I'll go ahead and duck now from the tomatoes but there is a middle path as well...
Using CheapCharts and buying Movies and TV on iTunes. Yes you don't "own it" and yes there are the rare occasional license revocations but it's not often enough for me to care about that--They still remain in your library anyways.
I have been diligently collecting quality, fun, and beloved movies over the past 2 years when they go on sale. That or buying bundles when they go on sale. I've amassed a solid collection of quality media, a lot of which is not on any streaming platform. I even have a lot of Disney titles as well!
I can watch it wherever, whenever and I can download it to devices.
Not if you move countries. I moved from the UK to Canada, updated my payment method and all UK purchased content was gone from my itunes account
And yes, there is some elaborate workaround to create a brand new account and share the original with the new but fundamentally I could no longer access what I purchased because I moved. And no, I didn't get a refund for the years of purchased content.
Geez, I feel like the default behavior for that move should be to refund the content that is removed, does the content become available if you move back?
I have a little "dance" I have to do to change my store back to the UK (I'm British) and you need a valid british credit/debit card and address to switch stores to the UK store...
I live in Sweden now and I got a bit bent out of shape when I moved and discovered this was the case.
I have recently started doing this too - I prefer r/iTunesMovieDeals for discovering stuff on sale. What I have been trying to optimize for is a low cost per hour and a high critical rating.
For example, I recently got the entire bundle for HBO's Rome for $9.99. That is ~50 minutes per episode (22 episodes), or $0.54/hour, which is not a bad deal! For a casual viewer like me, who might spend <6 hours each week watching TV, this should last a little more than 3 weeks. Recently, The Sopranos went on sale for $29.99, or $0.38/hour.
For streaming vs. buying to work, you just have to be patient about nabbing ~1-2 purchases per month and not be tempted to buy every single day.
The best part is the reduced cognitive load - you don't have to spend time browsing for content every day, and there are no ads, too.
Yeah, my iTunes library is over 20 years old and it's more valuable to me now than ever. The iPod halo effect lives on.
Once or twice a year during the holiday sales season I'll buy some new shows/seasons from iTunes. These are always downloaded and backed up, so I never have to worry about license changes, etc.
For old shows (20+ years) I will either rip the old DVDs or torrent guilt free.
When I travel, I load up my iPad or an SD card with my latest queue of shows so I can stick to my weekly TV schedule..
iTunes is more trustworthy for this, but keep in mind not every service where you can buy things will be. Sony did just revoke movies this year and I wouldn't really rely on Google or Amazon for it at least
> buying Movies and TV on iTunes. Yes you don't "own it" and yes there are the rare occasional license revocations but it's not often enough for me to care about that--They still remain in your library anyways.
agreed : have been doing that since 15ish years ago, works fine, no time squandered on stupid ass "ask your doctor about ___" ads, and that time saved is hugely valuable.
Yes, it takes effort to do something clever with an LLM because LLMs can do only one type of "humor". And it's precisely the kind of humor I see everywhere on this website. Tell me that you sincerely laughed at this:
> “I bought a house through an app called Open-something and now I don't know if I own a home or a model checkpoint.”
I don't even know what this means. No human has read this and thought to themselves "this is a funny joke, let's keep it". Or how about this:
> “I tried to make a restaurant reservation and accidentally fine-tuned a language model. OpenFatigue finally made me feel seen.”
...or this:
> “My open-source project got forked into a closed product called OpenMyProject. Now I just lie on the floor.”
This is another example of "Claude make me a joke website for HN points", with zero effort behind it. There's so much real, human work in the /new queue, and we upvote this...
Hmm. I sense your dismay and while I understand the underlying argument, I would like you to offer you a nugget of wisdom bestowed to me by level 9 monk of the Tibetan variety.
As I have reached the high doors of the oft-closed monastery and sought wisdom of the doorkeeper I was gently ushered in to a courtyard, where a line was already forming to meet the enlightened one.
