Michael Tsai

Mac: "The Power to Be Your Best" (ed. Apple's slogan at the time) Anti-Mac: “You won't always have to work that hard” AI (Apple Intelligence) is the Anti-Mac: https://mjtsai.com/blog/2024/11/12/misguided-apple-intelligence-ads/ “It’s really quite a different message than a bicycle for the mind.”

Your right! I found this[1] which says it was $10 at launch. So you paid $10 and helped support indie developers launch what, in time, evolved into an almost universally beloved app. That should feel pretty good. Your tiny investment helped create something great! [1] https://mjtsai.com/blog/2010/04/13/netnewswire-for-ipad/

Market consolidation generally being bad for consumers and workers is not a hot take at all. Maybe you should reconsider your holier-than-thou attitude. https://lowendbox.com/blog/two-weeks-after-killing-the-linode-brand-ak… https://mjtsai.com/blog/2023/03/03/linode-price-increases/ https://www.linode.com/community/questions/23898/new-price-increase-is…

Michael Tsai does a great job of rounding up the general sentiment in the Apple developer world. It’s worth checking out his two posts here: WWDC 2025 Wish Lists: https://mjtsai.com/blog/2025/06/06/wwdc-2025-wish-lists/ WWDC 2025 Preview: https://mjtsai.com/blog/2025/06/07/wwdc-2025-preview/

I really appreciate your comment, I'm hoping I am wrong about my experiences! But, this is the issue I believe: https://mjtsai.com/blog/2023/09/15/limitations-on-macos-virtual-machin… (or, the original is here: https://eclecticlight.co/2023/12/26/when-macos-wont-work-with-the-app-… You cannot login using AppleID. If you can't do that, aren't you prevented from basically doing any kind of stapling and/or retrieving certificates for signing? I would LOVE to be wrong about this. You've done that?

> Incorrect. I already gave a link showing that Dash returned to the iOS App Store: https://mjtsai.com/blog/2017/05/30/dash-for-ios-returns-to-t... It never did. Please read links before posting them. The original developer open sourced it under a GPL license and a few people decided to re-package it and resell it, in violation of the source code's license. > Also incorrect. Compare the timestamps of these tweets: I stand corrected on that. > It's also worth noting that selling directly outside the Mac App Store still requires an Apple developer account in order to sign with a Developer ID certificate and notarize the app. Indeed.

> Mac just works I don't think Macs can claim that anymore, if they ever could: https://mjtsai.com/blog/2022/12/27/ventura-issues/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34155875 I get that it was a great bit of marketing, and it's become a fossilized idea in many people's heads, but I've never had the kind of bizarre failures in Linux that the article and the comments talk about regarding modern macOS. > and apps look gorgeous. This is a matter of taste. I dislike the Mac UI and the fact Macs only have one UI is one dealbreaker out of many.

> anyone at this point advocating for any other phone/os/service out there besides apple is really going out of their way to swim up river. Did Apple ever implement the ability to run software without first phoning home and asking for permission? The last time I checked they had not followed through on their promise to do so. https://www.howtogeek.com/701176/does-apple-track-every-mac-app-you-ru… https://mjtsai.com/blog/2022/06/16/apple-reneged-on-ocsp-privacy/

Apple blesses a converged Mac/iOS approach, which in practice means you basically throw away a lot of what made the Mac excellent. Not that Apple is even following their own guidelines... https://mjtsai.com/blog/2022/06/08/system-settings/ The incoherent design, weirdly bipolar automation efforts, letting the command line rot, and a new-feature focus on lock-in are making the platform increasingly something I just don't care about anymore. Not to mention every time I get another Buy Apple Music! nudge or deal with their bratty "not now" dismissal of the fucking credit card offer makes me actively dislike Apple a bit more. I'm clearly not the customer Apple wants, and all good things come to an end. It just saddens me a bit - I've been using Macs for over 30 years now. Watching them become more annoying and arrogant than IBM sucks.

