I actually love Apple for pushing this matter this hard and sticking to its guns. This will bring in more regulatory scrutiny not just in the U.S. but in other countries as well. That will force Apple to give up (maybe in a decade or so) this practice of arbitrary rules and squeezing the last penny from others.

Thanks a lot, Eddy Cue, for all that you do to bring Apple down to its knees!

In the U.S. I wouldn't expect meaningful regulation from an administration that accepts bribes in the form of literal gold nuggets.

Tim Cook has been spending a lot of time sucking up to Donald Trump recently, so I think the U.S. federal government will only be assisting Apple

So in about a trillion or two dollars of revenue’s time, then.

On my company provided laptop with Windows 11 (previously Windows 10), the top three CPU usage was and is usually from Antimalware Executable, Microsoft Defender and MS Teams (or Crowdstrike). I don’t download files or get files from other sources often, yet these things keep doing busywork and slowing things down. Despite virus and threat protection running quick scans often and forcing a full disk scan every couple of weeks or so.

It’s almost as if these programs are people who ought to show that they’re doing something even though they’re just heating the room and running the fan.

Same here. ng install takes 2000x as long as on my similairly priced mac. Installing a package for any language locks up the laptop for indexing

The worst part is it can’t even show the attachments sorted by size so that one can browse and delete some large ones. Same with the Photos app on iOS. Can’t sort photos and videos by size from within the app.

What’s the point of using application databases if the application cannot even query items by size and other attributes?!

> What’s the point of using application databases if the application cannot even query items by size and other attributes?!

I know that's not the solution that we want, but at least you should be able to look into the sqlite database it's using under the hood (https://github.com/RhetTbull/osxphotos/wiki/Understanding-th...)

I feel like this is leaking into macOS Sequoia updates as well. Disk space just keeps getting eaten up quickly and I’m scrambling to clear up some space on a MacBook Pro with a large disk and lots of RAM. I know I should reduce user data (like the documents, photos and videos I’ve stored), but something doesn’t seem right in how more and more disk space keeps getting used.

> They need to fire Craig Federighi first, but of course that is Tim Cook's job, and he showed poor judgment in firing spiky but effective Scott Forstall to keep that hack Jony Ive. Ive is the one who appointed Alan Dye, an advertising designer with no clue about UX and too arrogant to listen to those who did, leading to iOS 7 and now Liquid Ass.

These have been exactly my thoughts for years. Craig Federighi does not have any taste or interest in software quality. And Jony Ive (after Steve Jobs) has been a disaster for UI/UX and industrial hardware design. Tim Cook has been an extraordinary bean counter and hasn’t been hiring useful people (from users’ perspective) under him.

Craig Federighi needs to go when Tim Cook also moves out of his current role this year. Maybe, maybe, there are some old school folks at Apple who can take over and do things better.

I’ve seen before that this is not followed in certain cases, such as the entire development team being in a specific country where some or many team members don’t know English (well enough). As an anecdote, I’ve seen a team in a large multinational company (US origin) in Spain that used function names, variable names, database table names (and column names), log message text and many other things in Spanish. English was only for the language keywords because that’s what the compiler would accept.

With the latest Google Gemini deal to be the backend for Apple’s AI, I wish Apple could also do a deal for search (even though Google seems to be struggling more as time passes). Apple’s search being broken in Settings on iOS, macOS and iPadOS seem intentional — it can’t search in a relatively small and fixed list of items! Is it any wonder that Mail search doesn’t work with external data?

The AirDrop and Hotspot issues described are spot on. The success rate for these is like 40% to 65% (the latter if you’re lucky). These features require doing a dance of airplane mode, disconnect from WiFi, go to Settings and fiddle with the toggles, etc. When it works, it’s like magic. At other times, it’s a big joke on “it just works”.

Text selection and the trials to just move the cursor quickly and accurately: it’s like Apple has no senior management that cares enough (looking at you, Craig Federighi), no QA (this is obvious truth to every user) and no money to spend on making things better (don’t let the stock prices fool you). FWIW, I know of slower and fiddly ways to move the cursor somewhat (press space, hold and move or place finger on the text, hold and move).

All these issues persist for years or decades because senior management does not care. I can’t think of any other rational explanation.

My god I cancelled my isp because I’m moving. Thought hot spot would be fine for a few months. Every single day I have to restart my MacBook Air for hot spot to work. Multiple times every day I have to turn hot spot off and on even though it’s in discoverable but won’t connect. Multiple times every day hot spot is just off and can’t be turned on in control center. And this is with iPhone 17 and m2 on most recent updates. I can’t imagine on older hardware.

With older hardware the trick is to not upgrade the OS.

Apple's strategy is actually to make people auto-upgrade to make their work of maintaining older OS/software cheaper and make people who don't have recent enough hardware suffer.

It's funny that one argument for Apple was that you got updates for free. But in practice, Android doesn't need to upgrade the OS to access recent apps and ship security updates for old versions of Android. You just lose access to new OS functionalities, but it has been a while since there was much to care about.

I agree having to work around this is ridiculous, but maybe consider a little MiFi router? Those are cool to have anyway.

I've had this experience too. One thing I've found that can sometimes help with laptops failing to connect is renaming your iPhone in the settings (which in turn renames the hotspot name)

Search inside settings is a baffling one because search seems like it’d be a relatively easy thing to tackle. On iOS 18 I can’t really find anything in the settings.

If I go to the applications sub-sunscreen and search for an app, it’s a “no results found” for 5–10 seconds. Sometimes it does find an app, but that unreliability means there’s no point using the search bar.

> I loved Unity on desktop, and I know many others too.

I loved Unity in the desktop too (I had installed Ubuntu on an old Mac mini). I was disappointed when it was killed and then I switched to XFCE.

I think I get what you’re hinting at. But is there a more expensive option that’s free (as in freedom) and provides an experience that the GP referred to?

And there will never be such option if we all collectively choose to perpetuate Apple's monopoly. It is us, of all people, who need to take a stance, because we have the necessary skill.

> while Outlook supports starting five minutes late

This contrast is an incorrect assumption. Outlook does allow starting meetings late as well as ending meetings early, with somewhat arbitrary durations. [1] I have definitely seen these options in Outlook settings (on web, since I hate Outlook).

However, I haven’t used it because the teams one works with need to be alerted and reminded of it before it sticks in their minds (if nobody else is using such settings).

[1]: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/end-meetings-earl...

Our corporate IT managed to enable that setting for everyone, which made the transition easier. Doesn't stop people from overriding it, alas.

Yes, outlook supports both. At Microsoft though we only ever used "start five late".