machine's getting old, but does it really need a second to load in the Profiles menu when I open a new Firefox window?
I don't see how age matters here for such primitive low cost operations, so no, it should be instant on a machine older than yours
> Sometimes the search bar in System Settings simply refuses to work.
This continues to be a very frequently highlighted epic fail across various Apple platforms. I wonder, is there any substantive explanation on why it's so bad for so long?
> Perhaps there's hope yet. Snow Leopard had nearly two years of refinements to achieve the level of polish and stability its name has become synonymous with today.
Not really, it's more like it has years of memory loss leading to a bunch of bugs like in this blog to be forgotten and the marketing tag taken over. So definitely there is hope, just wait a decade...
Also not a bug, but a bad recession ihmo. I always used to have Finder>Show-Hidden-Files option on. Now it is always off, and one must Cmd+Shift+. to show hidden files each time one opens a directory. Why take that option away ??
If anyone has insights about what might be causing my blank "after search" window, and/or a way to make show hidden files the default please advise. Thx, NSC
Golden Gate works pretty well so far for me.
They could've shipped a smaller list of bug fixes by a given date rather than a bigger list of bugs
I waited until Aug 31 before updating to MacOS 26, a new record for me. I very much hope 27 will be ready to go by Feb 1.
My recent upgrade was from Ventura to Sequoia, and I will likely move to Golden Gate at some point next summer right before Sequoia's support period expires (this happens in July or August). Over years it meant that I avoided some of the famous bugs like the discoveryd fiasco in Yosemite (I went from Maverics to El Capitan).
The one downside is that I sometimes have a to go through a huge app redesigns or big feature changes that have been accumulating over several versions. I ignore most of them and probably don't get as much value from the OS as I could have.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Halen_test
I don't know if I'll ever upgrade to Golden Gate, and this blog post isn't giving me confidence.
Apple 2020 Mini - Sequoia - Music/DAW
Intel 2017 MBP - Sequoia (OCLP) - Software Development
Intel 2014 MBP - Sequoia (OCLP) - Board game tutorials and videos at the gaming table (dining room)
Intel 2012 Mini - High Sierra - Very retro video gaming (doesn't access the net)
Since I can't afford to buy anything anymore, I'm keeping these the way they are for a long time. As each one dies, so does my enjoyment of computing.
Just one small thing to add about the Color Picker: I think it's a good example of how native UI apps have changed over the last decade.
The macOS Color Picker is nice. The idea is to have a single color picker for the whole system. It's extensible, so apps can add their own custom pickers (for example, an OKLCH picker), and you can reuse your palettes across applications.
Sounds great! But most of the applications where you might care about those features (customization, sharing your color schemes, etc.) don't work with the native Color Picker: Figma, Adobe apps, all Electron-based apps, and so on. So the Color Picker's features are useless. That component of the system is exactly the same as it was when I got my first Mac in 2007.
There are multiple nice native features that apps don't use; over time, they become forgotten and barely maintained.
I don't know what the solution is, but at some point, I think Apple should take frameworks like Tauri or Electron into account and build integrations for developers who use them. I know the integrations exists (they are the native APIs), and it's the developers' responsibility to use them, but that's not happening, and it ends up affecting the UX.
in practice, developers will not use them. they think they have better ideas and they don't care about platform or the user as an abstraction over the platform. they could use the existing thing.
it's the same mindset that has automakers not wanting to support CarPlay. they think they can do it better or just as well and it's completely missing the point: the user doesn't want to fuck with their custom one-off UI.
Safari Developer Tools freezes the app.
Even though I’ve disabled the Siri AI tools, they still show up everywhere for some reason.
The main menu bar sometimes gets darker.
Apple Mail keeps formatting my emails in ways I don’t like (bullet lists, etc.).
Apple Mail Smart Mailboxes are broken if you have multiple Macs.
The list goes on…
I had this happen after toggling the menu bar background / Liquid Glass transparency settings a couple times. I think a window (from Firefox) somehow got positioned slightly behind the menu bar, which was causing it to take its color from the window instead of my desktop background when it was on top.
Find the window, then Option + maximize button should fix it.
It's such an obvious issue that I'm wondering whether I'm the only one experiencing it or whether Apple users just don't use Spotify or whether Spotify simply doesn't test on macOS (and as such I have no idea where even to write a ticket, the macOS Feedback app doesn't even have a category for problems in non-Apple applications).