I really don't recommend doing that with Apple Mail. I did, many years ago, and ended up losing quite a few emails due to Apple Mail bugs; I did it again a few years later and ended up with weird corruption of email headers (wrong "received" dates). That was way before the Catalina Apple Mail data loss bugs. https://mjtsai.com/blog/2019/10/11/mail-data-loss-in-macos-10-15/ Any sysadmin will tell you Apple Mail has had occasional weird dogshit bugs for a decade. Use Thunderbird, it's more likely to be robust and not corrupt your emails, then feel free to switch back to Apple Mail once you've moved everything.

I agree with the sentiment that macOS UI is on a severe decline. Here’s one bit of possible comfort for you. Get the proxy icon back without having to hover over window titles: defaults write -g NSToolbarTitleViewRolloverDelay -float 0 https://mjtsai.com/blog/2020/10/05/big-surs-hidden-document-proxy-icon…

Ouch. Changed from https://mjtsai.com/blog/2021/07/30/safari-extension-rejected-because-d… now. Thanks! Submitters - please follow the site guidelines: "Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Xcode 11 Release Notes (https://developer.apple.com/documentation/xcode-release-notes/xcode-11… "Scripting language runtimes such as Python, Ruby, and Perl are included in macOS for compatibility with legacy software. In future versions of macOS, scripting language runtimes won’t be available by default, and may require you to install an additional package. If your software depends on scripting languages, it’s recommended that you bundle the runtime within the app. (49764202)" Found via https://mjtsai.com/blog/2019/06/04/scripting-languages-to-be-removed/

I think it is the wrong trade off. >I’d still prefer a smaller trackpad to avoid accidental input. And it looks like the edges and indentation in front of the trackpad remain sharp, as if you aren’t supposed to put your hands near there [1] . You are trading absolute best for some people at the expense or annoyance for some people. The older trackpad isn't small either. Which is exactly the same thing with TouchBar and Keyboard. Some loves the butterfly keyboard, but they dont hate the old scissors keyboard. There are lots of people who hated the butterfly. [1] https://mjtsai.com/blog/2019/11/14/the-16-inch-macbook-pro/

Looks great. I'm currently using Canary mail because the Apple mail data loss bug still isn't fixed after almost a year! Canary mail doesn't feel as polished as Apple mail so I'm happy to see a potential replacement. https://mjtsai.com/blog/2019/10/11/mail-data-loss-in-macos-10-15/

Apple's policies permit charging $360/year for that email client, so they do, and that's actually cheaper than many small iOS utilities and games. Since you can cancel any time it is presented as your fault if a small utility, recently worth maybe a buck or two, quietly charges you hundreds of dollars. https://mjtsai.com/blog/2019/07/12/predatory-ios-app-subscriptions/

It's to control business & brand risk. I believe this explains all downstream choices: how devices are designed and how easy they are to repair, whether they supply repair groups with adequate info, parts availability, etc. Remember engineers love anything that loosens constraints. Making things easy to repair is a pretty challenging constraint to juggle with all the other constraints like manufacturability, chassis design, thermals, etc. They say they don't make profit on repairs. I've no particular reason to not believe this. They could design products to be easier to repair and thus cost less to repair, but the fundamental rationale always points back to controlling brand risk, because a drop in customer satisfaction by even 1% is worth billions. https://mjtsai.com/blog/2019/11/20/are-apple-repairs-profitable/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23422661

Steven Sinofsky thread here: https://twitter.com/stevesi/status/1005848814048047105 Some other good ones tracked by Michael Tsai: https://mjtsai.com/blog/2018/06/10/on-my-misalignment-with-apples-love…

This matches everything I've read from Mac developers – the App Store would be a great idea except for the arbitrary impediments to having a viable business. Michael Tsai had a good roundup of just how widespread that trend's becoming and how it's driven by only a few issues like the inability to do paid upgrades and the slow review process: http://mjtsai.com/blog/2015/12/01/sketch-leaving-the-mac-app-store/ I really wish the Mac App Store was more like Yum/APT where you have a single update mechanism with baked-in mandatory security but otherwise leave publishing up to the actual developers. If Apple wants to have a curated store with reviews, etc. that's fine but it's just not viable as the only option for every class of application.

