The ones I’ve noticed - once the 10g adapter just decided to imitate a DSL modem for some reason. Disabling and reenabling it fixed it (it reported 10g negotiated on Both sides the whole time).
And if I edit a file in downloads and save it - finder sorts it at the top (I sort by date) but an upload file dialog in safari doesn’t see the new date
Some of these may not be bugs. For example, I actually prefer this:
> Mail now loses the mailbox selection when you start a search, instead changing the selection to All Mailboxes, which is rarely the scope that I want.
This one isn’t new to Ventura. This happened all the time to me as far back as Big Sur:
> External drives still take minutes to mount or sometimes never mount automatically. Sometimes I can manually mount them from Disk Utility. Other times I need to reboot or disconnect other drives first.
The real question is, has the author opened Feedback Requests about these things? If not, don’t expect them to get fixed any time soon.
External drives still take minutes to mount or sometimes never mount automatically. Sometimes I can manually mount them from Disk Utility. Other times I need to reboot or disconnect other drives first.
I've encountered failing USB disks which appear to work fine on macOS, but suddenly operations take minutes to perform and can block operations system wide. They don't report errors, and they don't show as CPU use in any program, but everything on the system slows to a crawl when you hit sensitive spots on the disk.
It's worth removing external storage devices and adding them back one by one any time you have a hanging or slow Mac to diagnose.
Apple hates to scare or confuse users, but if a disk drive is taking a four orders of magnitude more time to do operations than it used to, I'd like my computer to please let me know.
Yeah, I’ve felt that pain, for sure. The flip side is that if you don’t open a feedback request, don’t expect it to get fixed ever. They can’t fix a bug they aren’t aware of or don’t have steps to reproduce.
Some of the listed points in the article have been bugs for YEARS. They have survived major release cycles and a lot of them have Radars. Nobody wants to fix any of the thousands of bugs in MacOSX. Apple is just falling forward with every release.
OS X 10.7 (Lion) was the first post-iPhone version of MacOS, released in late 2011.
It was a bumpy release and it's not remembered fondly, but it introduced a number of fundamental features that modern iOS/Mac users depend on, like iCloud.
The previous version from 2009, OS X 10.6, was essentially a maintenance/refinement release with few new features while the rest of Apple was heavily focused on launching the iPhone and the App Store. Many people consider 10.6 to be the strongest OS X release, but it feels positively retro by today's standards.
IIRC, this was relatively on purpose, with $modifier $name basically meaning "we made a backend change to the release but nothing else". Snow Leopard was a big shift towards 64-bit for core apps, and Grand Central Dispatch for multi-processing,
Apple is badly, badly in need of a “code red” style freeze on new features for macOS and iOS. Even very basic things which should be rock solid are not. I just had a kernel panic when copying files to an smb mount. No issue when I do the same copy mounted as nfs. Ridiculous in this era.
Long ago, the release speed in the entire industry accelerated. I knew that quality would nose dive as a result because there was no way to develop and fully test an entire OS (even for a phone) as frequently as each is being released. All operating systems are now effectively permanently in beta.
It's not just about release speed. The whole industry is aligned towards new, towards features, towards impact.
Going around making the world better doesnt rank, isnt visible work, isnt tracked or roadmaps, isnt rewarded, and frankly, it's not as fun being a 0.1X hacker tackling the gross ugly old shit, especially when the org wont say thank you either.
Sometimes I wonder whether Douglas Adams was the most prescient sci-fi writer when he came up with the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation. Year by year it seems to get closer, and I can't help feeling recent AI developments will only accelerate it.
But Apple has had the right idea- they release a new version of their desktop and mobile OSes about once a year. I would surmise that their OS reliability and stability issues have more to do with the switch from Objective-C to Swift than anything else. Heck they change Swift dramatically each year (or they did in the first few years). Swift 2 was RADICALLY different from Swift 1. Swift 3 was radically different from Swift 2...
