Comment by flohofwoe

Seconding this. Feels actively anti-user even if this is just a bunch of heuristics that end up choosing the wrong thing. Honestly, why is this not a dropdown?

Related bug: macOS defaults to variable refresh rate when available instead of remembering my choice of 144hz. This is confounded by my hub (Caldigit TS3 Plus), which has trouble with variable refresh rates that result in a black screen.

The cherry on top: either I use a HDMI cable and deal with BetterDisplay forcing RGB to fix YCbCr, or a black screen when using DP through my hub due to the above bug.

Sometimes I wish Apple would get broken up just so macOS could have a chance at getting more love.

I JUST BOUGHT A NEW MONITOR AND WENT DOWN THIS RABBIT HOLE AHHHH Almost returned this perfectly fine monitor thanks to Apple, thank god for BetterDisplay though, actual gem of an app

The entire apple monitor settings are just awful. I have a small portable projector which accepts 4k input but just downscales it to 1080p.

I cannot get osx to actually output at 1080p, all it does is output at 4k and scale the result.

The downscaling in the projector adds input lag and just drives me crazy. I really wish they'd just let you control these things rather than poorly guessing.

I didn't know about better display, I guess I should try it and see if it can fix this problem.

I ran into this issue with the Sonoma update. My display (4k LG) was negotiating RGB just fine before, but not anymore. The BetterDisplay workaround hasn't worked for me. The poor colors and fuzzy edges around all the text is causing eye strain too. I'm beyond furious.

The same thing happens under Linux with some monitors and AMD graphics drivers. A lot of monitors have poor standards compliance (and the standards aren't great either).

I once spent hours trying to find out why apple's font rendering is so atrocious for a 1440p monitor on a m3 macbook air (reddit just keeps telling everyone to get higher resolution screens). Turns out it's related to the color scheme - the colors were fine, but the pixels are somehow located wrong, making everything look super pixelated.

BetterDisplay provided a workaround, but it needs to be selected every time the monitor is hooked up.

(I guess that's normal for Apple stuff nowadays - when I hook up my ipad to my projector, I need to tell it every single time not to use the audio output of the projector, but keep using the bluetooth speaker.)

There is no reason why YCbCr should be visually worse than RGB if the conversion is accurate

I think that Apple, perhaps naively, expects display manufacturers to adhere to spec when in reality they often don’t.

Either way macOS has no trouble with my 27” 2560x1440 Asus and Alienware monitors. Both connect with 10bit RGB no problem, at least over USB-C and DisplayPort (haven’t tried HDMI).

it's comically bad. the UI is a mess, the search functionality is broken, you can't resize the window horizontally. it's feels like a hello world first project in a new language type of app.

also - it's such a bummer that they have decided to shit the bed so hard on software at a moment when their hardware lineup is arguably at its pinnacle. like, the hardware has been firing on all cylinders since M1 but the software degradation is making it less and less pleasant to use.

To be fair, Windows really had the same type of issues going from the old Control Panel to Settings. I still get large delays for some of the screens in Windows Settings.

They rewrote many of their tools in SwiftUI.

So far, I am not willing to ship anything in SwiftUI. I don't think it's up to the task.

I mean ok, the old one was already a bit overloaded and unwieldy, so a redesign was probably overdue and Ill give them the benefit of the doubt here but WTF is with the 1-2 second delay when switching between the menus in there? Are they doing web requests upon opening every settings page or what? This is real amateur hour.

A few years ago, I filed a Feedback Assistant bug report regarding an issue I was experiencing in Final Cut. In response, I was contacted by Final Cut developers who worked with me to replicate the issue and then shipped a fix.

Just one anecdote, but some reports definitely get looked at.

Feedback Assistant is a UI for Radar.

You will never get a response to tickets unless it is affecting a lot of people and they need more information e.g. crash reports.

They are all read/triaged though.

If you look at the macOS feature history, it's pretty clear that the bulk of the team got shifted to iPhone in 2007 and never really recovered. The widely acknowledged Snow Leopard high water mark happened shortly after.

