Comment by Tyrubias

> The privacy is more of a market position thing than it is a political thing.

It is a market position, but companies do have some choice in which market positions they choose to take. And I wouldn't underestimate the effect of the personal views of the CEO in that.

> and it helps deprive Google and other services from monetizing their customer base.

The payment Apple gets from Google for being the default search might help explain this. It would be hard to turn down the sums Apple gets.

https://9to5mac.com/2025/09/03/just-one-word-in-the-google-a...

If you’re referring to their AI services being ‘woefully behind’, that’s just a market sector that they’ve chosen not to focus too much effort on. That was a sensible gamble too, given how unpredictable that sector is five years after it was released.

I’m not sure what else they are behind on frankly, as their current offerings have been extremely stable from day dot.

How many products has Google released and killed in the past 20 years? Apple managed to land on a good thing with Apple iTunes and iPhotos in the early oughts, and managed to transition those core services into Apple Music and iCloud with little to no disruption to users. iCloud is generally a pretty predictable service that delivers on a core set of user requirements very well.

Also, thief productivity suite isn’t meant to completely replace Office, and for a free package, it meets many users needs perfectly fine.

>but is woefully behind on the software

iOS is ahead on software security compared to Android, Windows, Desktop Linux, etc.

If you think Ternus wouldn't do it, you are in for a bad time.

It's less than the other tech CEOs who seem to evade criticism on HN. Elon literally worked for Trump, accomplished nothing, and ended up just leaking everyone's social security data. Thiel and Palantir are profiting from war and building out the surveillance state. Bezos made a $75M documentary about Melania. Larry Ellison took over TikTok US to squelch any criticism of US and Zionist war atrocities.

Pricing is based on customer value and restriction of customer options.

If we're paying $1000 for a Chinese phone that we'd pay $2000 for, we'll end up paying that price when the manufacturers have finally starved the professional capability to compete from the rest of the world. As we get closer to that point, the urgency to onshore is increasing.

Exploitation when we can get away with it is in our social nature as humans. So this isn't about the Chinese, or any other culture. It's just necessary for this to be onshored because it's critical.

If I never had to replace it again, I wouldn't mind that price.

I spend my entire day in VSCode and Chrome. Who actually interacts with the built-in OS UI anymore?

No don’t waste any time on Linux, Apple memory independence, clustering and moving on to M5, M6, M7, and beyond, a technocrat in charge yes, hopefully Apple will continue to iterate across the software ecosystems and the hardware systems.

Official support for alternative OSes would be nice, but no reason to throw everything out to make that happen.

Chrome is equivalent of operating system, meanwhile Finder? :D

Oh I also killed my Teams Chrome tab at the same time. But it was only 1 G :)

You're asking why, if its software is better than its hardware, people aren't driving cars with them on? Not sure I follow...

Because the HW is bad and pricing is bad. Not because SW is bad.

Because it costs thirty five hundred American dollars?

The software being good and it being used in a product consumers wanted are two very different things.

What did you think you were asking? Or was this just a lame, ill-conceived gotcha that probably needed another few hours in the oven before being chucked in the garbage?

Well, if you're asking if apple execs use that setting, the answer is probably that they don't.

I think the issue is that there are SO many piled up little features everywhere that SOMEone is using that keeping everything working while making any changes at all is very difficult.

I am a fan of more wood behind fewer swings. Don't add something like spaces unless you think you've got something so good that you are confident that it will be the common path.

on windows it does not leak slowly. just preallocates 2x memory for all future leaks.

Also, remember guys, you can't have a shell on iphone because. Nor a text editor. Because. ssh into your iphone? hah. These are all software issues.

> iTunes on windows

For decades it has been speculated they intentionally make that shit so people will be more likely to switch to apple

Really wanna discuss the current windows debacles? Come on! Apple software regressed but it’s not outright hostile bad still.

what is bad for you? was you at linux or windows - may be apple is best of all bad?

Give the competitors a try...

It’s so sad. Circa 2003 OS X wasn’t just good it was amazing. Nearly Movie OS quality. Every release the quality goes down. Every migration to SwiftUI more and more AppKit standard feature get lost.

Can we add Photos to that list? Can we add it twice cause it is that bad.

Bribery is the actual normal function of US politics. That’s what lobbying really amounts to.

The USA has the best government that money can buy.

I agree, but I'm taking as an axiom that some amount of bribery (tribute, really) had to be done, that Apple could avoid massive government retribution. In that lens, this bribery, while bad, is the least destructive form it could have taken. It being so gaudy actually helps this case.