I don’t understand why Apple doesn’t invest more in testing and bug-fixing. It is not as if they can’t afford it. Bugs lead to unhappy users, which in turn leads to brand damage. You’d think it would make business sense to spend more on improving quality and hence preventing further such damage, possibly even reversing some of the damage already done-convince people “Apple is different now”, some people will forget their past bad experiences
It still amazes me that in the 21st century no computer can use a couple of extra monitors reliably without sometimes not detecting them, getting in the wrong resolution, or other strange issues.
Don't know what happened with iOS 16, but Spotlight has been painfully slow. Results used to be nearly instant, now it can take 6+ seconds to show an app I searched for
I installed a few apps since upgrading to iOS 16 when it came out, and those apps never show up in Spotlight. I've updated with patches, restarted the phone, deleted and re-installed since then; still broken. The main one is Slack but I've seen it with others, too.
Ventura has serious issues with ExFAT volumes (failing to boot with them connected, Finder or other apps not showing all of the files, inability to empty the trash, etc.) I have several 2 TB external SSD's and ended up migrating them all to APFS because of Ventura. If you google "ventura exfat site:discussions.apple.com" you'll see all sorts of complaints. Pretty terrible situation.
Most of these frankly seem like small beer and to be expected in an early release of an OS. I also am not sure how a Git Tower issue is a Ventura problem.
That said, I'm still running Monterey, having amended my practice of waiting until the after the first point release to now waiting until the 2nd to do a full version update because of Apple's tendency in recent years to introduce major bugs which are not compensated by major functionality improvements. Updating System Settings to look like iOS serves Apple's needs, not mine.
I've had to turn it off in Ventura. Sometimes it will just decide it's time for downtime outside of the schedule. Tried everything to fix it including turning off syncing of Screen Time settings, changing schedule, resetting all the settings, restarting computer. Nope, will still do it every few hours.
The new system settings app is painful. It freezes for up to 30 seconds at a time after I take an action.
It often goes completely blank, it flickers a lot and in general it's so hard to find stuff in it - the search is bad and they have just jammed settings in places that don't make sense.
I am on a 2020 MacBook Air with m1 chip, 16GB ram - wouldn't expect performance problems in the settings app, yet here we are.
I also get that issue with Safari where it freezes the entire system, that happens on my work laptop which is an M1 Max with 32GB RAM
Seriously, what was wrong with the old tried and true System Preferences? Everything had a recognizable icon, every icon arranged in simple rows, and every icon lay before me in a single window.
Now, I'm forced to scroll the pane on the left (unclear since scroll bars are invisible by default) to find the outermost setting, and then deal with nested navigation confined inside of the right pane. Also, gone are the recognizable icons, replaced with confusingly similar colored gradients and a hieroglyph icon that is unreadable because the contrast ratio terrible against the gradient. Also, the 'search' causes the entire left navigational pane to go blank and replace itself with search results, rather than 'show me the way' like it used to. Extremely disappointing!
It sort of feels like the only "advantage" to the new one is that it is more like the iOS Settings. Looks very similar in layout. That might be the intent. "Harmonization". Product Managers Gone Wild.
This. It appears they want to harmonize the OS ecosystems. macOS has a control center UI someplace now off the menu bar which was pretty interesting to find the other week.
The Windows equivalent also went through a similar and just as horrible change (Control Panel being replaced by Settings), and strangely enough, Windows 11 Settings looks disturbingly similar to the macOS Ventura one.
I don't mind the design. Whenever I want to know where to find something I just ask where would I expect to find it on the iphone and it's usually there.
System Preferences was rewritten for Ventura in SwiftUI, which is absolutely not ready for production, especially on Mac. Speaking from personal experience, I recently wrote a simple macOS app using SwiftUI. I found the framework to be slow (why does it use so much cpu/memory when idle??), unintuitive, and awkward to use. Despite being in its 4th year, SwiftUI is still very much beta software, and I wouldn’t recommend using it for anything serious.
