Perpetual Random Apple Rants Thread

[xoa]

It's been a month or two I guess since Apple added their shitty anti-security new "you must enter your password every single fucking time you connect to a computer" aka "hurry up and pay for iCloud and upload all your stuff there we need to juice our profit margins this quarter :^)" thing and I still hate it. Leaves me once again hoping for the day the EU or whomever forces them to let owners access root key stores if they wish and reduces my normal sympathy and belief in a nuanced careful approach.

 

[xoa]

It's been a month or two I guess since Apple added their shitty anti-security new "you must enter your password every single fucking time you connect to a computer"

I'm not sure what change you refer to.

I backup my iDevices to my Mac same as I always have, auto-sync on connect. Starting with the most recent iOS it now demands full passphrase entered on each iDevice connected each and every single time. A further even more bullshit thing over the previous expiration of "trust this computer" expiring. Backup, connect 10 minutes later? Passphrase. And just to rub salt in it sync takes 30 seconds or whatever to start, so one connects and it doesn't need it right away, instead you have to sit around and wait a bit, then enter it, which adds even more friction. From a company that has historically cared a lot about smooth interaction it's even more glaring. But of course, the point of it is "we don't want you backing up anywhere but iCloud even if we aren't quite ready to just explicitly tie it all to us yet with government breathing down our necks".

 

[xoa]

I hate how hard Apple makes it to use a CA on iOS. It's completely fine with macOS, Linux, Windows, or Android, OpenSSL verifies fine, I even went to the significant effort and trouble to make it domain restricted, but then iOS still won't take it. It's my fucking domain and internal services you anti-security assholes. FFS.

 

[xoa]

Finally did my first Ventura install. Late to the party but holy crap do I already hate the new system preferences. All sorts of important stuff is far more clicks to get to, less information dense, and of course it breaks tons of muscle memory. I hate the design trends it embodies as well as the implementation. And since I spend a certain amount of time in the network panel particularly it's not just set and forget either. Sigh.

 

[xoa]

This has probably been said endlessly in the Ach already but damn if it isn't annoying how Apple has continually nerfed Disk Utility from what was once quite a capable GUI into a near worthless piece of garbage that requires going to the commandline for nearly anything. And as far as I can tell the restore function is just completely fubar'd at this point despite still being in the GUI. sudo /usr/sbin/asr restore still works same as always but running it from Disk Utility doesn't ask for and doesn't grant any rights so it just fails with an unhelpful "Operation is not permitted". Converting images all seems to be in hdiutil now as well. Sigh.

 

[xoa]

It's been awhile now and I still absolutely frickin hate the new system preferences. Hate hate hate. Hard to find all sorts of basic stuff, search is no substitute, the "hurr it's similar to iOS" is meaningless since the Mac is full of things with no iOS analog, things I do a fair amount take longer. Damn it.

 

[xoa]

It's now been well over a year. Well, I still abso-fricking-lutely HATE the new System Settings vs the old System Preferences. It infuriates me every single time I have to use it, which is a lot. Everything now takes massively more clicks, displays far less information in a far more confusing crappy way, more slowly. It sucks. May the gods visit a pox upon everyone at Apple involved with approving/developing it.

 

[xoa]

- I continue to absolutely loathe the new Settings app with the fury of 1000 exploding suns in every single respect. I hate hate hate it and whoever designed it and greenlit it, it's so utterly awful. Damn it.

- The ghost press issue on the Apple Watch is surprising and infuriating as well. Series 9, all up to date, I have it set to turn the screen off, but it's just constantly randomly starting random workouts even if I'm in the middle of another workout! And doing random splits. I've turned off all the autostart/stop stuff and it still happens. I'll be hiking and suddenly here a "split 1 marked" and it just decided to randomly set me to rowing sometime ago. Not that I wanted a random split either. FFS. Theater mode sorta helps but even that doesn't entirely resolve it and then it's harder to see anything else either. Sigh.

 

[xoa]

I'd do a warranty claim on that watch-- I've been wearing Apple Watches since the first-gen and have never seen anything that might be considered a "ghost press". Any Series 9 watch should still be in warranty, with or without Apple Care.

