This isn't always a popular opinion, but most of the time, I really like Apple. I use a Mac as my main computer. The Mac is a solid piece of hardware, and its operating system is (usually) a software developer's dream. The iPhone is a decent and useful phone, even if it's a bit expensive.
But, today I'm really mad at Apple.
What's Apple done to earn my nerdy wrath? It's all about three really poor decisions in Catalina, the new version of macOS.
If you're a gamer, this matters to you. It may seem like 32-bit applications are dead weight at this point, since everybody's got a 64-bit processor now. Maybe it is, but there are still a lot of apps out there--especially games--that were published as 32-bit apps to, ironically, ensure compatibility with old systems.
What does this mean for me, and for gamers in general? Well, I own 471 Mac games on Steam, and a big percentage of those are 32-bit apps, released that way by their developers so they'd work on older Macs. How many of my games won't work on Catalina? Well, I have no way to find out except to try them out and be disappointed if they don't work.
This is also completely out of Steam's control. Their suggested workarounds are essentially "don't upgrade to Catalina, ever" and "dual boot into Windows on your Mac". (Source on that)
I imagine all those game developers who were making some revenue selling their games to Mac users on Steam are going to be even less happy than us gamers.
Okay, this point is a little arcane, but let me lay it out. One of the reasons a lot of software developers prefer the Mac is that macOS is based on Unix, which means that most of the open source software that developers like to use, including really common programming languages like Python, Ruby, and some versions of JavaScript, work right out of the box on the Mac.
So what did Apple do in Catalina that was so bad? They decided to change the Unix shell everything runs on from bash to zsh. There's nothing wrong with zsh, but the problem is that there are tons of open source development tools out there that assume they're running on bash, and are going to have to be fixed for zsh.
Bottom line, that means that a lot of the tools we programmers use every day are just going to break, due to an arbitrary decision on Apple's part. Thanks, Apple.
This may just be my personal thing. But, I use the Apple Reminders app basically to keep my life together. And the fact that it seamlessly syncs between my Mac, my iPhone, and my iPad is a big part of my workflow.
Unfortunately, when I upgraded my iDevices to the new iOS, they stopped syncing with my Mac. And now I don't even get unsynchronized reminders on my Mac; I just get a message telling me that reminders won't work there until I upgrade to Catalina.
Ugh.
Let me be clear--I'm just venting here. I'm not ready to get out of the Apple ecosystem and switch to Linux/Android/etc. just yet. But I'm pretty pissed about all this, as are a lot of my friends and colleagues.
When Apple makes these big errors in judgement, I often wonder what Steve Jobs would have thought of the whole thing. By all accounts, he was kind of a jerk, but he did seem to care a lot about customer experience. I'd like to think that, if he were alive today, he'd at least be in somebody's office yelling at them and calling them names, in true Steve Jobs style.
