When I did some work on porting out product to macOS (so developers could run their server environment locally, though a few loons wanted to actually run macOS on servers), I was immediately struck by how awful and incomplete the documentation was. And, I've been working in the Linux world for a couple decades...where docs are copious but wrong about 50% of the time.
In particular, the service launcher (launchd, mentioned in the article), and various other system level things (including logs, also mentioned in the article), have so little official documentation as to be laughable. You just have to spelunk the web to find someone who has the tribal knowledge and has shared it in some form.
I gave up on the task, as the level of pain was far too high.
But, I'm kinda baffled why anyone would volunteer to provide free labor to one of the largest and most profitable companies in the world. I give away tons of my time for OSS, but I'm not about to get out and push if I've paid for a luxury car.
I'd rather put my time into something that is free and open for everyone, including my future self. Actually, the word "rather" isn't strong enough: I would never give my labor to an $820B corporation.
> But, I'm kinda baffled why anyone would volunteer to provide free labor to one of the largest and most profitable companies in the world.
Somewhat related, it has become Apple user/developer etiquette not to mention bugs without filing a bug report on Apple's closed issue tracker beforehand:
I can't believe how many hours I've wasted on detailed bug reports only for them to be closed as a duplicate, or "works as expected".
If you are frustrated with Apple, there is only one thing that works: 1) be influential, 2) complain publicly. If you want macOS to be documented, don't do it yourself. Find people at prominent media outlets and start the meme that Apple's documentation sucks, and that it matters for <reasons>. Add all sorts of pressure and with any luck, Apple will address this issue to turn the narrative around in its favour.
Since I don't have any of that power, I try to find open source projects that affect me and donate time or money to them instead.
Imagine you have written a small utility for a commercial OS. Something like it should have been included with the os but wasn't.
You've scratched your itch. You decide to open-source it, so that everyone else who has a similar problem could benefit. Kudos!
Good thing is that you can push it to Github or something like that, making it instantly available.
Now replace the code with documentation. You have found something hard to find and important. You've solved your problem. Now you can share it, so that fellow developers could benefit from it. You have already spent time on it, for your own purposes. You don't want to document the rest of the lacunae in the official docs, but this particular bit is ready.
You'd like to waste as little effort doing that as possible, and make it instantly findable.
> But, I'm kinda baffled why anyone would volunteer to provide free labor to one of the largest and most profitable companies in the world. I give away tons of my time for OSS, but I'm not about to get out and push if I've paid for a luxury car.
> I'd rather put my time into something that is free and open for everyone, including my future self. Actually, the word "rather" isn't strong enough: I would never give my labor to an $820B corporation.
That's exactly what springs to mind. Why should we do Apple's work for them when they are swimming in cash reserves. It beggars belief that anyone would suggest this. Obviously their pain is so great, they're so tightly shackled, their alternatives so limited, that they would rather willingly donate their labor to a wealthy corporation than attempt to take said corporation to task or shock horror jump ship.
> In particular, the service launcher (launchd, mentioned in the article), and various other system level things (including logs, also mentioned in the article), have so little official documentation as to be laughable.
God launchd's documentation is so woefully incomplete it's soul-crushing, even more so as they deprecate "legacy" subcommand (which are "community documented" as various souls tried to understand how to make them work) and the documentation for the "replacements" is even worse. I'm not a sysadmin, I don't really care for launchd, but every time I want to set up a cron I waste an hour trying to coerce it into doing something useful before just falling back onto crontab.
Not to mention the… idiosyncratic command lines which makes even documented tools a chore to use fucking `lipo`:
the various options are mostly exclusive which is documented but weird as fuck, but then say you want to check if a given binary contains a specific arch
-verify_arch arch_type …
Take one input file and verify the specified arch_types are
present in the file. If so then exit with a status of 0
else exit with a status of 1.
You'd expect `lipo -verify_arch x86_64 <file>`, but no, since it can take multiple arch rather than repeat -verify_arch you must put it at the tail: `lipo <file> -verify_arch x86_64`, if you don't you get a screenful of garbage telling you that you gave an incorrect architecture flag, which architecture flags are valid and re-printing the synopsys.
>And, I've been working in the Linux world for a couple
>decades...where docs are copious but wrong about 50% of the
>time.
Nice summary of the status of Linux documentation. Not sure if it's really 50% wrong, especially the man pages make an impression of over-corrected but the usefulness depends on the tool and is completely random. But yeah, online documentation, classical tutorials are usually useless. When I see a tutorial, I close the tab. They just lead to dirty installations. If a tool needs a documentation, there might be an alternative that needs none. ;) But seriously, a lot of stuff on Github is obvious to use.
