
Is macOS Becoming Unmaintainable? - sylens
https://eclecticlight.co/2020/08/30/last-week-on-my-mac-is-macos-becoming-unmaintainable/
======
AnonHP
It used to be a long running joke as well as practical wisdom on the Windows
side to always wait for SP1 (Service Pack 1) for better stability and never to
install the X.0 version.

For all the “doubling down on Mac” that Apple’s senior employees harp about in
interviews, macOS itself has been focusing more on eye candy and iOS parity
than on stability. For my machines, I switch to Linux once macOS updates are
no longer available, even though the user experience isn’t as great with older
hardware and support for external peripherals like the Trackpad. For machines
that can run the latest macOS, I upgrade every two whole releases on macOS
(and that after it’s way beyond a X.0 release) since security updates are made
available to past releases for a few years.

Right now I’m on the latest Mojave release, and skipped Catalina completely.
I’ll consider Big Sur a few minor releases after 11.0 is released. This also
makes some practical sense because Apple works on features with a multi-year
plan but releases them partially done in a “brand new version” (you’ll notice
this pattern if you look at it).

I’m thankful to all the brave souls who venture sooner (intentionally or
because they bought new hardware that will refuse to run an older OS) and pave
the way for me to avoid potholes and land mines.

My days of tinkering with the computer and “yak shaving” are long over. Even
though my comment may sound hostile to macOS, there’s no other OS I’d rather
start using my personal computer with unless I really, really have to.

~~~
perryizgr8
> For my machines, I switch to Linux once macOS updates are no longer
> available

What's the best way to use Linux on an old MacBook air? Should I be running it
in a VM? Is there a way to dula boot? The laptop is quite old, it has 4GB of
RAM. So I'm worried nothing will run well on it. Macos definitely feels
sluggish on it now.

~~~
jlokier
On my Macbook Pro, I found Linux used more energy running directly, than
running inside a VM (tested with VMware Fusion).

So I'm happy running Linux in a VM.

This might be due to the dual GPUs (on higher end MBPs), I didn't check
further after the initial battery test.

It's nicer anyway, because of the ability to run MacOS and Linux at the same
time, and four-finger swipe between their desktops. That way I get the nicer
GUI of MacOS, consistently good touchpad (including in Linux), and Linux for
my command line dev needs, and can use utilities for either that aren't
available on the other.

On an old Macbook Air, Linux might us less energy running directly rather than
VM. To be sure you'd have to try both.

4GB of RAM is tight for current software, even Linux, and a VM will make it
tighter. Firefox is using more than 4GB for me right now, and Safari is also
using more than 4GB. So you will need to avoid using Firefox the way I do,
regardless of OS :-)

You might need to stick with older versions of whatever you decide to use. I
would pick one of the Linux distros that is explicitly for old machines and
small memory usage.

~~~
heavyset_go
Look into tuning TLP with a GUI if you plan on running Linux on your laptop
and power usage is an issue.

> _4GB of RAM is tight for current software, even Linux, and a VM will make it
> tighter. Firefox is using more than 4GB for me right now, and Safari is also
> using more than 4GB. So you will need to avoid using Firefox the way I do,
> regardless of OS :-)_

You can use cgroups to limit the amount of memory an application can use. I
use it to limit Firefox's memory usage on a machine with much more memory than
that.

------
iansinnott
> Apple has long taken pride that “it just works”, but seems to have convinced
> itself that is inviolate fact

This. Apple's inability to admit fault coupled with decreasing software
stability makes life difficult in many ways. For instance, aside from the
obvious detrimental effects of OS bugs, it's often quite difficult to find
specific solutions without a specific error message. "$APP silently fails" or
"Why is my framerate so low?" don't always lead to answers, even though there
are probably many others running into the same issues.

