(The first section’s penned by our erstwhile contributor from the Channel Islands.)
I was asked to write a few words about this. They weren't completely serious. They asked me to look at and comment on Apple's latest desktop iteration. They can’t have been completely serious.
It's so interesting, so sensational, that it's not even mentioned on their front page. Apple makes its money from idiots and they know it. That 'OS X' page - note the old name still works - is a sales page, no more. But they are trying to convince fanboys they need to upgrade - which, by the way, often means they'll have to put out for new hardware. After all, the OS itself is free, get it?
So let's get down to it. Plug your virgin ears.
Ventura
It's called 'Ventura'. They used to be named after cats. Puma, Tiger, Lion, Leopard, Snow Leopard... Now it's places. Whoopee. But has anything really changed - aside from the fact that, in the spirit of planned obsolescence, they already ditched their heavily pimped ‘Dark Mode’?
OS vendors are supposed to work on and improve their OS. Is there any indication on this page that they've actually worked on their OS?
'Works smarter. Plays harder. Goes further.'
Oh. That tells us a lot.
'Ventura makes the things you do most on Mac even better, with powerful new ways to get more done, share and collaborate in your favourite apps, immerse yourself in next‑level games, and take full advantage of your other devices.'
OK. So show us.
Nobody uses local mail anymore. Only Apple fanboys. Local mail exposes your sender-IP. And you don't want that. Even Gmail hides your sender-IP. Although you know they're hanging onto that data, because they're Google. But using local mail is about as smart as using, for example, Apple's iCloud. Because Apple is a member of the NSA PRISM group. So you know everything you do in Apple Mail is shared by their friends in Fort Meade. You don't really want that, or do you?
'Undo send. Schedule send. Follow up. Add rich links.'
Modern webmail services can already do this. As to what 'rich links' is: who cares? You’re talking email here, right?
Spotlight
Does anyone seriously use Spotlight? I sure don't. It's designed wrong and it's a resource hog, and if this is how you have to find things on your computer, invest in a drool bib.
Safari and Passkeys
Almost all browsers have the equivalent but hang on - Safari is your choice of browser? Don't do that. Safari means Apple, means walled garden, means vital fixes will arrive later rather than sooner. And the Safari programmers aren't the best: their browser breaks faster and more often than others.
Shared Tab Groups
All browsers have them (if you want them). Wasn't this Apple page about the OS, not some dinky application?
Messages
'You can now edit a message you just sent or unsend a recent message altogether.'
What they're describing are two sides of the same coin. Anybody can do this.
(OK, this is getting boring, so let's skip a bit.)
Stage Manager
'Stage Manager automatically organises your apps and windows in a single view.'
Or you could just use a decent file manager and/or shelf utility. And what's wrong with the Dock and the myriad other doodads Apple came up with over the years?
The 'You're Kidding' Department
'Switch between apps'
'Create your ideal workspace'
FaceTime
You mean like Zoom?
Continuity Camera
Why does Apple insist on using female models that aren't quite pretty?
Desk View
Oh please. That's reason to upgrade?
Games
And we're gone.
Now we’re going to talk about some of the things Apple won't tell you about. Just to firm up your trust in Apple.
Ventura is OS X is NeXTSTEP?
Ventura is OS X is NeXTSTEP. Except it's not. Apple paid $429 million for NeXTSTEP. No one would pay a wooden nickel for Ventura. Ever since the 1996 merger which saved Apple's sorry ass, things have gone downhill.
NeXTSTEP was created in Redwood City. Steve Jobs had been forced out of Apple and he spent a long time figuring out what to do next. He ran into a lot of academics who said they had workstation computing needs but couldn't afford it. NeXT was founded to make a product for not 'the rest of us' but 'the best of us'.
NeXT boxes didn't reinvent the wheel. NeXT found what Linus Torvalds didn't find: FreeBSD. That's a close relative of the original Bell Labs Unix, so it's solid. NeXT put an OO veneer on the top. This veneer was for the graphical user interface (GUI) and, for once, somebody finally got it right. Steve Jobs at Apple visited Xerox and came away with the visual idea, but Apple had no clue what was really going on inside. Microsoft took Macintosh prototypes to build the Multiplan spreadsheet for the coming Mac but also took notes to design their first-ever Windows release in December 1985, and they totally misunderstood as well. Philippe Kahn's upstart Borland tried to create an OO underbody and made it even worse. Then along came NeXT and suddenly it all made sense.
