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macOS 27 is so buggy

50 points · 51 comments · dbg31415

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dbg31415 · 1790874904 · focus · HN ↗
Man... I know this post will have some real "angry old man shaking his fists at the clouds" energy, but this latest OS update, even 27.0.1, is just so freakin' janky.
Spaces... the windows don't layer right. So I can't always move them to a new space. When I bring up the various desktops, some windows just freeze at the original size and refuse to move.
Similarly, the desktop previews for other desktops don't work. They start out working, but as soon as I resize a window, the previews in the virtual desktops go blank, so I can't see which desktops have files and applications running.
Also, probably the most annoying, my laptop (M4 Max MBP) battery life is just gone from what it was a week ago. It used to last a day; now it's maybe 4 hours -- I've noticed the fan is on a lot more which is likely the cause.
The laptop went from always being quiet, cool, to being warm when I pick it up.
And yeah, I've tuned all the settings, fixed what I could, but Spaces and virtual desktops are just broke.
As someone who has been using virtual desktops for as long as Apple has had this feature... man, it's just a total drain on productivity to try and shoehorn everything into one desktop. I hate it. Might as well be using a computer that isn't my own.
And as someone who has used Mac for 40 years at this point... I'm just not used to Apple breaking this much. They were sticklers for detail, and that's why I love their products. But this latest OS feels untested. Do they only care about users using one application at a time? Feels like they just gave up on advanced users. Anyone running Spaces / virtual desktops would have noticed all these bugs.
The last OS added a ton of bullshit transparent glitter; this one broke how I use my computer. It sucks knowing that even Apple can't get things right today. Flat out just sucks.
Wish I could just roll back. Left waiting for them to maybe, hopefully, someday put in a patch to fix all the stuff they just broke. Just maddening.
1. chrisweekly · 1790875556 · focus · HN ↗
  Yikes! I'm still on Sonoma and sticking with it as long as I can. Thanks for sharing. Good luck.
  1. dbg31415 · 1790876868 · focus · HN ↗
    Yeah I can't name a single feature I liked that was introduced Tahoe on.
    macOS Tahoe (26) was the one where they introduced transparent everything, and it flat out sucked from a usability standpoint.
    Design was busy for the sake of being busy, glossy for the sake of being glossy. And no attention at all was paid to usability.
    * It’s hard to justify Tahoe icons @ tonsky.me // <a href="https://tonsky.me/blog/tahoe-icons/" rel="nofollow">https://tonsky.me/blog/tahoe-icons/
    Anyway stay on Sonoma mate, upgrading has killed my productivity and that just makes me way too angry. Ha.
    But seriously, the real advantage to open-source software I think will be that you can just tell Claude, "Make this work the way I want it!" and boom it does.
    I have loved Apple products for so long, and I can't imagine a world where I don't love their hardware, but since they shat the bed on usable design, and shat the bed on testing, I fantasize about a world where we could just send our PRs to fix MacOS. =P
  2. seam_carver · 1790879165 · focus · HN ↗
    Sonoma is out of security updates so I went to sequoia.
    It's pretty much the same as Sonoma besides the apple intelligence which is optional.
    chrisweekly · 1790879480 · focus · HN ↗
    (facepalm) I meant Sequoia. (15.7)
2. commakozzi · 1790878988 · focus · HN ↗
  I have zero of those problems. Weird.
  1. zamalek · 1790880428 · focus · HN ↗
    Maybe because you don't do outrageous things like having gifs in the background.
rythmshifter · 1790876687 · focus · HN ↗
iOS 27 has also been very buggy. Both releases are frankly embarrassing for Apple. I really really hope it’s not happening because of vibe coding…
pmkary · 1790877515 · focus · HN ↗
Somehow it fixed all my problems.
sedan_baklazhan · 1790877775 · focus · HN ↗
So what exactly is happening to the software industry? Why are we getting buggier than ever releases of major Operating Systems?
For some reasons I can’t stop thinking about “AI”.
1. simmerup · 1790878132 · focus · HN ↗
  I’ve noticed so many bugs in spotify after they tweeted about how little coding their devs do now
  1. sedan_baklazhan · 1790878945 · focus · HN ↗
    I am seeing this in all kinds of software. Quality is steadily declining.
    GlickWick · 1790880867 · focus · HN ↗
    It's in AAA games too. For example, Diablo 4 has incredibly degraded. Basic features are often broken, like dungeon exits sending you to the right locations, UI interfaces having things that can't be clicked under certain circumstances, unlockable season abilities simply not working, etc
    throw-the-towel · 1790883757 · focus · HN ↗
    But be wary of possible observation bias though. In my opinion, for one, the quality decline was going on long before AI.
    za3faran · 1790892180 · focus · HN ↗
    AI could have amplified it.
    sedan_baklazhan · 1790927351 · focus · HN ↗
    On the contrary: software quality was steady and improving in my observations back then.