~~~
tonyedgecombe
I'm not sure software stability is decreasing, these sort of problems have
existed for as long as I can remember.

~~~
kalleboo
Yeah, people forget how buggy macOS has been. Both Snow Leopard and Mountain
Lion were public admissions that they needed to focus on quality. They haven’t
had a proper one of those in a while.

That said, I can’t remember a time when bugs have been as long-standing as
they are now. SMB file shares have been completely broken for nearly 3 years
now (the solution is to buy the program AutoMounter), and USB-C docks have
been broken since day 1 and still are on Big Sur.

~~~
swiley
I use a usb-c dock with some version of OS X on my work laptop and it totally
works 28/30 days. The other two days I usually notice it’s not working when
the CPU throttles because the battery is now at 4% and is “not charging” (I
still haven’t figured out the difference between the “charging” and “plugged
in but not charging” icons.)

------
bgorman
I recently switched to macOS after using Linux pretty much exclusively for
personal use over the last 5 years. (2020 MacBook Air)

For me the most infuriating thing is that Apple completely hides what is
actually going on from the user.

Want to manually scale your display to an exact resolution? Go to Displays,
Hold down the option key and then click on the text next to a radio button.
WTF!!! Who designed this, this is completely non nondiscoverable.

An exFAT external hard drive wasn't "shut down correctly" ... no problem Mac
OS will just run fsck in the background and refuse mount the drive or let you
examine the disk in Disk Utility until it is complete. If you kill -9 the
fsck, you get stuck in some limbo state where you can't mount the disk or run
diagnostics on it.

The worst thing I have discovered is Pages... The stylesheets and layout logic
make absolutely no sense, it is way worse than Word or Libreoffice.

However the OS does run smoother on a day to day basis than my work provided
MacBook Pro 2019 running Mojave, and there is absolutely no screen tearing.

~~~
marmaduke
> this is completely non nondiscoverable

I also don’t find this discoverable, but option clicking was best analogy to
right clicking on Apple since the mouse used to have one button.

Your complaint is like saying that having to copy and paste with ctrl c and
ctrl v is non discoverable in Windows with a two button mouse because in Linux
it’s just select text and middle click somewhere else.

~~~
rowanG077
How is that non-discoverable? Most software literally tells you beside the
copy/paste entry that it is ctrl+c/v.

~~~
marmaduke
Because the first part is to select text with a mouse?

~~~
rowanG077
No It isn't. You have various shortcuts on your keyboard that can select text.
With many of them labeled in context menus as well.

------
easton
I don’t know, at scale in a company, my mood has always been (with Windows,
mostly, but sometimes older versions of macOS) that if the issue doesn’t exist
on a clean test box, we’re reimaging your machine. Since home folders are
often somewhere else (folder redirection or OneDrive in Windows, in this case
on a separate volume from /System), a OS reinstall isn’t very time consuming.
Once the OS comes back up, MDM grabs it and sets up policy and applications.

For personal use, most people don’t install stuff that’s that complicated to
redo (maybe at most, Adobe and Office which are download pkg and sign in), so
if the OS was so fundamentally borked that the sealed system volume stood in
your way, you’d waste more time trying to fix it by hand rather than just
reinstalling the OS from Internet Recovery and signing back in. Especially
since Time Machine does a good job at backing up home folders.

~~~
livueta
At one of the large companies I worked for, IT took that "just pave it"
approach for _everything_. Maybe because of the contrast between that and my
day job of spending weeks to months root-causing really weird distributed
systems issues, it stuck me as penny-wise-pound-foolish. At least in this
example, that attitude was used as an excuse to never actually investigate
anything, even issues that recurred within days of a re-image. Outlook won't
connect? Here, go watch the installer for a couple of hours, use your device
for a day or two then back to square one. Eventually, it's easy to get so sick
of IT's obvious unwillingness to actually fix shit that IT is avoided unless
absolutely necessary, and everyone's productivity suffers as a result. At that
company, IT was at the top of the negatives column on every internal survey.

It is definitely an effective attitude to take at scale, but it has to be
paired with at least some troubleshooting of the class of issue. Otherwise,
severe bugs get swept under the rug by user exhaustion and IT inaction.

