macOS needs its grid back
124 points by ranebo 4 hours ago | 65 comments

xp84 3 hours ago
> If they approve, the settings open, then the user has to find the specific little toggle and enable it. Another security prompt then done. Why isn’t this at most 2 prompts?

Answer: Because modern-day Apple has subscribed to a particular brand of mitigation for the "noobs will always click 'Allow' especially if you ask them to first" problem. The mitigation is that Apple just dumps you on step 2 of a little 4-5 step mini sysadmin adventure where you prove, every time, that you're sophisticated enough to deserve an exception to the padded-cell walled garden mode they've sealed off 'for your safety.'

As a complete nerd, you'd think maybe I'd like that I can prove my skills like this, but it comes off as deeply disrespectful to me as the user that I can't disable this.

What's my solution to prevent grandma or a 10-year-old from clicking "Allow full filesystem access and keylogging" to an executable she downloaded from facebook-security-center-and-password-verification-cgi-bin-ab383 dot xyz? IDK, that's their problem, but they should offer a way for those of us who aren't clueless to turn whatever it is off.

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kdheiwns 7 minutes ago
The scary thing to me is how Apple makes you jump through hoops to install or use any sort of app, but when it comes to adding items to your login items, they don't even require you to grant permission.

Tried some little throwaway app and realized you don't need it? Sucks for you. It added itself to your login items and it'll start up in the background every single time you turn on your computer. And it won't even tell you. Thought you deleted the app from your Applications folder? If you didn't check your login items, there's probably some little script that deeply installed itself and it'll reinstall it in the background during your next startup.

Adobe is the fucking worst with this. Their Creative Cloud spyware keeps enabling itself and reinstalling itself so long as you use photoshop. And it'll constantly find ways to turn itself back on. Steam also adds itself to login items, which is fucking annoying because you'll reboot and be hit in the face with game ads. At least it respects your decision when you turn it off, but login items should be opt in, never opt out.

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manwe150 3 hours ago
That’s likely not quite the reason. It is to make you have to pause to think if this is the action you want to take.

On the flip side, many websites ask if I want to allow notifications. I almost never do. I was looking at settings recently and surprised how often I’d clicked yes by accident (maybe about 5% false click rate?)

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syabro 2 hours ago
but the damage of notifications is almost zero compared to keylogger IMHO
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mrpippy 49 minutes ago
Right, that’s why you get a simpler yes/no dialog for notifications, and a conplex “navigate to this settings pane and click a separate button” flow for a keylogger
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greazy 2 hours ago
Notification requests add to decision fatigue, which can lead to bad things.
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joshspankit 2 hours ago
For a long time, I’ve believed that the actual solution is to make the system transparent enough that a compromised system is obvious. Imagine playing hide and go seek in the salt flats
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somat 18 minutes ago
I agree, however the fundamental problem here is that transparent systems are on the far side of the axis from user focused systems, think about it, the whole point of building a user interface is to hide and remove choice from the user, to change the system from "A steady hand with a magnetic needle" to "point and grunt" the whole point is to build a shiny facade that hides the inner working of the machine. So while you and I and many other people like to see the machine, the inner workings whirling around in grandiose majesty. Millions of man hours have been spent hiding that stuff away keeping it from view, pretending it does not exist. And thus the transparency of our computing environments have suffered correspondingly to this focus on hiding things.
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tikhonj 14 minutes ago
That seems ≈impossible in a world where you're running arbitrary, Turing-complete code. A modern consumer machine can do so many different things—often a bunch at a time—that there is always a massive amount of space to hide bad behavior.

There might be some way to design a system from the ground up to avoid this problem (some kind of declarative, capability-based security?), but retrofitting that onto an existing behemoth of a system does not really work.

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refactor_master 22 minutes ago
If I log into my system it's safe. If someone reads my password off my screen post-it and logs into my system it's quite thoroughly compromised. How would you demonstrate which of the two sessions are compromised, during the act?
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thfuran 2 hours ago
What does that actually mean?
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rmunn 2 hours ago
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonneville_Salt_Flats — the salt flats are extremely flat (as the name implies), and because of all the salt, no vegetation can survive. Look at the pictures: there are no trees, no grass, no hiding places at all. Anyone standing (or even lying prone) on the salt flats is visible to anyone else for miles around.

