Comment by nntwozz
1 day ago
Not to beat on my own drum but as a mac convert from the days of Tiger I saw the writing on the wall from miles away.
Still on iOS 18 and macOS 15 (Sequoia). I was a day one upgrader up until now, never had any regrets but this time things seemed very different.
It's worrisome but all is not lost, I'll start sweating for real if next year's releases don't improve things substantially.
My HN comment history shows I've been worried about macOS for quite a while now, too. I'm a bit less optimistic than you, but I hope you're right. I'd really prefer to be wrong.
macOS has been an incredible productive OS for me since I was 15. I'm now 39. In the last few years is the first time in that period that I've seriously begun to wonder if it would be wise to get off the platform. I've already dropped iOS, watchOS (Garmins are actually amazing these days, for what it's worth), and iPadOS. I still use macOS daily along with tvOS when I happen to watch something, but the days seem numbered now. I'm pretty disappointed. I hope it turns around, but I'm slowly preparing myself to be on Linux primarily.
My phone updated on me and yesterday it took me 10 minutes to figure out how to listen to my voice mail. Like seriously, how do we go from clicking on the name calling to clicking on the name to see the voicemail left by that specific caller and no others
This is the most disappointing aspect of the slide in quality for me.
I working in software and "build features" for a living, and over the years I've come to prioritize reliability, performance, and an intuitive experience over all else. No matter how good the feature set is, if it crashes, is painfully slow, or I can't figure out how to use it, then I don't want it.
Apple used to have that focus, but seems to have lost it of late.
You can tap on the filter button (three stacked horizontal lines of decreasing length) and select the "Voicemails" filter to view them all.
I did find this later, but that's also very unintuitive. I'm looking at a call log, why would I filter my calls to look at voicemails? I mean even the options there are categorically inconsistent. It is "Calls", "Missed", "Voicemail". voicemail is a different category than received and missed. I'm expecting that because that's what used to be at the top of that page. They taught me that that's what I should expect from the filtering option.
My solution was to change from "Unified" to "Classic" which changes the bottom bar from [("Calls" "Contacts" "Keypad") "Search] to ["Favorites" "Recents" "Contacts" "Keypad" "Voicemail"]. THE ICONS ARE EXACTLY THE SAME SIZE. The only difference is the spacing between them.
But again, this is fucking crazy because going back to the classic mode, if I click on a recent name it starts dialing them. But in the unified mode it gives me information. The unified makes the whole name act as if I'm pressing the info button.
The problem is that Apple created an anti-pattern, TO ITSELF. They taught users that an action did one thing and then used that action to do something completely different. No one on iOS 26 should expect that clicking the call line will take you to the information page and should instead expect that doing so will start dialing that person.
Maybe you didn’t catch this yet, but Apple pulled their latest iOS 18.7.3 update and they seem to only promote iOS 26 now. They really want everyone off iOS 18 :/
https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman/2026/01/07/hundreds-...
They don't allow you to upgrade to iOS 18.7.3 if your device supports iOS 26.
You can sign up for Apple beta and keep doing iOS 18 updates.
There are many reports that since around Christmas day, you can not do this any more on phones that support iOS 26. Updating to iOS 26 is the only option now.
1 reply →
Not anymore. Tried this but the pulled 18.7.3 for beta upgrades too.
Nope, they don't sign iOS 18 updates anymore.
> Still on iOS 18 and macOS 15 (Sequoia). I was a day one upgrader up until now, never had any regrets but this time things seemed very different.
I've tried and returned the iPhone 17 Pro. Love the hardware (especially the camera), but iOS 26 is inefficient (for lack of a better term), and the new camera UI hides too many things.
Upgrading to iOS 26 was a mistake. All the slow, distracting UI features that only makes the iPhone feel like some slow Android phone is really not an "upgrade" in any reasonable sense of the word.
Same I'm on iOS 26 and it's reasonably bad but I figured I might as well pull of the band-aid and have app compatibility.
I can't see a single reason to upgrade to Tahoe. We'll see what 2026 brings.
One huge benefit of Tahoe for me is that you can now hide any menubar icon, even if they don't explicitly support hiding. It's a small thing but that alone makes the upgrade worth it for me
The Tiger to Snow Leopard era was fantastic. Things were simple and worked.
There was also a great boutique apps ecosystem.
Right now, it seems that macOS is going through its enshittification phase, sadly.
I still remember Snow Leopard - I think that's when I started using Mac.
Most of the upgrades since then I have resisted and not enjoyed, though I seem to recall liking Mavericks.
A lot of the big features each time seem to be about tieing further into the Apple ecosystem, which doesn't interest me at all, since I have no other devices and don't use iCloud.
I think also that Snow Leopard era (unibody) MacBook Pro design was peak Mac. It was really full-featured while also having clean intentional design.
Tiger on a G4 tibook was peak apple.
Snow Leopard was spectacular. Rock solid, I never had a single problem with the OS. Lots of third-party developers making good software helped, I think shortly after (Lion?) I bought Things, Little Snitch, Sketch, and Alfred.
> Tiger to Snow Leopard era was fantastic. Things were simple and worked
Was it also great for developers? (Genuine question.)
Yeah, OS X was definitely the nicest native development experience at the time. Apple's documentation was considerably better and more searchable back then than it is now (especially as it is now for desktop). And even though they've introduced lots of niceties (including Swift), as Apple's piled additional features and APIs into Cocoa/Xcode I find the overall experience quite a bit less coherent or intuitive or ergonomic than it used to be.
Pretty much. Xcode was quirky but it still is. But the frameworks were well documented and 1 Cocoa book could get you a long way. I loved building Obj-C/Cocoa apps back then.
I'm not mac dev but wasn't apple all in on objc back then and these days it's more swift? that is pretty big shift, I'd assume for the better for most parts.
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xcode has been getting better bit-by-bit. No major regression.
I am also HODLing Sequoia. Started using a Mac 2024.
(Hold On for Dear Life)