~~~
pxeboot
On the opposite end of the spectrum, I worked somewhere that avoided reimaging
PCs at all costs. Every system had tens of random workarounds applied to 'fix'
issues as quickly as possible. Nothing was consistent, and IT also had a very
poor reputation.

------
brundolf
> We are heading rapidly towards the corollary to “it just works” being “and
> if it doesn’t, just wipe everything and re-install”.

Is this really all that bad? In the era of everything living in the cloud, it
generally takes me only a couple hours to setup a system again from scratch.
Not that I've ever had to do this on macOS personally (though I did once on
iOS), but if I had, I wouldn't be terribly upset about it.

> If every time your car had a problem you had to replace its engine, wouldn’t
> you consider that abysmal engineering?

This is a ridiculous analogy. Re-installing an OS is free (both the materials
and, for Apple customers who don't know how to do it themselves, the service).

macOS today doesn't always just work. I run into bugs sometimes and get
frustrated. But whenever I boot up Windows and have to fight to get the most
basic dev tools working, or boot up Linux and have to fight to get a core
function like system updates or audio working, I'm reminded how much closer
macOS still is to "just working" than anything else out there.

~~~
phoe-krk
_> Re-installing an OS is free (both the materials and, for Apple customers
who don't know how to do it themselves, the service)._

To make a semi-unrelated quote from Jamie Zawinski, "Linux is only free if
your time has no value."

~~~
wqsz7xn
> "Linux is only free if your time has no value."

I've always wondered if Ubuntu was introduced to a child would they learn to
use it just as fast as a child that uses Windows? All the times I've used
Ubuntu it's exactly the same as windows without all the distraction.

~~~
phoe-krk
I guess so, yes. This comment from Zawinski is _very_ old by today's
standards, and Linux has made massive progress when it comes to usability. A
child should be able to learn it quickly.

~~~
pjmlp
My graphics card and time spent configuring hardware video decoding begs to
differ.

------
bborud
I used Linux as my main operating system on the desktop for 16-17 years before
switching to OSX. The reason was that I was tired of having laptops that
didn't work properly and the endless weeks of tweaking whenever I got a new
laptop. It also helped that Macbooks were pretty decent laptops.

I needed a portable UNIX machine. First and foremost. The software available
for it was a bonus.

In the latter half of the 2010s the quality of the Macbooks has had a sharp
downturn. The majority of the Macbook Pros my team has bought has had
problems. Keyboard, screen connectors, batteries, etc. Fully one third of them
have had more than one problem (including recurrence of the same problem after
repair).

Experiences colleagues have had with the new Macbook Pro 16" are also quite
depressing. Reports of the thing thermal-throttling and spinning up its fans
like crazy doesn't make me want to upgrade from my 2015 Macbook Pro 15". I'll
hang on to that machine until there's nothing left of it.

The hardware quality argument for Apple is gone. They are odd, fragile,
finnicky devices that you can't really repair (it is too expensive, and the
approved repair shops generally do not have the qualifications to do board
repairs - they can only reliably, and expensively, replace stuff).

And while people have their own anecdata, I've had to approve computer
purchases for my department for the last 6-7 years. We do NOT have anywhere
near these kinds of problems with Thinkpads.

I, rather foolishly, installed Catalina, and what is immediately obvious is
where Apple is heading: they want to lock down Macs more. Getting software
from parties that have not paid Apple for access (come on, let's be honest,
this is about money) to run is getting more and more painful. And a few things
simply do not run anymore.

The trajectory Apple is on means that I might go back to using Macs as my
secondary platform - or even start to look to Windows as my secondary
platform. With Linux as my primary platform.

I think that right now is perhaps the time in the last 20 years where having
more desktop software for Linux would be a very good thing. I really, really
want Fusion 360, Affinity suite, Ableton Live etc on Linux now.

