Last week I wrote an exploration of Ben Thompson’s recent question, “Why is the ChatGPT Mac app so good?” A lot of people on the internet, it turns out, do not agree with this premise!
Many folks have been having problems with ⌘C not copying text. Hacker News sees the app as “not good at all”, to the point that my post about it being better than the alternatives was flagged off the site. X doesn’t like it either.
Beyond the bugs I mentioned in last week’s post, I’ve recently been plagued with a ChatGPT Mac bug of my own, where every time I start a new chat, it will pre-fill the text field with the first input I used last time I started a new chat on Mac.
All of this led me to an informative post by one of OpenAI’s Mac developers, Stephan Casas:
nearly everyone who works on the ChatGPT macOS app has been stretched thin, and hard at work building Atlas.
[…]
i’m thankful that our users appreciate our decision to develop a native app just as much as i’m thankful for the heightened expectations they hold because we did so
Apparently he merged a fix this week for the copy-paste bug that has been plaguing many folks, which is promising.
Something implied in last week’s article that’s worth saying explicitly: although many good Mac apps are native, being native is neither necessary nor sufficient for being a great app.
While OpenAI is investing more in desktop apps than any other model labs, they have much to do before they can transcend “better than the alternatives” and achieve “great.”