While I understand that, I can't help but compare this to Mac hardware rather than software. There was a years-long stretch when it seemed like they'd really seriously lost the plot: the butterfly keyboard, the Touch Bar, the "trashcan" Mac, heat issues across the line. There was a real case to be made for abandoning Macs based on hardware issues alone (and I'm sure some folks did, and hopefully they're happy for it).

Then came Apple Silicon. And at least in my eyes, Apple hardware is the best it's been in a really long time.

There are some definite trainwrecks in the current state of Liquid Glass (especially on the Mac), and there have been other dubious choices and mounting bugs made over the last few years. But I've used both Windows 11 and a recent Linux distribution (Fedora, via Asahi Linux, running KDE Plasma), and while I like the latter it's just not enough to make me give up what I like on the Mac in terms of Mac-only applications and little life-bettering affordances I've internalized over the years I've been here. Yes, if the trajectory they're on now in software continues, I'll have to re-evaluate that -- but their hardware took a real turn for the better after Jony Ive and some of his deputies left. Alan Dye and some of his deputies left earlier this year, and I'm not going to count the new team out before giving them a chance to prove themselves.

It's a good point. I hated that butterfly keyboard, and the Touch Bar was an utterly useless gimmick for me. And they realised that and rolled it back (and added ports again!).

They do eventually listen to their customers. Let's hope it doesn't take as long for these changes to get rolled back.

I'm kinda stuck with Mac at work. I don't mind it, but I run Linux on all my personal computers and find that is way better.

I wonder how much connect there is between those in charge of hardware and those in charge of working software. It would be one thing if the software had a design direction, we all hated it, but it was implemented to its logical conclusion and pure stupid bugs weren't left to linger for years. That would be a matter of difference in taste and vision.

But I wonder if they have the ability to execute... anything, anymore. It's starting to look a little like Windows, which in a totally shameless and burlesque fashion has 3 or 4 design paradigms at the same time, jumbled together in a big stew.

It does feel like the decision making is internal-politics-driven rather than customer-satisfaction-driven, for both Mac and Windows now. Senseless changes that have little in common with other changes.

We've had this for decades with Windows, and internal leaks confirming that it's all to do with turf wars between departmental heads.

As you say, it's an indication that Apple are going down the same road, and are unable to actually execute a vision anymore.

I mean, you can take your iPad back to Apple and have them replace the battery, you know. For my current one (a "4th generation" Air) that'd be $120, which is not cheap, but it's cheaper than replacing it for $700 and a lot less stressful than trying to replace the battery myself.

(Having said that, I'm not ruling out replacing it, but I don't think I'll be inclined to do that until they stop updating its version of iPadOS.)

As a technical writer who's spent a great deal of time recently editing AI-drafted documentation, this use case is not going to go as well as AI boosters think it is. :)

It's the same challenge as picking an email server, which is why no one does that.

...

Seriously, joining Mastodon is not particularly difficult; people just freaked out a few years ago at being asked to pick a server to join. The joinmastodon.org website has gotten a lot better at explaining what that means and just directing people to mastodon.social if they don't want to pick something more specific, but the "oooh, this extra step makes Mastodon super super scary, if you pick wrong YOU ARE DAMNED FOREVERRRRRRRR" vibe persists.

Trump didn't even win 50% of the people who voted. He got the most votes (a plurality), but ~1.5% of the votes went to third party candidates, slightly more than the gap between Harris and Trump voters. One of the many reasons this "we have a huge mandate to reshape the country in the image of Project 2025" line is so infuriating; you have to go back to 1968 to find an election with a smaller non-negative popular vote margin of victory.

(Also, "non-negative" is carrying a lot of weight, since both Trump in his first term and George W. Bush in his first lost the popular vote. The idea that a wide majority of the country is conservative, let alone MAGA, is risible.)

As someone who uses Git for technical writing and Word's revision system for fiction that goes back and forth with an editor, I mean, sure, it's sort of a merge request, but you need to place a higher value on the "goes back and forth with an editor" part of the requirement than I think you are. :) An editor suggests changes, sometimes by editing directly and sometimes by leaving comments, that the author can accept, delete, or modify, right? If we're talking about technical writing that's already in a Git repo, then using a PR review system like GitHub's is an acceptable substitute. If we're talking about somebody sending a story to the New Yorker, we're not.

I'm definitely not saying established organizations should change their workflows to "just use git" or something—word processors already offer these features, and the workflow at the New Yorker is already tailored around the affordances of Word documents.

The underlying data model, though—passing around diffs and comments, tweaking sets of modifications before applying them—is the same. You could put together a decent editing workflow around git (although maybe the UI would need to be different from what we use for code). Version control is editing, is my point.

Of course not, but I'd rephrase what the OP said as something more like "it's unrealistic to expect them to go 'hey, guess what, never mind about all that' after a half a year.

I think it's more realistic to expect that they're going to stick with a UI officially called "Liquid Glass" for the next decade, but it's going to go through some serious iterative changes in the next couple of years -- probably much more than it would have were Alan Dye still around.

Almost everyone buying MacBooks installs applications outside of the App Store, the process for which has never changed (e.g., download it and run the installer or unzip it, use the free open-source package manager of your choice, etc.). I also can't find anything anywhere that suggests there are "terms of service" for Apple's hardware that prohibit installing another operating system on it, and part of Apple being "weakly supportive" of Asahi Linux is making deliberate design decisions to supporting installing third-party OSes on Apple Silicon in the first place. To copy from the Asahi Linux blog,

> Apple formally allows booting third-party operating systems on Apple Silicon Macs. Shortly after the Asahi project started, Apple even added a raw image mode to prevent macOS updates from breaking the boot process for third-party operating systems. This provided no benefit to macOS whatsoever; it merely served to help third-party operating system development.

There are a lot of reasons to be annoyed with Apple, but we don't need to invent new ones, and there's an awful lot of misinformation out there about Macs that conflates how locked down iOS is with the Mac (combined with the insistence that Macs are going to be locked down just as much as iPhones within the next few years, which I have literally been hearing since the iPhone came out in 2007). There are some things that are more difficult to do on macOS Tahoe than they were on MacOS Leopard twenty years ago (like, apparently, resize windows), but there is nothing that is "locked down" in a way that makes something I remember doing then literally impossible to do now.

Shortcuts are (probably) never going to be consistent across Linux apps; that's something Mac, and to some degree Windows, developers just historically care about more. I've also never found a better hardware trackpad than Apple's, nor found better OS-level drivers for trackpads than Apple's. (I'm sure somebody out there is ready to tell me their experience is different, but I've used many Linux distributions, many PC laptops with trackpads and at least two different PC desktop trackpads, and many Macs over the past quarter century and at least for me I'm going to stand by that.)

Syncthing is great. I'm closer to the poster you're responding to -- I tried Asahi Linux and liked it, at least when I ignored the "Mac users will probably like GNOME more" and switched to KDE Plasma (this Mac user, at least, thinks it's way better), but still ended up back on macOS Tahoe despite having a myriad of nits to pick with it. But when I was playing around with it, I set up Syncthing so I would be able to keep working on documents on the Linux laptop, other Macs, and the iPad, and Syncthing worked fast and basically flawlessly, better than either iCloud or Dropbox in my experience. I may eventually set it up as a local sync solution between the Macbook Pro I'm using for everything and a Mac Studio that's become my home server.