I'm using both Linux and macOS close to 20 years (Linux is even more than 20, IIRC), and macOS (aka Mac OS) used to be snappier, more stable, more uniform and had incredibly low number of papercuts around the UI. Now it has some nasty thorns here and there, while Linux is improving steadily and not regressing much as macOS.
Apple needs to overhaul their software stack. They can use a lot of sanding and polishing to bring the shine back. They need another "Snow Leopard" release, as many people say.
On the other hand, even with all these bells and whistles, they can't even get close to the composability of Linux systems. Doing so will also damage their bottom line, so they won't, and that's OK.
These days I'm happier (or at least content) without a Mac. My FW13+Linux setup may not be as nice as the latest macbook, but it does exactly what I want and if it doesn't, I have options.
I think it started slightly earlier: 10.7 Lion in 2011 introduced the new full-screen mode that was completely broken on multi-monitor setups, as though Apple entirely failed to test on or even anticipate what was at most a moderately "power user" hardware configuration. They've introduced lots of useless features over the years (eg. Game Center), but that full-screen mode was the first time I recall OS X having such an in-your-face usability regression that was so obvious and avoidable.
10.7 also dropped Front Row, which was a disappointment to me, but is at least understandable in the context of Apple TV existing as a separate product they wanted to steer users toward. Losing Rosetta in 10.7 was also somewhat justifiable, and didn't hurt me much since my first Mac was an Intel machine and I didn't have much of a library of PPC-only applications.
Dead on.
Apple's current software is such a joke I almost regret ever having invested in the Mac ecosystem. I still run Mojave for its 32-bit app support for (apple's own) apps that have no contemporary equal.
Apple weathered the passing of Steve surprisingly well, however the cracks still show. Apple's very best is exclusively reserved for those products/devices/software with Jobs' fingerprints on them.
I still run an original iPhone SE as well. The entire tech sphere has gone in such a poor direction, I've increasingly divested myself from tech. If it no longer works with my system, I simply stop using it. It's a happy ("insecure") place.
It's really easy to fail to see this in the heat of things.
macOS has a feature where it puts an orange dot on the top right corner of your screen whenever your microphone is recording. That orange dot is normally part of the menu bar, and completely unobtrusive, but will still show up on top of full-screen windows (e.g. it'll show up on top of games if you're on Discord talking to friends), which is distracting as hell.
As horrendously annoying that little dot is, what's the alternative? Either you have an uncircumventable marker saying you're being recorded, or you don't. Any way to turn that thing off that doesn't involve disabling SIP would be trivial to exploit by anybody who managed to plant malicious recording software in the first place.
Again, I get it, but as a power user this kind of stuff is just infuriating.
So much pain in macOS is in areas like this, trying to hack basic features back into the anemic OS.
Apple's "OS" updates typically focus on end-user applications that I don't use and never intend to. Meanwhile the core of the OS, and even the desktop environment, feels stagnant compared to many Linux distros.
I think that was mainly due to GPL 3.
Many other iPhone/Macbook users have been shocked I don't turn on Messages on my Mac due to a bad experience with sync in the first year that was possible, and I had a similar bad experience with photos in iCloud early on. Maybe the sync is fast now, but my usage would put my in a higher iCloud tier than I'd like, and I still feel more at ease juggling many Photos libraries on external hard drives. I avoid Google Photos like the plague, and even though I trust Apple more (for now), I'd still rather not entrust to them my family's personal photos and videos.
Hopefully in a place where I can solve the bigger problems I have then!
You can use Messages on the Mac without storing messages in iCloud. iPhone, iPad and Mac can all send and receive the same account’s messages, effectively staying in sync without actually syncing them to iCloud’s servers.
Improving interface response times is the single best thing Apple can do to improve their UX. I don't need an interface which throbs, wiggles, jiggles, shines, and refracts, I need an interface that's snappy and fast.
As far as I know, MacOS is the _only_ desktop OS with this problem. The only way to fix this problem on MacOS is to do everything inside a virtual machine running anything but MacOS.
You can turn down the animation times for most of this with "defaults write" commands. Set them to 0 or as small as you want. Here's a good list to get started:
https://gist.github.com/j8/8ef9b6e39449cbe2069a
> I don't need an interface which throbs, wiggles, jiggles, shines, and refracts, I need an interface that's snappy and fast.
