From natural dexterity to artificial inaptitude: MacOS 2010 to 2020

Confessions of a loyal Mac user, forced to switch from 10.6.8 to 10.14.6, in 2020. That graceful Snow Leopard… became Mojave. Whatever. Read on.

Original title: 2010-20, from a ‘MacOS X’ to some other, ALIEN kind-of ‘iOS’…

Qualifier: I did not move from 10.6.8 back then, because I just detest glossy screens. That Powerbook of mine was the last of its kind with a matte screen. So I had to hang on for as long as possible, and upgraded until there were no more upgrades. Then came MacOS X 10.7, Lion: that auto-edit drove me nuts. I did buy a MacBook Air for travel.. and just tolerated it, but never used it as my main directory management system on 10.6. Stuck with that too, fine. Two OSs. More on this, below — when we discuss the issues with Finder. Until 2019, when I considered changing my old laptop, and move on with the times, as many applications started failing on me (mostly networked, such as browsers, teleconference utilities and the like). Backward compatibility was a forgotten concept by 2020. Had to experience what Apple offered, years later (and admittedly, no huge news on the MacOS front)! Never expected to be so disappointed, being a user since 1990. Twenty years of bliss, until 2010. Then ten years of wait. And then all seemed to be going south. PS: you might agree or disagree, the point of this article is to share my experience from a huge leap between 10.6 and 10.14: small, incremental changes go unnoticed, but this type of retrospect experience might be rare and more revealing. It’s like meeting classmates from college, one regularly and one 10 years after. You will notice changes in the latter, yet you never did for the former. That’s life.

First, the hardware. Looks slim and cute, but lost so much since 2010. Matte screen? Forget that. Almost a touch screen (OK, bar) (what a concept, dirty fingers on a clean LCD?), but not quite! Lit Apple logo so that you know the machine is on: gone — cost-cutting, profit-making changes. [Why my “-””-” lines become “ — “? with wrong apostrophes?]. “AI”? Let’s go for the details.

Ports: gone is the Ethernet port so is the audio output? (oh, there is one). Two USB ports, where you could plug in a multi-USB bank, and have one free for a quick USB stick entry point: gone. SD reader, to get photos from a pocket or SLR camera, logically on your left: gone. Magnetic power lead: gone. All you are left with are 2+2 bi-directional TB/USB-Cs, one taken by the power chord. Power, difficult to plug in, hard, awkward, no magnetic lead as said. Hard to detach: stumble across it and here goes the laptop into a dive and onto the floor. Can live with that, I thought — just have to be careful! Plugging in a multi-USB, so ugly: hangs out, taking up precious physical desktop space, the umbilical chord that never was. Even for a simple plug, like a mouse USB component. The multi-USB has an Ethernet port even. Isn’t that pretty!

Trackpad: why huge? Almost doubled in size. Who is using those ridiculous gestures to do simple things? Not me! Hitting the right pixel by trackpad (or the magic mouse, another pretty ergonomic nightmare) is so much harder: more often than not, you go to the wrong spot. Creativity and productivity drops significantly. It’s almost like it’s done on purpose? Every hit on the trackpad seems to contain a level of uncertainty that was not there before. Instead, my fingers get cramps, almost suffering from repetitive stress injury, distances are way too large. Whoever thought to increase the ‘abstract’ screen space mapped on the trackpad, that huge and ugly real estate, making the keys a tad too far away from your wrists. Criminal, health hazard, really.

Keyboard: lost the depth of the keys somehow. I hear it’s the so-called butterfly design. I do not see any improvement. On the contrary, my typing drops from 99% precision down to 60 something percent. Why is that? I don’t know. Just the unnatural layout, look and feel of the keys. The key is top left (US layout), impossible for fast typists to toggle between windows of the same application. The keys feel cheap and shallow, and the space key sticks, generating by some unknowable AI double spaces where there should be just one. Another known ‘feature’, they say, because dirt might be a factor. Well, why was this not a factor ten years ago??? God (and Apple) only knows.

Screen: screen flickers. From time to time. For no reason. Unexpectedly. There is not much more to say here. For a $3K plus laptop, is there any excuse whatsoever? Feels like work in progress. In that case, please do not release it. Update: dropped a little weight on the screen — screen is gone. Now with an external monitor, until I manage to replace this hugely disappointing MBP.

