Self-destruction, via small acts of self-sabotage.
Next day, your inner critic and saboteur tell you something along the lines of: "You shouldn't go today - you're tired, there's so much work that you should do instead, and you're not even doing the gym actually/properly (AGAIN), just look at yesterday, you couldn't even do 25 min, you've cheated and have now tainted it". Even though it was the same exact voice that led you to do it yesterday.
i don't think that computer vision gates or even an ai agent trying to enforce accountability are going to help all that much in that case. maybe try a therapist or a real-life accountability partner.
I’ve tried it all. No real life partner can be there on the hour (most accountability partner systems work on a daily/weekly basis). “Friends” definitely don’t work.
An automated measurement system is the way to go. Like the poster above you said, the “cheating” rarely happens in a binary Yes/No situation or me going into a log and editing it (that would obviously be silly). It happens in the rolling measurements, the 22mins vs 25 mins hard day gray zone situations
yeah in that case, use a binary for "did you do it that day?" and a measure for "how much of it did you do that day?". loop habit tracker supports both, i bet this one does too. a built-in stopwatch to make time tracking specifically easy would be cool.
i have done things like "do x at least once three times a week" and then had a separate counter for how many times. it's good to track intensity or progression, but i think the most value comes from "did you do it at all that day?" and then sticking to a plan that involves n days a week.
the finer grained tracking can contribute to "i am not on target, so maybe it doesn't matter" sort of thinking where maybe the most valuable thing is "i am setting time aside n days a week and sticking to at least attempting the activity on that schedule."
I was blown away by M1 Pro, and used it for 4 years before it became a little sluggish, and replacing it with an Asus S16 running on Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 (an excellent laptop). One of the main reasons was missing my old Linux setup.
I've briefly tested M5 Pro in an Apple store and was surprised by how quick it felt and did anything. A tangible and significant difference, and I really feel it would be good getting it, or M6.
However - before, MacOS was a big factor driving me towards Apple - now, it would be hard for me to give up my Linux setup and all the stuff I love about it, even for such performance...Linux progressed really nicely, while MacOS deteriorated at the same rate, and it's changing the balance and the decision for me.
Still rocking an M1 Air - 2020 build. 8GB ram. No slowdown or deterioration at all. Battery health reports the battery max capacity at 84%. Best computer I've ever owned, by far.
Feels as snappy and impressive as the first day I got it. I never need to close apps, or reboot. I record multitrack audio on it without any perceptible latency. I write code on it. It's the best computer I've ever owned by a significant margin.
However, I live with Activity Monitor open at all times. The computer constantly grinds to a halt, and I have to force quit apps at least 10 times per day.
Not really Apple's fault though, just most apps use around 4GB of RAM these days even when they're idle. Some use upwards of 16GB.
I've watched the computer slowly get obsoleted over time, not because the hardware is too old, but because software just get's worse every year.
Install Linux to unleash the full potential of your M1 (or to liberate any other system with a BloatOs, like macOS or Windows).
I resucitated and saved from the landfill a laggy and almost unusable laptop with Window 10, 4GB RAM and a Celeron processor, how?... Installing Manjaro (Arch), XFCE and kernel 6.18.
ZSwap and MGLru do wonders with memory and cache management.
It's fast enough with Thorium SSE4. I can easily open 15-20 tabs.
I mean, you could make a better comment about it, but in my opinion the sarcasm is justified.
AI has greatly increased the number of security bugs found on a weekly basis (which is great) and we're getting one of those one-shotted and then immediately abandoned open source "projects" every day (which is useless).
And yet there is no indication that any of this new software development capacity is going into improving the quality and efficiency of the software we use on a daily basis.
Why is widely used professional software not getting better and more efficient if bug fixing is supposedly so much cheaper now? Is it not worth putting any effort into optimisation at all?
I think the reason could be that AI can only do more of what we have done manually before, i.e. more lowest common denominator code.
Or am I just too impatient and this is all coming?
> Or am I just too impatient and this is all coming?
I doubt its coming, at least not within the timescale OpenAI or Anthropic would like to believe. If we were close, then we'd see the fruits of that, which like you said, we are seeing the opposite currently.
The bottleneck was never writing code, and it still isn't. Writing code is like 15% of the job, but the labs can't tell investors "Yeah we make everyone only 15% more efficient" and still be able to raise trillions in capital. Whatever AI accelerates, the bottleneck is still code review, comprehension, and security debt.
Vibe coded slop gets abandoned because non-devs were never going to be able to use AI to make commercial software beyond an MVP. Once your app needs multi-tenant auth, session invalidation, concurrency handling, API changes, graceful degradation under load, etc. natural language prompts will fail. You still need a mental model of how things work.
When building a house, lowering the cost of bricks and getting them delivered faster does nothing to speed up the rest of the process that still relies on engineering discipline.
I don’t get it either. What are these people doing that keep saying that Mac OS is snappy. It’s the same slow garbage as windows.
One problem is that you need Firefox because safari doesn’t peppery do ad blocking. But once you have 20 tabs open or so, it uses 5GB GB ram. But perhaps your also need safari for something else. That’s another 5GB of RAM. Then once you count a finder replacement (2GB ram), and some office stuff (probably 1-4GB for each app window), 16GB of ram are almost as sluggish as an old windows laptop. Add MS Teams, and the thing is brought to it’s knees. And Mac OS has a lot of quirks and the window management is atrocious (alt-tab doesn’t switch between app windows, a bunch of apps to get alt-tab behavior don’t work properly either).
I feel like more and more that Mac Users are being forced by the atrocious window management to only have one window open per software, so then the system is fast. Problem is when you have multiple tasks going on in parallel, then you need many windows and desktops.
I don't really think it's all that much about macOS. I think it more has to do with the state of web development - claude.com or chat.com or grok.com all can use up to 5GB of RAM as an idle webpage in the background regardless of browser. Most apps these days seem to be electron apps which can fire off multiple 4+ GB node processes doing who knows what.
I think most true native apps don't have these issues. Unfortunately there is very little incentive to build on the macOS platform these days, which is where I point more of the finger at Apple. UX, UI, & DX are all quite a bit worse for Mac native.
I live with safari and finder and all my office ware is native (mail.app) or web based (Google Docs). Chat is via slack, but I use the website and not the native app. I've adapted to the quirks and I'd bet that's a lot of the reason why it doesn't feel slow to me. I feel I have plenty of windows open at once but likely less than you do.
If you have to use specialized software to make your system snappy, then it is, as a system, not snappy. The attitude about the MacBook is that it never slows down … what, unless you use MS office?
my point was I'm not using specialized software, I'm using the software shipped with the system. MS Office isn't Apple Software, so holding apple responsible for Microsoft code quality seems counter to your first point.
If I have Office stuff open and the whole system crawls, then the system isn’t snappy.
It’s like the claim is “get a Mac and you’ll never see a slow down ever again! Just as long as you run software that won’t make the whole system come to a crawl”
I have one of these too. I can’t believe how long it’s performed at very high levels of use including two external screens and 10-15 memory intensive applications running concurrently, including three different browsers with multiple tabs open on each. I installed a new video editing application today and was apprehensive it would stumble, but it worked like a champ.
The battery indicator is starting to show a decrease in performance. It won’t hold a full charge, but even when I’m without a direct power connection, I can still have it running for nearly 4 hours with Wi-Fi, 6+ without.
I'm baffled why anyone would think you wouldn't be able to record multi track audio on a modern laptop with SSDs as if it was a difficult task. I had an Alesis HD24 once and that recorded 24 tracks on hard disks, not SSDs.
Hmm same one but mine is clearly deteriorating lately. Lots of beachballs. I think I abused the SSD pretty badly though if I’m being honest. Loading and offloading large media files almost daily for five years lol
MacBook is great hardware, but I really hate MacOS. It feels perpetually cellophane wrapped, and I don't like any of the window management. Finder is particularly awful too.
You should be able to deeply tweak how window management works, but Mac won't let you do that.
I'd run Linux on the hardware if it wasn't a hack.
When I had to use a Mac for work, Rectangle was a life saver since it basically let me replicate manual window management pretty closely to how I've done it on Linux forever, between that and iterm2 it wasn't a terrible experience but man was I happy when Linux was an option again.
I just don't get on with OSX, I can use it, it's "fine" but it never feels like home the way Linux always has, mostly because I generally run with defaults for everything but when something does bother me I can poke it on Linux until it's how I want it to be.
Linux simply assumes you know what you want and lets you have it, Apple assumes they know what you want and based on how much love OSX gets from some folks they seem to get that mostly right for those people.
I can't speak for others, but my preference for macOS basically boils down to "it's a *nix system that can run the commercial software I need, with a lot of nice little attention to detail features" I'm trading friction in some areas, for the removal of friction elsewhere.
Plus macOS has little niceties like readline key bindings in every text field OOTB, pleasant font rendering (on retina quality displays), and all the "ecosystem" features. I use universal control between my mac and iPad daily, AirDrop, universal clipboard, and airpods auto device switching, etc.
I don't pretend it's a perfect OS, it's far from it, but I willingly accept the tradeoffs and find ways to work around them to get the other features I want.
This is a solid summary of Apple to me. Generally great hardware (outside of when they fuck up the keyboard or for ~5 years or something), and you have to piece general usability in from a myriad a third party apps while hoping Apple doesn't generically decide to lock out whatever API they're relying on unceremoniously.
What in particular do you find hacky about Asahi? I've been daily driving Asahi Fedora for about 8 months on a 13" M1 MBP, a significant portion of the project has been upstreamed to the kernel at this point, so the bar is set very high. The most significant compromises I've encountered have to do with Fedora's aarch64 repos, nothing to do with Asahi itself.
Also M1 Air 8gb, though not the daily driver. Bought second hand, the machine is still an absolute champ with no slowdown and is my go to machine when I want a calm space for writing.
