Why do you consider a color to be an entirely different model? Storage size would be a better differentiator, but even then it’s just an option.

Do you feel the same way about cars? Have you been this fired up looking at a dealership all these years? So many paint options and wheel choices!

Idk, my phone gets hours of use each day, in my hands. Very personal device. I appreciate the options.

I agree with you about the cpu confusion, but I think most consumers largely act on price and many biased towards the lowest or highest ends every cycle. Largely any modern CPU will be enough for regular users.

As long as stock profit is the only goal then Tim Cook is the correct CEO for Apple. Bribing the president publicly and doing what ever is required to keep the cash flowing in the short term is what share holders want.

They need to fire Craig Federighi first, but of course that is Tim Cook's job, and he showed poor judgment in firing spiky but effective Scott Forstall to keep that hack Jony Ive. Ive is the one who appointed Alan Dye, an advertising designer with no clue about UX and too arrogant to listen to those who did, leading to iOS 7 and now Liquid Ass.

There is no point in complaining, or worse, enduring Stockholm Syndrome, Apple repeatedly demonstrated its contempt for its customers. I've decided to cut my losses after 25 years of using the modern OSX Mac (and 35 years using the Mac), and iOS since the original iPhone, to go back to Linux, and to GrapheneOS, and the migration is largely complete.

> Why is there even a MacBook Pro without a Pro chip?

I like MB Pro with a regular chip: my tasks aren’t hugely parallelisable, the plain chip is plenty fast, but I want the nicer display, sound, and ports, and additional battery life is nice to have.

Apple's hardware lineup has never been stronger. They need a new software guy, and it looks like they've recently gotten one.

This reminds me of when Steve Balmer became the CEO of Microsoft.

He sold Windows in so many versions that even a developer like me had no idea of what the difference was between them. I could not figure out from the packaging which version I needed.

Guess I’m not in a position in telling Apple how to structure their product offering and choice isn’t a bad thing IMHO.

But I’d highly encourage you to have a look into which Apple pencil is compatible to which iPad.

Choice, yes, a mess - no.

I would expect the M4 options to be cheaper than their M5 counterparts. Given how expensive Apple products are, I appreciate them offering both options at the same time. Just because it doesn't make sense to you doesn't mean it doesn't make sense for anyone; you're obviously in the miniscule [nit-picking] minority since Apple will have done enough market research to offer the options that they do offer.

what are you people talking about? Cook is the best thing that happened to apple. Look at their sales. They are killing the laptop market - likely a complete dominance in the next years. same with the iphone - first year to be the biggest phone seller in a long time.

the switch to ARM and their M silicon was one of the best moves in computing in years.

I find this comment baffling. Apple needs a new CEO because their products come in lots of colors? And they have (gasps) two series of laptop chips?

I'd hardly call a different colour an extra mnodel

The lowest hanging fruit is to clear caches from whatever package manager you're using.

I highly recommend Daisy Disk[0], which shows a folder level breakdown of your disk space usage. Hyperspace[1] is pretty nice as well. It works well if you have a lot of duplicate files. It uses APFS clones to reclaim the disk space.

0: https://daisydiskapp.com

1: http://hypercritical.co/2025/02/25/hyperspace

I am pretty sure its this

/System/Volumes/Data/Users/<your_user>/Library/Containers/com.apple.Safari/Data/Library/Caches/CloudKit/

I need to `rm` it at least once a month, I ran `du -sh` and it takes 153gb on my machine

https://github.com/tw93/Mole

I have the exact same problem. plus, I have usually surprised system processes eating up CPU like ‘suggestd’ and it’s hard to get information about what it does. I guess one could find out by reverse engineering, but that’s not the point. they could easily make it transparent and documented and the feeling of my own computer being a black box is constantly pissing me off. I regret all my investment in the Apple ecosystem and I wish I hadn’t locked me in as much.

Often lots of this "system data" is in ~/Library/Caches:

  du -hs ~/Library/Caches/*

Yes!

