These terminal commands don't fix the problem- there are still lengthy animations, e.g. when swapping desktops or opening folders. These are tasks I sometimes do multiple times per second on Linux.

> This is always the default answer to this question online, and I’m sick of it! It doesn’t even solve the problem, but rather replaces it with an equally useless fade-in animation.

https://arhan.sh/blog/native-instant-space-switching-on-maco...

But this eroded over time. Nowadays both Mac and iOS are bloated pieces of crap that reek of design by committee. A lot of people blame Alan Dye (and they are probably right to do so) but there are other factors too. With Steve and Jony gone, they need someone who cares to step in and assert control once more

In any case, it’s odd that hardware is multiples better yet it doesn’t always nail something as basic as typing

FWIW, SwiftUI got a huge performance boost for iOS/macOS 26+, and Instruments 26 has been nice for finding performance bottlenecks. You may find the SwiftUI performance auditor in a free/FOSS project of mine (https://charleswiltgen.github.io/Axiom/commands/ui-design/au...) helpful as well.

Why it took 4 years to get to near-UIKit levels of performance I couldnt say, but I've had a great experience working with it on an app that's 97% SwiftUI.

It's not the default, but IIRC Windows could be configured to have zero animations, and I found it to be quite responsive as such.

I'm not talking about the speed of opening programs, but more of the speed of every-second interactions: Unfolding a folder (or other interactions within a program with keyboard or mouse), alt-tabbing across windows, moving between desktops, etc. At least on Windows, I saw far fewer IO-blocking animations than I have on MacOS.

You're right about the "something starts to happen": Apple hides delays behind sigmoidal animations throughout much of their OS. For those who aren't aware of the trick, the delay between the start of the animation and the tail where it starts appears to just be an animation that started on the interaction.

But did you try Homebrew and its extensions? It works pretty well for managing both terminal and GUI apps, and has some useful extensions like Brewfile, MAS, etc. Its not perfect, but for single-user Macs with an up-to-date OS version, it works quite well.

I use both linux (with a decent tiling window manager; the tiling management being the least important part of it) and macos. And certain things are just not possible to do with macos. On linux I can have 300+ open terminal windows AND CAN find the one I need when I need to. On macos 20 (counting in Termianl tabs, which are implemented as windows, underneath) is about the high mark that it gets annoying to work on. On macos, you can't effectively work on multiple projects that use the same software (editor + terminal, for example). You can work with different Applications, though, and that is managed pretty well (better than most linux window managers that I have seen).

Every year or so I try adding a couple of Spaces, and always regret it a couple of hours later, switching back to a single Space (+ a few fullscreen apps).

Dead on.

Apple's current software is such a joke I almost regret ever having invested in the Mac ecosystem. I still run Mojave for its 32-bit app support for (apple's own) apps that have no contemporary equal.

Apple weathered the passing of Steve surprisingly well, however the cracks still show. Apple's very best is exclusively reserved for those products/devices/software with Jobs' fingerprints on them.

I still run an original iPhone SE as well. The entire tech sphere has gone in such a poor direction, I've increasingly divested myself from tech. If it no longer works with my system, I simply stop using it. It's a happy ("insecure") place.

I think it started slightly earlier: 10.7 Lion in 2011 introduced the new full-screen mode that was completely broken on multi-monitor setups, as though Apple entirely failed to test on or even anticipate what was at most a moderately "power user" hardware configuration. They've introduced lots of useless features over the years (eg. Game Center), but that full-screen mode was the first time I recall OS X having such an in-your-face usability regression that was so obvious and avoidable.

10.7 also dropped Front Row, which was a disappointment to me, but is at least understandable in the context of Apple TV existing as a separate product they wanted to steer users toward. Losing Rosetta in 10.7 was also somewhat justifiable, and didn't hurt me much since my first Mac was an Intel machine and I didn't have much of a library of PPC-only applications.

I think that was mainly due to GPL 3.

Many other iPhone/Macbook users have been shocked I don't turn on Messages on my Mac due to a bad experience with sync in the first year that was possible, and I had a similar bad experience with photos in iCloud early on. Maybe the sync is fast now, but my usage would put my in a higher iCloud tier than I'd like, and I still feel more at ease juggling many Photos libraries on external hard drives. I avoid Google Photos like the plague, and even though I trust Apple more (for now), I'd still rather not entrust to them my family's personal photos and videos.

> macOS is dropping all all macs with Intel CPUs.

Those two cases are not really comparable though, are they? The last Intel CPU Mac was the 2019 Mac Pro, which was discontinued in 2023.