I do wish when people say happy vs sad with LLMs for code they’d qualify it with what kind of code they’re talking about. I can totally see a web dev being super happy grinding out JS code and someone doing scientific computing being less happy even though they’re using the same tools. Without understanding what people are using it for, what their expectations are with respect to correctness, completeness, and performance, these discussions just turn into the same back and forth of people arguing that the other person is wrong and talking past each other. I think people on this site forget the diverse contexts where people use computers, the different backgrounds we all have, and our different expectations for what we work on.
Not a stupid question at all. There are two reasons verification tends to happen in these specialized languages: the languages we usually use are often not expressive enough to write things like specifications, and a bit too expressive in the sense of letting people write program logic that is insanely difficult to verify (think untyped pointers into a dynamically allocated heap for example). So these verification related languages often are more expressive on the spec side and more restrictive in terms of what kind of code you can write.
Yes, but the quality of the spec varies. For example many (most?) C programs have undefined behaviors which means the spec is incomplete and unreliable. Dafny gives you better tools to avoid this. So in the end you get a higher quality spec with Dafny.
ACL2 doesn't get a lot of love from the side of the verification community that focuses on the proof systems that are more academically popular (HOL family, CIC family, etc.). A lot of interesting industrial work has been done with ACL2 and related systems.
Yes. Been there, done that, with the pre-ACL2 Boyer-Moore prover. We had the Oppen-Nelson prover (the first SAT solver) handling the easy stuff, and used the Boyer-Moore prover for the hard stuff. Not that much manual work.
Anti-MS sentiment is common in some corners of the tech world. People ignore the fact that the CLI and C# are ECMA standards like JavaScript and C++, and treat them like closed proprietary systems. .NET is a great choice and there are tons of people who happily use it.
I maintain my own library too where I spent a while ripping my CD collection back in the early 2000s (and then again maybe 6 years ago when storage was cheaper to a lossless format). The CDs are all boxed up safely for archival storage, and most of my recent music has been purchased from wherever I can get DRM-free stuff. I fiddled with various self hosted servers but I’ve mostly stuck with iTunes Match since it lets me access it all from my phone, and then I just back up the library from my Mac to my NAS. I just don’t have the time or patience to play sysadmin at home anymore. I use Apple Music streaming for stuff I don’t care about potentially vanishing, but for the stuff that I really love and would be sad to lose, I buy it and put it in the archive. It does happen occasionally that stuff I don’t own that I found on Apple Music disappears, which can be annoying.
I think for most people this is overkill, but for music nerds like me where the collecting and curation is a big part of the enjoyment, maintaining your own library makes sense.
Ideally that is true. I do see the volume-over-quality phenomenon with some early career folks who are trying to expand their CVs. It varies by subfield though. While grant metrics tend to dominate career progression, paper metrics still exist. Plus, it’s super common in those proposals to want to have a bunch of your own papers to cite to argue that you are an expert in the area. That can also drive excess paper production.
Vanilla emacs to start, and then the approach I take to finding interesting packages and config is to read the Emacs Weekly News from Sacha Chua (which often links to articles and videos describing packages and configs). There sometimes are articles or videos linked from there that talk about configuring from a vanilla setup that are likely what you are looking for.
I think people are willing to pay for privacy protecting software. The problem is I don’t think people trust companies who claim that because there are too many instances of that “privacy” coming with a subtle asterisk. Businesses can’t seem to resist eroding trust in the interest of $ (growth! Shareholder value!) or caving to authorities. Plus, it’s rare that companies are transparent enough to earn the trust they claim we should give them.
I do agree with the sentiment: people need to get paid to write software, and people want freedoms to be respected by that software. It seems to be challenging to rectify the two in most cases (yes, there are cases where it works - those are the exception not the norm).
100% agree. Regulation is part of the answer. For instance, we trust that a gas pump is accurate because we know the government inspects it.
But I think we need more companies where trust/privacy is a brand promise. Apple, I think, is trying because they can. As long as they make money selling hardware, they don't have to rely on ad revenue.
In my opinion, the reason there aren't more companies that brand themselves as privacy-protecting is because people aren't willing to pay that much for it--at least not as much as the companies can make by selling data.
Part of my reaction to the article, however, is that the people who most value privacy are the least willing to pay for software--their solution is always about free-as-in-beer software. That obviously shrinks the market for privacy-respecting software.
This update is one of the rare cases where I really dislike the new version. I’m usually happy with Apple updates, even ones the commentators dislike. This time I’m sorta agreeing with them: I don’t like the new iOS. Same with the Mac and iPad: other than being glitchy, I just don’t like the changes. It feels like my screen real estate isn’t as efficiently used, UI elements feel jumbled and the transparency makes things harder to read. I’m sure I’ll get used to it over time but I’m not enjoying it so far, even after going into the settings to try to adjust things I don’t care for. Not my favorite update cycle from Apple, and I’m usually one of the overly positive folks on whatever Apple ships.
