Comment by jamil7
10 months ago
There's always been a lot of room for them to optimise performance on macOS to a level that they do iOS, but modern Apple basically wants macOS to go away and sees it as more of an annoyance, so they don't spend any time tuning it. Then the elephant in the room is SwiftUI itself, there's a performance cliff there, wherein if you've optimised everything else, you might just hit the brick wall that's the layout engine with no recourse or ability to even peak under the hood. We're at a point now where building a fully native macOS app, with the first-party toolchain, will give you far worse performance (in terms of responsiveness not resource usage) than something like Electron. I have a suspicion teams inside of Apple are also running up against these issues as they start to actually adopt the framework.
A modestly sized list of WiFi networks (30-40 items) slows down and stutters while scrolling on a M4 MBP. SwiftUI is a performance disaster, and I refuse to use it outside of toy single screen projects
Yeah it's in a really bad spot on macOS still, iOS performance is a lot better. I'm sure all of this can be overcome but I'm not certain it's a priority for them.
Considering how good the hardware is supposed to be, iOS is not that great actually. This is why Androids that have benchmarks score way lower than iPhone can actually feel smoother to use. Apple is brute forcing the thing and making all their customers pay, it's useless to have the most powerful chip if you waste all its power running garbage code.
And this is exactly how macOS and iOS feel nowadays: the hardware is supposed to be great but it doesn't feel that good because the software sucks.
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> modern Apple basically wants macOS to go away and sees it as more of an annoyance, so they don't spend any time tuning it
[citation needed]
Oh, the leadership keeps saying that MacOS is separate from iOS and they care about MacOS.
And then they keep adding iOS UIs into MacOS, produce horrible laggy iOS-optimised software for it, and call it a day.
Actions speak louder than words.
Doesn't mean they want macOS to go away though. Merging code-bases is a bad thing now?
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What sort of citation would you be looking for here? It's generally accepted that it's not a priority for them, the discrepencies in performance and features between UIKit vs AppKit have always existed and are even more pronounced in SwiftUI. Due to how it's used they can't apply the same business model to the mac as they can iOS and therefore can't extract as much value from it, this is reflected in revenue.