Comment by aylmao
2 months ago
I grew up with this animation so I didn't consider it annoying until I bought a new Macbook a couple years ago.
I noticed sometimes I would press keyboard shortcuts before my system's focus had switched. Just little stumbles here and there, some inoffensive, some annoying, but who knows maybe I didn't catch enough sleep.
Over time it happened often enough that I decided to google it, and it turns out my muscle memory wasn't failing me; the animation speed did change ever so slightly and was slower in new Macs with 120Hz displays [1][2] (newer MacBooks, 2021+). If you switch your screen to 60Hz it goes back to the faster animation.
Why is this animation slower now, and why does it depend on screen refresh rate? I have some technical theories but can't think of an organizational reason it happened and hasn't been fixed 5 years later at a 3.82 trillion market cap company. If you Google it there's plenty of discussions online about this. It's noticeable and annoying to people who have used the feature often enough.
[1]: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/256124324?sortBy=rank
This is such an insane bug to still have around all these years.
Are apple engineers not using macOS?
I think Apple's self-image of being the epitome of design actually acts against them. Leads to monstrosities like Liquid Glass kinda vandalizing random parts of the UI in small ways that I intuitively read as "they are anti-anti-aliasing" not "they added cool refraction effects." It used to be you'd see something in a well-chosen color, now it is just a muddy kind of greyish brownish whatever.
I'd like to see them make some costly signalling to indicate that they are going to turn it around like maybe buy two Superbowl ads in a row and let the CEO make a personal apology.
Isn't going to happen because the competition is Microsoft and Intel and Dell who won't hold them accountable and it is just too easy to turn reject iPhone chips into netbooks in 2026.
I'm pretty confident many Apple employees have eyes, and thus are aware of how absurd Liquid Glass is (wtf, my iPhone capitalizes that but not a standalone i?!?!)
So assuming everyone at Apple isn't deaf (it's all over public discourse), blind (it looks bad), and dumb (no genius needed), then how does it get through? I can only see a few scenarios, none of which are good.
Maybe Apple engineers are afraid to push back on management?
Maybe management isn't receptive to their employees who voiced concerns?
Maybe key decision makers have pushed themselves into an echo chamber where it's difficult to hear concerns.
One of these has to be true, or some combination. But none of these are good, they are incredibly destructive to companies. Though also unfortunately common across monopolies. Iron Law of Bureaucracy hard at work...
I often think of that scene in Pantheon where they basically say they don't know what to do after Steve died. You can only laptops so small... and they're so small that anyone that puts on lotion is going to have an imprint of their keyboard on their screens... Steve wouldn't have accepted that
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> too easy to turn reject iPhone chips into netbooks in 2026.
You mean the flagship chip from their former pro phones? I was with you until you said this. Makes you sound out of touch or ideological.
I think they've been on the worst design tear since they went to OSX for the past eight-ish years. At no point does their awful software design intrude on their awesome chip designs.
My partner's first Mac is a MacBook Neo and she loves it. Pink. Looks pretty good. Does what she needs. Not right for me, probably not right for you, but what I'd tell my mother to buy if it existed when I told her to buy a regular MacBook Air.
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My pet opinion is that Steve Jobs was an asshole but an asshole that used his own products and used his powers of complaining to steer the whole ship to fix major "this annoys me everyday" bugs.
From my experience, "annoying but not blockers" bugs are often very neglected compared to (1) bugs that actually break things and (2) feature work. Neglecting quality of life issues leads to the "do you even use your product??" kinds of experiences.
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I… think that actually Liquid Glass was put on the iPhones to make sure that older iPhones that still have relatively fast chips can show up finally slower than the brand new ones, and that with this stress there’s again a much larger slope in difference between an older iPhone and a newer one which causes enough nagging in users to upgrade = buy a new one.
I mean, their damn phone keyboards are so bad I'm 100% confident that Tim only does voice to text on his phone. There's no way that the CEO of a company could use a keyboard that horrible and not want to fix it.
It’s SO bad. It makes me not want to use my phone anymore and physically go get my laptop if I’m chatting/messaging someone.
It’s probably the worst typing experience I’ve had since resistive-touch screens on PDAs. At least with them you could still type what you intended to though, just slowly.
The behavior of the iOS keyboard also showcases how there must not be many decision-making people who communicate in multiple languages.
If Tim used speech to text we’d be at least testing SotA local voice models in the iOS betas
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Most of my issues were fixed when I disabled swipe to type. Not all, but most.
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This, along with circle to search (for translating, mainly) are the current main things pushing me to stay on Android.
Why are you paying money for something that you find so terrible when there is a perfectly good alternative.
Life is too short to waste is using junk you don’t enjoy.
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In my experience iOS 26.4 did largely fix it btw. Update if you haven’t already.
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> Are apple engineers not using macOS?
If they are, they aren't using anything but very basic parts of it.
But I think the better question is "Are Apple Executives not using MacOS?" because if they were, none of these mad bugs would still be here.