GP was saying that systems should be "transparent enough that a compromised system is obvious". I'm not entirely convinced that that's possible (On Trusting Trust should have taught us that compromised systems can create places for the compromise to hide), which means that the salt flats analogy is not a great analogy, IMHO. But at least now you understand the analogy.

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klodolph 3 hours ago
This particular permission is pernicious, ponder for a picosecond the possibilities:

It’s used for writing keyloggers.

That’s it. It’s the permission that lets you write a keylogger. It SHOULD NOT be just a click away. It should require some extra song and dance, because this is an especially dangerous permission, and the extra friction is justified.

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xp84 2 hours ago
All the permissions are treated the same way though. Microphone access. Screen sharing access. etc. Yes, all could be used to spy on you in evil ways, but the replacement of a straightforward "Want to grant this app the following permissions?" with these stupid little spelunks through the garbage app that is Settings irritates me every time.

Apple should throw this whole thing out and replace it with first-launch lists of permissions, with toggles for each. This app 'Zoom' wants "Record the screen, microphone, camera." Then you're done and you don't have to keep searching for it in little lists and relaunching it.

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klodolph 2 hours ago
Honestly, I think the permissions model for desktop and laptop computers is way too permissive to begin with, I think it just kinda sucks and doesn’t do its job. Apple is kind of fixing it but there is a long way to go.

There have been alarm bells ringing in my head for a long time with all these settings, and the fact that they’re buried in the settings app gives me a lot of peace of mind. I’ll click through a lot of boxes and alerts and grant permissions that I shouldn’t. I’m SUPER glad that I won’t accidentally grant, you know, full disk access or accessibility to an app just by clicking on a box that appears at startup.

I remember back in the bad old days when I was constantly making extra user accounts just to run some program. Kinda sucked. Hard truth is, you sometimes want to run code that you don’t fully trust.

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js2 2 hours ago
> but they should offer a way for those of us who aren't clueless to turn whatever it is off.

I'm not sure if it's what you're asking for, but you can disable SIP:

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/security/disabling...

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jlarocco 19 minutes ago
It's been a while since I dumped OSX and went back to Linux, but IIRC, this setting gets reset every time the system updates.

At some point Apple realized the "power user" market was too small, and they were better off treating all of their users like idiots. And that's when I left.

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FireBeyond 3 hours ago
And then one that grinds my gears, perhaps more than it should: there's no way to change the default browser without explicit user action or consent.

But do that and the very next thing that happens when you try to open a browser or a link in an email?

"Your browser has been changed from Safari to Chrome. Would you like to use Safari or keep using Chrome?" and for a little salt, the default is "Use Safari".

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jimrandomh 3 hours ago
Prior to MacOS 10.11, Mission Control was good: you would swipe up with four fingers and it would show you a preview of all of your spaces. Then in 10.11, for no discernable reason, they changed it to suck: rather than showing you a preview, the bar just says "Desktop 1", "Desktop 2", etc until you mouse over it; the practical effect is that using spaces is disorienting and requires memorization.

Some third-party software pretends to restore this functionality, but they do it by repositioning the mouse to simulate a hover, which introduces a delay and doesn't integrate correctly with the animation. Someone wrote a patch that works by disabling SIP and injecting code (https://github.com/briankendall/forceFullDesktopBar), but eventually stopped maintaining it.

A decade later, I doubt anyone at Apple remembers that this bit of user interface used to be good.

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ebbi 2 hours ago
Agree! That "Desktop 1", "Desktop 2" view is so annoying, and given we have higher res monitors now, it serves no purpose if the intention was to save space.
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josho 2 minutes ago
I loathe that I can't even rename the desktops.

Wouldn't it be great to have them named "Design", "Dev", "Productivity", "Games". Or whatever makes sense given your needs, instead of simply desktop #.

