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Here's what I find most puzzling about these things: Apple does amazingly helpful WWDC sessions on how to profile and improve your code, how to prioritize performance...but when it comes to their own apps, it's like they forget everything they know?

Messages on Mac is one of my biggest annoyances. How do you make one of the most used messaging tools and have the keyboard lag so badly while typing - sometimes even skipping typed letters? It's a complete mystery to me.

4 comments

There's always been a lot of room for them to optimise performance on macOS to a level that they do iOS, but modern Apple basically wants macOS to go away and sees it as more of an annoyance, so they don't spend any time tuning it. Then the elephant in the room is SwiftUI itself, there's a performance cliff there, wherein if you've optimised everything else, you might just hit the brick wall that's the layout engine with no recourse or ability to even peak under the hood. We're at a point now where building a fully native macOS app, with the first-party toolchain, will give you far worse performance (in terms of responsiveness not resource usage) than something like Electron. I have a suspicion teams inside of Apple are also running up against these issues as they start to actually adopt the framework.

A modestly sized list of WiFi networks (30-40 items) slows down and stutters while scrolling on a M4 MBP. SwiftUI is a performance disaster, and I refuse to use it outside of toy single screen projects

Yeah it's in a really bad spot on macOS still, iOS performance is a lot better. I'm sure all of this can be overcome but I'm not certain it's a priority for them.

Considering how good the hardware is supposed to be, iOS is not that great actually. This is why Androids that have benchmarks score way lower than iPhone can actually feel smoother to use. Apple is brute forcing the thing and making all their customers pay, it's useless to have the most powerful chip if you waste all its power running garbage code.

And this is exactly how macOS and iOS feel nowadays: the hardware is supposed to be great but it doesn't feel that good because the software sucks.

I agree with you, just my obsevations from using SwiftUI "in anger" for the last few years, performance is atrocious on macOS and acceptable on iOS, especially with some tuning.

Oh yes, I agree, it's not as bad on iOS for sure. But acceptable for a premium device is a very low bar to clear. It becomes much less acceptable over the years as well, infuriating.

In my country the mainline iPhone start around 1k€ and even the "e" is over 700€. If I had paid 2-300€ like a low-end android device I would find it acceptable but Apple only sells stuff that is the high end of pricing, therefore it is not acceptable.

> modern Apple basically wants macOS to go away and sees it as more of an annoyance, so they don't spend any time tuning it

[citation needed]

Oh, the leadership keeps saying that MacOS is separate from iOS and they care about MacOS.

And then they keep adding iOS UIs into MacOS, produce horrible laggy iOS-optimised software for it, and call it a day.

Actions speak louder than words.

Doesn't mean they want macOS to go away though. Merging code-bases is a bad thing now?

They are not just "merging codebases". They are literally letting it stagnate in all the parts that matter, and all the user-facing parts are iOSified, or literally delegated to iOS with "you can run iOS programs directly now".

And yes. Merging codebases is a bad thing when it's done without any care for one of the paradigms. The one that they don't like, don't understand, and want to go away.

What sort of citation would you be looking for here? It's generally accepted that it's not a priority for them, the discrepencies in performance and features between UIKit vs AppKit have always existed and are even more pronounced in SwiftUI. Due to how it's used they can't apply the same business model to the mac as they can iOS and therefore can't extract as much value from it, this is reflected in revenue.

Poke around on jobs.apple.com looking at developer positions and everything will become clear. There seem to be at least an order of magnitude more outsourced software development jobs than jobs within the US/EU.

You don't outsource to India because you want to get better quality products. You do it so you can pay a terrible Indian programmer $30,000/yr instead of hiring a great Indian programmer for $300,000/yr in Cupertino.

Apple is a large company. The people making those videos do not also work on Messages.

Messages on Mac freezes up for 5-10 seconds every time I get a Screentime request. It’s a hot mess.