System Settings -> Accessibility -> Reduce Motion: Enabled System Settings -> Accessibility -> Display -> Reduce Transparency: Enabled
These terminal commands don't fix the problem- there are still lengthy animations, e.g. when swapping desktops or opening folders. These are tasks I sometimes do multiple times per second on Linux.
> This is always the default answer to this question online, and I’m sick of it! It doesn’t even solve the problem, but rather replaces it with an equally useless fade-in animation.
https://arhan.sh/blog/native-instant-space-switching-on-maco...
But this eroded over time. Nowadays both Mac and iOS are bloated pieces of crap that reek of design by committee. A lot of people blame Alan Dye (and they are probably right to do so) but there are other factors too. With Steve and Jony gone, they need someone who cares to step in and assert control once more
That's kinda rose tinted history. System 7 (1990s Mac OS) for example crashed and locked up a whole lot, in my experience. The UI was fantastic and had great consistency, and the developer docs were of a quality that would blow minds today. But the software was not as solid as all that.
Windows was the same or maybe worse at the time. BSOD was common and a nightly reboot was a good idea until NT/Win2000. Solaris and BSD would have months of uptime on similar hardware, so it was a software problem. PC OSes were just not there yet. Windows 2000, OSX, and Linux gradually fixed that.
That's all basic uptime. The UI design drift of MacOS is another story.
Now that said iPhone is a thousand times faster, just invoking the keyboard can cause a serious delay with stutters.
In any case, it’s odd that hardware is multiples better yet it doesn’t always nail something as basic as typing
But I often have input lags where I will press several keys, and then a period of time (which can be multiple seconds) will pass before my taps are registered.
The 14 Pro Max launched less than four years ago, and should not be slower than an Android which launched a decade prior.
No-one has forced you to upgrade. I’m writing this on iOS 18.
FWIW, SwiftUI got a huge performance boost for iOS/macOS 26+, and Instruments 26 has been nice for finding performance bottlenecks. You may find the SwiftUI performance auditor in a free/FOSS project of mine (https://charleswiltgen.github.io/Axiom/commands/ui-design/au...) helpful as well.
Why it took 4 years to get to near-UIKit levels of performance I couldnt say, but I've had a great experience working with it on an app that's 97% SwiftUI.
Input devices and monitors can make a difference as well.
It's not the default, but IIRC Windows could be configured to have zero animations, and I found it to be quite responsive as such.
I'm not talking about the speed of opening programs, but more of the speed of every-second interactions: Unfolding a folder (or other interactions within a program with keyboard or mouse), alt-tabbing across windows, moving between desktops, etc. At least on Windows, I saw far fewer IO-blocking animations than I have on MacOS.
You're right about the "something starts to happen": Apple hides delays behind sigmoidal animations throughout much of their OS. For those who aren't aware of the trick, the delay between the start of the animation and the tail where it starts appears to just be an animation that started on the interaction.
I plug a Mac into a 120hz monitor with a high refresh rate mouse and it is gloriously snappy, snappier than any Windows PC I’ve ever used.
But did you try Homebrew and its extensions? It works pretty well for managing both terminal and GUI apps, and has some useful extensions like Brewfile, MAS, etc. Its not perfect, but for single-user Macs with an up-to-date OS version, it works quite well.
How often are you switching systems that you can't remember the package manager?
You could just alias your package manager to something more memorable if it's really a problem, but I feel like this argument only really applies to servers where you may be logging into a variety of different distributions every day.
In terms of package management SOFTWARE, however, nix (and guix, lix, etc.) are state of the art and work fairly similar in both linux and macos. A deeper integration with the OS would have been nice.
I use both linux (with a decent tiling window manager; the tiling management being the least important part of it) and macos. And certain things are just not possible to do with macos. On linux I can have 300+ open terminal windows AND CAN find the one I need when I need to. On macos 20 (counting in Termianl tabs, which are implemented as windows, underneath) is about the high mark that it gets annoying to work on. On macos, you can't effectively work on multiple projects that use the same software (editor + terminal, for example). You can work with different Applications, though, and that is managed pretty well (better than most linux window managers that I have seen).