You can go to the folder ~/Library and then delete what you want.

To open the folder from a terminal: cd ~/Library open .

In the Finder, you can enable "Calculate all sizes" from "View options," which will calculate folder sizes to understand what to clean first.

This folder contains data from all apps; sometimes it is cache, sometimes persistent data. You will find all your previous apps taking gigabytes...

Everytime I upload a package with altool, it makes a copy of the package somewhere in /var/folders. Luckily rebooting the computer cleans this up so it's not the issue you are running into, but if I'm not careful about rebooting the systems, our CI/CD stops working until I get physical access to the machines for a reboot.

You can use tools like CleanMyMac to show folders and their sizes. All cache and library files are counted under System, e.g. files from vagrant, docker, vms, old jetbrains IDEs, caches from rarely used/uninstalled apps etc.

You don‘t need to buy the full version, you can just use the info and delete it manually in Finder.

Download and open OmniDiskSweeper. THEN (important) go to Settings/Preferences > Privacy & Security > Full Disk Access, and enable it for OmniDiskSweeper. Then reopen OmniDiskSweeper and it should reveal the missing data.

Dot folders contribute to the „System Data” section. Maven/Gradle caches can take a lot of space. Take a look at your home folder first and press CMD + SHIFT + . to reveal hidden folders. You might not need 3rd party software.

I was wondering what was up with my macbook and then Chrome popped something up saying I had something like 200gb of web storage that random websites had put on my machine.

Backing up the device and restoring should clean it. Also there is some "folk remedy" of setting the system clock in the future then force restarting the device.

The cleanmymac app let me do it, using the trial period. In my case it was due leftovers from music production software and an overblown docker image though, so YMMV.

Do you happen to be using Rosetta? The aot cache of that slowly fills up and its not easy to clean up. I remember i had to google some magic command to do it

Are you Java developer? For example Gradle tends to download half of the Internet and the store it etc

> macOS is still the best OS I'd want to use IMO

Linux has low-key become a very valid choice for a desktop OS. You can thank a lot of people for that.

Apple and Microsoft for sandbagging.

NixOS for pioneering the immutable Linux concept.

Valve for heavily investing into making games run well.

GitHub for inventing Electron, the eater of RAM and the great equalizer of UX.

Lots and lots of Linux and distro maintainers and contributors, achieving the opposite of the death of a thousand cuts.

There are some still unsolved problems, like power management and device drivers, but I feel like we're over the hump. There's a critical mass of regular people using Linux as their primary desktop OS on modern hardware, so trying to make Linux work on a 2025 laptop no longer feels like empty struggle.

Steve Jobs was a founder of the company. He expected to remain CEO for many years (until his illness). I do not know whether he still have a large stake but its likely he did, and he certainly formed his approach when he did.

That motivated him to look at the long term as he expected to benefit from increases in the value of the business over the long term.

A regular CEO looks more at the short term. The value when the next options vest or the next bonus or whatever.

I believe you never worked with Steve Jobs. This is not my memory of working with him.

I agree, Tim Cook is a businessman, Steve was someone who constantly put himself in the customers shoes. Apple needs a visionary like that, a dictator to demand a specific user engagement, and a design team able to carry it out. IMHO Tim Cook has never filled this role, and needs to step aside.

It is the first time I am trying to skip a macos version. I really hope in macos27 they will fix things. I used to skip every second windows version, so back here we are.

I feel like this is leaking into macOS Sequoia updates as well. Disk space just keeps getting eaten up quickly and I’m scrambling to clear up some space on a MacBook Pro with a large disk and lots of RAM. I know I should reduce user data (like the documents, photos and videos I’ve stored), but something doesn’t seem right in how more and more disk space keeps getting used.

Curiously, since the last update I have the problem where Safari tabs go completely white after a while. Refreshing doesn‘t help. I have to copy the URL and paste it into a fresh tab.

