> Apple software does “just work” with Apple hardware.
This is essentially a false statement for all intents and purposes.
Apple software is far from being immune to bugs, bad UX, etc., even on Apple hardware, as I can personally attest today from using a Macbook Pro daily for work.
You use this word, "straw man". I do not think it means what you think it means.
No, it is not a straw man to point out that bugs interfere with the notion that something "just works". When bugs interfere with getting things done - as I've found they often do in the course of using macOS daily, like when I can't open firewall ports for development or share my screen via Google Hangouts because the Big Sur update broke the password prompt for editing restricted things like firewall settings or app permissions, or when apps can't present an Open File dialog anymore across the board because God knows why, then it's a complete farce to call that "just working". There is no "just" nor "works" about that. Not to mention all the little paper cuts, like the lock screen taking 30 seconds to unfuck itself before I can actually type in a password, or constantly forgetting which applications I've set to open things by default (meaning that every so often I end up with a cacophony of fan whirring instead of an editor window when I try to open an XML file because macOS yet again decided to reset the default app to fucking XCode). (EDIT: oh, and the Touch Bar stops working if I plug in an external keyboard, which is just dandy)
Also, I love how both comments immediately coming to defend Apple's honor stop at the "bugs" bit and entirely ignore that I'm taking a fat steamy deuce on Apple's UX, too. So on that note:
> It means not having to do a bunch of incidental configuration, tuning, and setup.
Which you have to do anyway, because the macOS UX sucks, and seems to be getting worse with each update. Want to have persistent named workspaces? Nope, gotta install some buggy hack of an extension to do it (which in turn required going through a whole bunch of red tape to bypass a bunch of security checks, because of course it does). Want to control where in which of those workspaces application windows open (or at the very least whichever workspace currently has the selected window)? lol fuck user intent, Workspace 1 Monitor 1, and switching away from whatever workspace was on Monitor 1 because double fuck user intent. Application menus are so far away from application windows that the Ever Given could do a goddamn u-turn between them with room to spare. Forward/back buttons on mice don't inherently set focus, so instead of navigating the history on the window my cursor's actually pointing at said buttons end up doing so for some random window on an entirely different monitor. (EDIT: and how could I forget the arcane screenshot shortcuts! Command-Alt-whatever-4? The fuck?)
I could go on, but this comment's already enough of a deranged rant. A Chromebook has fewer bugs and a better UX. Even the grotesque hackjob that is the average GNU/Linux desktop has fewer bugs and a better UX. The bugginess and UX is maybe better than (modern, non-LTSC) Windows, but that bar is so low that even ants have to duck when crawling under it.
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EDIT:
I will, however, give Apple credit where credit's due: I do like the use of Command instead of Control for the CUA shortcut prefix (and the use of Emacs shortcuts for text navigation), and the touchpad gestures are nice, even if limited in options. It'd be great if more operating systems adopted these things. And the Touch Bar's kinda cool, I guess.
Beyond that, I don't really have much praise for macOS. It's overrated, and "just works" is a myth in this day and age. It was arguably a lot more true back in the PowerPC days (even if OpenBSD is my current preference for my PowerPC Macs), but it's been getting worse and worse over the years. Maybe the switch to ARM will be an inflection point re: software quality. Fingers crossed.
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EDIT 2:
And even just now, doing an SMC reset (to fix that password issue in System Preferences) broke the UI, giving me no background, no dock, and no workspaces. Rebooted to find that no input devices worked until I unplugged my docking station. Background loaded briefly, then back to brokenness. System logs say that the dock is crashing due to a SIGILL. Here goes another night of troubleshooting macOS again instead of getting work done. "Just works" alright...
If by ‘better UX’ you mean doesn’t even try to do things.
> Application menus are so far away from application windows that the Ever Given could do a goddamn u-turn between them with room to spare.
Have you considered why? There are good UX reasons for this. It uses less screen real estate, and leverages Fitt’s law because you don’t have to be accurate in the vertical dimension. It’s fine to have a preference for menus in windows. There are some arguments in favor of that, but you are just articulating a preference here.
Really your comment has nothing to do with whether MacOS *just works(, you have articulated a list of preferences and desires for it to work more like other things you have more familiarity with.
You just want it to work differently - I.e. you just don’t like it.
I increasingly don’t like it either for various reasons, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t just work.
Cherry picking bits and pieces of what I mentioned rather than addressing the entirety of the argument does not a good counter-argument make. And no, neither does linking some dictionary entry as if it actually proves you understand what that dictionary entry is saying. No comment on the Touch Bar being disabled with external keyboards plugged in? Or needing to disconnect USB-C devices to login? Or password prompts being broken in System Preferences? These are bugs that actively hinder usability and pretty clearly contradict the notion of "just works". It is not a strawman - at all - to suggest that these bugs and others directly challenge the notion that something "just works".