I splurged for the 16GB version of this. Originally bought it for my spouse, and then replaced it with a refurbed M2 with 1TB of storage for reasons. So I took the "old" M1 Air. So far, can't come up with a reason to want to replace it. Not updating to Tahoe helps with that too.
Apple - the absolute kings of planned obsolescence. Who else could do it so brazenly AND have a bunch of zealots who will now reply to this defending them and attcking anyone who points it out.
Any industry not involving a computer they'd be in big trouble even with their massive (legal) bribes to politicians and fortune spent on legal teams.
Their “sorry this hardware is too old to run the latest macOS” seems entirely based on KPIs versus capabilities.
There’s absolutely no reason a maxed out MacBook Pro from 10 years ago shouldn’t be able to run something like the ChatGPT or Claude app, because those seem to think they need a newer version of the OS and Apple has decided that a 8 core 3.8ghz i7 with 32gb of ram is obsolete
The reason why the apps won't run is the weird SDK thing. As a Mac or iOS developer you can only run certain versions of XCode and each version of XCode supports only the most recent couple of OS SDKs. If you freeze everything in amber, like, keep a Mac on the 2016 Mac OS release, you can keep shipping compatible builds forever, but at some point just by virtue of one of your developers buying a new computer suddenly locks a minimum Mac OS, which has a minimum XCode, which means a certain minimum SDK version, which dictates a minimum Mac OS target. And besides that, to use just one new feature you pretty much have to jump to the very latest SDK, and from there, supporting even one version back means forking your codebase and backporting, so it doesn't take long for 90% of software to abandon old versions.
I know that in some ways Apple is better than their hardware-making peers in terms of supporting current OS on hardware made a few years back. But compared to other software vendors, say, Microsoft, they are terrible.
Golden Gate runs on 2020 and newer macs.
Windows 11 runs on 2017 8th-gen Intel CPUs and better.
Windows 10 is supported even on PCs from 2006 with 4GB of RAM - and importantly, a ton of modern software (e.g. Chrome) is still compatible with Windows 10.
The comparison may be relevant since it seems Apple is incentivized primarily to move hardware, whereas Microsoft seems like they want to promote Windows as a stable, non-fragmented platform you can trust, both as a consumer and as a developer. One of their worst-received OSs was the one that basically forced most users to buy a new PC -- Vista. (And to a lesser degree, the TPM 2.0 requirement in Win11.)
I run a 2012 MacBook Air 11” for Zoom meetings. It’s stuck on Catalina, but it runs fine. If I really wanted (which I don’t), I could probably hack it to run newer operating systems. I know there’s a few ways to do that.
On an x86 laptop you run linux. Too easy. xfce if it's 4G ram.
Can you do that with an M{1..4} ?
You sure can't do it with an iphone. I own one an iphone 15. Was beautiful when new. Even now it has started on the path of suck. Apple have "upgraded" it to have a more frustrating touchscreen because they clearly think I should give them more money to keep the experience I bought. They are not cheap.
Apple are the absolute kings of planned obsolescence.
Zealots going for silent downvotws because there is no case they can make to the contrary. Not what downvotes are for, says HN but we're all used to HN being used like this by now.
It's not the same as running on an x86 Mac, though. Asahi's efforts are herculean, but it will always be an uphill battle. Many things are still unsupported, even on M1.
The latency is not an illusion and yes Apple absolutely did that. It isn't plausible that they don't know they are doing it.
It is ridiculous to suggest otherwise. Go pick up an iphone 6 and try to do anything with it and then tell me that is how awful the ui was when it was released to apple orchestrated media fanfare. Or any older ipad. Imagine if that ui extreme sluggishness, random delay and the button moving just as you hit it is what they were showing off at launch. The laughter would have haunted them all the way to the accountants telling them their options were now worthless.
Apple latency degradation is not worth discussing with anyone who says it isn't happening. You can't solve whatever issues they have.
Same. It was borderline unusable on Tahoe to the point I had to downgrade it, but the Golden Gate beta brought it back to life.
I’m only using it as a travel machine now, trying to hold on from upgrading it until I can get an Air with OLED display - hopefully coming in <24 months…
They clearly did a bunch of optimizations, because working on my Xcode projects (and even basic every day use tbh) in 18.x was fine, on 27.x it’s mostly fine, but on 26.x it was a slog fest.
Same here. Still using the original M1 as a daily dev pc. The portability and battery life are great. Biggest gripe is the limited number of USB-C ports...
Until recently my M1 Max 32GB 2021 was great until memory became the bottleneck.
My M1 Pro 8GB lasted me less than a year bcs with Docker dev stuff made it sluggish.
32GB was great for years until AI assisted productivity got so high with Codex.
Running 3 projects, 3 different worktrees, each either Docker compose or running/building Electron apps. So in this high AI era productivity my Mac is using insane amount of RAM and SSD space (bcs of all the worktrees)
M1 Air 16GB, and macOS Sonoma is definitely starting to weigh down on the hardware.
I used to have Netflix, Civ 5, and a Simulator running with no visible slowdown. Nowadays Safari + Simulator is enough to make everything less snappy; and I no longer keep WebStorm open either.
Anecdotal, but I do think they’re releasing heavier updates. Can’t imagine the M1 on macOS 26 does very well.
My M1 Air died a week ago after 4 years of use. The Apple store told me it would get less than a year of updates and replacement part availability from now, and the logic board despite being most of the laptop would only be warrantied for 90 days. Not sure why so many people here praise Apple's "longevity" which is clearly not good.
Good news for you is that whoever told you that was almost certainly wrong. Apple considers a product "vintage" 5 years after it was last offered for sale, and "obsolete" 7 years after it was last offered for sale[1]. Parts availability is guaranteed until vintage status, and is generally still available until obsolete status.
The M1 airs were available for sale as recently as march of 2024, so you have at minimum another ~3 years of replacement parts availability ahead of you. The timer starts from the last offering for sale, not when you bought your computer. Software updates might be more limited, we'll have to see. 6-7 major updates is about average for the Airs[2], but 8 and 9 isn't unheard of either and we're already at 7 for the M1s
They were however right about one thing, out of warranty repairs are only warrantied for 90 days from Apple.
The main problem with Apple's is the limited years of updates to MacOS, combined with less than ideal Linux support. I can easily install Linux on any Thinkpad, but I don't think it's yet easy for newer Macbooks.
With Linux, a device can stay snappy far longer than Apple provides updates to MacOS. That's why my personal computer is old Thinkpad, I can thankfully use work-issued Mac for anything that requires more power.
I bought a used M1 air with 16GB and 2TB a few years ago for $1000 CAD. It’s easily the fastest computer I’ve ever used, and I have no reason to upgrade. It chews through 4K footage and ten of thousands of RAW images off my cameras.
Same here. For tough compute, I spin up a machine in some cloud service, do what I need, and shut it down. Of course, its a different issue if you need power on the desktop right there, like for A/V/Graphics work.
Aren't these properties of the (G)UI rather than of the processor?
I've been using systems 20 years ago that were super snappy. The same software would still be snappy today obviously. But the software has become bloated to the point that you need to run the latest generation of CPUs such that things are not sluggish. In principle you don't need 32-core GHz CPUs to move a window around on a screen without it feeling sluggish.
Casey Muratori has a 20 minute talk on YouTube called "Clean code, horrible performance"[1]. Using an oft-repeated example in C++ he rewrites it uncleanly and then benchmarks.
Removing Classes/subclasses/polymorphism: 1.5x faster. That overhead was like reducing an iPhone 14 to an iPhone 11 performance.
Replacing Encapsulation with a table-driven calculation: 10x faster. That overhead was like reverting an average desktop CPU from 2023 back to 2010 performance.
Adding basic SIMD: 20x faster.
His position is that the principles of Clean Code wiped out 15 - 20 years of hardware progress, for a subjective ideal of maintainability, and even if they deliver on that, the cost is too high. It shouldn't/cannot cost a decade of hardware performance to make programmer's lives easier.
While I agree with a lot of what he says (complexity and layers of abstraction impact performance), it's probably worth noting that his examples are not necessarily relevant to all software.
Does my web browser feel slow because of pointer indirection or virtual function calls? Or is it because I have to download 15 MB of Javascript to load this page, which then goes out to 35 other domains to fetch other Javascript and ads and CSS?
In the insanely tight compute loop that he's looking at all of those things definitely make a difference, but a lot of software is slow not because it's inefficiently written (which it probably is) but because it's inefficiently designed and it's doing too much.
In a game engine, where you have 16ms to do 100% of your simulation work, update all your state, and then send all the data out to be rendered, definitely this sort of thing is an issue. In an Electron app? There are a thousand other things that are wasting far more of your time and responsiveness than the misguided 'cleanliness' of your code.
Counterpoint. I have a Dell laptop from 2017 at work. I keep it around for plugging in to network equipment and that sort of thing. I've had Win 11 on it for the last few years, and it was getting unusably slow. Also, the battery, even though replaced in the last year, would only last about an hour of normal use. I had a similar belief about browsers and the web. No matter how light your OS, the browser and web experience is the bottleneck. But then a couple weeks ago, I installed Arch and IceWM with Firefox. What a difference. The thing is snappy, even in the browser. And the battery lasts all day. I was blown away.
Did the same in 2012 with hp 2510p that had windows vista pre installed on it. I could literally brew a cup of coffee and make it halfway through while this poor boy was booting up.
Bit the bullet, installed arch and dwm. I remember my initial impressions on how fast the boot went, how silent the hdd is, how the whole things works reporting just a fraction of RAM in use(right after boot).
It was the first hands-on YAGNI experience. Windows(and macos and the likes of ubuntu) loads and starts everything it has and keeps the system busy at all times in terms of cpu, disk io, network io.
Barebone linux without beefy desktop environment was like “I boot into essentials and will lazy load anything upon request”.
