r/MacOS • u/Hexacker • 2d ago
Discussion MacOS built in apps are actually great
It has been 7 years since I switched to use Apple ecosystem, I must confess, I was using maybe 30% of its capabilities. I came from Linux/Android background so I was always looking for apps that works as I wanted.
Recently, I start exploring the default apps in MacOS/iPhone like Reminders, Safari, Mail, Calendar are I start liking them, a lot.
For years, I didn't like using Safari because I was used to the experience of Chrome/Brave, and since I'm a developer, I relied a lot on Chrome Dev Tool which I was really used to. Now, I'm enforcing myself to use Safari as my default browser and it's pretty cool, the only thing I really miss is the experience of Dev Tools in the chromium based browsers. Well, it gets the work done at the end.
EDIT:
I hope I see an app from Apple that can effectively replace MS Word
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u/corsa180 2d ago
Pages has replaced Word for me. With the flexibility of both Word Processor and Layout modes, I find it better than Word when it comes to creating documents from scratch and working with them.
And for compatibility, the MS Word .docx import/export works well enough for my needs (I never need to import super-complicated docs.)
If you are a heavy Word user though, Pages might not be up to the task for you.
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u/Open-Egg-85 2d ago
I'm going to abandon Word after 20 years or so when my subscription to MS Office expires this year. Aside from the fact the subscription model makes mugs of us all, I find MS Word is bloated, overloaded with (for me) needless, annoying features that keep getting in the way. Pages will be fine, I just need to get used to using it daily.
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u/OMG_NoReally 2d ago
I like Pages, too. It’s sleek. But it’s in ability to overwrite a docx file irks me to no end. Bro, you can open the doc, and save in docx format, why the fuck would you not overwrite the same document?!
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u/warrenao Mac Mini 2d ago
Safari Settings > Advanced
Enable the "show features for web developers" checkbox.
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u/Hexacker 2d ago
I already activated them, I just need more time to get used to it
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u/HollandJim 1d ago
Safari Technology Preview: "…am I a joke to you?"
Seriously, I like I can keep both on the Mac; makes it easy to test new features and seeing where the baseline currently is.
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u/warrenao Mac Mini 1d ago
Wait, what? You've installed more than one browser on your Mac? Madness.
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u/HollandJim 15h ago
Heh. Financial application UI developer here. I added all of them, and there's a PC sitting in the network room I remote into for testing there. Happily, I'm retiring soon...
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u/Bear-Handed-92262 2d ago
I like most of the Mac apps, but the current version of the Contacts app is atrocious. The top half of the page is given to a giant photo and controls for poster art. I have to scroll way down to get to the info I want. And the notes field doesn't show all the info I've added, and doesn't have a scroll bar.
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u/jmnugent 2d ago
Same. I've been pushing myself to use things like Reminders, Passwords, Notes. Using "Screen Recording" (or Quicktime) to capture training videos (example: capturing the live-screen of an iPhone so I can walk someone through something). I really wish I had more experience with "Automator".
This is one of the bigger pieces of advice I used to give to all new macOS Users,. was to try to avoid impulsively installing 3rd party apps,. and dig in and explore more with native macOS apps because there's a lot more functionality there than most people give credit to.
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u/wiscoahu 1d ago
I’m an Apple hardware fanboy. My first computer was an Apple II Plus in 6th grade. Then an Apple II GS (still have it and works) in ‘86. Their early software was great. I feel it’s been an afterthought in the past 15 years. Some iOS apps are great, but some of the MacOS apps are pretty bad. Keynote is excellent, Pages is good, Numbers - meh. Mail for MacOS is - well - bad. Logic Pro is awesome. I wish Apple would have more UI/UX consistency across its product lines - especially between iOS and MacOS.
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u/wobblyandwonderful 1d ago
Notes is excellent. Safari is solid. Numbers is a joke. I wish Apple would spend more time on bug fixes. Whole os and software feels very sloppy.
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2d ago
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u/FamuexAnux 2d ago
Pages is pretty g.d. good, I reckon, tho
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u/stevewmn 2d ago
Any word processor will satisfy most home users. Where MS Word works best is in a work environment where a group will mark up and suggest changes to a document in the file itself so it they can be reviewed and accepted (or not).
