Hello Apple.

You know, this website is, among other things, a direct tribute to the Macintosh first quarter of a century existence.  It attracts hundreds of thousands of users and counting.  Both old and young curious users come here to discover, or re-discover, what it was like using a Mac near the year 2000.   There is a reason for this: Dozens of millions of early Mac users fondly remember the Macintosh in its infancy.  This was a time where you, Apple, was innovating like no tomorrow to try and desperately gain market shares, because back in the 90's, you didn't have fancy iPhones, iPads or Apple Watches to sell us to keep your head above the water.  The 90's was an incredible decade for the Macintosh development, both because the Internet began to be a thing in North American homes, but also because Intel and AMD processors entered the Megahertz Wars and you, Apple, proved to the world that your new RISC PowerPC based Macs could outperform those bulky CISC Windows computers that had faster clock rates.  Remember that, Apple? This was when Mac OS X was about to come out.

The thing is, back when Mac OS X came out, I stuck with Mac OS 9.  I never liked OSX because it wasn't Apple-esque at all.  Remember Kaleidoscope that could instantly transform Mac OS 9 with one of over 4000 custom appearances to choose from? Wood grain Finder windows, glass buttons, translucent menus, heck... it even had a couple Mac OS X aqua appearances to choose from if you liked that new OSX look.  Oh and do you remember GoMac that allowed Mac OS 9 to look and feel like Windows 98, complete with a task bar and start menu.  Well, none of those worked under Mac OS X.  OSX came with an Aqua theme and you better liked it because there was nothing else to customize your user experience.  That's about when you, Apple, began to not be Apple anymore. 

Remember in 2006 when you said F it, ditched the PowerPC architecture and switched all the Mac user base to Intel despite all the trash talk you did about Intel for almost a decade? Yeah... Well you know, I was also using an Intel computer back when this happened, but at that point, it wasn't a Mac anymore.  What's the point of using a Mac that has an Intel CPU? No, in 2006, my computer was a 3.4ghz hyper threaded Pentium 4 laptop running Windows XP and let me tell you that this thing was running all the software you could think of.  Sure, it got HOT but it was FAST.  That P4 devil from hell was a great computer both for work and after work! It ran all the games and did it all... that is, until it caught a virus. You see, I wasn't used to malware, having used Macs since 1990. When this happened and I lost all my files, I looked at my iMac G3 that was beginning to gather dust in the corner of the room.  I had it since late 1998 and I remembered how that computer introduced my family to the Internet, did emails, allowed us to look up all the websites on Altavista, ran our first true OpenGL 3D games, etc... and I fell in love with it, again.

I continued to use Windows computers for almost 20 YEARS after that... but always kept my iMac G3 running Mac OS 9.2.2 near my Windows PC.  I even moved several times with my iMac G3, often not bothering and simply ditching the Windows PC and buying a new one after moving, because it felt worthless to me.  But my old Macs, I kept them.  I have them on a shelf and I use them from time to time, just to remember what it was in the time of Mac OS 9, before Mac OS X.  I'm still amazed today by how simple, yet how good it was.

This eventually led me to wonder: What Macintosh computers is Apple making nowadays? Then, in early 2021, somebody told me that they've just bought a brand new MacBook that did not have an Intel processor in it, but it rather had a "M1" CPU.  This sparked my curiosity so I went over to check it out.  Its design was sleek and it was very light.  The OS felt responsive, yet the computer was always cold to the touch and completely silent.  They told me that the battery lasted more than 14 hours on a single charge.  Back in 2021, I couldn't afford switching because of long term projects I was working on that only worked on Windows, but 2 years later, Apple rumours began to emerge that there would most likely be a 25th year anniversary iMac.  This got me very interested (especially after seeing how much of a mess Windows 11 was, I needed something different) so I planned a few thousand dollars budget in case Apple unveiled one by the end of the year... and they did, so I immediately ordered one (and in hindsight, I'm so glad that I ordered the upgraded model, because NOTHING can be upgraded after purchase which, coming from the Windows PC world, was kind of new to me and still feels very unacceptable to this day). But yeah, can you imagine? Coming back to the Macintosh world after almost 20 years... This was exciting!

