Are you wanting me to explain to you why secretly and without notifying the user that your browser is installing a new program + network service he didn’t ask for is a bad thing, or why having an extra Windows service one doesn’t use running 24/7 on top of the network stack and built into the browser is a bad thing?
People want car insurance because it's a law, low-flow showerheads if water is expensive, and electric appliances if gas is expensive or outlawed. And some want fuel-inefficient vehicles because they like them and gasoline isn't very expensive, while plenty of other people opt for MPG.
On an unrelated note, I use Time Machine and I’m surprised at how unpolished, not to say downright buggy, all the animations are. They used to look magical, but now they are a mess of elements popping on and off and things moving and then vanishing the next frame and so on. It looks like they kept changing Finder and Time Machine didn’t keep up; they kept fixing the bare minimum to have it compile and nothing more.
Even the new app launcher. It takes 1-2 seconds to draw a bunch of icons. Scrolling is also choppy. This even happens on their newest machines. How this possible in 2026?
If you have a legacy Time Capsule you'd rather not e-waste, you can try this out. Note that this is very much beta quality software, so don't expect it to work on all configurations.
My app launcher loads as soon as it's triggered (4 fingers swiped in). There is a weird 5ms glitch on the zoom in animation, but otherwise it loads in within a few ms, and scrolling is smooth. I'm on a M2 MBA macOS 26.3.1
Edit, but don't take this as me saying I like the current state of macOS. There are plenty of weird edge cases I wish they'd fix, but on the whole the OS works fine for me.
For me the launcher itself loads fast, but it takes 1-2 seconds to show the icons. And when I scroll down it often times does not draw the icons fast enough.
What "walled garden"? The Mac-only apps aside, what's that that you couldn't get on Windows (and most even on Linux), either the same thing, or a zero-switch-cost subscription (it's not like you need to rebuy something to go from Music to Spotify for exampe).
iCloud? You can use Google Drive or Dropbox or whatever MS calls theirs.
Apple Music? Pretty sure it plays at both.
Most major apps are cross platform (Adobe, Microsoft and such), or Electron based.
Syncing with your iPhone? You can do that from Windows and Linux as well. Airpods? Work with Android and Windows too.
With this bad faith line of reasoning that ignores user defaults, ecosystem ties and switching friction, Windows was also never a monopoly because companies and users could just switch to Mac or Linux whenever they wanted.
>How many Ukrainians can find Iowa or Missouri on the map?
> With this bad faith line of reasoning that ignores user defaults, ecosystem ties and switching friction, Windows was also never a monopoly because companies and users could just switch to Mac or Linux whenever they wanted.
This bad faith line of reasoning ignores how viable Mac or Linux actually were as consumer devices at the time Microsoft had a monopoly.
>How many Ukrainians can find Iowa or Missouri on the map?
Their country doesn't make decisions about American on their behalf (or even at all), so they don't have a moral obligation as citizens to. And Iowa and Missouri are mere states, and not even very interesting ones at that.
My point is that the US is a huge country and American education prioritizes learning where all 50 states are, since that's going to be a thousand times more relevant to any American in the span of their lifetime. So it's not surprising that the average American may not know where the fuck Estonia is, but they can tell you where Rhode Island is – and the reverse is true for the average European.
Being able to point something out on a map is a metric that means nothing. That is my point.
You didn't read what I said. I said MacOS IS a monopoly in the Apple ecosystem.
Apple users dissatisfied with how MacOS is changing, as the one I was replying to, have nothing else to switch to without uprooting themselves out of the Apple ecosystem altogether, which most don't do but just put up with it.
The Mac isn’t a monopoly, but choices for desktop operating systems are indeed limited. I use macOS, Windows, and Linux on a regular basis. The only one that’s improving is the Linux ecosystem. I prefer macOS to Windows, but macOS is not as polished in 2026 as it was in 2016 or especially in the Snow Leopard era.
Originally, it was "solved" because computers were the only thing Apple sold. They couldn't afford a Lisa without successes like the Apple II.
Now, Apple's incentives are changed. The App Store alone makes multiple times more money in a year than the sum of annual Mac and iPad sales put together. The OSes for these products are decidedly back-burner so Apple can focus on expanding AppleTV's IP library and lobby for Apple Pay. Ternus won't be your savior.
