Steve Jobs and Apple used to use “It just works” as a slogan or alleged truism for their Mac products. Well, of course the reality is that that is just not true all of the time. And it is comically terrible at doing so sometimes. The most frustrating example of this for me right now, and really for several years now, is trying to use “This Desktop” on my iMacs.
On a Mac you can create multiple “spaces”, or workspaces, where one app or more can live to give them a more dedicated area of the screen. I usually want to have a single app per space, so that I can allow favorite / most used apps that dedicated real estate - one space for my browser, one for my to-do app, and so on. I typically have four to five spaces open for this purpose.
This Desktop is advertised, by Apple, as a way to pin an app to one space/desktop. Which sounds great. I could have confidence that my browser always hangs out on Desktop 1, my Slack application on Desktop 2, the to-do app on Desktop 3, Spotify on Desktop 4 and so forth. Except ….
It almost never works beyond Desktop 1. Slack decides on a regular, or even daily, basis that it would much rather live on Desktop 4, overlapping with Spotify, and it does not care what I say. The to-do app rebels in a similar way - decides it would like to use Desktop 5. This doesn’t happen once in a while. It happens far more often than not - across multiple years, and multiple iMacs, worth of use.
My older, and to my mind, more ridiculous example of this, is from something like 10-12 years ago when I was using the built-in Mail app on a Mac. The Mail app got slower and slower and terribly slow over the course of time. It would often take close to two minutes just to open. It would take a painfully long time - into tens of seconds and beyond, to perform common actions - e.g. compose a new email, open an email in the Inbox, refresh the contents of the Inbox after deleting emails, and more.
I tried to find a system setting for something like repairing or optimizing the mail database; I couldn’t find anything. I called Apple Support and asked where I could find a setting or a utility app on the Mac to do this. They could not point me to one either, and suggested I visit a local Apple store and the Genius Bar. I did that, and initially a couple of geniuses spoke about the “just works” and how it shouldn’t ever need that sort of thing. I asked them to spend some time in my Mail app and share their thoughts on what level of just working it was at. They agreed it was not just working, not very much at all and very much not as expected. They suggested editing and or deleting a few different library files, and tried that out for a bit. There was no improvement.
In the end, they took the iMac into their employees area at the back of the store, and several hours passed before they returned with the iMac and Mail working better, though far from speedily. I ditched the Mail app that day and have never gone anywhere near it ever since.