[aylmao]

I grew up with this animation so I didn't consider it annoying until I bought a new Macbook a couple years ago.

I noticed sometimes I would press keyboard shortcuts before my system's focus had switched. Just little stumbles here and there, some inoffensive, some annoying, but who knows maybe I didn't catch enough sleep.

Over time it happened often enough that I decided to google it, and it turns out my muscle memory wasn't failing me; the animation speed did change ever so slightly and was slower in new Macs with 120Hz displays [1][2] (newer MacBooks, 2021+). If you switch your screen to 60Hz it goes back to the faster animation.

Why is this animation slower now, and why does it depend on screen refresh rate? I have some technical theories but can't think of an organizational reason it happened and hasn't been fixed 5 years later at a 3.82 trillion market cap company. If you Google it there's plenty of discussions online about this. It's noticeable and annoying to people who have used the feature often enough.

[1]: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/256124324?sortBy=rank

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNBWt4NvqHg

[veber-alex]

This is such an insane bug to still have around all these years.

Are apple engineers not using macOS?

[PaulHoule]

I think Apple's self-image of being the epitome of design actually acts against them. Leads to monstrosities like Liquid Glass kinda vandalizing random parts of the UI in small ways that I intuitively read as "they are anti-anti-aliasing" not "they added cool refraction effects." It used to be you'd see something in a well-chosen color, now it is just a muddy kind of greyish brownish whatever.

I'd like to see them make some costly signalling to indicate that they are going to turn it around like maybe buy two Superbowl ads in a row and let the CEO make a personal apology.

Isn't going to happen because the competition is Microsoft and Intel and Dell who won't hold them accountable and it is just too easy to turn reject iPhone chips into netbooks in 2026.

[godelski]

  > I think Apple's self-image of being the epitome of design actually acts against them. Leads to monstrosities like Liquid Glass kinda vandalizing random parts of the UI

I'm pretty confident many Apple employees have eyes, and thus are aware of how absurd Liquid Glass is (wtf, my iPhone capitalizes that but not a standalone i?!?!)

So assuming everyone at Apple isn't deaf (it's all over public discourse), blind (it looks bad), and dumb (no genius needed), then how does it get through? I can only see a few scenarios, none of which are good.

Maybe Apple engineers are afraid to push back on management?

Maybe management isn't receptive to their employees who voiced concerns?

Maybe key decision makers have pushed themselves into an echo chamber where it's difficult to hear concerns.

One of these has to be true, or some combination. But none of these are good, they are incredibly destructive to companies. Though also unfortunately common across monopolies. Iron Law of Bureaucracy hard at work...

I often think of that scene in Pantheon where they basically say they don't know what to do after Steve died. You can only laptops so small... and they're so small that anyone that puts on lotion is going to have an imprint of their keyboard on their screens... Steve wouldn't have accepted that

[mort96]

It gets through because Cook has no eye for design or usability (he's a supply chain guy) and Alan Dye, who Cook put in charge of software design, wanted it that way. I'm sure there are designers who hated it, but they don't have the final say.

[aylmao]

Apple is hurt by being so centralized Cupertino IMO. A company that big in city that small and frankly, boring, isn't going to have the best hiring pool.

I know plenty of very talented people who simply won't apply to Apple. They don't want to live in Cupertino or have to commute 2+ hours each day to go to work.

Steve Jobs was a middle-class guy trying to find his place in the world; the kind to travel India to to meet Neem Karoli Baba, shaved head, barefoot, wearing kurtas [1]. 50 years later, who grows up in Cupertino? It's no longer "middle-class". I'm sure Cupertino produces some excellent talent that did great at some top university, but I'm also sure it's not the kind that rocks the boat, or the kind that will push a "dumb decision" out of principle at work and get fired, like Jobs did back in 1985.

When I think Cupertino, the city, I don't think vibrancy of the built environment, diversity of professions, or wealth of ideas. I think comfort, complacency and quiet. The type of place that repels the kind of people who want to fight in the trenches, and slowly milds the fight out of those who do move there.

I can only assume Apple, like a lot of the Bay at this point, survives from imported talent. The kind that is hungry enough to move across the country, or across the globe, to achieve something. But if you're in demand, why would you want to work in Cupertino and not San Francisco? Or better yet New York, Shenzhen, London, Tokyo, Shanghai, Paris, etc. Money only motivates people so much, and people who are in it for the money don't stand up for or against things in the same way.

[1]: https://medium.com/macoclock/how-much-did-coming-to-india-co...

