Apparently, Apple is making macOS Catalina phone home so much it’s making the operating system slow, laggy, and beachbally, as Allan Odgaard details.
Apple has introduced notarization, setting aside the inconvenience this brings to us developers, it also results in a degraded user experience, as the first time a user runs a new executable, Apple delays execution while waiting for a reply from their server. This check for me takes close to a second.
This is not just for files downloaded from the internet, nor is it only when you launch them via Finder, this is everything. So even if you write a one line shell script and run it in a terminal, you will get a delay!
Aside from the obviously terrible design and privacy implications of your computer phoning home to Apple every time you execute something, this is also another case of Apple only designing for the absolutely optimal use-cases – i.e., people working and living in Cupertino – and that’s it. The less optimal your internet connection or the farther away you are, the worse your experience will be.
Apple has a few file system locations that require user permission to access them, for example
~/Desktop,~/Documents, and~/Downloads.Surprisingly though, just obtaining the display name or icon for one of these folders will trigger Apple’s code to verify that the client is allowed to access the location.
This is done by sending a message to the
sandboxdprocess which sends a message totccdwhich callsSecCodeCheckValidityWithErrorsand seems to communicate with yet another process, but I can’t find which, and this takes around 150 ms per location.
It may not seem like much, but this adds up, and can add more than half a second of delay when opening an application.
Like with privileged folders, keychain items also require permission for applications to access them.
But again, something is wrong. Specifically calling
SecKeychainFindGenericPasswordcan cause noticeable delays, on a bad internet day I had this call stall for 3.3 seconds and this was with System Integrity Protection disabled!
And on other delays in launching applications in general:
This is the worst issue, sometimes, things will stall for 5-30 seconds.
Mostly though it is when launching applications. Sampling the application during launch shows stalls in
ImageLoaderMachO::loadCodeSignature,SLSMainConnectionID, and many references to Skylight and CGS in the stack trace.
The current best way to “address” this issue is disabling System Integrity Protection and disconnecting from the internet (!), and especially that second one is of course entirely unreasonable. I wouldn’t touch macOS with a ten-foot pole even before Catalina – it always felt slow and sluggish to me, even on faster Macs, and Mac hardware is terrible value right now – but with all the general complaints about Catalina, and now this, it’s getting ever clearer I’m not missing out on anything by sticking to Linux.
At least my computer isn’t calling home to Clement Lefebvre every time I run a tiny script.
Catalina is Apple slow killing MacOS X by driving away users (to iPads according to Apple’s plan). Catalina is already a problematic update because it kills 32-bit apps, despite the fact those old non-subscription versions of Adobe software are 32-bit. If I was the CEO of Apple and wanted to drive away the creative freelancers that comprise most of Mac OS X’s userbase, that would be my go-to move.
Let’s be honest, after the App Store became a thing, neither Apple nor Microsoft like the fact dmg and exe files accordingly can be sold freely without the OS vendor getting a 30% cut.
kurkosdr,
+1
I’m doubling down on my prediction that apple is intentionally continuing to make macpro less accessible to all users unless they can afford the enterprise level pricing. Apple is planning on the upcoming ARM units to take it’s place, and their pricing will be affordable for market penetration. It will be marketed as a next generation macos for users and creatives alike, however it will most likely come with new restrictions that give apple more control over both users and developers akin to what they’ve done on IOS. I know that MacOS fans don’t like this and I really hope I’m wrong in my prediction, but this is increasingly looking like what’s taking place.
On microsoft’s side, restrictions haven’t been popular either since they’re almost universally hated by consumers and developers, but microsoft continues to hammer away at it with a lot of determination. So I speculate that a lot of the freedoms that we’ve enjoyed as computer users are ending with x86. As much as I want ARM to be a successful alternative for x86 computers, I’m highly concerned that the upcoming flood of ARM PCs from both apple and MS are probably going to highly restrict what owners are allowed to do 🙁
“and their pricing will be affordable”
Apple = affordable??? Is this some kind of joke you are telling?
