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Tahoe and Apple Quality or Competence

jasnw

jasnw

macrumors 65816
Original poster
I'm always asked why I'm not happy with Apple's software these days. Here's an example. I spent a couple of hours today setting up a new Mac Mini for a volunteer organization. This is my first run-in with Tahoe, and I wasn't disappointed (or maybe I was). The machine came with 26.2 installed, so I had to update it to 26.4.1.

I think many of you know what's coming next. The update status bar got to "5 Min" left and froze. After 10 minutes I killed it and did some searching. Fortunately, I found on The Eclectic Light Company (very useful site) a description of this very issue. Solution is to just wait it out. I tried again, and after 15 minutes it came to life and in another 5 minutes things were OK.

Apple is too lazy, or something, to make sure their status bars sync with what's going on. I realize that a perfect sync isn't really possible, but come on! I'm not real happy with how long updates take these days, but if the status bar reflects what's going on I can live with it.

It's the many little things like this that can be easily fixed and aren't, or should not happen in the first place, that have soured me on the Apple experience.
 
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jasnw said:
I'm always asked why I'm not happy with Apple's software these days. Here's an example. I spent a couple of hours today setting up a new Mac Mini for a volunteer organization. This is my first run-in with Tahoe, and I wasn't disappointed (or maybe I was). The machine came with 26.2 installed, so I had to update it to 26.4.1.

I think many of you know what's coming next. The update status bar got to "5 Min" left and froze. After 10 minutes I killed it and did some searching. Fortunately, I found on The Eclectic Light Company (very useful site) a description of this very issue. Solution is to just wait it out. I tried again, and after 15 minutes it came to life and in another 5 minutes things were OK.

Apple is too lazy, or something, to make sure their status bars sync with what's going on. I realize that a perfect sync isn't really possible, but come on! I'm not real happy with how long updates take these days, but if the status bar reflects what's going on I can live with it.

It's the many little things like this that can be easily fixed and aren't, or should not happen in the first place, that have soured me on the Apple experience.
Click to expand...
yes, because your singular experience speaks for everyone, and apple in general 🙄

sometimes things like this happen; you resolved it. seems like a good ending to me....
 
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jasnw said:
I'm always asked why I'm not happy with Apple's software these days. Here's an example. I spent a couple of hours today setting up a new Mac Mini for a volunteer organization. This is my first run-in with Tahoe, and I wasn't disappointed (or maybe I was). The machine came with 26.2 installed, so I had to update it to 26.4.1.

I think many of you know what's coming next. The update status bar got to "5 Min" left and froze. After 10 minutes I killed it and did some searching. Fortunately, I found on The Eclectic Light Company (very useful site) a description of this very issue. Solution is to just wait it out. I tried again, and after 15 minutes it came to life and in another 5 minutes things were OK.

Apple is too lazy, or something, to make sure their status bars sync with what's going on. I realize that a perfect sync isn't really possible, but come on! I'm not real happy with how long updates take these days, but if the status bar reflects what's going on I can live with it.

It's the many little things like this that can be easily fixed and aren't, or should not happen in the first place, that have soured me on the Apple experience.
Click to expand...
..... I'm a moderate hater of MacOS 26, but this has nothing to do with MacOS 26. Since the beginning of time computers have given inaccurate estimates. It's a dummy GUI element to keep users engaged, not a specific timeline.
 
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jasnw said:
I'm always asked why I'm not happy with Apple's software these days. Here's an example. I spent a couple of hours today setting up a new Mac Mini for a volunteer organization. This is my first run-in with Tahoe, and I wasn't disappointed (or maybe I was). The machine came with 26.2 installed, so I had to update it to 26.4.1.

I think many of you know what's coming next. The update status bar got to "5 Min" left and froze. After 10 minutes I killed it and did some searching. Fortunately, I found on The Eclectic Light Company (very useful site) a description of this very issue. Solution is to just wait it out. I tried again, and after 15 minutes it came to life and in another 5 minutes things were OK.

Apple is too lazy, or something, to make sure their status bars sync with what's going on. I realize that a perfect sync isn't really possible, but come on! I'm not real happy with how long updates take these days, but if the status bar reflects what's going on I can live with it.

It's the many little things like this that can be easily fixed and aren't, or should not happen in the first place, that have soured me on the Apple experience.
Click to expand...
Your post is just one example in a sea of inconsiderate details. Apple used to focus on core feature and user experience. Now, they build meaningless features and changes just for the sake of it.

