OS X Sequoia Still sucks

2025-4-4

I've updated to Sequoia just last month, but my touchbar still hasn't been fixed.  Macs are still crap.

My Mac hasn't been crashing for a few months already, but the touchbar still blinks crazily and goes out after a while, unless I go kill the Control Strip and the Touchbar to stop the crazy blinking.  This means I can no longer send a crash message to the dev team at Apple right after a crash.  Maybe my previous messages got them to fix the crashes, but not the underlying issue.

Relatively recently, Sequoia 15.3.1, if I leave the blinking Touchbar alone, it will eventually blink crazily and then stops lighting up, but the controls are still there.  Since I remember the basic layout, I can still use it, but you can't look at it to find where to touch.  It doesn't light up, so you just have to do it from memory.  After a while, if I leave it overnight, it will eventually start blikning crazilly again and the touch bar will become "normal" and light up again.

Apple has much fewer hardware to support than Microsoft, yet they have so many more issues.  It's no wonder they've remained so 2nd rate as a computer company.  They only survived because they created the iPhone and created the AppStore marketplace.  They're really an iPhone company and not a computer company.  They're really neglecting the Mac.

After I just updated to Sequoia 15.4, the touch bar got better, but it still goes on a crazy blink fest until I touch the keys, or let it go to "sleep" to save energy.  It's only been a few days, but the touch bar hasn't died, so far.  It's improving, but still crap.  Why did it take more than a year to reach this point.   This is definitely a software issue introduced by the OS team.

Somebody fucked up OS X for Intel and the touchbar when the M-Series chips came out.  OS X first became reliably stable with the Dec 2016 (Jan 2017 for me) release of OS X and that lasted only until the release Nov 2023 (Dec 2023 for me).  This was the only period when I really had no crashes, no spinning beach balls, and no other major issues.  I've always had more problems with Macs than Windows up until those 7 years.  Right now, I've discovered that some app is sucking up 100GB of disk space until I reboot to clear it, but I may have isolated the App.

Windows was reliably stable for me since Windows 2000.  I've only had a handful of bluescreens back during XP, and while I've seen others with bluescreens after that, I haven't had any of my own since then.  Most of the issues with Windows has been with other apps and not Windows itself.  I've seen far more Spinning Beach Balls and the old Sad Macs than I've ever seen of Blue Screens, and that was even when I used Windows far more for work.

 

P.S. I've finally just got a Blue screen recently.  I think it's mostly because Zoom doesn't like the graphics driver on the work Thinkpad P Series laptop.  If I don't quit zoom after I'm done with the meeting Zoom will freeze up and eventually crash.  This time it happened because I forgot to quit Zoom after my Meeting on April 1, and it was doing weird stuff on April 2, here I could connect and hear the other person, but the entire interface froze up.  Then my browser froze.  Then the entire system crashed and I finally got my first blue screen on this 2.5 year old laptop.  I did my standard dism, chkdsk, and sfc checks and they were all clean.  I'm not sure why Lenovos have the largest share of the market, probably because they're in places like Costco and average people don't know any better, but they have worse computers than Dell overall.  I didn't have as many issues or crashes with the Dells as I have had with Lenovo, and that's with supporting more total numbers of Dells.  I think most of the bluescreens I've seen in the previous 8 years were Lenovo and they were 1/4 of the laptops in the various companies I had supported.