Not sure about the macOS. Having changed from Linux to macOS as my main (laptop) OS, I first noticed the unusual BSD tools. So I installed GNU tools on my first year OS X. Now I just use the BSD tools, some I even prefer over the GNU versions. But I guess the stuff that has been developed by Apple has no docs at all..
> In particular, the service launcher (launchd, mentioned in the article), and various other system level things (including logs, also mentioned in the article), have so little official documentation as to be laughable.
I've filed documentation bugs against launchd. They acknowledged the issue, and then filed them for resolution in the n+2 major release in macOS, because it was too late for the next major release.
I suspect their technical documentation process to have gone pear-shaped.
Recently had to standup an OGS cluster for mac os sierra.
Took me a day to get it built and deployed where it takes 15 minutes with any Linux I know of.
The worst three years I've recently experienced was supporting a dual OS (linux and mac) build/deploy for a highly complex proprietary scientific modeling system.
No. It's Apple who needs to do that. This isn't a free software project - lack of documentation is an argument for abandoning the platform, not for starting a community project of doing work for Apple for free.
I guess the problem is that Apple don't need to do it; lots of people would like them to do it, and maybe they should do it, but it's not hurting their bottom line much so they can just continue as they are. Unless a whole heap of customers suddenly decide to buy different laptops instead over it, but I'd not be betting on that.
Indeed, the responsibility belongs to the company that is providing the proprietary software/product. Otherwise it would send the message that good documentation shouldn't be provided because the "community" will handle it for free.
OT a bit but I think still related. 8 years ago when I switch to OSX I was furious with finder. Tiny window, no hierarchical browsing and the search just doesn't do shit that is useful.
I normally default to locate or find now so much that I was using it the other day I was reminded about how much it sucked. It's literally identical (aside from tags and labels) to what it was forever ago and is a terrible paradigm. I looked around for a bit for some help on refining the search sensibly and nothing in the OS helped (back on topic!). I've been using a great replacement for Finder called PathFinder that does everything Finder should do, but you can't swap it out. All the native places I access Finder are important inroads. They used to have instructions to hack it but apple shut them down.
I feel more and more like UI and usability innovation totally ate itself and died at maybe a specific moment in time ~6 years ago. Where did the people and companies go that do cool new things? Are the giants on their laurels long enough yet to get eaten? I'd switch totally to Ubuntu or Mint for my desktop work, but I do things that require the adobe suite, I need a trackpad that works as well as the mac one without fighting it, and I want to just solve problems, not fiddle with barely supported gizmos for weeks.
Did we reach the absolute end of all we can do with this juggling of rectangles that display and accept text and now we just get everything that matters to a power user stripped off for the sake of what "most users care about"? I really don't think we have.
I'm still pissed and I still have no answers. My kingdom for a $3000 laptop that "Just works" and helps me murder code, deployment, graphic arts, music, and still loads HBONow.
Ugh, finder is shit. I've set my default to list view a million times only to see a bunch of folder icons on my screen everytime I double click a directory.
I enjoy living in terminal. I'm very mediocre with both find and grep but I'm getting better and it makes me feel cool ;-), heh.
A beefy windows workstation or laptop to cover Adobe & DAWs + VMWare for Linux. With fullscreen VMWare and open-vm-tools I can barely notice that it doesn't run bare metal, and i can keep different distros at hand for different purposes.
It probably depends on a personal workflow, but for me, Finder works perfectly, and I really miss it on Linux. I have a reasonably organized directory structure, and I navigate and do basic tasks like copying mostly using just a keyboard. I remember directory names and I just start typing their names and the Finder goes to them (actually, most file managers have this feature). Occasionally, I do 'ls | grep' or 'find' from the console to find some specific stuff (I have Spotlight disabled).
This sentiment is why I do almost everything in a terminal. I see even people who use mac do everything on the terminal. Whenever someone complains about a UI tool crashing, acting wonky, being slow, my reply is always 1. I can't help you, I don't use that; 2. Just use the terminal.
UI fashions come and go, but the terminal is forever.
In contrast to undocumented free (open) systems?
Documentation is an issue irrespective of prorietariness(??!) of a system.
I welcome this initiative.
(Yes I know there are examples of documentation excellence to be found in some free/open systems. You can advocate their use whilst also having well documented macOs.)
