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I grew up with this animation so I didn't consider it annoying until I bought a new Macbook a couple years ago. I noticed sometimes I would press keyboard shor
by aylmao 5mo ago
I grew up with this animation so I didn't consider it annoying until I bought a new Macbook a couple years ago.
I noticed sometimes I would press keyboard shortcuts before my system's focus had switched. Just little stumbles here and there, some inoffensive, some annoying, but who knows maybe I didn't catch enough sleep.
Over time it happened often enough that I decided to google it, and it turns out my muscle memory wasn't failing me; the animation speed did change ever so slightly and was slower in new Macs with 120Hz displays [1][2] (newer MacBooks, 2021+). If you switch your screen to 60Hz it goes back to the faster animation.
Why is this animation slower now, and why does it depend on screen refresh rate? I have some technical theories but can't think of an organizational reason it happened and hasn't been fixed 5 years later at a 3.82 trillion market cap company. If you Google it there's plenty of discussions online about this. It's noticeable and annoying to people who have used the feature often enough.
[1]: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/256124324?sortBy=rank https://discussions.apple.com/thread/256124324?sortBy=rank
[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNBWt4NvqHg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNBWt4NvqHg
- tranceylc 5mo agoI would assume it’s something based around whatever deacceleration animation it is calculating? So in the inverse of what you would see in games that don’t support uncapped framerates. It would at least explain why the refresh rate has an inverted relationship
- veber-alex 5mo agoThis is such an insane bug to still have around all these years. Are apple engineers not using macOS?
- amelius 5mo agoI wouldn't be surprised. Their 3D solid modeling is done on Windows, so why not their electronics.
- PaulHoule 5mo agoI think Apple's self-image of being the epitome of design actually acts against them. Leads to monstrosities like Liquid Glass kinda vandalizing random parts of the UI in small ways that I intuitively read as "they are anti-anti-aliasing" not "they added cool refraction effects." It used to be you'd see something in a well-chosen color, now it is just a muddy kind of greyish brownish whatever. I'd like to see them make some costly signalling to indicate that they are going to turn it around like maybe buy two Superbowl ads in a row and let the CEO make a personal apology. Isn't going to happen because the competition is Microsoft and Intel and Dell who won't hold them accountable and it is just too easy to turn reject iPhone chips into netbooks in 2026.
- harrall 5mo agoMy pet opinion is that Steve Jobs was an asshole but an asshole that used his own products and used his powers of complaining to steer the whole ship to fix major "this annoys me everyday" bugs. From my experience, "annoying but not blockers" bugs are often very neglected compared to (1) bugs that actually break things and (2) feature work. Neglecting quality of life issues leads to the "do you even use your product??" kinds of experiences.
- hirvi74 5mo agoI have not been impressed with Cook in the slightest. He came from Compaq, if I am not mistaken, and in many ways, I feel like Apple has become more Compaq-like during his tenure.
- jbverschoor 5mo agoThis is exactly my thought as well. Soo many things either work buggy, laggy, inconsistent, or don’t work at all Filling bugs doesn’t help. And I don’t think anyone is inventive to fix bugs. Resolving sure. But closing WONTFIX or NEEDSINFO is also a resolution. Most of what I do is chrome +Linux terminals and vscode anyway And the only reason I’m on Mac is because of hardware, encryption, and ease of backup/restore/wipe, and the power struggle of Linux distros. freeBSD is not really an option
- ryanmcbride 5mo agoI mean, their damn phone keyboards are so bad I'm 100% confident that Tim only does voice to text on his phone. There's no way that the CEO of a company could use a keyboard that horrible and not want to fix it.
- sen 5mo agoIt’s SO bad. It makes me not want to use my phone anymore and physically go get my laptop if I’m chatting/messaging someone. It’s probably the worst typing experience I’ve had since resistive-touch screens on PDAs. At least with them you could still type what you intended to though, just slowly.
- fizwidget 5mo agoIn my experience iOS 26.4 did largely fix it btw. Update if you haven’t already.
- ryanmcbride 5mo agoI'm on 26.4 on a brand new 17 Pro Max, recently upgraded from a 13 Pro Max, and I have noticed absolutely no difference in the keyboard. It's still awful.
- niij 5mo agoBut then you'd have to upgrade past 18, meaning the liquid glass abomination.
- Barbing 5mo agowas only dumb for a month or few, now that it's max blacked out as best it can be I can redirect my focus... and be annoyed by the STUPID hiding bottom menus like in Photos. Literally ZERO times did I complain I was missing seven pixels of "real estate", thanks Apple, love the extra tap to see what I need (to be clear, only sign on iOS 26, NOT macOS 26)
- JoeBOFH 5mo agoMost of my issues were fixed when I disabled swipe to type. Not all, but most.
- mrguyorama 5mo agoEven if they did, what are they going to do? File a bug report that will sit at the bottom of the priority pile forever? Devs don't set priorities. Software "Engineers" largely don't get to engineer at all.
- fragmede 5mo agoStockholm syndrome. Moving between spaces is fine! What are you talking about? You get used to it and then it's not a big. Stop holding it wrong!!!