As a counterpoint, I’ve done several Mac apps with SwiftUI for internal use and it’s been quite pleasant. Early SwiftUI was definitely rough, but it’s quite nice now as of Monterey and Ventura.
If you’re seeing high CPU use and slow performance, it might be due to high usage of ObservableObject or other things that may be triggering updates under the hood more often than need be.
SwiftUI is very sensitive to the data model structure since it’s a react style setup.
Apple really needs to put some effort into evangelizing SwiftUI — some of the problem is poor or nonexistent Apple documentation and some is that every Stackoverflow answer is obsolete because the documentation is still so poor.
You can still run into walls with SwiftUI, but there are fewer of them than there used to be.
This OS "upgrade" has been annoying. At least I'm not the only one with issues, and I have some of the same issues listed listed here. I hadn't seen them documented elsewhere.
I waited until the first point release to upgrade in hope of a seamless transition, but instead I've been keeping a list of issues. I've been meaning to do a writeup (or at lease a tweet), but haven't done so for the same reason I still haven't spent time trying to fix them. It's many small annoying things. There might be a way to fix some of them (like the generic icons for some filetypes, or my NAS not mounting at startup, or Finder constantly crashing), but so far I've decided to keep my sanity.
One of mine: sometimes (50% of the times?) turning on my MacBook Pro for the first time leads to the Dock using very high CPU and making switching between desktops abnormally slow. The fix is to force-kill the Dock app, and make it restart again by itself.
I don't think it was ever officially in the UI beyond "allowing" certain applications to use the dedicated GPU inside a MacBook Pro. The only reason Apple even added that was as a battery conservation concern.
It was labeled "Automatic graphics switching" in past releases. It appears to be gone completely. I just confirmed it was under Battery on 12.5.1. This is a shame. The Intel GPU on the 2019 MBP is pretty anemic and it is definitely felt when programming in some editors.
Ventura also broke DNS-over-TLS support and reliable blocking of domains using /etc/hosts. Some browsers are no longer able to use either on Ventura while other browsers do.
Something else that's odd is it will sometimes mix up icons in the force quit menu. But this was around prior to ventura
At the same time, there's so much stuff going on in macos that there's a very wide surface area for random things like this. I wonder how many people work on it, if I had to guess it would be in the hundreds
Apple on a good day does just enough to get the basics right. Beyond the basics it's a matter of luck whether something will work and continue to work reliably.
The thing is even Microsoft in the post Win 10 era is reliant on insiders to test Windows releases nowadays so there's not really much competition for desktop market nor is there anything huge at stake.
At this point I as a regular non-enterprise customer can't even pay for a churn free, ads free, forced apps free security updates only OS like Windows 7 - unexpectedly fast descent into sadness.
(Where possible I run Linux and thankfully it has worked fine so far but some work things still require Windows or Mac.)
I always felt that mantra of Apple simplicity was a cop out for lack of desire or inability to write rich complex software at scale and not get subsumed by bugs and QA load. It is a matter of prioritization too, the non sexy stuff doesn’t sell nor lead to promotions so many fundamental things just stagnate it feels.
I joke with my wife that being in the Apple ecosystem is sometimes like being married to this inconsistent and erratic spouse who oscillates between a few extremes. They bring out all this high romance show off blingy stuff that elicits high emotions and surprise and delight. But when it comes to the more mundane stuff like cleaning up and daily chores and keeping the socks and underwear off the floor they become lazy bums sleeping on the couch who can’t be bothered. They then try to make it up to you with a “hey babe check this out I can now do fancy thing xyz, see?” all the while ignoring the honeydo list of 125 things that have made no progress in the last three years. The funny thing is I’m still on the fence for determining which ratio the behaviors skew and how it all rolls up in net.
OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion was the last release of the golden years. You could argue it was actually 10.9 Mavericks, but that's the release that introduced the annoying notification every time you disconnected a USB drive. Either way, OS X 10.10 Yosemite was when shit started hitting the fan- that's when they started rewriting OS X in Swift, an Apple-designed language which is somehow WORSE than Objective-C.
As a software engineer, I find all three ecosystems (macOS, Windows, Linux) far from perfect, but the only one that ALLOWS me to do all the things I want and need to do, is Linux.
As someone who uses XCode with schemes and Android studio with flavors, I have way more issues with Android studio. Having to invalidate caches on Android studio quite frequently and delete derived files in Xcode occasionally.
But with Apple Studio Ultra at least build times on both are amazing compared to a few years ago.
Those on the Windows side are just as if not more angered by Windows 11 too. The software industry has become an example of quantity over quality, features over fixes, change and novelty over stability, diversity over excellence.
Instead of gradually approaching perfection as bugs are fixed over time, software gets needlessly rewritten and introduces a bunch of new bugs. Thanks to the wholly misguided focus on "developer experience", the new version is more inefficient and more complex, leading to even more bugs than the previous one. They call it "progress", but it really isn't. It's an increasingly steep decline fueled by an abundance of developers that need to be given something to do.
I recently switched to Windows because I need some performance-intensive windows-only software. I'm convinced that Microsoft lets marketing write the feature bullet list and then tells product managers to assign arbitrary dates to each bullet entry and use that as their project timeline. Quality is absolute garbage. Microsoft 365 Family is shockingly bad. The 6tb of storage you get for $10/mo (spread out over 6 accounts) might not actually be worth it.
It’s not even “the quantity over quality.” Early OS X point releases would get big new features like hardware accelerated compositing. What does Ventura even add? The last big new feature was APFS becoming the default back in 2017.
I guess it’s better than Microsoft, where Metro/WinUI/web rewrites of core apps actually remove tons of long-standing features.
Well using the iPhone as a camera on the Mac is pretty awesome. And it’s desk view feature to show what you draw. So there’s no need to take a webcam or camera for better quality with me when I travel for work. Just a mouse, keyboard and clamshelled MacBook hooked up to the hotel TV - still allowing me to make video calls.
> The software industry has become an example of quantity over quality
Yes, and so many other industries have lead the way as well.
On some level I think it’s for the better. I won’t buy perfect, indestructible, 0.1 micron tolerance carrot peeler for the price of a car (nor will buy a car summiting the state of the art technology for the price of a house). I’m for cheap goods striking a good feature/price balance.
But on the other end of the spectrum it all reminds me of John Siracusa’s legendary toaster reviews, every single one of them being so crappy in some specific way. Having overall nice experience for a reasonable price is becoming more the exception than the norm.
I’m still happy we’ve left the Win98 days and kernel level crashes are pretty much a thing of the past.
Windows 11 is truly awful. Perhaps windows has always been a clunky mess and I din't quite realize it until I started using MacOS professionally, but I can hardly stand it. That said, I remember feeling Windows 10 was a notable degradation of UX, and Windows 11 only doubled down on that. Windows 7 is the last MS OS that I have any fond memories of, if it was announced that Windows 12 would be designed to more closely resemble that then I would seriously consider buying another Windows machine, until then I'll stick with my Macbook.
> The software industry has become an example of quantity over quality, features over fixes, change and novelty over stability, diversity over excellence.
Well, it is all caused by senior managers counting JIRA tickets and certified scrum masters pushing the sand through the python.
Software enthusiasts in sandals loving technology have been replaced by people driven by compensation structures.
I ignore macOS updates as a self preservation technique until something forces my hand such as buying a new computer or Xcode complaining it only runs on a particular release.
Between macOS, cpu architecture changes, and the fast pace of Electron’s release cycle (node ABI vs native modules), I’m constantly terrified about keeping builds running. Each upgrade … I’m just clenching my chest waiting for the other shoe to drop.