Patiently I have waited for the other fools to utter their nonsense at the poor master and, eventually, my time has come.
Why wouldn't Apple encourage devout users such as the author, to claim actual bounties for such finds? Like - a pair of pods for every 5 UI bugs they find? Tis a rich company after all...
Ludicrous. Bug reports by the average user are worthless and generally a net negative if you consider incorrect and duplicate reports.
Paying user for bug reports would just incentivize very prolific spammers (you know who) to fuzz your entire OS and automate sending thousands of reports a day.
There must be a way for certain automated vetting in 2026 for this, you think in terms of human reviews. Most of what's in this article is easily confirmed by VLMs today (IMHO at least, and I do a shitloads of VLM work for more than an year now, daily).
Even correct bug reports are a drain on your engineers' time and attention, and it frustrates power users to file them because being amateurs they often put too much effort into doing it.
Apple traditionally had a culture of a lot of high quality bug reports, but once those become too fast for anyone to keep in their head, there's no point to them because they'll just get lost. You might as well just go look for bugs if you run out of some. You'll find them.
These are pretty worthless critiques. In the grand scheme of things, they worked on items that actually matter as opposed to these minor things that no one will notice.
Well, it sounds like you fundamentally misunderstand the appeal and the DNA of what macOS strived for then:
> "When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through."
These things matter because that's what the OS has been championing for years. It's not Windows where it's almost expected to see a random Windows 95 dialog when you're trying to do something.
Apple slipping here means they've lost sight of their DNA and that's rot-from-within bad. If you are careful of the small details, that means they care enough that the larger details will iron themselves out.
Yes, like you said, there's bigger things that matter, but Apple's older software quality strived to achieve both, not just one or the other
They broke Mission Control, and people have definitely noticed it. But with regard to smaller details, Apple used to take pride in paying attention to such things. Scott Forstall would go over Apple's interfaces using a photography loupe. Your "who cares" sloppy attitude is a relatively new thing in the Apple world.
There was some news about this recently sadly I cannot find it at the moment. I guess there's a scale that is used to measure sugar content; the Brix scale, and fruit is moving up the scale really rapidly over the past decade or so.
Asking out of genuine curiosity... Do you think the Asahi maintainers could use your work to speed up future GPU driver development? M4, M5, M6 and so on... I am assuming they wouldn't just accept your work outright, but instead could they use it to substantially speed up their development process by mapping out a lot of the GPU after which they can focus on optimization and other aspect of drivers? Do you think they will?
I don't use Asahi now but that's largely because my current Apple M series hardware is still supported. I see a day where an older unsupported Mac is running in a rack in my basement or being used by my kids as a general purpose computer.
I grew up with DOS, Win 95, 98, 2000, XP and so on. I have to ask when was Microsoft above breaking things? In my mind they always had a reputation as being pretty shoddy. As soon as MacOS (OS X) was a viable alternative I gleefully switched and never looked back. I still keep a Windows machine around for gaming but I don't use it for anything more than that. All my serious work happens inside of MacOS.
The difference is that now the breakage comes to you instead of being something optional that you can seek out or ignore. I remember installing, like, fewer than ten updates ever for Windows 95: The ‘95A’ patch, a few updates to Dial-Up Networking, WinSock update, CHM Help Update, MSXML, MSVCRT. I steadfastly avoided the webby Active Desktop IE4 ‘Desktop Update’ but did install the browser itself.
I think people just forgot how insanely unstable and prone to breaking MS OSes were back then. Crashes and hangs that take down your entire machine were common, and “reinstalling the OS” was seen as a normal thing that you just had to do every once in a while.
Windows 95 was pretty much broken “by design”. This is truer than it seems, especially if you skip being charitable by taking the context into account, namely that Microsoft mainly designed Windows 95 for compatibility. (The contemporary Windows NT on the other hand was a much cleaner design, though still questionable above its kernel layer).
