It seems like more and more of the work on MacOS is dedicated to propping up iOS instead of simply making a great desktop OS. As someone who does not use or want Apple's mobile devices, it's been hard to get excited about these last few releases.
I like Apple's mobile devices but ever since the iPad turned out to be a giant iPhone instead of a true desktop/mobile hybrid, I'm scared as hell that they will lock down their desktop/laptop ecosystem the way they do with mobile. It's clear now that iOS is absorbing everything Mac.
Now I'm trapped between MacOS, Windows 10 and maybe Google's Chrome environment. Linux, please take off. I wished the open source community had good interface/usability designers.
Sorry, no can do. We have to complete the process of breaking everything with systemd, then as soon as that's done rewrite KDE and Gnome from scratch again.
I swear, I must be the only person on the planet satisfied with the current state of systemd and GNOME 3. Fedora 23 is my main workstation OS and I have the least amount of friction getting my work done on it compared to either Windows or macOS these days. Then again, I mostly spend my day in IntelliJ, DataGrip, PyCharm, Firefox, a terminal, and a Windows VM for when I'm forced to open Visual Studio.
I'm a maintainer of runC and long-term contributor to Docker. From my perspective, systemd has been nothing but a huge pain from a development perspective. Not because of the UX (which is okay, there's lots of odd stuff there too) but because systemd sets up the system in a way that is ridiculously frustrating for people using low-level kernel primitives directly.
If you want to use cgroups and don't want systemd to start messing around with your setup, then you have to go through systemd (which is bad, but it gets worse when you find out that systemd doesn't support all cgroups). Also, systemd has ridiculous defaults. I wrote the pids cgroup code in the kernel, and was surprised when systemd set the default limit for all system services to be 512 tasks and 4096 for all user tasks. Then there's the binary logging format which is such a brain-dead idea, that I'm not even sure how someone actually went through the process of writing the code without ever considering that it was a bad idea.
That's just one example of the things that annoy me with systemd. Things mostly work with it, but if you actually want to do something, using it is such a pain. If systemd had stayed as what was promised (a replacement for init scripts) and hadn't gone beyond that (managing your bootloader, binary logging, abusing cgroups and changing the kernel plans for what cgroupv2 should look like, messing around with coredumps, misusing /dev/kmem to actually spam people who are trying to debug kernel issues, an-almost-but-not-quite reimplementation of ntpd, etc).
If they didn't have such strong views that they were entitled to be the owners of my system, it might actually have turned out as a good project. Too bad that the management of the project has decided that they should "rewrite all the things, but badly".
I concur as a user of Docker. Trying to get a legacy application running on Docker went smoothly. That is until I tried to start a simple rpcbind service and discovered that during my time away from software development and linux that systemd had taken over plain old kludgy (but hackable!) sysV init scripts. Trying to get a dead simple service running took hours because systemd segfaults instead of gracefully handling and reporting errors. In this case, cgroups wasn't mounted, though why a system init system has a hard requirement on a relatively new kernel feature set not needed in this situation, I can't fathom. Eventually I found a shim for cgroups, but seriously it was a pain. I lost half a night's sleep due to shoddy system level programming you mention from systemd. I'm currently highly eager for FreeBSD 11.0 to reach code freeze. It has a new Docker / linux64 layer and _no_ systemd.
> I'm currently highly eager for FreeBSD 11.0 to reach code freeze. It has a new Docker / linux64 layer and _no_ systemd.
For what it's worth, if you find a distro that doesn't have systemd you can run Docker and runC on it -- both use the underlying kernel primitives themselves and aren't wrappers for systemd scripts.
True, that's also a good point. Alas, many of the non-systemd Linux distros have pretty small communities. Do you have any preferred distro's for this?
Here, however, your audience has launchd, and has had for over a decade, running on top of Mach IPC; and BSD APIs such as kevent() for tracking forking processes.
Hmm, my impression of Gnome 3, so far, is that it's kind of a poster boy for ambitious design gone bad, visual as well as functional. On top of that, it seems to be very unstable (every minor update knocked out most of my plugins and I had to re-scramble to get a working desktop back together) and a security train wreck waiting to happen. Who thought it was a good idea to download plugins from a website that are basically JS code mashed into the existing code? Or has that changed recently?
After approaching Gnome 3, Cinnamon, and Unity with an open mind, I'm a happy Unity user.
Well Fedora is basically systemd central, so no surprises there. Frankly if it continues the way it has, every distro becomes Fedora with the serial numbers filed off...
Count me in too. Among other reasons, because I administer both Linux and OSX systems—and the systemctl(8) utility is basically invocation-for-invocation identical to OSX's launchctl(8), so I never really have to context-switch.
Just because some UI looks pretty doesn't mean it's well-designed. I sat there staring at that page for like 2 minutes, trying to figure out where I was supposed to click to get more information, before I realized I had to scroll down. Perhaps I'm old-fashioned, but I don't consider that good UI.
Designer here. I and a lot of my colleagues love open source and what it stands for, but, the truth is, it is going to be very difficult to convert designers into hardcore open source advocates like coders/engineers can be when the tools we rely on every day are all closed source. Adobe creative suite, Rhino, proprietary render engines, and a bunch of other platforms designers use simply don't have open source alternatives competitive with market leaders, making conversion to open source very difficult for working professionals.
The majority of the professional community for creating UX/UI do not have the tools to work in FOSS, so you aren't going to see many designers working for FOSS projects as result
> The majority of the professional community for creating UX/UI do not have the tools to work in FOSS, so you aren't going to see many designers working for FOSS projects as result
Then put a call out for what tools you need replaced. Maybe even back GNU to hire people to do it. As a free software developer, I have no clue what you need in order to do good design work. From my perspective, inkscape works "good enough for me". But I'm not a designer.
Free software communities require some give as well as take. The fact that there isn't a free software version of $tool is because nobody has given enough of an incentive to replace it (we're too busy replacing other proprietary tools or making our own tools better).
This sounds like a good encapsulation of the reason why Desktop Linux has died - it is good enough for engineering types who get satisfaction and value out of using it, but who have no idea how to make it useful for anyone outside of the programming community.
That's not really a fair statement. Desktop GNU/Linux works for people who don't have incredibly specific requirements (like "Inkscape isn't enough, I have this $5000 software suite that nobody has replaced with free software yet").
LibreOffice + {Gnome,KDE} + {Chrome,Firefox} is enough for quite a few users "outside of the programming community". My girlfriend uses GNU/Linux (she has to use Windows now because my university requires some proprietary CAD software that I don't want to set up with WINE), several of my non-technical friends now use GNU/Linux.
It's dishonest to claim that just because some professional designers aren't happy with the tools we have available right now on GNU/Linux that "Desktop Linux has died because programmers have no idea how to make it useful for anyone outside that community".
Yeah i think the problem for Linux on the desktop is not software but hardware.
More specifically the issue of getting preinstalled Linux out on store shelves right next to Windows and OSX.
In large part because there is no marketing machine to match Apple available, nor the deep pockets to get into a war of attrition with Microsoft.
The closest we came was when Asus shipped their original EEEPC. And Microsoft wasted no time offering a specialized license for Windows XP so that OEMs could offer it instead. Keep in mind that MS had stopped offering XP, and was trying to sell Vista at the time.
On top of that most stores have gotten damn used to the Apple MS duopoly. Thus anything thats not an Apple is a MS, with all the customer support problems that entails...
FLOSS always has to start somewhere and there are definitely professional artists and designers that use the existing FLOSS tools.
During the day, do your work with the tools you are used to. During the night, share a few design tips with open source folks and try out the FLOSS tools.
It feels like a lot of Microsoft software has a very "eh, fuck it, whatever" kind of attitude, especially when it comes to troubleshooting. Lots of good intentions that just never get finished.
Case in point, the "Do you want Windows to search for a solution?" Since the day this feature was added I've never once had Windows figure anything out; I always get "Windows was unable…". In the Win2K/XP days, you could right-click on a network adapter and choose 'repair' to do all the standard stuff (flush DNS, release/renew DHCP lease, etc.) which would solve most problems. They took that out in Vista in favour of the "idk man" wizard, and now you have to do it by hand.
Windows is also full of catch-all error messages, where it says "We couldn't copy the file. Check file permissions, make sure there's free space, and if it's a network drive make sure you're still on the network", as if those weren't things that the computer couldn't check for me in milliseconds.
When people say that macOS is falling behind Windows, it seems to be, at best, a superficial judgement from people who don't use both of them for productive work. Windows 10 has a lot of polish, but it also has two separate control panels for changing settings, apps which don't seem to know what kind of apps they are, and more and more new APIs and features that only store apps can use, in exchange for extremely limited access to the system.
Windows is great for playing games, but for any serious work the overhead of making it work and keeping it working is just ridiculous.
> Windows 10 has a lot of polish, but it also has two separate control panels for changing settings...
I've seen this with every new version of Windows (except Windows 8.x, which I haven't used and instead jumped from Windows 7 to Windows 10). With each new introduction and addition of polish, you still see old dialogs and methods of doing things underneath once you go one or two levels in. Control Panel is the best example of this. Windows 10 isn't even a complete OS yet. As an example, if I go to Settings and search for "proxy", nothing would show up. If I drill down into Network manually, then I can see and change the proxy settings. I'm sure there are many other unfinished things in it. It's as if they released an in-progress OS right in the middle of a development cycle, and I find it both frustrating to use and ridiculous!
> As someone who does not use or want Apple's mobile devices
My guess is that most of Mac users do want/use Apple mobile devices, and that in fact the majority of their computing time is now on those devices so it makes sense that the team would focus heavily on the interface and overlap between iOS / MacOS.
I would be, because most of the workplaces and other places didn't confirm your observation. With perhaps the exception of SV, which is filled with Apple hardware. Can we conjure any statistics from somewhere to confirm / deny our observations?