To be fair, Apple can still pull off the occasional amazing feat of vertical integration -- HDR, APFS, keeping audio latency under control despite the relentless assault of apathy from all directions -- but they never had the same level of consistent drive forward, at least not until a year or two ago when the big push for AI integration started. Apple gets ragged on here, but I think their integration is actually some of the best. They were putting neural cores in chips back when that sort of thing got mocked, not lauded, and every step has been thoughtfully tied in rather than airdropped from a ChatGPT science fair project. But they never got good at building or deploying leading-edge models themselves; I hope they turn it around because this is important.

I was in a QA role on MacOS in 2010-2013. There isn’t a QA team, rather each group of developers and EM had a QA embedded with them.

I worked at Apple on Mac OS X until 2008. For QA, Bertrand believed in a lightweight touch, with dedicated QA staffing only at the top of the stack (plus a few key places like the filesystem), with the idea that any bugs will bubble up and be found through real-world usage. Most QA was informal, through heavy dogfooding.

You felt a real sense of ownership to the thing that you worked on. You worked hard and fixed bugs because it felt like it mattered, because you thought about how e.g. your mom would end up using the product, and also Steve Jobs would see it, so it had to be great. Also, teams were small. Something would involve only 1-2 people, and then we would look over at Redmond and they'd have dozens of people working on the same thing. The need-to-know secrecy was not just for PR value; it helped keep circles of communication tight, cutting out a lot of noise, so you could just focus. The organization was stable (and relatively flat, around 5 levels from junior engineer to SJ). I think in my 9 years or so there, there were no major reorgs. Avie phased himself out and retired, and Bertrand moved up. The only major disruption was when the iPhone project happened.

Release cycles were annual. Throughout most of the release cycle, it was pretty free up to each team and engineer to decide what to work on and how to prioritize it. Near the end of a release, it would get more and more strict on what you were allowed to change, up to the point where Bertrand sometimes would even ask to see code diffs.

I don't really know what is going on over there now. They have moved to a more agile approach, with more frequent integration checkpoints. In theory this should be better, but I suspect there's less sense of ownership and more of a feeling of a software factory. But it's probably mostly to do with the fact that the systems are way more complex, both the tech and the org, with way more moving parts. Even the programming language itself (Swift) is a moving target. I know (from talking to friends) there's a lot more politics and career-building going on, the kind of corporate douchebaggery that would not have been tolerated under Steve Jobs. People are thinking about RSUs and their promotions, rather than the products.

Ultimately, I think it boils down to this observation by jwz at Netscape, that there's "two kinds of people: those who want to go work for a company to make it successful, and those who want to go work for a successful company." Post-iPhone, Apple has filled up with the latter. A majority of the people at Apple now didn't work there under SJ, and the senior management who did experience that is now aging and retiring. At least from the outside, as a customer and end-user, it feels obvious that the founder-led product-obsessed culture is gone.

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Oh, I envy you, I have the exact opposite problem. Sometimes new icons start stacking up one over the other on the top right corner.

If you try moving one of the icons anywhere, it snaps back to the top right corner right away.

I haven't found a fix. The only fix is moving the icons away from the Desktop into another folder using a Finder window.

I am on 15.3.1 and when I attempt it, it stays in place on the color I selected without issue.

And that also raises a huge issue: The problem isn't just functional defects, but also design defects and regressions. The new Settings panel is pretty much universally hated, from all the feedback I've seen. Apple is spending time dicking around with things that already worked and that will not drive sales through changes... so WTF? This faffing points to a major priority-setting problem within the firm.

Look at the state of Xcode, a tool that's fundamental to the iPhone's appeal. Every developer knows that this thing needs a massive rewrite. The word is that nobody within Apple even understands it thoroughly anymore, so it's way past time to strap it on and build a modern tool from the ground up that's maintainable, instead of slapping band-aids on Project Builder indefinitely. Come on, Apple, you can afford to throw resources at this for a year and just get it DONE.

