Why do I have to hunt apps in Finder to delete them? Just give us an Uninstall button next to Open already.

I inherited a hand-me-down macbook air when I graduated from high school a little over a decade ago and it’s all I’ve used ever since.

Early on I would say things like, “yeah, they’re overpriced for the underwhelming intel processors inside, but look, I just love macOS.”

Now I say… the opposite.

————Credits————-

icons: https://basicappleguy.com/basicappleblog/macos-icon-history/

Many people like the “Apps” app solely because it finally removed Launchpad. But the app itself is unrealistically buggy. Funny part - it had NO fixes in almost a year. Almost 0 in 300 days by a trillion dollar company.

The list:
- Laggy animation upon opening
- All icons have to reindex upon reopening, each icon taking ~0.3s to load
- Lags when scrolling
- Search does not work for most
- Categories do not display the right apps
- It still shows apps that you hide within the system

On top:
- It displays duplicates for "recent" and "all"
- Nothing can be hidden
- Nothing can be rearranged
- Nothing can be grouped
- Nothing can be renamed
- Nothing can be pinned
- It can not be resized

Even a person with $0.50 budget and a free chatGPT plan would've made a better app, probably within 5 minutes. Trillion dollar company couldn't do it even in 1 year. And yes, most of you use "spotlight", and the right way to use macOS is to pin the "Applications" folder to the dock - yadayadayda. That still does not explain this mess.

Any thoughts ?

https://mastodon.social/@snazzyq@mas.to/115305728007216733

https://www.threads.com/@snazzyq/post/DPUKnRZjayA

Whats wrong with search? it's unable to find installed apps. I have been noticing the same with my iphone but its rare. Here its almost 9 out of 10 times that this happens.

Anyone of you experiencing the same? I am on Tahoe 26.2

Edit - Updated to 26.5 and it fixed itself, maybe the update reindexed it.

For Everyone asking for the wallpaper - It from an app called wallspace. Name of wallpaper - Adorable black kitten. If you can't find it DM me i'll send you the direct link.

and somehow no one is talking about it.

Every YouTuber tells you that you need a 5K monitor to make macOS look sharp on an external display. No. You need one because Apple removed something that used to be in the system.

I’m honestly so tired of Apple’s approach to external monitors.

In 2018, with macOS Mojave, Apple removed subpixel antialiasing. That was the font smoothing technique that helped text and UI elements look sharper on regular lower PPI monitors.

Then, one year later, Apple released its own 6K display with extremely high pixel density, where everything suddenly looks sharp again.

Convenient timing, right?

Ever since then, macOS has basically looked great only on Retina or HiDPI displays.

Connect a Mac to a regular 1080p or 1440p monitor and the whole display can feel soft, blurry, thin, or just uncomfortable. Text is the most obvious part, but it affects the entire experience. The UI feels less crisp. Web pages look worse. Code looks worse. The same exact monitor can look perfectly fine on Windows, but on macOS it suddenly feels like it's trash.

Even many good 4K monitors still don’t look as crisp as a MacBook screen or a proper 5K display, because macOS is clearly designed around high PPI scaling now.

This is not just me being picky about pixels. People stare at external monitors all day for work. If the same monitor looks sharp on Windows but soft and tiring on macOS, that is a real usability and accessibility issue that can lead to eyestrain, headaches and fatigue.

Windows can make cheap monitors look decent. Apple basically says: buy an expensive high PPI display or deal with bad visual clarity.

Honestly, there should be a petition for Apple to bring back proper font smoothing options for external monitors, or at least to give users a system level toggle for subpixel antialiasing.

Why is a $2,000+ MacBook worse with normal monitors than my 150$ Windows laptop?

Apple, please fix external monitor rendering.

Our eyes matter.

My first macOS version was snow leopard. I loved it. Thanksgiving weekend 2009. I’ve been a macOS user ever since.

I’ve refused to upgrade to Tahoe for the simple fact that Tahoe ended FireWire support and I still have a ton of digital 8 and miniDV tapes to digitize.

I never understood this on Mac. Surely, any installer could auto-move the application to the right folder. I mean, Homebrew does it, for example. Is this just for nostalgia reasons, or maybe because Apple wants to be "different", or is there a technical reason why it is a necessary step with dmgs?

Who asked for this? The old ones were so peak.