John Ternus says Apple has ‘so much’ opportunity to expand services
A couple of revisions in Time Machine was just fine.
The UI was cute and fun if you wanted an older revision of a single file (especially since you could see previews of the file as you warped backwards).
However, importantly, the snapshots were available in Finder itself so you could browse through the files you wanted and retrieve them.
The worst feature of Time Machine is how it takes over every single display you have. Even though it only shows content on one screen, it feels the need to completely black out the others.
Classic Apple engineering. I would there is technically a "single responsible individual" assigned to Time Machine, but it covers the whole product, so the UI component falls by the wayside as the work on other products or the low level portion.
- 3rd party devices are often unreliable. Not directly Apple's fault, but the lack of certification process hurts
- SMB extensions: In order for an SMB server to support Time Machine, it must support Apple's AAPL extensions to SMB (my understand of this my be a bit uncorrect)
- Network device connecting is separate from Time Machine device connecting. This causes an inconsistent UX.
- Not possible to browse a backup. You can only view file or folder's backup over time. In other words, you can scroll through time but you can't browse a single backup (point in time). This requires using 3rd party tools like BackupLoupe
You can't turn it on without an external drive attached, even though it saves local backups. It works if you mount a disk image and then point TM to it with the CLI.
The "quality" Apple delivers is by now a complete joke. It's going south since over a decade, and this never stopped.
It's like that because people are still buying. Even for the ridiculous prices Apple asks for.
So why would Apple actually care? They get away with this "quality", so from a business standpoint there is simply nothing that needs investments or even just attention.
It's a race to the bottom. Like everywhere else. That's simply how the system which people created works.
It’s more tangential than unrelated. It’s how conversation naturally flows, and this is a discussion board. No need to fire up a new post.
On another tangential note: you’re insufferable. If you’re like this in the real world, I can’t imagine you’ve got many people wanting to hold a conversation for very long.
Gabe and Carmack are probably above Amelio and below Jobs and Gates in impact on the world - but probably above them all in impact when measured on a “desired” axis - people sought out Doom in a way that even the iPhone wasn’t.
Correct. You have to spend a while in settings disabling stuff.
The browser does not re-enable the things you have disabled, but they keep implementing new stuff that you have to disable too.
It’s annoying, although that’s how most software works nowadays (and I include Firefox unfortunately). You have to disable a lot of stuff to make it usable.
> If your competitor is dumping (selling for an unsustainably low price) then competing your way to bankruptcy is not the right option
Italy is simply making a political choice to attract wealthy people instead of other people. Is it unsustainable as you put it, who knows? But what we know for sure is unsustainable is raising taxes like France every year on the middle class.
Also contrary to France who is running a 6% deficit annually, Italy is running a 3% deficit so it is managing its finances much better than France.
So much so in fact that France has become the de-facto "sick-man" of Europe because it is simply incapable of reforming itself.
Macron is on his way out and his government is paralyzed because they do not have a majority in parliament and he is pretty much hated by everyone. Meloni on the other hand is pretty well liked and has good chance of being reelected in 2027.
In France the situation is much more unstable with new candidates for the presidential election coming out of the woodwork every month including Francois Hollande, the most hated president of the entire 5th French republic who sees himself making a comeback somehow.
The outlook for France in 2027 and beyond is bleak. There are no parties interested in reforming France so the debt will keep on increasing, the public services will keep on deteriorating and none of the structural issues will be resolved either by the right or the left.
All of this to say that if I was wealthy French resident, I would consider moving to a country that is taxing me less and that is also much more politically and fiscally stable at the moment than France.
>If you're paying a million euros of income tax a year in France, Italy is very tempting. As for US citizens, Americans are always taxable on worldwide income, so moving to Italy would not help their tax bill.
This characterization:
>selling for an unsustainably low price)
also applies to previous governments and voters that approved defined benefit pensions and retiree healthcare that needs ever growing populations to fund it.
I can see the situation just as easily be characterized as “avoid being liable for an unsustainable debt”.
Income and assets are different though. They will tax what you earn, but they aren't trying to tax your net worth afterwards. Idk how France can go after the assets of people who move.