I'd think devs would be kin to have a macos computer but no iOS device (android devs would be the obvious pattern, but web devs would also easily be on android)
Out of that demographic, I don't see much people that care enough to buy a mac but choose an android or windows phone.
The macOS users of the past have adopted iOS for its good macOS integration, the iOS users of the current and future will go with macOS for its good iOS integration.
Apple is tying all it's devices strongly together through software and services. This way you have a huge incentive to completely buy into the Apple ecosystem.
This matters far more than something like a new filesystem - a term most Apple customers have never even heard.
As someone who has used Windows, Mac and Linux as both personal and work OS for > 5 years each, I'm curious to know how come (you don't see yourself getting one in the future). The two things I have against the Apple platform compared to Microsoft and Google are Apple's bias toward lock-in and their aversion to tinkering. Other than that, I think what they are offering is rather good.
I got a Macbook Pro as work machine in late 2014, having used a Thinkpad before.
1. Mac OS is just too unfamiliar. It starts with the keyboard layout, which I reverted to Windows-style after I went crazy trying to find the square brackets. (Which, probably for aesthetics, they didn't bother to print ont he keyboard.)
2. Mac OS's poor multi-monitor support regularly drives me crazy. To their credit, they have ironed out a lot of the bugs in Mavericks, but there is still plenty of stupid behavior (e.g. screen 1 sliding back to the desktop from a fullscreen app when a new window opens on screen 2, or a messagebox from an app on screen 3 opening on screen 1, completely out of my sight). Windows is somehow much better in this regard (at least, I was not annoyed by it that often), and even Linux has very solid multi-monitor support these days (at least for me, YMMV).
3. The userland is UNIX, but does not match my expectations well enough. It's basically in the creepy valley. For example, I was using units(1) one day and wondering why it gave a syntax error when I tried to use a power operator (like "2^64"). Then I noticed that I was in the Mac terminal, not in my Linux VM (where I usually work), and upon inspecting the manpage, I found that they hadn't updated their units(1) since 1991 (wtf).
4. The company where I work is mostly a Windows shop, so corporate IT is based on Microsoft products (AD, Exchange, Lync aka Skype for Business) all the way through. While there are Office for Mac, Outlook for Mac, and Lync for Mac, these are still no match to their Windows counterparts in terms of polish and OS-level integration.
All in all, I'm already set on going back to a Windows notebook when it is time to get a new machine. (It's not like my Linux VM cares which host OS it runs on, anyway.)
The multimonitor support has fairly recently become passable. It's hard to imagine that it took more than a decade to do that. It used to be almost entirely useless. I think it's a case of overthinking it and trying not-to-be-windows that made it take so long.
I'm not sure it's correct now, but at least it's useful.
The Unix outdatedness is really annoying sometimes. I wouldn't even mind running some kind of big update after getting a new machine and waiting a couple hours for things to improve. The number of Macs I've seen with Linux VMs running on them just to get up-to-date things on them is really unfortunate.
brew install <whatever you want>. I have about 100 packages installed and haven't had a problem in months. Anything somewhat popular is updated within day.
But I don't get the complaint about multiple screens either. It's always been plug in -> desktop extended. I wouldn't even know what to get wrong.
Only since maybe Yosemite has multi monitor support been what I'd call well modeled and decent. It's quite often been plug in -> useless grey screen on the other monitor you can't use, or some other nonsense. It took, what 3 entire revisions of the OS just for that not to happen? For a while, I had apps where I couldn't put different windows of the same app on different monitors, or one of the windows would randomly go away never to be seen again. Other apps would resize to 0,0 when disconnecting and then save the window position so I'd have to either reconnect to the same monitor I was no longer near, or uninstall, reinstall the app.
There was always weirdness about the dock and menu bar that's sort of now settling down, but the dock used to display all sorts of bizarreness, especially when it was set to autohide.
Fundamentally it came down to issues with Apple's way of thinking about workspaces, monitors, desktops, applications and windows. Even now I still have to spend far too much time hunting down things across multiple desktops and monitors. It seemed like Apple was dancing around what should probably just happen in an effort not to too closely mimic Microsoft.
But to get at the heart of it, what happens when you full-screen an app? Apple had no idea what that meant when it was launched in 2011. However, what Apple chose to do in the case of full-screening an app on multiple monitors made absolutely no sense and was absolutely useless: the app would take on the role in the hierarchy of a desktop, and the other monitor would go grey. Why? nobody outside of Apple knows, but it took until 2013/2014 to fix.
"Fundamentally it came down to issues with Apple's way of thinking about workspaces, monitors, desktops, applications and windows. Even now I still have to spend far too much time hunting down things across multiple desktops and monitors. It seemed like Apple was dancing around what should probably just happen in an effort not to too closely mimic Microsoft."
Everything you need to know can be summed up in the fact that, in OSX, you can click the green button with a '+' in it, and that window can get smaller.
The worst part is not that they have a "unique" UK keyboard layout, but that they don't support the standard UK layout at all with the built-in keymaps, which is frankly incredible given that every single keyboard other than Apple ones uses it since it's a British Standard and that's what everyone uses and expects.
As has already been said here, there are British Standards covering computer keyboard layouts. There are the several parts of BS ISO/IEC 9995 (parts 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, and 11), there is BS 4822, and the BSI also publishes ISO/IEC 15412.
Those standards are just someone else's opinion though. As long as they don't claim to meet those standards then they aren't 'wrong', they just have a different opinion on what's best compared to the standard.
> 3. The userland is UNIX, but does not match my expectations well enough. It's basically in the creepy valley. For example, I was using units(1) one day and wondering why it gave a syntax error when I tried to use a power operator (like "2^64"). Then I noticed that I was in the Mac terminal, not in my Linux VM (where I usually work), and upon inspecting the manpage, I found that they hadn't updated their units(1) since 1991 (wtf).
That's an interesting one. OS X has a BSD user land (FreeBSD to be specific), while Linux is traditionally used with the GNU user land. Looking at the FreeBSD site, they ship the same units version from 1993: https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=units&sektion=1
> 1. Mac OS is just too unfamiliar. It starts with the keyboard layout, which I reverted to Windows-style after I went crazy trying to find the square brackets. (Which, probably for aesthetics, they didn't bother to print ont he keyboard.)
I assume you're using a non-US keyboard? I've been using Macs for programming for 15 years, and I haven't seen this, and I have MacBooks Pro from 2010 through 2016 in our office and they all have square brackets on the keyboard.
That is my biggest (and really only) complaint against Apple. Sometimes you have to go under the hood and do a few things. I don't know what Apple has against this way of thinking though.
"My guess is that most of Mac users do want/use Apple mobile device"
That's what it is... a guess. Unless you can produce some data to back it up.
There's a huge community (especially outside of US) who use Macs for day-to-day work but use android mobile devices as that's the most sensible choice for a majority of the world.
It's not even a preference thing though. Android phones are absolutely killing the low-end smartphone market and international users are very heavily Android locked-in. I can buy a pretty solid Android phone for 200-300 dollars, even less these days. The cheapest iPhones are 400-500 dollars. It's why Android dominates iOS globally.(https://www.idc.com/prodserv/smartphone-os-market-share.jsp). Outside of SV, Android is still the most common mobile OS (including in the US).
I'm disappointed. After them announcing the subscription pricing changes, paid search results, etc. in a press conference because "we can't fit all into the keynote" I expected more. Instead we got 20 minutes of adults playing with emojis.
Not what I would expect from a developer conference keynote.
/edit: Thanks for the hint to watch the State of the Union video.
Wait for the Platforms State of the Union video, it will be probably available in few hours on Apple's developers website [1]. It's basically another keynote, but more developer oriented.
The stuff announced last week is mainly of interest to developers, not end users. Most of what was in the keynote was for end users.
That said, I'd be surprised if they couldn't fit last week's stuff into the Platforms State of the Union (later today), which is basically the developer-oriented keynote.
Copy/paste across iPhone and Mac is very useful. All the other features are Meh.
I really don't want to be that guy talking to my Mac at work. I can't be sure that all my questions to Siri are not awkward to speak out.
Would have been great to have a textual interface though. You know that Keyboard thingy that is always with a Mac?!
> Copy/paste across iPhone and Mac is very useful.
I don't use a Mac or an iPhone, but I applaud this sort of device harmony.
That said, I am worried that it would unnecessarily leverage the cloud. My guess is that instead of the two devices directly communicating with one another—that is, instead of leveraging the fact that they are probably on the same local network and should just work in concert—the clipboard data will be sent via a cloud intermediary. That is, it will be exfiltrated from the local network, sent through Apple, and then back into the local network.
Yes, the Hand-off mechanism works without iCloud involvement or even using your active internet connection. I just tried by disabling Wifi on my Mac and opening up message to continue on a semi written message from my iPhone.
Now, there could always be a iCloud fallback that says if there is internet, just use it. Perks of using non-free software is that it will almost always non-verifiable.
> I just tried by disabling Wifi on my Mac and opening up message to continue on a semi written message from my iPhone.
How is this possible? Bluetooth? USB? Or are we talking about a previously synced draft that's still there when you turn your internet off? Sounds like a basic iCloud cache to me.
The original Continuity used bluetooth, p2p wifi (which is also what AirDrop uses), regular wifi and iCloud, some features would depend on a specific substrate but for others it could use several at the same time or switch between them.
2. ‘Poll’ the clipboard by pasting every ~5 seconds.
3. If the contents of the clipboard appear to be ‘secure’
(looks like shellcode, bitcoin address, url, etc), quickly replace the contents with an attack string with same datatype.
If you have an untrusted device attached to your Apple account, your local clipboard can no longer be trusted.
Indeed, WHATWG is currently considering [1] a related scenario where rogue websites with access to the clipboard will inject formats with dodgy payload to exploit flaws in some app if the user pastes.
To my knowledge, existing continuity features already do one better and communicate directly between devices, not even requiring them to be on the same network. (AirDrop is a good example.) But obviously we have no way of knowing if this will be the case here, or if there is a cloud-based fallback.