* bluetooth keyboard suddenly very laggy * mission control spaces shortcuts
Can't believe they made this glaring oversight.
smdh
I started writing a list of UX and software bugs in Mac OS, but honestly, I don't have the energy or time, there are so many. Mac OS has become an absolute travesty of an OS.
It's the worst desktop OS there is.. except for all the others.
I feel like the author wanted to write a post like one of those about Tahoe (menu bar, corner dragging), but the stuff they wrote about was all very "who cares"?
Golden Gate has reversed many of Tahoe's regressions and further updates will continue to do so.
Well, OP, today is the day you learn about anamorphic lensessure, but also apple has 170K full-time employees
it is a total mess for a company that used to care
New since upgrading:
- In telegram messages get stuck sending and the app has to be force quit - Discord doesn’t pick up audio device changes until the app is restarted - Soundsource has crashed a few times if I change my AirPods out. - Selecting a screenshot area is laggy when dragging the selection box
They don't just mention one bug here.
Especially worrying is the last bug, which hangs the entire system.
I hoped this update would've made my Mac more stable from the last release, and while maybe the performance is better, I feel like issues like this do randomly occur.
Did they fix the bug where the toolbar of applications would either get stuck open or disappear while in full screen mode, requiring them to be moved to the desktop before returned to fullscreen?
Wait for the next upgrade unless you're forced to go with the first release.
They've completely broken every experience around minimized windows:
- App Expose doesn't show minimized windows at all
- Cmd-` iterating doesn't iterate through minimized windows.
- I've had times where Cmd-`-ing to another Terminal yanked it from it's workspace onto my current one.
- It will just stop rendering the Mission Control thumbnails. 90% of the time it just shows empty workspaces
- It seems to be doing some stupid optimization where it blanks out my Firefox window until the workspace switch animation has fully finished. Likely it's part of how they finally removed the janky animations from the past 3 releases. But, COME ON Wayland can run on my 5 year old x86_64-linux laptop with perfect animations with none of this jank and compromise.
- It regularly doesn't change focus from Firefox (on my second workspace) to Firefox Nightly (on my first workspace), when swiping. Or even swiping and clicking. Only if you swipe, move the cursor and then click does focus shift to the open, top app on the workspace.
It's hot f****king garbage. Maybe this is my foot peddle but it breaks every basic way I do window management and use the OS.
Breaking minimized windows. Only Apple could manage that.
This isn't new of course, it's old news. Mac OS X has been buggy since I developed for it more than two decades ago.
For a cry, ask it how to change the keyboard shortcut for activating Siri in Golden Gate.
These should have been fixed as of a couple weeks now.
Anyone still seeing Tahoe? If so, please reply with the URL you are visiting.
Apple (iCloud) Data Recovery works only if you deleted files from Drive via GUI, which places them in Trash.
So you actually do have them. Whaat? Why would you need a recovery? Good question.
Now it gets really interesting: you’ve emptied the Trash and now wanna to recover some.
But they are no more. Gone. Can’t be recovered anymore.
And there is a reason of course: because fuck you, that’s why.
And it’s documented FYI, so it’s a feature.
Checkmate.
Been on Mac since the 90s, now a very happy Linux desktop user.
It’s time for some apple internal honesty about the state of MacOS gui.
Hell, frickin watchOS 27 Siri on my Ultra 3 can't set a timer because "the Clock app isn't installed on this device" ...????
and 2027 was supposed to be a "polishing" release.
When will we start seeing the benefits of all the smart AI coding shit they've supposedly rented from Anthropic? 2030?
I sure ain’t upgrading my Mac any time soon if I can help it.
I switched from Linux to macOS but the lack of QA is going to force me back to Linux once security updates stop for Sequoia.
Same. Will sell my Air when security updates stop for Sequoia
For all that Steve was batshit he was willing to do hard things that were "bad for business." I heard so many legendary stories over the years of Steve Jobs holding up releases at the last minute because they weren't up to par. That takes guts in a corporate environment where there is so much pressure to go along and say "well, we have to ship something." No, you don't have to ship something. You can take your time to do it right and ship things that are high quality.
Apple shouldn't assume that just because they are the incumbent that they will be around forever. Today's Steve Jobs could already be alive and plotting...
Every AppKit and Foundation type uses the NS prefix, and will keep doing so for any foreseeable future. New NS types are added to these frameworks each macOS release.
Citation: I was a NeXTSTEP developer.
Objective-C doesn't have namespaces (like C), so people use two-letter prefixes on their types to prevent name clashes. The NS prefix is used by Apple's Foundation and AppKit frameworks, that originated from NeXTSTEP, hence NS.
there, just told you