You're right, there aren't enough great engineers out there. I'm just wondering if the direction of the company is an impediment to hiring the best. Check out the reviews of Pages 5, which has been dumbed down. If the vision and future for OS X is to turn it into a Fisher Price OS for the masses, I can see why a great engineer would prefer to work elsewhere and tackle bigger challenges. http://mjtsai.com/blog/2013/10/23/iwork-13-a-huge-regression/ http://www.betalogue.com/2013/10/24/pages-5-disaster/

> This is more than just a revenue calculation Everything is a revenue calculation > that has massive engineering implications for an ecosystem as vast as Apple’s. That is Apple's problems. All Eu says is "do not deliberatly hamper competition and don't install artificial barriers to differentiate your products". Apple has had no issues complying with every single request from any government. > Simple features like Live Translation or iPhone Mirroring become 10x more complex to build when you need to test and support other vendor devices. You don't have to test and support them on vendor devices. You either provide an API, or let "vendor devices" implement the same features. This has never been such big of an issue. > In fact some features become downright impossible if you require interoperability. Then those features are either not needed, or it's Apple's own fault (e.g. for preventing others from building the same feature set). It's insane to me that Hacker News, of all places, would argue that walled gardens are good, actually. Ponder this article, for example: "Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones" https://ericmigi.com/blog/apple-restricts-pebble-from-being-awesome-wi… > This is about slowing down the pace of development and adding engineering complexity to everything worldwide The only ones insisting and making it so are Apple. A great example is this: https://mjtsai.com/blog/2025/03/14/dma-compliance-default-maps-app-in-… Apple…

> Often I’ll just open the files in IDEA to have sane hotkeys, my plugins, multiple cursors, and the list goes on and on and on. "Sane hotkeys" and "my plugins" are subjective (and suggest that you probably don't use Xcode as your primary editor). And Xcode has had multiple cursors since Xcode 10 in 2018 https://mjtsai.com/blog/2018/04/29/multiple-cursors-in-xcode/ The reason AppCode died is that Apple platform engineers on the whole are very happy with Xcode. Source: I worked as an Apple platforms engineer for a decade across many teams and the person who complained about Xcode the most was always me, and overall I also think it was usually pretty good, arguably great. That is until they added Swift, which always had performance and stability issues (many of the complaints in this thread are fair for Swift support in Xcode). It still worked quite well for me for the C family of languages though (I haven't used Xcode seriously in a couple of years now). If your going to give your opinion on Xcode, it's a good idea to give a count for years that you've worked in the program. For an IDE I personally wouldn't bother with anyone's opinion that hasn't put at least 1000 hours in the program, and a lot of the comments in this thread sound like people who just opened the program for a one-off task and formed their opinion based on that. My colleagues for years have been people who live in Xcode, eight hours a day, five days a week, and I've never heard opinions like this thread…

I will echo what others have said here - Apple have failed on the original goals of Swift. - It is no longer simple, Swift 4 onwards have been piling the complexity higher than I previously thought possible. I would never recommend it as a language to teach. I would have with Swift 3, but 4 to now - absolutely not - too complex. - It was never open, but the language features dropped on the community to support SwiftUI cemented the fact that outside contributors are not treated with any respect. Worth reading - this is from the guy who created the language! https://mjtsai.com/blog/2022/02/22/why-latter-left-the-swift-core-team - Swift on the server is dead. Swift on other platforms has dreadfully poor support. It would and should be rejected for anything outside of iOS apps. Kotlin or Rust are much much better choices that live in the same space that Swift projects would be considered for.