P2P connections is a place that's generally terrible for mobile. You have to keep connections open to more devices, which is generally bad for battery.
You could imagine a copy/paste that waits for a message from the cloud (because Apple push notifications are pretty solid), then opens the new connection to the local device, so the data never leaves your network. At least to me, that sounds needless complex when the typical use case could just send the entire payload with the "go look for this device" message.
Now, I'm all for making Siri better as an "Accessibility feature". I was just referring to myself talking to my Mac for doing my basic activities. It might be annoying at best to my co-worker so would he be to me when he does talk to his Mac all the time.
I think clipboard permissions for applications is going to become an issue with features like this. I may be incorrect but I'm pretty sure that clipboard access is unrestricted on both OS X (ugh, macOS) and iOS.
Frankly, I much preferred when they called it Mac OS X. The change to OS X just seemed stupid to me—with a name like 'Operating System Ten', it was as if it didn’t even have a name anymore!
…which is why (in my opinion) macOS ('Mac Operating System') is far better than what it’s replacing.
I use iOS and a password manager, and maybe 5-10% of apps I use have an integration for it (and I place the blame on Apple for this, imo if they actually care about user security as much as they want everyone to believe they do, they should have an app store review policy that forbids having a password field without using the password manager extension).
Anyway, the effect is that almost every time I sign into an iOS app, I'm copy & pasting my password into the password field. So now my passwords will all be synced via bluetooth and/or to icloud whenever I sign into an app.
At this point, is using a password manager actually less secure than just re-using the same password everywhere like everyone else does?
Your alternative is simply copy-pasting without using the system clipboard (old-fashioned style). I imagine there's a lot less attack vectors by doing it that way, at a small time cost.
Is there no option for a "local only" clipboard with this?
Spotlight is already incredibly useful, and I wouldn't be surprised if it's getting some of these improvements. We should know soon since Developer Preview of Sierra should be available today.
>I really don't want to be that guy talking to my Mac at work.
If Siri might bring an end to shared offices, I am all for it! But joking aside, yes, there are surroundings, where you don't want to talk to your device - in which I also prefer text messages to phone conversations.
But well-done voice integration can vastly improve usability. Just think of not having to grab your mouse and look for that music/video player control just to mute/stop things, but being able to do it with a short voice command without leaving your editor.
I thought I had at least 20 years before being scared of new technology. Still sitting on OS X 10.10 scared to update, and completely disinterested in most cloud stuff except for my OneDrive folder.
Time to look into Linux, I suppose, since I'm about to become one of those people.
I can feel you. (Even though I am already on Linux.) It's always weird to be sitting there at 26, wondering about how "kids these days" use the internet.
I'm doing the same thing. Two years ago I started to do most of my work in a Virtual Machine in Debian Linux. Looks like my gut was right - I'll wait until 10.10 or my MBP doesn't work anymore and then I'll have to do a painful switch.
Actually I already migrated most of my things (Evernote, Things, Mail.app) already into Emacs and must say that this old Lisp machine is the best OS of the three^^ So I take the world becoming closed and proprietary as a chance to go back to sanity.
That Apple doesn't do quality anymore? For Mac OS, system bugs are increasing release after release, kernel panics were introduced in Mavericks and didn't go away with El Capitan even though it was supposed to be a bugfix-centric release. I also have deactivated upgrades.
If you are scared of updates breaking stuff, Linux is not the best choice either.
Updates to OS regularly breaks graphics and Wi-Fi drivers for me; after every second update I have to solve "why is everything black" and "why are all videos green".
Of all the things I disliked on OS X when I moved to Linux, instability with updates is even worse here.
This depends a lot on which distribution you go with.
Gentoo is notorious for regularly breaking things. Debian has a reputation for constantly being two years out of date because because of their QA process.
Ubuntu is somewhere in between, though lately it has been leaning towards the "Let's change everything every six months!" end of the spectrum. You can mitigate this a bit by sticking to their LTS releases, though. (This is what I'm doing currently.)
Yeah, I am at ubuntu, since that seemed like the easiest distro to get started, but now I am afraid of switching and setting up all the graphic drivers again. (and working around bugs in Network Manager again. Come on guys, it's software with which people connect to Internet, why is so important thing so buggy.)
Are you sure this isn't a hardware problem? I've been running El Capitan on really quite unsupported hardware (Skylake K6700 / Samsung 950 Pro SSD) and haven't had a single kernel panic – nor on the Macbook Pro.
Also if you're looking for quality (opposed to freedom or configurability) Linux on the Desktop really doesn't fit. I adore it on the server, but there isn't a distribution/hardware combination where essentials sleep/wifi/graphics/sound work out of the box. UI inconsistencies are a constant annoyance, dist-updates will always break something etc. It's not an indictment of Linux, it's just that GUIs are terribly hard to get right.
I'm absolutely certain it isn't hardware: It started to happen the same week I upgraded to Mavericks. Besides, it's a Macbook Pro 2013. I had noticed several comments on HN about kernel panics in Mavericks, I didn't want to give them credit when I upgraded.
As you note: I reckon Linux isn't much better. I switched to Mac when Ubuntu dropped a bugfix for Ethernet encryption in 13.04 which prevented me from working for my employer (and reduced mouse controls in the UI since 12.04).
nix seems really interesting & the 'right way' to do things. but strangely, i don't really* have problems with homebrew -- maybe because it has the luxury of being built on top of a stable, known system.
*i have had problems with python. i always have problems with python.
Does anyone know if this is a bad idea? Like do any of the system provided utilities do anything special in OS X that will be broken if they are replaced? I'd like to do install these replacements, but am concerned about possible side effects.
By default, it will append a "g" to all the coreutils at least, like ls -> gls, sed -> gsed, etc. And things that are already default on OS X, like curl, perl etc, will not be symlinked into /usr/local unless you force it.
But personally, I changed my coreutils over a year ago to the GNU ones (via symlinks), and I force link every single package, I've never had a single issue.
Though our use cases may be different, and you may have issues. In which case you can just `brew unlink $package`.
You can't really replace the underlying tools, you'd want to install the new versions in a different folder and update your Environment to point to those executables.
EDIT: I'm wrong, didn't realize homebrew-dupes actually is meant to replace the OS X utils.
So effectively, it's only one step better than installing Cygwin on a Windows machine?
Can someone please remind me again why the MacBook is such a preffered machine for software development? For years I've been told, "You get a shell!", and "It's UNIX under the covers", etc.
Except that the shell userspace is antiquated, and the UNIX flavor is BSD rather than Linux. Meaning that I'm just as out-of-sync with my target server as if I were on a Windows machine, I still have to run Docker through a VM layer, etc.
Don't get me wrong, the hardware is excellant. But the software is even more locked-down and less customizable than the MS world... and just skipping the middle man and installing Linux directly is a 10x better developer experience than both.
I just don't get this complaint. Run brew install <package>, add a folder to PATH. Done. Anything somewhat popular (vim/git/python/ruby/graphviz, imagemagick...) is usually updated after a day and I don't remember the last time it gave me any trouble.
The comparison with Windows simply doesn't work. Unix software compiles on OS X out-of-the-box. It doesn't on Windows. The conventions (pathnames, line endings, CLIs, time zones) are either the same or compatible, on Windows they're not.
If your complaint is that the UNIX layer of Mac OS X isn't ~exactly~ like Linux, then the only way you're going to solve that problem is by running Linux instead.
It's easy to get more up-to-date software with package managers.
Just install all the formulae from that repository, I'd assume. They all replace some system-provided tool. I believe they install the binaries to a separate directory that you need to prepend to your $PATH in order to get your shell to default to the updated versions.
By default, FreeBSD uses Almquist Shell for root, and Tenex C Shell for users. OpenBSD uses a modified pdksh for users, which is simlinked to /bin/sh for root, and NetBSD uses Almquist shell for users and root.
They all have their own version of the "GNU core utilities". BSD make instead of GNU make. less(1) is dual-licensed (I think) so everybody uses the same (OpenBSD has forked it recently though). FreeBSD's default shell is tcsh, OpenBSD uses a fork of pdksh. If you want bash then you have to install it from ports.
Most of OS X's userland comes from FreeBSD (except for bash and make) and I think they keep it reasonably up to date.
Most of it is BSD-style licensed, some (less and ssh for example) are dual-licensed, and very few are GPLv2 (the old versions of make, bash, and emacs; but also current git). vim is licensed under a custom GPLv2-style license.
A lot of GPLv2 code now uses GPLv3 (all the GNU tools obviously) and Apple (and others too) doesn't want to ship GPLv3 code.
Almost all of the userland comes from FreeBSD. Even stuff that Apple could take directly from OpenBSD for example.
Well the tools are 'stand-alone' for the most part, and they do provide the code for them, I believe the issue would be if they integrated any tools into BSD licensed software that it would have to be GPL licensed. I was hoping BSD to some degree maintained their own versions, that could of been useful for Apple, not saying they can't maintain their own, but at least they could help fund BSD and maintain their OS' CLI toolset.
> Maybe while they're at it they can add a real package manager too.
Contrary to those who suggested Brew, I stand by your request: de-installing anything that went in as a .pkg is a .pita and Apple doesn't provide, as best I can tell, any mechanism short of the author providing its own "Uninstall.app" to remove software.
I've gotten very close by scripting some of the `pkgutil` output, but it's nowhere near `apt-get remove` and friends.
I think Apple's idea of a package manager is the App Store. Since they do not screw with /usr/local in any way stuff like brew and ports is a quite good alternative to a first party solution.
I just hope they will not start screwing with /usr/local
They can't upgrade to recent GNU tools (bash is the one most people complain about) because of the GPLv3. And I feel their developer manpower is better spent on fixing OS bugs at this point. These issues are better fixed by developers less encumbered by the closed-sourceness of OS X.