One is that the rewrite has 'mechanical sympathy' with the machine e.g. arrays without pointer chasing can fit more data in CPU cache with fewer stalls while it reads over the main memory bus and waits after every item. That should not be a surprise, it's knowable in advance. Why deliberately ignore knowledge about the machine when designing the code, then come back and use that knowledge?
Another objection is to the idea of "measure then improve". Imagine a delivery truck which loads parcels without checking their weight first, then drives the truck onto a weigh machine (profiling), then if the truck is overweight they unload each parcel, weigh them individually, find the one heavy one filled with lead weights, then repack the truck without it. That would be silly and inefficient, right? Now imagine they unload the truck and there's no single parcel which is surprisingly heavy and instead the goods have been packed with 'lead foam'. Who could forsee that would cause problems with the weight on the delivery truck? (Anyone!). Now what's the fix? Unpack and repack every parcel, rewrite the whole code. There's no accidentally quadratic here to remove, instead every tiny piece takes a few more microseconds than it needs to and those add up.
Another objection is "YOU FOCUSED ON IT' - this implies that there is some way you can design and write code that doesn't need any focus. Part of the point of the video is that the faster code is not harder to write, there's no complex algorithms, no compiler intrinsics, no deep knowledge; it doesn't take a focused performance expert to write a switch(){} instead of a subclass.
Another objection is your implication that performance shouldn't be a consideration until you measure it and find a problem, and prove that it is. Which is like saying that aeroplane design weight doesn't matter until after you build it and measure it and prove that it matters. Computers are finite and limited, why have we got to the stage of assuming they are infinite and unlimited, and then demanding proof that they aren't, over and over on a case-by-case basis? A 3D game can render a virtual world at 100 frames per second. Does a program which takes 3 seconds to show a username/password login prompt need enough resources for 300 frames of game until proven otherwise?
Another objection is that you are defaulting to 'clean code is the default, performant code needs measuring and benchmarking to justify itself in every individual case. Why isn't that the other way around? Less resource-wasting code as the default, and 'clean code' only when maintainability has been measured and proved to be a problem, and only in the parts of the codebase which have the highest maintainability problems?
If all the clean code, encapsulation, isolation, abstraction layers, are providing the developer benefits that are claimed - why aren't programs better? If it's now so clean and easy to refactor, why doesn't that translate to software that gets better instead of software that gets worse? Casey's example is that Visual Studio debugger updated the watch window in realtime while stepping through code, on single core Pentium 4 with 512MB RAM, and now on a modern multicore machine with 64GB RAM and an M2 SSD it can't do that. (RemedyBG can, so it's not impossible).
Another small objection that I just remembered, Casey has an interview with Rico Mariani[1] who worked on performance at Microsoft for two decades, from their first C++ compiler, to .NET, to web browsers.
He coined the phrase "pit of success" after his team had spent months profiling and tuning the .NET startup to remove many milliseconds from it. One developer on another team called a default constructor for an XML class, and in that commit wiped out all their gains, three times over, he didn't know the default path was slow and there was another way. Rico was giving a talk and said that isn't a good way to design things, success can't be the hard way that only a few experts can find, it has to be like 'falling into a pit', the default way to do things has to be the good way.
Anyway, with one browser related performance regression, they profiled and found that the layout engine was using a lot more CPU. He believed the layout engine was good enough, looked elsewhere and found a commit which invalidated a node in a tree and all subnodes. That was cheap and didn't stand out in the trace, but far away in the codebase it triggered a lot of layout updates. Separating things out to focus on just one part at a time, and then the profiler can reveal where the problems are, neither of those things worked as intended.
Not to forget the fact that websites nowadays can be real memory hogs, are dynamically assembled on your machine and burn cycles on pure eye candy UX like animations and transparency. The web's focus on design and cleverness over content and functionality is partly to blame.
n=1 but my macbook pro constantly runs out of hard disk and memory and the two biggest culprits are jira/confluence/docs and other web apps (like 1gb+ of real memory consumed by a single instance), and the other is dev tools which litters my disk with 100s of gb of caches...
its crazy how our devices have become basically dumping grounds for terribly optimized software
Yes, but that's a game developers perspective. Hardware performance is not be-all end-all (an argument can be made on environmental reasons that it should be - but bear with me in the first instance).
Software is a tool working within a socio-technical system. Some systems have low user workflow diversity and a low rate of change - a game being a perfect example. Games get patched, but the diversity is purely in user data, not in feature use - everyone uses the same engine, the same textures, the same game logic. Some systems have high user workflow diversity - such as business software.
Pair that with the fact that games, due to the nature of the system, have to optimise for low latency AND they run on the edge - and it's natural that the primary optimisation will be for CPU cycles. For business software, for which distributional advantage of running it through web + the high rate of feature change that is a result of the specification being opaque and a moving target - means you have plenty networking latency that can hide your CPU latency for long after it becomes a true problem for you.
Not to mention that "clean code" optimises for developer churn and business priority shift (which is a luxury games which are an upfront investement don't have) as a result of accelerating industry of software technology and greater saturation of developers.
Had software remained the domain of the same number of practitioners such as <1995, even given everything else, the organisational systems would have evolved to protect them at all cost because churn would be catastrophic, and then they would enjoy more power and would be able to structure code not optimising for brain shift, because they'd hold the context in their heads.
I'll leave as exercise for the reader what pushing AI into the software development equation does for the system and inevitable hardware throughput implications.
> "you have plenty networking latency that can hide your CPU latency"
Does this excuse making 75 network calls instead of 5? Or knowing that you make a lot of network calls but designing the code as if they were instant and have the bandwidth of a local SSD?
> "Not to mention that "clean code" optimises for developer churn" "structure code not optimising for brain shift, because they'd hold the context in their heads."
Based on what studies or evidence is this optimised or optimal? How is it easier to work through code which is atomised and abstracted until there appears to be nowhere that anything actually happens, where the method and variable and parameter names are long compound words, where everything is multiple layers of indirection and generalised, and you have to hold all that context in your head?
1/ network calls are what I find still gets optimised by grouping API requests and bloating the exchange contract; but yes, if you're strictly clean coding, this will suffer too - it just happens less often than what the author of the youtube video objects to
2/ That's a fair challenge - and I definitely have more trouble reading through an absolutely ramped to the max collection of C# code (which reinforces the behaviour you describe) than a superscript; but for interchangeability, the middle between those two ends is typically better - you're trying to minimise functional context for the thing that a software developer needs to do. This has the additional failure mode that the feature that is envisioned (of sufficient complexity) never actually gets delivered, but the component parts that can be well encapsulated do. And this is because no one holds the full system in their heads. But this can be explained away to business as "there's too much complexity, we need another cycle" and "we need to iterate" and therefore the cycle continues.
I think I actually convinced myself away from encapsulation and separation of concerns in that last comment.
To be fair, Objective C uses message passing, which doesn't have the same performance characteristics as C++ (worse initially dealing with the selector pool rather than a vtable offset; much better later when maintaining stability in your brittle C++ ABI requires pImpl->pImpl patterns jumping all around heap memory).
My problem with Casey is that he is not a performance engineer, he is a performance maximalist. Software is a set of tradeoffs. If he truly cared about performance, the best thing for him to do would be to write clean code that had good performance, but he refuses to do that, since it's hard. Instead he insists that the only way to do performance is to write unmaintainable code which ironically enough makes it difficult to do performance optimizations because it's hard to lean on abstractions that allow for things to be refactored.
> he insists that the only way to do performance is to write unmaintainable code
This is new to me, where does he say this specifically?
Not to white knight Casey but his niche has been in rendering and graphics afaik , where everything he does have to fit inbetween frames, so it makes sense to be a "performance maximalist" in that environment.
It could be that you and he are working on different sets of problems with different tools.
But I'd be really interested I where he says you must write unmaintainable code.
Also (my take) : if you're looking at "clean code" to find abstractions that allow things to be refactored, then I think that's probably not the type of performance he's talking about for you. LLMs can do that type of work. FWIW I think he refactors from what things ought to be, not how they are currently
Obviously he's not going to call his own code unmaintainable, but he's basically against abstractions which let people write software that needs to survive past a frame. BTW I have found that LLMs are kind of bad at doing refactoring (like, they can mechanically do a refactor, but they cannot actually help you with picking what refactor you'd want to do)
I have found these same principles to be true in my own projects. More modern, “cleaner” implementations usually end up with a larger code base but a noticeable reduction in performance. Bloat ruins everything.
Yeah, I think they can be a combination of processor, GPU, memory architecture, and G(UI) software.
But I too have ran a super snappy XFCE desktop for ages on pretty old hardware. I only recently switched to KDE+Wayland on much newer hardware and felt like it was snappy enough to not bother me.
I also remember there were times were my much more powerful dedicated GPU was outperformed by my CPU integrated GPU, which I think has something to do how shared memory can be faster for UI rendering (or maybe it was just driver-related)
Yeah... my solution for the last 3 decades (with a grain of salt) has been to buy the most expensive decked out Apple laptop every 6 years and never, ever update the OS. This is in line with my philosophy about shoes: I only own 5 copies of one pair (4 in boxes in my closet until I wear the current ones out). Rolling everything over to a new dev environment every 6 years is annoying but manageable. This way I took a Powerbook 3400 into the intel age, took a titanium macbook into the air age, took two airs for almost a decade from 10.4 to 10.10 or something, then an M1. Which I'm still using. The 3400 still boots into OS 9 or something. I feel like I'm forgetting one. But the point is this: Apple software usually suits the hardware it's released with, and taking their updates is always a bad idea. Just get comfy with homebrew and settle down for your 30s or 40s until you've broken all the keys and the fan stops working. A $3-4k investment in the best performing machine they have will be great essentially until the machine itself breaks as long as you scrupulously block all apple ip addresses and rip all their update shit out as soon as you get your hands on it.