Every year or so I try adding a couple of Spaces, and always regret it a couple of hours later, switching back to a single Space (+ a few fullscreen apps).
I love the three finger gesture to move between them though, it's like moving pieces of paper around. You can also work around the bug I mentioned by swiping faster, but yeah I wish they'd just fix it so we can move on.
I wouldn't expect that of Android because it's Java and Kotlin parts run in a VM and there's a garbage collector pausing the execution at times.
With macOS, you really have no choice to use what Apple offers. You can hope they listen to dissent but they may not depending on priorities. And things have to be bad enough to jump platforms before real dissent registers. And things have to get pretty bad for that.
Same issue with Windows of course.
With GNOME, KDE, COSMIC, and the Linux rat pack, it is easy to switch experiences without ditching Linux entirely. And somebody has probably even patched your DE of choice to address the papercuts you do not like.
So true. I run into so many little and annoying bugs I sometimes wonder if Apple Execs actually use their own devices.
As for Linux, I don't think I've ever used a system with UI for any serious amount of time. >99.999% of my usage is on headless systems through a terminal. As god intended.
https://www.macrumors.com/2026/03/15/ios-27-will-reportedly-...
iOS 26 is slated to drop a bunch of iPhone models. macOS is dropping all all macs with Intel CPUs.
A Snow Leopard release isn't great news for a lot of people.
> macOS is dropping all all macs with Intel CPUs.
Those two cases are not really comparable though, are they? The last Intel CPU Mac was the 2019 Mac Pro, which was discontinued in 2023.
The broader point is that a "Snow Leopard" release has historically resulted in a lot of hardware being left behind, and many of the devices that could have benefited the most from optimizations were cut off.
You just have to look at their directors managing those software directions and you will exactly why it's become the mess that it is today.
They were so much better. And have slid slowly into complacency, if not worse.
There are many, many things that are completely normal in Linux that are super clunky in MacOS at best.
But at least try to match Nautilus or Thunar ffs.
I've used basically all of the major operating systems for 30+ years and I cannot stand macOS. I use a Mac as one of my work devices, and off the top of my head:
* Basic things such as window management require third party tools to get things that are table stakes everywhere else. Even with third party tools doing anything with a "full screen" mode is not going to work the way you expect.
* You can't have separate scroll directions for your trackpad and your external mouse.
* External peripherals in general are a disaster. Every time I connect or disconnect from a docking station my windows are left in awkward positions sized larger than my screen and I need to drag them around
* macOS seems to store a different set of monitor orientations based on what USB port I connect my dock to - same dock, same monitors, 2 different layouts I had to configure independently. I don't even know how you could accomplish that if you wanted it - and absolutely no one wants that.
* Multiple monitors is constantly an afterthought, whether it's menus, the dock, layouts, what have you
* The Settings app is impossible to find anything in. You have to search, and that works OK sometimes, but the layout has no rhyme, reason, or comprehensible order
* Safari. Enough said.
I could keep going, but I absolutely do not associate Apple with quality software.
1. ios performance in scrolling and loading (especially on my ipad pro m2) is unbearably slow, just stutters everywhere when loading a page in the background
2. tap-and-hold to open a link menu is so strange; sometimes it highlights text instead of showing the menu, sometimes it works ok, there is some kind of strange ui timing issue at work
3. on ipad and ios the tab overview display scrolling is absolutely appalling like 4fps level slow... completely unbearable to scroll through tab previews
4. developer tools are abysmal compared to chrome
5. on desktop performance is also extremely slow compared to chrome, its night and day
6. battery usage is so bad on ipad, just leaving some tabs open they run down the battery and chug memory (i know this is more a web thing, but they should at least freeze tabs in the background or make it an option)
7. just strange bugs on ipad, when tapping a text field the keyboard pops up, then suddenly disappears and the pops up again... just a terrible app
etc etc lots of paper cuts, but the performance issues are the biggest for me... i like the tab groups + auto save and icloud sync and built-in spellcheck, but its getting harder and harder to resist the alternatives
I could basically sums up your experience as Safari is appalling at multi tab resource management. And it has been the case for 14+ years and counting.