Doesn't SIP cause issues with the TiVoization clause? I guess I'm not an expert on this, but it's possible Apple wants to leave the possibility open of making SIP mandatory.
The decision of not shipping GPLv3 user space tools predates SIP by several years, far more than I would bet SIP has been in development. I think it's just a legal issue as in lawyers don't want to touch it period
An OS with mandatory SIP will be the point I stop upgrading. I'm fine with optional features like this, but the instant it becomes mandatory and can't be bypassed I'm gone.
Nothing prevents them, they chose not to. It would restrict them from shipping GPLv3 versions in the future if they tivoize the platform further, which they almost certainly intend to do, its kind of Apple's thing nowadays.
The GPLv3 has clauses in it that opens up a new load of legal questions for Apple that they'd rather avoid. I just wish that Apple would move to using less encumbered shell that is actively being developed, like pdksh or zsh.
They're not. After you enable the Linux subsystem you get the userland from Canonical under Ubuntu's license, Microsoft ships WSL and CLI shims triggering the download of the Ubuntu userland.
They really don't. They know exactly what they can and can't do.
They don't think it's vague or ambiguous.
They just don't see it as worth the energy for them to use it.
I can't disagree with that strategy (if no one is really pushing you to do X, why bother), at Google we do the same with android mostly, but for different reasons:
We don't use GPLv3 because the OEMs/etc don't want it, and rip it out anyway :)
Similarly, i expect in Apple's case, they don't use it in parts they may keep common to ios/macos because then they can't keep them common.
In any case, the TL;DR is that there aren't open legal questions or magic things they are waiting to play out. They've made their choice and have been sticking by it.
"The GPLv3 has clauses in it that opens up a new load of legal questions for Apple that they'd rather avoid."
I'm curious why you think it opens up legal questions, etc. They've pretty definitively stated they just don't want to use it.
There are no vague or mysterious questions they are waiting to get answers to or anything like that.
They can't find or build alternatives? they could have the same impact at the Unix level that they've had on the high-level GUI. It could certainly use it.
But an updated cp(1) that has all the same options as the GNU one has a much lower return-on-investment as 3x emojis (which I chose for this example since it could be around the same amount of work).
Nothing. Apple is just being overly paranoid or hoping to some day do things that GPLv3 won't allow them to do. Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Intel, IBM; all of these companies have some interaction with GPLv3, but Apple staunchly refuses to even touch it.
It's a real pity, because Apple's popularity is sending some message that GPLv3 is poisonous, when it reality it's only a problem for them because they chose to make it a problem for themselves.
The Linux devs publicly denounced an early draft of GPLv3 and never reconsidered the question. Yeah, I think they just didn't feel like trying to understand it, and Linus's own anti-FSF attitude spreads to his followers.
Actually Linus didn't have any big problems with one of the GPLv3 drafts[1]. And many bits of the Linux kernel are individually licensed as GPLv2+. Not to mention that Linus used to have in COPYING that they were considering updating. Very few kernel developers hate GPLv3.
I was thinking of this position statement, which is signed by prominent Linux devs. I don't think they ever reconsidered their position after the final draft:
The new clauses in the GPLv3 bring up legal questions that some teams would rather just not deal with, even as user space tools. As such, Apple has decided to avoid potential legal headaches and stick with tools under better understood licenses. Most of the BSDs have stuck with GPLv2 stuff, with FreeBSD actively working to replace the few bits and pieces of GPLed code in their base system with code that is under the BSD or other liberal licenses.
Am I the only one who was really disappointed when the were talking about 'getting back disk space' and by the meant 'move stuff to the cloud' and not 'LZ4 in HFS+'? (I've given up on ZFS on OS X by default.)
See, the thing is - I use sync across multiple Apple devices. I have had zero problems with duplicated or missing entries, and it's one of the absolute killer features of the ecosystem for me.
It's hard to get a real impression of what problems may or may not exist, unfortunately.
That was just the first link from a Google search.
Internet forums are full of other users complaining of the same problem.
Even if it only affects 0.1% of users, multiply that by the tens of millions, and that's a large number of people having a horrible experience.
It works great for you, until you're in the 0.1% then it's a bitch.
Edit: and it's not just music, it's a mulit-year history of botching up sync across multiple different technologies - some of which I've experienced first hand, some of which I've had friends complain of. Either way, Apple have zero credibility with me and syncing.
Apple is bad at cloud syncing. And "cloud" stuff in general, really. That's just not the scale they think on naturally.
Apple has always done "workgroup"-size sharing pretty well, though. See: early AppleTalk; Bonjour; AirPlay; Time Machine with a Time Capsule; etc. (Though I won't include iTunes Home Sharing in that list; it's garbage.)
But, I was surprised to learn, OSX Server.app is actually supposed to be part of that "workgroup-sized solutions" list, too. It's basically "Active Directory Controller - Home Edition"—an actually not-insane thing to use to manage ~3-8 devices for your family. Stick it on a Mac Mini, forward some ports through your router, set up dynamic DNS and a LetsEncrypt cert, and suddenly everyone can consume regular old CalDAV calendars and LDAP contacts. (Plus some cute other things, like putting all your family's devices under Profile Management so you can push an update to them whenever you are about to e.g. change the wi-fi password, instead of having to go around to everything and change it.)
I've used Apple sync between my laptop and phone for my calendars for over a year with no issues. I have several friends with Apple devices who depend on reliable calendars and none have complained about this aspect. YMMV.
Same here. I've had multiple problems with sync. Specially with Notes. I've lost notes, I've had notes duplicated, etc. The best decision I had was to switch to Simplenote.
It was under the impression that it's not one desktop being synced across all your computers, but rather your desktop on other machines are accessible anywhere. Akin to iCloud tabs, or Chrome tab syncing.
Basically you open Finder on your MacBook and there's a new sidebar entry: "Desktop on imron's iMac"
I haven't read enough about it to corroborate, but I very much hope this to be the case. My personal machine and my work machine have very different use profiles (not to mention monitor setups), and I would not want actual automated syncing of everything, but being able to grab something from my home machine would be useful (which I already do with iCloud browsing history).
You can already sort of do this. But it is done with drag-n-drop. Pick a file on your Desktop and drop it into a Screen Sharing window! Drag a file from a Screen Sharing session onto your desktop.
I really hope this is an Opt-In feature rather than Opt-Out. Out-of-sync iMessage threads, bizarre chicken-or-egg "Approve Keychain for this device from your other device" (what device? I never approved it in the first place - JUST STAY AWAY FROM MY PASSWORDS, I'm perfectly happy with 1Password + Dropbox sync), and my personal pet peeve is Spaces. I used to love OS X Spaces as with really easy to use keyboard shortcuts, Apple got rid of around Lion and replaced it with mediocre "workspaces" with very little keyboard friendly-ness - TotalSpaces helps fill the void, but once has to disable sip in order to use it.
Completely agree. Apple's unstated policy regarding sync is that customer data loss is acceptable, and for that reason I avoid any form of sync from Apple.
That's true for macOS Sierra, but will Mac OS X 10.11 El Capitan and earlier be retroactively rebranded as macOS? Now we will have to listen to people say things like "I upgraded my Mac from Mac OS X 10.10 to macOS Siera". :)
Minor correction. The switch from "Mac OS X" to "OS X" happened with OS X 10.7 Lion, not with OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion. The last release with the "Mac OS X" name was "Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard".
The good news is that I might not have to listen to people call it "Mac OS Ex" anymore.
I'm hoping there's a bunch of new APIs hiding in there allowing ISVs to do cool stuff. Because the new version, meh, don't care about Siri much and the rest of the stuff is window dressing, IMO. Maybe some improvements for Xcode, testing tools?
Just curious what age range you are in. From what I've personally noticed, younger folks tend to almost all pronounce it "O-S-ecks" and most in my generation (~40) tend to pronounce it "O-S-ten".
I am close to your age, and I have always called it "O-S-ecks" because I hate roman numbers (there's a book that I call D-S-M-eye-vee) and because "O-S-ex ten point nine" sounds better than the alternative.
24 year old here. I exclusively call it "O-S-ten" and cringe every time someone says "O-S-ecks". Only particular reason I can think of is that we had OS 9 machines in grade school that slowly got replaced by OS X machines. Seemed natural I guess.
Plus, "O-S-ecks" gets too close to "O-S-sex". I was a kid...
Yeah, 9->10 seemed natural, and I remember articles when it was first released along the lines of "OS X (pronounced O-S-Ten)". I used to cringe when I heard "ecks", but it's become so common it doesn't have an effect anymore.
Okay, I could get on board with that. Though I'm not one of those loading every window manager out there in search of perfection, Mac OS is looking a bit dated. I'm not even sure what I'm looking for (well, except I've figure out that I'm not a tiling WM kind of guy), but some sprucing up would be appreciated.
> Also new is what Apple calls the universal clipboard. This gives users access to a single clipboard that works across iOS and macOS
I hope this only works when the 2 devices are on the same wifi network or have bluetooth enabled, rather than by sending every single thing I copy to an Apple server...
Complete and utter speculation, but if this is implemented well I imagine it is done the same as iMessages, with end to end encryption to all your devices. (Which, last I read about it, has its flaws and isn't a perfect system against state level actors, but it's not the worst.)
Will this make the OS suck less? Seriously, at least for my use case, and in my opinion, OS X has been on a downward trend for a while (since 10.6). They need to fix the bugs, and get back to a nice stable OS that "just works." That's all I'm interested in.
I had kept my Macs at 10.6 for a long time but had to "upgrade" one of them to help my daughter with an iPhone problem (really annoying that you have to update your Mac just to copy files to a phone, but whatever). Everything was worse. Search was terrible. Mail was in the crapper. The weirdest shock was when I was using Apple apps and discovered they'd changed Shift-Command-S from "Save As" to "Duplicate." That move is really emblematic of Apple's direction with the Mac — arbitrary changes that either eliminate features or make everyday workflow more cumbersome.
