Automation painpoints
Fourteen filings against macOS, each one a place where the Mac already holds the capability and refuses to hand it to the person using the machine. Written the way a bug report should be written — reproduce it, measure it, say precisely what should happen instead.
“The power of the computer should reside in the hands of the one using it.” — Sal Soghoian
Most of these are automation walls: an app that ships a scripting dictionary with the verbs missing, or none at all. One is different — SYSTEM-SETTINGS-002 is a data-loss hazard, where Apple keeps something on your behalf and tells no one.
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The Copy You Never Sent →
SYSTEM-SETTINGS-002 — Send a file too big for iMessage and Messages compresses a copy, sends that, and quietly keeps your original. It is counted at the size that was sent, so it appears in no storage panel. It was never in the conversation, so it has no bubble. And it is usually the only full-quality copy you own — 8.57 GB across 43 conversations on one machine, which Apple’s own one-click storage remedy would destroy without a word.
Full evidence, measured: read the filing →
All filings
The pattern across all fourteen
Read together, the filings say the same thing in fourteen dialects.
The data is already on the machine. Messages holds every conversation in a SQLite database. Photos holds every image and its metadata. Activity Monitor reads process tables the kernel already publishes. HomePod has a thermometer in the room you are standing in. Nothing needs to be invented — it needs to be handed over.
The scaffolding is often already built. Messages’ dictionary defines message,
chat, and buddy classes with no verbs that read them. Photos ships a dictionary
that catalogs but cannot edit. Apple designed for the access and then did not ship it.
Privacy is the stated reason, and it is not a good one. macOS already has the Automation privacy framework: the user grants permission per app, explicitly, in System Settings. Blocking a person from scripting their own data is not privacy. It is paternalism with a privacy-shaped explanation.
Where a tool does exist, it must be correct — and it must say what it did. SYSTEM-SETTINGS-002 is the newest filing and the odd one out: Apple identified a real problem, built the panel, shipped it, and pointed its filter at the transmitted size while the disk holds the original. A missing feature sends you looking for another way. A tool that silently omits the answer sends you away believing there is nothing more to find. And when the omitted thing is the only full-quality copy of a video of your child, the failure stops being about disk space.
Filed by @esaruoho — software tester, UI enthusiast, amateur scripter, automation and workflow obsessive, user experience evaluator. Reporting the missing bits and pieces one at a time.