Or maybe abandon strictly ideological and polarizing standpoints, accepting that most people are productive in different ways than our own, and conceding that not giving a damn about distros, dependencies and command line interaction doesn't make you a evil operator of the IT Satan?
And use what? Windows spies on you and they call it a feature. Linux is a great server OS but a really terrible choice on the desktop. I'm not convinced that free software documentation is any better, either.
macOS is the best desktop OS going, for the moment.
How come I never see them come up in Google searches? I have seen it come up when looking for conditioning your battery or the shortcut keys for Target Disk Mode. But more often I'll search for a runaway process name or an OS message that is spamming Console. The top results are Apple Discussion posts that go on for pages, but often don't have a clear result. I also recently was trying to learn more about macOS' init system and got lost like the article mentioned.
Do they? I don't think the OP (or me, for that matter) is looking for documentation telling him where to click in the UI. The article seems to be about more low level stuff.
For all the things that Microsoft takes flak about, this is one of the few areas you really can't complain much about. They maintain detailed versions documentation and make it easy to explore.
Every so often I come across something that isn't documented well or at all and it hurts. But it has a page at least and on every page they have a public feedback mechanism.
> Yet Apple’s documentation for users and those supporting users has all but dried up
You and me we both RTFM, but the population at large? Not so much. When computers were in their early days more of the people that used them were willing and even interested to learn a lot about what was going on. Now the computer is a tool used by most people to do specific tasks. Just like I don't care to learn how to fix my car they don't want to learn how to troubleshoot software nor hardware problems with their computers.
So it might not make economical sense for Apple to spend any significant amount of money on employing technical writers.
I think a more common example would be Googling a daemon that's hogging memory or CPU. Ideally, the top result would be Apple docs with a clear, concise description. In practice, it's usually an Apple discussion thread (which I do give some credit for them hosting/maintaining) or Stack Exchange. Although, I don't think I've ever seen an official response in their forums. It's usually a meandering set of posts (and "me toos!") before I can get any description of what it is or how to address it.
Sure, the average person doesn't have Activity Monitor (or top) open, but they could be walked through that process when their fans blare and battery life nosedives.
Not only that, but when I have a problem with my Mac, I go to Stackexchange and ask my question there. Many times I get a useful answer. Apple could set up a team to help people over there, and officially support it, like Ubuntu does. Documenting is one thing, helping people with their questions is the easy way out.
Apple has always been vague and stingy with the documentation; despite the author mentioning this,
In the days of classic Mac OS, when print publishing was growing as a result of Macs, Apple published an exemplary series of books under the banner Inside Macintosh
I have read the Inside Macintosh books but they still felt somewhat incomplete and superficial (although they're definitely a little prettier) compared to what I'd consider close to a "gold standard" for documentation, the IBM PC/AT Technical Reference and the same one for MS/PC-DOS.
I suppose it had a lot to do with the general attitude of Apple's culture, summarised in the famous phrase "it just works". The notion that systems should be designed to be so easy to use and obvious as to require no documentation, has resulted in a lack of documentation even for those cases which are not easy to use nor obvious.
I have read the Inside Macintosh books but they still felt somewhat incomplete and superficial (although they're definitely a little prettier) compared to what I'd consider close to a "gold standard" for documentation, the IBM PC/AT Technical Reference and the same one for MS/PC-DOS.
One of these is a foot of big books documenting a GUI system and its components, the other is a single volume that tells you handy things like 'The PC/AT has three programmable timers'. I don't think the documentation was ever complete but Apple did produce a lot more of it and had a lot more to document to begin with. The level of documentation is not really directly comparable let alone a symptom of some non-existent 'just works' culture and attitude. If anything, one could make a reasonable argument Apple of the time spent too much effort on beautifully documenting piles of things that were ultimately not useful or successful.
The author seems confused. Launchd is a service for starting processes (on boot, on other events, or on a schedule), Centralized Task Scheduling (CTS) is a low-level API used only by developers writing native code to perform tasks within a process [0]. CTS can only be used by a running process while launchd is a running process you can instruct by loading .plist files (normally they're only loaded at boot from LaunchAgent/ and LaunchDaemon/ directories).
If you haven't already, join the MacAdmins Slack. https://macadmins.herokuapp.com
It's an open-invite slack team with over 12000 users - sysadmins, MDM developers, security researchers and so on.
We have various ongoing efforts to document and improve the macOS experience for users. If you have a macOS question, you'll likely find the answer there.