[PaulHoule]

I think a lot of Bay Area companies don’t come to their full potential because of their location. I think Apple does so well though that I couldn’t tell them to change anything,

They are singular in a lot of ways. I was working with a business development guy on something that could have been “like Palantir but 10x potential TAM” and we seemed to have a knack for getting people to tell us more than they should have. Like instead of breaking up we should have gone into industrial espionage but I’ve seen just enough of that world to know better.

We heard from all sorts of places where “people never talk” but never Apple.

[achierius]

> Steve Jobs was a middle-class guy trying to find his place in the world; the kind to travel India to to meet Neem Karoli Baba, shaved head, barefoot, wearing kurtas

I'm gonna be real: I've seen guys with shaved heads and kurtas at Apple Park. Admittedly they did have shoes but Indian people aren't "exotic", they're just people.

[brantonb]

This isn’t unique to Apple. The Windows developers were very vocal about a full screen start menu in Windows 8 being a bad change. We were told that we weren’t allowed to talk about it anymore on the large mailing list about the product. The decision had been made and complaints would no longer be read or responded to.

[nwienert]

It's significantly worse on Mac than iOS, which gives you the answer. On iOS it's fine, even good. I prefer it, as a designer. On Mac it's a mess, and obviously spent less time baking.

[alsetmusic]

> Maybe Apple engineers are afraid to push back on management?

I can tell you with confidence that this isn't the issue. HIG (Human Interface Guidelines: a design spec that became a department / org) overrides them.

[alsetmusic]

> too easy to turn reject iPhone chips into netbooks in 2026.

You mean the flagship chip from their former pro phones? I was with you until you said this. Makes you sound out of touch or ideological.

I think they've been on the worst design tear since they went to OSX for the past eight-ish years. At no point does their awful software design intrude on their awesome chip designs.

My partner's first Mac is a MacBook Neo and she loves it. Pink. Looks pretty good. Does what she needs. Not right for me, probably not right for you, but what I'd tell my mother to buy if it existed when I told her to buy a regular MacBook Air.

[PaulHoule]

It's not meant to be an insult, I have a phone in my pocket with one of those chips. back when I was using Android I was like "why do people get so excited about apps?" but the iPhone experience is all different. They are "rejects" because a lot of them have a busted core which can be fused off.

If there's a problem w/ the Neo in it's current incarnation is that are going to run out of those chips and find something else. It takes an advantage of the opportunity and might be the beginning of a new market segment for Mac which will hold PC and Chromebooks accountable.

(Funny a pink netbook served me really well back in the day! I remember using one to log ham radio contacts from a mountaintop near San Luis Obispo into a sqlite database and then using it as the best ever car computer in the passenger seat of a car with Microsoft Streets & Trips and a music player)

[alsetmusic]

It'd be clearer had you said "binned" or something similar. I get what you mean. Apologies for my tone.

[wlonkly]

No, it's the chips that could've been used in those flagship phones, but that were rejected. Rejection isn't ideological here, it's the QA process.

[harrall]

My pet opinion is that Steve Jobs was an asshole but an asshole that used his own products and used his powers of complaining to steer the whole ship to fix major "this annoys me everyday" bugs.

From my experience, "annoying but not blockers" bugs are often very neglected compared to (1) bugs that actually break things and (2) feature work. Neglecting quality of life issues leads to the "do you even use your product??" kinds of experiences.

[jbverschoor]

This is exactly my thought as well.

Soo many things either work buggy, laggy, inconsistent, or don’t work at all

Filling bugs doesn’t help. And I don’t think anyone is inventive to fix bugs. Resolving sure. But closing WONTFIX or NEEDSINFO is also a resolution.

Most of what I do is chrome +Linux terminals and vscode anyway

And the only reason I’m on Mac is because of hardware, encryption, and ease of backup/restore/wipe, and the power struggle of Linux distros. freeBSD is not really an option

[alsetmusic]

There's a windowing bug that was introduced in 2009 that I'm confident will persist until MacOS has another MacOSX-style transition to something entirely new. They need someone who cares about fit&finish more than features driving the ship. That's not what gets promoted to the top, unfortunately.

[jbverschoor]

I’d be more than happy to spend a year polishing macOS and iOS for that matter

[drob518]

Steve Jobs knew what he wanted and was willing to put his foot down in order to get it. Yea, I’m sure he was difficult to work with and drove people insane, but he was the plumb line that kept Apple driving in (mostly) the right direction. Now, it seems like they have bored designers trying to make a name for themselves with a “new” and “revolutionary” interface in Liquid Glass, which nobody likes and is less usable than its predecessor. But nobody ever got promoted for maintaining the status quo, so they are going to push forward. Steve’s advantage was that he never needed to be promoted.