I bought my first Mac in 1989. I bought my first non-Mac PC in 2015 and stopped using Mac altogether.
Basically at this point I'm recommending everyone to forget about iWorks apps (even though I brought a few people onto them earlier). I'm still holding on to Keynote even though the version compatibility issues are absolutely horrible, but it still produces the best presentations with the least effort, so I'm biting that bullet. To everyone else who's still using the old Keynote: Don't even think about trying out the redesigned one, nothing will be compatible anymore, just stick with it as long as you can!.
Apple really needs to improve OpenGL support at least. Bump version to 4.4. They should also fix any OpenGL bugs in a timely manner.
Windows file sharing (at least with Windows 10 Pro) is pretty broken as well. Transferring multiple large files (especially 2 GB+) from OS X to a win10 file share seems to fail every time.
Actually, a number of hardware announcements and unveilings have happened at WWDC over the years. A couple of iPhones unveiled, a few Macbook Pros (including last year, I believe, as well as 2012 with the first retina MBP), and a few others.
I foresee a lot of trouble as a MBP user with no other Apple products (MBP=work machine). Interoperability with Android phones is already sucky and they seem to bundle their product line even more.
Siri for MBP will be annoying, hope it can be disabled completely...which of course won't stop my co-workers from using it all day :(
It also sounds like there will be a few new attack vectors. The log in when close by sounds like a pretty horrible idea and I have a feeling the copy/paste feature will turn out to cause some issues as well.
What is sucky with Android phones and OS X? You want Universal Clipboard use something like Pushbullet or alternatives http://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/questions/26495/univer... you want cloud sync use the existing cloudservices or use Syncthing which lets you sync even without a cloud. You can get nearly all features today also with Android ( even unlocking the Mac with Android Wear https://www.gadgetish.com/index.html ). Of course you will not get them from Apple ;)
As an owner of still-functioning early-2008 hardware, it stings a little to see the machine suddenly unable to “support” such a minor-looking OS update. It was easier to handle back when you saw something like a complete transformation of the OS from one version to another. There are many reasons to want a more layered software architecture, and this is one of them: I would like to be able to continue improving the core of old machines without necessarily having to support whatever else they feel like building on top.
On the other hand, Apple has always done this: it blasts forward, and it always finds ways to make you just a little dissatisfied with what you have. They’re sort of brilliant at it, actually.
I hope all the cloud storage can be turned off. Depending on your job (e.g. confidential data) or how much you pay for bandwidth, these are some really bad features.
Those are not the only reasons to want the cloud features turned off. I don't want my phone and computer tied together, and it already annoys me how integrated the iPhone is to iTunes. I also don't want Apple cloud data storage. It's not a feature I need very often, and for the times I do, I have dropbox. I am not interested in having cloud storage integrated into the operating system like that.
I will not be upgrading to this version until it has been verified that all of this crap can be turned off completely.
It's not like iOS where everything is locked down. You are root and can do anything you want on your machine. It should be pretty trivial to prevent the cloud storage stuff from running.
Unless they remove the ability to turn off SIP, you have full control over your machine. This is very different from iOS where you have to wait for some team of Chinese hackers to discover a security vulnerability in order to get access to your own device.
Not sure why this is not "root in the traditional sense", unless you're in some environment where you don't have physical access to the machine and can't reboot for some reason.
I meant with SIP, root is not the all powerful account it is traditionally. I'm also sick of the idea of disabling security to do simple things that shouldn't be covered by the security.
You can be sick of that if you want, but it doesn't really have anything to do with the point I was making, which is that it should be possible to disable cloud storage on your Mac, since you can do anything on your own device.
Whether you can do that with a reboot or not, whether you need to disable SIP, etc., isn't really germane to what I was talking about and I feel like you just wanted to take the opportunity to rant.
I don't think I should have to disable security to do things that are not security concerns. I also doubt the average user regards root as a solution. I am not hopeful given what was said during the prior beta, that disabling SIP will always be an option.
> I feel like you just wanted to take the opportunity to rant.
I have to dispute that changing core system files is something that 'shouldn't be covered by the security'. It's exactly what this sort of feature is for.
> You are root and can do anything you want on your machine.
That was never my experience on an Apple device. Now my Linux boxes yes, but Apple and Windows no way. Especially with the Mac App Store and the user Interface being so locked down by Apple. Many things are hidden by Apple.
The only thing I have found that couldn't be done on an OS X device was run a custom kernel without breaking power management. Do you have any other examples of things that you can't do?
Ya that cloud storage thing needs to be able to be turned off for my personal use because I don't want that feature and for work otherwise I can never upgrade past 10.11 and will basically have to go back to a Windows machine when it comes time to replace my work machine.
Apple Pay in Safari seems very interesting. I wish they had come up with something that would have worked with any browser as my personal primary machine is Linux, but I can probably upgrade my old macbook to use that.
There are also people who simply don't have access to sufficient bandwidth to make use of cloud storage. Forcing it on would make the OS and my internet connection useless to me.
Auto unlock would be a lot more interesting to me if I hadn't already been using Windows Hello on the Surface Book.
I'm honestly more comfortable with that than proximity locking; I can foresee situations like stepping into a coworkers' office next to mine or to the restroom across the hall where I don't want the device to autounlock without me sitting directly in front of it.
MacID is a much safer (and seemingly more powerful, from what I could tell from the keynote) implementation of this idea. I've been using it for a long time and it's really solid.
I've been using Apple operating systems for most of my computing, since the Apple IIe. I started using OS X in 2001. Every since the release of 10.7, I have just been disappointed with their releases. Now that they are releasing major updates on a yearly press-release driven schedule, their quality has suffered. And their drive towards making the desktop more like iOS seems to cater more to non-technical consumers than developers. I have been happily exploring Linux the past year, mostly in VMs trying out different distros. I kinda doubt I will upgrade to macOS.
What version of Mac OS was ever meant for more technical consumers though? Apple's DNA has always been consumer product focused in everything they build.
Obviously they were never exclusively marketed towards technical users, but Apple was definitely targeting the UNIX workstation and multimedia workstation markets in the early 2000s.
Will they likely be moving to major version increments for each named release? Since it's no longer "OS 10," will Sierra be macOS 11, and the named release after it macOS12, and so on?
On the iPhone, the always-on "Hey Siri" activation is actually local on the device. You can test this out by activating Airplane Mode and saying "Hey Siri". The interface comes up, then says that you can't use Siri because you're offline.
This means that Apple isn't listening to you 24/7, only when Siri is activated. Sure, sometimes it's activated accidentally and might overhear something you didn't want it to, but those times are pretty rare.
If Apple introduces a "Hey Siri" feature on the Mac (which it's unclear about given the fact that in the demo Craig activated Siri by clicking on the icon, then later by pressing a key on the keyboard), I expect it would operate in the same way.
Finally, I'm sure there's a software setting you can use to disable Siri if you really don't want it to be activated.
| This means that Apple isn't listening to you 24/7, only when Siri is activated.
what?! your proof that Apple isn't listening 24/7 is not a proof at all. A device that is listening to you 24/7 to hear when you say "hey Siri" can tell you "you can't use it because you are not online" whenever it wants to, and I don't think anybody was suggesting that Apple servers were capable of listening in when you have no network.
Apple has been shown in the past to log information on the device itself, however.
There's a sysconfig to turn off nearly everything in OS X if you're comfy with the CLI, I doubt Siri would be any different. It will probably be a usual GUI switch though, due to privacy laws.
The beta for XCode 8 is up which includes Swift 3 and support for iOS 10.
Before you decide you're disappointed, wait for the Developer State of the Union later today and the other sessions. There's interesting things like an "Apple File System" session. It looks like the beta for the file system will be in macOS Sierra and come out officially in 2017. You won't be able to use it as a boot drive (probably a safe precaution) and it has a few other restrictions, but it's a good start.
In the past year since El Capitan I have had essentially zero major issues with the software. I feel that most of the time programmers tend to overstate the bugginess of Apple software - most users I know have a consistently smooth experience.
Absolutely if there's a bug, there's a bug. By "overstate bugginess" I meant that some people speak as though the software is so buggy that it is difficult to use the computer (example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11895916). I personally have had a very smooth and pain-free experience with OS X/macOS 99% of the time, and many people I know have a similarly smooth experience.
Wow, we're back to MacOS but now it's spelled macOS. It's like moving back into your parent's house, and noticing that some of the furniture in your room looks smaller than you remember.
Half the people here are complaining about too many new features and not enough stability, and the other half are complaining that there aren't enough new features. This is why Apple doesn't listen to consumers and instead just puts out whatever they want to.
Could be in the dev sessions. Seems to be that the keynote hasn't been direct at devs in quite a few years. So the stuff you, as a developer, care about won't be shown in the big show.
Thankfully, I've been doing much of this mobile integration (like sharing clipboard) for a while via KDE and KDE-connect on GNU/Linux with Android/Linux!
Otherwise, the entire reason I use GNU/Linux at all was when Apple added the Mac App Store and made it clear that they would eventually turn the Mac into iOS effectively, complete with the walled-garden stuff, censorship, sabotaging of GPL software (which can't go in the App Stores) etc. So, thanks Apple for introducing me to software freedom! :P
KDE Connect is one of the most noteworthy developments in FOSS in the last few years, precisely because it's simple and elegant and "just works", like an Apple product, while at the same time carrying all the core values of FOSS.
Yeah, they made it so clear that four years after the App Store was introduced, I'm still perfectly able to install Non-App Store software. And brew <anything> is more up-to-date and bug-free than apt-get. The App Store doesn't support the GPL3, but then again, neither does the Linux kernel.
MIT license, by the way, is compatible with the store.
Yeah, of course permissive licenses are compatible with anything, they just fail to preserve freedoms, see, e.g., the Apple App Store.
And you're right. I mistyped. I didn't mean that Apple made the iOS direction of everything clear, I meant that they made it apparent at all with enough hints of its potential to be really worrying.