This problem is actually the reason I've fallen out of love with Macos as a platform for my home computers.
There's way too much stuff that goes around, daemons that are waking up at any given point and doing a lot of I/O, for which there's absolutely no documentation whatsoever.
It kills the performance on my old Macs and also doesn't inspire confidence that I'm a user/owner of the device.
TFA gives two very disparate examples of documentation failures (basic use of the dock vs service management and the init system). What does the author want to write? A book in the style of the For Dummies series? Something more like the Windows Internals books? Both, everything in between? Some of those surely already exist...
Does anyone remember "Inside Macintosh," the manuals Apple published back in the classic Mac OS days? I have many of those books, covering everything from how the hardware handles drawing to the screen, up through memory management, files, networking, etc. They're examples of some of the best technical documentation I've ever encountered. It's too bad they don't prioritize that anymore. :(
"... a collection of thoughts on securing a modern Apple Mac computer using macOS (formerly OS X) 10.12 "Sierra", as well as steps to improving online privacy. This guide is targeted to “power users” who wish to adopt enterprise-standard security, but is also suitable for novice users with an interest in improving their privacy and security on a Mac."
I find most answers I need on Stackexchange. However there are books like "Mac OS The Missing Manual", I always wondered if anyone bought them and what they actually contained.
My thoughts exactly. First thought was what problems did this person run into that can't be found in a single google hit today? I was thinking the piece would go into some obscure internals but that doesn't seem to be the case.
MacOS is simple enough to grasp for most people at first use. More advanced usage is documented, not in one location but scattered over the internet. Google made that not matter anymore.
In addition, most documentation you would need today is for the products you install I guess, not macOS. But again, it really doesn't matter much with Google finding anything you search.
My experience with (large) documentation projects. They are outdated almost always. Q&A style works much better nowadays.
[+] [-] SwellJoe|8 years ago|reply
In particular, the service launcher (launchd, mentioned in the article), and various other system level things (including logs, also mentioned in the article), have so little official documentation as to be laughable. You just have to spelunk the web to find someone who has the tribal knowledge and has shared it in some form.
I gave up on the task, as the level of pain was far too high.
But, I'm kinda baffled why anyone would volunteer to provide free labor to one of the largest and most profitable companies in the world. I give away tons of my time for OSS, but I'm not about to get out and push if I've paid for a luxury car.
I'd rather put my time into something that is free and open for everyone, including my future self. Actually, the word "rather" isn't strong enough: I would never give my labor to an $820B corporation.
[+] [-] gurkendoktor|8 years ago|reply
Somewhat related, it has become Apple user/developer etiquette not to mention bugs without filing a bug report on Apple's closed issue tracker beforehand:
https://blackpixel.com/writing/2012/02/radar-or-gtfo.html
I can't believe how many hours I've wasted on detailed bug reports only for them to be closed as a duplicate, or "works as expected".
If you are frustrated with Apple, there is only one thing that works: 1) be influential, 2) complain publicly. If you want macOS to be documented, don't do it yourself. Find people at prominent media outlets and start the meme that Apple's documentation sucks, and that it matters for <reasons>. Add all sorts of pressure and with any luck, Apple will address this issue to turn the narrative around in its favour.
Since I don't have any of that power, I try to find open source projects that affect me and donate time or money to them instead.
[+] [-] nine_k|8 years ago|reply
You've scratched your itch. You decide to open-source it, so that everyone else who has a similar problem could benefit. Kudos!
Good thing is that you can push it to Github or something like that, making it instantly available.
Now replace the code with documentation. You have found something hard to find and important. You've solved your problem. Now you can share it, so that fellow developers could benefit from it. You have already spent time on it, for your own purposes. You don't want to document the rest of the lacunae in the official docs, but this particular bit is ready.
You'd like to waste as little effort doing that as possible, and make it instantly findable.
Where do you go?
Hence the idea of the original post.
[+] [-] igravious|8 years ago|reply
> I'd rather put my time into something that is free and open for everyone, including my future self. Actually, the word "rather" isn't strong enough: I would never give my labor to an $820B corporation.
That's exactly what springs to mind. Why should we do Apple's work for them when they are swimming in cash reserves. It beggars belief that anyone would suggest this. Obviously their pain is so great, they're so tightly shackled, their alternatives so limited, that they would rather willingly donate their labor to a wealthy corporation than attempt to take said corporation to task or shock horror jump ship.