 

Looking at a modern Mac and using one were two different experiences for me.

Having extensively used and loved Mac OS in the 1990's forged high expectations for me when it comes to UI.  Unfortunately, I quickly found out that 1990's Mac OS and modern macOS have almost nothing in common... and it did not help that I was using Windows over the last 20 years or so.  Year 2024 has got to be the steepest computing learning curve I've had to deal with since 1990 or basically all my life.  I'm not saying modern macOS is entirely bad or that it doesn't have a place, but as you will see, my first year of returning to the Mac after a 20 years hiatus was nothing short of frustrating.

That single instance BS

I'll start with one of the most obvious and confusing issue (to me) that I immediately had to deal with after unboxing my brand new iMac M3: Everything in macOS runs as a single instance.  In Windows, every time you launch an app, it spawns a new instance of that app, so you can run as many of the same app in parallel as you need.  But in macOS, every time you double click an app, it only opens that same, single instance of that app.  Of course, I found out that I can duplicate that .app file, so I can have "FileZilla.app" and "FileZilla 2.app" running at the same time, which more or less suits most of my FTP needs, despite the fact that I need to do that with all my apps... Months later, I stumbled upon a post that explained that you can actually mimic old school "launch as a new instance" behavior by running a command like this using Terminal: open -n /Applications/FileZil

But what about browsing the web in Firefox and having the convenience to "ALT-TAB" between its windows? Nope.  Same issue: all Firefox windows are in the same, single app instance, so you cannot easily bring the previous window to the front.  Of course, I found out that I can remap the "Move focus to next window" keyboard shortcut, which allowed me to more easily bring previous Firefox windows to the front, albeit in a in full circular fashion, which is not that great if I wanted to go back to the previous window, but had 8 of them open.  I would then have to hit the keyboard shortcut 6 times in a row to get to the previous window... not very efficient.

The Finder windows hell

Another thing that annoyed me from day 1 and that I still cannot accept a year later, is how messed up Finder windows are.  I wrote above how everything in macOS runs in a single instance, but so is the Finder.  This means that all folders that you open are all part of the same process.  This leads to incredible UI bugs and annoyances.  One of them is that the Finder is horrendously confused about what size and positions it should open folder windows.  Under 1990's Mac OS, there would never, ever be a time where you would open a folder and that the Finder window would not be perfectly positioned and sized to what it was the last time you closed it.  It was 100% pixel perfect every single time.  Under macOS, it's almost impossible to predict exactly where and how large the folder window will be.  Oh, and every new folder or disk that you open in macOS will gladly open a small, useless window in the center of the screen.  To the best of my knowledge, the default folder window size cannot be configured, so I had to manually adjust every single folder window on all my disks to even be able to see a decent amount of files in them.  Once that was done, I realized another bug: From time to time, the size and position of those folder windows would randomly change.  This happens because the Finder will force any window that is supposed to spawn in a location near where another window is currently being displayed to move elsewhere.  After months of this mess, I have been able to position every one of the folder windows that I use the most often to a slightly different position so that Finder doesn't have the urge to reposition them.

The Finder Disk Utility windows hell

Every time you launch Disk Utility, it will shrink the window vertically by about 58px.  You like it half your screen height? Maximized? Whatever size you make it, the next time you will launch it, Disk Utility will be about 58px shorter vertically.  It also tries to center itself vertically on top of that.  WTF?