  2. asdff · 1790879700 · focus · HN ↗
    The app straight up doesn't work anymore on my phone for songs that aren't downloaded. Just plays the first 1 second and skips to the next. I'm so close to just pirating all my music again.
2. kjellsbells · 1790879262 · focus · HN ↗
  Software quality has been miserable for decades. And more and more of daily life depends on software working well, so we all feel it much more.
  This predates AI, eg recall Windows was gnarly before the third Service Pack, etc.
  Personally I blame outsourcing and its cousin offshoring. Not because Indians can't code or any such racist nonsense, but because relentless pressure to be the lowest bidder, no universal measurable standard of what quality actually means, and, above all, no practical way to exercise meaningful managerial control over a team you don't control or are ten timezones away makes quality impossible.
  I suspect that in the Wide World of Software, away from the 10x people here on HN who write SQLite clones for fun and send Fabrice PRs to fix his bugs, vibe coded software might actually be approaching the quality of what they get from their vendors today. That doesn't make it good, but it's at least equally meh. It's the Visual Basic era of 1994 all over again. We'd better get used to it, fast.
  1. valleyer · 1790880018 · focus · HN ↗
    As relevant here, basically none of macOS development is outsourced/offshored.
  2. Amekedl · 1790880735 · focus · HN ↗
    I observe this too. New platforms, like VR, had to replace a lot of the stack, and therefore new chances.
    Hard though from the idea initially too.
    The main stack is reasonably web, as broad as that is
3. bluetomcat · 1790879325 · focus · HN ↗
  It's what happens when you substitute human causal understanding for probabilistic pattern matching that "solves" problems with layering more problems in a pile of cognitive debt beyond human comprehension. We are compromising our entire digital infrastructure with mindless slop that erodes decades of know-how and conceptual awareness about complex systems.
  1. ttoinou · 1790880468 · focus · HN ↗
    The reality is probabilistic, and engineering has always been about turning that into deterministic behavior and outcomes, in an industrial, repeatable, observable, debuggable way
    bluetomcat · 1790881047 · focus · HN ↗
    True, but with Gen AI, we are turning most digital products into unpredictable slush machines that appear to mostly work on the surface, while hiding an incomprehensible amount of behavioural and performance anomalies.
4. 233mhz · 1790879700 · focus · HN ↗
  Complexity has to play a role, google chrome has more LOC than windows XP... At this point everything is a pile of piles of shit built on top of a gigantic pile of shit.
  Today I ran out of ram, the "teams" desktop app was taking 2 gigs just standing there doing nothing, you can run four whole windows Xp on the same amount of ram, comfortably. My inactive chatgpt chrome tab alone was taking 900mb
  1. ttoinou · 1790880405 · focus · HN ↗
    I wouldn’t call Chrome a pile of shit software. If anything else we should learn from this project
    And the web is the most advanced and open OS in the world. That all those features can be packaged into a 100MB binary is magic
    nullpoint420 · 1790880719 · focus · HN ↗
    Real. The Chrome rendering stack is such an inspiration for how to do high performance GUIs on multiple operating systems.
    RunSet · 1790896492 · focus · HN ↗
    > how to do high performance GUIs on multiple operating systems.
    By being a poorly-behaved process until you are caught red-handed.
    <a href="https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/07/why-google-took-years-to-address-a-battery-draining-bug-in-chrome/" rel="nofollow">https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/07/why-google-took-year...
    nullpoint420 · 1790898380 · focus · HN ↗
    Did you mention this as some sort of gotcha? This article is over 12 years old.
    Chrome has gone through almost two rewrites of their core rendering stack since then. It's impressive work.
    Although this itself is outdated, I remember enjoying "Life of a Pixel"[0] back when it came out.
    [0] <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-J-tbAlFic" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-J-tbAlFic
  2. wuhhh · 1790881931 · focus · HN ↗
    I try to do more and more in the terminal, but even that isn’t immune to the same syndrome, programs tying up tons of threads and memory, terminal emulators themselves being GPU accelerated and performance intensive. Perhaps we will see a cultural hard fork and a trend towards small, simple, utilitarian programs in personal computing; if the price of basic components continues its upward trend, it may even be necessary. Devices that are purposefully limited, hacked, owned, customised, privvy to closed networks that follow the same philosophies.
5. wetpaws · 1790880065 · focus · HN ↗
  [dead]
6. o_m · 1790881118 · focus · HN ↗
  My theory is that the industry grew too much and too fast and this lead to even more feature creep, which turns into buggy software over time.
