On iOS, it’s not just Wifi but cellular too. I tried switching from Spotify (got tired of their constantly deteriorating UI/UX) but this was a dealbreaker. You can’t listen to albums in the car because if the phone loses coverage at the wrong time it just… skips songs? HOW does this get through testing and persist for so long?
So I cancelled Apple Music and reluctantly went back to Spotify. At least in Spotify, music playback is functional.
Haha, same. I actually prefer the layout and organization capacity of Music (I was an iTunes fan back in the iPod days), but there are so many things that don't work like you would expect them to or just plain bugs that it's too tiring.
Whenever I would enter a supermarket without network access, Music would just stop streaming after one song, no buffering. Spotify handled it just fine.
Even the Spotify remote functionality is better and snappier than the godawful Music Remote. That is a separate app, because for some reason they can't integrate that functionality in the main app for their own hardware.
Apple is really in free fall; I don't think any of the top dogs actually use their stuff or care about it.
It still looks good, and the base is strong, but now the cracks that started appearing a few years ago are becoming too big to ignore.
The irony is that LLMs being so paranoid about talking security is that it ultimately helps the bad guys by preventing the good guys from getting good security work done.
For a further layer of irony, after Claude Code was used for an actual real cyberattack (by hackers convincing Claude they were doing "security research"), Anthropic wrote this in their postmortem:
This raises an important question: if AI models can be misused for cyberattacks at this scale, why continue to develop and release them? The answer is that the very abilities that allow Claude to be used in these attacks also make it crucial for cyber defense. When sophisticated cyberattacks inevitably occur, our goal is for Claude—into which we’ve built strong safeguards—to assist cybersecurity professionals to detect, disrupt, and prepare for future versions of the attack.
I know who runs that blog, but that's a really exaggerated take.
Notepad has had nearly identical UX from Windows 1.0 until 10. Sure, there's a search feature that appeared at some point, ditto with the status bar, at some point they made it able to open files larger than 64K, and apparently you can open files from URLs directly?
Five or so noticable changes in an extremely lightweight and utilitarian application in thirty years is not at all like completely redesigning it into an AI slop machine.
Tabs are fine I guess but also: it's NOTEPAD.EXE. Its purpose to be super primitive and launch in 2 milliseconds and give you a place to paste or type some text real quick. Anyone who needs a good text editor with actual features will just download the good text editor of their choice.
Simple example of the newly poor UX. I try to start notepad to jot down some scratch. It sluggishly reopens whatever it previously had open (e.g. from before a reboot)...and in doing so, doesn't actually create a new document for me.
This is the same stuff that comes up every time in these threads, and at some point, you have to consider that maybe you're holding it wrong. For example: "installing programs is a mix of flatpaks, APKs, and building from source"? Like Windows and macOS aren't hellish wastelands of unreliable and inconsistent installations? Really?
Microsoft Store? .msi? Custom .exe installer that litters random junk in inscrutable places and that is impossible to know how to cleanly uninstall? Just a zip file that you dump somewhere? Chocolatey? WinGet?
Or, macOS: Is it a .dmg with an .app that you drag to Applications? A standard installer? A custom installer that does who knows what? App Store? Homebrew? MacPorts? Just a tar.gz with random crap in it?
Meanwhile, 99% of my Linux software is "apt install foo" and that's it.
Linux can be a much cleaner and more coherent desktop experience than Windows but at some point you have to respect that you are using a fundamentally different operating system. If you're trying to use Windows on your Linux computer, you are going to have a bad time.
> Or, macOS: Is it a .dmg with an .app that you drag to Applications?
- In 98% of cases it is a .dmg with .app ... so drag and drop or App Store install.
- 1% of cases it is a standard installer and that is mostly because the developer is old-school and too lazy to make a .app (e.g. here's looking at you Microsoft)
- The remaining 1% (Homebrew/Macports) is really for the power-user, and in most cases you can just download a pre-compiled mac binary from the developers Github anyway.
For example I have never used Homebrew/Macports because my 1% power-user software has been available through the developer's Github (e.g. `bazel` etc. all publish mac release binaries )
> Meanwhile, 99% of my Linux software is "apt install foo" and that's it.
But `apt install foo` is a synonym for "custom installer that does who knows what" and/or "tar.gz with random crap in it"
Why ?
Your average user will blindly follow `trust me, sudo curl foo | bash` ...
And your average user is unlikely to look at the apt package build rules and/or source and/or dependency list and in the majority of cases will just answer `Y` to any questions from `apt`.
- In 98% of cases it is a .dmg with .app ... so drag and drop or App Store install.
- 1% of cases it is a standard installer and that is mostly because the developer is old-school and too lazy to make a .app (e.g. here's looking at you Microsoft)
Part of my job is automating macOS software deployment. I do this all day. I can confidently tell you that your percentages are way off. I wish you were right because dragging an app bundle into Applications is obviously the correct way to do it. But alas, that is very far from the world we live in.
For example I have never used Homebrew/Macports because my 1% power-user software has been available through the developer's Github (e.g. `bazel` etc. all publish mac release binaries )
This is "a tar.gz with random crap". Convenient perhaps, but it doesn't help your argument that macOS is less of a hellscape.
But `apt install foo` is a synonym for "custom installer that does who knows what" and/or "tar.gz with random crap in it"
No, it's really not. It knows what files it puts where and can cleanly upgrade and uninstall with a predictable and standardized method. It's not that I usually care where the files are strewn exactly, it's that I want consistent installations done in a systematic and coherent way; I don't want to rely on an UNINSTALL.EXE that, like the installer, I have no idea what it does.
Mid range/high end CD players almost always have both analog and digital outputs and have since some time in the 90s at least, so I’d say quite common.
As a macOS sysadmin I feel this in my bones, and of course I don't know what apps are essential for you, but FWIW Sequoia has been basically identical to Sonoma for me. In fact I had to double check what I was running on this computer before writing this because there's just no functional or aesthetic difference that I know of off the top of my head.
(And yes, I'm holding off on Sonoma for as long as possible because... yuck)
Because there is no such product as Office 2025, much like there was no Windows 96. There is Office 2004, 2008, 2011, 2016, 2019, 2021 and 2024. They usually release roughly every three years so there might be an Office 2027. 365 is a separate (but closely related) product.
Windows 98. Windows 95 would let you do this if you installed Internet Explorer 4.0 but there was no HTML anywhere in the OS in vanilla Win95.
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