Beyond that, it’s buggy and inconsistent. In dark mode, text boxes suddenly become light mode when they expand to add a second entry line. Buttons aren’t aligned within their containers properly. Some times buttons are in light mode when my phone is in dark mode, or if I open an app, it starts out in light mode and then suddenly switches to dark mode after a second or two. There is a noticeable lag when I back out of a message before it loads the other conversations in iMessage.
I think I had tracked 15+ things I would easily qualify as bugs the first two days after upgrading my phone - this would be absolutely unacceptable where I work, and we aren’t a trillion-dollar company with psychotic hiring standards.
Was this even QAed? I don’t like the look, but that’s a personal thing, these are actual issues that are not subjective.
In my opinion Liquid Glass is still an alpha release. Nothing is really finished, it's conceptually unfinished, the changes are not well thought through, and it's really buggy.
I think they failed with Apple Intelligence (also a mess, without being useful) and needed something big. So they planned this big design change. When they realized they failed miserably, it was too late to undo it.
The recently presented ChatGPT apps are what Apple Intelligence (and Siri) should've been. Some chat/voice interface, that can access data from installed apps and trigger actions.
It should've been a home run for Apple. ChatGPT starts with zero existing apps, Apple has one of the biggest app ecosystem, and with (Siri) Shortcuts they already have most of the necessary interfaces available for years.
They have your context. OpenAI doesn’t know where you are. It doesn’t know what you bought or when you last called your wife, it can’t know your heart rate or your work schedule.
Apple can turn it around.
Great AI is a good model with lots of context. Your model can be the best, but if you need the user to provide the context it’ll never be a great experience.
After working with Claude code for a while now, I’ve become much more aware of how to convey context to a machine, and just how poor some humans are at doing it in conversation.
Your AI product is toast if you need people to make it work.
Yes, Apple still has the advantage over OpenAI. But OpenAI can also release some iOS and Android integration layer, that allows to connect with installed apps on the device.
If Apple doesn't get their act together with the next iOS release, it could be too late.
OpenAI can't, they're completely dependent on Apple and Google permitting such a thing. Unless you have a particular way in mind they could currently achieve this?
They can integrate into third party apps, if the publishers want to. A lot of them are going to do it.
It's already possible to connect Gmail, and many other services, this can extend even more. The connection of those services could be done by the iOS/Android apps.
I doubt this will be super successful because so many of the apps that people would want to integrate it are those made by Apple, Google, Meta and others whose goal is to be a direct competitor. I might be wrong though, we'll see.
I still find Apple Maps to be awful. It consistently gives poor directions. For example the exit you need to take from the closest major road to reach my neighborhood splits once you are on it. If you continue straight you reach a stop light where you can then take a left and then continue 1/8th of a mile to the turn for my neighborhood. Apple Maps will instead have you go to the right when the exit splits and then have you continue another 1/2 mile before taking a u-turn and heading back the 5/8ths of a mile to turn into my neighborhood. Google Maps does the right thing. I now warn visitors to use Google Maps or to ignore these directions from Apple Maps.
I also live near a large city and a couple of smaller cities with busy downtown areas. In each of them the main streets are virtually impossible to perform a u-turn on because of the large amount of traffic. Apple Maps will insist on giving directions which involve taking u-turns on these streets. Google Maps will instead route you the easier way around the block instead of insisting on an impossible u-turn which in the end is slower because of the difficulty in actually performing the maneuver.
Also I find the directions from Apple Maps when taking an exit which further splits into multiple exits to be highly confusing. The spoken directions from Google Maps is much better in these circumstances.
Every new release I try Apple Maps again just to see if it has gotten better in these circumstances and every release I am disappointed.
Well it's useable sure but also not very good/useful.
From a directions/routing standpoint it's pretty decent and I'm OK with how the route planning works.
But they miss many POIs and the data they have is often stale, and their version of street view, while smoother, is not up to snuff at all.
I think it's really annoying and a major reason I have stopped using it even though I was an advocate at first. Apple can't be bothered to invest as much as Google did to have a proper open map system, with a good web version where people/business can post/add data easily.
At this point the privacy stick is tiring because we don't get anything from it and they will comply/sell the data the minute they can profit from it anyway (as they have shown).
So, you just end up paying more for a product that is clearly worse and won't become much better because of Apple's ideology and how stingy they are.
They generate a lot of cash but are unable to invest it in proper competitive software.
There are many bad things to be said about Google, but at least they manage to serve pretty good software that is open to everyone...
