Even the new app launcher. It takes 1-2 seconds to draw a bunch of icons. Scrolling is also choppy. This even happens on their newest machines. How this possible in 2026?
If you have a legacy Time Capsule you'd rather not e-waste, you can try this out. Note that this is very much beta quality software, so don't expect it to work on all configurations.
My app launcher loads as soon as it's triggered (4 fingers swiped in). There is a weird 5ms glitch on the zoom in animation, but otherwise it loads in within a few ms, and scrolling is smooth. I'm on a M2 MBA macOS 26.3.1
Edit, but don't take this as me saying I like the current state of macOS. There are plenty of weird edge cases I wish they'd fix, but on the whole the OS works fine for me.
For me the launcher itself loads fast, but it takes 1-2 seconds to show the icons. And when I scroll down it often times does not draw the icons fast enough.
What "walled garden"? The Mac-only apps aside, what's that that you couldn't get on Windows (and most even on Linux), either the same thing, or a zero-switch-cost subscription (it's not like you need to rebuy something to go from Music to Spotify for exampe).
iCloud? You can use Google Drive or Dropbox or whatever MS calls theirs.
Apple Music? Pretty sure it plays at both.
Most major apps are cross platform (Adobe, Microsoft and such), or Electron based.
Syncing with your iPhone? You can do that from Windows and Linux as well. Airpods? Work with Android and Windows too.
>How many Ukrainians can find Iowa or Missouri on the map?
Their country doesn't make decisions about American on their behalf (or even at all), so they don't have a moral obligation as citizens to. And Iowa and Missouri are mere states, and not even very interesting ones at that.
My point is that the US is a huge country and American education prioritizes learning where all 50 states are, since that's going to be a thousand times more relevant to any American in the span of their lifetime. So it's not surprising that the average American may not know where the fuck Estonia is, but they can tell you where Rhode Island is – and the reverse is true for the average European.
Being able to point something out on a map is a metric that means nothing. That is my point.
With this bad faith line of reasoning that ignores user defaults, ecosystem ties and switching friction, Windows was also never a monopoly because companies and users could just switch to Mac or Linux whenever they wanted.
>How many Ukrainians can find Iowa or Missouri on the map?
> With this bad faith line of reasoning that ignores user defaults, ecosystem ties and switching friction, Windows was also never a monopoly because companies and users could just switch to Mac or Linux whenever they wanted.
This bad faith line of reasoning ignores how viable Mac or Linux actually were as consumer devices at the time Microsoft had a monopoly.
You didn't read what I said. I said MacOS IS a monopoly in the Apple ecosystem.
Apple users dissatisfied with how MacOS is changing, as the one I was replying to, have nothing else to switch to without uprooting themselves out of the Apple ecosystem altogether, which most don't do but just put up with it.
The Mac isn’t a monopoly, but choices for desktop operating systems are indeed limited. I use macOS, Windows, and Linux on a regular basis. The only one that’s improving is the Linux ecosystem. I prefer macOS to Windows, but macOS is not as polished in 2026 as it was in 2016 or especially in the Snow Leopard era.
Originally, it was "solved" because computers were the only thing Apple sold. They couldn't afford a Lisa without successes like the Apple II.
Now, Apple's incentives are changed. The App Store alone makes multiple times more money in a year than the sum of annual Mac and iPad sales put together. The OSes for these products are decidedly back-burner so Apple can focus on expanding AppleTV's IP library and lobby for Apple Pay. Ternus won't be your savior.
John Ternus says Apple has ‘so much’ opportunity to expand services
Interesting that you mention commodity, because the better AI models become the more fungible they are. AI companies become like web hosting companies renting out server space with good enough open models. It’s not like Excel that runs the world economy because people don’t want to learn anything else.
It seems that the winner takes all market for tech will eventually go away. Countries and regions want to develop their own good enough solutions that is not dependent on America.