It wasn't until Safari 18 before I have most of the rendering issues gone on sites I visit. Safari 26 is completely gone. I haven't encountered one since Safari 26.1.
With a lot of features done, I just hope Safari turn its attention to performance and snappiness of the browser. Multi Tabs doesn't work. For people who uses more than 30+ Tabs is when it start getting slow. Safari used to have an option to unload background tab and that usually fix 80% of the problem but it was taken out some years ago.
But if I want to search for any comment by you on this page, how do I do it?
I’m not after a web search, I just want to see ‘j16sdiz’ highlighted on this page.
Currently I go to ‘…’ > share > scroll down > find on page.
Code-signing to force updates should be illegal (including iOS versions)
1. Mandating all browsers on iOS/iPadOS to be powered by Safari (excluding in the EU). This doesn't sound bad, but wait until #3 below...
2. Safari's many bugs. Too many bugs. Oh so many bugs. Damn that's a lot of bugs.
- See: https://webventures.rejh.nl/blog/2024/history-of-safari-show...
- Also see the State of CSS developer survey where Safari makes up such a large portion of pain reports that "Safari" is its own category: https://2025.stateofcss.com/en-US/usage/#css_general_pain_po...
- And again in the State of JS developer survey: https://2025.stateofjs.com/en-US/features/#browser_apis_pain...
3. Grievance 1 and 2 compound together. Whenever Safari (or a Safari update) breaks a feature, you cannot inform a user that they can use another browser as a work around (because all browser engines are forced to use Webkit on iOS/iPadOS)
4. Bad dev tools. This has been seeing much needed improvements (e.g. being able to type an entire word in the css pane instead of a new character on each line), but it still feels 7 years behind.
5. No way to report bugs. There is a "bug reporter" at bugs.webkit.org, however each bug is auto-tagged with a link to an internal bug tracker within Apple. This means that those who are trying to fix bugs and those are trying to report bugs have a wall between them. There is no way to have a discussion to try to narrow down what the bug is, why the bug happens in one case but not another, what's really the cause of the issue, or why the bug matters more than whoever is assigned it might realise. When reporting a bug to Apple, it's more useful to talk to an actual wall because it might fall on you giving you an actual response.
6. Performing incorrectly is more important than getting the performing correctly. This one takes some explanation, but it's a little tricky. I'll give three examples then show how they're all the same issue:
Example 1: The cool homepage.
I was working on a website. Two months before launch I decided to spend a month of time juicing up the homepage, then one more month on polish.
On the homepage I decided to use the brand's pre-existing graphics and turning them into a parallax animation (inspired by: https://www.firewatchgame.com/)
It had:
- Regular content on the page
- Parallax layers with simple vector graphics inside them so that when the user scrolled down the page, the user saw a parallax animation of the landscape changing. (e.g. far clouds, far mountains, close clouds, close mountains, hill, foreground, simple bubble particles closer than the regular content on the sides to strengthen the depth of field illusion, etc...)
- Other vector graphics following a motion path animation
- This was done in 2017, so before CSS got scroll driven animation support, or motion-path support. It was also done without JS.
- Everything worked brilliantly, until we discovered that one particular iPhone model rendered an empty blank white page.
- I lost the last month trying pulling the effect apart trying to diagnose the bug (and with Safari's buggy dev tools being no help I had to do it in the dark). I was able to determine when the bug would trigger, and had to tear down my whole homepage and rebuild it with 2 fewer parallax layers before launch and 3 days of polish for the rest of the website before launch.
(you can see the final result at https://myobrace.com, but I really would have liked the extra time for polish, if you're wondering how I achieved the effects without JS and/or scroll-driven animations, I used css's perspective and transform rules to position the elements back in the z-axis then scaled them up so they appeared the correct size with the regular page content so as the page scrolled, the elements further back appeared to scroll at a different speed. I then used SMIL for the motion paths in the SVG elements).
Example 2. The texture
I wanted to add a repeating texture to buttons so they didn't feel so flat without needing a separate network request to download an image.
I tried generating one with SVG but the SVG 1.1 filter effects implementations aren't all hardware accelerated.
I tried generating one with CSS which worked everywhere but Safari.
