"It just works" -- Is Apple too large now? Is this a QA problem, product team problem? Management? Catalina is still stumbling and Im surprised to be honest after the past 4 years.
My feeling is that Apple beancounters have decided macOS is mostly a gateway to Xcode for iOS development, anything else is just to help sell laptops. The stuff in "anything else" doesn't need to actually work well, just exist so it can be something on the features list.
I feel like they are doing random deprecations with replacements that don't work as well as the original. As in, leaving the deprecated thing unmaintained but present in the install would be a better outcome. I wonder why they are wasting so much time doing this when they appear to have a working system. I'm not even talking about big items like 32-bit support or opengl but completely random libraries that work fine.
This is a completely standard failure mode of large organizations. You have a product that works perfectly fine the way it is, but you also have an entire team of people whose job it is to do something with that product. The existing product has already been optimized for years and most changes are moves away from optimal rather than towards it, but they can't get paid to do nothing, so they change things that were better the way they were.
This is related to the thing where what customers want most is bug fixes for existing bugs but what marketing wants most is new features to sell to new customers and marketing tends to win, which causes the number of bugs to go up rather than down over time.
It's also a problem of company culture and career ladders. Fixing bugs and making a more stable product isn't going to line you up for a promotion - but some fancy new feature no one asked for will.
As just another random instance, I updated my MacOS about a year ago and now I can only change the last 3 parts of my MAC address, the remainder appear to be fixed.
I know my hardware has the ability to change my entire MAC address - I don't get why they are doing this.
The leading octets in MAC addresses are often called "vendor prefixes", and are assigned to various hardware vendors. Apple probably wants to ensure that all their devices show up in ARP scans and MAC lookups as Apple devices.
To make it harder to spoof specific devices, perhaps. Commercial end-user OS vendors generally don't think your computer being able to do something implies you should have control over that capability.
It does help that there is no overall competitor to MacBooks in terms of ease of use or (now that the butterfly keyboard is dead) build quality.
There are decent build PC laptops but you have to run Windows or Linux on them. Windows is a dumpster fire these days with ads in the start menu, the use of "dark patterns" to herd people into MS cloud, and out of control unnecessary telemetry. Linux is fine only if you have a lot of time on your hands to troubleshoot edge case issues and hunt for drivers. Linux also still (through no fault of its own) can't run a lot of apps that many people need.
Linux is the only option IMO, but I have a very high yakshaving tolerance. That said, if you run a recent Ubuntu, most stuff "just works" as long as you don't need Photoshop or the Office suite.
Or 4k monitors, or screen sharing when running more than one monitor. That's the reason I haven't switched from macos back to linux (I was all in on linux until about 5 years ago when I started to care about display quality and working remotely).
High-DPI is still a mess on Ubuntu (and Debian, for that matter). Last time I used Ubuntu on a 4k panel I had to manually edit some xorg config files. I'm using Debian+KDE right now and I had to manually make some adjustments (in a UI, at least) and it still randomly gets confused sometimes.
Not true for me. I've used several distros (including Ubuntu) with Gnome on my 4K XPS and the worst I've had to do is go into Gnome settings and click 200% GUI scale. I'm pretty sure Ubuntu set that automatically.
High DPI is fine as long as you have just one display. However, there's no good way to have one high-dpi display and one normal one (for example, a laptop with high dpi screen connected to a standard external monitor).
There is a good way to have mixed-dpi setup: you use Gnome-on-Wayland (for normal users who expect normal desktop) or Sway (for those who want tiling wm).
Mixed DPI is not coming to X11 displays. If you insist on X11, you are going to have bad time.
Not to mention mixed-DPI. Apple is the only vendor who actually handles HiDPI and mixed-DPI environments really well in my opinion.
macOS can scale different parts of an application differently depending on which screen it is on. So if you are in the process of moving an application from one screen to another, it doesn't change size mid-move.
Windows can't do that, and I've even seen applications where all windows belonging to an application use the same DPI (chosen based on which window is in focus), regardless of the DPI of the screen the window itself is on.
So it seems to me the integration of mixed-DPI into window rendering APIs was not well handled by the development team behind its implementation in Windows.
The most common "solution" I see is lowering the resolution of the high-DPI display, but that's not a solution, that's actually not even a workaround, it is literally removing the problem by pretending my screen is not as good as it is.
If all your monitors are 4k it works, but if you have a mix of high dpi and standard dpi monitors it does not work. And I'm betting you can't share just one of those monitors with any screen sharing software. Something I need to do frequently.
External monitor support on macOS is terrible.
When it does work, you can't turn on HiDPI resulting in a tiny UI.
And the latest 16" macbooks simply kernel panic: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/250876794
It sucks that you are having issues with your setup, but in general macOS is the king of external monitor support.
Compare the experience with Windows for example, where disconnecting from your external monitors pushes all applications and windows to the remaining monitors, and doesn't restore them when the external monitor is reconnected.
macOS also handles mixed-DPI really well, no other vendor even comes close, Windows simply scales according to the monitor most of the application window is on, resulting in ugly resizing of applications when moving from one monitor to another.
I don't know what you're talking about with regards to "turning on HiDPI", can you elaborate?
> Compare the experience with Windows for example, where disconnecting from your external monitors pushes all applications and windows to the remaining monitors, and doesn't restore them when the external monitor is reconnected.
Huh? I have a dock that I disconnect and reconnect from all the time; windows move onto my laptop screen when I disconnect, and move back onto my docked screen when I reconnect.