> That very much was the end of the developer's sales of the Dash app on the Mac App Store and the iOS App Store. Incorrect. I already gave a link showing that Dash returned to the iOS App Store: https://mjtsai.com/blog/2017/05/30/dash-for-ios-returns-to-the-app-sto… Technically, it was the end of "sales" in the iOS App Store, because the developer had already open-sourced Dash for iOS and made it free: https://github.com/Kapeli/Dash-iOS Nonetheless, it's indisputable that Apple approved Dash to be in the iOS App Store in 2017. > Apple decided to respond publicly only after he published the recording of the phone call with the Apple rep. Also incorrect. Compare the timestamps of these tweets: https://twitter.com/theloop/status/785600832335073280 5:00 PM · Oct 10, 2016 https://twitter.com/kapeli/status/785621704081022976 6:23 PM · Oct 10, 2016 It's also worth noting that selling directly outside the Mac App Store still requires an Apple developer account in order to sign with a Developer ID certificate and notarize the app. It's not surprising, though, that the developer chooses to no longer use the Mac App Store. Again, Michael Tsai's blog post has extensive coverage, including a link to the Daring Fireball post that you linked.

Not the OP, but these days I find new things (mostly blogs) through four different mechanisms: 1 - Hacker News - If there's an interesting article linked, then I'll consider adding the site to my feed (using feedbin since the great Google Reader apocalypse). 2 - Blog referrals - Sometimes existing feed items will link to other articles sites (sourced from, similar problem, etc) and I'll sometimes add those sites. 3 - Search Results / Organic - If I'm investigating a particular problem/issue/topic and find a good blog, then I'll add it to my feed. 4 - Topic Specific Aggregators - in some cases there are people that produce topic specific post summaries (such as the .Net Morning Brew https://blog.cwa.me.uk/ or Michael Tsai https://mjtsai.com/blog/ ) that link articles - again, if the articles are good, or I notice I've visited the site before, I'll sometimes add it to my feed list. Just checking my OPML, I have around 600 sites (more than a few are likely no longer posting) in my current reader - accumulated over the last 20 years or so - that I've found specifically interesting (mostly professionally, and a few hobby based ones as well). I still get around 60 or so new items per day, and probably skim 20, read 10 in detail, and mark the rest as read. Like the linked article discusses here, it's no longer possible to easily get a feed from major social media sources - which limits the usefulness of RSS from a purely social perspective (but I've never tried to use it that…

If you want more reliable backups, Backblaze personal backup should never be on your list. The client takes anywhere between 1-8 hours to upload the index of files to the server after uploading the actual data for the backup, but it will say that the backup is complete before this happens and give a false assurance. So if your machine dies in that span (data uploaded but index not uploaded), then it’s as good as the backup not happening because the server has data blobs but no metadata, and cannot provide you a way to restore that. This is an intentionally designed behavior (for some other reasons) that adds risks that I belief nobody should take. See this blog post and comment from nearly four years ago for a better description. [1] And here’s Backblaze’s support page on the same, last updated a month ago (June 2021) indicating that this behavior remains. [2] Any backup solution that doesn’t, at a minimum, follow the 3-2-1 rule will cause more instances of regret in the future. If the data is of value, it needs better and constant care. [1]: https://mjtsai.com/blog/2014/05/22/what-backblaze-doesnt-back-up/#what… [2]: https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/217665498-Why-hasn-t-Back…

One example I saw cited recently is the Web browser itself. This is according to one of the original iPhone developers at Apple: > Apple’s iOS rules would not have allowed for the invention of the web browser. Let that sink in. They would have rejected one of the most important technical innovations in the history of computing. Microsoft‘s bully tactic of making IE free seems quaint in comparison. > But here’s the kicker: think of all the other amazing ideas that haven’t gotten a chance to be invented because they aren’t allowed on mobile devices. Mosaic happened less than 10 years after the Macintosh. We very well might have already had a browser-caliber invention by now. > Just for people asking: the flagrant violations of AppStore policy that web browsers would be rejected for in this hypothetical are: > 1) Running outside code > 2) Allowing payments that circumvent Apple’s IAP > 3) Allowing access to NSFW content Source: https://twitter.com/tolmasky/status/1297199788316692480 More commentary: https://mjtsai.com/blog/2020/08/25/potential/ It’s hard to give specific examples about innovation that hasn’t happened, if only because not everyone is sufficiently innovative to come up with truly groundbreaking ideas. I doubt any of the original Mosaic developers had any idea just how important their original innovation would become.