A 'plot'? That must be some kind of weird online conspiracy theory. Apple Maps worked poorly on initial release for reasons that are entirely unmysterious (the lack of comprehensive and accurate geographical data). Forstall was of course fired as an eventual result of this, but the idea that the whole PR disaster was engineered as part of a scheme to oust him is just daft.
One of the issues is almost certainly that the app developers didn't add the UIDesignRequiresCompatibility = YES[0] item to the Info.plist.
Set that, and it doesn't use Liquid Glass in your app.
I set it for all my apps. One was designed by a professional designer, who absolutely defecated masonry, when I showed him what it did to our app.
I'm worried that Apple may end up ignoring that flag, and will force us to use LG. That would suck. It says that it's temporary, but I'll bet that Apple will be hating life, if they ignore it.
I'm not freaking out about Liquid Glass, but I don't like it. I completely agree that it is quite unusable.
I’m referring entirely to built-in Apple apps - Mail, Messages, etc. The in-house apps can’t even get it right, which to me means:
- devs are so siloed, nobody knows what’s going on
- product is not communicating anything outside of individual fiefdoms
- there is zero QA testing
- no designers are actually signing off on the final results
…which all seem pretty typical for a large bureaucracy, I guess I just had higher expectations of Apple, since we pay a premium for their products. Some of these bugs are frankly pretty embarrassing.
Such reclusiveness is not an obligatory property of large corporations. Say, Google around 2011-2015 may have had fiefdoms, but at least things were quite transparent, you could know what other departments are doing, and see all the code. Facebook circa 2020 was surprisingly transparent and peer-to-peer, at least in the area I touched, messaging and storage infra. I've seen companies 1000x smaller that had incomparably more reclusiveness and opaqueness.
What I hear about Apple sounds more and more like what I used to hear about Microsoft, especially Microsoft of Ballmer times, when teams inside it clandestinely warred with each other, instead of cooperating.
Apple has this vision-driven culture, and the inclination towards internal secrecy, so that competitors won't steal their thunder. It worked relatively well under Steve Jobs, and whoever he assigned. It worked far less successfully when Jony Ive's ideas of usability made Macbooks into visually more sleek, but less loved devices. Whoever came up with Liquid Glass, has some interesting vision, but the gimmick value in its current implementation seems to dominate, and the usability shortcomings seem to be ignored. Technology-wise, it's half-baked. This means to me that Apple internally not in a good state, the leadership has trouble hearing the voice of reason.
Apple of course has an immense inertia. But giants like Nokia or General Motors also used to have an immense inertia, wads of cash, and dominant market positions.
Search is bad everywhere. If I open Settings, and then search for application $X, no results. If I search for $Y, $Y shows up. They are alphabetically next to each other, and I can see them both if I open the Applications submenu and scroll down to access individual app settings.
Why does one show up and one doesn’t? The one that doesn’t is a built-in Apple app, too. They both have identical settings for “show app in search”. This worked fine before iOS 26.
It’s so bizarre. I wanted to use it for a menu extra and something as simple as animating the icon couldn’t be done. There are several of Apple’s own apps that use animated Menu extra icons and they’re probably doing the same hybrid AppKit/SwiftUI workarounds.
I won’t use UIViewRepresentable. I feel that it’s a kludge, and kind of negates the whole purpose of SwiftUI. I know that some of the “native” types are probably UIViewRepresentable, under the covers (like maps), but I feel as if it’s a “duct tape” solution. Also, some of the code gymnastics that I need to do, in order to implement “non-standard” functionality, are pretty crazy. SwiftUI makes it absurdly easy to do stuff that follows the intended workflow, but completely falls down, if you stray off the path. UIKit complains, but grudgingly goes along with you.
I actually want SwiftUI to work. I think they have a good idea, but it’s a massive undertaking, and really, breathtakingly ambitious, when you consider what it’s trying to do.
UIKit represents a mature tech that has been refined since 2008, and a lot of that is based on lessons learned, implementing AppKit, which has been around forever (especially if you consider that it came from NeXTSTEP, which probably started in the 1980s). With AutoLayout and UIKit, I can do pretty much anything I want.
> One of the issues is almost certainly that the app developers didn't add the UIDesignRequiresCompatibility = YES[0] item to the Info.plist.
Ah yes, let's require all developers scramble to try and fix their apps instead of spending time to actually fix and polish the design system we force down everyone's throats.
If it were implemented as intended, it would just be very ugly, slower, and a waste of battery life. But a lot of it is really just broken. In the past hour, I saw a number of funny glitches. The funny glitches are better than the glitches where things crash or hang.
On MacOS, it even requires running terminal commands at startup to fix performance regressions.
This is hitting people who aren't tech-savvy particularly hard, and it makes my position as a security advocate ("always update your devices!") hard to maintain. For most people, not updating their devices means they have more reliability and consistency in their devices, because of things like this.