Just not being able to use one application is better than your whole OS going up in smoke every couple weeks. Yes, Windows 95A on the wrong hardware (and how would you know?) did that.
I mean, sure, although the crashes could sometimes come with data loss as well.
You might now ponder whether a broken login screen, i.e. temporarily not being able to access data, is maybe better than downright losing it, but my point was more that I sometimes get the feeling that earlier MS DOS/Windows OSes are now seen through some kind of nostalgia glasses, that seem to make the OSes much more stable and put together than they actually were.
In my experience, most somewhat mainstream OSes were much less shoddy. This includes various Unixes and Unix-likes, but also OS/2 (which was jointly developed by Microsoft, with IBM).
Oh, man. The "Active" Desktop. The only thing that it kept active was my CD drive when I was forced to reinstall Windows every time I tried to make it work on my PC and it broke everything.
I was all about some 98lite ‘Sleek’ on my hand-me-down 486DX/2-66 in the late '90s, Windows 98/98SE/Me with the original Windows 95 pre-OSR2.5 non-Active Explorer swapped in :)
Pretty much up until Windows 10. Not that every decision they made was great (it wasn't), but they very rarely shipped stuff which was straight up broken. They used to have a commitment to quality which they threw away around the time of Win10 when they fired the QA staff.
This was the era when I had replaced explorer.exe with litestep and had a reminder to reinstall Windows every six months to keep the computer running smoothly. It wasn't MS "shipping" stuff that broke it IIRC (though patches did have that effect), but rather a steady degradation in performance over the months. I tried to hold in abeyance with tools like defrag, but to no avail.
* Surfing the web
* Using Eudora lite for email
* Playing Quake1 and GLQuake, probably some Quake 2 and StarCraft around that time
* Using mIRC a ton to chat on undernet
* Using Xylinx to do my coursework for CS314
* Using MS Visual J++ do do more coursework (good riddance!)
* Writing papers in (I think) StarOffice, but it might have been just "Word" at that point.
This was right around the year I switched to Linux because of the issues. Though, I have to admit, it was a memory and DVD drive upgrade that drove me over the edge. I guess MS had a "point" system for each hardware component, and if enough points of components changed, they considered the machine a different computer, and would refuse to boot (since you didn't buy a license for that "different" computer). They told me I had to call them so I could boot my machine, at which point I table flipped, formatted my drive, and asked my buddy to burn a whole bunch of floppies so I could install Slackware.
They were essentially just huge steaming piles of shit.
What you are describing was true at the time for Linux. It was an absolute bear to set up (at the time of win95/98) if you had anything unusual but once it ran it ran.
This has never been true for windows although the reasons why have shifted over time: it used to not work primarily because it was just shit. Now it additionally doesn't work because it is actively malicious.
I am writing this from the perspective of someone who is regularly forced to use Microsoft's products for work. I am familiar with the subject matter.
Random existing Windows bugs breaking things, third party software breaking things on install/uninstall, and bloat causing problems are very different from Microsoft forcing an update that introduces new flaws in windows and breaks Windows in ways that had been previously working.
Windows was always buggy as hell, but windows updates didn't break windows as often and most importantly they were also optional. For decades people would go online on Patch Tuesday to look to see if people were reporting problems with the newest round of Windows updates. Maybe there'd be a problem with an update and a specific network card, or a certain video driver, but Windows didn't usually break Windows.
Even if it did, you at least had the option to just not update. These days Microsoft doesn't care about problems with their updates. Even when they are warned ahead of time that there are problems they're happy to shove them down our throats, at any time of the day or night, and break Windows or even delete your personal files (https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/10/microsoft-suspends-d...) in the process.
Out of all the vague and unprovable things that never happened, that one never happened the most.
I'm sure you can find users on any OS complaining with "random" breakages but unless you can show any data that proves it was due to the OS and not your HW or third party apps or your own actions, this means nothing.