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willtemperley 2 hours ago
> rather than showing you a preview, the bar just says "Desktop 1", "Desktop 2"

I never noticed that behaviour because I only use mission control in full-screen mode. If you swipe up with three (or four) fingers from a full-screen window the previews are visible immediately. I have no idea why we need a different preview for desktop vs full screen however.

The part of this UX that annoys me is the spaces get re-ordered for no apparent reason. I usually have a few IDE windows open and it's tiring to have to double-check the window hasn't moved.

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jimrandomh 26 minutes ago
The full-screen mode handling might be a clue about what went wrong: if you swipe up from a space that contains a full screen app, it has an animation where the app goes into a slot in the preview strip, but that animation doesn't make sense visually for a non-full-screen space. So, perhaps someone was implementing that animation, didn't want to implement an alternate animation for the non-fullscreen case, and decided to minimize the preview strip instead? And because this was after Steve Jobs had died, there was no one left in charge of UX to explain why that was a bad idea?
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fragmede 2 hours ago
that's a setting you can turn off. settings -> desktops and spaces -> reorder spaces
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brigade 13 minutes ago
Unfortunately that also forces new fullscreen apps all the way to the rightmost space, which is slightly more annoying than being unable to predict what clicking on a dock icon will do.
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willtemperley 2 hours ago
Ah thanks!

The setting is "Automatically rearrange Spaces based on most recent use" which explains why the behaviour felt so intermittent.

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mortenjorck 36 minutes ago
I can never prove it, but I like to think I'm the one to credit/blame for inspiring Apple to "inexplicably restrict [spaces] to a horizontal line only" in Leopard. I produced a concept video in 2009 that prominently featured a linear window manager with gestural navigation, and while it's mostly forgotten today, it was covered by all the tech press at the time and inspired a few attempts at adapting some of its idioms into proofs-of-concept in the early 2010s.

While linear window management is clearly not to everyone's taste, I still think it's a valid idea! It was heartening to see this launch and its reception, as I'm actually working on something in the same area right now...

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pwg 2 hours ago
> Two decades ago I had a better Mac desktop experience than I have today.

Two decades ago was 2006. I have the same desktop experience today as I had two decades ago (Fvwm2) and have had the grid virtual desktop layout this author misses so much for the entire time via the Fvwm2 (and Fvwm before that) virtual desktops feature. One of the reasons I switched to Fvwm (I no longer remember when, but sometime in the mid to late 1990's) was the grid virtual desktops feature. So I've had gridded virtual desktops for longer than twenty years. Fvwm2's configuration has been tweaked and adjusted slightly along the way, but at no time did a corporate designer decide that I no longer should have a feature I had previously been using.

Proprietary software does not have your interests at heart, it has its stock price or next quarters sales numbers at heart, nothing more.

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keyle 42 minutes ago
Yeah okay. But at least we have decent font rendering.
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regexorcist 49 minutes ago
Reading the article as a Linux user was almost infuriating. I can't imagine having my workflow, something I've refined for my needs over the years, taken away from me at the wish of a company. Before I switched to Plasma and Wayland I ran XFCE with the exact same config for maybe 15 years, unbothered by updates.
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auszeph 10 minutes ago
I use Charmstone for spatial app switching - https://charmstone.app/

Not the same as full spaces, but it gives the same vibe of always having a particular app on a particular hotkey.

I try to limit my multi-tasking though, so I can imagine where full spaces would be useful.

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a-ve 29 minutes ago
A bit of self-promotion here, but coming from Windows/Linux land I got used to having the taskbar at the bottom and never really liked the Dock. I love my Mac, and I know folks who have been using macOS for decades swear by it, but this is one UI feature from other OSes that I would have liked to see in macOS.

One major issue is that the Dock cannot filter apps between Spaces, so I built boringBar[0] for this. It frees up real estate taken up by the Dock and makes it much easier to figure out what goes where.

I do understand the need for an app switcher on the Mac, though. It has the same problem I faced: it is very app-centric rather than window-centric. Switching between windows is nigh impossible on a Mac without third-party apps, unless you like using the three-finger swipe up gesture. I have never been able to switch quickly between windows using Mission Control.