Even if they did, what are they going to do? File a bug report that will sit at the bottom of the priority pile forever?
Devs don't set priorities. Software "Engineers" largely don't get to engineer at all.
Essentially all Apple engineers use macOS ~exclusively (at least in the SWE org). That these bugs persist is in spite of that fact.
Frankly there's just a lot going on, and between all the kinds of bugs that have higher priority -- crashers, panics, memory regressions (your app gets Jetsam'd), power bugs (your phone runs out of battery mid-day), perf regressions (could violate EU regulations against planned obsolescence), security bugs (people can lose their money, journalists can get killed) -- bugs like this often fall by the wayside for quite some time until they're fixed.
Stockholm syndrome. Moving between spaces is fine! What are you talking about?
You get used to it and then it's not a big. Stop holding it wrong!!!
I wouldn't be surprised. Their 3D solid modeling is done on Windows, so why not their electronics.
Wow I never realized I had this problem until now! I never even considered the reason keys would dispatch to the wrong window was because of the animation. I just knew that sometimes when switching workspaces I'd have to wait until whatever window I'm switching to has focus before typing.
I believe I first learned to shorten animations on MacOSXHints.com (gone now). Regardless, I learned a lot of great "enhancements" here:
https://github.com/mathiasbynens/dotfiles
And here's the blog of the person who ran MacOSXHints.com:
https://robservatory.com/make-your-macos-dock-suck/
Fun aside, I'm pretty sure that my mention of a system issue that I read about that morning on MacOSXHints.com was a helper in landing a job in an interview that afternoon. What I mean is, I said, oh are you talking about "whatever thing on that site today…?" and it demonstrated that I was familiar with whatever internals.
Nice resources! I've use MacOS for over ten years and I never really modified anything other than my zshrc. I'll check then out!
Don't know about customizability on MacOS but I've always been very accustomed to animations and recently I just turned them off on Android and Linux and I... Don't miss anything. Turned out they don't add anything other than an initial wow factor.
Personally, I think some animations can help add context to what is happening. For example, when using QuickLook, there is an animation when opening/closing QuickLook that zooms out from, and then back to the file location. If doing something with that file after the QL, that little visual clue helps find it faster and know where it opened from.
The closest thing you can do on macOS is to turn on "reduced motion". This doesn't remove any animations, it just replaces them all with fade animations which take the same amount of time.
and set it to 60hz instead of 120. And install the tool that the article links to.
I noticed this immediately when I first used a 120Hz macbook in 2021. As a vanilla MacOS UI feature that I'm sure many people use, I can't believe it hasn't been fixed yet.
I also have a 120Hz Mac, and the animation is indeed slower in 120Hz mode. In my opinion, the animation crossed the line from "too slow but bearable" to "unbearable" with 120Hz. It is as you say; it's not really the animation itself that's the problem, but the delay from when I tell my machine "switch to this other workspace" until the focus switches to a window on that other workspace. The animation has this horrible ease-out effect where the last few centimeters take what feels like forever.
Getting a 120Hz Mac actually completely changed my whole macOS philosophy. I used to use spaces extremely heavily. I now almost don't use them at all, preferring window switching with cmd+tab instead.
The infuriating thing is that almost all discussion on this on the web just says "turn on reduced motion". Not only should that be unnecessary; it doesn't even fix the problem! Sure, there's no longer a sliding animation, but there's now a fade animation instead which takes just as long.
It's completely incomprehensible that Apple hasn't fixed this.
Sadly, solutions like BetterTouchTool and InstantSpaceSwitcher won't work for me because I prefer to use my trackpad to switch spaces.
EDIT: I actually recorded and compared the switching speeds a while ago: https://old.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/rfmg4e/workspace_swi.... Apologies for the choppy recording, QuickTime screen recording is not very good; but it gets the point across.
> Sadly, solutions like BetterTouchTool and InstantSpaceSwitcher won't work for me because I prefer to use my trackpad to switch spaces.
One of BetterTouchTool's first features ~17 years ago was trackpad gesture customization, it is still one of the most important things you can do with BTT! ;-) You'd just need to assign the "Move Right a Space (without animation)" and "Move Left a Space (without animation)" actions to trackpad gestures in BTT.
I don't want it "without animation", I like that the animation tracks my fingers and that the response is instant and doesn't wait until a "gesture" is "triggered". I just want it to wait a second after I let go until the target workspace starts receiving input.
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Instant space switcher now supports overriding the gesture.
I would assume it’s something based around whatever deacceleration animation it is calculating? So in the inverse of what you would see in games that don’t support uncapped framerates. It would at least explain why the refresh rate has an inverted relationship
I've been having the same problem, entering keystrokes in the wrong windows when changing spaces. I'm so glad to know it's not just me, it's the fact that I just a couple months ago bought a new MBP. Thank you!
I have noticed this bug years before Apple started selling 120hz displays. I thought for sure they would fix it after that, but to my surprise it has persisted...
I think it must go back to High Sierra or Mojave at least.
we are a certain type of people here, aren't we?