Pundits complained about NeXT's postponed releases and Steve Jobs dismissed them, saying NeXTSTEP was five years ahead of its time.
Steve Jobs was wrong. NeXTSTEP was twenty-five years ahead of its time. Although now, under the leadership of Tim Cook, those twenty-five years have dwindled to near-zero.
NeXTSTEP wasn't a finished product at the time of the merger. It was miles ahead of everyone else, but it still had kinks to iron out, even if they weren't immediately visible to the end-user. The file system needed to be encapsulated and document orientation had to be extrapolated full-out. But NeXT had come closer to perfection than anyone before (or since).
The people at Apple understood none of this. They never learned to code in C, much less with the ‘OO preprocessor' Objective-C. Numerous exchanges with their bug-reporting team made this clear. The Apple people who took over the NeXT code didn't understand how it worked.
The issue of full-out document orientation is more cosmetic, the matter of file system encapsulation directly critical. Apple continue to fail on both counts.
When Wall Street started using NeXT boxes, Apple was still thinking it's only a PC. That a PC has but one user and that the only security you needed was a lock on the door.
Think of the timeline. Of when Tim Berners-Lee literally invented the 'Web' - his application called 'WorldWideWeb.app', created on a NeXT box, if that can give you a clue. No one, not NeXT, not anyone, had understood in the early 1990s how things were about to catch up with them. NeXT with its FreeBSD had a head start on the rest of the market, but it was first after MS Windows 95 and the 'web revolution' that the coming issues became apparent.
Bell Labs Unix had never gone in for file system encapsulation because there was nothing to encapsulate. Thirty years later, with the advent of multitasking and GUIs and the web, there was. DEC's David Cutler built his bulletproof VMS around the concept of objects - not object orientation, just objects - self-protecting code entities with strictly defined access points, code whose highest priority was self-preservation. Mainframe guru James Martin had touched on the topic earlier, referring to what he called 'mathematically robust functions'.
These concepts were largely ignored by others in the industry. Berners-Lee hadn't finished putting the final touches on his World Wide Web. How was he to see, in his Swiss crystal ball, what his invention would bring?
At the time of the NeXT-Apple merger, NeXT file management was layered. The bottom layer was the collection of FreeBSD primitives, the code that command line programmers has used for 20+ years.
The next layer was NeXT's NSFileManager class. This class resides in the NeXT shared library Foundation. This code is completely abstract. It does not appear on screen. Its job is to wrap all the Unix primitives.
The final and uppermost layer is NSWorkspace. This code is visible - or at least it was until Apple's engineers got their hands on it. This is where user interaction is supposed to be handled.
The counterpart code in the open source GNUstep is much more sophisticated and much more secure. Their code owners were quite shocked when they learned how little OS X code was left to handle safety and security issues.
Simple matters like flagging recursive copies or self-defeating moves are handled by GNUstep but not Apple. How the original NeXT code behaved is not known, but the idea that the file system itself is so wobbly that protective code has to be built into each and every client app shows how untenable Apple's position is.
There have been too many scandals over the years, such as the Tom Karpik scandal, which showed that source files on a move operation over volume boundaries were deleted before the operation was certified to have been completed. Or how about the file type overwrite scandal which persists to this day, where entire hives of files and directories can be demolished in an instant, where no self-respecting OS in the universe, not even Apple's old 'MacOS', would have permitted such lunacy?
The hierarchy of NSWorkspace - NSFileManager - Unix was correct as far as it went, but it wasn't enough. Had the NeXT mentality been able to persist even after the merger in 1996, things might have been better. But we're talking here about programmers who can hardly program, who have no experience whatsoever with C or other nontrivial system domains, who, even if confronted with the actual original NeXT source code, will grasp precious little. Add to that the fact that Scott Forstall revealed how he'd taken the 'brightest' programmers at Apple for his iPhone project, leaving what precisely to deal with legacy NeXT code they couldn't handle? Ask anyone who wrote any nontrivial code for OS X and they'll tell you. It was bloody Amateur Hour.