I mean, media player on always on display on iPhones, what's with the play/fwd/backward button? why is it there when you can't interact with it directly without unlocking the phone first? Or, next time you view a video full screen on your phone with the native video player, touch the middle of the screen, you can actually pause the video with the play/pause button, which isn't there.

I used to be on Tahoe with my M4 Pro 48GB of RAM, the Mission Control UI animation sucks. I mean, the signature way of macOS to multitask and the animation is not 120fps, what's the point of ProMotion display when simple UI animations can't be done properly.
 
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MacGizmo said:
That's a rather meteoric-sized assumption I see a lot from people. I understand the frustration, but the mere idea that "because something looks simple, so it must be" is just plain foolish.
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OK, gotta respond to this. I've been writing code, for myself and for others, since the late 1960s. I have a feel for what is, or should be, easy and what's not. Much of what irritates me about Apple these days are things that I'm pretty sure are easy to fix, or should be (if the underlying design isn't bad as well). The fact that these things make it through whatever is left of QC at Apple and then take forever, if ever, to get fixed. Well, that's IRRITATING!
 
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jasnw said:
OK, gotta respond to this. I've been writing code, for myself and for others, since the late 1960s. I have a feel for what is, or should be, easy and what's not. Much of what irritates me about Apple these days are things that I'm pretty sure are easy to fix, or should be (if the underlying design isn't bad as well). The fact that these things make it through whatever is left of QC at Apple and then take forever, if ever, to get fixed. Well, that's IRRITATING!
Click to expand...
on iOS, if you rearrange tabs in safari, then quit and re-open safari, the tabs will be in their original order, then be visibly moved to their new positions. Somehow, for some reason, someone at Apple decided to store the original tab order, and then store the new order. Anyone with any sense would just store the new order. The best part about this bug is that if you're in low power mode, or somehow otherwise make the CPU busy, Safari can just skip the reordering step. Absolutely crazy for a company that used to pay so much attention to detail they remembered where each of your icons were placed, and all of your open folder locations. Funnily enough: that's borderline broken in recent macOS!
 
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fisherking said:
yes, because your singular experience speaks for everyone, and apple in general 🙄

sometimes things like this happen; you resolved it. seems like a good ending to me....
Click to expand...
There's an article about this, many people have experiences the exact same thing. The average user should not have to second guess their computer, research, and find articles explaining that Apple messed up.
 
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droplink said:
Thanks for the mention of the The Eclectic Light Company
Art and (lots of) Macs.
eclecticlight.co

The Eclectic Light Company

Macs & painting – 🦉 No AI content
eclecticlight.co eclecticlight.co

Tahoe is just broken.
Click to expand...
All of Mac and IOS installations suffer the same problems. If they display a progress meter it starts at a couple percent, stays there for a while and shoots to 99% before completing. This is a wrong use for a progress meter. If you can’t estimate time use something like a spinning gear with changing information text with what is occurring, Its even worse when it reboots a couple times and doesn’t tell you it is normal. The screen should never go blank for more than a couple of seconds. It looks like Apple puts no work into insuring a good experience for installation.
 
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I've done a progress meter. I didn't find it easy to get it right - so I gave up and got it wrong. It pretends to work, but there are too many external factors for me to figure how long each part of the work will take as a portion of the whole effort. And my progress meter was tracking a pretty simply thing as compared to an OS upgrade.

macOS has been adding more and more functionality. It's just going to have more and more bugs. It does seem that Apple misses some very obvious bugs which speaks to poor testing practices. They are really struggling with using Liquid Glass properly in their own apps. But 26.4 seems to have addressed most of my issues. Time Machine is horribly broken (I've proven this for myself). Once I gave up on TM, and since 26.4, I've been happy with most of it.

But, I certainly understand the frustration. Sometimes we just want reliability and would be happy to give up much of the fancy functionality.
 
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Labeling something "broken" is subjective. I've given that label to Time Machine. I thought of something else that I consider broken. The Contacts app is broken; it's an amazing mess of bugs.

There's something broken about mouse event handling. Whether mouse wheel scrolling or clicks work depend on whether you've assign a picture and/or a poster.

If you've assigned neither a picture or poster and scroll on the contact list you can sometimes trigger random flickering on the displayed contact.

