Comment by hei-lima

Similar experience here, started with the same G4 ("white") iBook. That was an amazing machine. Under the hood it was hard to distinguish many differences with Linux/BSD of the time. The UI on top (OSX Tiger) was peerless -- I recall being very excited for the introduction of Spotlight. I'd say the decline came around 2012-2013 or so. Hardware was still great, but they were no longer updating the GNU stuff and anti-features like SIP made it harder and harder to run the applications I want (gdb for example). I gave up not long after they introduced the touchbar

These days I'm happier (or at least content) without a Mac. My FW13+Linux setup may not be as nice as the latest macbook, but it does exactly what I want and if it doesn't, I have options.

The whole experience you're having with the rain dance is because the cloud does just work. It's a vanishing a tiny percentage of people that don't use it.

> 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.

You can turn down the animation times for most of this with "defaults write" commands. Set them to 0 or as small as you want. Here's a good list to get started:

https://gist.github.com/j8/8ef9b6e39449cbe2069a

> I don't need an interface which throbs, wiggles, jiggles, shines, and refracts, I need an interface that's snappy and fast.

System Settings -> Accessibility -> Reduce Motion: Enabled System Settings -> Accessibility -> Display -> Reduce Transparency: Enabled

What saddens me is that a decade and a half ago, Apple led that charge with a reliable and unblockable UI thread on the iPhone.

Now that said iPhone is a thousand times faster, just invoking the keyboard can cause a serious delay with stutters.

I think a big part of this in recent years is SwiftUI just not being fully-cooked and Apple trying to shove it into a bunch of areas without enough attention to performance. Not sure how it is on iOS, but for example, the Settings app feels chuuuunky if you navigate through the panes with up and down arrow keys. I wasn't able to make a selectable list view that worked consistently and didn't feel like a regression compared to an equivalent AppKit view

It's odd to see this comment, since I've always had the opposite experience (at least when comparing Windows and MacOS -- I haven't used desktop linux much in the past 20 years). On MacOS, when I click something, something happens, or at the very least starts to happen (and I get some visual indication). While in Windows I often click on something and get no indication that something happened or started happening, so I click again, and then suddenly perform the action twice. This most often happens when opening programs, but it happens in other places too sometimes.

I find using non-Apple pointing device to have drastically improved the latency.

I plug a Mac into a 120hz monitor with a high refresh rate mouse and it is gloriously snappy, snappier than any Windows PC I’ve ever used.

Package management, too. I recently got a MacBook for work, but it’s sitting on my desk and I’m continuing to use my Lenovo. Managing software updates is much better on Linux. As is managing windows (via Niri in my case). macOS really feels like a downgrade.

This is the biggest thing that irks me after coming from windows. Everything feels so sluggish. I wonder why the internet ist full of people complaining about that. I guess they just dont work fast enough to be bothered by that?

Yes, I hate how slow it is to swipe between desktop workspaces, for example.

>The thing where Linux (and Android, and Windows at least circa 2023) blows Apple out of the water is in UI latency.

I wouldn't expect that of Android because it's Java and Kotlin parts run in a VM and there's a garbage collector pausing the execution at times.

A major reason Snow Leopard was well received was because of how performant it felt along with the bug fixes. What isn't mentioned anywhere near as much is that it dropped a lot of hardware (PPC). The last G4 Powerbook got about 1.5y of OS support before it was dropped.

iOS 26 is slated to drop a bunch of iPhone models. macOS is dropping all all macs with Intel CPUs.

A Snow Leopard release isn't great news for a lot of people.

Great... yet more attention on iOS

I miss Steve :((

I use macos for dev. Not even install xcode tools, neither most apps via apple store.

not the op but for me safari has been deteriorating for years:

1. ios performance in scrolling and loading (especially on my ipad pro m2) is unbearably slow, just stutters everywhere when loading a page in the background

2. tap-and-hold to open a link menu is so strange; sometimes it highlights text instead of showing the menu, sometimes it works ok, there is some kind of strange ui timing issue at work

3. on ipad and ios the tab overview display scrolling is absolutely appalling like 4fps level slow... completely unbearable to scroll through tab previews

4. developer tools are abysmal compared to chrome

5. on desktop performance is also extremely slow compared to chrome, its night and day

6. battery usage is so bad on ipad, just leaving some tabs open they run down the battery and chug memory (i know this is more a web thing, but they should at least freeze tabs in the background or make it an option)

7. just strange bugs on ipad, when tapping a text field the keyboard pops up, then suddenly disappears and the pops up again... just a terrible app

etc etc lots of paper cuts, but the performance issues are the biggest for me... i like the tab groups + auto save and icloud sync and built-in spellcheck, but its getting harder and harder to resist the alternatives

Apple nuked all 3rd party extensions unless they go through their bureaucracy.

Code-signing to force updates should be illegal (including iOS versions)

I have many MANY grievances with Safari:

1. Mandating all browsers on iOS/iPadOS to be powered by Safari (excluding in the EU). This doesn't sound bad, but wait until #3 below...

