- For my entire adult life,
Macs have been more expensive than PCs
while being simultaneously useless for gaming.
So the bugs, quirks,
and outright bad decisions that Apple has made
in the development of Mac OS never really affected me,
outside of the few isolated instances
where I was forced to use it.
However, Linus Media Group has more daily Mac users
than ever before and even they agree,
there are a shocking number of Mac OS deficiencies,
some that Linux and Windows solved 10 or even 20 years ago.
And if Apple would address them,
it could improve their workflow, reduce daily frustrations,
and generally boost the user friendliness
of the operating system.
So, with the help of our team and our community,
we've put together this list of ways
that we think Mac OS falls short
of Apple's "just works" philosophy
and how they could be done better.
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(icon beeps)
(upbeat music)
- Right off the top, I want to make it clear
that we are talking about the stock operating system,
not apps like BetterTouchTool
or SnapTool or Magnet or anything like that.
If you have to download a third party app to fix it,
it doesn't count,
Anything outta the box from Apple is fair game, though.
So let's jump straight into the big one, corner snapping.
Linus and a small handful of others
have been calling attention to the lack of this feature
for years at this point.
On Mac OS, you cannot by default snap a window
by dragging it around.
It just moves.
To Apple's credit, they do give you options
when you click and hold the green button
and even more options if you also hold down
the appropriately named option key on the keyboard,
but this is miles away from the simplicity
offered by Windows.
Behold, drag and drop a window to the side you want it on
and it will snap in place and resize automatically,
even with multiple monitors.
Stuck using a touchpad?
Windows still has you covered.
Press the arrow keys while holding the Win key
and the active window moves accordingly.
You don't have to awkwardly drag it around,
and that's just what Windows does out of the box.
Microsoft even extends the power of their corner snapping
with a first party tool called FancyZones,
which is part of their PowerToys line of utilities
designed to give control back to the power users
who want that extra degree of customization.
Virtual Desktops actually used to be a PowerToy.
It's a real shame that Apple doesn't offer
a similar suite of programs for their power users.
They did introduce Stage Manager
with the recent Ventura upgrade,
but control over window placements
still lags behind other operating systems.
If you do want that level of control,
you're going to be left looking
at one of the many third party solutions
like BetterSnapTool, Magnet, or Swish.
But get your wallet ready, because these are all paid apps.
- While we're on the topic of active application management,
the weird full screen behavior in Mac OS
is another popular point of friction.
We're not gonna comment on the inclusion
of a notch on a laptop screen, but my brother in Christ,
Apple, you cannot change
the meaning of the words full screen just because of that.
As a wild and crazy suggestion, we think the option
to automatically hide and show the menu bar
when in full screen should probably do what it says
and hide the damn menu bar, not just the text.
That is not free real estate and I want it back.
And the current implementation
is different from one app to the next.
If you enter full screen mode
from a non-full screen Firefox window,
the menu bar and traffic lights don't appear,
but if you do the same thing from Chrome or Safari, they do,
and to further complicate things,
if you enter full screen on Firefox
before doing a full screen video, now they do appear.
And you know what?
The way that the traffic light buttons
are handled currently differs from app to app, as well,
though it really shouldn't.
Full screen calendar and Safari have them animate
from left to right.
In Maps and Notes, they fade in instead,
and in Messages and the App Store,
a bar slides down from the top
so you can't click on what's underneath the damn bar.
The worst part is that a lot of the time,
there's enough room for them to just stay there,
but they disappear anyway.
Why hide them in the first place?
To fix this, Apple either needs to give developers
a single set of rules for handling this UI element
or give users an option in the system settings
that forces the colored buttons to always stay visible,
just like you can stay visible
in our new color block hoodies at lttstore.com.
- Also annoyingly absent from the setting of its menu
is an option to decouple the scroll direction
of the touch pad from the scroll direction
of the Magic Mouse.
And this may sound ungodly to some,
but it's a really popular gripe.
Like it or not, though, you're stuck scrolling
in the same direction on the Magic Mouse as on the touchpad.
And I hate natural scrolling.
'Cause even though there are two separate options
for this in the menu, they're linked.
To solve this, I just use a third party mouse
that has its own software.
Our final missing setting has to do with multiple monitors.
As it currently stands, the dock will move any monitor
that your mouse happens to brush along the bottom of,
unless that is, you change
the displays have separate spaces option,
which doesn't seem like it should affect the dock,
but it does.
Is natural scrolling on on this teleprompter thing?
- [Camera Person] Yes.
- Really?
Are you trolling me with this?
What is up and what is down?
Like the other missing options we mentioned,
you personally might love the default behavior,
but that doesn't mean that the people
who don't like the out of box experience
should have to suffer.
I did not write this, I should, end note.