The iPad range is more affordable overall than the Mac range.
brostenen,
I agree with your sarcasm taken out of context, however when you read what I’m saying in context I think it makes sense overall. I know their current mac lineup is not affordable, but the ARM macs will probably fill the price gaps in their lineup, provided that you’re willing to succumb to their IOSification.
Microsoft face a roadblock in their quest to lock Windows down: business users. In the world of business, you can’t -as an OS vendor- walk into the room and start swinging your dick around and breaking things overnight, because once you lose a business customer, they are gone for life. Even when it came to Windows Mobile (awful and completely irrelevant as it was in the post-iPhone era) Microsoft had to support it under the name “Windows Embedded Handheld” for years, and even today they continue making it available to business users interested. The win32 platform is pretty entrenched in business, so Microsoft will have to always deliver an open version of Windows supporting win32.
In contrast, Apple is a boutique OS vendor, basically the equivalent of buying from the organic and vegan shelf in the supermarket, so they *can* break things without too much consequence, since enough hipsters will take it anyway.
kurkosdr,
I agree with all of that. Clearly the challenge for microsoft is dealing with consumers and businesses who strongly resist restrictions. But in all likelihood what will happen then is that x86 will be needed for the legacy & business users, while ARM remains locked down.
There’s also windows 10x, win32 continues to exist but with increased limitations and no direct host access. As I understand it, it is something like an RDP session in a virtual environment. I don’t necessarily have an issue with the option of doing this with owners in control. But if owners aren’t in control it obviously has potential for abuse and double standards with microsoft giving itself privileged access & control over others, like IOS.
If you let your hardware provider get away with explicitly user-hostile acts like removing the headphone jack just to be able to charge three digits for a $10 headphone, you will obviously see much more “awesome” and “exciting” features from them.
there is one upside to this; phasing out certain legacy solutions and simplifying new hardware. Apple is just a tad too aggressive at it, because they have a specific ecosystem of hardware-software.
Why do we phase out legacy solutions? To replace them with something better. Sure, replacing my grandma’s wood-powered oven with an electrical one makes sense.
Replacing headphone jack with a proprietary alternative makes sense only for Apple.
It will be interesting to see what Apple’s justification for this is. If they even acknowledge it. It won’t matter what it is, I’ve begun migrating away from Macs after an 11 year run. Not for this reason, but for several others. This just confirms I’m making the right decision. It’s sad really, because overall I do like macOS, albeit not all of the changes from the last couple of major releases.
Greg,
I understand your preference for the platform, it isn’t always easy or fun to change when you’ve got so much vested in your platform of choice. If I were a mac user, I think a few things would tick me off about apple right now. The lack of maintenance and investment into macos for the past decade is shameful. They won’t committed to supporting standards like opengl/opencl or the next gen vulkan, and dropping the ball on nvidia support renders the mac a second class citizen in the GPGPU industry. They have a huge hole in their prosumer product lineup with exactly zero products out now that fit my needs: I need more power than imac pro or macbook pro offers, yet the $6k macpro is way too expensive while simultaneously still being too under-speced without even more upgrades.
So, I’d be voting with my feet about now too, but seeing as I wasn’t in the apple camp to begin with, I’m not sure my absence will be felt, haha.
I might be temped by the hackintosh route, where’s Psystar when you need ’em? 🙂
I think they want to make the Mac into an appliance, like how the iPad’s currently are. They have demonstrated this by dumbing down the MacBook Pro into a fancy MacBook (without ports and a terrible keyboard). They have partially fixed the keyboard, but the general attitude is still there.
I want a generic purpose PC. Other platforms have embraced openness (even Microsoft is backing down from closed Store system, and including linux). Mac wants to go to the other extreme.
This might be useful for people who don’t actually need “pro” work, but a generic computing device with a low bar for entry. All things will be checked by the gatekeeper, and the user can be assumed to be not knowledgeable to manage their own system. There is a market for that. But obviously it is not for me.