Also, the m5 mac mini impulse buy as a home server has been fantastic to just login to remotely, but I'm so glad I'm still using Monterey on my M1 for daily coding.
Surely you mean you don't update the major OS version, e.g. from Sequoia (15) to Tahoe (26)? Or do you literally mean if you start on Sequoia 15.0, you stay on 15.0 the entire life of the machine? The former is fairly understandable, but the latter is just insane considering the number of bugs in a x.0 release (including severe security and usability issues).
I do this! Interesting to see someone else advocating the practice. In my open source development I start work on a retro machine running Snow Leopard, specifically to be able to generate authentic retro binaries that'll work anywhere, and then I have a process to port to modern MacOS and signed Apple Silicon binaries, but the machine's a M1 Studio on Monterey and building for 11.1.
My worry is that they'll kill signing for people who aren't updating, though that shouldn't be a factor. I would have to simply get another machine to port to, because I don't trust that changes they make are always going to be good in any sense.
There might be a window for computing within which it's good: I find I'm not worried about adding new Linux machines and architectures to build for, but my Windows builds are 32 and 64 bit on Windows 7 with no attempt to modernize the build system, and I've got that two-stage Mac build process where it starts on a time capsule machine not connected to the internet, and continues on the M1 running Monterey. I'm anxious for the day Apple requires you use stuff that's constantly changed out from under you. I don't work like that.
Wow! Great respect to how you've set up your publishing that way! I don't build anything for the Apple ecosystem, and haven't since around 2015, and my biggest fear was always some dreaded forced update (or new app store jargon) .... so yeah, I think you're living on the knife's edge, but I would do the same.
One great reason for never upgrading the OS is you can still pop open a laptop and run things you wrote 10 or 20 years ago... and honestly now I've sent Claude around my local network accessing those old laptops and snapshotting and clicking ancient apps and rewriting things I'm too tired to do by hand, which is weird but kind of a nice coda to my work.
I'd have to check em, it was just a guess, but I have two airs from the last decade (2009 and 2015 I think) with their original operating systems and I think one is around 10.4 and the other 10.10ish.
Maybe I misunderstood your question... I never updated the OS on either of them. Or on any Mac I've owned since the mid 90s.
I'm not sure either of your approaches are optimal. You'd be further ahead with the shoes to be alternating two pairs as they last longer with recovery & dry time. Ignoring security updates, while maintaining performance, takes on a certain amount of risk. And while I do a similar approach to machines I do art/performance stuff with, they're air gapped when frozen. And you can't take this approach if you're publishing anything with Xcode.
I should have done this with my 2020 Intel Macbook Pro. Now it's basically unusable and spins rainbow wheels constantly, because the OS is apparently garbage for an Intel system.
I had the same experience as you. I bought a super-fast 10-core iMac 27” with 72 GB of RAM in 2020. It ran beautifully until the moment I “upgraded” to Tahoe, when it instantly became unusably slow.
This cost me half a day wiping the disk, restoring the original OS, and then carefully upgrading back to Sequoia. Now it works well again, but I am counting the days to when Linux is the only way to continue using this great piece of hardware.
Another anecdote: a few years ago I was offered a shiny new never-before-used iPad for free by a client (a telco). There was only one catch, I was told: it was a few generations old. It had sat in its box on a shelf unopened for several years. I thought it might be useful at least as an e-reader, but I soon realized why it was now useless: I could not find a single app in the App Store that would install on it because every app required a “newer OS” (which wasn’t available). Most websites also refused to talk to its old (non-upgradable) web browser. Well played, Apple.
I keep thinking this and maybe I'm missing something, but I'd love to be able to opt for something in this direction, some old school constraints, I feel like we should be able to do something pretty magical these days
For example, is there a version of linux that I'm missing? I've not run a desktop linux box in over a decade, any suggestions would be great, or is everyone happily running ubuntu / fedora?
Plain Kubuntu on an Asus Zenbook OLED 14 laptop looks and feels pretty great compared to both Win11 on the same machine (ok that's not really surprising) or current macOS on an M1 Pro MBP (hardware is pretty old by now ofc). Once you start CPU intensive tasks the ASUS gets pretty hot though, while the Mac at most gets a bit warm.
Distro choice mostly determines package manager and how configuration works and what you get by default. Any distribution can approximately run any program and that includes window managers.
I'm using ArchLinux with XMonad as my window manager. That's neat, though it doesn't make Firefox or VSCode any faster (nor slower).
Atomic OS images. I moved away from individual package management once I discovered the alternates. Currently on Bluefin (Fedora-based) - not affiliated with the project but just a happy user.
No distro is going to be perceptibly faster than another. It's all about user experience - what tools ship with it, package manager, etc.
I'd pump the brakes on Ubuntu, which nowadays is a perceptibly worse user experience than other mainstream distros. Snap is a disaster, and flatpak rocketed past it years ago thanks to Valve bucks.
Yeah mine is Debian + xfce although my laptop is fairly powerful 32Gb gen 12 Intel. It's fast, light and pleasure to use. Apt any day over all those fancy flat pack etc
No one uses Ubuntu any more (besides corporations), it's possibly the worst distro of the whole lot due to several bad decisions from Canonical (snap etc). Fedora is a decent alternative, but if you're really after performance, CachyOS is the way to go as they provide highly optimised (PGO/LTC etc) and CPU-family specific kernel, custom scheduler (BORE) and optimised binary packages (catering to x86-64-v3, x86-64-v4 and znver4+ architectures).
PorteuX is also an interesting performance-optimised distro that takes a different approach - which is that of extreme minimalism (aggressive binary stripping, minimal packages) and its "Copy to RAM" feature (basically the OS runs 100% from RAM, so storage I/O bottlenecks are completely eliminated).
I've tested both on a 128GB Strix Halo laptop and haven't found much of a difference in terms of snappiness, but if you have older, more humble machine, I reckon PorteuX would definitely feel more snappy.
Finally in terms of snappiness, the DE you use also makes a huge difference. The PorteuX guys have just put together an interesting benchmark comparing various DEs and Wayland to X11 which is worth checking out: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Wayland-X11-Performance-Porteu...
Tbh, Ubuntu/Kubuntu is fine if you're not a Linux die hard and just need a balanced OS that either feels more like macOS (in that case go for vanilla Ubuntu) or like Windows (in that case go for Kubuntu).
Ubuntu is even more problematic for non-Linux die hards because they won't know (or want to) deal with all the issues with snap (like slow app startups and other compatibility issues), or the inevitable package conflicts or other issues when it's time to do a dist-upgrade. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42949222
My mum was on an Ubuntu base as well (Mint first, later Xubuntu) but after both eventually experienced failed dist-upgrades (no GUI after reboot), I switched her to an immutable distro (Aurora) and it's been rock solid so far. And in the event something does break, rollback is as simple as selecting the previous image from the boot menu.
So for normies who want a macOS like experience, I'd recommend Bluefin, and for Windows-like, I'd recommend Aurora. And Bazzite for gamers. All of these are Fedora-based immutable distros and have none of the stability issues that Ubuntu-based distros have, plus the generally newer kernel+mesa stack compared to Ubuntu means you'll also have better compatibility with newer hardware.
> In principle you don't need 32-core GHz CPUs to move a window around on a screen without it feeling sluggish
I think the snappiness is less this, and more about the speed to open a file, how quickly chrome pops open when you open it etc. I assume this is a combination of hardware and how fast SSD->RAM is due to the SOC, but software will certinaly play a big part too.
> I assume this is a combination of hardware and how fast SSD->RAM is due to the SOC, but software will certinaly play a big part too.
That is exactly what I'm talking about. Sorry, you are completely off. My machine 20 years ago was not an SOC and didn't have an SSD either. It was fast as lightning to open a window.
What does this have to do with SSD? Or an SOC? It's all because the software is incredibly bloated, and as your comment indicates, the young generation doesn't even know this and thinks the hardware is to blame because it's 2 gens behind state of the art (so, 3.5 years old).
This is very sad and exactly why things are the way they are.
> My machine 20 years ago was not an SOC and didn't have an SSD either. It was fast as lightning to open a window.
I never understand what people exactly mean by claims like this. I very vividly remember double clicking some executable, and then immediately hearing the HDD start to spin, and waiting with baited breath to see if it will spawn a window or silently fail, as programs on Windows 98 (the only option for personal computers at the time) often did.
So what exactly was snappy? Nothing that runs off a HDD is ever snappy.
> I very vividly remember double clicking some executable, and then immediately hearing the HDD start to spin,
Are you sure about that? At that time, hard drives were constantly spinning. Getting them to suspend was a rare feat.
> programs on Windows 98 (the only option for personal computers at the time) often did.
20 years ago, Windows 98 had long been abandoned. At that time I had been running a Linux desktop for many years already.
> Nothing that runs off a HDD is ever snappy.
Of course it can be. By already being in RAM. Open another window of some program didn't need to touch the HDD. If I nowadays open another instance of some electron thing, it takes a while load those gigabytes of bloat and make dozens of network roundtrips.
I'm not saying all software 20 years ago was snappy. But today's bloat is undeniable. The user experience has not improved with the orders of magnitude (!) with which the hardware has gotten more performant.
I think people don't realize how much more performant today's hardware is. Mostly because the bloated and terribly architected software eats it all up.
> Are you sure about that? At that time, hard drives were constantly spinning. Getting them to suspend was a rare feat.
I am pretty sure, though, of course, memory is highly fallible (and note that I was a kid back then, and didn't understand that well what those sounds or the blinking disk light actually meant).
> 20 years ago, Windows 98 had long been abandoned. At that time I had been running a Linux desktop for many years already.
20 years ago means the mid-to-late nineties. That's my position and I'm sticking with it /s
But I think it's undeniable that Linux in the 2000s was a massive pain for anyone but the most dedicated tinker, and even then only for pretty carefully chosen hardware. The Year of the Linux Desktop meme existed for a very clear reason. Virtually the entire PC user base, both Consumer and Corporate, was running Windows XP in the 2000s.