Trump is the president. People voted him into the Office. Tim Cook didn't give him the golden statue before he is in the Office.

Everyone in the United States is complicit to the horrible things done by the Trump administration by your logic. I partially agree, but I also think burning Apple to the ground will not be Tim Cook's legacy and he is in no place to go against the executive branch.

It is not about Trump, it is about the corrupted executive branch. Tim didn't do any crime against humanity in his act.

It's fair to say there is not much contrast. But he's kept Apple's DEI and climate commitments in place even after being attacked directly, while Zuckerberg, Musk and Altman are proactively broadcasting right-wing talking points, sometimes pre-emptively. Yes, Cook gave $1 million, but Brockman gave $25 million, and Musk gave much, much more.

He also donated to Kamala Harris campaign. He would also donate to the next Democratic president for their inauguration if they still choose to do this corruptive thing. And your point is?

When Apple released its BSD-based OS X at the turn of the century, I was at Rice learning on Solaris machines, and also started dual booting Linux on my personal desktop at the time. My first few years in the working world were spent on Dells running Windows, so by the time I bought my first laptop in 2006, I was excited to spend my dollars on an unusual-looking white Macbook specifically because it had a *nix shell and the developer experience was vastly better to me than any machine I used at my day jobs. I still prefer working on Macs because ever since, they have just worked and Windows has gotten progressively worse (I know, because I have helped my parents with their Surface laptop). Unfortunately, Mac OS X has been less robust in the last several years, and I'd love to see them turn this around, both for the developer experience and for regular consumers. I still like using Photos, but I don't use their cloud for those, and I've been amazed over the years just how uninformative the Photos app on Mac can be when it flakes out and I have to try a rain dance just to get it to sync with my iPhone. That's pretty abysmal for a company that used to just work, but I believe it comes from the top. Steve Jobs used to enforce quality, and I want to see that again!

The thing where Linux (and Android, and Windows at least circa 2023) blows Apple out of the water is in UI latency. The built-in animations on Apple's software are sometimes hundreds of times slower than on their competitors, in ways which can't be accounted for.

Improving interface response times is the single best thing Apple can do to improve their UX. I don't need an interface which throbs, wiggles, jiggles, shines, and refracts, I need an interface that's snappy and fast.

As far as I know, MacOS is the _only_ desktop OS with this problem. The only way to fix this problem on MacOS is to do everything inside a virtual machine running anything but MacOS.

Linux benefits long term from the fragmentation that hurts it in the short-term. Competing projects means it is harder for software to go too far down the wrong road. Go to far and somebody emerges to replace you. And popular ideas emerge that others can copy from.

With macOS, you really have no choice to use what Apple offers. You can hope they listen to dissent but they may not depending on priorities. And things have to be bad enough to jump platforms before real dissent registers. And things have to get pretty bad for that.

Same issue with Windows of course.

With GNOME, KDE, COSMIC, and the Linux rat pack, it is easy to switch experiences without ditching Linux entirely. And somebody has probably even patched your DE of choice to address the papercuts you do not like.

> but the problem is, they were better in the past.

So true. I run into so many little and annoying bugs I sometimes wonder if Apple Execs actually use their own devices.

I've been using Apple since IIe in the 80s and all of the UI iterations. People make iOSification comments about macOS, and there have definitely been annoyances as they are seemingly trying to unify the UX. Maybe it'll make sense when they have touch controllable macOS systems, but making things that work well for fingertips and assuming they will work equally as well operating by a mouse is just bad.

As for Linux, I don't think I've ever used a system with UI for any serious amount of time. >99.999% of my usage is on headless systems through a terminal. As god intended.

> That's true, but the problem is, they were better in the past.

You just have to look at their directors managing those software directions and you will exactly why it's become the mess that it is today.

A Snow Leopard move, at least for iOS, is what's on deck:

https://www.macrumors.com/2026/03/15/ios-27-will-reportedly-...

This hits hard.

They were so much better. And have slid slowly into complacency, if not worse.

True, it's better than most for sure and I agree it used to be better. Though a lot of other software for windows and linux are really not that great so the bar is probably on the lower end.

I use both Linux and Macos, and I'd like to get rid of xcode or have something like Nautilus.

There are many, many things that are completely normal in Linux that are super clunky in MacOS at best.

But at least try to match Nautilus or Thunar ffs.

They were also worse in the past at times. Lion was a shit show. Worst OS X release. And does no one remember the 90s?

We need thinner phones. We need 19 cameras. The future is clear.