[0] https://boringbar.app

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ramathornn 2 hours ago
Magnet is easily one of the best mac apps i've ever purchased - makes window management so easy and it works great every time. Just Command + Shift and then you can pick any portion of the screen you want the window to go to.

That paired with multiple desktops does the trick for me! Highly reccommend (not sure if it's okay to share URLs? sorry in case it's not):

https://magnet.crowdcafe.com/

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cosmic_cheese 2 hours ago
Nice to see I'm not alone in missing old Spaces.

It's too bad we can't mix and match parts of releases as desired. If I could have OS X 10.9 Mavericks (last Aqua release) with 10.6 Spaces and modern macOS integration features (Continuity, etc) I'd be in heaven.

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veidr 3 hours ago
This fixes a dozens-of-times-per-day annoyance for me.

The grid is good, but even better is the instant virtual display switching.

Nowhere is the death-by-a-thousand-paper-cuts annoyance of modern macOS worse than having to hit Ctrl→→→→→→→ and suffer those repeated animations, over and over.

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xp84 3 hours ago
It's every action on Mac and iOS that does this, and it has been increasing in intrusiveness for a decade. I can't be sure why they do it, but it comes off as though their visual designers are immature, thinking we want to see their impressive animations not just in a demo, not just in a tutorial that we go through once, where we are meant to grasp the relationships between the things, but over and over again, all day long, for decades.

I freaking don't. One time was plenty. I don't want any animation. And the "reduce animation" feature's implementation is a slap in the face: all the delay -- that part is non-negotiable apparently -- but with blurry crossfades instead.

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skydhash 31 minutes ago
I'm using cwm (x11) without a compositor (never noticed tearing). And it's so nice when everything is not trying to be cute with shadows, animations and round corners. Animation only makes sense when there's a direct action that controls it (like when swapping spaces or hovering) or the system wanting to inform us (notifications). And it's better be fast. Otherwise it's just visual effects that quickly become tiring after a few days.
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chamomeal 2 hours ago
It is absolutely, positively mind boggling that you have to sit through those animations. And key presses don’t even take effect if your new desktop until the animation is done. It’s just lunacy.

How does a company with infinite resources and talented designers come up with shit like that??

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coolmitch 3 hours ago
yes! it's the worst!

I've been using Instant Space Switcher (which got a small callout in tfa) as a targeted fix for this, and it's lifechanging

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arkits 3 hours ago
DockDoor does this and a lot more. Its also open source https://dockdoor.net/
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egypturnash 2 hours ago
I just checked out DockDoor and I could not find anything related to multiple desktops in it at all.
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WaltPurvis 2 hours ago
Maybe I just missed it, but I don't see where DockDoor has anything at all to do with spaces.
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felixding 2 hours ago
Slightly off-topic: the old Aqua UI looks so much better. Not only it was much easier to see what's a control and what's text, but it also looked visually nicer (subjective, I know).
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ido 52 minutes ago
Funnily enough when Aqua was new i remember thinking Platinum looked so much better.
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digitaltrees 19 minutes ago
I loved spaces. It was so awesome. I tried stage manager the other day and died inside. Immediately turned it off.
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kritr 41 minutes ago
I’ve been using a friend’s app switcher because cmd+tab was a bit too slow and not window oriented.

But this has been pretty nice for me.

https://mwitch.viraat.dev/

It’s also open source if you want to customize it for your own preferences (pinned apps, custom keybinds, etc)

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hajile 54 minutes ago
Humans have good spatial memory and having a handful of statically-positioned desktops in a 2D plane makes navigation intuitive and consistent.

The real issue is how the ORDER of the desktops changes all the time which messes with that spatial memory and kills a lot of the productivity improvements. A consistent straight line would still be worse than a grid, but still MUCH better than the current situation.

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rafaeltorres 43 minutes ago
I think this behavior can be changed in System Settings > Desktop & Dock > Automatically Rearrange Spaces based on most recent use (turn it off)
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toomim 3 hours ago
I just installed it, but I can't get it to switch spaces, or show the grid overlay. It just beeps at me with the "you can't do that" beep. When I click "Add Desktop", it says "Could Not Add Desktop" and "GridLion could not read the current Spaces for this display."