“Old man yells at cloud”
lol, but seriously, you’re definitely correct. Bloated binaries and unnecessary frameworks (electron and soon, tauri). Everything is built for the web, then forced into a broken and bloated mobile app and desktop binary. Zero platform optimization anymore.
I keep my chromium and chromium profile loaded into a ram drive, and it’s still slow and sluggish. Tech debt and a growing monorepo has damaged it beyond recovery. I really hope those two new browser engines reach a usable state soon. Chromium, WebKit, gecko have been doing for too long without a full foundational overhaul.
Yes, even my 2013 Haswell-based Arch Linux KDE Desktop feels more responsive than my M4 MacBook. And I think the MacBook has so much more power under the hood, but somehow the animation settings or whatever are just not that good.
To be completely fair, I use the Desktop via DisplayPort at 144 Hz, while the MacBook uses HDMI + USB-C, and I believe it's just at 60 Hz, which is also a factor, but I honestly think that this is not the primary reason.
Windows 11 isn’t full of vibe coded AI slop because that hasn’t existed long enough to affect it much. It is full of poor decisions and poor programming the old fashioned hand made way.
This applies to the whole stack, even ignoring the GUI, you would not find systems with a gazillion of processes, doing OS IPC all over the place, because the hardware could not accommodate it.
But hey, microservices and static linking are the future. /s
> But hey, microservices and static linking are the future. /s
Aren't those two things contradicting each other? ;)
I think macOS getting more sluggish in each release (which is objectively true) is just plain old bad software engineering and prioritising the wrong things. E.g. it's just Apple's version of "What Andy giveth, Bill taketh away.".
It's maybe a combination of incentives. Give the devs the latest shiniest model, give them a list of barely manageable feature requests , and nobody will spend the time to consider performance issues that you'd get on hardware from 10 years ago if you take approach X, Y, Z if you don't notice a difference on your formula 1 setup.
A high refresh rate is only a crutch/workaround to reduce latency caused by too many pipeline stages until an input action shows up on the screen. A better fix is too reduce complexity in the involved software layers.
Yeah tell that to the chrome instance that takes 3.5 seconds to open an new tab. Because it needs to suspend one of the other tabs that are taking 5 GB of ram each.
I'm always a little cautious about "tried it in the store" experience. If I nuke and rebuild my machine (either Linux, or Windows), it's always significantly faster than it was before. Over time stuff just tends to accumulate that you don't notice. Like the old days of needing to defrag hard disks.
Yeah, same - I tried the M5 Pro randomly while waiting for my daughter to finish salivating over a Neo, and just got surprised by how quickly it opened apps and reacted to anything I did - ~1-1.5 seconds for Affinity Designer was amazing.
My MBP probably got affected by OS updates like other people are saying - opening apps and responsiveness definitely got worse, and felt like slightly deteriorating over time (but it might have been MacOS updates along the way).
I agree with you that this is a noticeable effect, but I have a hard time figuring out why it is, especially on Macs with the sealed system volume (which should make the operating system files bit-for-bit identical between a freshly set up Mac and one you've been using for years). Certainly it could come from the accumulation of cruft in /Library and ~/Library, but you can clean that up too.
Thermal performance degrades too. Paste breaks down over 2 to 5 years, you'll thermal throttle more often and more quickly than when new after a few years.
Phase change thermal pads help with this, extending that timeline out beyond 5+ years but still will eventually degrade.
There's all kinds of other hardware things we don't usually think about that can start having an actual performance impact after ~3-5 years too. Battery, obviously, as it degrades can limit your peak wattage, the power delivery capacitors lose capacitance over the years and develop more resistance impacting maximum clock states, fan bearings wear out, you get vacuum leaks in copper heat pipes, and micro-fissures in soldering.
Granted, most of it is going to be software but its easy to forget that hardware degrades, and degrades relatively quickly especially in higher power systems.
This is why repairability and user serviceability is so important. If you can't open up and swap parts in your machine easily, a $10 consumable turns it into $2,000+ ewaste.
I have never owned an Apple product that didn't slowly get worse over time. After a couple iPads and MacBooks, I'm almost certain they are intentionally updating their operating system to slow down older products. Even worse is the removal of access to certain applications for older hardware in the name of security or compatibility.
Meanwhile my Linux laptop continues to get faster every year as the operating system improves with performance updates and bugfixes.
This may be true (not perceptible w/ my apple silicon Macs), but the important thing is that they get slower more slowly than my wintel gets slower (I blame disgruntled Windows and/or nvidia drivers devs....)
Absolutely agree - happened on MBP, 2 generations of iPads, and Watch...For iPads and Watch, I thought that it might just be the famous battery health vs performance tradeoff they enforce on us, but I rarely ever used the MBP on battery, it was plugged in 95% of the time.
M1 Pro here 32GB 1TB good machine but slowing down so much that I really hate it. I had Asahi on it 2 years ago but in the end had almost bricked it when I tried to reinstall. I'm running a Linux desktop well spec and am quite happy with it. But on the road and in the office I use the MBP.
I'm thinking, now that I fully gotten used to and am in love with fedora Workstation and Gnome I should give it another try maybe and see what it can do nowadays. I was holding back cause DP Alt was missing and that still seems to be an issue. but have since reduced to 1 big external monitor so even HDMI would do it. or DisplayLink.
The M1 was genuinely a big step forward, but what has followed, not so much. I have an M5 Pro with 48GB of RAM and it is genuinely good ... but that's about it.
I love the battery life, appreciate the hardware, but find the OS to be annoying. Less annoying than Windows for sure, but I'd rather be running Linux.
I'm really curious about this deterioration? I use a M1 Macbook Pro with 16GB RAM as my primary machine and it still runs fine. I do iOS development so it's not exactly fast but I wouldn't call it slow by any word.
My Poor M1 Mini though is struggling though but that's b/c I'm running it as home server and 8 GB RAM is not enough anymore.
Curious about the choice of the Mac as a home server. I feel like an off-lease x86 usff pc, at roughly half the cost, would be more useful as a server. Pre-RAM-crisis you could get one with 32GB of RAM for like $240. My main home server is one of those HP ProDesk, running Debian.
Interoperability between my server and working dev system was a perk that I'm willing to pay the apple premium for. I can run Linux on the server but then I have to deal with running Linux and if I want to develop something locally instead of having to ssh into my machine it's nice.
The cheaper PCs don't have strong graphic cards which I needed to run Plex and hardware transcoding and other few ML tasks that I occasionally do but that was only a smaller factor.
Nowadays, it's even more important b/c I refuse to keep an AI model on my mac mini in case it gets compromised.
Ah. Especially once you're doing an AI model that makes plenty of sense.
For non-AI, non-AAA gaming needs, I was able to get an RX560 GPU module[1] for my EliteDesk, which I use for Minecraft (It is mutually exclusive with its 2.5" HDD/SSD bay, but I just have an nvme drive in that).
I had to upgrade from an M1 Pro with 16 GB to an M4 Pro with 24 GB last year because one of my work projects at the time needed multiple docker instances, and 16 GB wasn't enough. This year 24 GB isn't enough for a few AI models, but there's no budget for an upgrade...
My home "servers" don't do much but 8 GB or 16 GB of RAM is enough them, for now (Linux).
There is a youtube channel 'Dank Pods', he was going on about his Framework laptop and was talking about how modern OS's have this ark to their usability.
He was arguing that Windows is well past its best years and that OSX is now starting on the downward slope and that is why he was moving to Linux. It was a interesting take on the whole thing about the life times of OS quality.
But with a new CEO for Apple, they have an opportunity to turn things around and blame it all on Tim Cook, but only time will tell if they do that.
I'm not a kernel plumber, but I don't think Wayland, systemd or snap are necessarily part of Linux whatsoever.
You might think that desktop environments are going downhill (which is a fair opinion), but Steam reports an all-time high adoption of desktop Linux in 2026: https://www.gamingonlinux.com/steam-tracker/
Exactly. In a broad sense, 'Linux' is an idea not a specific thing. I mean, yes, there is a specific kernel but beyond that it is flexible beyond reason.
I have stuck with distros that are not trying to chase the latest trends but keep a ethical high ground.
Yup, that's the benefit. To each their own on Linux. I absolutely love Wayland and Systemd (snap... not so much), but no one is forcing me to use them or not use them, and that's the way I like it.
I've been using Linux as myninly desktop OS for ~25 years now and I agree. I can't really understand the irrational hate of a vocal minority towards systemd, pulseaudio etc
I think there has always been a gate keeping minority that liked the dysfunction. Or more specifically, they liked that they could figure out how to correct the dysfunction while others struggled. That really obnoxious, insecure, computer nerd personality type. So glad I can just block those motherfuckers now instead of begging for their assistance.
Exactly. I have forgot at this point how things use to be with how well everything just works.
I am typing this on a gaming laptop with a Nvidia card that probably would have been a nightmare trying to use linux not too long ago but instead it is an absolute dream machine.
That's a baffling take. The era when hardware compatibility was a coin flip (I vividly remember having to download WiFi adapter drivers on another computer to get a fresh Linux install connected), when most desktop environments were poorly developed and very prone to crashing, was your favourite? I suspect this might be a big case of rose-tinted glasses. Linux has never been more "it just works" and accessible than it is now.
Can you characterize the deterioration more specifically? I only ask because every time I run this exercise for myself I end up back on macOS, despite any hiccups.
Not OP, but a decades-long Mac user. Removing CLI tools over the years would be one way, though I run Homebrew and have everything I want or need. That doesn't change that scripting is less useful on a fleet of devices.
Also, the UI has been in decline for a decade or so, with the regrettable decisions under Alan Dye. Thankfully, Zuck poached him and we're all grateful for that. I mean, what they've done to our icons is tragic, the glyphs in the menus was intern-level boneheaded, and reduction of contrast to "get out of the way" of our content has made everything less usable, especially for people with vision issues.