Thanks, this is my first one so haven't had any reference, and since Apple saw fit to specifically mention it in the 10.4 Watch OS update:

• Resolves an issue that causes some users to experience false touches on the display

I just sort of figured it was a thing they were still working on. I'll try to find someone Apple to ask about it. Closest Apple Store is like 4.5 hours drive away so it's not convenient to just go in person and check, will have to see how their phone/online options are nowadays.[/url]

 

[xoa]

Yes, and I don't want that - for MANY reasons. I'm almost at the point of moving my dock to the right side (although that creates its own issues).

I wish the dock had some "group minimized windows by application" or other options, something inbetween default behavior of having all minimized windows on their own and "minimize into application icon", which makes it annoying to then hunt the minimized windows. Left side would usually be my preference, on most screens these days vertical space is at much more of a premium then horizontal, but with a lot of minimized windows everything gets so very, very tiny. I suppose I could use Spaces more heavily and try to stick unused windows on their own space and avoid using the Dock at all that way but it's one of those aspects of macOS that feels kinda half-baked even after over 20 years. They got the dock "ok enough" then just sorta stopped, no major changes ever since.

 

[xoa]

Marvin on an iPad is what I have used for years and years and it's perfectly cromulent for my needs.

Sadly Marvin is no longer available in the App store, so if you ever replace your iPad, you won't be able to re-install it. As I discovered recently.

FWIW you can still use iMazing to save apps offline on your computer and then load them back onto your iDevices even if Apple has removed them from the AS, so long as it's under the same Apple ID. That won't save an app from potentially eventually ceasing to work with new iOS updates but it has proved useful to me in the past since removal doesn't necessarily correlate with that.

 

[xoa]

I have plenty of saved up rants but:

The part that pisses me off the most isn't even that Spotlight is buggier than its age and release status would lead one to believe, but how, in typical (recent'ish?) Apple-fashion, the whole shebang is so incredibly complex and apparently littered with a staggering number of potential points of failure, yet at the same time there doesn't seem to be even the most rudimentary user-facing (⇠!!!) notification/reporting system that'd let users know what, when and where step/process XYZ might've failed. Or, for Pete's sake, even let users know that something, anything at all, failed.

this is at the root of a number of them. Not that Apple was ever the most transparent of course, and they preferred to cover up complexity of errors by default. I can't even say that was typically a bad idea really. But in the past it was often at least possible to find the errors in a clear place or some sort of code that could be looked up, or enable more reporting somewhere. It now feels like it's become almost a fetish to be as opaque as possible and report as little as possible no matter what. When things automagically work it's smooth, but when things fail for any reason at all it's utterly inscrutable and impossible to work around. My two most recent ones and fresh on my mind are:

• Apparently the GUI-based normal Mac method for trusting a root CA is now borked on macOS 15, at least for me. No error message, no nothing, you add it to your login or the system keychain, go to info, set it as trusted, system asks for admin password, you give it... then nothing happens. No indication of any kind. And Ican still add it and set it as trusted from the command line and it's fine, so nothing underlying is broken, nor is it some new security thing (I assume? maybe?).

• HomePod minis are a nightmare of this (combined with Apple's allergy to buttons or any sort of native control capability). If you follow the flow just right and it all works then great. If not woof. They have surprisingly limited WiFi network support, and no ethernet as a wired fallback. I was put in charge of trying to set up a couple of them, and one ultimately worked just fine, whereas the other has been nothing but mysterious failures. It's possible it's just defective hardware somehow but it's very hard to tell.

 

[xoa]

Seriously. I'm skipping OS Duplo on my Mac and Phone so far, because I see no compelling reason to install it. When the 15.7.2 patch release came out, Apple pulled a dark pattern where it offered to install 26.1 as the only option. Cancelling out of that exposed the option to move from 15.7.1 to 15.7.2, which is what I actually wanted. If there is a 15.7.3, I assume it will do the same thing again.

The Mac dark pattern at least is (to an experienced user anyway) fairly easy to click around, and the cli softwareupdate shows everything with no BS same as always. I'm more irritated by the state of affairs on the iPhone where it showed nothing anyway for 18.x, only 26.x. To make 18 ones show up for my iPhone 16 I had to enable the 18.x beta channel, even though the production build of 18.3 is identical :|. That is definitely unintuitive.