Trashing a code snippet is one thing, but trashing fundamental designs is another, often leading to irreparable damage. Apple's NSWorkspace - NSFileManager - Unix hierarchy is broken today and will in all likelihood never be repaired. It's doubtful any of those 'programmers' even understand what they've done. NSWorkspace and NSFileManager are no longer complete or congruent. The one is not the visible counterpart of the other, the other is not the complete abstraction of the one. It's as if Apple's people go into the NeXT storeroom now and then and just rip shit off the shelves with no regard for what damage they create, either at the time of their crime or further down the line.
Management's Plumbers Pipe Solution
Management suits have a tendency not to regard programmers as real human beings, and not to think of technical consequences when they come with their ludicrous ideas. If something gets screwed up - such as the change from secure copy to insecure move in ordinary file I/O - then they seem to think that anything can be fixed as long as you can hire on a few new programmers to fix it.
But it takes time for even seasoned programmers to 'discover' new code, and code is not the same thing as people. Code has to be good to its roots. NeXT code used to be pretty good. Apple has yet to show any good code added to the base.
Systems that rely on open source can always be fixed. Closed source systems like Apple's cannot. One has to rely on both the goodwill and the skills of the people on the other side, and that's always going to be doubtful when it comes to Apple.
So keep this in mind: Apple will rarely release a product so rum that it causes global embarrassment, even if that can happen and often has happened. But they're the kind of company who will let management wreak havoc and then apply the 'plumbers pipe solution’ when things get too fucked up. You'll see a solution for today, even as the real issues are pushed further down the line.
Who's the Owner?
Oh lovely Apple, always looking out for you, always protective of your privacy…
Bullshit. The entire Apple marketing model of today is primed to suck out as much money as they can from you. It's unconscionable, it's ugly, but it's too wide a topic to be included here. Suffice it to say that Apple is not your friend.
Getting safe and secure hardware that's not invasive and doesn't spy on you is another topic that's too wide to bring in here. Just try to be as smart and as cautious as you can until someone or something comes along to again tip things in the people's favour.
Secret Agreement?
Steve Jobs could have crushed Bill Gates. Jobs probably regarded Gates as subordinate. Yet Jobs didn't crush Gates - he borrowed money from him instead.
Did the two twits have a deal? Wasn't Jobs man enough to do the right thing for the planet? Was part of the Jobs-Gates deal that Jobs not go after the Windows hegemony? For, after January 1997, Jobs had the far superior product and he also had plenty of market clout and brand recognition.
This was back when the latest version of Windows was Windows 95, a 16-bit cooperative multitasking monstrosity. And it wasn't until 1998 with the release of Windows 98 and especially Windows 98SE that Microsoft became unreachable.
Steve Jobs could have crushed Bill Gates. He had the world at his fingertips. But to his own company's and the world's detriment, he opted not to act. Will we ever know why he didn't?
Postscript
I gotta say this is my favourite screenshot of all time.
I mean, just read what those idiots wrote. Try to imagine how they think. They’d stand in the square like Winston and Julia without ever having to visit Room 101.
They just admit right out how fucked over they are and how much they love it.
This is another favourite. From the University of Missouri School of Journalism. Click the photo to find the piece, penned by me.
And does anyone remember what hardware issues Apple was having? The AppleDefects website might be down, but their tally lives on.
Cracking cases, display failures, thermal grease applied by the litre, misaligned cases, improperly sealed cases, DVD drives destroying DVD discs, Bridget Riley lines, other coloured lines on boot, blocked air vents, palmrest discolouration, mooing fan noises, ticking fan noises, random shutdowns, oozing chemicals, burning chemicals, toxic odours, hard drive thuds and clicks, idle CPU noises, keyboard failures, DVD drive noises, failed and blown speakers, kernel panics, faulty trackpads, headphones causing kernel panics, vibrating cases, weak and uneven LCDs, battery failures, static noises and cracking, iSight malfunction, totally DOA units, swollen batteries, exploding batteries, hard drive failures, high pitched squeals, electric shocks, melting power adapters, hissing LCDs, uneven LCDs, white dots on LCDs, scrambled displays, video output failures, underclocked graphics, loose lid hinges, warped casing, corroded casing, wireless drivers causing kernel panics, Wi-Fi signal failures, broken headphone connections, vertical blue lines on displays…
- BCB