macOS desires

macOS was, until recently, my favorite desktop operating system. This is my personal wishlist of things I want to see or want fixed in future macOS releases post-Tahoe.

1. It has been well-documented that SMB performance is bad when copying files using Finder. macOS should focus on the basics, and make sure SMB is just-as performant on macOS as it is on Windows out-of-the-box.
2. macOS should be more like Linux with /etc/fstab and Windows, and allow SMB and other network resources to be automatically continuously mounted. Third-party apps like AutoMounter aren’t reliable, and should not be necessary. I’m glad Command + K exists in Finder but not happy I have to use it.
3. Attaching network mounts should not require opening every mount as a Finder window immediately.
4. For apps that use the built-in cloud file storage system, pinning files so they’re actually always downloaded should not be rocket science. If I have free disk space, I expect my cloud-provided files to actually be there.
5. End-to-end encrypted backup of macOS should be a feature included with iCloud, which is something already possible on iOS.
6. Report the speed of the actual transfer in the actual transfer dialog. What are we even doing? Why is it that we get a silly ETA but not actual transfer speed? KDE, Windows, and probably a billion other OSes actually said the speed of the transfer. Just tell us.

1. Between Homebrew, .app files, and .pkg files, there is no centralized location or method for apps to persist data. Sandboxing is an imperfect solution because apps are not required to be sandboxed, and the sandboxing system is too restrictive. PKG-based installers should have system-provided tracking for what they do. Provide Homebrew with a reasonable solution to register installed files. All of this leads to one goal: there should be a reasonable way to remove installed software that is actually effective. Apps like AppCleaner can guess what files need to be removed when you delete .app files, but this is not something third-party apps should be left to handle. On Windows, with the exception of malware, removing software is really easy. On Linux, this is accomplished nearly universally with every package manager. On macOS, it is the wild west.
2. Apps and malware have way too much freedom to be persistent without user interaction. The addition of Startup Items in macOS settings is a great feature, but it still lists items that cannot be disabled, and it does not actually provide a removal solution or more information about these items. It is not helpful to tell a user that ‘/bin/sh` will run on startup with no more context.
3. App installs should not result in an endless sea of Windows Vista style permission prompts with no context. The permission prompts could at least be centralized into one dialog or controllable in a central way that isn’t dependent on a user being spammed with modals on install.

The TCC system is Apple's Transparency, Consent and Control system, which provides pop-up modals to approve microphone, camera, location, startup item, background item, photo gallery, filesystem, and probably 22 other individual per-action permissions.

1. “Do not become Windows Vista” should be a specific goal of the TCC team. If the TCC team transgresses this, the TCC team should lose 10% of base salary and all options until the problem is resolved.
2. TCC denials should actually mean something. Has anyone on the TCC team actually denied something? If you do choose to deny something, most TCC prompts immediately re-prompt. If the system is not expecting users to deny something it should not exist.
3. TCCs should be centralized, in System Settings, by app, and not by TCC. If an app needs a permission, it should be trivial to go to the particular app’s panel and turn it on.
4. System Settings’ complexity should not be a security measure. When profiles were moved to “you must find the blessed panel in System Settings” it became a security feature. System Settings should be easy to navigate.
5. TCCs should be synchronized across all macOS systems. TCCs should persist across installs of apps.
6. I simply do not care about some TCCs ever. I should be able to turn them off.

1. The planned removal of Rosetta 2 should be abandoned.
2. xattr -d com.apple.quarantine should work again, or better yet, there should be an option for developers to disable Gatekeeper entirely. Bypassing Gatekeeper in each new version is more difficult and it simply is not tenable for developers to have to continually fight the OS to do basic tasks.
3. “Disable mouse acceleration” should be coupled with a clear “just use what the mouse DPI is” mapping for tracking speed. The current UI toggle to remove acceleration is good, but tracking speed remains an opaque track with no steps or labels.
4. defaults write hidden settings should be exposed in the UI whenever possible. Anything that can be done via defaults write should be done via the UI.
5. System settings should have an easy way to import, export, and synchronize settings across macOS installs.

1. It should be impossible for the macOS notch to hide menu bar items. Bartender or Ice should be 100% built into the OS. The fact that menu bar items can be hidden by the notch is completely incoherent and nonsensical and someone should be fired for this decision.
2. Disabling the menu bar item should, for all intents and purposes, not impact the operation of the program. Notably, Zoom really doesn't auto-update itself if its menu bar item is disabled. Maybe “disabling” a menu bar item should just hide it.
3. In System Settings, Software Update takes a significant amount of time to “load” pending updates. What? Even if the system harasses you with a notification to install updates, you click that notification and then it takes you to System Settings, where you stare at a spinner that sometimes never does anything and never loads the actual update panel. The only solution is to fully restart the OS. WHY?

1. The text redaction tool in Preview draws redaction rectangles based on the selected thumbnail in the thumbnail track, not based on the page you actually draw the rectangle on. To the user, the rectangle they just “drew” disappears sometimes, but it actually lands on the page below or above because the “selected thumbnail in the track” is the one that gets it. WHY?
2. Preview should NEVER close all documents with Command + Q without at least a warning or “hold to quit”.
3. Preview “Highlights & Notes” does not actually have a system for typing notes? Am I missing something?
4. Who broke Search in Tahoe? Why is search broken? If I search my Mac in the Downloads folder for “42001” I cannot find a document called “ISO_IEC_42001”. Why is ls | grep 42001 instantaneous but finding one file in Finder using the default search literally impossible now? You're telling me that in the year of our lord 2026 both Windows 11 and macOS Tahoe are incapable of having search that does not suck? Voidtools Everything on Windows is the best search engine I have ever used on a Desktop. There is absolutely no excuse for not having search that returns all results instantly. This is 2026.
5. APFS, the default filesystem, does not care about data integrity. WHY? It's 2026. Come on. Why is metadata integrity a feature but data integrity itself not a feature? Fix this. Computation is cheap.
6. I don't want to use Apple Intelligence, but it doesn't matter because I can't. Why can't Siri language be set to one language and have macOS work with a different language? We know that large language models are actually great at multiple languages. Why is Siri language synchronized across devices? If I have an iOS or macOS system running different languages Siri/Apple Intelligence will always be broken on one of them because this setting, for some absurd reason, synchronizes. But this whole limitation is stupid.
7. If I start doing something absurd like “try to type my login password” on the login screen when the screen is still black, macOS clearly accepts the input because it wakes up but drops it from the password field. WHY? Just put it in the field. This used to be fine but is now broken in macOS and Windows. SDDM gets it. Fix it!