 

[xoa]

New fun: while everything went "fine" for me (mysterious new problem popped up out of nowhere but not critical) a colleague ran the update on a M3 MBP and now it's just utterly borked. Bootloop at the Apple screen, going to recovery mode and reinstalling doesn't do anything. Sigh. So I go to nuke and pave for the first time in ages, and oh right, Apple got rid of Target Disk Mode, because fuck us right? Now you have to do this super slow pseudo-SMB thing both ways. Sigh.
Edit: WHICH DOESN'T ACTUALLY WORK GOD DAMN IT. It's so easy everyone. Just do all this stuff, then 'In the Network window, double-click the Mac that has the shared disk, click Connect As, select Guest in the Connect As window, then click Connect.'! What's that, nothing shows up in the Network window? Well we have this great advice for you of "nothing :^)".

This all used to be so fast and simple .

Edit 2: After poking around in the network interfaces, finding posts describing the exact symptoms in much older versions like this years old Stack Overflow post that ended with the classic "mysteriously started working", and multiple reboots of each system, it finally did show up. Now it's "working", cruising along on an M4 Pro to M3 Max connected by a Thunderbolt 4 cable with NVMe storage at a blistering... 24 MB/s, thanks to being forced through Apple's dogshit SMB. Awesome. I'm sure glad it can almost get to 50% the speed what Target Disk Mode did over Firewire 400 twenty years ago. We're living in the future!

My System Settings showed 26.2 as an update, and further down, it showed “Other updates”, which included 15.7.3.

Clicking that installed those and only those, no dark pattern, no update funnelling, no surprises.

Like @Your Dishes said it did that for me. I read on DF as well that clicking the button will do it anyway but it's pretty unintuitive and worrisome behavior for such a critical potentially breaking operation that would be a big pita to reverse. I don't think it's as bad at all as on the iPhone but it's still poor behavior imo. I don't think they should force a major OS version to be in simple Software Update at all.

 

[xoa]

Wow. Makes me realize that I need to have a better "break glass in case of sudden loss of Apple ID" plan. My Apple ID is as old as his and has the same amount of information with respect to most of my life, although it doesn't have anything relating to my work in it. In particular, as of right now, I don't think I'd be able to access any of my photos or videos if my Apple ID were suddenly closed.

Yeah I too have a really old one dating back to iTools, but perhaps ironically in part due to having been with it so long and seeing Apple fumble and strategy change over and over again I've never trusted it to any real degree and have avoided tying into it as much as possible. It's definitely worth assessing that from time to time though, good habits regardless of how one manages their digital lives. Like, if you selfhost a bunch instead or as well, what happens if the building with your server burns down or floods? Etc etc. Or for one that's universally relevant, if you go into a coma, is there any fallback for anyone else (and does it even matter)?

And even with all of that, he's apparently still screwed. JFC.

I find it wild that Apple's systems would do all that over a measly $500. And the system is all automated, so FU. And with one account to rule them all, a single point of failure. Brilliant!

It's not just Apple, some of the horror stories about Google and YT'ers aren't much better, but it's again wild to me how systems can be automated without barely any human intervention when the system goes awry.

FWIW it could actually be much, much worse than what you're even suggesting here. I have no inside sources here and no idea exactly how this all runs at any of the tech companies, but when "problematic gift card" of ANY value comes up immediate things that springs to mind these days I'm afraid are scamming and money laundering. And the regulations around that sort of stuff are kafkaesque. Patrick McKenzie has written some readable though long and in-depth articles on KYC/AML intro and AML and compliance more specifically, and then more recently some of how that can apply around the conversation of "debanking", but the big take home is how quickly someone can fall into a entangled web of bermuda triangles and then rapidly thereafter even the company employees themselves don't know why, they just see a non-response polite ban notice on their computer.

Apple/Google/MS/etc are of course not directly banks, but they do touch a lot of money directly or indirectly and globally they probably get pressed pretty hard by governments in similar smelling ways. "Something went wrong with this gift/credit card, and shortly thereafter I was quietly kicked and even pretty high level people don't seem to have any clue or action ability" might be sheer automated incompetence but also sounds worryingly like this particular nightmare zone. There is no clean legally compelled separation unfortunately, quite the opposite.

 

[xoa]

I’ve never tried Mac file sharing over Thunderbolt

You missed out! (firewire and USB too)

but I did have to spend some time last summer trying to unf*ck Mac SMB into giving me 21st-century-level performance. As a starter, here is some pointer for playing with /etc/nsmb.conf on your computer:

https://forums.unraid.net/topic/146...gs-to-get-better-macos-to-unraid-performance/

With that said, it might be simpler and less painful to do it in the same way cavemen migrated their PCs back in the days: use Carbon Copy Cloner or something to copy the whole disk onto an external HDD, then hook it up to the new Mac and restore appropriately.