- achierius 5mo agoEssentially all Apple engineers use macOS ~exclusively (at least in the SWE org). That these bugs persist is in spite of that fact. Frankly there's just a lot going on, and between all the kinds of bugs that have higher priority -- crashers, panics, memory regressions (your app gets Jetsam'd), power bugs (your phone runs out of battery mid-day), perf regressions (could violate EU regulations against planned obsolescence), security bugs (people can lose their money, journalists can get killed) -- bugs like this often fall by the wayside for quite some time until they're fixed.
- apple4ever 5mo ago> Are apple engineers not using macOS? If they are, they aren't using anything but very basic parts of it. But I think the better question is "Are Apple Executives not using MacOS?" because if they were, none of these mad bugs would still be here.
- juujian 5mo agoDon't know about customizability on MacOS but I've always been very accustomed to animations and recently I just turned them off on Android and Linux and I... Don't miss anything. Turned out they don't add anything other than an initial wow factor.
- al_borland 5mo agoPersonally, I think some animations can help add context to what is happening. For example, when using QuickLook, there is an animation when opening/closing QuickLook that zooms out from, and then back to the file location. If doing something with that file after the QL, that little visual clue helps find it faster and know where it opened from.
- mort96 5mo agoThe closest thing you can do on macOS is to turn on "reduced motion". This doesn't remove any animations, it just replaces them all with fade animations which take the same amount of time.
- fragmede 5mo agoand set it to 60hz instead of 120. And install the tool that the article links to.
- bschwindHN 5mo agoI noticed this immediately when I first used a 120Hz macbook in 2021. As a vanilla MacOS UI feature that I'm sure many people use, I can't believe it hasn't been fixed yet.
- theredleft 5mo agowe are a certain type of people here, aren't we?
- presbyterian 5mo agoI've been having the same problem, entering keystrokes in the wrong windows when changing spaces. I'm so glad to know it's not just me, it's the fact that I just a couple months ago bought a new MBP. Thank you!
- jurplel 5mo agoI have noticed this bug years before Apple started selling 120hz displays. I thought for sure they would fix it after that, but to my surprise it has persisted... I think it must go back to High Sierra or Mojave at least.
- abustamam 5mo agoWow I never realized I had this problem until now! I never even considered the reason keys would dispatch to the wrong window was because of the animation. I just knew that sometimes when switching workspaces I'd have to wait until whatever window I'm switching to has focus before typing.
- alsetmusic 5mo agoI believe I first learned to shorten animations on MacOSXHints.com (gone now). Regardless, I learned a lot of great "enhancements" here: https://github.com/mathiasbynens/dotfiles https://github.com/mathiasbynens/dotfiles And here's the blog of the person who ran MacOSXHints.com: https://robservatory.com/make-your-macos-dock-suck/ https://robservatory.com/make-your-macos-dock-suck/ Fun aside, I'm pretty sure that my mention of a system issue that I read about that morning on MacOSXHints.com was a helper in landing a job in an interview that afternoon. What I mean is, I said, oh are you talking about "whatever thing on that site today…?" and it demonstrated that I was familiar with whatever internals.
- abustamam 5mo agoNice resources! I've use MacOS for over ten years and I never really modified anything other than my zshrc. I'll check then out!
- mort96 5mo agoI also have a 120Hz Mac, and the animation is indeed slower in 120Hz mode. In my opinion, the animation crossed the line from "too slow but bearable" to "unbearable" with 120Hz. It is as you say; it's not really the animation itself that's the problem, but the delay from when I tell my machine "switch to this other workspace" until the focus switches to a window on that other workspace. The animation has this horrible ease-out effect where the last few centimeters take what feels like forever. Getting a 120Hz Mac actually completely changed my whole macOS philosophy. I used to use spaces extremely heavily. I now almost don't use them at all, preferring window switching with cmd+tab instead. The infuriating thing is that almost all discussion on this on the web just says "turn on reduced motion". Not only should that be unnecessary; it doesn't even fix the problem! Sure, there's no longer a sliding animation, but there's now a fade animation instead which takes just as long. It's completely incomprehensible that Apple hasn't fixed this. Sadly, solutions like BetterTouchTool and InstantSpaceSwitcher won't work for me because I prefer to use my trackpad to switch spaces. EDIT: I actually recorded and compared the switching speeds a while ago: https://old.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/rfmg4e/workspace_switching_takes_almost_twice_as_long/ https://old.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/rfmg4e/workspace_swi.... Apologies for the choppy recording, QuickTime screen recording is not very good; but it gets the point across.
- fifafu 5mo ago> Sadly, solutions like BetterTouchTool and InstantSpaceSwitcher won't work for me because I prefer to use my trackpad to switch spaces. One of BetterTouchTool's first features ~17 years ago was trackpad gesture customization, it is still one of the most important things you can do with BTT! ;-) You'd just need to assign the "Move Right a Space (without animation)" and "Move Left a Space (without animation)" actions to trackpad gestures in BTT.
- mort96 5mo agoI don't want it "without animation", I like that the animation tracks my fingers and that the response is instant and doesn't wait until a "gesture" is "triggered". I just want it to wait a second after I let go until the target workspace starts receiving input.