Apple please do better...

[avkills]

So I just upgraded my 2019 Mac Pro to Sequoia 15.7.7, and after several restarts the computer just shut down and the power button would not power it back up. Maybe I was not patient enough, who knows, but when the power light is off and nothing seems to happening, one generally thinks the computer has shutdown.

So I unplugged the power from the machine and waited a few seconds and plugged back in and it finally started -- and of course complained about a kernel crash and not being shutdown correctly, etc etc etc. Thank god it actually did the whole update.

For god sakes Apple, this was your flagship god damn professional computer that cost a mint to purchase. Yeah yeah I know everything is about Apple Silicon these days; but when you can't even have a basic OS upgrade happen smoothly, and all we hear is about stupid AI **** like Genmoji's and whatever other AI slop crap you are going to add to the OS, one has to wonder what in the hell is going on.

Please Apple, focus on getting the basic OS functions working 100%; once you do that then you can start working on fluff.

Computing sucks ass these days in my opinion. On the one had you have Microsoft upgrading your OS whether you want it to or not, and Apple who can't seem to get just the "basic" functions of the OS to work 100%. I would jump to Linux but then there is not really professional support and very little of what I need software wise runs on it.

 

[bogdanw]

On the one had you have Microsoft upgrading your OS whether you want it to or not,

Even Microsoft understood the years of complains.
“Microsoft will allow users to indefinitely pause updates in Windows 11 — first change in over a decade to the mandatory update policy”
https://www.tomshardware.com/softwa...-over-a-decade-to-the-mandatory-update-policy
“When 35 days just isn’t long enough, we are also enabling you to extend the pause end date as many times as you need.”
https://blogs.windows.com/windows-i...r-windows-update-experience-just-got-updated/

Apple is now turning on autoupdates behind users’ backs.

 

[avkills]

Yes it is very troubling. They have to know that a small subset of people run the risk of some very real down time due to minor changes that could drastically effect whatever it is that they are doing. And the worst part is Microsoft and Apple do not care anymore. Apple used to care, but not now. Microsoft is in a tough spot because they pretty much have to enable back compatibility. I don't mind things changing, but I do mind being forced into it.

 

[TheIntruder]

I was running Mojave as primary boot in a dual boot situation for a long time, but the realities of trying to use an older browser on the modern web were beginning to manifest themselves, despite Mozilla continually extending the lifeline of the older branch of Firefox ESR, and delaying its demise.

Sequoia performs well, but certain parts of it, like Mail, are hot garbage if not used in the way that Apple programmers assume. Mail.app has always been mediocre, if acceptably functional, but has only gone downhill from there.

I still prefer separate windows, instead of the three-pane setup, and Sequoia mail will not remember message window positions, nor the column widths in the older style message listings if you dare to toy with column settings between multiple accounts.

Today, I discovered a bug anew -- if the spell check setting is "when I send," it can prevent messages from being sent, because the dialog that is supposed to pop up to signal and errors doesn't, and the process just stops and sits there, with no explanation, despite all servers being connected and functional.

That also touches upon the different settings that exist in apps, and system wide pertaining to spell checking and predictive text, leading to the classic Windows-like hunt for the relevant preferences in different parts of the OS and apps.

Another brilliant idea that I assume probably isn't fixed in Tahoe either, are the page number labels on the thumbnails in the system print dialog, which serve to obscure the view of the bottom of the page, where it just might be useful to determine which page breaks occur in the content, and assist in tweaking the scaling so superfluous extra pages can be eliminated. That's a plain cosmetics over usability tradeoff, but no surprise when Liquid Glass is full of them, you know that as a user, you're cooked.

And here we are decades later, and FTFF is still a valid cry, especially with respect to window handing in Mac OS, or lack thereof. People like to joke about the need to rebuild the Desktop on Classic OS, but the .DS_store files that OS X seemingly liked, and still likes, to ignore at its convenience, is a grain of sand that has never developed into a pearl, and has remained a chronic annoyance.

My first OS was DOS 3.3, with a CLI, so I've seen the gamut of Apple's UX. My confidence in Apple's software quality is in a valley at the moment, one that I don't see it climbing out of in the near future.

Thanks, I feel better now…

 

[blufrog]

I'm not a fan of the new UI in Tahoe at all. It is a huge chunk of wasted screen real-estate. They seem to be reeling it in a bit but the first release especially was awful. It is still bad, and a major pet-peeve. I don't have a large very high resolution screen just so someone in an art department can waste it looking pretty. My computer is primarily for work, and I'm an engineer not a graphic designer, so more than happy with square edges and 2 px gaps between elements.

Apple, along with every other OS developer out there, seems to have forgotten that an operating system is supposed to run the hardware and host a user interface. Sure, include key admin interfaces and some basic utils, but if you want to do anything else, well, that is the job of application developers.

AI? It should be absolutely completely optional. I don't want that crap on my systems. I hope they learn from Microsoft that "AI everywhere" is NOT what we want or need, and should come with an absolute way to disable it completely, and make any AI-specific files optional for download.

When I bought my Mini half the reason I opted for 48 GB RAM and not 32 GB was simply because I knew the OS was going to burn some memory on loading AI garbage that I couldn't get rid of. Ironic that a year after purchase, there is a memory shortage.

The biggest bug I have encountered so far is in SMB file sharing. It remains to be seen if there is a .8 patch for Sequoia, and whether it addresses this problem. What is the use of having a specific "Share Only" user type, when it doesn't bloody work?! I even tried adding it to SMB via the terminal, but that didn't work, either. I consider this a major bug.

I found a less annoying bug with sudo - you are supposed to be able to sudo -u <a different user> than the one you are logged in as, but this doesn't work. I had to login then sudo as that user instead.

All the above ignores the significant memory leaks, and whatever process caused macOS to write 56 TB of data to my disk in the year I was only using built-in apps (I took far too long getting external storage and backup sorted out). I'm now using it as my main machine, finally.

 

[SDAVE]

So I just upgraded my 2019 Mac Pro to Sequoia 15.7.7, and after several restarts the computer just shut down and the power button would not power it back up. Maybe I was not patient enough, who knows, but when the power light is off and nothing seems to happening, one generally thinks the computer has shutdown.

So I unplugged the power from the machine and waited a few seconds and plugged back in and it finally started -- and of course complained about a kernel crash and not being shutdown correctly, etc etc etc. Thank god it actually did the whole update.

For god sakes Apple, this was your flagship god damn professional computer that cost a mint to purchase. Yeah yeah I know everything is about Apple Silicon these days; but when you can't even have a basic OS upgrade happen smoothly, and all we hear is about stupid AI **** like Genmoji's and whatever other AI slop crap you are going to add to the OS, one has to wonder what in the hell is going on.

Please Apple, focus on getting the basic OS functions working 100%; once you do that then you can start working on fluff.

Computing sucks ass these days in my opinion. On the one had you have Microsoft upgrading your OS whether you want it to or not, and Apple who can't seem to get just the "basic" functions of the OS to work 100%. I would jump to Linux but then there is not really professional support and very little of what I need software wise runs on it.

This also happened to me. Clearly they don't care about dead Intels 😉