I already think that the non-App-store warning message requiring changing security settings (which looks really scary to generic end-users) serves to somewhat sabotage the non-App-store market.
Between versions 7 and 10 it was officially MacOS [VERSION], before that it was referred to as system [VERSION], as in System 6 and so on. That was not an official name, it was the version number of the file `system` and was simply the system that ran on a Mac, because there was only one.
It got the official name MacOS when they allowed the selling of clones.
You mean like, the cops, FBI, or TSA take your iphone, put it close to your laptop, and then have access to everything, probably including your encrypted hard drive?
What bums me out is the seemingly arbitrary dropping of support for older hardware.
I have an older MBP that I've upgraded with SSD and mem. It works great other than being bulky for my use case (email, surfing) It relies on a iGPU so there's really no reason for support to be dropped other than Apple wanting me to upgrade.
I believe the older models (and by older models, those that are 8(!) years and older) were deprecated as they didn't included a couple of the execution flags for processor assisted encryption.
I waited for PiP or as Windows calls it make a Window always stay on top (like Win and Linux can do for decades) for so long and now I have to use Safari as it seems to get it working. I also doubt it will work with Flash or any live web sport streams :( What was/is so complicated to get an always on top window on OS X aka macOS?
It's the state of Linux on the Desktop anywhere. Expect three hours of fiddling kernel parameters to get sleep to work as expected, followed by the same for Wifi, Sound, Graphics. To be repeated at least with every dist update.
Expect different applications to use different languages, some to have menu bars within the window, some on top. Sometimes strg+c copies something, sometimes highlighting text does it. Not all applications use the same clipboard. Font rendering is inconsistent. Some applications bring their own color-, font-, kb-layout-management.
Linux is excellent on the server. On the desktop it's ... not something for people complaining about OS X.
I'm a bit surprised at your comment as my experience with linux on the desktop (or laptop) has been consistently good on such things as Dells and custom-built boxes. Granted, there are a few minor bugs here and there, but overall Ubuntu and Debian seem to "just work" on commodity hardware. Maybe I've been lucky?
Are you suggesting that all these problems are comorbid or that these are all possible problems one might experience (in an uncorrelated way) on Mac hardware?
Seriously, did Apple fire their OSX / macOS team? Pretty much all new features are spinoffs of their iOS infrastructure (Siri, handover, etc.) and the main OS development and innovation seems to have stalled. Not even a feature like telling software that you're on a metered connection and it shouldn't run backups!
Is there anyone at Apple still working on innovating / improving OS X? Like people that tried to bring in ZFS, improve the Unix layer, work on Vulkan/3D/VR or something like that? O.o
Hey, one less reason for me to use FB Messenger. In complete honesty, I prefer FB Messenger because it seems a lot more expressive and it's way easier to access your photos.
FB is really stomping on iMessage in the chat realm, and I'm sad I have to wait for iOS 10.
I'm very torn about this. I can see why they might want to keep this on Apple hardware only. I've yet to see a video chat solution work as well as FaceTime on iOS devices does on Android. Maybe Duo is it but I need to see it to believe it.
Still, it's very frustrating. I have an Android device as my main phone but have an iPod touch to iMessage and FaceTime friends.
Strange, I've had pretty bad luck using FaceTime. Anytime my wife goes away for work it seems to be laggy or calls don't connect, or it doesn't even ring on the other parties side.
Not trying to dispel your point, but my girlfriend uses her iPhone to FaceTime her relatives in rural Russia with where their main broadband is spotty 3/4g modems; and it performs better than anything else they've tried.
I think a bigger reason it's doing so well is because you don't need a phone number to contact someone. I have several friends who I first talked to on FB Messenger before I had their phone number.
Their wifi/data-based group messaging is also far superior to MMS groups.
Then it would be nice if Apple simply supported your preferred email address wholeheartedly and didn't keep trying to always rope you into an icloud email. Seriously, those are dark patterns that people hated (and still hate) about Microsoft and Windows.
I'm not sure if you'll find that helpful, but you can create a Google account with a non-gmail email. When you create your account, below the username textbox is a blue "I prefer to use my current email address". Never tried it myself though..
They've changed it now so if you want to signup for a Google account it asks for your existing email and has a text link to signup for a gmail. If you are on the gmail landing page and hit sign up then it's how you stated though.
It may well be that Google is worse, but I keep on having to opt-in my accustomed email address and shut off the icloud one. I've probably shut that thing off in Facetime over a dozen times. It keeps on coming back like some sort of boss zombie. It has even caused arguments with a girlfriend, when emails got sent to the icloud address because it keeps coming back. (Now forwarded.)
If you also have an associated Gmail account it won't let you use another email address as the primary one.
That said I'm in some apple limbo land where I need to switch to an email address for iCloud but it won't let me use mine since I had a pre-email appleID. Yay.
Still, you can meet someone organically and follow up with talking to them the next day knowing just their name and what mutual friends you have. Email and phone numbers are both unnatural arbitrary strings compared to names.
Some features are not intended to maximize penetration; they are differentiators for their platform. Super Mario has a real future and you can only get it on Nintendo.
I really enjoy FB Messenger. There's a part of me that is disturbed by how deeply integrated into my life Facebook has become, but there's another part of me that just loves the convenience of it all.
Now if only they'd fix that random infinite-reload-loop bug that's been plaguing me for the past week...
This is huge! I can understand that they wouldn't want to devote a lot of time to it, but I can't believe this wasn't even mentioned in the keynote. It is a developer conference after all.
"Developer State of the Union", Jesus... you talk about a closed platform.
I've never been able to stand these ecosystems where you need to attend state of the unions to know what will be deprecated and how the "establishment" has decided you would run your business (tools, etc...).
I know there's good money to be made there but Apple is just too much for me.
If it's any consolation, I've been downvoted a bunch of times when I tell stories about my time working for Steve at NeXT. People just don't seem to like hearing things that disagree with whatever perspective they hold. (And Steve used to refer to our software as the "crown jewels" that needed to be kept secret at any cost - even if we lost business or bankrupted partners. Steve freely admitted that we would overcharge anybody who was naive enough to pay high prices. But people don't like to hear that - even though I was in many meetings with Steve where he said those things.) And I should add that I'm not anti-Apple. I think we need to be able to see people and companies clearly - warts and all. Otherwise, how can we react to the real world?
I think the problem you are facing is that you have made some pretty outlandish claims with some basis in fact but also with some embellishments as to your role in all this and that HN has a whole pile of old timers on board many of who might have been present as other parties to those very same happenings. Likely they have long ago figured out who you really are.
That coupled with a hatred for rich people, the '1%' as you call them, and the fact that almost every major development in computing - according to you - in the last 20 years had your hand in it makes it hard to believe anything you say.
Maybe just stick to the facts, leave out the embellishments. For instance 'your time at NeXT' was just a single year but if we're to believe your comments then you were the guy that singlehandedly saved NeXT, Apple, Linux and Oracle to boot and if it weren't for a small glitch in your thinking we might have had global internet some years earlier.
It seems a bit much for one person, even if they've been quite active, Forrest Gump was fiction, not a biography.
Hmmm...sounds like a lot of things being conflated. I do think that the 1% has too much of the wealth, but I'm not sure how that is related to other things that I've said. You may disagree with that, but I'm not sure that justifies any downvote about my observations of the 1%. And, as best I can recall, I've only described computer-related events that I was present for. You may disagree, that is your right, but I was actually there and involved with the projects I've described. (And I worked in three different groups and multiple projects during my time at NeXT - it was chaotic to say the least. If one of your "old timers" thinks they know everything I did there, I would be pretty skeptical about that person's credibility.) I've never claimed to have saved any company at all - so I'm not sure where that comes from. I can't help it if I happened to grow up and work in Silicon Valley - where a lot of things were happening related to computers. Just because you weren't around when such decisions were being made, doesn't mean that nobody was.
Let's just say that adding 'and in a court of law I'll claim I made it all up' doesn't do much to add credence.
Anyway, I'm pretty sure you're more than welcome here but HN is kind of skeptical and if you are anonymous and start making grandiose claims about conversations between the execs of the largest companies in the IT space at some point in time expect some pushback ;)
Actually, they put up the videos on their site and you can watch them there or download them. So, complaining that you can't stream it is a really minor complaint. Plus, I tried to stream it on my Apple TV and it wasn't available to stream, so the complaint is completely invalid.
Seriously, how is this the top comment? They are in fact working on a brand new filesystem under the hood plus a Dropbox Infinite competitor, on top of all the other stuff. They didn't exactly phone this one in.
Also from the likes of your pet feature wishlist I'm not sure you are making an informed critique. Apple has withdrawn from the Vulkan group and put serious effort into its own graphics API, Metal. While you may not like that decision, it's no indication of low engineering investment.
APFS is only a developer preview in macOS Sierra, your system will not use it by default. It is meant for production use with the 2017 release.
The filesystem does not seem to include any innovation, it is just catching up to the state of the art. A new filesystem was long overdue ever since ZFS was dismissed.
Funny I have the opposite. I often need to induce a sleep/wake cycle to restore detection of external speakers. Killing coreaudiod does not fix it, but a restart or (I recently learned) sleep/wake does.
Yeah so my issue is pretty much opposite of yours it seems.
If I have headphones/speakers plugged in, and unplug them (usually to swap from headphones to speakers, or vice-versa), often after I unplug, it won't recognise that I plug something back in.
I used to think this happened when some perhaps-not-so-diligent audio using apps were open (I'm looking at you Skype) but it seems to happen more and more. Then again I'm already on my 3rd logic board for this MBP (both times replaced because of dedicated GPU failure), which is the 2nd MBP I've had that's had that same problem fixed twice.
I think this is on Synology issue, my Samsung TV routinely loses the NAS drive while streaming media. Not constantly but randomly once or twice a day; I have to power my TV off/on to get it to see the drive again. Meanwhile the same NAS connect to my Macbook Air, iPads and iPhones (for the kids) never drops the NAS.