A bug that I filed about window-ordering when using the Cmd-` / Shift-Cmd-` shortcuts has been live since 2010 without getting fixed, though an industrious HN user posted a link to the background utility they made to fix it themselves[0].
100% I wish Alan and Meta well. I look at what happened to System Preferences (I mean Settings) and it’s a disaster. Some apps have title bars and many don’t (AppleTV). Just trying to enjoy Apple Music is so painful compared to the old iTunes. I am struggling to enjoy my Mac as much as I did during the M1 transition when I thought finally they got rid of the HW bottlenecks brought by Jony like the dreaded MacBook keyboard and touch bar. Not the greatest hardware. But, now the software experience is so subpar, especially the HI (I mean UX).
I really like what they did with the MBP redesign, reminds me of the PowerBook G4 Titanium aesthetic. The hardware to me is great, but the OS has gone very downhill. If I had a Snow Leopard era-ish build of OSX + modern security I would be perfectly happy. Settings.app is a disaster, same goes for recent iOS versions.
Apple Music must have been written by an intern or outsourced, how can you have a music playing app crash and do a System Report just by hitting the previous song button.
And now when you want to set up a fresh Mac it's a parade of dialogue boxes:
Do you want to turn on Siri? No. (the dialogue-choice is probably "maybe later" ugh)
Do you want to share app analytics with developers? Yes.
Do you want to add Touch ID? No, because I'm setting this up for someone else.
There are more!
I gave those examples -- each of which having a different answer or reason -- to show that the problem of onboarding is nontrivial, but Apple has spent no(?) effort toward fixing it. It's the same for new iPhones and iPads.
NB I don't know if you sign into your Apple account it pre-answers these questions. That'd be nice.
"There's no step three!" -- I can hear his voice in my head.
But the Goldblum phrase I really try to keep alive is thinking jail, as in "What is beige? It's not even a color. Were they in thinking jail?" I often remark out loud when I realize I have been in thinking jail on a subject.
When you install Chrome, which you cannot accidentally do, and when you set it as the OS browser default, which you also cannot accidentally do...
... the next time you launch Safari, it will say that the default browser has been changed, "Did you mean to do that?" and of the two options presented ("Keep using Chrome" or "Switch back to Safari") the Safari option will be the default.
No, all those dialogs are there with Apple account sign-in as well. Maybe even more, since they might want to upsell you on something along the way (Can't remember, haven't bought a new phone in almost 3 years)
That is amusing because to me one of the largest abominations about mac is the keyboard layout and mappings. It's terrible for anyone with decent sized hands to accomplish anything of even medium complexity.
I'm not a fan myself but needing to only memorize one set of commands and keyboard shortcuts is plus for sure. It's one of the biggest annoyances when switching between operating systems.
IT is a bit of a journey (as is life). I started off with a ZX80 kit and some bluetac ...
I've lost count of how many interfaces I've had to fenangle to get a job done. For 20 odd years I rocked Gentoo as my daily driver but my lap can't take the heat any more. Wifey gets Arch and I've settled on Ubuntu for a simple life.
Embarrassingly enough, I had to get a "child" to explain to me how to get a wine dispenser to work, recently 8)
Ubuntu is really polished these days. I rock Kubuntu myself and just migrated my Dad to it from Win 10 (no Win 11 on that box).
I have two members of staff who have asked me to migrate them over. I just need to get "drive mappings" stable and it looks like SMB over QUIC might do the trick.
Canonical show no signs of going evil empire and even if they did there are plenty of options, starting with Debian!
I wonder if the dislike comes from using third-party keyboards with excessively wide spacebars that make the modifier keys genuinely hard to reach with a thumb.
Nice. I've also found, through that, kinto.sh which is apparently the equivalent for Windows.
As a recent Mac-> Windows switcher for work, my productivity has nosedived partially for keybinding confusion. For instance, I instinctively reach for Option+Arrow keys to jump the cursor over words, which mapped onto the Windows keyboard is Windows->Arrow, which moves the whole window around the desktop into predefined positions. Cool feature, but my muscle memory for the other thing means I'm always screwing up window position (and never thinking to use it on purpose).
Same, I bought it with the justification that this would be future proofed for 4-5 years. Nearly 5 years later with daily usage, it's not limping along, the battery isn't on its last legs, it's doing great. My impulsive side is annoyed that I don't have a justification to buy the next latest and greatest.
Is it amazing for LLM stuff? No, but that's the same story for anyone else _not_ spending boatloads, or willing to hack on weird mining cards.
I have a nice M2 and a Linux box ... I do enjoy the looks of the Mac, but I never find myself reaching for it. A modern Linux box is just so much more useful, especially when you live in the backend dev / K8S world where Linux is the assumed foundation.
I have an M5 pro at work, and certain things are a smidge faster than my personal M1 Max, but they're pretty close overall.
Given how much more you can get buying used versus new, I'd go used unless there's some feature/characteristic only the new hardware has.
Having said that, I could see stuff slowing down over time with OS updates/etc. I've had my M1 air for a while, and some UI stuff was slower after specific updates (I think glass in particular).
Same, although my M1 pro has only 16 GB of RAM and that does seem to slow it down a bit with my current usage. I recently bought a used Mac Studio M2 Max with 64 GB RAM and it's much faster, both subjectively and objectively by looking at how long it takes to run the full test suite of the Rails app I'm working on.
My 16" M1 Pro MacBook with 32 Gigs of RAM is still going strong. Not going to upgrade till this thing dies.
I can ride this puppy for the next 10 years. Say what you will about Apple but their hardware is top notch and it is a great value if you can snag some OG hardware in M series.
I thought so too when I bought a beefy iMac Pro in 2017. But then guess what, new CPU architecture and 10 years down the line it's not supported anymore. Yes I can stay on whatever OS was last supported, but the tools also start ditching support slowly. For example, Rust no longer has tier 1 support for x86_64-apple-darwin so it's a matter of time when things will start breaking.
I am quite sure Apple will think of a reason to deprecate my M1 Macbook Pro (which works great BTW!) in a couple of years, at which point I'm switching back to Linux and will not be coming back. I'm tired of accumulating perfectly good hardware in my house which is nerfed by lack of software updates.
I ran my ~2011 i7 MBA for 12 years as primary laptop before the battery finally killed it (had to run linux on it due to apple killing support the last few years).
Same here. I use a MacBook M3 for work and it's nice (still on Sequoia though - new macOS looks horrible) but I also have my own 2012 MBP still working and running (recently taken out of the cupboard due to my Lenovo dying) with Linux on it; replaced the battery, put in more RAM, and put in a different SSD and it's still fine. Well made hardware.
> I've briefly tested M5 Pro in an Apple store and was surprised by how quick it felt and did anything. A tangible and significant difference, and I really feel it would be good getting it, or M6.
How did you measure this? I have an M1 Pro and short of actually measuring with tools I can't imagine you can tell the diffrence between an M1 Pro and an M5 Pro in the Apple Store
bro people don't measure things - it's all vibes these days (in all fairness OP specifically used the word "felt"). if they measured anything they'd have realized M5 GPU is ~V100 lolol.
I am in the same boat.
I would buy a Mac if I could run Linux on it. As it is I will pay more for X1 Carbon with a worse CPU just to run free OS on it.
But you aren't buying a Mac at that point, no? The hardware is 1/2 or 1/4. I'd get an X1 myself if it could run macOS, I like the looks and the aesthetic, don't much care about Linux besides my Proxmox / HA/ *arr setup on an old NUC. Why can't we have it all, eh? :)
There's actually a number of Thinkpads that can. Searching "thinkpad macos efi" will reveal a number of OpenCore configurations that support booting into the various x86 builds of macOS. I set it up once and was surprised to see that even my touchscreen worked, in addition to a HW accelerated desktop.
Mac is actually cheaper I think.
I am looking for laptops with 64GB of RAM. X1 Carbon with not even top Intel CPU costs the same as Macbook pro with 18 core M5 PRO and 64GB of RAM.
Mac has much better GPU (not even close), much faster CPU (not close either).
I am getting about half the performance (if you combine CPU and GPU) for the same price with X1 Carbon.
It's true X1 is lighter, arguably has a better keyboard (although that's a judgement call) and has a trackpoint. At this point though Apple wins on both performance and price overall.
Yep, vote with your wallets. It’s about time Apple learned that excellent hardware alone would not make up for what macOS lacks and where it fails for development.
It's useable, but for me it's a sometimes frustrating experience. You're meant to compensate for the hard edges of the operating system, instead of the operating system being designed for humans.
My M5 pro macbook panics one to two times a week. I narrowed it down to an issue with a thunderbolt-linked ethernet adapter.
I reported it about ten times, Apple never replied or addressed it. After a while I decided to take things into my own hands, and to write my own driver.
Just installing a VM you can load a driver in for development and testing was a two-week effort. Everything locked down. Their VM infrastructure is so bad you can't even properly emulate or route the device, so in the end the only way to test it properly was to install the driver in the real thing, which is extremely disturbing to productivity, as the device you're working on constantly crashes.
The whole platform is developer-hostile, which is essentially the same thing as user-hostile as far as I'm concerned.
Meanwhile, on Linux, zero issues, and writing or testing a driver is child's play. It's literally built for tinkerers.
Ok, so they can migrate to an OS that fits their standards and preferences, no need to make it a militant stance with "vote with your wallet" or whatever. You like Linux or Windows better, go use it, Apple won't be mad
Also, I do not want to have to upgrade my machine and OS every few years just to keep up with apps that stop working or installing, not because the hardware is no longer capable, but due to ridiculous obsolescence policies. Heck, I can not run the latest version of a lot of software (including basic developer tools) on one of my MacBooks, simply because it is running Monterey.