This is all nice in theory for general usage sure, but it only works if the computer will actually boot vs being caught in an infinite bootloop even after doing an fsck and then reinstall from the recovery partition. It was in that sort of last resort situation (amongst others) that TDM really shined because you could just make the internal drive act as a standard fast external drive. It's why Apple bothered to still include any sort of option at all, it's just that they went with a really lazy crappy one unlike in the past.

 

[xoa]

Apple still has two shitty an annoying account security practices if you just want a basic dedicated Apple ID for something like Game Center.

1. They allow other people to lock your account. This has been an industry-wide plague but holy fuck is it so irritating. Like everything else that is password-only I have a 24 character fully random alphanumeric password (equivalent to about 2^143 combos) I keep in my password manager. All the """security""" questions they still force you to use so that people have a potential way to break into and steal your account are also 24 char random same as the password. But some rando somewhere on the planet has been trying to brute force one of my Apple IDs. Despite this being impossible Apple then dutifully goes ahead and locks the account because of too many false tries, thus allowing them to DDoS me despite absolutely zero security value whatsoever. FFS
2. They don't allow just adding some FIDO2 tokens and having multifactor that way (with a recovery key or 10 if need be) unless you give them a phone number first (?!!?!??!) because who fucking knows. Probably for advertising purposes or just because they're lazy and Cook has been letting the rest of the software go to shit too so no need to break form with Apple IDs.

I'm deeply angry at them drifting further down the path of NEXT QUARTERLY NUMBER GO UP and going along with fascism too of course but those are bigger topics then this immediate little random rant.

 

[xoa]

Quite serious, very old 0-day vulnerability patched, which in turn makes it even shittier that Apple is now trying to artificially force people to move from iOS 18 to iOS 26 by restricting 18.7.5 to old devices only . Hooray, leave open serious vuln or move to liquid crap UX. It'd be one thing if they just didn't patch it at all, but given they produced a patched version anyway it's ugly they're not letting any iOS 18 device use it.

 

[xoa]

While I strongly agree with your post, I also strongly feel one part should go a touch further:

I’m not arguing that Apple can or should give away their services for free – running things like iCloud Photo Library for as many devices as they support obviously has significant costs, ranging from infrastructure to security to maintenance, etc.

This is fine by me as well... so long as Apple wasn't engaging in textbook anti-competitive behavior by leveraging control in one area to push people to buy from them in another. Apple can charge what it likes for services, but when it comes to iOS and macOS owners should have equal API access to Apple and be able to develop and/or point their own hardware at anything they wish. The backup experience in particular should have zero required ties to iCloud. Most people would likely stick with the defaults anyway, but if someone wants to develop an iOS/macOS backup service that can run off a local NAS it should be possible to do that with full capability and just point your devices at it and have an identical experience.

And I think it's also incredibly important in the long term for Apple too, even if in the short term it's let them squeeze out more revenue from people. And indeed goes into a lot of the other frustrations people are having. Having to stay competitive helps keep incentives aligned for a healthy internal culture that will produce better results over time and keep a happy user base. It provides a steam release valve when inevitable stumbles happen, in Apple's case meaning people will continue to buy hardware and generate revenue that way at least even if they're angry about certain things, because they are free to just work around those bits for awhile. While there are no doubt multiple internal cultural reasons for the rot at Cupertino, I honestly think some of it has come about from the ever increasing level of control they've grabbed onto. It's let them get away with stuff without facing any clear immediate repercussions, but that ultimately IMO just builds debt and pressure down the road. And when people are forced to cut ties under those circumstances, when the tipping point is finally reached, it tends to be a lot more catastrophic (a total move to another platform say) then if there was never any "force" involved.

It's a real shame, as well as infuriating. I'd argue "technofeudalism" is one of the actual core scourges of the modern world, even if people have trouble really putting a finger on it.

 

[xoa]

>macOS 15.7.7, Mini M4 Pro

get onto a workstation this morning
a bunch of email accounts in mail show as offline
huh, odd, wonder if that email service is having a hiccup
go to check Internet Accounts
every single last account has somehow vanished over the weekend, list shows entirely empty

FFS. That's new .
(uh, sorry to interrupt in this Random Ferrari Rants threads all )