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Comment by boxed

1 day ago

Honestly I don't think lack of new ideas is the problem, it's the bad execution/design of their existing products. Like look at Time Machine on macOS. The basic idea (backups) is almost not an idea at all, but the first implementation was amazing for its time, and the current implementation is a total mess and basically unusable. The idea is not the issue.

Or look at Spotlight. Same deal really, the idea is trivial but they've let it languish and slowly rot. With macOS 27 they've gone back and rebuilt it. That's what we want to see. Go back to the basics and make it work great not just work mostly.

Good examples.

When I switched to Mac in ~2020, the Mac users I knew all told me to avoid Time Machine – at least two had issues where they needed their backups, only to find that the entirety of their backups had been silently corrupted. (I used Arq then based on online recommendations, now I use Vorta on my Mac just because that’s what I use on Linux.)

Spotlight was near-unusable when I switched as well. Often 5+ sec delays from pressing Cmd-Space to the thing actually popping up, and it would sometimes reorder entries right before I clicked Enter, causing me to open the wrong thing. Alfred uses the same Spotlight index AFAIK, but lightning fast.

Those are both things that I agree should… Just work.