The worst part is it can’t even show the attachments sorted by size so that one can browse and delete some large ones. Same with the Photos app on iOS. Can’t sort photos and videos by size from within the app.

What’s the point of using application databases if the application cannot even query items by size and other attributes?!

> I've seen one of these posts for every single one of the ~15 years I've been using apple products

Yes, one. On Tahoe there’s thirty. The scale of complaints is definitely higher this time around.

Yes, it's like in that joke about not having to run faster than the bear.

As long as their competition is what it is, they don't have to put much effort in.

Talk about lock-in and enshittification.

Apple laid off everyone in their #a11y and user experience team back in... was it 96? It hasn't been the same company since.

Agree, been using Apple on-off for decades, seems to get worse every time.

> try to do my own manual photo backups

As a Linux desktop user but Apple phone user, I do the same thing, so I can save the photos to my NAS, using ipairdevice/libimobiledevice/ifuse et al. to do it. Best part? Apple still spams me that my photos aren't backed up, because I'm not using iCloud. Is there a way of disabling that? Nope, they'll forever bother me about this, thanks.

> It really does seem like nobody at Apple is actually using any of the software they're releasing. Its just such shoddy quality control!

I think this is the crux, there are no humans with brains doing QA anymore. Since I got my iPhone 12 Mini, up until yesterday when I last used it, CarPlay still feels like it's worth risking my life every time someone calls me while I use the navigation. Not a single person could have tried this at Apple, because who would think it's a great idea showing a large avatar across the screen, over the navigation, as soon as someone calls? Absolutely bananas the direction Apple went as soon as Jobs disappeared, shame really.

I'm in the same position - holding out for a year in the hope that things change direction.

I've been in the apple ecosystem for 20 years at this point, because the ecosystem delivered real value for me. But that value has declined sharply - hardware is still good, but software quality has cratered while the drive for services revenue has become so relentless that I've now got one foot out the door.

I switched after Apple dicked me on the G5 iMac about 20 years ago and haven't looked back. To be fair... all OSes have their plusses and minuses. Immediately after switching to FreeBSD as my daily driver (and then to Leenucks) I was very happy because the things that annoyed me about Apple products weren't problems in the PC world. But over time I noticed other irritants that definitely never came up with iProducts. FreeBSD and Linux give me more control over my daily experience, but at the cost of way more time debugging and administration.

Your plan seems like a good one, but remember, your mileage may always vary.

And there are days I keep thinking I want to go back to my Commodore 64. It didn't really do much, but at least it didn't bug me every 15 minutes to upgrade.

Same, wrt iOS26. Hoping iOS27 ditches the glass crap.

Otherwise, I guess I'll be buying an Android.

Just finished my switch. Dumped my iPhone + Macbook Pro + iPad Pro + Apple Watch + Airpods setup for a Framework 13 + GrapheneOS Pixel 10 Pro + Seiko watch and wired earbuds.

I run NixOS, it's incredibly easy to do anything I want by just pointing Claude at my dotfiles and telling it "I want this", applying, and then reverting if I don't like the results.

The switch came more from a realisation that Apple devices are becoming media/slop consumption devices, rather than devices that run my workflows for me.

> Apple has not forced me

Not for lack of trying. Heard the wife scream that they updated her to 26 2 days ago. And she had been warned. Not by me, she may not trust the conservative geek, but by our daughter who is cursing at iOS 26 right and left.

So far I've managed to protect all my iOS and MacOS devices, but who knows what they sneak in next...

By the way, ages ago I had to pull over on a road and wait for an iOS upgrade because Apple deemed to display the "upgrade now" dialogue over my navigation app and of course i touched the screen in the wrong place to get rid of it because i was driving.

Windows would have forced you to update a 2023 machine? Really?

DaisyDisk - the version you download from them, not the one from the app store which has to be sandboxed - helps with purging that crap.

But then you have to buy an extra app to fix Apple's mess.