[+] [-] notalaser|8 years ago|reply
YES! MacOS users don't need to document macOS as a volunteer project, they need to demand Apple to give them their money's worth.
[+] [-] masklinn|8 years ago|reply
God launchd's documentation is so woefully incomplete it's soul-crushing, even more so as they deprecate "legacy" subcommand (which are "community documented" as various souls tried to understand how to make them work) and the documentation for the "replacements" is even worse. I'm not a sysadmin, I don't really care for launchd, but every time I want to set up a cron I waste an hour trying to coerce it into doing something useful before just falling back onto crontab.
Not to mention the… idiosyncratic command lines which makes even documented tools a chore to use fucking `lipo`:
the various options are mostly exclusive which is documented but weird as fuck, but then say you want to check if a given binary contains a specific arch You'd expect `lipo -verify_arch x86_64 <file>`, but no, since it can take multiple arch rather than repeat -verify_arch you must put it at the tail: `lipo <file> -verify_arch x86_64`, if you don't you get a screenful of garbage telling you that you gave an incorrect architecture flag, which architecture flags are valid and re-printing the synopsys.[+] [-] blablabla123|8 years ago|reply
>decades...where docs are copious but wrong about 50% of the
>time.
Nice summary of the status of Linux documentation. Not sure if it's really 50% wrong, especially the man pages make an impression of over-corrected but the usefulness depends on the tool and is completely random. But yeah, online documentation, classical tutorials are usually useless. When I see a tutorial, I close the tab. They just lead to dirty installations. If a tool needs a documentation, there might be an alternative that needs none. ;) But seriously, a lot of stuff on Github is obvious to use.
Not sure about the macOS. Having changed from Linux to macOS as my main (laptop) OS, I first noticed the unusual BSD tools. So I installed GNU tools on my first year OS X. Now I just use the BSD tools, some I even prefer over the GNU versions. But I guess the stuff that has been developed by Apple has no docs at all..
[+] [-] AceJohnny2|8 years ago|reply
I've filed documentation bugs against launchd. They acknowledged the issue, and then filed them for resolution in the n+2 major release in macOS, because it was too late for the next major release.
I suspect their technical documentation process to have gone pear-shaped.
[+] [-] fundabulousrIII|8 years ago|reply
The worst three years I've recently experienced was supporting a dual OS (linux and mac) build/deploy for a highly complex proprietary scientific modeling system.
[+] [-] robbyt|8 years ago|reply
Management probably doesn't even realize this is an issue. Perhaps getting this started will get some visibility on the problem.
[+] [-] seba_dos1|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pebers|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dethos|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stuntkite|8 years ago|reply
I normally default to locate or find now so much that I was using it the other day I was reminded about how much it sucked. It's literally identical (aside from tags and labels) to what it was forever ago and is a terrible paradigm. I looked around for a bit for some help on refining the search sensibly and nothing in the OS helped (back on topic!). I've been using a great replacement for Finder called PathFinder that does everything Finder should do, but you can't swap it out. All the native places I access Finder are important inroads. They used to have instructions to hack it but apple shut them down.
I feel more and more like UI and usability innovation totally ate itself and died at maybe a specific moment in time ~6 years ago. Where did the people and companies go that do cool new things? Are the giants on their laurels long enough yet to get eaten? I'd switch totally to Ubuntu or Mint for my desktop work, but I do things that require the adobe suite, I need a trackpad that works as well as the mac one without fighting it, and I want to just solve problems, not fiddle with barely supported gizmos for weeks.
Did we reach the absolute end of all we can do with this juggling of rectangles that display and accept text and now we just get everything that matters to a power user stripped off for the sake of what "most users care about"? I really don't think we have.
I'm still pissed and I still have no answers. My kingdom for a $3000 laptop that "Just works" and helps me murder code, deployment, graphic arts, music, and still loads HBONow.
[+] [-] codyb|8 years ago|reply
I enjoy living in terminal. I'm very mediocre with both find and grep but I'm getting better and it makes me feel cool ;-), heh.
[+] [-] pampa|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] oscii|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Asooka|8 years ago|reply
UI fashions come and go, but the terminal is forever.
[+] [-] blacksmith_tb|8 years ago|reply
1: https://ss64.com/osx/mdfind.html
[+] [-] nebabyte|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] em3rgent0rdr|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mvdwoord|8 years ago|reply
I welcome this initiative.
(Yes I know there are examples of documentation excellence to be found in some free/open systems. You can advocate their use whilst also having well documented macOs.)