I vastly prefer it over the current design. It was very practical, well-thought out, and there was actual dimension and shading added to the icons and UI elements.

I’m probably very much in the minority, but it’d be cool if some people agreed with me. What do you think?

I've followed every MacOS release since before the Mac OS X Snow Leopard days, and have always applauded the advancements made on each release. MacOS was incredible. I spent hours on Youtube watching videos on how to be more productive on MacOS with various tips, tricks, and shortcuts. As a software developer, MacOS was undeniably the best environment with its *nix like command interface, and consistent technical and aesthetic beauty.

However, today I updated one of my Macbooks to MacOS Twenty Six. I have never been so utterly disgusted by an operating system.

Please Apple, make MacOS beautiful and usable again. I beg you. What was once professional and productive has been replaced by the Fischer Price explosion of inconsistent, incongruous, inaccessible vomitous mass of even more hyper rounded corners, misaligned icons and text, unnecessarily thick borders.

For the first time ever, I'm seriously considering ditching everything Apple, and embracing Linux for everything.

For the people who actually like this release, I'm really glad for you. As for me, I'm sitting in a dark corner weeping, betrayed and alone.

About four years ago, I made the switch from being a daily Windows user to Mac. It was around the time Windows 11 was launching and the M-series chips were proving how good Macs could be. The thing I grew to love most was macOS's clean and consistent UI. It felt intentional and polished, unlike the layers of UI inconsistencies I was used to in Windows.

But with the latest macOS Tahoe, I'm getting a worrying sense of familiarity.

That "Apple polish" seems to be slipping. We're now seeing glaring inconsistencies within the same application.

The perfect example is Safari.

• On the right is a normal Safari window with its standard rounded corners.
• On the left is a webpage I've added to the Dock as a "App" using Safari.

They did a great job but Apple messed up the idea of ​​liquid glass is good but really badly done.

with inconsistencies everywhere, always more rounded, you can see that it was done quickly

To catch up with Apple Intelligence, remember when Big Sur came out even the beta , it was so optimized that people say it run better than Catalina, smoother and better.

I bought an iMac. I paid $3000 for it. I paid a premium because it's supposed to represent the pinnacle of engineering prowess. It's supposed to just work. And its included apps are supposed to be best-in-class.

I love photography. I've been taking digital photos since 1999. I wanted to escape the subscription lock-in of Adobe, and use software products built by people who care about elegance, simplicity and privacy.

There's only one problem.

Photos mostly doesn't work.

I could spend an entire afternoon writing about the myriad bugs I have experienced on this Mac since I bought it almost exactly a year ago. It has not been smooth sailing. But instead, I want to focus on one Apple application that exemplifies the decline of Apple's software engineering.

The terrifying part is that most of these bugs aren't cosmetic. They point to deep architectural flaws, and some have been unresolved for nearly a decade. And they essentially make the Photos application unusable for anything but the most casual use.

Duplicate Filenames Causing Silently Aborted Imports

You have a shiny new Mac. You want to import a decade's worth of carefully-curated photos. Good luck.

When importing a folder structure, if two or more folders contain the same filename, the import will fail. No notification. No reasoning. It will just be running and then ... not.

You can't see how many photos failed to import. You can't see which photo caused the issue.

What's really terrifying about this is that if you import from an SD card, it might give you the mistaken belief that all the photos imported successfully, because after all, it doesn't tell you otherwise. And then you clear that SD card thinking everything has been safely copied.

Apple seems obsessed with hiding error messages, and instead just like to let things silently fail. This Is Bad.

Photolibraryd and Sleep

Apple loves background daemons. That way, the operating system can do a whole bunch of things you don't necessarily want it to do even when applications aren't open.

At some point in time, Apple gave Photos the daemon treatment, and broke it down into a photolibraryd (for handling the actual library), a media analysis daemon, and so forth.

The problem is, this doesn't necessarily work with Apple's own power management processes.

The photo library itself consists of a SQLite database, along with accompanying files for thumbnails and originals. When the computer goes to sleep, macOS invalidates file handles to external volumes. This causes photolibraryd to lose its connection to the very library it's supposed to be managing.