The Finder Disk Utility scrolling windows hell

If you've ever used anything else than a Mac, you will know how a maximized window is extremely easy to scroll: Simply click your mouse anywhere on the far right of the screen and then drag up/down.  For those who will tell me that I just have to pet my magic mouse with my index finger to scroll any window, I'll tell you right now: That mouse has been sitting in a drawer since day 2.  On day 1, I gave it a very hard try and I couldn't stand a wireless mouse that you cannot charge while using it.  I now use a standard 3 buttons Windows mouse that cost me 5$ and it works perfectly fine.  It has an USB lead and never runs out of battery.  But I digress.  I know I can scroll by using the scrolling wheel on top of the mouse, but when you want to PRECISELY scroll any container or window to an exact position, rolling that wheel is a frustrating, fiddling trial and error process.  For me, in some occasions, it would be faster and easier to scroll manually by clicking the mouse and dragging.  But see, you cannot do that with a Mac.  FOR SOME REASON there is a 1px gap to right of the scroll bar making it next to IMPOSSIBLE to click and drag to scroll a window.  You have to be 1px away from the edge of the screen for your click to trigger the scroll bar... and no, entering full screen mode does not fix this annoyance.  WTF, Apple?

Quick Look inconsistency

This one has got to be a joke.  You know when you want to quickly preview pictures or PDF files and hit space in a Finder folder then the Quick Look window popups up and you can hit the right arrow to preview the next file? What happens when you hit the left arrow? Of course it doesn't preview the previous file.  It navigates to the parent folder, OF COURSE! No but seriously, WTF Apple? I know the real keys that should be used in the Quick Look window are UP and DOWN keys, not RIGHT and LEFT arrow keys.  But what's the point of making the RIGHT arrow key work if the LEFT arrow key is doing something completely unrelated? And it throws you out of the folder you were sifting through on top of that, so you have ot start over by going in the folder and selecting the file you were at when you accidentally used the LEFT arrow key instead of the UP one.  Genius.

Finder icons inconsistency

Any old school Mac user will tell you just how much they always loved applying custom icons to everything by simply copy/pasting pictures on any file or folder.  It always has been a Mac thing: It's so simple to perform and it looks awesome. It's one of the things that Apple did not take away from users after burying Mac OS 9 in its grave.  Now, a few decades later, in macOS, if your custom icon files and folders are stored on an USB drive (even if it remains connected at all times) then all those cool custom icons will disappear after a restart and will be replaced with a bland, white sheet of paper until you "get info" on each individual file and folder.  Then, they reappear as if nothing happened when you get info on them (click on the file/folder, then in the File menu > Get Info).  This left me confused for days... But wait, it gets even better: This also happens with anything in the dock and whats worse is that custom icons do not always come back after a reboot for app shortcuts accessible through the dock!  I have used this macOS environment for over a year now and I can honestly say that whether the dock is showing the custom icons or not is completely random at a chance rate of 1 in 100 days.  That's right: I only saw those icons 3 or 4 times in a year.  The rest of the year they appeared as a white sheet of paper.  At this point, why bother with custom icons anymore?

 

Lazy engineering?

Sometimes, while using macOS, I can't help but think that engineers lacked the motivation to really extensively test the features before releasing macOS.  The features look like prototypes, almost... and it's not because it's challenging or too hard to come up with something else, since FREEWARE can be downloaded to pick up the slack! Yes, some brilliant programmers came up with FREE software that does better than what you did, Apple.  Isn't that ironic given the price of your products?

Spotlight... needs to be turned off

In November 2023, when I unboxed my iMac M3 and turned off my Windows 10 PC, I was shocked at how SILENT my room became.  Up until somebody made me realize that my specific iMac M3 (apparently) has fans, I did not know and even to this very day, I never, ever heard a single noise coming from my iMac M3.  But about a month in using it, I started noticing new noise that my Windows 10 PC did not produce in over a decade: my external hard disks were making scratching noise almost 75% of the day.  At first, I thought that indexing needed to be done so I left my iMac M3 running all night for a week... but the noises never stopped.  The hard disks were super hot from all that constant reading and a little bit of writing.  Then I read online that Spotlight was probably constantly indexing, re-indexing and then indexing some more... non stop.  The most shocking thing about this is that in Activity Monitor.app, you can see that it constantly reads about 1MB/s from some disk, but it doesn't tell you what process does that.  Given how the top processes are accessing the main SSD a ton, it gets very confusing to determine exactly WHAT is reading your hard disks at this very moment.

