Speaking of Messages… as hard as I found that to believe myself, somehow things there got unimaginably worse about a year ago. I don’t know when or why exactly it started, but Messages has been permanently out of sync on my Mac so badly that it is barely usable anymore.

The conversation above is from July 2024.¹ Looking at the timestamps: Philipp answered 30 minutes after the hilarious meme I sent. His response arrived on my phone immediately. 18 minutes later I returned to my Mac to check out the links he sent, but no sign of the messages there. From experience I already knew that sending another message myself would get things unstuck – that’s what is shown in the video. Once it catches up, things work without any delay – until it gets stuck again as I use Messages on the phone or my work Mac.

This affects all my conversations (I only still use Messages with three holdouts that haven’t moved on from Apple), and has gotten worse over time. In the beginning it would catch up on its own after a few hours. Now it is often several days behind. Responding myself to “force a sync” as shown in the video doesn’t work instantly anymore. Sometimes it only seems to partially catch up – e.g. loading the last two of five missing messages in total. I lost any trust in Messages on the Mac showing me the full content of conversations, erasing what little remaining value that service still had to me.

Maybe I could fix it by reinstalling – logging out of iCloud and logging back in didn’t help. But frankly, I don’t care anymore. I moved on from macOS for most parts of my personal computing, and I expect to fully rid myself of it this year. Besides life being busy, that’s a main reason for the decrease in postings here. Our criticism, petty as it often may seem, usually means that we genuinely care. When you care about something, that comes with a desire for improvement and an expectation of higher standards. I stopped caring about Apple long ago – seems as good a time as any to articulate that.