Touch bar: use it very little. Siri off. Volume/brightness controls… there. Oh mercy. Sometimes not activated… for reasons unknown. Have to click elsewhere. Known issue. On my left (next to the ESC key) there is a smilie?!? If I click on it, many emojis appear on the touch bar. How useful, right. And when using Emacs... I have to use the software ESC key, up there. So sad.

Case: is it my impression, or does it feel unique in collecting dust particles, hair, and stains so much faster than anything I have owned before. I don’t know why. Even the screen, impressive despite its glossy mode, where I can see myself sometimes when I work — creepy, seems to collect dust and stains. Maybe materials got cheaper, or there is some other process that powers up the machine, responsible for this ugly outcome. Opening the case, has to leave more stains on the screen, very close to the camera. Very narrow margins between the screen and the case: why? Cannot think of any reason. What were they thinking? Is it the half inch of ‘saved’ width compared to my old laptop worth it? Buggy, not even talking about the OS, coming up next.

Oh and then the software. Got all the trendy looks, and I am sure there are great improvements under the hood. The question, however, is how does it feel to a 30-year long user and loyal customer, who has invested more than US$200K in Apple’s products, for personal computing and professional operations. This user does not hope for, but demands, an OS that is a Mac OS. And could be one of many, many more. Let’s bring back some features lost. Instead of the iPhone universe to inherit some cool Mac OS features, the opposite seems to have happened. Cutting corners, an OS for dummies.

OS, generally: I don’t know where to start. General points: First, the machine, the design and of course the software is awesome yet it’s made for passive users/consumers, gone are the active/creator types, that defined Apple ever since its inception. Creativity, productivity in a real sense, is at risk. Consumerism is at the heart of the design for much of the hardware and software. Assumes that you don’t code (much), you don’t write (much) and you don’t experiment (at all). Watch videos, silly ‘stories’, listening to music and any other activity such as time-wasting games, chats, smilies, emoticons, etc. So much unnecessary stuff that makes your head spin Eyeball time. Second, simple principles violated, like hierarchical directory structure, incremental numbers for mail messages, and other essentials. More on those later. Spotlight search: lost search by content. Why? What is the use then? File names? I can do filenames, no need for Spotlight. Siri, better not mention it at all. I will just pass. Deactivated. Third, it appears that clicks multiplied. Before, two clicks would clear Chrome’s cache, now need six clicks to do it. Mercy. Fourth, and foremost: PREDICTABILITY is no longer there, gone with the feline series. The OS tries to be smart (see Siri) but fails miserably. Then it’s all a bit of a gimmick. But the essence of computing, namely accuracy thus predictability, is somehow gone. I can do something, maybe this or that way. But no one is certain anymore, thanks to iPhone. Hordes of programmers have been creating components for new OS X versions, but no single vision prevails. This is not a computer for creative minds. It’s a hybrid smartphone-tablet-laptop contraption that does a bit of everything, maybe even well yet grudgingly, but certainly nothing too well. The essence, somehow gone. Take a long, hard look at releases since 10.8, Mountain Lion. And tell me what you see, that increases productivity on a Mac. I cannot find much clarity, myself…

Applications: I will leave comments for the two most critical applications, Finder and Mail, for the climax. For now, let’s see what else is there. Safari: followed the HTML evolution, no easy way to set fonts. Fine, will live with CSS. Never remembers my identity, have to login each and every time. Cause: unknown. Gave up. Unlike Chrome (a memory hog). I have to choose between two ‘upgraded’ browsers. Joy. Calendar: what was wrong with the previous calendar? Nothing. Suddenly, Reminders seem to have copied my calendar properties and are out of the box, basking for attention. I don’t even know what’s the difference between Calendar and Reminders — and I am not interested, really! Calculator: old one, grey, serious looking; now some kind of a kid’s play. Cannot even change looks, let alone other details, e.g. size and font. Yawn. Photos replaced iPhoto? No idea why. Preview: why is it that ALL pages in many applications, including this one, shift left and right while there is no space bar allowing this. This is the most awkward thing, does not feel like a Mac. Feels some kind of a cheap smart phone requiring attention, while deserving none. One more: iWork applications — they look as made for high school kids, so different, and not for creative professionals. Counter-intuitive menus. No further comments. Cool applications (e.g. Grab) gone, it’s like a battlefield of a lost battle. The only nice little thing that survived from OS Lion is Launchpad. Useful, sometimes. Will not comment on the loss of Rosetta and backward compatibility with PowerPC applications. Could have stayed, at least for those that did not require network access/upgrades. Gone now.