The one good thing with iOS 26 is that Apple reverted their destructive redesign of the iOS 18 Photos app. Maybe they can be hurt enough to revert the destructive redesigns throughout iOS 26.
I hope to some day read a book describing what's been happening at Apple these past few years. It's safe to assume not a single person at Apple thought this was ready to release, and yet it did. This has to be the result of some serious dysfunction as-of-yet not known to the public.
This is hitting people who aren't tech-savvy particularly hard
I don't really see it among family and friends. My parents who are not very technical mostly went shrug, it looks a bit different and went on with their lives. The only family member who said anything about it was our daughter, who likes it a lot.
Agree that Photos is much-improved.
Personally I am not really a fan of liquid glass. On the Mac, I don't notice it much. On the iPhone I find it more noticeable, the primary thing I'm annoyed by is the overlay with video play controls (macOS too). I would rather have seen them invest time into fixing existing issues than a redesign (e.g. why can I not configure Headphone Accommodations on the Mac for AirPods Max, but I can on the iPhone).
Just from my anecdata, I know someone whose dad stopped responding to voicemails since he was confused by the new app, and another person whose parents both using iPhone SEs (2020 / 2022 version) who also really don't like it. (They upgraded because I'm always talking about software updates- feels bad.)
I suppose an upvote should be sufficient, but I am so unhappy with the new UI I am actually holding off switching to a new M4 MBP and sticking to my old M1 still on Sequoia 15.7.1. I also try to give these things time and I am usually ok with the changes eventually, but the new UI elements are so incredibly distracting it's actually affecting my ability to focus on what I'm actually doing.
At least with Macs you are free to choose and downgrade to any OS version that you like, so long as that version supports your hardware. macOS 15.7.1 will run just fine on any M4 Mac, and Apple will likely continue to release 15.x updates for a year or so yet, and security updates even beyond that.
It's not like iOS where, once updated, you're generally blocked from ever downgrading back to a previous OS version.
Apart from the usual suspect of "modern" UI designers needlessly changing stuff to justify their job, it is my personal opinion that the SwiftUI framework is one of the root causes of Apple's piss-poor software UX and performance. For anything apart from very simple bog-standard views, that framework becomes bewildering with a high cognitive burden and simply does not scale well when any kind of customization is needed.
Also compiler performance - People get fed up of "The compiler could not type check the expression in reasonable time" and just say fsck-it and ship broken stuff.
It is one of the reasons that now >40% of apps on iOS/MacOS now use other frameworks - and that percentage is steadily climbing. (I think that number has already crossed 50% recently).
Apple needs to re-invent their UI framework from scratch. Plain old-school MVC worked better.
The M4 MBP, even if it comes pre-installed with Tahoe, can still be downgraded to Sequoia via DFU restore. The real cut-off will be the M5 Macs, which only Tahoe and above will have hardware support for.
I decided to postpone an iPhone upgrade for another year rather than be forced to use iOS 26 without a downgrade option. This is the only way to send a signal.
I upgraded iOS after I discovered that the AirPods Pro 3 lose native integration with iOS 18 and macOS 15. Hated it so much, I sent the AirPods Pro 3 back for discounted AirPods Pro 2 and am considering trading my upgraded iPhone in for the latest model I can get on iOS 18.
I'm going to ride iOS 18 and macOS 15 into the sunset and then leave the Apple ecosystem.
Thanks, that’s very good to know. I was actually eyeing the new AirPods, and it didn’t even occur to me that their functionality is tied to the iOS version. Now they’ve become just another thing to skip.
They still work as generic Bluetooth earphones, including ANC and transparency, but they don’t show up in FindMy and you can’t control case charging sounds or notification volume.
IMO at Apple the feedback loops seem to have gotten longer. They took a lot of time to discontinue the butterfly keyboards, bring magsafe back, etc. So it's likely that they'll double down on this OS/ UX than correct their path soon. I am not saying that they don't care. But I haven't seen statements like 'we made a mistake', or even 'you are holding it wrong', etc. This- not caring to be answerable to the end user, along with other perceptions in this thread (like siloed teams, bugs in their own apps) makes me think that Apple has become a somewhat dysfunctional enterprise. If they are going down that path, maybe they should hire SAFe Agile consultants. :-)
Disclaimer: Don't follow Apple or HN a lot. And these opinions are maybe more of my perceptions than facts. Open to corrections.
I know it's shit. But for all of you, regardless of whether it's Mac OS or iOS, go to accessibility options and enable high contrast. It removes transparency/liquid glass.
I just bought a M4 MBA, my first since a 2014 MBP. I absolutely hated the 26 update on my phone and iPad but honestly don’t even notice it on my MacBook.