You can see a texture here where the texture is generated entirely within CSS, and it doesn't work in Safari (but I didn't hide the seams because the result looks like a cool mosaic and I wanted to share the technique): https://codepen.io/spartanatreyu/pen/Yzbmvbr
(if you're curious about the actual texture I used, I hand drew a minimal noise texture in photoshop that could be repeated without showing seams, then base64 encoded it and inlined it within the CSS file so it could be loaded without needing an extra network request. You can see my development version here: https://codepen.io/spartanatreyu/pen/YzoexGg?editors=1100 (the final version is locked behind a login wall in a child-friendly education webapp))
Example 3. Asset downloading
I made a webapp for kiosk machines that downloads 100mb+ of video assets when logging in for the first time. iPads have a kiosk mode so I supported iPadOS' Safari mode so that the iPads could be used in commercial settings as kiosk machines.
When the final assets were added, the iPad machines would randomly crash during the asset downloading process.
With Safari's completely broken debugging experience, I eventually learned that as Safari downloads a video, as soon as it tries to put that downloaded data somewhere, it has to copy it across to the new place it's being stored, and if you're copying more than 3mb, it crashes the browser.
The fix was to download and store each video in 1mb chunks. This slowed down the installation speed by a bit over 300%, but at least Safari didn't crash any more.
---
Now back to: "Performing incorrectly is more important than getting the performing correctly."
It turns out Safari on iOS/iPadOS has an invisible time/performance budget. Anytime Safari hits that budget, the browser stops what its doing.
- Drawing texture to screen? How about we stop drawing all textures to the screen, including text. Websites don't need to draw any text right?
- Rendering a texture in CSS? How about you have the color white covering everything else instead.
- Downloading a video that's more than 3mb? How about I crash the browser when the download completes.
Compare this to Firefox and Chrome, as they run out of their budget, they stop starting new work so they old work can finish before starting their next task. The page may take a few milliseconds longer to get to the correct result on slower devices, but the result IS correct.
Even worse:
- Safari has no way of informing the code how close it is to the budget.
- The budget can only be found by trial and error.
- If the iOS/iPadOS device has other apps in the background, the budget is smaller.
- Each device has a different budget, so you have to penalize all Safari devices to the smallest supported budget of the oldest supported device.
- If you hit the budget on the most basic functionality (e.g. a homepage, a button, downloading required assets), then your website / webapp may as well not exist to those Apple users.
Agree on the time/performance budget. It is pain stupid. As has been the case for so many years. And yet nothing has been done about it.
No serious computer user can use a Mac anymore, and this is an unfortunate departure from Steve Jobs' Mac where he expended great effort to ensure the Mac remained a serious desktop OS.
The most egregious example of this stupidity is the dumbing down of the Disk Utility app - an app rarely if ever used by normies, and so dumbed down the pros don't want to use it either. Really leaves you scratching your head what the decisionmaking process there was.
Where Steve Jobs' would draw lines in the sand and ask developers and users not to cross it, chairman cook put NATO wire and basically forced users to do as told (safari extensions got nuked, app store apps don't load older versions of software and there's some weird exclusivity agreement, HFS+ support got dropped and apple refused updates to machines that didn't follow, etc. etc. etc. etc.)
The settings app being hot garbage is apple trying to unify their toy phone OS with the desktop OS.
Safari nuked 3rd party extensions so everything has to go through apple's extensions "store".
Apple treated its core base, the ones who saved Apple from collapse in the 90s, like expendable slave. Worse actually; apple actively chased them away like lepers.
This has led to a systemic core rot in apple's software and ecosystem, one that will take years to rectify.... if apple even chooses to do so.
> * You can't have separate scroll directions for your trackpad and your external mouse.
Scroll Reverser
The worst. There are even separate toggles in Settings for mouse and trackpad scrolling direction, but changing one changes the other. It is truly amazing that this has persisted for 15 years.
I'd go further and say I am constantly frustrated by how difficult their software can make basic tasks. I often find many of their UX patterns unintuitive, or even feel user hostile at times. Small example, I really want to view passwords as I type them in. I constantly miss type passwords on touch screens. User error maybe, but frustrating experience.
XCode is my least favourite IDE that I use regularily.