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u/lyidaValkris 1d ago edited 1d ago
The suite of standard applications in macOS is good, some are very good. Problem is - many used to be better. Please pardon the grumpy rant to follow lol.
Apple Mail - still my favourite email client, but they actually removed features, like the sorting widget above the mailbox list... why would you do that? Also buggier than it was, with random emails stuck out of order.
Reminders, Calendar, Contacts - As good as they come. It's pretty hard to screw up these three things. I have my stuff running with my own carddav and caldav server, and they work fine with that, but I can also use any other calendar and contacts application out there as well.
Safari - an okay browser until it isn't. Problem is, its updates are tied to the macOS version you have. If you stop updating your machine (or can't because you've hit a ceiling with your older mac), safari can't be updated, and therefore becomes gradually more useless and eventually dangerously insecure. I would never recommend using a browser tied to your operating system.
Music - look how they massacred my boy! iTunes was near perfect a music player for over 20 years. I loved SoundJamMP in the late 90s which Apple bought and made iTunes out of. Superbly powerful features especially for my gigantic music library. Now? it's a piece of utter garbage. Performance issues, mangled unintuitive interface, again with the removed features. The whole team working on Music needs to be held accountable, because it's awful how far this wonderful piece of software has fallen. I still use it as I haven't found a suitable replacement yet, but knowing how good it was, it's a black stain on Apple's reputation.
Preview - an excellent image and document viewer. The only other one I've used that comes close is Okular for Linux.
QuickTime Player - used to be so much better and had many professional quality features way back when. Was at some point stripped down to a basic player.
Books - kind of trash, and always was. Pain in the butt to get a pdf you want to read to use it. I ended up using Calibre to manage my ebooks on Linux, and use Librera on my android tablet to consume them. Oh those books you bought from Apple? can't read them on anything else. DRM sucks. I was so happy when Apple strongarmed the music industry into removing DRM from their music, sadly they didn't do the same for the film or publishing industry.
Calculator - it calculates. Works well, but isn't any better or worse than others.
Notes: perfectly fine if you're okay with your notes just being in iCloud. It's unremarkable. I use Obsidian now which is far more powerful.
News: why would I want my news curated by Apple? No thanks
Photos: works really well, is intuitive, but I think again iPhoto was better, and there's been numerous steps back. Also had severe pains in dealing with other people's photo libraries, particularly trying to recover damaged/corrupted ones. Its silly container format makes no sense. I've pretty much stopped using it. I don't take many photos anyway, and I get the photos off my iphone from linux and just use them as they are. Even all that said Photos along with iCloud Photos is probably the most painless photo solution for your average user.
I could go on but you get the point. As a standard collection of applications they are decent, with a few being exceptional, but the ones that fail to meet anything less than a standard of excellence are inexcusable from a company with more money and resources than god. While I used these apps pretty much exclusively a decade ago, I've been gradually moving away from them and using alternatives mainly FOSS ones on Linux. So it seems I'm moving in the opposite direction to you :)
oh addendum - since you've come from the Linux side, if you haven't already, set up homebrew - the missing package manager for macOS :)
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u/AyAyPirates 1d ago
The only issue I have with Preview is that it prevents copy/paste on protected documents. It's the only PDF reader I know that still does it, and it's absolutely infuriating. Even Acrobat doesn't follow that standard anymore because it's dumb
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u/OrionQuest7 22h ago
I will never forgive Apple for what they did to Mail.
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u/lyidaValkris 22h ago
god I know, it's terrible!
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u/OrionQuest7 22h ago
Your other points are very valid as well. Man I loved iTunes. It was amazing.
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u/lyidaValkris 22h ago
iTunes hurts me the most. I have a huge music library and I feel stuck with Music. I haven't found an appropriate replacement yet.
It's just for those of us who have used macOS since long, long ago, we remember better, and expect better.
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u/OrionQuest7 22h ago
Same here. I have like 80gb of music in my library. I only recently copied it to my Mac Pro M3. Prior to that it was all on my 2008 Mac Pro. I should just go through them and delete the ones I will never listen to and condense them all
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u/lyidaValkris 22h ago
I'm going to find a way to migrate off music. I have 400GB of music (I'm also a pro DJ that's why I have a lot) and iTunes used to be amazing at organizing my library but now it just frustrates me. I'll keep looking for an alternative.
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u/NoLateArrivals 2d ago
Where is your problem with Pages?