Because I really, really do not want Apple to be part of my future if they are
going to become a fully walled garden running on marginal hardware.

~~~
chongli
I honestly miss the classic Macs of the 80s and 90s. Sure they had their bad
points. The operating system let badly-behaved applications stomp all over the
address space and crash the machine, and preference files (as well as the
desktop database) got corrupted frequently.

But they were so easy to use! The operating system was so simple you as one
person could understand the whole thing. There weren’t countless background
processes running all the time. You knew exactly which applications were
running (only one, in the case of system 6.0 and earlier).

And Apple was a different company back then. They were artists and underdogs.
Now they’ve become this ruthless capitalist machine of staggering scale. I
guess nothing good lasts forever.

~~~
bborud
Nice try. Tell you what: what if you come work for me and deal with developers
whose machines break and deciding how to spend a limited hardware budget so as
to maximise productivity and minimize downtime.

I am, of course, assuming you will be doing this for free. Certainly the
opportunity to troll people will be its own reward.

------
bradknowles
And this is part of why I refuse to be forced to upgrade to Catalina.

So, when I buy “new” hardware, I will make sure that it is compatible with
Mojave.

Which means it won’t actually be new....

Something’s wrong when the best hardware you can buy from a manufacturer is
from the versions they’re not making any more.

~~~
WantonQuantum
This is exactly where I am right now and I’m starting to explore my options
for jumping to Linux for desktop and laptop. There are some great distros out
there that I’m looking forward to trying.

~~~
vladvasiliu
I'm more or less in the same situation. I own a 2013 15" MBP that still works
perfectly but I'm afraid of what will happen if / when it stops working. I
actually use it often, so it could get stolen / I could drop it / etc.

My client uses Windows and HP computers. I've been able to save an "old"
Elitedesk 800 G2 SFF (6th gen i5) from the dumpster and upgraded it with an
old ssd I had lying around and 16 GB of ram (instead of 8). I've set up
ArchLinux on it with I3 and boy do I love that machine. It's plenty powerful,
quiet, and everything just works. It actually replaced my MBP as my "dev"
machine during the WFH phase.

I've also had close to no issues running Arch on a Probook 430 G5. Everything
except for the fingerprint reader works. But while the desktop is great, I'm
less happy with the laptop. It's not so much related to Linux but to the
physical machine itself (the touchpad isn't great, the keyboard's texture
feels weird, it has coil whine, assembly is half-assed and rubs the wrists
while working on it, etc).

As they say, YMMV, but my experience is that depending on what you do day to
day with your computer, a Linux PC may actually work surprisingly well
compared to a mac, especially on the desktop where the superior materials and
assembly of the mac are less of an issue.

------
_ph_
As a long-term mac user, I hope that the transition to ARM and what goes along
with it, is largely responsible for what went wrong in recent years. Not only
did this transition for sure mean a lot of team reshuffling, additional tasks
to do etc. To my understanding, there was a big reorg in the code base itself.
iOS began as a fork of macOS (or rather OS X as it was called back then), and
over the years, those two codes bases drifted apart. To my understanding, with
the move to Apple Silicon, not only macOS was ported to the new architecture,
but the code bases got merged again. So the aim is to have one universal core
onto which the separate teams can build iOS/iPadOS/watchOS/tvOS and of course
macOS.

Such a big code refactoring is of course a very big undertaking, causing a lot
of disruption. But once it is finished, not only the disruption goes away, but
hopefully maintenance is easier and more systematic. If that holds true, then
macOS should be improving again moving forward. That all platforms use
identical or at least very similar hardware should also help stability.

------
mindfulhack
I think in general macOS is an amazing operating system, recent Catalina bugs
aside.