My favourite example being looking for the volume mixer, and after looking online the top advice seemed to be to pay for a 3rd party application for that... Wtf?
Those third-party apps do increase the overall appeal of Apple's platform, but suggesting that Apple might want to encourage that situation rather than improve their OS themselves sounds like a broken windows fallacy.
Microsoft finally caught up around that time, but has since added a whole new dimension of enshittification that the only conclusion that can be reached about tech as a whole is that it all sucks and will always suck.
20+ years ago, software was so horrible that we were just tolerating it, and every new OS release was a big deal because there was hope things would get better! Today an OS release comes out and I have to be bothered by automatic "you must upgrade messages" to even care.
People forget how horrible it used to be, and if you still use windows, how much worse it could be when vs. Apple (and let's not get started on Linux).
Absolutely not, especially not on an Apple thread.
By example, the iPod released in 2001. Anyone who used those early knows the user experience was competitive with the current experience. In 2006, I was using the version of iTunes then which was probably objectively the best desktop music app ever created. There are features then that were just there, that were pioneered, or now absent, like an automatically sorted "least listened to" playlist that are now nearly impossible to find. Sync alone is still an headache the OS community just does on the side, and no one is even bothering to compete on it anymore.
I had an iPod in those days and Apple's firmware updates that periodically broke third-party sync (while bringing no improvements) is the reason that to this day I've never bought Apple hardware for myself from Apple since that time. Used hardware only.
Every time I had to use iTunes was regrettable. The app was an insanely massive download for the time. It tried to install fucking Safari on Windows for no reason. The UI was somehow simultaneously a sprawling mess and feature-deprived.
Maybe there was a brief period where iTunes was genuinely an interesting app, but even by the mid-aughts, it had been totally surpassed by a number of open-source music players.
But Amarok at that time was only available on Linux. I assume most iTunes fans of the time never got to try it.
When it comes to the software, I’d take the Tiger experience over the Tahoe one hands-down.
I don't think software is improving today, which is why I have to be nagged to upgrade. I don't think it worse, but my computer usage probably varies greatly from yours.
I understood that, and I was using it in the same way.
> I don't think software is improving today, which is why I have to be nagged to upgrade. I don't think it worse…
Yeah this is the part I was disagreeing with, and I gave a couple examples showing why it’s meaningfully worse now.
I’ve been using Macs since the 1980s. The timeframe of 20-25 years ago (post Classic Mac OS) was some of the best software Apple has ever released.
The macOS Tahoe release is a great example of this. I can't think of a single thing I prefer about it and could easily name ten things I hate about it.
The fact that they tie the mobile version to the OS version is just ridiculous.
My company keeps the testing cycle smaller by only adding new OS-dependent features to its mobile app when the minimum supported OS version gets incremented and a feature is supported in every supported OS version. That means that the iOS app is only now getting features that were added in iOS 15 in 2021.
The latest version of iOS runs on iPads back to 2919.
The latest version of Chrome requires the version of Android - released in 2019.
So how is it better?
The latest version of Chrome requires the version of Android released in 2019. Even phones that old aren’t getting other security updates.
Is that really the argument you want to make?
Both those ecosystems are rapidly enshittifying (apple cannot even reliably process keystrokes with subsecond latency, and google is banning sideloading).
We need a third, actually user-serving and open alternative. Maybe the new CEO will slow or reverse the bleeding on the iOS / MacOS side.
The hardware is nominally open only because they enforce participation in their software ecosystem via other means.
Partially accurate / misleading at most.
If your “partially accurate” objection is that I didn't describe a perfectly universal experience, I will be greatly disappointed.
Are we talking about root checks? Bootloader unlock?
your bank’s app sucks, tell them they suck,
and or use the webapp.
Tens of thousands of financial institution apps work A-OK on GrapheneOS,
that is my objection.
https://security.it.miami.edu/stay-safe/sec-articles/macosx-...
[1] Actually, the defect was that creating a root account was a unprivileged action, so anybody could create a root account on your machine with a password of their choice. The most obvious presentation is that you could login to root by pressing enter twice with the empty password; the first time creating root with the empty password and the second time logging you in.
