Right now you have the MacBook Air 13" and 15" in 3 variants and 4 colours, that makes for a total of 24 models. M4 processors only.

The MacBook Pro 14" can be purchased with the M5, M4 Pro, M4 Max in 2 colours for a total of 12 models. Then the 16" with the M4 Pro and M4 Max in 2 colours for a total of 8 models. That makes another 20 models.

That is 56 different models to pick from! And that is before customisation.

Why is there even a MacBook Pro without a Pro chip? And why are you selling M4 and M5 processors at the same time? Why release the M5 non-Pro in a Pro laptop and not put it in the Air, leaving it with an M4? The M5 is sometimes better than the M4 Pro, making it hard for the customer to decide to pick which one.

Don't even get me started on the convoluted mess of the iPhone. Apple sells the iPhone 16 (5 models), iPhone 16 Plus (10 models), iPhone 16e (6 models), iPhone 17 (10 models), iPhone Air (12 models), iPhone 17 Pro (9 models), iPhone 17 Pro Max (12 models). 64 models to pick from!

I remember Apple selling the iPhone 4. You would walk into the store, pick a Black or White model, 16 or 32 gigabyte. If you wanted colours, get a case.

I occasionally use a macbook pro at £WORK for a few apple specific processes, and it currently has 188.67gb of "system data" that I have no idea how to clean up or remove. It's marked separately from the 11.01gb of macOS in the storage settings, and it constantly complains about the disk almost being full. Updating and restarting don't clear it, I wish I could just rm -rf it all. Does anyone know how I can at least see what it is, and potentially even clean it up?

EDIT: Thanks for the CleanMyMac recommendations, the 57.6gb of xcode caches that didn't show up in the "developer" section of the storage settings might have had something to do with it

Tim Cook is more of a regular CEO that wants to make money for the shareholders. He started doing stock buybacks and in general prioritizing making money.

macOS is still the best OS I'd want to use IMO--if you can manage to avoid upgrading to Tahoe--but Apple seems to definitely be on its way down.

Hopefully something changes.

Two days ago, I finally upgraded. Liquid Glass is one of the worst things I've ever seen in terms of design. It reminds me of when I personalized old cheap android phones or Linux distros just "to look cool". Cool-looking: yes. Unusable: also yes. Tasteful design: almost absent.

Just the increase of the border-radius in all elements makes it hideous. Apps with a search bar on a scrollable list look like a CSS bug when the search bar is on top of the elements. Neither the search bar nor the element underneath are visible. Although this applies to most transparency effects on Liquid Glass. Neither the elements above nor below the "glass" are visible. And the extra value added is zero.

The thing is, I can still adapt to it, or tweak transparency and contrast. But I've seen elderly relatives struggle just because WhatsApp decided to add the "Meta AI" floating button. I can't imagine what this "inaccessible" UI changes can do.

The battery sometimes randomly drains within less than a day. There are absolutely no benefits of the new visual effects.

The watch was my favorite apple device because it helps me to reduce screen time on the phone. Now it is a source of anger.

There is something seriously wrong with system data in iOS 26.

It's that the basic shit is now so broken. Safari is unusable with too many tabs because it won't suspend them. The Tahoe app launcher will randomly remove apps from the list, and you need to open Finder to get it. Apple Books is unusable; the book keeps blanking out, it displays random error messages, search is slow and cumbersome because you need to scroll the search results list each time.

There's a collapse in basic functionality where it's obvious they don't use their own products.

I agree, Apple needs a focus on quality. Plenty of Apple fans have been asking, for years, for a bug-fix release of all the OS's.

I don't know where the buck stops. I would point to Craig Federighi, but no doubt if Tim Cook told him he had to pivot to quality over features, Craig would do as Tim asked.

(I went to one Federighi feature meeting where engineers from the various teams show up with a demo ready to show and Craig goes round robin within the conference room watching each demo, asking questions, and then generally giving a thumbs up or not. It is done very rapid fire though—we were expected to show up "ultra-prepared". I watched him go from team to team before getting to us and my impression of his capabilities and understanding of the OS as a whole was in no way diminished by the experience. Craig is a capable guy. I want him and Apple to succeed.)

I've been asking myself the same for a couple of years now.

Assuming Tim Apple uses an iPhone, does he just throw it in the garbage and pull out a fresh one every time the battery reaches 20%? Is no one at Apple irked by the low battery notification modal that blocks all interactions until you dismiss it, the same way it has for 19 freaking years now? It even covers the PIN entry form and makes the device unusable. I honestly think it's more reasonable to assume they're all on Android.

I run into this daily. I don't understand how this got through QA

Life on the outside is really nice. You can just... do things.

I am eyeing a few tutorials on building my own cloud.

She has an old MacBook and old iPhone (circa 2017?). Apple no longer updates these OS’ even the bundled Safari.

One of the bureaus, Experian I think, has a TLS cert that is not compatible with the old OSs so all the “don’t trust this site” warnings come up.

How many people have incomplete credit freezes because of this? Apple is of a size that this hurts society.

I tried then to workaround and use apple Image Capture app to copy some files - always the latest picture is not available in the app. So now I have to do like cavemen to share some stuff to my email and download file in the email. And share button sometime fails as well...

They really need to do a year release that just focuses on fixing all the broken things and cleaning things up.

Also, here's Tim kissing fascist ass on the same day ICE shot an unarmed man: https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/tim-cook-attended-melani...

https://derlien.com/ "Disk Inventory X"

regularly to find stuff to clean up.

It really does seem like nobody at Apple is actually using any of the software they're releasing. Its just such shoddy quality control!

(Oh man. That came out super smug. Imagine the non-smug version of that message. Maybe it should have been something like "I went on a project to reduce the amount of screen time over the last couple of years and generally feel healthier and happier. Pick your own level of engagement with tech, but I encourage you to think about if you're spending too much time on your phone (or commenting on threads at ycombinator.com) at least every couple of months.")

But I did it nonetheless and system data reduced! So crazy is real.

Now we're all going to have to pay for Gemini model storage, probably 2 to 4 GB.

That means we're probably paying $10 per-device for the storage required to have Google's model on "our" devices. Which we never asked for.

They could just make it an optional part of the install. Does anyone really care about the on-board "intelligence"?

Gemini FFS.

This kind of BS has become very common with Apple. There's a very pretty happy path, and a very ugly muddy trail if you fall off the scenic route.

Just saying...

  a. Apple is not the same company it was 40 years ago.  Or 20 years ago.  Or 5 years ago.

  b. Apple quality varies greatly over time.  I'm typing this on an 8 year old Dell XPS laptop.  I've never had an Apple product I bought new last more than about 4 years.  People tell me they've had Apple products last 6-8 years before dying.  Clearly there's a distribution, but the central tendency of the apple curve is lower than the central tendency of Dell or Lenovo.

  c.  Apple is filled with <insert epithet I can't repeat here>.  Without exception, everyone I've met in the product group is actively trying to figure out how to get you to buy a new iProduct.  And they seem to hire only sociopaths.  Engineering doesn't seem to be overrun with sociopaths.  I think because at the end of the day they have to build things that work for at least a few months after you unbox them.

Endless restart loop. No recovery possible, even with a second iPhone and mac. It’s a known bug for years.