I expect AI to become more like the news, where every country has their own news services, rather than the global monopoly Sam Altman had envisioned. We even see it with Meta, a company that doesn't sell AI. They'd rather build their own models than let one or a few companies have that much leverage over them. This is why it's unlikely open models will disappear. That's the only thing that prevents a global AI oligopoly.
Has nothing to do with geography and everything to do with marginal cost. Software and hardware is winner takes all because the marginal cost of producing a copy of a software product is near zero, and the marginal cost of producing a hardware chip is also very low. This is not true of AI models. Both inference and training have high marginal costs, since the compute demand is intense.
An article on this did the rounds a few months ago and suddenly everyone quotes it as gospel truth.
Unfortunately, it's not. What will happen is that you'll get somewhat better at digesting lactose as your gut bacteria learn to partially compensate for your lack of ability to produce lactase enzyme.
If you're only slightly lactose intolerant that might be sufficient. But for many people it would just make a bad health issue into a slightly less bad healthy issue.
Not great when there's a clear and obvious full cure available: don't eat dairy if you can't digest it.
Or maybe lactase enzyme pills. I've tested them for an occasional slice of cheese cake and they seem to work if I get the timing right.
Lactose issues are fascinating. Some peop’e are triggered by pasturized milk, others can't handle milk at all. Some people can only handle cooked milk, others cheese until limits. For some lactose works, and for others not - to the point of upsetting stomachs. There's even compelling annecdotes (to my knowledge, no research) indicating that adding a couple of drops of any citrus to milk helps some people.
I didn't know I was lactose intolerant for a long time and thought it was some other issue so I kept having dairy daily for well over a year. It never went away.
Lactose intolerance principally derives from a failure of the human body, not the microbiome, to produce the enzyme lactase which breaks down the sugar lactose.
All humans (and all mammals) produce lactase as infants and children, but many lose that capacity in adulthood. Several populations (Northern Europeans, some North Africans, and a few elsewhere) inherit a mutation which continues lactase production in adulthood. Many parts of the world, notably east Asia and the Americas (indigenous populations) lack that mutation and adults tolerate unfermented milk products poorly.
Fermented products (cheese, yoghurt, keifer, doogh, buttermilk) tend to have most of the lactate converted in the fermentation process, and tend to be better tolerated.
Your body produces lactase, an enzyme that breaks down lactose. People who are lactose intolerant are unable to produce lactase and therefore, unable to break down lactose. Gut bacteria can break down lactose and perhaps if you drink milk all the time, those bacteria proliferate but loactose intolerance is no fun. It's better to just skip milk altogether.
I'm nitty picking now, but for most people you can't cure lactose intolerance because it's not a disease. It's more like the default state that adult mammals have. You might be able to rebuild some tolerance, but it's much easier to just take the artificial lactase and manage intake. One could argue that, biologically speaking, lactose tolerance is the off state and just so happens because we keep consuming breast milk well into adulthood (just not our own mother's).
Yeah - humans have adapted to be able to use milk(s) from other sources than parents for the high sugar and fats present and required to survive in harsher climates (cold) that we're not native to.
Milks, butters, and cheeses are a high value food source for people who burn massive amounts of calories to keep their bodies warm.
Hmm, I’ve been intolerant my whole life, but I also used to drink milk daily during childhood, resulting in, for reasons I now know why, in a subpar youth ..
having discovered the lactase supplement has finally given me some peace of mind :)
Maybe? What follows is just my own dumb anecdotes.
For a long time, I sometimes had issues. I'd keep anti-diarrhea pills in stock at home. I kept some in the car. I even had some in blister packs my wallet (they'd get smashed up over time, but they still worked in powdered form and the desperation was very real).
I didn't know why that was a problem, but I definitely knew it was a real problem and that it could erupt at any time, so I treated the symptoms when that was useful to me. Sometimes, those shitty days on the toilet were intense. They'd wreck me, physically and mentally, for far longer than I want to think about.