Something related: what I've been really living with is the T2 chip kernel
panic hardware bug. Over 3 different models (the 2017, 2018, then the 2019
16-inch MBP which is my current), I've seen Apple go from:

\- The initial full-scale buggy behaviour of 1-2 complete system crash &
forced reboots per week;

\- to Apple suddenly deleting all my previous system kernel crash logs (and no
longer recording new ones in Console.app) without my consent or knowledge even
though it's my own machine that I paid over $5000 for (must be silent updates
of some kind because it happened in between macOS updates);

\- to observing Apple slowly tweaking how macOS responds to the kernel panic
by no longer crashing the system but just freezing the screen and all controls
for up to a minute (while sound continues) before unfreezing itself (this
happens maybe 3-5 times per week for me, even more, it happens when watching
full-screen video in any app).

So they've improved it but it's still disruptive and noticeable, and plain
unacceptable on hardware this expensive.

Yes, I'm slowly planning a move to Linux, but it's not easy, it will take time
and it's a major adjustment depending on what your computer needs are. Linux
Mint Cinnamon seems the safest bet to me.

I say all this knowing how catastrophically worse Windows 10 is in terms of
bugs like Windows updates suddenly hard deleting your entire Documents folder.

~~~
mschuster91
> to observing Apple slowly tweaking how macOS responds to the kernel panic by
> no longer crashing the system but just freezing the screen and all controls
> for up to a minute (while sound continues) before unfreezing itself (this
> happens maybe 3-5 times per week for me, even more, it happens when watching
> full-screen video in any app).

That's not a kernel panic then, by definition a kernel panic is an
unrecoverable event. What you're seeing is likely an issue somewhere in the
GUI/GPU driver stack. Windows used to crash upon such issues too, they
mitigated it by moving lots of stuff to userspace.

For me, what is a regular event is freezing for a dozen seconds whenever I
alt-tab to Cisco VPN, but ah well that may also be a result of shoddy
antivirus software.

~~~
roboyoshi
I have these regularly when I wake my 16inch macbook from sleep.
Keyboard+Trackpad+(Touchbar) Freeze for 30s or up to 1min.. and then it
continues like nothing happened. Haven't found much info about that, but
reading this, it seems to fit. I'm really digging my machine, but those
"silent" errors and apple not admitting _anything_ takes a lot of fun out of
it.

------
jmercouris
It seems all of the engineering resources are going towards iOS and macOS is
only an afterthought, a device necessary for making iOS apps... I'll be moving
on when I get a new laptop.

~~~
kalleboo
They’re doing lots and lots of engineering on macOS - APFS, read only system
partition, app sandboxing with user file protection, app notarization,
catalyst, SwiftUI, Big Sur native iOS app support, the whole Big Sur redesign,
custom T2 controller, ARM Macs.

The problem seems rather like they are making too many deep system changes
without any bug fix time to let them settle.

~~~
the_lucifer
Exactly this. There's no breathing time or a tick-tock cycle for large changes
to settle down. The last proper one being High Sierra. Three years of
consecutive large scale underlying changes are taking a toll on the overall
polish and stability of macOS

------
bookmarkable
I feel for developers on macOS bugs, bloat and unreliability, but for many
users, it still works every day for 5 to 7 years without issue, and updates
just mean some new emoji are available.

~~~
Voliokis
Unless you're on a device that can only be upgraded to 10.13, after which it
won't get security updates anymore after 11 is released. Meanwhile, I can
still put W10 on 10-12 year old PCs and it'll run fine (if the hardware wasn't
particularly terrible even for back then). It might not support some of the
latest features, but it works and you're not subject to some arbitrary
decision by Microsoft as to whether you're allowed to use W10 or not.

~~~
tonyedgecombe
W10 is terrible on traditional hard drives which most PC's were using 10-12
years ago. We are also at the tail end of the core 2 duo era, those devices
aren't really up to the job.

~~~
fock
well, a cheap SSD costs 20€. And you know, with 95% of Windows-based PCs you
can just replace the harddisk. whoaaaa

~~~
rorykoehler
I use Windows at work occasionally and I can't get over how much clicking I
have to do. Also some basic stuff is missing without convoluted work arounds
(such as resetting the default app to open a file type to none). W10 is not in
the same league as MacOS despite MacOs getting worse.