Thankfully, there was a solution... and it involved getting rid of Spotlight on all my external hard disks with this command in Terminal: sudo mdutil -a -i off

I tried for months to mitigate the issue so that I could keep Spotlight, such as resetting the indexes, turn it off and then on... but nothing worked. Then I discovered that a freeware app (it's called EasyFind) can search all or any of your hard drives just about as fast as Spotlight, but does not even need any indexing at all.  The only thing that I was stuck with is the muscle memory of typing in the search field in the top/right corner of any Finder window.  This would spawn a non-indexed Spotlight search and would almost freeze the computer given how many terabytes of files I have, so I eventually had to just remove the search field from the Finder windows toolbar to avoid slowing down the Finder to a crawl whenever I forgot that it was useless.  So now I only use EasyFind whenever I need to search for a file, it doesn't take longer than using Spotlight and my room is silent once again due to Spotlight not constantly trying to index all my external hard disks, which I think Spotlight would eventually have broken by indexing so often.  Apple, I sincerely think that you caused millions of dollars of failed hard disks over the last few years due to defective Spotlight indexing.  I think you should learn a trick or two from Mac freeware developers.

Time Machine is always late

This one is so easy to fix. I almost fell off my chair when I discovered it was impossible to set a precise time where Time Machine would do backups.  I have 4 hard disks totalling almost 40TB of files, some of them being redundant rsync backups of other disks.  I don't want Time Machine to back up in the middle of the day while I'm working, yet it's bound to happen some time in the not too distant future.  Why? Because you, Apple, did not think it was important to let the computer owner choose the precise time where Time Machine kicks in.  Instead, you rely on the time of the first backup, which COULD be seen as some sort of janky solution to the issue, but what's worse is that each backup gets slightly shifted in the future by 10 minutes or so! How hard would it be to put a time field in the Time Machine settings? Cronjobs only take 2 parameters: a time and a task! Apple, what the hell?

Printing to PDF is fine until you include links

You know, back in the 90's, you'd make a Microsoft Word document and send it as is.  30 years later, it's all about PDF since you can embed custom fonts and the PDF document will (in theory) always look exactly the same on any device you read it.  One of the things that is great with PDF is that it supports clickable hyperlinks so that your reader can easily go look at a web page.  In 2025, you'd expect this feature to just work flawlessly, but you see, almost every time that I print a nice Word document to PDF using my Mac, most of the https:// links become hMps:// for some inexplicable reason.  At first, I thought that this was a LibreOffice bug, but then I used LibreOffice's own "Export to PDF" function... and it just works.  I can't believe that Apple fails at such a simple task in 2025.  Does anybody at Apple even test functionality before releasing macOS to the consumers?

Sporadic mouse clicks

Who would have thought that such a simple device as a wired mouse could cause issues in 2024? (Because yes, this bug was reported more than a year ago and it's still very much happening in 2025) There have been numerous users complaining about their Mac randomly not registering their mouse clicks on forums.  If it was April 1st, I genuinely would have thought that this was a joke, but I personally experienced this multiple times throughout the beginning of the year 2025.  Everything that users have mentioned fixing it for them did not actually, permanently fix it for me.  Disabling stage manager widgets or disabling displays having their own spaces all are kind of a placebo effect, because at some point, the user rebooted and THIS is what fixed their issue on that day.  For me, I always found the issue coming back after a week or maybe a month and I have yet to find an explanation for it.  It's just weird and maddening to work with unreliable mouse clicks, especially that a 0$ trash PC with an Intel or AMD CPU will never, ever have this kind of strange issue.  Since I'm stuck with this iMac M3, I guess I will just reboot, reboot, reboot and hope that eventually I will get lucky and my mouse clicks will be registered for some amount of days until the issue inevitably comes back.