On my Mac I almost laugh at how massive the borders are to accommodate the freakishly large corner radius. The next version might have round windows at this pace.
I found that there's one upside to it: the empty space "outside" the corner still counts as part of the window, but it also works as a hot corner for drag and drop window resizing purposes.
That said, it's still comically large, and actually intrudes onto app UI in some cases, especially with scrollbars.
The only time before this I've felt like Apple took a huge UX or appearance dive on an OS upgrade was iOS6 -> iOS7. People complain about almost every macOS upgrade, but the closest they've come to bothering me is that I hated the new tab styles in desktop Safari they introduced a while ago, but that was configurable so I just set it back to normal and that was that. I've disliked other things (the Touch Bar was never anything but a way for me to accidentally open Music—I basically had to disable it to make any of those MacBooks usable) but never really been bothered by an OSX/macOS update's appearance.
So, I didn't expect to mind this at all, despite lots of people apparently hating it.
Then I upgraded. And yeah, it's remarkably shitty looking, first time I've agreed with the "haters" for a macOS release. It looks like an above-average GTK theme, which is to say, awful. Plus they found a new and different way to make Safari's tabs look like crap (and I'd swear tab manipulation is super laggy now, where it wasn't before) and this time I can't fix it with a settings toggle. Like, that element specifically looks and feels like it's from a below average GTK theme.
Heh, I submitted a complaint with Apple every day until they reverted those Safari tab styles. Awful design. There is something deeply broken inside Apple allowing these broken, awful designs get out.
I thought the strength of Apple design, historically, was the resistance to this middle-manager BS. Apple pushed out UI changes just to keep the pot boiling, so to speak, but it generally all made sense together, which suggests strong governance.
P.S. thank you for using the correct form of “effect”!
“No one wants an actual touch screen, but they definitely want a really narrow touchscreen directly above their keyboard. It’s contextual.”
I had a MacBook Pro with the touchbar for a little while. I found it to be useless. I do agree if they had left the function keys alone it would have been a much better, or at least less annoying, option.
> No one wants an actual touch screen, but they definitely want a really narrow touchscreen directly above their keyboard. It’s contextual
The reason why I don't want an actual touch screen on my laptop (after using two laptops with one) is because it's just not ergonomic. For one thing, operating it strains the arm very quickly. For another, it means covering the screen with fingerprints, although that's less of an issue with modern ultrabright screens (but sometimes I don't want bright).
A dedicated touchscreen that's located in an area where it's actually convenient to use is a very different story though.
Just like big screens on phones weren’t ergonomic and a stylus for a tablet meant the tablet interface had failed. It’s a bad idea right until Apple does it. (Which is not to say that Apple might not do it better if/when they decide to do it.)
An upright screen that you need to use for lots of input would indeed result in the arm becoming tired quickly. But no one actually uses their touchscreen laptops like that. It’s an additional form of input. Most of the time you still use the keyboard and mouse/trackpad. But it’s very convenient sometimes to reach forward and touch the thing you want to click instead of mousing over to it (especially if you have multiple monitors). It’s also extremely convenient/comfortable for scrolling through long documents if you have a laptop on or near your lap. You rest your hand on the base/your lap/table and scroll with your thumb.
I don’t use the touchscreen on my Windows laptops a ton, but I still use it daily. And I miss it when I use my MacBook.
Yes and for things like manipulating maps/photos (zooming and scrolling around) it's quite convenient.
The point is that it's stupid to not have it in laptops that cost this much money anyway. Anyone who doesn't want to use it doesn't have to and for the rest it can only allow more interaction methods.
In any case I think that the MacBook designs are stale and really stuck in the past, for now they only win because of the build quality and the silicon. But competitors are quite close, so if Apple continue with their destruction of macOS there won't many reasons to keep buying.
I wonder if Apple is already planning the switch to touchscreens. They’ll never announce it’s coming until they do it because it would damage current model sales. But they have made so many changes on macOS to bring it closer to iOS and the current version seems like it would be pretty touch friendly already. They even allow iPad apps to run on macOS now. Bringing touch to the MacBook seems perhaps not a given but a reasonable destination for all their other changes.
Yep I also think that's the plan.
But I really doubt their approach is good, in my opinion it's like how they "managed" HiDPI displays implementation: take a shortcut to make it easier for them (and in some ways 3rd party devs who use their frameworks) to develop but with some intrinsic flaws that re-enforce their hardware lock in and isn't really future proof/scalable.
The point isn't to have the whole system of being able to be used with touch but to allow specific touch interactions depending on the context. It doesn't make sense to have big buttons and menus when you are going to hit them with a mouse/stylus most of the time regardless of touch interactions. This is a problem with all or nothing Apple approaches.
