Agreed, macOS has hardly improved in the past decade. The only improvements are about ecosystem integration, which I don't really care about. Everything else is stuck in the 2010s. UI has regressed if you ask me.
Windows Terminal and PowerToys are pretty nice. The Phone Link app is convenient, and screenshots are way better (no need to paste into Paint anymore, just use snip and sketch)
The snipping tool (with all features I'm using today) was added to PowerToys more than 20 years ago. It was integrated directly into Windows 10 pretty early in the update cycle. Not sure it qualifies for "the last decade".
Or their constant use of dark patterns to push you into using Bing and Edge. I was actually an Edge user myself. I liked a few of its built-in features, and it felt pretty fast. But then they started tricking me into changing my default search engine to Bing. I fell for it a couple of times, and then I quit.
> Agreed, macOS has hardly improved in the past decade
I would argue the opposite. Shared clipboard with my iPhone is a killer feature (i copy a lot of OTP tokens) and I envy you in the US that can remote access the iPhone (it is currently blocked in the EU, but hopefully will come eventually). Also mulit-monitor setup has become way better (I used to use 3rd party tools to restore window and monitor positions).
If there are reasons its not good enough, since it's open source you should be able to help fix them (excepting iOS issues, since those are mostly just apple locking down the OS too hard for various things to work).
We're on hacker news, we should all want something we can hack on. Shared clipboard between two devices with proprietary OSs we can't hack on is a great feature for the masses, but not us.
Good for you, not see how that is relevant for the discussion what features were added to macOS though. Also note that clipcoard sharing just as Airdrop are point-to-point and neither require internet connection, nor is the data send through a third party or network.
> since it's open source you should be able to help fix them
And I can also grow my own tomatoes and cucumbers in my back yard, but I still prefer to buy them from a supermarket.
It has even regressed, I'm still on my High Sierra 2011 MacBook Air, but on my mom's M3 Air I can't help but observe that they did all that engineering to reduce the black bezel around the lid, only for Tahoe to have overly rounded windows and huge title bars.
No, macOS has improved a ton in a lot of ways under-the-hood. Battery life, memory compression, paging behaviour. The MacBook Neo wouldn't be possible at 8GB without all this stuff.
Ecosystem integration is the shining difference between Apple and others, as it is radically better than any other available implementation.
I would argue that ecosystem integration is the only primary consideration that you need to use at the top/first-culling-step of the flowchart to either include or discount Apple products in any purchasing decision. Anything else is secondary, and has workarounds.
> UI has regressed
Honestly, I love the UI of MacOS 9.2.2 the most. But I don’t have a Time Machine or Elon Musk levels of wealth to chart a different course.
And sure, some UI decisions of late have been questionable. That is always the case with non-niche products that don’t have highly focused and largely conforming users. Apple moved out of that category back in the early 2000s, and it is forced to make the same UI tradeoffs that Microsoft makes.
I actually don’t mind the modern UI, and aside from a few warts I think they’re going in a very user-friendly direction even if power users feel slighted and abandoned.