[+] [-] hoorayimhelping|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] camillomiller|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] LeoPanthera|8 years ago|reply
macOS is the best desktop OS going, for the moment.
[+] [-] LeoPanthera|8 years ago|reply
https://support.apple.com/macos
A lot of this is built into your Mac also, at Help > Mac Help in the Finder.
For those who prefer physical books, I've always found the "Missing Manual" series to be excellent.
[+] [-] pfranz|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nottorp|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cptskippy|8 years ago|reply
Every so often I come across something that isn't documented well or at all and it hurts. But it has a page at least and on every page they have a public feedback mechanism.
[+] [-] diego_moita|8 years ago|reply
The Android ecosystem is not bad, also.
[+] [-] unkown-unknowns|8 years ago|reply
You and me we both RTFM, but the population at large? Not so much. When computers were in their early days more of the people that used them were willing and even interested to learn a lot about what was going on. Now the computer is a tool used by most people to do specific tasks. Just like I don't care to learn how to fix my car they don't want to learn how to troubleshoot software nor hardware problems with their computers.
So it might not make economical sense for Apple to spend any significant amount of money on employing technical writers.
[+] [-] pfranz|8 years ago|reply
Sure, the average person doesn't have Activity Monitor (or top) open, but they could be walked through that process when their fans blare and battery life nosedives.
[+] [-] hollander|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ZenoArrow|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] userbinator|8 years ago|reply
In the days of classic Mac OS, when print publishing was growing as a result of Macs, Apple published an exemplary series of books under the banner Inside Macintosh
I have read the Inside Macintosh books but they still felt somewhat incomplete and superficial (although they're definitely a little prettier) compared to what I'd consider close to a "gold standard" for documentation, the IBM PC/AT Technical Reference and the same one for MS/PC-DOS.
I suppose it had a lot to do with the general attitude of Apple's culture, summarised in the famous phrase "it just works". The notion that systems should be designed to be so easy to use and obvious as to require no documentation, has resulted in a lack of documentation even for those cases which are not easy to use nor obvious.
[+] [-] pvg|8 years ago|reply
One of these is a foot of big books documenting a GUI system and its components, the other is a single volume that tells you handy things like 'The PC/AT has three programmable timers'. I don't think the documentation was ever complete but Apple did produce a lot more of it and had a lot more to document to begin with. The level of documentation is not really directly comparable let alone a symptom of some non-existent 'just works' culture and attitude. If anything, one could make a reasonable argument Apple of the time spent too much effort on beautifully documenting piles of things that were ultimately not useful or successful.
[+] [-] extra88|8 years ago|reply
[0] https://developer.apple.com/library/content/documentation/Pe...
[+] [-] zalmoxes|8 years ago|reply
We have various ongoing efforts to document and improve the macOS experience for users. If you have a macOS question, you'll likely find the answer there.
[+] [-] enqk|8 years ago|reply
There's way too much stuff that goes around, daemons that are waking up at any given point and doing a lot of I/O, for which there's absolutely no documentation whatsoever.
It kills the performance on my old Macs and also doesn't inspire confidence that I'm a user/owner of the device.
[+] [-] nebabyte|8 years ago|reply
...What gave you that delusion? Are you one of those people who clicks "okay" to EULAs without reading them?
[+] [-] schappim|8 years ago|reply
The author of this article fails to realise that the Mac is not Apple's flagship product anymore...
[+] [-] ecma|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Gracana|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dredmorbius|8 years ago|reply
Just sayin'.
[+] [-] walterbell|8 years ago|reply
"... a collection of thoughts on securing a modern Apple Mac computer using macOS (formerly OS X) 10.12 "Sierra", as well as steps to improving online privacy. This guide is targeted to “power users” who wish to adopt enterprise-standard security, but is also suitable for novice users with an interest in improving their privacy and security on a Mac."
[+] [-] natch|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CrazyRabbit|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TrickyRick|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bastijn|8 years ago|reply
MacOS is simple enough to grasp for most people at first use. More advanced usage is documented, not in one location but scattered over the internet. Google made that not matter anymore.
In addition, most documentation you would need today is for the products you install I guess, not macOS. But again, it really doesn't matter much with Google finding anything you search.
My experience with (large) documentation projects. They are outdated almost always. Q&A style works much better nowadays.
[+] [-] jalcazar|8 years ago|reply
Maybe we as customers of Apple should demand Apple to better document macOS. Apple can well afford to get the documentation fixed.