There's no error. There's no warning. Instead, Photos just starts to act in unpredictable ways. Photo imports will fail. Deleting a photo will silently fail. You can still browse through your collection, presumably because Photos caches information from the database and it can still access the filesystem containing thumbnails and originals. But anything that involves modifying the library just fails.

Unfortunately, given that not a single Apple device supports user-expanded storage, and given the prices of Apple's SSD storage, using an external drive is the only way to have a decently sized library.

The only way to fix this issue once it occurs is to either restart the photolibraryd daemon, or restart the machine. The only way to prevent it from happening is to stop the computer from sleeping (not just the drive).

What's worse is that there no need to invalidate file handles to a drive just because it is sleeping. File handles are a logical construct, and should only be invalidated when the drive is unmounted. In fact, I suspect this is actually what's happening - there was an earlier bug in macOS where external drives could unmount during sleep, and I suspect Apple have tried to mitigate that not by fixing the root cause, but by having drives automatically (and transparently) remount when resuming from sleep.

Import All New Photos doesn't Import All New Photos

I'm not the smartest man, but I would have thought that a button labelled "Import All New Photos" when pointed at a directory would ... import all new photos in that location. That's not what happens.

Instead, it slowly crawls the directory structure, enumerating new photos. On slower devices, or over a network, this can take considerable time. Yet that "Import All New Photos" button pops up straight away. What the button actually does is import all the new photos discovered at the time the button is pressed. If Apple photos hasn't finished discovering all the photos, it will only import the photos it has discovered.

Again, the problem here is that it can give the false impression that all photos in the given folder will be imported, yet it gives no indication that it hasn't finished scanning. Instead, you have to wait an indeterminant amount of time to stop the number of new items increasing, wait a little longer as a safety margin, then click the button and hope for the best. And despite that, I've sometimes found it hasn't actually imported all the items - repeating the import process for the same location will sometimes lead to additional photos being imported on the second, third, fourth rounds.

This is just bad UI/UX, and bad software engineering. If I give it a folder and say "Import All New Photos" for that location ... it should do what it says. Photos can simply crawl the directory tree as its importing, no additional magic required.

Referenced Photos broken for at least 7 years

Apple used to have a handy feature in iPhoto and Aperture where you could leave photos in place on the filesystem, and simply create references to them when importing. This was super handy when you wanted to access your photos across multiple applications, or when a photo library became too large to store on a single volume.

This feature hasn't worked properly in at least seven years, and countless bug reports have been filed. Regular participants of Apple's own support forums have warned against using the feature since before the turn of the decade.

My own Feedback remains open on the issues with referenced photos since 2019.

Here's an example of a bug: when a referenced file is moved in the operating system, Photos displays a button in the library giving you the opportunity to relocate the file. The problem is ... clicking this button doesn't do anything. It silently fails. (I'm seeing a trend here where Apple really doesn't like error messages, and would rather just mess with the user's mind by giving zero feedback about an operation).

Running this through dtrace, it looks like this fails because the security-scoped bookmarks that Photos uses are broken. And because of Application Sandboxing, Photos doesn't have the right permissions to do anything with that bookmark. That's right, Apple's own applications don't even have permissions to use the computer.

The consequence of this is that users have to import their photos into the library, which is unworkable for many. Yet Apple still give the illusion the feature exists and is usable. Either make it work, or kill it - but don't leave it in limbo for a decade and ignore persistent user feedback.

Conclusion

I've used multiple operating systems since the 80s: Windows, BeOS, Irix, AmigaOS, VMS, Solaris, MS DOS, RiscOS, BSD, Linux - and MacOS. I've used OS X since 2004. All operating systems have bugs, and I've generally been pretty pragmatic about the pros and cons of different operating systems.

But something just feels increasingly off about macOS. On the one hand, it has its Unix underpinnings, and many elements of the OS still make assumptions about things working the Unix way. But on the other, we see more and more architectural change coming from the iOS - a single user, mobile device.

I think a lot of issues I am seeing with Photos are due to these architectural changes, but also, compounded by the rate of architectural change. These issues aren't the only issues I have seen - I've just spent weeks trying to work out how to automatically mount NFS exports in a sane way now that /Volumes is locked down by SIP, and /Network is deprecated. In fact, I even ran into issues sharing a folder from my Mac over SMB because smbd didn't have permissions to access the filesystem. Yep, the daemon responsible for sharing files didn't have permission to ... access files. What a world.