Eventually, after decades, I noticed a pattern: Milk. Days when I drank milk or ate ice cream were much more likely to be problematic than days when I did not.
But then, I noticed that some other milk products like cheese were usually just fine. And that made sense and fit the pattern well, because the fermentation of cheesemaking reduces lactose very significantly.
And I like milk. So, experimentally, I started buying lactose-free milk. This worked well, but it was expensive and it tastes different. That helped to further define the pattern.
I started buying cheap lactase tablets instead, in bulk. That saved a fair bit of money, tasted good, and it also worked fine. This also reinforced the observed pattern.
Somewhere along the line, I became interested in kefir, so I bought some completely non-mystical mass-produced kefir from the grocery store and drank some.
Kefir treated me fine (yay fermentation). I found that adding a bit of kefir to a glass of milk also worked: That was never problematic at all, even without lactase tablets. (And it let me stretch that delicious, to me, kefir flavor out over a larger volume -- which also saved some money.)
I found that these observations strongly suggested to me that I was lactose-intolerant.
This went on for a long time; several years. Lactase or kefir, with milk, in various amounts -- whenever I felt like it. I thought I was proactively managing my apparent lactose intolerance very effectively. And by observation, I was indeed doing so. Keeping active stock of anti-diarrhea pills always nearby was reduced to kind of a fuzzy memory.
---
And then one day, I wanted a nice big ice-cold glass of milk, so I poured myself one. I went to the cabinet in the kitchen, but the lactase bottle was empty. I went to the fridge, and the kefir was gone.
So there I am, with a big glass of milk and nothing to help me digest it.
My health-and-sanitation spidey-sense refuses to let me pour stuff back into containers, and my dread for waste refused to let me pour it down the drain.
So I drank that milk. It was every bit as delicious as I expected.
And I expected (anticipated) the worst, but nothing bad happened. Everything was fine.
One sample isn't a trend, so I had more later. That was fine, too.
Weeks went by, then months. Now years. No issues: Milk goes in, and everything comes out properly.
I can have milk without assistance whenever I want, and that's fine. The previous and clearly-evident pattern that suggested lactose intolerance has become broken.
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So now I don't have lactase tablets in stock anymore. I still drink the least-fancy milk I can get at the grocery store whenever it suits me.
I do enjoy some kefir from time to time (I love the taste of it), but I haven't had any of that for several months now either.
And I'm still fine. I'm doing really well in that area, really.
I'll leave it to the microbiologists to explain the hows and the whys; that's not my field of study. All I know is that this aspect of my life is way, waaaaaaay better than it was.
I'm very deliberately not providing causation or theories here. This is just my story, and I'm sticking to it.
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(Now, someone reading this probably has some questions that are shaped like "Holy hell. Decades? Why didn't you at least go to the doctor or something?"
And that has a simple, dumb-as-bricks, one-word answer: 'Murica.)
I am not an expert, but I think 'accepting reality' is not the correct term. It is 'seeing clearly the way things are'. That does not imply passivism, but it will enable more 'skilful action', not clouded by greed, hatred etc..
Just like how it already work with watches. You can replace batteries yourself, but waterproofing is not guaranteed. If you want to be certain that the waterproof rating is maintained, you have to sent it to an authorised service provider.
If Tokyo was in America, your situation would be like this: imagine going outside of your home and walk for 10 minutes to a small hamburger shop. It only has 10 seats and it’s run a by hamburger nerd who makes elite hamburgers. This guy grinds his own beef, bakes his own buns and pickles his own pickles and everything is perfect. The burgers are only 8 dollars and you can’t even imagine of making hamburgers yourself.
I know, I’m familiar with Tokyo. But my family would take up half the restaurant, only one of the three kids would like the burger, and the other two would throw a shit fit because the burger guy only sells burgers. Two different societies optimizing for different things.
There are family restaurants in Japan as well. You would not bring your family to the place described above, you would go with your spouse, friends or colleges or other adults.
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