2. Safari's many bugs. Too many bugs. Oh so many bugs. Damn that's a lot of bugs.

- See: https://webventures.rejh.nl/blog/2024/history-of-safari-show...

- Also see the State of CSS developer survey where Safari makes up such a large portion of pain reports that "Safari" is its own category: https://2025.stateofcss.com/en-US/usage/#css_general_pain_po...

- And again in the State of JS developer survey: https://2025.stateofjs.com/en-US/features/#browser_apis_pain...

3. Grievance 1 and 2 compound together. Whenever Safari (or a Safari update) breaks a feature, you cannot inform a user that they can use another browser as a work around (because all browser engines are forced to use Webkit on iOS/iPadOS)

4. Bad dev tools. This has been seeing much needed improvements (e.g. being able to type an entire word in the css pane instead of a new character on each line), but it still feels 7 years behind.

5. No way to report bugs. There is a "bug reporter" at bugs.webkit.org, however each bug is auto-tagged with a link to an internal bug tracker within Apple. This means that those who are trying to fix bugs and those are trying to report bugs have a wall between them. There is no way to have a discussion to try to narrow down what the bug is, why the bug happens in one case but not another, what's really the cause of the issue, or why the bug matters more than whoever is assigned it might realise. When reporting a bug to Apple, it's more useful to talk to an actual wall because it might fall on you giving you an actual response.

6. Performing incorrectly is more important than getting the performing correctly. This one takes some explanation, but it's a little tricky. I'll give three examples then show how they're all the same issue:

Example 1: The cool homepage.

I was working on a website. Two months before launch I decided to spend a month of time juicing up the homepage, then one more month on polish.

On the homepage I decided to use the brand's pre-existing graphics and turning them into a parallax animation (inspired by: https://www.firewatchgame.com/)

It had:

- Regular content on the page

- Parallax layers with simple vector graphics inside them so that when the user scrolled down the page, the user saw a parallax animation of the landscape changing. (e.g. far clouds, far mountains, close clouds, close mountains, hill, foreground, simple bubble particles closer than the regular content on the sides to strengthen the depth of field illusion, etc...)

- Other vector graphics following a motion path animation

- This was done in 2017, so before CSS got scroll driven animation support, or motion-path support. It was also done without JS.

- Everything worked brilliantly, until we discovered that one particular iPhone model rendered an empty blank white page.

- I lost the last month trying pulling the effect apart trying to diagnose the bug (and with Safari's buggy dev tools being no help I had to do it in the dark). I was able to determine when the bug would trigger, and had to tear down my whole homepage and rebuild it with 2 fewer parallax layers before launch and 3 days of polish for the rest of the website before launch.

(you can see the final result at https://myobrace.com, but I really would have liked the extra time for polish, if you're wondering how I achieved the effects without JS and/or scroll-driven animations, I used css's perspective and transform rules to position the elements back in the z-axis then scaled them up so they appeared the correct size with the regular page content so as the page scrolled, the elements further back appeared to scroll at a different speed. I then used SMIL for the motion paths in the SVG elements).

Example 2. The texture

I wanted to add a repeating texture to buttons so they didn't feel so flat without needing a separate network request to download an image.

I tried generating one with SVG but the SVG 1.1 filter effects implementations aren't all hardware accelerated.

I tried generating one with CSS which worked everywhere but Safari.

You can see a texture here where the texture is generated entirely within CSS, and it doesn't work in Safari (but I didn't hide the seams because the result looks like a cool mosaic and I wanted to share the technique): https://codepen.io/spartanatreyu/pen/Yzbmvbr

(if you're curious about the actual texture I used, I hand drew a minimal noise texture in photoshop that could be repeated without showing seams, then base64 encoded it and inlined it within the CSS file so it could be loaded without needing an extra network request. You can see my development version here: https://codepen.io/spartanatreyu/pen/YzoexGg?editors=1100 (the final version is locked behind a login wall in a child-friendly education webapp))

Example 3. Asset downloading

I made a webapp for kiosk machines that downloads 100mb+ of video assets when logging in for the first time. iPads have a kiosk mode so I supported iPadOS' Safari mode so that the iPads could be used in commercial settings as kiosk machines.

When the final assets were added, the iPad machines would randomly crash during the asset downloading process.

With Safari's completely broken debugging experience, I eventually learned that as Safari downloads a video, as soon as it tries to put that downloaded data somewhere, it has to copy it across to the new place it's being stored, and if you're copying more than 3mb, it crashes the browser.

The fix was to download and store each video in 1mb chunks. This slowed down the installation speed by a bit over 300%, but at least Safari didn't crash any more.

---

Now back to: "Performing incorrectly is more important than getting the performing correctly."

It turns out Safari on iOS/iPadOS has an invisible time/performance budget. Anytime Safari hits that budget, the browser stops what its doing.

- Drawing texture to screen? How about we stop drawing all textures to the screen, including text. Websites don't need to draw any text right?

- Rendering a texture in CSS? How about you have the color white covering everything else instead.

