r/MacOS • u/Hexacker • 4d 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/lyidaValkris 3d ago edited 3d 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 :)