------
apatheticonion
It's been fun, MacOS, but it looks like our time is drawing to a close.

With competitive, affordable AMD hardware and better GPU support, both WSL and
Linux (KDE Plasma) offer compelling competition.

The only rebuttal from Apple being extra padding on the UI, so it seems like I
am no longer your target audience.

Fair well, it was a beautiful, cohesive experience while it lasted.

~~~
randomsearch
Was thinking about jumping ship but:

\- MacBook Air is still lovely (once ahem I had keyboard fixed)

\- Basic productivity tools on Linux - eg email or word processing - still
suck and I want native apps for such things.

Any solution?

~~~
panzerboy
For email and word processing, it depends on what you've previously used. I
would say that LibreOffice is quite all right for word processing. Also have a
look at FreeOffice
([https://www.freeoffice.com/en/](https://www.freeoffice.com/en/)) which aims
for great compatibility with MS Office.

For an email client, I personally use the GMail web client nowadays, but I've
used Thunderbird for a long time and it's fine (not as polished and good
looking as Mail.app on MacOS though).

~~~
ffpip
Why is it free? What's the catch?

Ads, premium features?

------
claytongulick
WSL2 on windows is really nice.

I do all my dev on a surface book laptop running windows. WSL2 has me covered
for anything that _needs_ posix, but that's increasingly rare.

Edit: my deploy target is Ubuntu.

~~~
vetinari
Is systemd/systemctl still broken on WSL2? How do you deploy on Ubuntu, when
the service control layer is incompatible between Ubuntu and WSL2?

~~~
majewsky
WSL2 is just a Hyper-V VM with some UI integrations. It uses an actual Linux
kernel rather than a NT kernel personality, so systemd should work like in any
other VM.

~~~
vetinari
It is not just Hyper-V VM with some UI integrations. While it uses actual
Linux kernel, it does not use actual init system as a _just a VM_ would. It
runs Microsoft's /init, which does not handle service management. Not even
SysV ones via /etc/init.d.

So if you need service managment, you won't find it under WSL2.

------
habosa
At work we were asked to upgrade to Catalina for security/maintainability
reasons. There was a list of "Known Issues" with Catalina linked in the email
asking us to upgrade.

The list was comical. Had at least 5 things on it that, if they happened to
me, would completely ruin my productivity.

I've spent most of my life on macOS but it does seem to be unraveling, while
Windows and Linux are only getting better these days.