[...]Use a space after keywords (if, while, for, return, switch). No braces are used for control statements with zero or only a single statement unless that statement is more than a single line, in which case they are permitted.[0]
The good thing is that -Wmisleading-indentation [2] (comes along with -Wall) catches this indentation error.
[0] https://man.openbsd.org/style - happens to be same for at least NetBSD.
[1] https://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/html_node/Syntactic-Conve...
However, it's bad. I much prefer the rare, elusive, postfix if:
goto fail if (condition);
Or comments such as: https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/Security/blob/rel...
Unsurprisingly, given BoringSSL doesn't have a stable API (yet alone ABI), it isn't exposed as a system library.
goto fail was relevant in 2014 - perhaps not the most useful point in 2026.
- Apple Music's UI/UX is quite rough on MacOS.
- Trying to use my iPhone to type a long password on my Apple TV is hit-or-miss.
- For some reason trying to view a password using Keychain requires you to enter your credentials twice, every time, for as long as I can remember.
But “best” is far too strong a word.
For starters, most if not all their software can be described as simpler also-rans.
And in line with that approach, for a company that innovates in hardware, it does not apply that effort to software.
With two exceptions in the last two decades. The iPhone and Apple Watch operating systems & interfaces were very creative efforts. Which genuinely matched the hardware innovation.
Vision’s OS, on the hand, basically iOS-ified hardware that deserved to be treated like the first device to be positioned above and beyond the Mac. The natural interface doesn’t fall below the Mac’s, like a touch screen does. It fat exceeds it, given a keyboard-trackpad.
Instead, software wise, we get another media and toy kiosk.
I am stunned that Tim Cook didn’t see the opportunity to leave his mark with a device that took the capability crown further than the Mac, instead of falling for the 3D as cute feature un-vision.
Pro hardware. Toy software.
He has been a great CEO. But if he let Steve and his own legacy down anywhere, that is where.
That, the predictable but mostly stalled vision of software apps. And all the odd software glitches on all their devices that seem to keep cropping up, that suggest poor underlying models to me.
Their underlying systems software are a high point. The hardware integration is stand out.
That describes me too. I even did for a while. But it just made the incomprehensible lack of any software ambition more painful.
The software is the only reason the Vision isn't worth the price. A real Pro OS, paired with an Studio M5-Ultra, or with its own M5-Ultra, would be an amazing work environment.
(The only hardware they would need to upgrade for the latter, i.e. its own Ultra, would be making live-battery swapping convenient. Which they should have already done.)
You are comparing against the wrong thing.
Compare it to NeXTSTEP from 35 years ago:
https://infinitemac.org/1989/NeXTStep%201.0
NeXTSTEP was both more usable and better looking.
But it's worst in the Apple software world compared to Apple's. In fairness, Microsoft has also been in steady tragic decline for a while. I don't know about Google.
I'd rather use nano than having to write code on xcode.
Usability wise (UI/UX/design), they are in the gutter.
This is not to say that Apple’s desktop software is great, only that the bar is a lot lower than it had to be when people had to be convinced to buy licenses.
A decade to produce a non-functioning gesture bar / system. Such a titan among titans.
Perhaps. Assuming it actually keeps existing:
Outside the two.. Fina Cut better than Premiere Pro or Resolve or Avid, Logic Pro better than Pro Tools or Ableton or many others, Motion better than After Effects, Pixelmator better than anything from Adobe or Affinity..
Come on, my dude. Only thing I haven't mentioned is OS only because that's a religion and I don't fall into MacOS one.
Apple's hardware game is strong. Software isn't, never has been.
Windows has a better desktop compositor and window manager than macOS. It supports Nvidia GPUs with CUDA. It also has WSL so you can use real package managers instead of homebrew.
Apple does xcode, known for being perpetually broken and an ungodly mess of whatever design it had. Isn't it enough proof to completely reject your claim?
Honestly, that's such a low bar to hit.
I use Pathfinder on MacOS, and it's generally a lot better than finder, but there are features I wish would carry over from other OSes. Windows file check boxes are incredibly useful
Apple's iOS is hot garbage. The macOS is not far behind on how horrible the UX is
In the answer to your question, there is nothing better overall across hardware and software top to bottom and that applies to computers, smartphones, tablets, and watches across five ecosystems.