This is a M1 macbook air. I really want to try this.

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krackers 3 hours ago
You could call it hyperspace in an homage to that old 10.6-era application which customized spaces. (Also I just realized why Apple called it called mission control, it allows you to organize spaces).

Also this is basically a replacement for the zombie TotalSpaces 3

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k__o 56 minutes ago
how do u write the "llms dont care about ux" paragraph then link to your app site that exemplifies llm ux
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gnarlouse 51 minutes ago
We need a new social media platform purely for Apple product experiences. Stay with me. People post their experiences with various parts of all their products, from hardware button position to software design and behavior. Upvotes are "It's Genius", downvotes are "It's Shit" -- because Apple has completely shirked its much needed Jobsian specter.

The joke, of course, is that I imagine a good 75% of the reviews would be "it's shit."

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antran22 47 minutes ago
They already have that, it's the Apple Support Community. Apple still manages to neglect most complaints on the site.

Honestly, people have been complaining about Apple's decision on every semi-Apple-related forum forever. Still didn't prevent them from rolling out Liquid Glass. Not sure another one would do the job

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Analemma_ 3 hours ago
Oh man, thank you! I was just complaining the other day about the missing Spaces grid… when they first took it away in Lion I looked frantically for the setting to bring it back, with no such luck.

Ironically, I think the reason they took it away was to help with fullscreen macOS apps, which are a garbage anti-feature it doesn’t seem like anybody uses. Long live the grid!

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drfloyd51 19 minutes ago
I want to use full screen apps. But they are not in the command-tab order. So… no good.
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ranebo 3 hours ago
Part of the reason I wanted to to make the app is because _I actually do like fullscreen apps_. Or at least maybe I learned to after they took away the grid. In any case I certainly wanted this app to work with them.
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OberstKrueger 58 minutes ago
As a fellow fullscreen liker (there are dozens of us! dozens!), this looks quite intriguing to me. A grid layout always fit better with my mental model of how these types of spaces should work, since I could use rows as categories of work and columns as specific applications within that category. Or one of a few other mental models I've used over the years.
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benatkin 2 hours ago
> LLMs don’t care about UX

Many parts of the LLM care about UX, and you unlock it with your feedback loop, which is a good way to unlock it but one of many ways.

One way to show that LLMs care about UX is to have one tutor you about UX. If they weren't trained to care about it, they couldn't do a decent job. But I've asked dozens of questions about UX to LLMs and they have a great deal of insight.

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Pxtl 2 hours ago
I don't get the use of the spatial layout here. A line may be cruder but if you're going full swordfish hackerman mode why are you caring about grid geography at all? Bind each to a hotkey. The only time you're swiping is when you're lost.

Like what competitive player uses scroll wheel weapon switching in Quakelike games? Nobody

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behnamoh 3 hours ago
I am not so hopeful about the future of macOS given that the next CEO of Apple is a hardware guy, not a software person.
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ibash 3 hours ago
That’s one framing, here’s another:

The next CEO of Apple is someone that cares about quality. (As evidenced by how good the hardware is)

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behnamoh 3 hours ago
> The next CEO of Apple is someone that cares about quality. (As evidenced by how good the hardware is)

I think it's important "what quality" they care about. Tim Cook cared about supply chain quality, and honestly he did an amazing job, but he didn't care much about software, vision of Apple, etc.

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LostMyLogin 3 hours ago
Their chips are quality and the hardware itself is still some of the best. Which is what I believe they were designed insinuating.
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xp84 3 hours ago
The current guy didn't ever once show a sign he cared about anything but 'Number Go Up'[1] so I don't see how anyone could be worse for those of us who care about the actual product than he was.

[1] to be clear, I stipulate Cook is indeed the world champion of Number Go Up. Nobody Number Goed Up more than Cook did. For Ternus to do Number Go Up to the same multiplier Cook did, I think he'd have to acquire all the other companies in the world.

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dyauspitr 3 hours ago
I do not like the grid. I can’t see what’s in it.
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