I used to have a "once or twice a day things the internet suddenly gets really flaky from certain hosts" problem. It turns out it was my router, somehow being so crap at DHCP lease renewal that it was wedging the hosts connected to it. Since I was already using a bunch of Apple stuff, I put my router/gateway in bridge mode and plopped an AirPort Extreme behind it, and the problems went away.
Though, given the particular devices you list, the problem might actually be support vs. lack thereof for 802.1q (media QoS). Apple hardware supports it at all price levels; every other vendor seems to see it as an enterprise feature (for e.g. VoIP softphone VLANs) and doesn't bother including support for it in their consumer chipsets.
How are you connected to the NAS drive? If it has the option, making it an iSCSI target and installing an iSCSI initiator works wonders compared to most network file-system setups.
Yes, Apple considers general purpose computers a legacy technology and more so a legacy business. Apple would much rather be in the locked down, small screen appliance business, i.e. computing devices made for techno-phobic user base.
But it may backfire spectacularly on them, since once they abandoned general purpose computers and server operating systems, their cloud services will/are suffering as a consequence.
Really, if you are a software developer not specifically developing for Apple platforms you are much better off building yourself a Linux system at this point.
iOS devices brought in revenue in Q1 2016 of around 58B, vs 7B for macOS - even iPad sales alone are greater than macOS devices. You can expect this focus on iOS to continue, or even accelerate, as they focus on making more money from all those iOS devices (like driving adoption of iCloud, Apple Music and other monthly subscriptions).
You could say that macOS was responsible for a good amount of the iOS revenue, insofar as 1. devs using Macs are a lot more likely to spontaneously decide to try developing iOS apps, and 2. having more iOS apps sells more iOS devices.
If Apple only sold iOS devices and you had to develop for them from e.g. Windows, I don't think the app ecosystem would have been nearly as large—making getting one a rather less attractive proposition.
I got my first mac product (mbp) a few months ago, I've dabbled in OSX development but still feel guilty for not trying iOS dev yet, despite not even owning an iPhone.
That seems a little unfair. They did a bit of this in the last couple of rounds - introducing Metal, for example, or all the energy work they did a couple of releases ago.
Metal is a proprietary 3D technology ported from iOS. Apple chose to do another closed tech instead of adopting Vulkan or fixing their slow OpenGL implementation.
If you look at the numbers, you'll see that Metal is about 30% faster than OpenGL on OS X, which is interesting because OpenGL is about 30% slower on OS X than on Windows. Which means they're forcing developers to use their proprietary API to get comparable 3D performance. How is that a good thing?
To be fair (regarding "closed tech"), Apple was hardly the only one to release a propriety Vulkan alternative (there's also Mantle and DX12) and Apple released Metal to developers almost two years before Vulkan 1.0 was released.
The difference is the Windows driver model allows IHVs to implement Vulkan alongside the proprietary DX12. Microsoft may not support it but they've provided the framework to let it happen anyway.
In contrast Apple exclusively controls the macOS graphics stack top to bottom, so as long as they don't explicitly support Vulkan they're forcing developers to use their proprietary API.
Vulkan is based on Mantle, and DX12 can coexist with Vulkan because Microsoft doesn't take responsibility for all of Windows' OpenGL and Vulkan support. In this area at least, Apple really is doubling down on proprietary technology where others aren't so much.
One aspect of their decision to run with Metal that surprises me, is that they decided the cost of developing and maintaining an API of that level of complexity was worth it. I'd like to know what they were thinking.
I think they looked at how 'well' third parties developed Mac OS X drivers for OpenGL, and figured that wouldn't get better.
Assuming they knew about Vulkan in time (Vulkan was announced at SigGraph 2014, about a year before Metal's _release_, so that may have been tight), I guess they assumed things wouldn't get better if they replaced OpenGL with another open technology.
Also, from what I read, Vulkan doesn't do anything implicitly, OpenGL does lots of things implicitly. They may have thought that the optimum API lies between the two.
I don't think Apple ever publicly stated anything about it, but my $0.02 is on "The latter seems more plausible to me" in http://apple.stackexchange.com/a/213893:
"There is debate over whether Apple make the entire driver set themselves, or just take NVidia/AMD's core code & add their own hardware/OS-specific code to it. The latter seems more plausible to me, but either is just speculation."
I also notice that that page mentions drivers that can be downloaded directly from Nvidia, but gives no indication that either driver is significantly better than the other. That is not inconsistent with them essentially using the same source code.
You know, I really think this line of argument on HN is getting old and needs to be relegated to the dustbin of intellectual discussion.
Saying "Well, but X did $similarthing" as a loose form of justification of whatever Z is doing, like some strange variation of the "not as bad" fallacy. (Though I understand you're point about industry modus operandi)
a cookie if anyone knows the actual fallacy this falls under
Basically making it like OSX's implementation of EFI vs. UEFI, or their Lightning cables vs. USB-C:
1. Apple creates their own implementation of something and pushes the industry forward;
2. Everyone else realizes it's a good idea, and standardizes on something slightly different/incompatible (usually with Apple on the standards committee!);
3. Apple continue using their own thing that Works For Them rather than adopting the standard.
The closest Apple ever got to making a standard was 1394, but even then, other companies were behind it (and thus the famous story about Jobs wanting to charge for 1394 until he found out Apple would be paying a fortune to other companies).
EFI was made by Intel and UEFI was basically EFI 2.0.
Thunderbolt was made by intel (lightning was a cheaper spec from AMD that didn't require expensive active cables). USB-mini breaks and displayport mini is big. What we got instead was USB-C which unifies both of them. Thunderbolt used displayport mini, but the latest 3.0 spec uses USB-C. The fact that all three technologies are starting to unify on the same connector is very beneficial and none of this is dislike for Apple.
Likewise, AMD made the mantle APIs for lower-level work and then turned them over to Kronos where they became the basis of Vulcan. Apple's metal API and doubling down by leaving the Vulcan work group is either "not invented here" or vendor lock-in.
Mantle is not proprietary. Metal being usable before Vulkan doesn't exactly make up for the complete lack of Vulkan support and anything past OpenGL 4.1.
It's conceptually similar, but is probably more properly related to Mantle (the AMD API later donated to Khronos, which they developed into Vulkan) and its initial release predates that of Vulkan by ~18 months (Metal was announced in September 2014 for iOS, the OSX port was released in June 2015, the initial release of Vulkan was in February 2016).
> The Apple File System (APFS) is the next-generation file system designed to scale from an Apple Watch to a Mac Pro. APFS is optimized for Flash/SSD storage, and engineered with encryption as a primary feature. Learn about APFS benefits versus HFS+ and how to make sure your file system code is compatible.
It seems phrased in the particularly Apple-y style that usually means "we're seeing whether we're allowed to throw this legacy feature away or whether something will force us to put support for it back in."
As I seem to remember running in case sensitive mode broke tons and tons of apps that made assumptions based on the history of HFS+ being case insensitive.
I'd be very interested to know if they run case-sensitive by default are not in the final release.
I finally understand a bug on OSX which bugged me for a long time. When I stored a file with the name äöü on and HFS+ volume and wanted to access this file via ä[tab] is would work. It was eventually fixed.
But know I know why this happened. HFS+ normalise the letter and ä becomes two characters, the a and the umlaut dots. And bash didn't know that or didn't care, so it so no file with an ä but with an a at the beginning.
Is this analysis correct? I so hope that APFS will be a little bit more sane.
I am getting progressively more fed up with Apple with every new iteration of OS X, but unfortunately, none of the things I need to run will work on Linux yet. Hopefully that changes, because I don't know how much longer I can hold out.
Even their hardware isn't that good anymore -- they haven't updated the Mac Pro since 2013, for instance.
Makes me wonder what they're doing with all that cash...saving it for the Apple Car? I'm with you, getting progressively more annoyed at the lack of hardware updates.
I assume this got downvoted by somebody who doesn't know the facts and/or didn't understand the point. If so, this is a pity, because it's better to learn from what you don't understand, rather than downvote it out of ignorance.
I wss replying to this comment:
> They're sitting on it and letting it invest. So pretty much nothing, except some stock buy back.
The last part is not true. If you read the link included with that comment, it says:
More importantly, almost all of Apple’s cash and securities are stashed overseas, proceeds from sales outside the United States that Apple will not bring back because it would then have to pay U.S. taxes. Maestri said Tuesday that $200 billion of Apple’s reserves — a whopping 93% — are overseas, and Cook has expressly said Apple does not plan to sacrifice roughly 40% of that stash in order to bring the proceeds home to Cupertino, Calif.
While cash and securities pile up overseas, Apple is piling up debt in the United States. The company currently sits on about $53.2 billion in long-term debt obligations as well as $32.2 billion in “non-current liabilities,” after executing a series of bond sales including the largest in history for a nonfinancial U.S. business.
There's also a report in the Wall Street Journal, which says in the headline: Apple to issue $10 billion to $12 billion of bonds to finance share buybacks, dividends (1)
So, exactly as I said, Apple is not using its cash for "some stock buy back". It is raising debt for that purpose. It is raising debt precisely and exactly to avoid repatriating overseas cash and paying taxes on it.
I am not making this up, it's what Tim Cook says: "Cook has expressly said Apple does not plan to sacrifice roughly 40% of that stash in order to bring the proceeds home to Cupertino, Calif."
Exactly. For developers, Platforms State of the Union is usually the one you want to watch. The WWDC Keynote is always more of a consumer facing side of things nowadays. Platforms State of the Union is always more of a low level behind-the-scene features.
WWDC is a conference for developers, but Apple's developers are almost all B2C developers, so the keynote has a specific purpose related to that.
The keynote is basically there to prove to Apple's B2C developers that the "Apple platform" will still be a viable market to sell to for the next year, such that it's worth investing time into to learn all their proprietary platform stuff at the very same conference.
