I am. Many of my old launchd services don’t work anymore. Well they run, the job begins, but then it can’t write to its files. I have no clue how they borked the permissions but something is up. The script works when I run it myself. As far as I can tell the launchd process should run the script as me the user in terms of permissions. It manages to run the script but doesn’t write to file. I am at a loss and gave up on debugging those services for now.
Is this a real bug? I recently got a MacOS device for the first time, and I have been frustrated that I couldn't get my custom service to work. Just like you, the script writes to files when I run it myself, but does nothing as a service.
I've been debugging it on and off for a couple of months because I assumed I messed something up.
It worked fine on mojave, that is how I know it wasn’t my doing. The only variable change is the os. Another bug: sound turns on after I’ve muted it if any media starts playing. Defeating the entire purpose of muting audio. I guess macos knows best and I ought to play any and all audio out of those generous speakers at an appreciable volume no matter my surrounding. God forbid it were the other way and my video plays for a half second on mute before I notice.
My own experience has been the opposite. Early versions of OS/X were dire, things like a kernel panic when removing an already ejected USB stick.
People like to point at Snow Leopard as being the peak of reliability but there are two things to consider about that. The first is that the previous versions were so bad that they had to stop creating new features and do a bug fix only release. The other is that it still needed countless updates through the following year.
If you want an example of something they have done exceptionally well take a look at the rollout of APFS on the iPhone. They replaced the filing system on millions of phones with barely a murmur from the community.
I think you are correct, people like to whinge (especially here).
I don’t have any issues, but I am that person who uses just web browser and terminal on Macbook. Almost all software comes from Nix package repository.
When I bought my first Mac (M2) I could reliably freeze the screenshot app by clicking 2-3 buttons in the right order. It was fixed months later at least.
To this day the mouse hover zoom animation for the dock freezes regularly and it happens on two separate devices. "Coincidentally" this animation was disabled by default. The preinstalled image viewer cannot open more than about 50 images without randomly distributing them across multiple windows and/or spamming a series of error messages telling me that some of the files cannot be accessed. When I click on certain video files in the file open dialog, some thumbnail process allocates over 25GB memory within seconds and the system becomes near unusable for a minute or two.
I would say it’s roughly comparable to Windows 10/11, which fell off a cliff in terms of quality. But to be fair Mac OS can handle much longer uptimes, today my Macbook force rebooted after about 250 days and it ran perfectly fine up to that point.
Not who you responded to but I've been looking now after reading this discussion and here are some things I've come up with in the last minute or so.
- Why when I drag the Safari window up to go full screen with the tiling manager does it leave a large gap around the window? When I double click the top bar it aligns the top and bottom with the edges but still leaves a gap on the sides.
- Why does the settings dialog have so much lag? It takes a couple of seconds to launch and then when navigating around there is a roughly one second lag between panels.
- Why can't I uninstall default Mac apps that I have never opened?
- If I open up task view using F3, why is there no option to exit the window or program?
- If I have a Safari window open in a smaller window and double click the task bar, why does it maximize the way it does? Leaving a large section open.
> - Why when I drag the Safari window up to go full screen with the tiling manager does it leave a large gap around the window? When I double click the top bar it aligns the top and bottom with the edges but still leaves a gap on the sides.
It's a feature. System Settings > Desktop & Dock > Tiled windows have margins.
> - Why does the settings dialog have so much lag? It takes a couple of seconds to launch and then when navigating around there is a roughly one second lag between panels.
Each 'panel' is actually an app extension that runs its own process. Similar to extensions and control panels in classic MacOS.
> - Why can't I uninstall default Mac apps that I have never opened?
This is annoying.
> - If I open up task view using F3, why is there no option to exit the window or program?
> - If I have a Safari window open in a smaller window and double click the task bar, why does it maximize the way it does? Leaving a large section open.
The modern macOS UX is an amalgamation of Classic MacOS and NeXTSTEP, neither of which really has the concept of "maximised" in the same sense as Windows does. The action you describe "zooms" the window to best fit the content. The parallel to "maximised" is full screen.
I see others have responded with specifics. That's cool and all but it seems a bit futile to me because Apple has all this data internally and could act upon it if they wished.
Certainly with "crashers" there are crash reports from the field (you and I) that are sent back home and filtered into various databases. Internal tool allow Apple to see the "top crashers" (and you can filter to specific OS, hardware, etc.). There will be Radars filed for these and they will be sent to the appropriate teams.
The issue of course is the degree to which these take priority over feature work, etc. If Apple decided to do nothing but address these for a year or two we could have nice things again.
Not an exhaustive list but some simple recent examples:
in Messages on macOS across 3 Macs I own, turning on and off the global 'read receipts' setting has no effect, not even from the perspective of iOS. The iOS setting does seem to work though.
Bugs in iOS mail where notifications just freeze the app.
Layout issues in macOS settings.
Memory leaks in WindowServer.
Many iCloud services inconsistent and non-reliable.
Apple Pay not showing correctly in Apple Account settings.
Idk but sometimes slack just takes over the screen and crashes the display drivers pretty regularly. You could put that to badly written software but I don't think display drivers should crash.
I know people like to complain about Apple's software quality - but is this actually an issue - or just the popular thing to say?