[naikrovek]

Well, the UI leader behind Liquid Glass is no longer with the company, replaced by a long time Apple employee known for his eye for detail.

I do t think Liquid Glass is going to go away soon, Apple doesn’t seem to reverse itself ever, but I do expect Liquid Glass to become better over time. We’ll see what WWDC brings on that front I guess.

[PaulHoule]

My take on it is that in my own work I really like transparency effects but it is always a chore to tune up the foregrounds, backgrounds and alpha blending to keep everything legible. If you control all the content it is one thing, but for a general-purpose OS where the content is supplied by the user and applications you have to dial the intensity way back.

When I first saw the prototype images I thought they were really cool and it was a bold idea though people on this site were complaining about it already for the predictable reasons.

When it came out I was thinking that they dealt with the legibility of the content by dialing down the legibility of the design -- like it looks like "anti-anti-aliasing" more than it looks like "bold transparent vision"

One reason I don't think I read it as "refraction" is that one of my tells for refraction is chromatic aberration and without that it doesn't seem real to me. I think it would triple the texture lookup rate (at least) and make content legibility worse and I think you would see a lot of people say it is was an ugly gimmick.

[alsetmusic]

> Apple doesn’t seem to reverse itself ever

I agree, but also they broke that rule very recently when they lowered the price of a display and issued refunds one month after intro. The VESA price dropped $400. I learned about it from Accidental Tech Podcast.

https://www.apple.com/us-edu/shop/buy-mac/studio-display-xdr

[hirvi74]

I have not been impressed with Cook in the slightest. He came from Compaq, if I am not mistaken, and in many ways, I feel like Apple has become more Compaq-like during his tenure.

[whstl]

Interesting. I have worked with a CEO that did exactly that.

The product quality was just insane.

I have also worked with people in power who believed they were doing the same, but actually just had weird taste in interfaces and ended up screwing up the product.

So YMMV.

[drob518]

I’ve learned over the years that most people have poor taste in UX. Even some UX designers and supposed “experts.”

[Cthulhu_]

The thing / issue at this point is though: how much is Jobs still responsible for Apple's ongoing success? He died 15 years ago, two years after Apple introduced "flat design" (to much criticism at the time but people got used to it). But after his passing, Apple's market value went from ~500 billion to ~4 trillion today, more than an 8-fold multiplication.

I find it hard to believe that his influence was so strong that it had an inertia that lasted for 15 years. Ive left his mark on it for longer.

[PaulHoule]

Apple had a few near death experiences and might not have survived.

One of those early near death experiences might have been Jobs fault (going at the Apple /// and the Mac when, in retrospect, the Apple ][ could have been evolved more aggressively) but he helped bring it back from the brink later on.

Android deserves a lot of credit for the success of iOS in that a zombie mobile OS that doesn't have to be profitable has displaced a competitive mobile OS. A similar kind of fragmentation has bedeviled the Windows (and Linux) PC as well as (from the viewpoint of Windows) distractions such as Azure (good business) and XBOX (bad business.)

Intel deserves a lot of credit for the success of Apple too because for 15 years Intel has had no strategy to translate architectural improvements to experienced performance for client PCs. The way they've gone about SIMD is an absolute disaster, like by the time we can use AVX-512 in mainstream software everybody will have moved on to ARM. Charlie Demerjian would talk your ear off about how the tech press has been uncritical about their hyperscaler/HPC patter, never reminding you that client PCs are still the bread and butter of their business -- pander to the likes of Amazon and they will use any cost savings they get to invest in ARM. It's suicide.

[plufz]

I guess that depends on what you put into the word "success". I dont believe that great design work or great products and high market cap has ever been that related to each other.

With that said I dont think Steve built Apple alone either. And i think they have done some great things after his death as well.

[apple4ever]

> My pet opinion is that Steve Jobs was an asshole but an asshole that used his own products and used his powers of complaining to steer the whole ship to fix major "this annoys me everyday" bugs.

I think you are right. He was not perfect and not always nice, but man that dude CARED. Nobody at Apple cares any more.

[lynguist]

I… think that actually Liquid Glass was put on the iPhones to make sure that older iPhones that still have relatively fast chips can show up finally slower than the brand new ones, and that with this stress there’s again a much larger slope in difference between an older iPhone and a newer one which causes enough nagging in users to upgrade = buy a new one.

[ryanmcbride]

I mean, their damn phone keyboards are so bad I'm 100% confident that Tim only does voice to text on his phone. There's no way that the CEO of a company could use a keyboard that horrible and not want to fix it.