I never thought I’d become a late adopter of technology. But here we are.
There was a time in late high school, early university where OSX updates were like Christmas. I’d be so excited for all these new empowerments. There was such wonder and opportunity to be seized.
But now I’m much like you. I’ve got stuff to do and digital places to be! If I don’t need an update, I don’t want one.
A decade ago it was a good watch because every single time they had something brand new.
Of course it’s difficult to follow that trend but for a long time now it’s just been iterative updates.
Maybe it’s just because I’m getting older and my views on consumerism have strengthened, but I used to get excited to preorder their new products, now I couldn’t care less.
TBF, each update was bringing long expected features and bug fixes, and more than anything dramatic performance improvements.
I started using macs around the 10.3 area, and boy was it slow and clunky. Was still glad it existed in the first place, but it really came a long way forward to the point it’s now faster than windows on ARM.
I was on the eagerly checking when this update came out. Wanted that iphone as webcam feature. It's such a huge improvement. My webcam no longer looks like a washed out newspaper printout. Freeform is also a nice new tool I'm looking forward to using as well as Advanced Data Protection for icloud to have end to end encrypted cloud storage at last.
On the other hand, Ventura prompts me (with a huge window full of whitespace) about using my iPhone as webcam every time an application opens the (built-in) webcam, with the two options being “Get started” or “Remind me later”. They seem to have forgotten the “fuck off” option, as usual for modern tech. What is the user supposed to do in cases where they don’t want/need to use their iPhone as webcam?
Hmm, not ideal but I’m pretty sure if you just go through that prompt it sorts it out. The iPhone becomes another listing in the webcam list but you can pick the built in one and it won’t prompt you to switch.
Yep. I just updated my desktop from 10.14 to 10.15 only because I had to. Best to stay a couple of years behind. Not like the Apple of 15 years ago where their stuff just worked.
I started using OS X with Snow Leopard (before it reaches 10.6.8), but already then my colleagues were telling me not to rush on the first release of whatever next major versions, and wait for the .1 update instead.
Snow Leopard was the greatest OS release of all time. No new user-level features. They made it faster and more stable. Why do folks insist that every new release has to have new features? Why not just make the current features more stable and efficient!?
I’m still on Mojave because I hate new UI changes and such. Don’t know for how long it’s last but for now it works.
One annoying thing is that an iPhone SE 2020 that I bought now requires a fresher version of iTunes that is not available for 10.14. I guess I’ll just wait until it annoys me too much and eventually switch to some android.
I would have stayed on Mojave, but what finally pushed me is that I didn't have full C++17 support for Xcode and the underlying compiler and libraries for some reason I still don't understand. e.g., I couldn't used std::filesystem stuff.
My Mrs is an Astrophysicist and she is exactly the same. In her case she is terrified that Apple will move stuff around and break her paths rendering her EMacs setup unusable. Curious to know how to manage all her pipelines, iraf, python, R, Fortran and general fits processing and sundry as well without it breaking every. Single. MacOS. Upgrade. She only upgrades OS’s every time her funding gets her a new machine. Which is infrequently. Like every three years or so. She uses MacPorts.
The static IP address entry field is messed up. It starts with blanks and dots but entering numbers doesn’t overwrite the blanks like in every IP address entry box since forever.
Funny how Windows made the same step backwards. It's ip input fields let you input all kinds of garbage, when the win 7 and control panel inputs constrain you to what is actually possible in ipv4/6.
Do apple and ms share the same clueless designers?
After reading this I learned there is a 13.1 available that macOS has failed to install or even mention, despite automatic updates being enabled. Apparently it came out 2 weeks ago.
- Revealing files in Finder (either from the title bar menu or a command in another app) sometimes doesn’t work, revealing an ancestor folder instead of the actual file, or sometimes doing nothing at all.
