Sure. Tim Cook was great at driving costs down and selling more devices and services.

Design is how it works, not just how it looks. Apple has focused much more on the looks instead of functionality and usability since Cook took over. You can even see it on Apple’s website. It’s looks flashy and elegant, but finding technical information is a hassle. The user interface is optimized to look clean and elegant in screen shots, not for usability.

I recently used an older Mac and was delighted with using it.

macOS has gotten noticeably worse in many aspects. The Human Interface Guidelines are often ignored. Some system applications like Disk Utility were rewritten with less features than before. QuickTime only has a fraction of the features of QuickTime 7. Hiding UI elements like scrollbars, excessive transparency made usability worse. The new System settings are a convoluted mess compared to the old one. The way permissions and app notarization are implemented is user hostile, while giving only marginal security improvements.

Also on the technical side it has been meh. Swift if a good programming language but it suffers from endless feature creep. Compile speed and debugging is still worse than Objective-C.

Apple used to dogfeed new APIs in house first for a few years and then open it up once it was working. They have changed this completely. New APIs are first introduced for public use while in an unfinished state.

SwiftUI being a major example. It’s a giant framework introduced with the idea of being cross platform between all of Apple’s platforms. However, it hasn’t managed to do that. SwiftUI is different on all of them. It even makes it harder to write proper Mac apps. All while being much slower, more buggy, and more limited than UIKit and Appkit.

Or look at the options for scripting and automation. Shortcuts is cross platform. However it’s limited and can’t do everything that’s possible with Automator, AppleScript, and shell scripting. It also doesn’t integrate with the existing Services menu in macOS. The share menu still feels kind of alien on macOS.

iPadOS is held back by lots of limitations. For example the file manager is a joke compared to Finder on the Mac. It’s still bogged down by design decisions that were made for the first iPhones that had extremely limited memory and no swap. The windowing and multitasking are clunky and inelegant.

Liquid Glass is so bad usability wise, the guy who lead it left the company.

The yearly releases of major versions for operating systems led to a less stable platform. Every year millions of developers spend time to test adjust to the new version. This means they can’t work ok features or other bugs. This has lead to lots of abandoned software especially on iOS, that could still work if Apple didn’t break stuff every year.

Steve Jobs gave a shit and is the reason Apple products had good design. Since his death Apple has been coasting and iterating aimlessly.

Mac Studio is a Mac mini with better cooling and better all around specs.

The trash can MacPro was kinda cool when introduced, but then they never bother to upgrade it.

The user experience and user interface has suffered.

The MacPro line has been finally canceled after being neglected for years.

It’s necessary because people develop software with Macs.

macOS just makes you jump through a hoop every time you run an application that’s not notarized.

In practice that means cross platform open source projects don’t want to pay money to join apple’s developer program and set up code singing and deal with certificates.

So after download an unsigned app, macOS refuses to start it until you go to system settings > security > and allow.

You have to do this again after every update.

It’s very annoying and does very little for security.

Scripts and aliases make this easy to set up.

What do you mean by natural? Do you want stateful APIs?

Unidentified

Jupiter contains lots and lots of Helium that just needs to scooped up from the atmosphere.

No, you tell about management the problem and how only their amazing social and people skills will be able to do something about it.

Multiplying by Pi is what I do. :)

This kind of social behavior is corporate politics and a failure of management of course.

Code presentations are great for that.

One or two people present their code before the merge. Others watch, ask questions, etc. Small changes and improvements can be done immediately. Ideally the change is merged after the presentation. It can speed up things immensely and more people feel ownership. If a simple ticket stays in review for a week, it can be very detrimental.

Read the JSONL into a real database like Postgres.

Dysfunctional engineering teams, that have no empathy for end users is an issue as well.

A good alternative is code presentations.

You present your changes to a group of engineers. Then discuss it.

argue

Yes, it happens too often. That’s a failure of leadership or a social problem.

Techies often try and fix human and social issues with technology, but that doesn’t always work.

Code review helps spread knowledge about the code base through the team. Without it, you easily end up with disjointed fiefdoms ruled by petty code lords that don’t share information.

Why do engineers do this?

Simply fix the relevant technical debt as part of implementing a feature or fixing a bug. That way you can chip away at it over time.

Waiting for the big removal of technical debt will never come. It’s an ongoing process.

Leave the code base better than you found it – always.

due date next Thursday

The answer is to say “We will try our best, but this is very ambitious.” Then you let the deadline pass, usually it’s artificial in the first place. When the deadline passes say: “As we feared this took longer than we hoped for.”

Scales according to five year plan.