------
ohazi
It's definitely maintainable, the real question is whether Apple is interested
in doing so properly.

~~~
majewsky
The article is not about _that_ kind of maintainability.

------
phendrenad2
MacOS is amazing. It's a 20-year-old fork of BSD, maintained by a company that
differentiates itself via hardware rather than software, and yet it's still
"competitive" (more or less) with Windows and Linux today.

------
metabagel
“ The most intransigent problem with failed EFI firmware updates has been with
the iMac Retina 5K 27-inch Late 2015, or iMac17,1. Some have sailed through
updates bringing them to version 428.0.0.0.0, others remain firmly stuck at
170.0.0.0.0, which was current for macOS Mojave 10.14.6 in July 2019.”

The first time I tried to update my late 2015 27” iMac, it bricked the system,
and I had to reinstall from Time Machine backup. I gave up on updating for
quite some time, every day having to dismiss the reminder to update. Recently,
I was able to update to Catalina. It was painful and took multiple tries, but
eventually it got there.

------
dangus
Law of headlines: the answer is no.

Yes, it’s bad that a few people are having issues updating firmware. We don’t
know how many are versus aren’t. But the article goes down a technical rabbit
hole that regular users don’t care about, and I suspect the number of affected
users is minuscule.

Plenty of Windows users including myself never bother updating
audio/chipset/WiFi drivers unless there’s an actual problem.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with Apple’s choice to use the OS updates to
also update firmware. It’s typically a benefit to the customer: Mac users
never had to worry about updating drivers. I’ve owned plenty of Lenovo and
Dell systems with infuriating automatic update software and I much prefer
Apple’s approach.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with Apple retail employees not knowing how
to update firmware. It’s a retail store. There isn’t anything special about it
just because it has an Apple logo on the side, and yet every technically
inclined Apple customer expects the $18/hour store associates to immediately
know how to do complicated things like this.

In reality, I suspect the reason why Apple employees are clueless on what to
do is that the problem is so rare.

------
moltar
I’ve had the new MacBook since December, but still using the old one because
there’s no smooth upgrade path for me.

------
csomar
I have recently switched to Linux (ArchLinux)[1] after a not so happy ending
with macOS. The new features that Apple keeps adding to macOS helps no
developer and are consumer-oriented. I feel this is the new direction they are
taking. As Apple gained momentum in the smartphone space, they want to
capitalize that on the laptop market. And what's better than giving your users
something they are already familiar with: iOS.

So macOS is slowly drifting to become iOS. While this might be good for your
average consumer as she'll be comfortable manipulating the same patterns of
the interface, for the developer it means less performance, less
customization, more gatekeeping, etc...

In the future, I think there will be two types of OSes: A developer OS
(probably a custom built Linux for the developer or the company) and a
consumer OS. The divergence will be big enough that consumer OSes can no
longer be used to do any useful programming (aside from programming for the
said platform).

1: [https://omarabid.com/apple-walled-garden](https://omarabid.com/apple-
walled-garden)

------
coldtea
No, it's just a bizarro question. I've been using it since 2003, and it's
stabler than ever, while doing more for the user than ever (new fs,
virtualization support, Handover, Continuity, and tons of other stuff
besides).

~~~
LiNeXT
> Handover, Continuity

I never got any of that stuff to work reliably before I moved off the Mac
completely. It would sometimes work and often not work. Often enough that I
wrote both of those features off as simple keynote gimmicks.

------
tester89
> We are heading rapidly towards the corollary to “it just works” being “and
> if it doesn’t, just wipe everything and re-install”.

This was my experience with an issue where my Mac just hangs for 30 s
randomly.

~~~
guanplee
I experience this also, turns out the bluetooth was trying to detect keyboards
and mouse even after I turned it off and explicitly turn off all bluetooth on
startup options.

------
Animats
Steve Jobs once said that an operating system was obsolete after 7 years.
MacOS is now 36. MacOS X is now 19.

~~~
calciphus
Yeah, but he said that as a sales pitch. Remember he was not an engineer.

------
sys_64738
It's the bloat that is terrible. Chrome pages are 5x the size of the same page
on Linux or Windows. You need 8GB minimum nowadays to run Catalina where Tiger
it was 256MB.

~~~
mciancia
> Chrome pages are 5x the size of the same page on Linux or Windows.

Source?

~~~
sys_64738
Did ya try it yourself? I did.

~~~
dangus
Even if they are larger:

1\. How is this Apple’s fault? You’re complaining about a third-party
application that Apple has no control over.

2\. How can you be sure that Mac and Windows manage memory in the same way?

The nerds who sit around and stare at their computer metrics and gauges on
their menu bar or desktop overlay are completely missing the point: is the
computer usable and responsive?

I use both Mac and Windows daily and they’re basically the same thing and do
all the same things, including running Chrome.

------
disposekinetics
MacOS has so many features I'll never use. It is starting to feel bloated. I
wonder if modern OSs did less would be smaller and feel snappier?

~~~
tonyedgecombe
Apple can't win here can they, one person complains they remove too much
functionality, the next complains the operating system is bloated.

~~~
reportgunner
Well you do reap what you sow, don't you?