Other behaviors: disks eject, just too slow. Failing to eject USB sticks, get error message, then ejects. Worrying behavior, on the margin of a data loss accident. Dock effects, unpredictable: sometimes Gini effect, sometimes not.

Finder: This is a big one. Green button: from maximize, it became full screen?! What were they thinking? They cancelled one function, for nothing. Maximize window≠Full screen view. Control-I takes time, is inconsistent, and sometimes reports wrong number of files. Mouse loses control when in USB concurrently with an external hard disk. Trackpad (huge) works fine, instead. Ejecting USB drives takes forever (unknown reason), compared to hard disks. Labels: so confusing, too much customization. Should have been kept simple. Copying (!) a directory is unreliable. Checking with Ctrl-I does not produce the same results, and after multiple attempts. Usually the .DS_Store file is the culprit. Guess what: copy has no issues on 10.6.8 — again, reason unknown. Thought to include all the bugs of the Finder but most have been reported elsewhere, so I decided to keep them for another post when I find the time.

Mail: Another big one. An indication that MacOS has lost its audience. Try naming a killer application more important than Mail. There is none, not even close. Yet, Mail has gone from bad to worse over the years. Cannot search content. Cannot number messages. New layout, for iPhones, not laptops. Never executes rules for smart folders as it used to. Lots of things need to be done manually. “On <date>, <name surname email> wrote:” is now inside the quoted text, on reply, not outside per proper netiquette. You need to select, opt-command-’ manually, again. Frustrating, time-wasting, error-prone. Duplicate emails are hidden (but kept on the server side! — how many emails have I received today? don’t know). Approximate counts. Mixes font series, some subjects in Greek become Arabic. Move to ‘previous’/(now.. ‘predicted’!) mailbox lost option-command-T. Cannot process large volumes of messages. Everything has become a more-or-less type of thing. Such underwhelming philosophy for an accurate and critical professional correspondence archive. As in the Finder case, I will document Mail bugs on another post, maybe…

Retrospective: OK, let’s review quickly what happens after Mountain Lion. Mavericks: Maps, yawn. Yosemite: Handoff for iPhone, yawn, iPhoto gone, shame. El Capitan: Metal, faster graphics for games, OKaaay. Sierra: Siri, oh no. High Sierra: AFS, fine. Mojave: dark mode, what?. Catalina: 32-bit applications dropped, noooo! These are grabs from Wikipedia, not from any personal experience. Have tested and rejected upgrades ever since 10.6/7/8, those majestic, feline-name series. Seems as if we are losing more than we are gaining, on each new version of Apple’s OS. Becoming consumers, not creators. And the company, perhaps lost in its ambitious dreams and big bucks, eroding the loyalty of decades-long sophisticated and experienced users and, foremost, valuable, high-end, 100K$-plus customers, for kids.

Thoughts: There must be a reason for all this. And here is my own modest interpretation. In an attempt to perform more ‘AI’, computing needs to be pluralistic, simpler, go for the least common denominator, allow, accept and even encourage mistakes, such as typos and messy clicks, so that AI agents can find those and suggest/auto-correct. Accurate scenarios don’t play out well with current ‘AI’. Loose scenarios, more clicks, errors, less precision, many typos, etc. give an impression that ‘AI’ works. Of course we all know that humans can fool any ‘AI’, but the marketing for the new generation has probably succeeded in that a few gimmicks provide an impression of an intelligent machine. To the detriment of real computing and true creators…

So… bring them back. Like, #bringthemback. It wouldn’t take much to recover some key features that make a Mac a real Mac and not some kind of super-expensive glorified tablet, and hopefully revive that unique Apple spirit.

Written with love, fond memories, maybe nostalgia. The end. For now…