[sen]

It’s SO bad. It makes me not want to use my phone anymore and physically go get my laptop if I’m chatting/messaging someone.

It’s probably the worst typing experience I’ve had since resistive-touch screens on PDAs. At least with them you could still type what you intended to though, just slowly.

[vvillena]

The behavior of the iOS keyboard also showcases how there must not be many decision-making people who communicate in multiple languages.

[Barbing]

If Tim used speech to text we’d be at least testing SotA local voice models in the iOS betas

[ryanmcbride]

Starting to wonder what he DOES use. I guess just the cameras since they seem to be the only things that change.

[llbbdd]

He's a gazillionaire, he has people to interact with phones for him

[Barbing]

But how to become a 2-gazillionaire, or even reach 3 gazillion, without feedback loops?

I guess it doesn't matter, or not enough to forfeit competing opportunities. If we deal with bugs so they could build the Neo maybe it's OK.

[JoeBOFH]

Most of my issues were fixed when I disabled swipe to type. Not all, but most.

[ryanmcbride]

I've heard this advice before and I've tried it, and I really didn't notice a difference. I also, unfortunately, use swipe to type a lot. If I'm typing one handed I'm pretty much always using swipe. Sure it barely works, but that's the same as if I was typing normally so feels like a wash.

[u_fucking_dork]

Keyboard works fine. Always has. iPhone just has so many users that there's going to be a plethora of passionate unpleasable nerds for every single facet of it. Even in your ideal virtual keyboard version, there was an army of people complaining that it wasn't a hardware keyboard.

[jbverschoor]

No it doesn’t.

It did work fine before. But I had to swipe 3 times to get “fine” instead of “going” just now

[Forgeties79]

I’ve never really disliked the keyboard. I’m not entirely sure what they’re talking about. That being said I’ve never used swipe to text so maybe that factors in, or never having had a smartphone other than an iPhone.

[yard2010]

This is misinformation, please provide sources to your claims. The iOS keyboard degraded in the latest versiond.

https://www.macworld.com/article/2952872/heres-proof-that-th...

[Barbing]

keyboard's fine

no macro support is not fine for me but wouldn't want grandma to have it so hmm

[mschulze]

Nice strawman, and unnecessary attack. I'm using iPhones since the 3GS, and from time to time type on an Android and the keyboard on iOS _sucks_. As someone else wrote, I am loathing to chat with someone on the phone and rather switch to my laptop.

[ryanmcbride]

okay.

[kcrwfrd_]

In case anyone else is going crazy trying to find this setting, it’s called slide to type

[apple4ever]

AHH thank you!!

[jurplel]

This, along with circle to search (for translating, mainly) are the current main things pushing me to stay on Android.

[testing22321]

Why are you paying money for something that you find so terrible when there is a perfectly good alternative.

Life is too short to waste is using junk you don’t enjoy.

[kinematikk]

Whats the alternative? Android not, because it's absolutely not perfectly good

[fizwidget]

In my experience iOS 26.4 did largely fix it btw. Update if you haven’t already.

[ryanmcbride]

I'm on 26.4 on a brand new 17 Pro Max, recently upgraded from a 13 Pro Max, and I have noticed absolutely no difference in the keyboard. It's still awful.

[niij]

But then you'd have to upgrade past 18, meaning the liquid glass abomination.

[Barbing]

was only dumb for a month or few, now that it's max blacked out as best it can be I can redirect my focus... and be annoyed by the STUPID hiding bottom menus like in Photos.

Literally ZERO times did I complain I was missing seven pixels of "real estate", thanks Apple, love the extra tap to see what I need

(to be clear, only sign on iOS 26, NOT macOS 26)

[apple4ever]

> Are apple engineers not using macOS?

If they are, they aren't using anything but very basic parts of it.

But I think the better question is "Are Apple Executives not using MacOS?" because if they were, none of these mad bugs would still be here.

[mrguyorama]

Even if they did, what are they going to do? File a bug report that will sit at the bottom of the priority pile forever?

Devs don't set priorities. Software "Engineers" largely don't get to engineer at all.

[achierius]

Essentially all Apple engineers use macOS ~exclusively (at least in the SWE org). That these bugs persist is in spite of that fact.

Frankly there's just a lot going on, and between all the kinds of bugs that have higher priority -- crashers, panics, memory regressions (your app gets Jetsam'd), power bugs (your phone runs out of battery mid-day), perf regressions (could violate EU regulations against planned obsolescence), security bugs (people can lose their money, journalists can get killed) -- bugs like this often fall by the wayside for quite some time until they're fixed.

[fragmede]

Stockholm syndrome. Moving between spaces is fine! What are you talking about?