Apple proves their market-viability going forward, by demonstrating all the consumer-facing features that will attract consumers to their devices, where they can then spend money on the B2C developers' apps.
This is also why they screen ads: they're showing the developers their strategy for attracting customers, to buoy up their faith in Apple's market strategy. Apple creating impressive ad copy for their platform directly affects your bottom line as an Apple B2C app dev—so you want to see that they've done it.
---
Note that all this stands in stark contrast to Microsoft's strategy: they love their developers too, but those mainly consist of B2B developers. And you don't win over B2B devs by proving that your platform will attract home users. You win over B2B devs by showing all the Enterprise-y features which your platform will use to guarantee the Enterprise-y deployments the B2B devs sell to; and how it will easily integrate with everything customers already have, such that there won't be an "incompatible" ecosystem of boxen serving some purpose that grows on its own rather than being absorbed into a larger Active Directory domain.
This is, for example, why Windows Server 2016 is all about virtualization: the latest incompatible-cluster tumor growing in the middle of what are otherwise Microsoft shop is private "virtual cloud" infrastructure using VMWare/Citrix/RedHat VM host appliances. If Windows can't integrate with those, acting as their peer or manager or SAN or whatever, then those machines will take over the datacenter and Windows will just become the thing being run in a VM on them.)
Well, they have "innovated" on security in a very detrimental way for us developers. SIP, for example, plus rheumatic sandbox rules has made coding on OS X very unpleasant and limited. It is like Apple don't want us to develop anything useful on OS X.
I can't really escape a feeling which tells me that apple wants to get rid of OSX completely. Ever since I posited the possibility a few years ago, they have followed my estimated trajectory almost perfectly, only a little slower. Bringing more and more iOS into OSX, even where it doesn't _really_ fit. The dual use file system lockdown (etc) feigning increased security as it's sole motive, but in reality it's as much about pushing all code within a set of API's shared between iOS and OSX.
I admit it sounds a bit like crazy talk, I guess we'll find out in a couple years.
>Not even a feature like telling software that you're on a metered connection and it shouldn't run backups!
I don't think they ever added features for deprecated technologies / limitations. The assumption going forward (and for the last several years) from all players is always on / cheap broadband, not "metered connections".
My relatives in /another country/ are on metered connections for everything (home internet, mobile, etc.). It's not a smart assumption for Apple to make.
I disagree, it's a very valid assumption to make given that mobile data quotas are increasing and metered broadband connections are most likely going to be a thing of the past.
Edit: Also, Apples targets the premium segment of the market. Who are less likely to have such limitations.
It's a very valid assumption to make given that mobile data quotas are increasing and metered broadband connections are most likely going to be a thing of the past.
The trend is in the other direction. AT&T now has data caps even on DSL lines. Almost all "unlimited" plans really have some limit.
Yep. And it has a cap too. In fact, that cap is so low that if you max out your connection for just over two hours you'll be over the cap for the month.
I think AT&T is the second one to admit that they do that and then charge you money to get out of it. The first was a small local ISP that didn't offer any way out and quickly backed down after pushback from their customers.
Chances are the other American ISPs do it, they just burry it in the terms of service. So AT&T figured out they could make some extra cash off of their privacy conscience customers who don't know how to use VPN.
And chances are they still collect and aggregate the data, they just don't retarget you specifically.
Not in my area. Verizon was working on it, then they threw in the towel and sold all their non-mobile business in Washington State to Frontier, who has made it crystal clear they won't be doing any more fiber roll-outs any time soon.
As bandwidth gets cheaper our usage will increase. Adding the capability for privilege certain usage (I just want to check my email while I'm tethered) is crucial for the foreseeable future.
This is a great argument, but I suspect that we'll see a similar pattern as we did with processing power: We got to the point where we really didn't need more horsepower and could focus on other things, such as energy efficiency.
That won't happen at the same time everywhere but where I'm from it's almost here already. Every apartment in the city either has fiber or really fast cable, it's cheap and the limitations are so high that you really have to try hard to run into them. For mobile data you can get 4G with 20+ gigs per month for less than $20.
And where I live (Germany), ISPs are monopolized enough that they are literally selling 4G plans with 3 GB per month at €40 per month.
I'm on 1 GB (3G speed) for €10, about the cheapest plan that I could find.
EDIT: And to add insult to injury, German Telekom is still connecting new buildings with 6 megabit connections or less in some places. (And I mean downtown. Some rural regions can be lucky to get 1 megabit.)
> Apples targets the premium segment of the market. Who are less likely to have such limitations.
I frequently tether my MacBook Air to my phone's data connection, which is limited to 1.5GB a month (on an overage rate of 20c/MB). It would be nice if I could permanently designate my phone as a throttled connection and expect the OS and apps to respect that (even so far as having, say, Chrome limit the amount of images and Javascript it downloads from sites).
How is connecting your Mac to iPhone / other phone LTE hotspot a "deprecated" techonolgy?
Having App Store download updates over a limited dataplan or even killing your non-perfect-signal HSDPA connection with updates is still utterly annoying.
Metered connections are the "deprecated" technology. Apple really does assume a world where the marginal MB of data is effectively free. (See, for example, the Wi-Fi Assist feature.)
Every time I see a new version of OS X released, I'm tired just thinking about all the dev incoming to support the new issues / crashes / incompatibilities / XCode things to download again and other so called "features" support...
Probably. The Apple Watch locks when removed from the wrist, and required subsequent authentication before it can be used for payments. There's minimal risk here.
>> "- a passcode is required to use features like Apple Pay"
Not true. You just double tap the side button and can use Apple Pay. The way it secures itself is that as soon as you remove it from your wrist it locks and requires a passcode. You can't do anything with it until you enter the passcode.
That's what I mean, sorry. You can't configure Apple Pay without having set up a passcode; wrist detection allows you to skip entering the passcode so long as the watch hasn't been removed.
I think this is fair but I also struggle to think of a situation where my Mac and my Apple Watch get stolen and I'm not aware of it in time to lock my accounts.
Your phone is locked because its got TouchID enabled and a passcode.
Your laptop is locked as well. Getting in here requires you unlock something first, even if you have everything. The stronger security devices provide authentication to the weaker ones.
Indeed. It's actually an interesting cycle: you can unlock the iPhone with your thumb, which unlocks your Watch if on your wrist, which unlocks your Mac if nearby.
Any problem in computer science can be solved with another level of indirection.
The article doesn't contain the term 'Safari-tab'. It does have 'Safari-like tabs' in it, by which I would imagine they mean tabs, like you get in the Safari user interface.
I’ve been asking for this for awhile now. It has never made sense for every app to try to tab-ify its windows in a slightly different way, when it so clearly needed to be a window manager feature. Although, I really hope it allows inter-app interleaving of tabs, and not just all-one-app tab stacks.
Any reason why they can't fork it and port all the new stuff? I'd imagine for legal reasons they will have to hire devs who haven't looked at the GNU source code.
Why fork? In 2016 Microsoft will be shipping a Windows extension that will allow running GPLv3 bash. Heck, if Microsoft is not afraid of the legal consequences, surely Apple shouldn't be, either?
> In 2016 Microsoft will be shipping a Windows extension that will allow running GPLv3 bash. Heck, if Microsoft is not afraid of the legal consequences, surely Apple shouldn't be, either?
Microsoft will not be shipping GPLv3 code. Microsoft will be shipping WSL, you get the actual code from Canonical under Ubuntu's license when you enable the WSL and try to use one of the command-line tools.
And guess what? You can do the exact same thing on your OSX machine right now, by installing Homebrew or Macports or Nix or even downloading and compiling the fucking tarballs. Apple has been "shipping an OSX extension that allows running GPLv3 bash" for a bit more than 15 years now.
What's the return on investment on that? A huge undertaking, bring features many people do not care about, and the only benefit is that the few people who do use those new features can have it the instant they install the OS rather than after they type `brew install bash`.
Looks like the best way to be downvoted on HN is to be critical of either Facebook or Apple - and to a lesser extent MS. That's the only way I ever managed to get downvoted.
You were downvoted for being wrong. And now you're being downvoted again because you're whining about it, instead of just admitting that you were wrong.
I see about as many people complaining that HN irrationally loves Apple as that it irrationally hates Apple. Neither one is true. Mostly HN downvotes people who don't check their facts.
You were downvoted (I downvoted you) not for being critical of any company, but by aggressively making profoundly sweeping statements in a way that seemed designed to troll people. What's more, what you said is incorrect. You don't need to attend (and indeed when I worked on OS X applications I never did)--you wait less than 24 hours for the videos to be posted, or you read the documentation that describes in detail any new features of the operating system.
You downvoted me because you disagree with me / felt mocked.
No trolling but I perhaps triggered more emotion than intended. I forgot the high level of zealotry when it comed to FB and Apple. And I overlooked that only people committed to Apple would participate in a thread having this title.
For the record:
I highlighted the irony of calling this meeting state of the union for a company already criticized for its closeliness.
"Having to attend" referred to the top-down approach. Never commented on the "you can stream/download thing".
Most downvoters were emotional and totally missed the point. I would do it again to be honest.
I respect your lifestyle choice, hope the conference went fine ;)
On the iPhone, the always-on "Hey Siri" activation is actually local on the device. You can test this out by activating Airplane Mode and saying "Hey Siri". The interface comes up, then says that you can't use Siri because you're offline.
This means that Apple isn't listening to you 24/7, only when Siri is activated. Sure, sometimes it's activated accidentally and might overhear something you didn't want it to, but those times are pretty rare.
If Apple introduces a "Hey Siri" feature on the Mac (which it's unclear about given the fact that in the demo Craig activated Siri by clicking on the icon, then later by pressing a key on the keyboard), I expect it would operate in the same way.
Finally, I'm sure there's a software setting you can use to disable Siri if you really don't want it to be activated.