Meanwhile, Apple is letting open, "urgent" QA personnel requisitions sit unfilled for YEARS. We can all see the results.

You need to close and reopen the setting after adding a color. Then in the top right there will be a custom color button.

Interesting, yeah. It doesn't happen when adding a new color to the "Colours" row at the bottom even though this happens with the same color selection UI widget.

I see this Custom Colour thingie at the top-right corner of the Wallpaper section, above a "Show on all Spaces" checkbox and left of a fairly big representation of the current desktop background.

After a bit of tinkering: this Custom Colour element is replaced with something else depending on the current background mode. If you selected a wallpaper image, it shows the name of the wallpaper. If you select a predefined colour, it shows the name of the color. When adding a custom colour, it will show an interactive element which allows to change the color in place, and that shows the buggy behaviour for me.

Ok, this at least explains why other people don't stumble over this as an obvious bug, I assumed it would be obvious, because the first thing I always do on a new Mac is to customize the background color by right-clicking the desktop, and since that moment I have that buggy Custom Colour element sitting there.

Not a great UX either way though.

PS: ...and now after adding a new custom color via the to bottom row of predefined colors, the bug in the 'Custom Colour' widget is gone and nobody will believe me it was ever there. Great :D

PPS: nope, it's coming back after going through the 'desktop => right-click => change wallpaper...' route again, phew.

Fewer QA means more $100,000 bonuses to overworked Apple devs (2nd hand experience).

initially also cannot, but now can. open wallpaper setting > choose + in color section, choose any color, close popup, (IMPORTANT) close setting panel.

now reopen the wallpaper setting again, click on top right custom color and do this, somehow the behavior is different. Now it change the wallpaper color as you drag over the colors rather than mouseup. My guess is clicking on + button at the bottom is triggering the popup config to update on mouseup, while opening it fresh will configure it to trigger on update, until the + button is clicked.

Did you try it with numerous pointing devices, or one in particular? It took only one try on a trackpad, M3 MBP

> And I haven’t not even started on its services like iCloud.

I feel like a lot of the Apple issues come from the fact they keep building on top of iCloud. It’s only very recently that people started trusting the sync.

It’s like MS, where anything built on top of sharepoint is going to be garbage.

Now tell us how you feel about windows.

That’s not a bug. The color picker always opens at the bottom left no matter which app opens it. Has always been like that.

Compile time issues are almost always type inference issues. Reducing chained functions and multiple levels of protocol witness indirection usually speeds this up dramatically.

The other big time sucks are C++ interop and dozens of micro-dependencies (react-native).

Oh god please don't get me started on Airplay bugs.

I honestly have some work to do this month.

"Hey, let's rewrite the framework again and not do any regression testing or test against old implementations or see what happens with any codec that is not exactly what we are expecting for any reason." - Airplay devs, every year.

Reproduces for me. I'm on your build but there's a new beta out today fwiw

Ah now it's getting interesting :) So far I could reproduce the issue across several machines, also on new demo machines at the Apple booth of electronic discounters - so I don't think it's something about my configuration, but maybe it has something todo with how I'm using the trackpad (but I'm just sliding around with the right-hand pointer finger).

PS: the mystery might be solved => that buggy 'Custom Colour' UI item only shows up under specific circumstances, which for my specific usage pattern is 'obvious' - see my sister comment for details.

Just tested on M1 Pro, 15.0 (Settings version) on Sonoma.

After initial custom color selection by clicking on the "+" (which works fine) and then reopening the Window to click "Custom Color" and then selecting the color again... it doesn't just jump for 20ms - it goes into full on psychotic flash jump behavior and basically continues to do so hands-off for 5 entire seconds before it stops at a random color.

There is 2 options now:

1) nobody has ever tested this workflow at Apple, automated or not.

2) it was tested and discovered but then pushed into the backlog as non-priority. Here the question arises - for how long?

The bug probably generates zero lost dollars so nobody at Apple cares anymore. THIS is what used to be different.