I agree with everything you just said. That’s exactly my take on it.

I'm a decade long Safari user. What's your grievance with Safari and what do you find better?

> You can't have separate scroll directions for your trackpad and your external mouse.

The worst. There are even separate toggles in Settings for mouse and trackpad scrolling direction, but changing one changes the other. It is truly amazing that this has persisted for 15 years.

Since Catalina (maybe since Yosemite), apple has gone down the path of iOSification of its destkop operating system; dumbing it down and trying to own all use cases. Any professional desktop users have long since been chased away, and whatever professionals apple cannot shake: video and music production, have been so shoehorned in to a stupid naïve vision of what their work should look like, it borders on a joke.

No serious computer user can use a Mac anymore, and this is an unfortunate departure from Steve Jobs' Mac where he expended great effort to ensure the Mac remained a serious desktop OS.

The most egregious example of this stupidity is the dumbing down of the Disk Utility app - an app rarely if ever used by normies, and so dumbed down the pros don't want to use it either. Really leaves you scratching your head what the decisionmaking process there was.

Where Steve Jobs' would draw lines in the sand and ask developers and users not to cross it, chairman cook put NATO wire and basically forced users to do as told (safari extensions got nuked, app store apps don't load older versions of software and there's some weird exclusivity agreement, HFS+ support got dropped and apple refused updates to machines that didn't follow, etc. etc. etc. etc.)

The settings app being hot garbage is apple trying to unify their toy phone OS with the desktop OS.

Safari nuked 3rd party extensions so everything has to go through apple's extensions "store".

Apple treated its core base, the ones who saved Apple from collapse in the 90s, like expendable slave. Worse actually; apple actively chased them away like lepers.

This has led to a systemic core rot in apple's software and ecosystem, one that will take years to rectify.... if apple even chooses to do so.

> * You can't have separate scroll directions for your trackpad and your external mouse.

Scroll Reverser

- Let’s hope they don’t change the way macOS manage windows. All the additions they made to accommodate Windows users are useless. - I don’t have any issue on searching macos settings. Could you provide an example? - safari is a great browser, i use it as main browser since years and i’d never go back I think you could keep going saying things that are not true.

Add sharing a contact to your current message in iMessage to that list.

for hardware you tried, was it all apple?

My latest Mac OSX wtf was sometimes the terminal window shrinks by 1 or 2 columns every time I wake the computer up from sleep, but only when connected via thunderbolt USB C hub to external monitor. Terrifying to imagine how that must be. By contrast, Linux/BSD desktops don't generally seem to pull this kind of weird mindfuck horror movie shit? Like it either works or it's completely, obviously, totally broken. Not some weird subtle in-between thing.

[dead]

100% agree. As someone who used both Mac and PC for 30+ years, and still use both, Mac OS (and iOS) aren't very intuitive. Lots of hidden functions. The way they organize settings is tough to find. It's always a struggle.

Apple hardware is incredible but the OS software & increasingly the design is mid at best.

My experience is similar. Great hardware. Software is good until there is something I want to do that isn't very obvious, then it's either a hassle or not possible.

My favourite example being looking for the volume mixer, and after looking online the top advice seemed to be to pay for a 3rd party application for that... Wtf?

XCode is one of the worst pieces of software in history. Imagine writing a code editor that couldn’t keep its syntax highlighting from crashing for multiple years.

You must be a fetus. Apple was leagues ahead of everyone else with the inception of the Mac all the way through Windows 7...

Microsoft finally caught up around that time, but has since added a whole new dimension of enshittification that the only conclusion that can be reached about tech as a whole is that it all sucks and will always suck.

It's not great, ofc. But I find myself less disgusted by it.

Here here

> 20+ years ago, software was so horrible that we were just tolerating it,

Absolutely not, especially not on an Apple thread.

By example, the iPod released in 2001. Anyone who used those early knows the user experience was competitive with the current experience. In 2006, I was using the version of iTunes then which was probably objectively the best desktop music app ever created. There are features then that were just there, that were pioneered, or now absent, like an automatically sorted "least listened to" playlist that are now nearly impossible to find. Sync alone is still an headache the OS community just does on the side, and no one is even bothering to compete on it anymore.

I was using (and writing) software as long as 35+ years ago and I disagree with your assessment that we were “just tolerating it” 20 years ago. 20 years ago, I was using Mac OS X Tiger on a new Intel-based MacBook Pro and it ran like a dream, and had software which mostly followed Apple’s human interface guidelines. Now I run macOS Tahoe and curse under my breath at the lack of design consistency and the iPad-ification of the interface. I’m also shown ads, and in some cases ads that can’t be dismissed or disabled, for things like iCloud and Apple Music.