You get used to it and then it's not a big. Stop holding it wrong!!!

[amelius]

I wouldn't be surprised. Their 3D solid modeling is done on Windows, so why not their electronics.

[abustamam]

Wow I never realized I had this problem until now! I never even considered the reason keys would dispatch to the wrong window was because of the animation. I just knew that sometimes when switching workspaces I'd have to wait until whatever window I'm switching to has focus before typing.

[alsetmusic]

I believe I first learned to shorten animations on MacOSXHints.com (gone now). Regardless, I learned a lot of great "enhancements" here:

https://github.com/mathiasbynens/dotfiles

And here's the blog of the person who ran MacOSXHints.com:

https://robservatory.com/make-your-macos-dock-suck/

Fun aside, I'm pretty sure that my mention of a system issue that I read about that morning on MacOSXHints.com was a helper in landing a job in an interview that afternoon. What I mean is, I said, oh are you talking about "whatever thing on that site today…?" and it demonstrated that I was familiar with whatever internals.

[abustamam]

Nice resources! I've use MacOS for over ten years and I never really modified anything other than my zshrc. I'll check then out!

[juujian]

Don't know about customizability on MacOS but I've always been very accustomed to animations and recently I just turned them off on Android and Linux and I... Don't miss anything. Turned out they don't add anything other than an initial wow factor.

[al_borland]

Personally, I think some animations can help add context to what is happening. For example, when using QuickLook, there is an animation when opening/closing QuickLook that zooms out from, and then back to the file location. If doing something with that file after the QL, that little visual clue helps find it faster and know where it opened from.

[mort96]

The closest thing you can do on macOS is to turn on "reduced motion". This doesn't remove any animations, it just replaces them all with fade animations which take the same amount of time.

[fragmede]

and set it to 60hz instead of 120. And install the tool that the article links to.

[bschwindHN]

I noticed this immediately when I first used a 120Hz macbook in 2021. As a vanilla MacOS UI feature that I'm sure many people use, I can't believe it hasn't been fixed yet.

[mort96]

I also have a 120Hz Mac, and the animation is indeed slower in 120Hz mode. In my opinion, the animation crossed the line from "too slow but bearable" to "unbearable" with 120Hz. It is as you say; it's not really the animation itself that's the problem, but the delay from when I tell my machine "switch to this other workspace" until the focus switches to a window on that other workspace. The animation has this horrible ease-out effect where the last few centimeters take what feels like forever.

Getting a 120Hz Mac actually completely changed my whole macOS philosophy. I used to use spaces extremely heavily. I now almost don't use them at all, preferring window switching with cmd+tab instead.

The infuriating thing is that almost all discussion on this on the web just says "turn on reduced motion". Not only should that be unnecessary; it doesn't even fix the problem! Sure, there's no longer a sliding animation, but there's now a fade animation instead which takes just as long.

It's completely incomprehensible that Apple hasn't fixed this.

Sadly, solutions like BetterTouchTool and InstantSpaceSwitcher won't work for me because I prefer to use my trackpad to switch spaces.

EDIT: I actually recorded and compared the switching speeds a while ago: https://old.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/rfmg4e/workspace_swi.... Apologies for the choppy recording, QuickTime screen recording is not very good; but it gets the point across.

[fifafu]

> Sadly, solutions like BetterTouchTool and InstantSpaceSwitcher won't work for me because I prefer to use my trackpad to switch spaces.

One of BetterTouchTool's first features ~17 years ago was trackpad gesture customization, it is still one of the most important things you can do with BTT! ;-) You'd just need to assign the "Move Right a Space (without animation)" and "Move Left a Space (without animation)" actions to trackpad gestures in BTT.

[mort96]

I don't want it "without animation", I like that the animation tracks my fingers and that the response is instant and doesn't wait until a "gesture" is "triggered". I just want it to wait a second after I let go until the target workspace starts receiving input.

[jurplel]

Instant space switcher now supports overriding the gesture.

[tranceylc]

I would assume it’s something based around whatever deacceleration animation it is calculating? So in the inverse of what you would see in games that don’t support uncapped framerates. It would at least explain why the refresh rate has an inverted relationship

[presbyterian]

I've been having the same problem, entering keystrokes in the wrong windows when changing spaces. I'm so glad to know it's not just me, it's the fact that I just a couple months ago bought a new MBP. Thank you!

[jurplel]

I have noticed this bug years before Apple started selling 120hz displays. I thought for sure they would fix it after that, but to my surprise it has persisted...

I think it must go back to High Sierra or Mojave at least.

[theredleft]

we are a certain type of people here, aren't we?