My reservations with MacOS Tahoe 26
2025-06-10 13:34:23 +01:00 by Mark Smith
Having recently started using a Mac laptop again, I am of course very interested in the latest announcements coming out of Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference WWDC 2025. It’s always nice to get a fresh coat of paint on an OS and Apple often adds very cool features. This year a big theme appears to be to make Spotlight, the app that you use to find things, much more central to your workflows.
I have long been a user of Alfred, which is described as an "award-winning app for macOS which boosts your efficiency with hotkeys, keywords, text expansion and more". It’s one of those rare apps that you start using and very quickly you can’t understand how you even did things before you started using it. And it appears Apple wants to add Alfred-like features to Spotlight. I’m actually all for it because one of the downsides of using Alfred is that you have to give it rather a lot of priviledges in order for it to do it’s thing. That has always made me a bit uncomfortable. As a user, having this sort of functinoality baked into the OS makes sense to me, even though I do feel for Alfred, an app that I have no complaints about.
So I like this new direction from Apple, but the thing that’s making it a bit underwealming for me is that most of the apps it says it will be able to do neat things with, I no longer use because they are basically kinda shit.
From the Verge:
Apple claims Spotlight is getting its biggest update to date, allowing users to take direct actions through it, like taking a note, sending an email, or running a Shortcut.
Sounds super cool from a high level. Yes I want to be able to do all those things.
But from a baseline reality level:
- I no longer use Notes because it’s not cross platform, it saves to a weird format, I can’t use it from my Android phone
- I no longer use Mac Mail because the UI is absolutely horrible, I can’t follow email threads that are longer than about 2 replies, it’s just easier to use Gmail in a web browser, because they have optimised it for email conversations, and
- Shortcuts. Jesus don’t get me started on fucking flipping Shortcuts.
Of all the MacOS app, fucking Shortcuts. The intensions of Shortcuts are great, it would be great to have an automation app for the everyman (or woman), but I’m sorry it’s a fucking disaster. I‘ve been using computers for decades and everytime I’ve tried Shorcuts, and I’ve tried it a lot of times, I have been unnable to do the most basic of things, and had to give up, lest I die of starvation and thirst. IMHO it’s the most unnintuitive app of all time. I never know where I am, or what I have to do, or how to troubleshoot or fix the issue that I am having. Apple, just delete the Shortcuts app, and give us a real shortcut, give us Github Actions running on our local machine, away from Github that is trying to block everything we do. For the love of everything that is good in the universe, please.
Hey maybe keep Shortcuts, but have it run ontop of a Github Actions clone, and then anyone that actually needs to get something done can use the Actions clone. Maybe one day you’ll figure out the amazing Shortcuts paradigm, or a way to impart this amazing paradigm onto regular normies. But at least until then we who actually need to do things can still operate.
So yeah, in a way I am excited by the announcements, but also, it just feels like the Apple creates it’s products by extreme top down committee meetings, and they have all these "amazing" apps that are designed and work perfectly in this imagineary place that is basically heaven, and they are just waiting for some mortals to actually implement the details of the amazing apps, except that’s never going to happen is it because the mortals can’t get anything done with your silly heaven apps, that you try to force them to use.
Not to say the current situation is great though. Notion that I use for Notes is pretty terrible a lot of the time. It’s constantly getting confused when it opens, always losing it’s place. It takes way too long to do simple things. I often forget what I was going to type into a note when I open the app because I had to faff around so much just to start typing. I’m constantly scared that Gmail will disapear if Google dies because of AI eating the world and the world wide web. And did I mention that Github has blocked my account for trying to pay them money.
Things are horrid. But you could make them so much better Apple. Just give me a way to write emails, notes and workflows in markdown. And if you want, stick some fancy UI ontop. That would be wonderful.
We really should solve the basics before we blow up the world with vibe coding, don't you think? Or we will never get out of this alive.
No pressure.
Utlimately we are probably all trying to figure out the core contradiction, which is probably why we keep getting into these strange situations in the first place. I hate being this vague, but if you try to be all perfect in some situations, you just get stuck because the core contradiction is trying to eat you. We just need to push the boulder along a little bit, and help each other along the way. This shit is difficult.
I really need to try out Asahi Linux when I get a chance. #