When it comes to the software, I’d take the Tiger experience over the Tahoe one hands-down.

you mean `bugs i have as developer` or bugs reported by users of your xplat app?

Huh, Windows?

not only Safari, several other apps such as Music (which also has several annoying quirks) never understood why they did not get their own lifecycle if they have dedicated teams for each of those apps

So exactly why is that a big deal when unlike Android - they actually keep their phones updated?

Google is worse. Most of their apps are cloud only with no E2EE. Also, they are much more user hostile when deciding what goes in the store (they make money off spying, but apple makes money off hw, so this makes sense).

Both those ecosystems are rapidly enshittifying (apple cannot even reliably process keystrokes with subsecond latency, and google is banning sideloading).

We need a third, actually user-serving and open alternative. Maybe the new CEO will slow or reverse the bleeding on the iOS / MacOS side.

The huge strike-out they made with the Vision Pro still blows my mind. I'm in the camp of people who would have possibly shifted my entire working setup to that thing if they'd made just a few less dumb choices with it, and it might have been worth it even at the high price. I still occasionally waste my time checking out the latest to see if they've made any headway towards making it useful, because I'm still recovering from the shock that they haven't. The only way I can see the current state making any sense is if they just wanted to squeeze as much field usage data as possible from early adopters of an overpriced prototype, but that seems so far outside of how Apple normally positions its products that it's hard to believe.

I much prefer the defect where the root password was the empty string [1].

https://security.it.miami.edu/stay-safe/sec-articles/macosx-...

[1] Actually, the defect was that creating a root account was a unprivileged action, so anybody could create a root account on your machine with a password of their choice. The most obvious presentation is that you could login to root by pressing enter twice with the empty password; the first time creating root with the empty password and the second time logging you in.

12 year old coding bug

https://www.imperialviolet.org/2014/02/22/applebug.html

Dare we not look to Android.

goto fail was relevant in 2014 - perhaps not the most useful point in 2026.

Most of the main apps on Apple TV shouldn't require a password anymore; you log in on your phone to authorize. The next Apple TV should simplify this further...

Performance wise, they often seem solid.

Usability wise (UI/UX/design), they are in the gutter.

Google has one of the worst commercial UX of any products I've ever used.

For servers, yes, but use Safari for like 5 minutes versus Chrome and it’s clear the reverse is true for desktops, especially if you’re not running with 32+GB of RAM. Google Drive, Photos, etc. are not as good as Chrome.

This is not to say that Apple’s desktop software is great, only that the bar is a lot lower than it had to be when people had to be convinced to buy licenses.

It's uneven in my experience. OS-wise (Android, ChromeOS), I've had some big and frustrating problems. On the other hand, I really like some of their web apps (Drive, Docs).

Only if you put aside the fact that Google makes its money from selling your attention.

Google software is trash

Ah yes, the company that still can't their gesture and backswipe UX functioning properly 7 years after its introduction, and with Apple giving them 2 years to study it beforehand.

A decade to produce a non-functioning gesture bar / system. Such a titan among titans.

> Google is much better at software than Apple...most in the Valley would agree with this.

Perhaps. Assuming it actually keeps existing:

* https://killedbygoogle.com

Their IMAP is okay, I guess.

God, I miss Android so much. iOS still annoys me. The app situation is sadly better on iOS, though.

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what is most non trivial way example?

So, they’re just like every other software outfit.

and people wonder why they have random regressions in updates. this is it. unit tests and other types of tests are a cornerstone of software stability and does the bulk of the job of preventing regressions

Presumably in terms of a conventional colloquial sense that's an amalgam of those among other things.

Not necessarily UI / UX - the entire preferences -> settings change remains the best example. The rest seems pretty good.

It has one feature I wish everyone else would copy: Miller columns. But even after NeXT used them 35+ years ago, they have remarkably little penetration into other OSes.

I use Pathfinder on MacOS, and it's generally a lot better than finder, but there are features I wish would carry over from other OSes. Windows file check boxes are incredibly useful

I kinda agree with this. But that doesn't affect my statemente.

what is better?

I don't agree with the whining about liquid glass. Sure, it isn't the design you like. But usability really isn't that different.

I agree. MacOS became completely unusable with Liquid Glass, it totally feels like one of those amateur custom themes for Linux.

I hope the new leadership will bring back better software. As of now, macOS 26 is disgusting.