A proper package manager CLI is also sorely needed. Delegating that to Homebrew and MacPorts doesn't cut it.
I tried to install stuff with Homebrew; it kept warning me that they don't support such an old macOS. Almost everything I wanted to install with it, it tried to do a source build, because the binaries did not exist for it. At one point it was building LLVM to install a dependency, which ran for almost one whole day, I kid you not, and still failed
Also, the latest version of Podman (both CLI and desktop) does not run properly on Monterey. Even if you manage to install those, you cannot create a Podman VM, because it relies on some newer Apple virtualization tech instead of QEmu, and that is not supported on Monterey.
MS Office, Adobe Lightroom, Photoshop, etc... The latest versions of these do not run on Monterey.
These are just a few of the examples.
On Big Sur, things were even worse. The latest versions of VSCode, VSCodium, Brave browser, and many things you might want install with Homebrew, etc. do not run on it. You will have to hunt for specifc old versions to install.
In general Rosetta2 is much better than QEmu, but you do need macOS 26 to get even basic things like AVX2.
In general, the model on Mac is that you need to run latest. It's not like you're gonna use it for a production server, they're meant to be personal devices, so upgrading them is not a major issue.
I mean that is unfortunate, but those are app specific problems not problems necessarily with Mac. Exhausted example but if pull up a raspberry pi 2 I’m not going to expect it to run the latest version of rust.
If the app devs drop support for a system that sucks, but it’s the devs decisions. One system I run I’ve had to air gap since it is out of date, but I’m not blaming apps. Though I gripe with the openjdk decision to not support Apple intel, it’s what it is.
Edit: im sure linux distros have problems as well, just like windows does with this. (Why can’t windows 95 run oblivion with 20 mods on it?)
Honestly, Homebrew is so healthy[1], and modern Apple is so corrupted by greed, that I'm sure I don't want Apple to try to Sherlock it. Can you imagine? To get a package published, you'd need the developer subscription, and Apple would block any package that threatened any of their revenue streams. Not to mention that they'd probably want to also run the scan the MAS does to ensure you're not using any "private APIs." No thanks, Apple has no role to play here.
[1] (Personally, macports hasn't been my jam in decades)
Improve the speed of APFS. Like try forking off a job to create a bunch of git worktrees in on APFS vs EXT4 -- it's significantly slower. Deleting a ton of files, cloning repos, hardlink performance, etc; APFS performance is poor compared to just about any other Linux filesystem.
The entire point of this comment chain is that Apple makes great hardware but they don’t like the OS. Buying a Dell laptop doesn’t get you the 256 GB GPU.
Well if price is your problem, sounds like you’ll just have to get along with macOS, save up, or use a vm. Just like if you ever want to work at a job (majority), you have to use windows (my least favorite of os’s by far).
> it would be hard for me to give up my Linux setup and all the stuff I love about it, even for such performance...Linux progressed really nicely, while MacOS deteriorated at the same rate, and it's changing the balance and the decision for me.
I can relate. I'm one of the few people at work using linux, most use MacOS or Windows with WSL. Every single time I share my screen and run build commands, people comment on how fast my computer is, then seem surprised when I say I bought it before COVID.
Weird, I'm still using my M1 Pro and it feels just as fast as it always has. MacOS feels almost identical to me as it did 5 years ago, too, except the ugly icon change.
I still use my M1 Pro Macbook... for iOS development. It still works amazing well, and the battery still is holding strong. For large apps, compiling can be a tad slow, but for medium and small apps it still works amazingly well.
Eventually I will upgrade, but for me the M1 Pro Macbook (14") has to be the best computer of the last two decades.
Before that, I had the butterfly Intel version, and that was a disaster. Apple just cooked with the M1+ line...
My 14" M1 Pro out of nowhere just died on me in May after 3 years and 11 months. 'Bad luck' was the verdict of the Apple store. This never happened to me since my first G4 tower. I now have the M5 Pro since i'm stuck in the ecosystem, but i'm still a little spooked.
This eventual sluggishness is due to inevitable OS rot. I bought a brand new MBP in 2017 and it was snappy as hell. Booted up instantly, breezed through complex tasks, and ran GarageBand and Logic Pro X very smoothly. Every OS update seemed to take it down a notch and eventually Logic Pro X - my main production tool - was unusable. I happed to be talking about this to a professional music producer friend of mine and he said that everyone in his industry NEVER updates their OS. Basically they install everything, disconnect from the internet, and don’t touch the OS ever again because it can break delicate plugin ecosystems and drivers. That’s essentially what I ended up doing. I installed a different DAW (UA Luna) and have not updated the OS for about 5 years now and it’s still chugging along. I don’t use that system for any other purpose however I do keep it connected to the internet for ease of access to icloud. One day the hardware will die, but my next audio production system will likely be a Mac Studio that I set up and don’t touch for 10 years.
I remember long ago, when I first met a computer person in college and he told me about PCs vs UNIX, I asked him, "why don't they make it run on a PC?"
What cant you do what you can do with Linux? Nowadays my main apps are terminal apps mostly running Claude. Honestly don't really care whether it's macOS or Linux or maybe even windows. I do care about local speed. Occasionally try out local models.
Yeah, I really wish processors like these were available for other hardware. I don't really understand why everybody else isn't making SoC processors like these for laptops, and is still clinging to the 40 year old intel architecture.
The Snapdragon X2 Elite / Extreme are a thing but they lag a bit on the GPU side compared to to Apple.
But it’s not setting the PC laptop market on fire, and I’m quite surprised as well… I guess Lunar lake and the few ARM compatibility issues make it a worse option?
> ...before, MacOS was a big factor driving me towards Apple - now, it would be hard for me to give up my Linux setup
I can relate to that. MacOS was my dream OS, even I installed Linux elementaryOS before I can get hand on Mac. Catalina is my favorite, I don't bother upgrade to BigSur and beyond. Now my Macbook is dead, I don't have reason anymore to get another one, maybe if Apple support Nvidia again somehow.
Earlier this year, a few weeks before the price hike, I bought an MacBook Air M5, and it was everything I hoped it would be. Long battery life and silent. The last part is important for me. I've gotten so fed up over the years by Wintel (Windows/Intel) machines where the fans are always running, even when idle.
My last Mac was an MacBook Air from 2011 (now we can talk about "a little sluggish"). I also don't dislike the current MacOS, although I do prefer the older look to the new one. But this is from a person using Windows 11 at work, so everything is a step up, right?
Battery life. I love my Linux laptops, and I don't mind being selective to make sure the hardware's fully supported, but whatever the reason Mac battery life is second to none.
I can get that being annoying. I enjoy that keybinds are a configurable thing in the linux distributions and DEs that I've used, and I've found that most tend to have sane defaults. I assume that the situation is similar in macOS, but I don't know. The last time I've used any version of macOS was in 2008 during school, and I was far too young to really "get" computers, so I never experienced them in the way that I assume many people do now. The only other Apple products I've used since has been some combination of fourth gen and seventh gen ipod nanos (which were excellent, save for windows iTunes). Is there some secret sauce that Apple has that I'm just unexposed to that makes it wonderful?
I've used linux desktops for years, and in my experience it is quite difficult to fight against the default keybindings. It is much easier to go with the status quo, which is annoying especially if you regularly switch between a mac and linux machine.
My NixOS + Hyprland desktop largely has the same shortcuts as OSX. I super+space for launching things. Super+Q for quitting. Custom keybinds are trivial. I always thought KDE and Gnome were kind of garbage, but Hyprland gets out of the way and really lets me build the desktop environment I want.
My M1 macbook with 64GB ram is still going great, I think it will be some time yet before I feel the need to upgrade my daily working machine. Team-wise though, we're looking into getting something to run a local model and offset token costs for generic tasks. It's starting to make sense.
I wouldn't even know where to begin, because the slide in quality has permeated every aspect of the operating system, from stability to design. Numerous networking bugs, SSH agent bugs, sleep state bugs, sometimes having to restart my machine because the network screws up so badly, Bluetooth issues that they keep introducing and then not fixing; I have peripherals that just no longer work due to this. I could go on and on. I could talk about the mobilization of a desktop interface (same mistake the Unity and GNOME teams made)
And I don't feel like beating a very dead horse, so just google "macOS Tahoe design issues" and take your pick.
Agreed. I have skipped Tahoe and will update to Golden Gate when it's out of beta. I did the same complete skip on "Sonoma," I think. At this point, the complete absence of quality in MacOS releases has turned me from an "update on day one" guy into a "Skip major version updates unless it's widely being praised for improving performance and fixing existing bugs" guy.
I bought a new macbook as insurance against a potential supply chain crash and it came with Tahoe :(
On my M2, I have kept it on 15 but Apple aggressively tries to trick me into upgrading in a way that reminds me of Microsoft's behavior with Windows 8/10.
I just buy older stock or refurbished these days. M1s and M2s are still good enough for me. Recently picked up a refurbished M1 16" because I wanted a larger screen in bed / on the couch for a good price with good condition refurbished from amazon.
Oh no, it got bad for a while until they received lots of backlash. They literally changed verbiage and tried forcing an update at least once unless you read very carefully in between the lines. They directly and intentionally employed sleight of hand and psychological manipulation to try and force an update in order to meet some misguided OKRs.
To be clear, I'm definitely not saying that MacOS is now bad - it's absolutely still a pretty good OS. But, personally, I do have a couple of gripes, and my feeling is that things are changing in the opposite direction from what I would like. Compared to Linux let's say a couple of years ago - yeah, better. Compared to Windows - there's no comparison.
But, still:
- it slows down after a while
- design direction is questionable and controversial - that it got more inconsistent is factual - also, so much wasted space and everything got bigger and a little dumber
- so little control over system behavior, functionality, looks
On modern Linux, you get a more polished (wow, unbelievable thing to say - I first dabbled with Linux in 1997), robust, and infinitely more functional and customizable experience. After a while, I started feeling at home - like it's "mine" - and how distinctively MacOS feels like being a guest there, and that it was never "my environment".