Personally I don't mind because I use it to clear my personal crap and it's made its money back countless times already, but to get it just for the purge...

Yes, move to android.

My iPhone has so little free space (thanks to the ever increasing “system data”) that it can’t update to iOS 26. Point updates for iOS 18 are usually much smaller and can still be installed.

I can’t believe I’m suggesting this, but… you could install a bunch of apps to get your phone storage to <10GB free, which should block it being able to update to iOS 26.

i switched to the ios 18 public beta channel, which currently has no beta available to dl and that stopped the damn update annoyances

Oh, I had the same (?) issue! Restarting the app fixed it temporarily. Closing (copying to a text file) all tab groups fixed it completely. Until I accumulated them again.

How did you do this? I once tried and it seemed impossible.

As someone who witnessed a lot of the quality decline at Apple from the inside, hiring more people is decidedly not the answer. All that does is encourages management to engage in more churn, which is the source of these sorts of bugs.

The answer, unfortunately, is that features need to be sunsetted/removed, the engineering org shrunk, and for a smaller group to concentrate on a reliable product core.

I'm really surprised they don't attempt to make the Mac a more work-focused machine.

Try building a graphics editor in SwiftUI. This is not really possible in 2026 in SwiftUI. I build a zoomable pannable page setup was incredibly difficult but possible.

Then try adding WYSIWG text editing to that. I got halfway to building one using CoreText to render to Canvas which works but then there's this fight with their NSAttributedString which is opaque and horrible, making it impossible to store CMYK colours alongside the text runs. There's also no way to capture iPad keyboard input in SwiftUI.

In the end, I have to build things that fit within platform constraints if I want to use SwiftUI.

The fact that e.g. Canva and Figma bypass almost all their APIs and draw to canvas should be a wake-up call for them.

Also PDF generation is painful enough that I'm considering a Java based web-service for document export on macOS.

I think it's an extremely recurring theme.

User: I will be so happy if Foo doesn't keep changing its UI and focuses on fixing bugs for a few versions

Foo's devs: Keep changing its UI and adding more bugs

You can remove Apple Intelligence offline models. Assuming you already have Apple Intelligence disabled:

Enable Siri, change Siri's language to Chinese, wait an hour, disable Siri again.

At least, it worked for me yesterday.

I think it’s possible to turn it off completely. Or have they ripped that out in Tahoe?

Try opening the share menu on your phone, then opening the full airdrop menu, and airdropping to your laptop. Works for me when airdropping directly to my laptop in the share menu does not.

It's so funny watching the proprietary OS folks despair as their software falls to pieces to make shareholders richer, meanwhile my Linux distro has "just worked" since 2007. You don't have to keep running on this treadmill, folks.

GrandPerspective is pretty good too (very similar).

If you think what's happening at Apple now is because of a single individual, you're wildly out of touch, it's an organization issue, pervasive in everything they put out today. Lack of proper QA I'd say is the reason.

Ironically, Google is the safer bet and this might have been a correct decision from Tim Apple.

AI is changing at a rapid pace ( still ) and OpenAI is no longer the only game in town at the top, plus their finances are.. something we’ll hear about the next year and Sam Altman is an incredible unscrupulous person with past actions and decisions catching up to him. Not exactly the situation you want to partner with.

At this point you don’t need your AI on Apple devices to be revolutionary, it needs to work and be better than the current situation which is not difficult.

Gemini 3 is quite good for the general public, Google has the money to keep playing the AÍ games and also played ball with Apple, OpenAI only has 1 or 2 of those going for them.

> Apple is absolutely trying to make your experience of an older iProduct craptastic. But... so is everyone else in the industry. It's just that Apple, who once made very decent products, had much higher from which to fall.

My personal laptop is a 7 year old Dell G5 running Linux Mint.

My experience using that on a daily basis is actually pretty decent. Very smooth sailing. It is good enough that I keep postponing my decision to get a new machine.

So, no. This is an Apple problem, not "everyone else in the industry".