The way Apple is sold, it’s like the second coming of Jesus, yet it’s riddled with bugs which would make Linux feel embarrassed.

Macbook’s “Now playing” control center icon is broken by design. It tries to be too helpful and includes both Apple Music and Safari; when I hit the “Pause” button in hopes to stop Apple Music playback, it instead activates the Teams Safari tab and starts playing the “ringing call” sound. What the fuck? Who at Apple thought this to be a good idea? Sure, instead of pausing the music, let’s hear a random sound from random Safari tab instead!.

And don’t get me started on the new way of positioning windows, the “Window > Move & Resize” menu. It’s great when it works, but it doesn’t work on BBEdit, and that’s because BBEdit removes the “Move & Resize” menu item from the “Window” menu. It’s true that BBEdit should not do that, but BBEdit shouldn’t be allowed to do that in the first place! Also, when I press the key combo to tile windows to left, I want The Mighty Window Manager to tile the bloody window to the left, end of story. It shouldn’t be the responsibility of the app itself capturing the shortcut, then maybe moving its window to the left (or not). What the fuck? The Window Manager needs to handle that, not the app itself!

On top of that, there are two maximize functions now: Zoom and Fill. Zoom has no keyboard shortcut assigned and for some apps it maximizes the app only vertically, but no horizontally (?!?!?); Fill is Fn+Control+F which is a PITA to press on the “Magic Keyboard with Numeric Keypad”. And it doesn’t work anyway on some apps, so I’m continuing to use the Magnet app.

When I quit VM in Parallels or close Slack, there’s like 5% probability that those apps crash & freeze, and with that, the entire fucking macOS! Da fuq? I thought, as a profession, we moved away from the MS-DOS times, where an app could overwrite entire memory and pretty much kill your PC. But noooo, macOS has one event loop and if an app doesn’t play nicely, everything just bloody freezes. The only thing that works is to right-click the app icon and select “Kill” - the option doesn’t show by default and feels like the kill switch is hacked on top of MacOS Dock bar.

Also, the tilde key. With Linux, it doesn’t matter what symbol is on the keyboard key; you can activate the US layout which puts the tilde character under ESC. Not with Apple. If you don’t get the Mac with the US physical layout, the tilde key is moved downwards next to the left shift, and no matter which keyboard layout I select in the settings, I can not remap the key elsewhere. I actually had to download some crazy software written by some third-party dude, to create my own keyboard layout, only to move the Tilde key to where I’m used to. WTF? Sure, get a Mac with the US keyboard you might say, but in the US layout, the ENTER key occupies only one row of keys and that annoys me to no end. AARGH I’ll have to get used to the small ENTER key since the tilde position is pretty much hardwired in my brain already.

I mean, many things are done in the right way, but there are some huge gaping bloody obvious usability issues, Jobs must be rotating in his grave like a turbine.

The way iOS does app settings is a complete UX disaster too: in order to configure the app, I have to close the app, go to Settings, find the app and set it up. WHY? I was in the fucking app in the first place but okay I guess!

The iPhone keyboard is so broken it’s not even funny. The autocorrection sucks, the UX for correcting autocorrection is horrible and I find myself fighting the UX to correct the autocorrection suggestions; most importantly, the support for auto-switching between three languages is non-existent. Apple, please take a hard long look at Google’s keyboard, and then copy it.

The programming environment on MacBook sucks balls. In order to install stuff, you need to install HomeBrew: you download a bash script from the internet and run it as root. NO FUCKING WAY. Linux-in-VM saves the day.

MTP (transfer files to Android devices) support is virtually non-existent - another huge WTF.

Apple Music is confusing as hell - I don’t really care for Home, New or Radio: I just want to mark a bunch of stuff favourite and listen to those. Opening a favourite artist only shows favourite albums, leading me to believe that other albums are not on Apple Music. I need to click on the artist name again (it shows as plain text, giving no impression that it’s a clickable element!!), to see all albums. Apple, please fucking fire all Apple Music UX designers and design that shit from scratch.

Will I abandon Apple? No. They do many things right, most importantly the privacy. Also, once the Magic Keyboard is remapped, it’s extremely pleasant to type on. The touchpad is amazing too. Now that I got things working the way I want it, the setup is pretty solid. Also, the working suspend and the entire don’t-shut-off-computer-for-a-year is highly addictive too. I’m pretty happy with my Linux-in-VM setup - Linux provides excellent programming environment, Apple provides excellent hardware and a thin OS on top of that, and I even get to play games on a Windows-in-VM. I love the M3 Max - finally ARM replaced the x86 garbage.