  <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feature_creep" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feature_creep
7. glimshe · 1790882279 · focus · HN ↗
  My onboarding flow for MacOS 27 was abysmal. Worse than anything Microsoft ever showed me, with multiple authentications due to me having to accept new Terms for iCloud. I saw 2 show-stopper bugs in this flow where clicking on the messages did nothing. After repeating the same passwords several times, I was able to log in. A complete and ridiculous mess.
8. fmajid · 1790933106 · focus · HN ↗
  Most Big Tech firms have shut down their QA teams and moved to CI only, a false economy with predictable effects on software quality.
cousinbryce · 1790877923 · focus · HN ↗
Clearly this is sabotage, someone alert the judge of the change
lapcat · 1790878214 · focus · HN ↗
The submission title has been editorialized, contrary to HN guidelines. The actual article title is "Buggy & Laggy Mission Control, Spaces, & Stage Manager in MacOS 27 Golden Gate? Try These Tips".
1. 0cf8612b2e1e · 1790879374 · focus · HN ↗
  There is no way that would have fit the length restriction.
  1. lapcat · 1790879689 · focus · HN ↗
    It fits without "Try These Tips".
seam_carver · 1790879095 · focus · HN ↗
iOS 27 fixed some bugs but added more. Sigh.
avazhi · 1790879158 · focus · HN ↗
Yeah I’m never leaving Sequoia.
swozey · 1790879977 · focus · HN ↗
I genuinely cannot believe you can't remove the 11gb llm they're installing and if I didn't just go through 6 months of Tahoe running like trash before I reinstalled macos for the first time in my life I wouldn't even think of installing it.
zamalek · 1790880540 · focus · HN ↗
Seems like the slop reaper has business with macOS too.
prymitive · 1790880965 · focus · HN ↗
It’s because nobody gives a fluff anymore, seemingly. It used to feel like products were built by people who use them and take pride in them, but for a last few years it’s the opposite. Google bought Fitbit and the app started becoming less intuitive and readable. It’s continues enshitification where the goal of products is to capture market and extract profits first, rather than solve user problems. Maybe some products got too big and that causes a disconnect, but if feels like there’s too much of that to explain it this way.
For example all modal windows on iOS have a close button on the right, except the weather app that has a close on the left.
newswangerd · 1790881071 · focus · HN ↗
This is one thing I hate about maintaining any software in the Apple ecosystem. I have to install all these crappy updates so that I can make sure they didn't break my apps.
1. esseph · 1790883958 · focus · HN ↗
  [delayed]
  1. newswangerd · 1790884735 · focus · HN ↗
    Windows takes backwards compatibility very seriously, so I’ve never run into issues with new versions of windows. I haven’t started Linux development yet so I have no idea how that will be. At any rate, MacOS is my daily driver so updating to a buggy version of windows or Linux wouldn’t be as disruptive for me.
  2. DavideNL · 1790916816 · focus · HN ↗
    I bought a Linux laptop about a year ago and installed EndeavourOS (Arch based) with the KDE desktop environment. I expected a "rougher" experience, but it turned out to be more stable than my Macbook Pro Max M1: the exact opposite of what I anticipated.
    My Macbook constantly suffers from window management issues, network related bugs, etc. Also i usually wait about a year or so before doing major macOS upgrades to prevent even more problems.
    (of course I'm not implying Linux is issue-free... your mileage may vary.)
    newswangerd · 1790944742 · focus · HN ↗
    I suspect the bigger issue for Linux will just be the sheer number of distros to contend with. I use Flutter which supports Ubuntu out of the box with snap, but idk how well that is supported for other distros.
    esseph · 1790978725 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
WalterGR · 1790881113 · focus · HN ↗
[delayed]
ngruhn · 1790881424 · focus · HN ↗
Not really macOS 27's fault but I almost got DoS'ed by Spotlight after the update. I had some random repo clone containing a decompression bomb PDF. The macOS update retriggered Spotlight indexing. When it found that file, memory usage went to the moon.
gnachman · 1790882331 · focus · HN ↗
This week I discovered that reloading an outline view leaks the disclosure buttons. The bugs you don’t see are as bad as the ones you do.
Zealotux · 1790889931 · focus · HN ↗
The window manager is driving me CRAZY, whenever I have an app in fullscreen and click on another app (not in fullscreen), it shows me the wrong screen, the preview in Mission Control is glitchy (the fullscreen app appears on top of all other windows). I've tried a restart, reopening all apps, it's just broken on my end. That, and a myriad of other small glitches I'm too lazy to document.
shantara · 1790928638 · focus · HN ↗
The bugs related to switching between virtual desktops have been present since the first developer beta, which is wild given how smooth this feature has been on Mac for as long as I can recall. I've reported them, and yet they've somehow made it into the final release. Unbelievable!

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