(First off, as a disclaimer, I no longer work for Dropbox, I don't speak on their behalf. I've only used the feature as a user.) I don't know a common search/find system that open()s or read()s files during the search by default. AFAIK Spotlight and Windows search are indexed searches. As for the indexing operations, I don't know how that is handled, they could disable indexing for remote files, or they could somehow integrate with indexing. Based on my testing of a pre-released version of the feature (it isn't released yet), if you were to do something like `find ~/Dropbox -type f -exec md5 {} +`, it would download files. As a user it did exactly what I expected. I was truly amazed. It was totally seamless and amazing. Compared to the complexity of what has already been implemented, solving the problem of "I want to recursively open/read every file in my Dropbox, but I don't want it to download terabytes of data and fill by hard drive" seems fairly simple. For example there could be a setting for the maximum about of space Dropbox will use up, e.g., 40 GB, plus Dropbox could be smart enough to detect disk usage. If you `grep -R` it may download/open/read the files, once you reach 40 GB or near your disk capacity, Dropbox could start removing local copies of files that are not pinned to be local, i.e., remove the files that were downloaded because of the open()/read(), not the files you explicitly told it to keep local. I don't know how the team will choose to implement…

Apple has completely lost the goodwill of Mac developers. The one and only reason the ones that haven't gone bankrupt are still staying is because they have no other choice due to platform lock-in. Every single conversation that I've had with indies recently have gone along the same lines: Apple is killing the indie scene. I wrote about the MAS exodus [1] more than a year ago and people were skeptical back then. Think again - here's a list of great apps [3] that are only available outside the MAS. Those are not just small time hobbyist apps - those are professional tools. Pieter (founder of Bohemian, company behind Sketch) listed many problems with the MAS at a recent conference [5]. Wil Shipley (well-known within the community) has also written about it [6]. And now you have another flagship OS X app ditching the MAS due to the multitude problems it creates. The message is loud and clear - if you're a real software business, not a hobbyist at home, don't waste your time with the MAS - it simply does not allow you to run your busienss properly. When the companies building the flagship apps for the platform publicly state they cannot do business due to the restrictions of the Mac App Store and then abandon the dysfunctional virtual marketplace, then you know Apple have pushed them beyond the edge. No company would just decide to leave the MAS unless the situation is hurting them significantly and holding them back. And unfortunately, there are almost no words to describe…

No, it is readable when it is on company servers. http://images.apple.com/privacy/docs/legal-process-guidelines-us.pdf "iCloud is Apple’s cloud service that allows users to access their music, photos, documents, and more from all their devices. iCloud also enables subscribers to back up their iOS devices to iCloud. With the iCloud service, subscribers can set up an iCloud.com email account. iCloud email domains can be @icloud.com, @me.com and @mac.com. iCloud data is encrypted 3wherever an iCloud server is located. When third-party vendors are used to store data, Apple never gives them the keys. Apple retains the encryption keys in its U.S. data centers. The following information may be available from iCloud..." "...i. Subscriber Information ... name, physical address, email address, and telephone number ... iCloud subscriber information and connection logs with IP addresses ... Mail Logs ... Email Content ... Other iCloud Content. Photo Stream, Docs, Contacts, Calendars, Bookmarks, iOS Device Backups ... photos, documents, contacts, calendars, bookmarks ... photos and videos in the users’ camera roll, device settings, app data, iMessage, SMS, and MMS messages and voicemail. iCloud content may be provided in response to a search warrant issued upon a showing of probable cause." It is only data stored directly on devices that Apple claims it can no longer give access for. Note that a lot of data gets synced without user knowledge including working drafts of documents:…