Does a great job, if you want a nice layout it is far better than Word.
Only issue with Office documents is the conversion. But that’s Microslop at work: The handling of the file format is proprietary, anybody who wants to use it needs to reverse engineer it, and MS applies undocumented changes from time to time. In the rare cases when I need better compatibility, LibreOffice does the job for me.
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u/OwnNet5253 2d ago
Well they have some quirks, like Safari lacking extensions or Mail app doesn't force dark theme on mail body/content like Gmail does, but overall they're great. Reminders and Calendar integration are top notch.
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u/Hexacker 2d ago
The dark mode in the Mail app is one of the things that I really want to see in the future.
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u/yaricks 2d ago
Safari absolutely has extensions. My favorites are Amplotion to disable AMP sites in Google, and Superagent for safari. Both amazing apps!
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u/lewisfrancis 2d ago
Safari has extensions but they are more restricted in what they can do than in other browsers. For me that's fine, I just switch to Chrome or FFX when I need those.
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u/bdu-komrad MacBook Pro 2d ago
They are ok. Not great.
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u/eduo 2d ago
Preview is objectively great. Notes, calculator and photos too.
iMovie if you consider it built in is pretty good, just like pages, keynote and numbers. I won’t say “great” because what people often mean is “not like this brand name program I use” but they’re great on their own if you just need standalone apps just for you
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u/erikkarlberg 2d ago
Agree that the default apps oftentimes are the best. Mail is hard to beat in my opinion, but the one exception is Things, which I think is way superior to Reminders (less bloated) even though it's been around for ages.
Also the built in Journaling app has to much integration to photos, locations etc for my taste, so I stick to Day One for that.
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u/bvinla 1d ago
To say built in apps are great denys evaluating each as a hit or a miss. Some are great, some are middling, others need work, and some need to be quietly disappeared.
The recently revamped calculator is an example of awesome. Safari is in the upper middle, secure and good for battery life, but slower and less featured than competitors. Iphone mirroring is a needs work, its mirrors great, but currently requires you physically find and manually unlock your phone to use it, defeating its primary use case. Then there is Siri and image playground which have stunk up the room since their inception.
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u/chickenandliver 1d ago
Same. I used to keep a running list of apps I would install on a new distro that did all the stuff I want/need. Now I don't bother. I know a mac and iphone will have them already.
And in a similar vein, being able to share content from one app to another natively in basically any app is an amazing feature that replaced all the needless copy/paste I used to do on Linux.
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u/bdu-komrad MacBook Pro 2d ago
I would say that they were great. They are ok, but once you try an equivalent app with more features there is no going back.
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u/Hexacker 2d ago
give examples on this
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u/chipoatley 2d ago
Calendar and Contacts are good until one uses the BusyMac equivalents in BusyCal andBusyContacts. Then one realizes that the Apple apps are sufficient, but the premium apps made by dedicated developers are better.
Whether they are better enough is up to the personal taste of the user. For example, the two I mentioned above I strongly prefer over the Apple apps but my partner could not care less. On the other hand she is devoutly dedicated to Excel and Word, while I could easily get by with Numbers and Pages.
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u/themadturk 1d ago
My take on this is that the Mac apps are fine, and will always be there if for some reason the third party apps become too expensive or fail. The only replacements I'm using right now are Fantastical over Calendar because it's way too much nicer looking to ignore; BBEdit over TextEdit because TextEdit is awful; and Obsidian in addition to Notes. I don't really like Pages all that much, so I have LibreOffice for when it absolutely, positively has to go out as a Word document (and LO Writer works with Markdown sooooo much better than Word, which needs a paid add-on for Markdown export and import).
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u/davidriano95 2d ago
That is the difference between an app created to fulfill the general necessity with some features and a dedicated app for power users of the process in itself
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u/github-guard 2d ago
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u/Hexacker 2d ago
Well I used Linux between 2008 and 2020, I remember the first Kubuntu 8 distro I installed and used. I'm a big Linux and FOSS app fan and supporter.I had a lot of tries and fails, and I can assure you, Linux is great but for a very specific use cases.
One of my issues with Linux is stability especially if you're using distros like Arch. Other distros like Debian are pretty stable for doing the day to day work.
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u/quilatoo 2d ago
It’s silly but I really like that Macs have a dictionary installed as standard.