You can already see that with iPadOS: at first the iPad was basically a giant iPhone made mostly for content consumption and the touch only approach made sense because it was optimized to be used conveniently on a couch for relatively simple tasks.
But as the hardware evolved and they added stylus support, software has gotten more complex in order to allow more advanced tasks. However, outside of purely artistic endeavor (where you use the table as a canvas to draw on) the UI who still has major focus on being touch centric stop making sense. If you are going to use it as a productivity machine, a keyboard is basically a requirement (why would you want to lose half the screen to display a virtual keyboard in the first place) and a finer pointing device (trackpad/mouse) becomes almost a necessity.
At this point you end up having an overblown UI with large touch target that hinders information density/compactness even though you won't use it much that way. It makes the software not as good as it could be and forces poor use of the display space.
You end up in a weird place where the high-end iPads are completely overkill for the typical media consumption tablets were targeting but at the same time it's not a very good productivity device and not just because of the locked down nature of the OS (that only adds insult to the injury) but because it ends up being poorly optimized for that use case.
And this is what I fear they will do with MacBooks: a weird middle ground where you have to deal with the tradeoffs of both interactions methods instead of enabling touch/stylus in the specific parts where it makes sense.
There is no need to have macOS fully touch compatible, only to support touch input in specific apps/use case where it makes sense. On top of that, Apple already knows how to transform a device for another use case just with software: in the 2000s they had Front Row, which allowed you to transform a regular Mac into a media center to be used with only a remote. That was just a software layer on top of the standard OS.
With the compatibility of iOS/iPadOS apps on Macs thanks to Apple Silicon, there is no real reason they couldn't just create this type of software layer that could enable fully touch centric use case on top of the regular productivity use case. And keep other parts of the system as they are just using the touch layer for the most commonly known use cases inside of apps (mostly scrolling/navigating, rough selection, etc).
But they don't want to do that because they are trying to sell hardware as much as possible, so they would rather make any given device miss a piece of the puzzle to force buying another device.
As far as I'm concerned, they could have made an iPad/MacBook hybrid for a long time now, where the display part could snap on a keyboard base and change primary interaction method accordingly. They won't because it means a single device could fulfill all the needs for most people who don't need heavy computing power.
In many ways Microsoft approach is actually better/smarter but they are being let down by inferior hardware (and to some extent the general hate on Windows, which is somewhat deserved but not as much as people make it).
To return to my parallel, at first Apple's approach with HiDPI led people to believe that they were ahead but, in the end, it was only a shortcut, requiring specific display resolution/form factor to enable proper integer scaling. It took a while for Microsoft to catch up, but now their solution is more flexible and allows for arbitrary resolutions that enables more different hardware configurations and ultimately use cases.
I feel it's the same problem. Apple is stuck in their ways and cannot let go of the touch centric approach, because this is what Steve Jobs argued for. They completely ignore that this argument was only about a mobile device that you carry in your pocket, where speed and convenience are the primary factors. And indeed, it is exactly what was needed for smartphones to be truly useful. But trying to apply this thinking blindly to every device regardless of their primary mode of use is self-defeating, yet this is what they are hell bent on doing it seems.
> As far as I'm concerned, they could have made an iPad/MacBook hybrid for a long time now, where the display part could snap on a keyboard base and change primary interaction method accordingly. They won't because it means a single device could fulfill all the needs for most people who don't need heavy computing power.
I've been an early adopter of this kind of thing (remember Asus Transformer?) and used it a lot. In my experience, the catch is that to make the screen detachable and usable on its own, it needs to contain most of the electronics and at least part of the battery, with the keyboard then becoming a dock with perhaps a battery extension. And the problem with that is that it makes the screen heavier and the keyboard lighter to the point where you can't have the screen at a comfortable angle when the whole device is on your lap (or if you can, it requires constant effort to maintain balance). It's perfectly fine if you have a desk or other such surface, but, well, it's a laptop, right?
Apple did an interesting thing with their iPad keyboard dock where instead of arranging it like a clamshell laptop, they suspend the screen above the keyboard, which allows them to move it closer to the user. I have one of those for a 14" iPad Pro. It balances better on the lap, but now you can't use it well while reclining...
That said I still think the concept could work, but it would require consciously designing around this problem. Personally I would be perfectly fine with stuffing the keyboard with more batteries as a counterweight, but I think that designers are reluctant to do this because it increases the overall weight of the device.
Anyway, on a device like that, yes, touch makes a lot of sense. On a regular laptop, IMO no (but with some exceptions; e.g. Lenovo's Yoga, and to some extent even Thinkpads because you can open them all the way to 180 degrees).
> I think that designers are reluctant to do this because it increases the overall weight of the device.
This is the SurfaceBook. The base has extra battery, extra GPU, and the hinge “unwinds” to extend the base a bit to help with balance.