- Downloading a video that's more than 3mb? How about I crash the browser when the download completes.

Compare this to Firefox and Chrome, as they run out of their budget, they stop starting new work so they old work can finish before starting their next task. The page may take a few milliseconds longer to get to the correct result on slower devices, but the result IS correct.

Even worse:

- Safari has no way of informing the code how close it is to the budget.

- The budget can only be found by trial and error.

- If the iOS/iPadOS device has other apps in the background, the budget is smaller.

- Each device has a different budget, so you have to penalize all Safari devices to the smallest supported budget of the oldest supported device.

- If you hit the budget on the most basic functionality (e.g. a homepage, a button, downloading required assets), then your website / webapp may as well not exist to those Apple users.

The alt tab implementation on macos is awful.

There are so many basic gaps in functionality and so many underbaked & poorly designed Mac OS features that I end up papering over with paid 3rd party applications.

Amarok was way better than iTunes in that era. Massively better UI, separation of playback queue from collection browsing, plugin ecosystem, better metadata fetching including lyrics support... And its dynamic playlists were way more capable too.

I had an iPod in those days and Apple's firmware updates that periodically broke third-party sync (while bringing no improvements) is the reason that to this day I've never bought Apple hardware for myself from Apple since that time. Used hardware only.

Every time I had to use iTunes was regrettable. The app was an insanely massive download for the time. It tried to install fucking Safari on Windows for no reason. The UI was somehow simultaneously a sprawling mess and feature-deprived.

Maybe there was a brief period where iTunes was genuinely an interesting app, but even by the mid-aughts, it had been totally surpassed by a number of open-source music players.

But Amarok at that time was only available on Linux. I assume most iTunes fans of the time never got to try it.

I used 20+ years ago as a guideline, not an absolute. Of course the intel MBP came out in 2006 (or 2007?) and was an absolute dream setup where hardware caught up with Windows while the software was pretty good as well (I was using a Mac since 2004 or so).

I don't think software is improving today, which is why I have to be nagged to upgrade. I don't think it worse, but my computer usage probably varies greatly from yours.

Same here. Two decades ago, I was excited to install updates to commercial software I used because they fixed bugs and brought useful new features. These days I fear updates because they introduce new bugs, remove features I care about, and come with new anti-features that I actively do not want.

The macOS Tahoe release is a great example of this. I can't think of a single thing I prefer about it and could easily name ten things I hate about it.

Bugs in the OS I encounter as a developer.

Yes. I generally don't have to deal with the mess Microsoft has put on top of their bloated but solid kernel / base OS.

If you're interested, it's to reduce cost. It's incredibly expensive to build something like Music or Maps. If each version is tied to an OS version, it keeps you from having to explode your testing and fixing cycle over time.

It's a deal when they stop updating. It is true they provide OS updates for longer than most, but many people use devices, especially ipads for way longer than the OS supported period. And those people are stuck on an old unsupported browser without being able to update or install a 3rd party one.

Unlike Android indeed, when you maintain a perfectly working phone that happens (by accident or force of nature) to live longer than the official lifetime some executives in a remote office had decided to grant it, the web browser cannot be updated any more. Just the single most security sensitive piece of software of any computer. Who would have guessed people were going to complain!

Google has so far allowed installing apps without their explicit permission. So it's much higher on freedom index, imo. And there's no obligation to use Google cloud apps. There's alternative for every Google cloud app.

> 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

That describes me too. I even did for a while. But it just made the incomprehensible lack of any software ambition more painful.

The software is the only reason the Vision isn't worth the price. A real Pro OS, paired with an Studio M5-Ultra, or with its own M5-Ultra, would be an amazing work environment.

(The only hardware they would need to upgrade for the latter, i.e. its own Ultra, would be making live-battery swapping convenient. Which they should have already done.)

Never understood that if statement style, it seems to only exist to create subtle bugs.

iOS (and MacOS) now use Google’s BoringSSL instead and have for many years

Android has a far better OTA update system than iOS. The notification system is much better and the default keyboard is better too. It supports multiple user profiles that you can switch between instantly, with their own separate apps and settings and home screens, a long requested feature for iPads that is inexplicably still absent on iOS.

Windows has a better desktop compositor and window manager than macOS. It supports Nvidia GPUs with CUDA. It also has WSL so you can use real package managers instead of homebrew.

"winget configure" is pretty great in Windows - you can store your personal .config file on GitHub and use it whenever you set up a new PC to install everything you want, uninstall all the cruft you don't want, and set all the Windows config you want via registry keys.

This!

If you are reading Hackers News for the most part, you are out of touch with the normal computer users and that was said over and over again with the introduction of the Mac Neo which appears to be a hit among normal everyday computer users who have never heard of Hackers News, a family member recently just bought one of the new Mac M5 PowerBook's and I expected some cry for help setting it up. Guess what there was none.

In the answer to your question, there is nothing better overall across hardware and software top to bottom and that applies to computers, smartphones, tablets, and watches across five ecosystems.