Very cool. Of course we both understand that this is the case - this is why it is in scare quotes. You are arguing about something I literally acknowledged in my original post. The issue is that it happened due to what is for all intents and purposes bitrot: It breaks during regular use due to small compounding errors that happen due to bad software design. In practical use this means what I wrote, even though to the most pedantic of nerds it means literally what happened. It can in fact mean both things
I just started using windows after being on macOS since Vista. I planned to go full Linux for a gaming pc, but there are still some kinks, so dual booting it is.
The shocking negative was the amount of ads and tracking I had to get rid of, like chinese budget phone tier of crap.
Once you get rid of that though, the experience is halfway decent. But there are absolute head scratchers for 2026: some dialogs literally blurry because they haven't adapted them to my 4k display, apps adding itself to self start at boot left and right, and so on.
The most laughable event happened after I installed windows home when my license was for windows profesional. The official way to solve this was... to turn down wifi and write a hardcoded switch-to-professional key as a fake activation. That was the most amateur workaround I've seen in decades.
> some dialogs literally blurry because they haven't adapted them to my 4k display
Windows is amateur hour when it comes to 4K support. They have rewritten some applications recently and they are hilariously broken. Like the task manager or the freaking start menu. If the scaling changes once they’re running, they end up a blurry mess.
Also, the task manager never recovers after changing from dark to light mode or vice-versa. The start menu is broken the first time it opens, but it then recovers.
The taskbar sometimes shows the icons at the wrong scale, so you have these weird mis-aligned portions of icons.
At this point I’m wondering if anyone in Redmond actually uses this OS.
That lack of care is the part that's annoying to me, combined with them being one of the largest corporations that has the resources to throw at those issues if they chose to do so. Quality issues aside, there's lots of similar aspects like the long drawn out migration of the control panel (i.e. their own control panel applets, putting aside third party) since win8 in 2012, if they wanted they could have completed that in the last 14 years and however many major releases you count since then.
It may not be the bean counting optimal, but it is a long term image they project of the company.
I think the general issue they have is that pretty much nobody who cares chooses Windows actively. It's mostly gamers, which seem to be on the way out, corporations who don't care about this, and creatives who, for whatever reason, don't want to buy a mac.
I'm in the latter category. As a Sunday photographer who daily drives Linux for work, I can't justify investing in Apple hardware. I used to daily drive macs, so I'm not against Apple on principle, but for my current needs it's just too expensive, since for my actual work Linux works better for me and the hardware is free (through work). Since I don't spend 8 hours a day using Windows and my income doesn't depend on it, I just put up with the shoddy quality. I can do what I need with my photos and it's good enough.
I've recently switched to a Mac after years on Linux, basically due to my frustration with the way the Linux desktop is being developed and the lack of quality all around for that platform.
Overall, it's an absolute joy.
It just works extremely well.
Like any new platform it has its fair share of quirks and inexplicable behavior. My two biggest pet peeves are magic interactions that are very useful, but I don't know how to repeat (my recent downloads file things disappeared from by dock on the last reboot), and extremely missable interactions (apps asking for the permission to send notifications is an extremely missable notification that you have to hover over -> Options -> Allow).
However, at the end of the day, these are all things I can learn. A few I can change with Vorssaint.
The issues with Windows and desktop Linux are much much deeper than that.
Meta-topic: I've seen this comment many times over the years, and it never results in a discussion where folks can agree. My reaction reading it is "You must be holding it wrong!" because I daily-drive Linux in many more ways than one (servers, laptops, desktops, handhelds (Hackberry Pi), SBCs, and, Valve-willing, VR headsets), and adore the Linux desktop. I use Pop!_OS almost everywhere, but Debian/Ubuntu/Arch with IceWM or Fluxbox (or the like) works great.