Nice concept but it definitely makes it heavier. I’m not really sure the market for this kind of device is very large. But then I feel the same way about 13” tablets and Apple sells enough of those to justify keeping them in the lineup so what do I know.
Yep. My brother actually has a Surface Book. It's a pretty cool device but severely let down by the hardware. The separation of the GPU is actually a problem and not something I find worthwhile but they didn't have a choice to enable good performance. But it's actually not relevant today, at least for Apple. They have a perfectly fine chip that they put in their Pro iPad that is good enough for most tasks with quite good performance. No separation needed.
The Surface Book is a 9 years old device at this point. I think it's the Microsoft curse, they have a good idea but launch it half-baked and lose interest. They didn't control the most important piece of the stack anyway: the silicon.
Nowadays with the Snapdragon chips they would have a chance at making something much better, but they failed too early, made a weird compromise with the Surface Laptop Studio (wasn't too bad but too expensive for the compromises) and then gave up.
They focus on the Surface Pro which isn't too bad because unlike Apple they actually allow a full fat OS to run and it's not a very good tablet (at least in the media consumption sense) but it makes for a pretty decent laptop.
Of course, you have to deal with Windows and it's not as efficient as an iPad would be.
For the 13" tablet market the appeal is really easy: it can be a notepad that you draw on, you can annote document directly, write equation/diagrams/whatever with the stylus and at the same time it can be a laptop by just snapping a keyboard base to it. The major problem is the software: ideally you want to be able to use "full-fat computer OS" software when bolted on to the keyboard but at the same time enable touch centric usage when used as a notepad/tablet.
Apple could very much do it: they already enable running iPad apps on macOS, they would just need to figure out a layer on top of macOS that would enable usage of touch for the relevant apps without needing to convert the full OS to be touch ready. Just like they did back in the days with Front Row, to enable media center usage out of a regular Mac.
I'm pretty sure they already know how to solve most of the problems (maybe they even have prototypes) but I believe they won't because it is not in their interest profit wise.
Yes I agree about the engineering tradeoffs that require but the point is, as you hint, that they are actually already there and it's mostly a business decision.
I have tried the iPad Pro dock solution and it's exactly what motivates my argument. The floating aspect is largely pointless and mostly serve as a look thing (if anything it makes it more tiring to raise your hand to use touch) while having stability compromises, and not providing enough advantages (they just added a port, the trackpad is small but at least the keyboard is better now). I don't think the weight argument is very relevant since the combo already weighs more than a MacBook Air. The point is to make it a more complete professional device, something has to give, MacBook Pros are heavier and people deal with it.
To keep weight down they have the Air line, this is what it should be for, not selling re-heated designs at a discount (but of course the bean counter will disagree with that).
They could make a much beefier base, with more ports and actually invest some engineering into figuring out a great hinge mechanism that the iPad part could lock into. They wouldn't need to rework a lot of the iPad parts and with their current chips you could get double battery life for what would be a very modular powerful device.
Apple used to be able to do that, I don't know if you have ever dismantled a "Sunflower" iMac but I can tell you it was great engineering. I wish they would work their ass off to deliver something "magical" like that.
But they won't because they know very well that many pros already get by just fine with a MacBook Air but they need to buy an iPad on top of that if they want stylus/touch functionality.
You can infer that because the iPad Pro uses the same exact chip as the MacBook Air and the device drivers must be extremely similar outside of touch/stylus and camera. If they wanted, they could at least allow dual boot macOS/iPadOS with not much work at all. The touch target is a poor argument since it would work just fine with the stylus and using Wacom displays with a Mac has been a thing since quite a while now.
It's purely commercial greed that motivates their behavior and it's the real reason they don't even try to make a device like that. One could argue that it's too niche, but that would be quite an argument, considering Apple just dumped billions of dollars in a Vision Pro, that ironically lacked vision and is the exact definition of niche. The problem with VR headset was never a technology quality problem in the first place but the fact that it doesn't really enable any kind of usage that goes past the cool demo to make up for the massive tradeoffs in useability/convenience.
So, you have Apple dumping billions into a stupid "me too" product while purposefully ignoring a potentially innovative device because they are afraid that they would lose money. I doubt we would get the iPhone today if Apple got as successful as it is with just Macs/iPods.
I haven't used an Asus Transformer but I have used a Surface Pro and my brother has a Surface Book. The potential is there but they are clearly let down by the comparatively much worse hardware. And that's the point, for anyone else than Apple this type of device is very hard (especially since their volumes are much worse) but if there is one company that has every building block that could make this go from very cool concept to absolutely amazing it's them.
And yes, I agree that on a regular laptop having touch is not that important, you need to enable the tablet/flat notepad use cases to make it worthwhile which is exactly why 180/360 laptops with special hinges are still a decent target. But Apple could do it all.
