Apple, We Have Other Problems: A Look at macOS Vintage Bugs

– Image generated by Microsoft Designer.

In the last post, I described some very recent bugs present in Sonoma, the latest version of macOS.

The bugs reported here, however, have persisted across several versions of macOS, and it seems that Apple has no intention of fixing them or doesn’t even consider them to be bugs. These issues, unlike other reports, don’t occur under extreme conditions or after opening a zillion files but during completely normal use, which makes it even stranger that they’ve never been resolved.

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The first two are more user interface inconsistencies, which are surprising given the almost obsessive attention Apple dedicates to the design details of its products.

• The scrollbar for the list of purchased apps in the App Store is partially hidden by the window title and only appears after scrolling through a certain number of apps (the exact number depends on the total apps in the list—if there are many, you’ll have to scroll quite a bit to see the scrollbar).

• The same thing happens on the App Store home page when you move the mouse to the top of the window, causing the title to appear. However, since this page contains fewer elements, part of the scrollbar remains visible.

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This one, however, is an old bug related to Terminal.

• I’ve configured System Settings > Desktop & Dock so that the Prefer tabs when opening documents option is always active. This way, every time I open a new window in applications that support this feature (including Terminal), macOS creates a new tab instead of a new window.

  But if I’m using Terminal with a custom configuration (e.g., mine is set to 120 columns x 40 rows) and I select the menu option New Window with a profile of a different size (e.g., the default of 80 columns x 24 rows), a new tab is indeed created, but the entire Terminal changes size to match the profile just chosen.

  This might even be a deliberate design choice. However, it contrasts with what happens when the Prefer tabs when opening documents option is only active in full-screen mode, where the new tab adopts the size of the existing one.

  To be fair, it was worse in High Sierra: every time a new tab was opened, Terminal would lose a row. Fortunately, this bug was fixed in the next version of macOS.

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For me, who always uses the Align to Grid option in Finder windows, organizes file icons visually in a logical order (at least for me), and often leaves empty spaces, this next bug is a major nuisance.

• Until El Capitan, if I moved icons in a folder below the bottom edge of the window, Finder kept their order intact, leaving a blank space where the icons were originally located. Starting with Sierra, however, the bottom edge of the Finder window became a sort of impenetrable barrier, causing icons dragged below it to “bounce” back to the top of the window, leaving the bottom empty.

  To avoid this, you have to drag the icons while holding the CMD (⌘) key, which in theory bypasses the grid alignment, but then you’ll need to manually restore their order afterward.

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This final gem, undoubtedly my favorite macOS bug, isn’t just an annoyance, it’s a royal pain in the neck.

• Just like with documents, I organize applications visually, grouping them by type and usage frequency, aligning the icons to Finder’s virtual grid.

  As a result, I place all pre-installed Apple apps (Pages, Numbers, Keynote, Xcode, iMovie, GarageBand, etc.) at the top of the Applications folder, followed by office tools (Office 365, LibreOffice, PDF managers), communication apps (Teams, Webex, Skype), browsers, and remote access apps. Further down are apps specific to my work—note-taking, code editing, image editing—and at the bottom, utilities for monitoring Mac temperature, managing the clipboard, unzipping files, recording the screen, and occasionally running an antivirus scan (MalwareBytes).¹

  This organization allows me to quickly locate the app I need, as I know exactly where it should be even if I don’t remember its name.²

  Unfortunately, for several macOS versions now, every time I update the OS, app icons are always reordered alphabetically. Since alphabetical order is the default for the Applications folder, most users don’t notice this. But for those like me, who prefer custom order, it means having to reorganize everything after every update.

  Why do I consider this a bug and not a feature? The reason is simple: Finder allows different sorting options for any folder—alphabetically, by date, by size, by type—and also lets you align items to a grid or leave them unordered. So why should the Applications folder behave differently?

  Are there technical reasons for this decision? Under normal use, the Applications folder can be customized like any other Finder folder, so why should Finder reset customizations after every OS update, even minor ones?

  In my humble opinion, this issue, along with the one mentioned above, is tied to a problem with the pesky .DS_Store files that manage each Finder folder’s configuration. The file format is more secretive than Area 51.

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If anyone from Apple’s development team is reading this, could you spare an hour to fix these bugs? It shouldn’t be too difficult—please take a look, a loyal user would be grateful.

1. The ability to organize apps and documents visually is one of macOS’s features that makes me prefer it over Linux or—horror!—Windows, where this workflow simply doesn’t exist. ↩

2. On the Mac I’m using to write this, I have 148 installed apps, which, for my habits, isn’t even that many. Remembering all their names isn’t for me, so I’ve never used alphabetical sorting or apps like Alfred and the like. ↩