You know what is a strawman? Cherry picking only some minor weaker points you want to attack while entirely ignoring the ones that you don't, and then trying to pass that off as a substitute for addressing all points in their entirety. If you actually understood what a "strawman" is, you would recognize immediately that your behavior in this discussion is much closer than mine to that definition you cited, and then you'd kindly refrain, thanks.
> You just want it to work differently - I.e. you just don’t like it.
I "just don't like it" specifically because it does not "just work". It is tolerable usability-wise only after extensive fiddling and tweaking and troubleshooting, and that's only on good days when those aforementioned bugs ain't actively preventing me from using basic OS functionality.
And that's fine - I do enjoy fiddling with things on my Linux and OpenBSD desktops - but those Linux and OpenBSD desktops don't advertise themselves as "you shouldn't ever need to fiddle with things because everything just works" the way macOS does, and therefore I'm a lot less frustrated with that fiddling because those systems are designed for it and encourage it and make it easy and friendly and fun. Nothing about customizing macOS is easy or friendly or fun; it is not designed for it, and it does not encourage it. It is Apple's way or the highway - and given the evolution of Apple's way lately, the highway doesn't look so bad after all.
> and leverages Fitt’s law because you don’t have to be accurate in the vertical dimension
Right, let's watch users spend multiple seconds dragging a cursor to a window toward the bottom-right, clicking, and then dragging that cursor all the way back to the top-left just to save fractions of a second on vertical positioning in a specific spot.
Fitt's law is hardly useful here. If the window ain't maximized, then you need some degree of vertical precision to select the window in order to make its menu visible anyway. And if it is maximized, then it literally doesn't matter what owns the menu 'cause it'll be in approximately the same place either way.
That is:
> There are good UX reasons for this.
There were good UX reasons for this, back in the days of m68k Macs where mice were some newfangled invention and displays were tiny. In those days that unintuitive disconnection was a fair tradeoff to make if it meant conserving that tiny amount of vertical real estate and helping people figure out those newfangled rodents.
Now? It's been, what, 40 years? People know how to use mice (or, if not, can figure it out with a bit of practice - Microsoft understood this and opted to encourage that practice with games like Minesweeper and Solitaire instead of paternalistically assuming users will remain permanently inept), and even the absolute lowest screen resolution Apple sells on a Macbook has multiple times the amount of vertical and horizontal screen space. That tradeoff is far less useful now.
> Cherry picking bits and pieces of what I mentioned rather than addressing the entirety of the argument does not a good counter-argument make.
Here’s where I addressed the entirety of your argument:
> Really your comment has nothing to do with whether MacOS *just works(, you have articulated a list of preferences and desires for it to work more like other things you have more familiarity with.
You just want it to work differently - I.e. you just don’t like it.
I increasingly don’t like it either for various reasons, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t just work.
As for cherry picking. I don’t need to refute every point you made - they all fall under this umbrella.
> And no, neither does linking some dictionary entry as if it actually proves you understand what that dictionary entry is saying.
It does. If it didn’t you’d have addressed it, but you didn’t.
Your entire argument boils down to “Mac OS doesn’t work like linux”.
That doesn’t mean it doesn’t just work. It means it isn’t a good choice for you.
> It is tolerable usability-wise only after extensive fiddling and tweaking and troubleshooting,
Almost nobody does this. Most people find it very usable as is. As I said - this is just about your preferences and nothing more.
> and that's only on good days when those aforementioned bugs ain't actively preventing me from using basic OS functionality.ugh
This is also something almost nobody experiences.
Perhaps your attempts to make MacOS work differently from how it was designed are causing you these problems.
What is odd to me is that you continue to use an operating system that is so ill suited to your preferences.
> Here’s where I addressed the entirety of your argument:
...except for the usability-hindering bugs. Hardly meaningful to reduce those to "user preference"; like, no shit I'd prefer it if basic devices like keyboards and mice worked on boot without extra fiddling.
> This is also something almost nobody experiences.
The Big Sur upgrade breaking the password prompt in System Preferences, as one especially annoying example, is pretty well documented online - and was documented for Catalina upgrades, too. It's exactly where I got the troubleshooting step of "reset SMC". I'm far from alone there.
> Perhaps your attempts to make MacOS work differently from how it was designed are causing you these problems.
Most of them were an issue long before I felt the need to tweak things. And all of them are far outside the scope of said tweaks.
> What is odd to me is that you continue to use an operating system that is so ill suited to your preferences.
It's a work machine. My own computers all run Linux or OpenBSD (with a few exceptions, like the old laptop running Haiku).
(As a follow up here: turns out the Dock crashing is a MacForge thing AFAICT, so I won't blame macOS for that beyond the fact that I wouldn't need MacForge at all if macOS supported things that even ChromeOS supports, let alone a "real" Linux distro. Still janky that I have to disconnect from my docking station to log in, though; that's a far cry from "just works")
This is essentially a false statement for all intents and purposes.
Apple software is far from being immune to bugs, bad UX, etc., even on Apple hardware, as I can personally attest today from using a Macbook Pro daily for work.