I definitely realize how vague and unquantifiable most of this sounds - and how little value those things have for a lot of people - but I've come to enjoy my setup, I spend ~12h / day in it, and I discovered that how it "feels" matters to me.
stuff that annoyed me on mac was the "find" feature was useful, but to get to a enclosing folder (what I want), involved searching, clicking something, finding the file again in the display and "enclosing folder" (this might not be exact, I don't have a computer in front of me).
Sharing files with a windows hard drive. My workmate had a seagate that installed an NTFS driver on mac, which saved us a few times. Never had a problem on linux.
Python never seems to work right. Conda, and other stuff, just never worked smoothly with the bioinformatics code we were running. Cluster machines it was easy.
There is a wierd issue that you can't close a macbook and use it with an external monitor without plugging it in. It just sleeps.
Would you like to join iCloud. No really would you like to join iCloud. How about apple music?
(To be fair MS is just as bad if not worse about onedrive...)
We had a pythonTK program to print labels from a CSV file. Every MacOS update broke it. We ended up just running it on a windows machine. back up was going command line on mac.
previously cmd+enter would work to "show in finder". New siri-enabled search seem to break that for some reason, but right click menu/show in finder on a found item still works.
I would say the artist formerly known as OS X has never been good. It literally started its life as a half-assed NeXT attempt and has only gone downhill from there. There's still a "Services" entry in the file menu. .DS_Store files are an abomination. Mac OS thinks it knows better than I do about which software I'd like to install. Plist insanity that makes the Windows registry look pristine. GUI inconsistencies across every surface area... I'm curious what you like about it, because other than font rendering (which it does well), I can't think of anything positive.
I love it! I write my own services for it all the time. You can assign global hotkeys to them as well which makes it crazy convenient to be able to select text, a file, etc and invoke some script you wrote on them.
There used to be – pre-LLM days – a "Summarize" service that "summarized" prose to a length of your choice by deleting sentences. I'm sure it was once someone's pride and joy.
I'm still using an M1 Ultra Mac Studio with 128GB RAM running Fedora Asahi Remix. It's far more power than I need for a very long time, which is one of the reasons I love the Apple Silicon platform so much.
Haven't they? Tahoe was released which had quite a negative reception, widely considered a regression in terms of performance and UI/UX, while Linux has been gaining significant traction (especially in the gaming space).
macOS always had terrible UI and accessibility, it's their trademark feature. I thought that's what people liked about it.
Windows emulation did see some improvements with Valve's sponsorship, but I wouldn't really consider that significant, and it's not like mac has any comparable technology anyway.
i'm still rocking m1 pro with 16gb ram. for all my eng stuff its still snappy for me. that includes some iOS dev from time to time, lightroom classic, much better than my pc with ryzen 9 5900x + rtx 3080 somehow! i haven't even think about upgrading my mac
Desktop is taking a bit to render after a reboot (which I need to do very rarely, admittedly), apps definitely got slower to open, a small delay in actions here and there - it started feeling a bit sluggish compared to before and it felt like it's deteriorating over time - but slightly.
I think it's very likely due to OS updates, like other people are commenting on. It probably doesn't happen to everyone, and maybe doing a clean reinstall helps (I tried all the standard stuff - rebuild caches etc).
you can easily install some linux distros on macbook. and from my experience, my macbook with m4 pro runs better than laptops with intel u7 and u9, which I use at work.
Because it still doesn't fully support all of the hardware on M1. I know it because I used Asahi while I had M1. Now I have M4 for work and it doesn't support Asahi at all.
I just use Linux PC as much as possible instead. And that 4$ M4 is just a fancy presentation computer I use when I travel.
Personally I would spend thousands on an actually great Linux laptop, but there are still none around.
Up to the M2 series are supported pretty much fully. There are a few exceptions, but it does work quite well. I'd need a good reason to grab an intel/amd laptop just for running linux.
Not OP. I'm a huge fan of Asahi and use it on my M2 MBP. There are some significant downsides in particular battery life is nowhere near what you'll get from MacOS due to inability to go into low power sleep state, and buggy DP alt mode for external monitors. I hope that will change but it's not there yet.
From what I understand, the based M1/M2s are closer to the battery life you'd want and still quite good for a linux laptop. USB DP is a real bummer though.
MacOS does some pretty annoying things. The virtual desktop implementation is abysmal. It won't let you just assign applications to a virtual desktop. It insists on forcing it and also auto-switching when you switch to the application. It's an archaic implementation, and I'm surprised Apple doesn't revise it.
The globe key only works with Mac keyboards, which apparently Apple refuses to license? And all Mac keyboards seem to be terrible.
Sometimes, the main application window seems to go away; or when I open an application it opens with no main window? What is the point of that?
So close to being a world class operating system. In some ways, Windows feels superior in terms of having softer edges. I think you can work around the Mac's hard edges with third party software, but in that way it feels more like a hobbyist operating system.
"Meant" is the problem here - if you think "meant" by your mentioned "manipulator", then yes - the elites are evidently holding that worldview for millennia. But "meant" - as in "natural order of things" / "higher purpose" is obviously not a fact, and should be strongly denounced.
But the author tried to show exactly that, if screenshots during animation don't look sensible, it points to animation as a whole not making sense - it being either messy, overlapping, or confusing - and, in general, eroding the user's trust.
Yes and I disagree. Youtube doesn’t "erode the user’s trust" with an animation that the author of this post finds yanky just because if you take a screenshot in the middle of it you see a frame that no real user sees that doesn’t look good.
I...have to agree about siding against the web...An optimistic part of me sees this as a move that pushes in the same direction that the "web" has already been going in for a long time - preventing users from getting the right information in an honest and efficient manner, preserving their attention budget, and choice. Until now, it was through increasing the noise to push monetary incentives, and now it's by cutting the noise to push monetary incentives. Why optimistic: up till now, there was no single enemy, and it was hard to fight a (somewhat) disjointed system; now, Google is positioning itself to push things further to the worse, with them (and small number of other companies) being the clear target.
My hope is that this will help overflow the proverbial glass for an increasing amount of people and we'll start pushing back towards the "old" web before Google and ad networks have transformed it, or find new modalities of interacting more freely with each other, and the content.
It's not going to be a small or easy fight, though...to a large extent, it's a fight against the current state of capitalism itself, and winning back our attention, critical thinking and choice.
And do you feel that the industry in general, and individual companies are currently trying to augment / 10x their workers and have everyone share in the 10x profits that will bring? Or are they jumping on opportunity to try and cut costs by even single digits, by replacing those workers with AI and it's not their problem what those people do from there?
Why do you think that is? Hint: taxing people buying food, which is getting worse and worse, while the top 0.01% gets more and more rich and keeps making it worse, is maybe not the solution people should embrace that you think it is...
An easier path would be to stop subsidizing the core of what is making junk foods to begin with. For that matter, at least in the US, having individual states require limitations of importing pre-processed goods could help too.
I've thought that it might be an idea for more states to require at least half of all beef and chicken to be imported into the state in at least half-carcass form. This would incentivize local farming, and local processing, reducing the more centralized processing and the environmental impacts could be further reduced in a lot of ways. That's just for meat.
Forcing insurance company accounting to average to single-payer modals and limit coverage combinations to no more than 3 choices across the nation could help with another part. Refactoring all federally funded insurance (medicare/medicaid/va/federal-employees) into a non-profit insurance corp that does likewise and any private company can also buy policies from would help to. Finally, establish "part time" work as no more than 10 hours a week averaged per 4 week window. Then require all employers to provide medical insurance for all workers that meets what the npo insurance provides.
The recent changes to USDA food guidelines are a step in the right direction, mostly... but there's still room to improve. Education in and of itself should improve dramatically. For that matter, actually having schools "make" most of their food instead of relying on premade/packaged goods would be a massive step in a right direction. Have every student participate in meal preparation at least a few hours a week as part of school work would help a lot.
I'd like to see some incentivization for more companies returning to a dividends model that includes employee profit sharing as part of said formula. I think this would do a LOT to shore up the middle class again.
Sorry, just went off on a total tangent... hitting reply anyway, but don't take anything too serious/deep... these thoughts are kind of always lingering in the back of my mind... I've just never been in a position to actually act on any of them politically.
Thanks for a thoughtful and longer-form reply. All of these ideas absolutely make sense - and their challenges and compromises could be worked on, of course.
But, even starting to think about each of them, I can't escape the frame of the current socio-economic structure, where short-term profits currently trump all, and influence of the aforementioned "0.01%" (or whatever we call it) is direct, heavy and effective, and all of that brought us here to a large extent in the first place.
In such a reality of ours, these kinds of initiatives don't go far - and even if surfaced in the media, there is a significant portion of population who would be very strongly against them, due to how opinions have been shaped and polarised over past decades.
It does seem almost impossible from current perspective.
Cool, you can fix the wealth inequality. But you also need to fix the excessive consumption of beef, fuel, and every other CO2-emitting good, whether consumed by you or by the "top 0.001%". You can't use "wealth inequality" as an excuse to delay action on climate change. Those goods' consumption needs to go down.
Fuel is trickier and requires investments and a transition period, but a beef tax would be trivial, and there are infinite substitute goods available.
I switched from M1 MBP to Asus Zenbook S16 with Ryzen HX370. A bit better performance, better screen, design, comparable battery, ok keyboard... I switched mostly because I was missing my previous Linux setup. But that was only possible several years afterwards, and if you try to compare it to the M5 Pro...
Next day, your inner critic and saboteur tell you something along the lines of: "You shouldn't go today - you're tired, there's so much work that you should do instead, and you're not even doing the gym actually/properly (AGAIN), just look at yesterday, you couldn't even do 25 min, you've cheated and have now tainted it". Even though it was the same exact voice that led you to do it yesterday.
reply