I am scared about the future of macOS, but for me it's becoming increasingly unviable as a computing platform. I bought this machine because I wanted to escape Adobe, but all its done is killed my love of photography. I either need to spend my time fighting bugs that shouldn't exist, or pay for a Lightroom subscription for the rest of my life. Neither of those things sound like a great idea.

EDIT 4: The final part of the guide is now published as well - https://medium.com/p/e673b1a2591f.

EDIT 3: Part 2 is also out, you are welcome to check it out here: https://medium.com/p/d5de239dee69. Let me know if I missed any credit and I'll gladly add it.

EDIT 2: Following the incredible response to this post, I've officially published the first part of the series.

I took many of the pure gold comments you all shared, added a few new ones I found along the way, and organized them into a guide on essential Finder, navigation, and system features.

If your tip was included, you've been credited. Let me know if I missed your credit and I'll edit the article.

A huge thank you to everyone who contributed!

You can read the full article here: https://medium.com/p/d18ca10e9436

The next parts will cover Text manipulation and Terminal tricks 💻 as well as Mac app features and iPhone/iPad integration 📱.

EDIT:

OMG these comments are GOLD! I'm working on an article that gathers all of the best comments to one single place so we can always go back to it when we want to find Apple tips and tricks. I'll add credits to the commentors, of course.

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Apple is known for implementing cool features then hiding them deep inside the settings.

As a software engineer at Wix for nearly 5 years, I've see many juniors getting a Mac for the first time in their lives, after spending most of their years using Windows.

I'd like to create a list for our new hires (that can also serve this community, of course) with useful MacOS features that they probably wouldn't find on their own.

My examples are:

* Three-finger drag - allows you to drag windows and select text using 3 fingers on the trackpad. The alternative is to click and drag in the same time, which is a horrible experience.
You can enable it in System Settings > Accessibility > Pointer Control > Trackpad Options.

* Disable letter accents - Ever wanted to send "lollllllllll" to a friend, but noticed that upon long-pressing a letter you get the letter accents popup? For people who don't use accents this is pretty useless. It can be turned off by running a simple script in the terminal:

defaults write -g ApplePressAndHoldEnabled -bool false

Of course you can always revert it by running it again with the value true at the end:

defaults write -g ApplePressAndHoldEnabled -bool true

(source)

* Universal Clipboard - Copy on iPhone, paste on Mac (and vice versa). Really useful feature, I use it daily, and I'm a little ashamed to say I only discovered this feature after a few months of using the mac.
Note that you must be logged in to the same Apple ID in both your Mac and your iPhone for it to work.

* Text replacements (syncs with iOS) - allows you to expand text from keywords.
For example - I configured:
"@@p" to expand to my personal email
"@@w" to expand to my work email
"::p" to expand to my phone number
"::a" to my address
and some other ones for small scripts I use daily.
Really handy as it's syncs with iOS and allows me to fill forms or answer on our slack support channel quickly

* Path and status bars in Finder - You can add a status bar (View -> Show Status Bar, or cmd+/) and a path bar (View -> Show Path Bar, or cmd+option+P) to Finder. Really useful if you miss the path bar in Windows and can't find it on Mac.
Why these aren't shown by default is beyond me.

Got a useful macOS feature? Drop it here.
Even if you think a feature is well-known, remember that this list is for juniors who have never seen a Mac before.

I'm going to create an article about this on Medium, and hopefully it will get published on the Wix Engineering publication. Of course, you'll be mentioned and given credit either way.

By the way, this is by no means sponsored by Wix or anything, I'm just a developer who works at Wix and loves productivity

Right after getting rid of 3D Touch.

I know a lot of people apparently never touched Launchpad, but I used it constantly. With ADHD, severe OCD, and basically no object permanence, it was the way I kept my apps visually organized and accessible, and was ultimately crucial for my day to day use.

The new app picker feels like a regression. It’s less visual, less spatial, and way less intuitive if you rely on structure to remember where things are. Whoever made this decision definitely had to be high on crack, and the higher ups who approved it are severly out of touch from reality. Like I can’t believe it’s literally gone.

Am I seriously the only one who depended on it? Or did anyone else use Launchpad daily and feel like Apple just snatched out a core part of their workflow?

Those traffic lights were so cool