On some contacts, clicking anywhere will trigger an edit of the contact. I haven't figured out what characteristics of a contact make that happen.

Sometimes when creating a new contact, a random existing contact will be edited instead.

It might be all one bug with various manifestations, but the app is very frustrating to use.

There's a whole thread on this nightmare of an application.
 
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svenmany said:
Labeling something "broken" is subjective. I've given that label to Time Machine. I thought of something else that I consider broken. The Contacts app is broken; it's an amazing mess of bugs.

There's something broken about mouse event handling. Whether mouse wheel scrolling or clicks work depend on whether you've assign a picture and/or a poster.

If you've assigned neither a picture or poster and scroll on the contact list you can sometimes trigger random flickering on the displayed contact.

On some contacts, clicking anywhere will trigger an edit of the contact. I haven't figured out what characteristics of a contact make that happen.

Sometimes when creating a new contact, a random existing contact will be edited instead.

It might be all one bug with various manifestations, but the app is very frustrating to use.

There's a whole thread on this nightmare of an application.
Click to expand...
When you read the macOS Tahoe Macrumors subform you start wondering:

Who is actually suffering more? Windows 11 or macOS Tahoe users?
 
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Refractor said:
When you read the macOS Tahoe Macrumors subform you start wondering:

Who is actually suffering more? Windows 11 or macOS Tahoe users?
Click to expand...

I'm in the camp of really enjoying Tahoe but also disliking some things about it. 🙂

- I really dislike no longer having room for the toolbar icons. I just stopped using them since there's almost always another way to do things.

- I really dislike no longer having room to see the full title on documents. I just eliminated most of the toolbar icons to make room to let the title expand.

- I really dislike struggling to find a spot to drag some windows. Eliminating some toolbar icons fixed that.

- I really dislike that every window has different corner rounding. I just stopped noticing it.

- I really dislike seeing all the bugs. But at the same time, they barely impact me.

One Tahoe release made the System Settings search field all messed up with text bleeding through from under it. The next release fixed it. The next release broke it again. Now it's fixed again. But, who am I kidding? Did I struggle to type in the field at all? No. How often did I type in that field? Once a week maybe and I don't even remember whether the bug was there when I did it.

Time Machine bugs were a nightmare. I stopped using Time Machine. Carbon Copy can do everything it does and more. That solved other issues that I hadn't realized were related to Time Machine.

A bunch of websites look bad in Safari because of corner rounding. I just stopped using Safari. I now see that many sites just behave better in my new browser.

And if I was a heavy user of my address book, I'd buy a different contacts application. Problem solved.

So, a few adjustments, compromises, and bar lowering and I'm quite happy with Tahoe. I've basically just stopped thinking about the things I don't like. I focus now on things I love.

But no matter how much I dislike some things, I would never move to Windows. I would have many more things to complain about if I hung out in a Windows forums.
 
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This should be posted with new users of Macbook NEO or those looking around to purchase one.
Coming from other operating systems to MacOs is a big learning curve.
If had to guess there is quite of few new people getting the NEO.
But yes MacOS is different from other Operating systems.
There was a time when i thought Apple had problems but It was me and my notions of how things worked on other systems.
Thanks for not being a cheerleaders but from practical knowledge complaints.
Looks like many of you have been around a long time now.

I am in the Camp that all operating systems have issues just like humans!
And yes I have issues with Tahoe but give them time maybe they get things fixed.
All software is BETA!

This has been a good post why because honest views being talked about not bashing too much.
 
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jasnw said:
It's the many little things like this that can be easily fixed and aren't, or should not happen in the first place, that have soured me on the Apple experience
Click to expand...
Do you know if they're actually easy? So Apple should stop fixing the critical security flaws, and bugs that impact users negatively so the eye candy looks a little better.

I get that is easy for people on the internet to monday morning coach, but I'm pretty sure that apple isn't lazy when it comes to coding and design.
 
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Haters gonna hate and whiners gonna whine. I use my Mac every day and it never crashes and I get my work done very efficiently. It is so much more usable than Windows and Linux.

Of course there are annoyances, such as the 300-ish non-removable fonts which appear in every font menu. Bugs the daylights out of me. And I hope we get a Snow Leopard release.

But the whining…
 
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I think this speaks for itself:

1776522484547.jpeg
 
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