Do you have multiple screens active at one time? This is really only a problem when you have multiple screens, applications don't "remember" which screen they are supposed to be on, they just go to the "primary" screen when docked.
Ah, you're right. I do use the dock screen and the laptop screen, but hadn't noticed that everything moves to the dock screen even if it was previously on the laptop screen when docked.
I would agree were it not for the hairy yaks. As a startup founder I just don't have time for my computer to not "just work." This is the primary thing that keeps me absolutely glued to Apple.
I do kind of like MacOS, but am concerned about their lack of strong interest in it.
I would pay for a "vertically integrated" open hardware Linux laptop. I've seen some promising projects but none are mature enough.
The second issue is apps, but that can be mitigated by having a Windows VM.
> But this entire thread of comments and even the topic of the post is proof that it really just doesn't work.
Yeah, there may actually be close to a dozen people commenting here!
>I would argue that any major Linux distro at this point "just work" just as well as MacOS
Given my perennial attempts to switch to Linux which are inevitably thwarted by aggravating driver bugs and incompatibility issues with X Windows and Wayland (both), I'm inclined to disagree.
I've had problems with printer drivers consistently since I switched to (K)ubuntu on the desktop in 2010ish. Since 2 years however, they are basically gone. That's thanks to IPP becoming more commonplace.
Then I'm having issues with PTP from my phone. Windows is fine but Plasma is broken. The phone also offers an MTP mode which thankfully works.
When I bought a Lenovo netbook in 2015, I was unable to set the screen brightness. It took a few years but eventually the issue got fixed with a new version of Kubuntu.
On my brand new ThinkPad T495 I'm having an issue with the graphics drivers, which crash and require me to issue an ACPI reboot when I close the lid and reopen it again. Pretty sure it's this issue as the error messages, symptoms and working workarounds all match. https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/amd/issues/883
It might be that I use pretty standard hardware and don't have any fancy requirements, but really, I have evangelized several people and installed mostly Xubuntu in their laptops and I haven't had problems.
My APU stuck in OpenGL 3.3 without video hardware decoding, would like to get OpenGL 4.4 and hardware video decoding back that it had with the AMD proprietary driver.
I’m not saying it cannot work but I am saying an IT department cannot just install Ubuntu on a laptop, hand it to someone who doesn’t know how to hack at Linux, and have the display aspects “just work” with any monitor.
I have no beef with Linux, but we have to be honest about what it needs to be capable of to compete with MacOS for the general user unable or unwilling to hack at it a bit.
If the solution in any way involves "enter this command", you have lost the vast, vast majority of users. Those users will never have any idea that "Catalina broke SSH".
I think you are wrong. I have seen it happen more than once, even in my current company. Especially when companies use mostly online tools, like our case, it's a no brainer.
Do you mean I am wrong that standard users won't notice ssh broken?
You're right, my statement may have been too strong.
We do know that Catalina isn't broken for everyone though as alluded to by others in this thread. No one in my company or anyone I personally know with a MacBook has been affected. There must be another interaction happening.
Sorry, no, I mean that you can really give Ubuntu units to people and expect it to work without any issues. If this works in schools it works also for power users :)
Linux had good support for multiple monitors when I started using it in 2003. Obviously something is crashing but it's not apt to be plugging in a monitor.
Windows is not "absolutely fine". Ignoring the garbage heap of bad/inconsistent ui/adverts/nagware. Its just not even capable of running a lot of dev software. The guide for running ruby on rails on windows is basically just to install a linux VM.
If you pick your laptop for linux support then you will have literally no driver issues. I'm running fedora on a Dell XPS and it runs flawlessly (Well the fingerprint scanner needs a 3rd party program).
Ubuntu is generally even easier since they bundle in proprietary drivers.
As if, I bought a Linux Laptop from Asus with Ubuntu, and my APU is still to get the OpenGL 4.4 that it had with the proprietary AMD driver, instead I should be happy that the open source version at least offers me OpenGL 3.3.
Thats unlucky but it doesn't apply to all laptops. My dell XPS is currently running on a vulkan version released in 2020. AMD strangely seems to lag behind intel in drivers at the moment. Perhaps because until just now AMD laptops were rare.
Well no business end-user or any typical Mac user is going to be bothered about something technical like 'SSH' breaking their system. Only actual devs here would care.
For those business users, it just still works. For developers it's a problem.
Apple's made huge inroads with developers over the last few years, partly coasting off of a social dislike for Microsoft. There's enough Apple fandom out there that they can probably annoy developers a good deal more without affecting the inroads. After all, exactly what can a dev do about it anyway?
Macs have a fairly large share of devs, especially in the startup centers like SF and NYC. Most startups end up with macs as the default computer because of the developer experience as well as the ability to manage them for a consistent user experience using MDM solutions like Jamf or Fleetsmith (both Apple-only)
Catalina I haven’t had much problems with, however noticed some odd stuff. Like the Apple Menu and System Preferences it reports one update available but if I go look - nothing. Then was playing with the new TV app and went to watch one of the Apple TV+ shows and all I get is a black screen with audio when watching a show.
Then even before Catalina, my AirPods mic seems to act odd, can hardly hear it and it messses with audio output too when listening to music, sounds like I’m listening to hold music on a telephone unless I disable the mic using a third party app. I think having a old Bluetooth chip might be the reason though since I have a older MacBook while it works great on my iPhone.
Almost everyone in my office has issues with Bluetooth headphones mysteriously disconnecting - the sound output drops even though Bluetooth is still connected.
