Comment by ndisn
17 hours ago
On an unrelated note, I use Time Machine and I’m surprised at how unpolished, not to say downright buggy, all the animations are. They used to look magical, but now they are a mess of elements popping on and off and things moving and then vanishing the next frame and so on. It looks like they kept changing Finder and Time Machine didn’t keep up; they kept fixing the bare minimum to have it compile and nothing more.
Even the new app launcher. It takes 1-2 seconds to draw a bunch of icons. Scrolling is also choppy. This even happens on their newest machines. How this possible in 2026?
Apple hardware team looking at Apple software team: You guys, everything OK over there?
I just did the work of the software team for them:
I got Samba 4 working on Apple Time Capsules: https://github.com/jamesyc/TimeCapsuleSMB
If you have a legacy Time Capsule you'd rather not e-waste, you can try this out. Note that this is very much beta quality software, so don't expect it to work on all configurations.
We put a supercomputer in a laptop just so the OS could struggle to draw a grid of icons. Peak modern engineering.
My app launcher loads as soon as it's triggered (4 fingers swiped in). There is a weird 5ms glitch on the zoom in animation, but otherwise it loads in within a few ms, and scrolling is smooth. I'm on a M2 MBA macOS 26.3.1
Edit, but don't take this as me saying I like the current state of macOS. There are plenty of weird edge cases I wish they'd fix, but on the whole the OS works fine for me.
For me the launcher itself loads fast, but it takes 1-2 seconds to show the icons. And when I scroll down it often times does not draw the icons fast enough.
My app launcher loads fine as well, but sometimes (a few times a week) it just doesn't find any apps at all. Or only some of them.
It isn't even centered on my monitor, looks like an intern wrote it.
>How this possible in 2026?
Enshittification. When you're an ecosystem monopoly, people are forced to buy your shit no matter how bad it gets.
Macs are nowhere near a monopoly.
I would (grudgingly) accept this argument for iOS, but for Mac OS it doesn't make any sense.
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The Mac isn’t a monopoly, but choices for desktop operating systems are indeed limited. I use macOS, Windows, and Linux on a regular basis. The only one that’s improving is the Linux ecosystem. I prefer macOS to Windows, but macOS is not as polished in 2026 as it was in 2016 or especially in the Snow Leopard era.
Apple used to solve this through the ruthless application of good taste; we hope this returns with the new CEO
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Even ignoring the lack of polish, the animations make it very hard to actually use Time Machine.
A couple of revisions in Time Machine was just fine.
The UI was cute and fun if you wanted an older revision of a single file (especially since you could see previews of the file as you warped backwards).
However, importantly, the snapshots were available in Finder itself so you could browse through the files you wanted and retrieve them.
The worst feature of Time Machine is how it takes over every single display you have. Even though it only shows content on one screen, it feels the need to completely black out the others.
I don’t know what kind of time machines you’ve been using, but typically everything changes outside all the portholes when you time travel.
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Classic Apple engineering. I would there is technically a "single responsible individual" assigned to Time Machine, but it covers the whole product, so the UI component falls by the wayside as the work on other products or the low level portion.
The "quality" Apple delivers is by now a complete joke. It's going south since over a decade, and this never stopped.
It's like that because people are still buying. Even for the ridiculous prices Apple asks for.
So why would Apple actually care? They get away with this "quality", so from a business standpoint there is simply nothing that needs investments or even just attention.
It's a race to the bottom. Like everywhere else. That's simply how the system which people created works.
I stopped using it because the interface was wretched and it didn't need to be cutesy. Rsync found it's way back into the tool belt.
i wonder if support for DIY backup tools isn't prioritized when a future iCloud monthly subscription will be pushed eventually.
future iCloud monthly subscription?
I've been paying for iCloud storage since I don't know when.
Other issues with Time Machine:
- Very slow, even on an M4.
- 3rd party devices are often unreliable. Not directly Apple's fault, but the lack of certification process hurts
- SMB extensions: In order for an SMB server to support Time Machine, it must support Apple's AAPL extensions to SMB (my understand of this my be a bit uncorrect)
- Network device connecting is separate from Time Machine device connecting. This causes an inconsistent UX.
- Not possible to browse a backup. You can only view file or folder's backup over time. In other words, you can scroll through time but you can't browse a single backup (point in time). This requires using 3rd party tools like BackupLoupe
You can't turn it on without an external drive attached, even though it saves local backups. It works if you mount a disk image and then point TM to it with the CLI.
On an unrelated note
If you know it's unrelated, why try to derail this discussion? Why not start another? What's the point?
Could it be that you only posted this in an active thread so it would get the most eyeballs, instead of being judged on its own merits?
It’s more tangential than unrelated. It’s how conversation naturally flows, and this is a discussion board. No need to fire up a new post.
On another tangential note: you’re insufferable. If you’re like this in the real world, I can’t imagine you’ve got many people wanting to hold a conversation for very long.
> Could it be that you only posted this in an active thread so it would get the most eyeballs
How is this a criticism? Seems smart to me.
Makes sense since it hasn't been supported since 2018 lol
Are you thinking of Time Capsule? Time Machine is fully supported and I use it every day on Tahoe.
Yep, I misread.