Same boat. I started with the third public beta on my iPhone and the UX overhaul has not grown much on me. I reversed the Safari layout back to the previous, the combined Phone sections are not intuitive (and I almost reversed back to the previous with that too), the lock screen change is not bad but also not bringing more usability... The lack of new lock screen widgets is baffling. The overall appearance... it's hideous. Everything looks unfocused/muddy, colors look gross, readability is down and practically everything is clunky. I changed my Home Screen apps to all clear so I wouldn't have to look are the loud and oversaturated colors. Def not Apple's best work and confusing how we got here. The spam filtering for texts and phone calls is the prize change for the entire OS, which is funny because Apple Intelligence is still somewhat worthless even a year and a big update later. Genmoji, the only good thing about it, still fails 50%+ of the time.
The transparency thing stopped being cute when I couldn't easily differentiate between Gmail, ProtonMail, and Apple Mail. These icons had color, used that color to differentiate them.
I don't think this is atypical, we have color screens for a reason.
The glass style for iOS app icons is completely idiotic. It's optional though. It doesn't even look good, it just makes the home screen look a little less crowded, but the UX is horrible.
Especially widgets are really bad. The widget for my car shows the battery level as a bar chart. During charging it's green, if there is a charging error it's red, when parked it's white/gray. In the glass mode I need to look really hard to see what's happening. All the color coded information is gone. Same for my todo list widget, due items are orange, long overdue items are red. With glass mode on they all look the same.
I'd be ambivalent about it if it didn't ship broken. My Mac updated the other day and I don't think I've seen the glass top bar work correctly once. In fullscreen in particular it doesn't work at all, the background that it's meant to be blurring gets stuck and never changes, so it just looks like shit and is nearly unreadable. I'm not on any beta track or anything so this is what normal people get. I have no idea how they felt good shipping it.
Same here. I was about to order a new MacBook recently, but there’s been a lot of small issues annoying me over the past few years and Liquid Glass was the straw that broke the camel’s back for me.
Back to Linux for me. Ended up ordering a Thinkpad X1 Carbon instead, and am planning to throw Fedora on it.
I always wait for each point release and see if complaints are up or down. I can adjust to about any UI, as long as 80-90% stays the same. For example I ditched windows almost completely at 8 when they left the classic look and went for tablet mode. That's when I went to Mac, I'd been an avid linux user since the 90s though. What I can't put up with are bugs, so I wait out reviews and such from actual technical people and tech sites like reddit and hackernews. It's a policy that hasn't failed me yet.
One thing I’ve noticed is that search fields are now generally at the bottom of the screen which makes them a lot easier to activate. (No more flicking the screen down to search).
I disliked the update for a week or so at first, but I have to say I find the liquid animations fun now.
> I have to say I find the liquid animations fun now.
This might be the most harrowing review that you can give without realizing it. UI animations are supposed to get out of the way. If you can recognize them as "fun", the most likely interpretation is that they are forcing you to expend attention, which in this age is one of your most valuable resources.
True, the search fields are in a better position now, but this really has nothing to do with the liquid glass paradigm. This could have been done in the previous designs just as well, I think.
From reading this thread I’m glad I’m not alone. It seems their “compact” mode has a bunch of invisible gestures that you’re just supposed to know about.
Luckily I’ve also discovered that you can revert back to “bottom” tab mode in the settings, which brings back something similar to the old UI.
This article gave me hope that when I finally have to upgrade my Mac to keep up with system requirements for software updates on third-party apps, maybe I won't hate it as much as I expected to. It's a mess, but the screenshots in this article give me hope that it doesn't have to be a complete and total disaster.
[0] How to Turn Liquid Glass into a Solid Interface:
It honestly wouldn't bee too bad on macOS if they kept this mostly to the window chrome, or things that really need to float. But adding this to all the toolbar buttons, in Safari and Finder looks just like some 3rd party theme hack, it's really tacky. They also didn't seem to consider dark mode well or at all.
It’s terrible from a UX standpoint. By definition, translucent elements present more potential information to a user. It makes it harder to parse certain screens. It’s a nightmare if you have subtle vision issues (where it’s not bad enough you’d need to enable accessibility options). You’re not going to “get used to it” — you’re really just adapting to a crippled interface.
I think it all stems from trying to unify the UX/UI across devices, and to also pull the Vision VR device into that iphone-iPad-MacBook-watch grouping. Handoff and other cross-device interactions suffer when you have significantly different UI elements or interactions.
The problem is designs and elements that were carefully considered and crafted for Vision OS don't always translate well when grafted into iOS and macOS. What looks elegant and modern in AR can look garish, distracting, and old-fashioned on a more traditional device.
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