- Finder sometimes loses all of its sidebar items.
- Finder sometimes forgets which sidebar sections are expanded.
- Sometimes mounted drives disappear from the Computer view, even though they are still mounted and in use.
- Finder windows sometimes don’t get focus when I click on them, even though Finder does become the frontmost app.
what kind of changes necessitate these kinds of degredations?
just random refactoring? junior engineers? developer culture?
btw, if you've ever heard of the word kaizen(??), the above would be called its opposite "kaiaku" (??)
I always see stories complaining about major macOS versions, but I've yet to see one about Windows yearly feature updates (except the data loss one years ago).
It seems that even though the initial releases of Windows 10 and 11 get criticized, Microsoft is better able to balance new features and bug fixes than Apple for smaller updates. They're also far more transparent about known issues.[0]
edit: Windows is no nirvana, but it's not acceptable for Apple to reserve security updates to the latest major version, and to only fix a previous release's bugs in the next release. It does feel like a permanent beta. Maybe creating a separate, and well-staffed, QA and bug-fix team would sidestep Mythical Man Month issues, and allow them to maintain the current pace of new features? Think about it, Craig! I bet a lot of Mac users avoid Apple's apps because major third-party apps are more stable.
Windows users are just used to things not working so they become desensitised. Every windows laptop has had suspend broken for the last few years and windows users just think it’s normal that your laptop heats up and drains to 0% overnight.
My most hated macOS bug: Safari’s URL bar resets the selection to the top item as the asynchronous suggestions load, which caused me to open the wrong URL countless times. See: https://youtu.be/teF1a2C6lwQ
This bug has been happening for at least 4 major OS releases now…
Another item that I've seen gone from Ventura is the toggle to enable a low-power mode in the battery settings. Now, either you have always enabled when on battery, or not.
I've recently bought my macbook air m2 (and also my first apple device), so far I've encountered some issues listed below:
- WiFi driver crashed after I've turned off the wifi, causing kernel to panic, rebooting my device. That happened twice already.
- Plugging TV via HDMI via a USB-C hub, switching to HDMI sound output, causes all media to jump to +8-300 hours (even if given media length is smaller than that...),
strangely enough changing audio output back to macbook's fixes the problem.
- Activity monitor (macos task manager) takes FOREVER to load, if top/htop can load in mere miliseconds, why not the native app?
- Sometimes app bar won't hide in fullscreen mode (don't really know if that's intended), hovering mouse over it will fix that.
While I love the overall build quality, battery life and hardware, the software has some measurable "jank" in it, to the point I'm seriously considering not to buy apple stuff again. I've considered those devices to work out-of-the-box and after sitting on barely working linux as my daily driver I've decided to go for it and buy one. Now I've lost all hope for "just works" system, they do not exist.
Not specifically Ventura, but anyone having issues having os remember monitor position? My Mac mini running Monterey can’t flips the monitor on login/unlock more often than not.
I had never had issues with external monitors until Ventura on the M1 Air.
Now, each time I plug it in to the monitor whatever will happen is pretty random. Sometimes it gets the full EDID from the monitor and everything is as I want it to be, including resolutions, refresh rate and positions. Sometimes, I get partial EDID and only some refresh rates available (my monitor goes up to 144Hz, sometimes macOS can only do 60 or 75Hz). When that happens, resolutions and screen positions may or may not be ok. Most of the time the laptop screen is set to mirror the monitor which is pretty much never what I wanted.
Other times it just doesn't properly detect the monitor which stays blank until I disconnect and reconnect - at which point any of the above paragraph might happen.
More rarely, the computer freezes and I need to force shutdown.
Since upgrading to 13.1, notifications have been severely problematic. Slow, delayed, clicking on Slack notifications would open the app minutes after the click.
And if I edit a file in downloads and save it - finder sorts it at the top (I sort by date) but an upload file dialog in safari doesn’t see the new date
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