A few extra toggle options
would be a long way for a lot of folks here.
I definitely did not write this.
I like the out of box experience
and it's been a big argument in the research of this video.
- This leads us to something that actually prevented me
from switching to daily driving a MacBook,
or I did switch, but I'm just really mad about it,
using external displays.
Using multiple external displays
requires choosing an M1 Pro Max or Ultra-equipped machine.
If you've got a system with a base M1 or M2,
you're limited to a single external display.
This is despite the Thunderbolt-enabled USBC ports
on the M1 and M2.
But slow down.
This sounds like hardware talk,
though it certainly affects modern Mac OS machines.
So where does the hardware end and the software begin?
Market segmentation, that's where.
See, the single Thunderbolt bus on the systems
with the base M1 or M2 could easily drive
more than one external display,
like it does on the XPS 15,
but especially in the case of the MacBook Air,
that would be stepping on the toes
of the higher end Apple products.
And what's the easiest way to encourage people
to spend more on features they need?
Artificial limitations,
and the most frustrating part is it used to be better.
Intel-based Airs had no trouble
outputting to multiple monitors.
(Alex groans)
- On the topic of limitations,
Mac OS also limits you in terms of audio.
There's no way of setting the volume
of individual applications.
This is something that Windows introduced in 2007
with the release of Vista,
and Linux distros like Ubuntu followed suit
shortly afterwards in 2008 because it was a good idea.
But 15 years later,
Mac OS still only has one master volume slider.
I mean, you're not doing more than one thing
at a time on your computer, are you, really?
You can ostensibly control this
by creating your own multi output device
in the audio MIDI app, but this is a clunky solution
and has to be redone for every additional application
you want to control.
It's maddeningly complex, a far cry from the simple
and accessible menus of Windows and Ubuntu.
I do have problems with Windows, though.
- Now, here's some rapid-fire pain points
that deserve a mention.
There's no way to create a new file through Finder,
even if you're already in the location
you want the file to be saved.
Checking ethernet connectivity and speed
is buried in a couple sub menus, and in general,
we wonder why Apple seems to hate ethernet
when it's so much better than wifi.
And having the option to get a preview
when hovering over an open application in the doc
would be massively helpful.
Just give us the option.
You love animations.
- Ultimately, a lot of the choices Apple has made
come down to a difference in how they expect
their software will or should be used.
Windows, for example, has a massive presence
in the enterprise and business world,
where support for legacy systems is critical,
and Windows tends to hold on then to features
that these systems might need in order to function properly,
even if no one else needs them.
Meanwhile, Apple tends to take
a more forward-looking approach,
out with the old, in with the new.
A prime example would be that Windows 11
no longer supports 32-bit processors,
but it does still support 32-bit applications
with no end in sight.
Then there's Linus Torvalds,
who just a few weeks ago
was discussing the possibility of maybe
one day perhaps removing support
for the Intel 486 microprocessor,
a 33-year-old chip that tops out at .1 gigahertz.
Apple also makes it a point to think different,
which can sometimes lead
to much better integration and functionality.
- One thing I like about Mac OS is that it keeps,
like, everything kind of compartmentalized,
so if you download an application and install it,
it's in the Applications folder,
and that's just where it is.
- It's got a really powerful terminal.
By default, these days, you're getting ZSH,
and you also have, like, Python and Ruby pre-installed.
Like, you had pretty much everything you need
in order to just do whatever you want outta the box.
- It doesn't have Windows Modern Standby.
Windows Modern Standby can just suckle my (beep).
I don't think I can say that, but...
(Alex laughs)
- But, thinking different can also lead
to a stubborn unwillingness to adopt a better method
of accomplishing a task,
seemingly because they're just salty
that someone else thought of it first.
At any rate, love them or hate them,
Apple's differences contribute nicely
to our conclusion here.
There's just no such thing as a perfect operating system.
Whether you're greeted by an Apple, a Window,
a cute penguin, or hey, even a sword and scales
when you're boot your PC,
there's going to be an element of imperfection,
and that's okay.
Blindly being a fanboy of anything is bad,
but being the kind of enthusiast that will take the time
to see and understand the flaws,
then give feedback about a product that you love,
well, that's pretty cool.
And even if it wouldn't turn me team Mac OS anytime soon,
we would genuinely love to see the imperfections
that we highlighted get the attention they deserve
for Mac OS users in our office and around the world.
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- Thanks for watching all the way to the end.
We hope the issues we mentioned
are as annoying to you as they are to us
and it didn't just feel like nitpicking and small details.
If you wanna hear more about the positive aspects of Mac OS,
we've got a video showcasing 10 ways
that it is just flat out superior to the competition.
Shout out to the Apple ecosystem in particular.
That's a game changer for many.