Anyway, this is not a call for you to start listing all the stuff that's broken (though feel free!), I'm just amazed that, with years of power and freedom on Linux, you truly enjoy Mac more. Just goes to show each of us has our own workflow and tastes!
Same for me and I don't use MacOS for the same reason some people don't use Linux, I find the UI lacking and confusing.
And more importantly, MacOS (like Windows) are still poorly translated compared to your average Linux desktop with some leftover always in English. It's okay for me as a software engineer but it's not acceptable enough to give to my parents.
It's a bit deeper than just a series of bugs. For all of Linux's power and freedom, its modern desktop architecture is extremely restrictive.
* There is only one systemd --user session per user with one D-Bus instance. So you can only have one desktop instance active at a time.
* There is no way for privileged apps/scripts to generically control the desktop or other apps in Wayland. (so no accessibility, AI computer use or even general scripting)
* There is no differentiation between configuration that should be active on (user, machine) tuple, and configuration that should be active on (user, *) tuple. (even Windows gets this right!)
* Desktop apps do not report rich activity information so they cannot be smartly memory managed.
* Desktop apps cannot generally be restored after getting killed/system shutdown.
* No application identity, PIDs voluntarily take on application identities in Wayland and on D-Bus, but PIDs that don't can easily escape observability, and if they consume resources but not enough to show up high in top, good luck knowing about them.
As technical as I am, none of those items really matter to me at all. So it's a great illustration of how the long tail of user needs is what ends up differentiating us in these discussions. It's very rare to get deep enough to actually identify that. I've always treated the desktop like a second-class citizen on Linux with the command line being my primary interface, and that has adapted so well to agentic usage that it never even occurred to me that desktop tool use was missing.
Which is an interesting assertion by itself, since I have a local deep-seek model that routinely uses scripting to fire up servers, browsers, take screenshots, and assess how it's converging on a solution. I'm sure there's a long discussion to be had about how all of that is just a dirty hack, but for my purposes, it's been working excellently.
As a kid I vaguely remember our family had a stack of Dr. Dobb’s Journals with one particular article actually warning about the dangers of doublespace, and since it was completely optional (despite being touted as a flagship feature) we kind of dodged a bullet and had a pretty reasonable experience with DOS 6.
> I grew up with DOS, Win 95, 98, 2000, XP and so on.
For me it's worse: I grew up on stuff like the C64 and then the Amiga. Switching to DOS was a serious step backwards.
> I have to ask when was Microsoft above breaking things?
Never: they've always been mediocre.
> As soon as MacOS (OS X) was a viable alternative I gleefully switched and never looked back.
I switched to Linux in the early Slackware days (then Debian 1.1). Most of the world followed and now tens of billions of devices are running Linux, not Windows.
Games I cant play on Linux are kernel level anti-cheat shooters. Anti cheat should be handled on the server anyway, no one should be installing that on their machines. Everything else works great!
I don't remember them being so bad. Windows 7, 8 were great. Visual Studio 6 was good. Excel was top quality for a long time. What used to be annoying to me was that Microsoft ignored the common Unix conventions for no good reason and tended to reinvent stuff. It was like smart nerds were tasked to come up with stuff without any awareness of prior art, or as if Bill G snd Steve B were trying to lock in customers into incompatible stuff. Obviously not great but working. What we get now is pure slop and negligence.
The internet revolted against 8 and stuck on 7 until it was EOL’ed and went straight to 10. I don’t recall 10 being positively received, but the hate has moved to windows 11. I’m happy to be corrected though.
The problem with 8 was that the UI was designed for a touch screen without a thought given to the fact that most users were going to be driving it with a mouse. Reliability-wise, it was perfectly fine.
The problem with 10 was that it was pushed as a "security update" on Windows Update. It was force-fed to unwitting/unwilling Windows 7 users like caged geese at a foie-gras farm.
That betrayal was arguably the first step towards the near-total enshittification of Windows that we see today, if you don't count the introduction of product activation with Windows XP.
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