I have always seen macOS as a social experiment in how slow, useless and nonsensical you can make a OS and still have people swear by it.
I needed to buy special apps just to get the mouse to act sanely on my latest iMac Pro. At least it was _only_ slow on the old 2009 Mac Pro and not broken. And thank god I only need a Mac for testing.
There are more severe problems with Catalina:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6dwqxsDHkKQ
The most important takeaway from this is Catalina locks part serial numbers to the install so only Apple can do things like replace wifi cards now.
smashIt,
This is a problem. If the motherboard fails, you loose your data even if the storage media is fine and you can’t recover it on a different computer. Users should take note because this significantly increases the risk of data loss.
Louis Rossman puts out so many videos it’s hard to find a specific one again, but in one he mentioned that he’s seeing more cases where customers with board damage are being turned away by apple technicians claiming there was water damage. Multiple times he was able to show this was false and the board damage was actually a manufacturing defect. Apple shops are actually lying about water damage in order to deny repair service.
Water damage has been their goto excuse for at least 15 years.
Leopard was the last MacOS that I have ever wanted. Actually Tiger and Leopard are the only two, that I wanted to buy a Mac for. Back then I saw Apple computers as something a bit special. Just not today. Thanks but no thanks. I stick with Linux as my main OS on my daily machine. It gives what I saw in MacOS back then. Plus much, much, much more.
I’d use Linux if it wasn’t so damn fragmented
I would really like to jump out apple+macos. Any suggestion for a modern laptop NOT 16:9 with good Linux support? I.e. at least 16:10 or better 3×2
fabrica64,
My last laptop purchase was a fujitsu and was not linux friendly unfortunately, I haven’t found a way disable secure boot. Reviews said ubuntu runs on it, which it does, but it’s no longer safe to assume this means that you can disable secure boot. Even windows boot utility media wouldn’t boot on it. Forced secure boot is such a hostile move, just watch out for it. Like you, I also despise unproductive aspect ratios. They do it to mimick movie theaters but in office / web tasks the horizontal dimensions just gets wasted on whitespace while the vertical is insufficient. Another criteria I’d strongly suggest you keep in mind is screen resolution, it baffles me that manufactures still think 768 is enough vertical pixels, it was sub-par back in 2000 and it’s just a pathetic spec.
One trend that really bugs me on modern laptops is the tendency to cram the nav/arrow keys such that it’s practically impossible to touch type effectively. Even large laptops that have enough space to space things out sometimes stupidly go with a crammed layout. Honestly I’ve struggled to find laptops that I’m happy with, and that’s even before looking at h/w specs and things like driver support.
I finally jumped the ship and moved to Linux after 29 years as a Mac user. I had become increasingly dissatisfied with both Apple’s hardware and Mac OS X. The Mac Pro (6000 dollars!) and Catalina (notarisation and dropped 32-bit support) were the two final nails in the coffin. (And before Catalina there was Mojave which “upgraded” my hard disk to APFS making it so slow it was nearly unusable.) Meanwhile, Linux started to look more and more attractive and I was especially intrigued by all the reports saying it could run many Windows games at almost the same performance as on Windows (and sometimes even better!).
Still, I’m sad to see Apple abandoning developers and the prosumer market. Back in the early days of Mac OS X it seemed like Apple was making a lot of effort to attract developers from the greater Unix world. It could have been a great Unix system, but I guess the Apple of today is more interested in being a lifestyle brand and locking people into their ecosystem. I’m still excited about Apple’s presumed shift to ARM, though mostly because I want to see someone challenge the utter dominance of the crufty old x86 and the implications it could have for the greater computer market.
Side note: I’m having a hard time finding any good resources targeted at Mac users migrating to Linux. There’s an endless supply of Linux tutorials for Windows users, but as someone who has had very limited exposure to Windows I feel that none of them are relevant to me. What I find is usually either “how to install Linux on a Mac” or discussions about which DM is most Mac-like (which I find rather superficial). Does anyone know of any good resources to help a long-time Mac user feel more at home on Linux?
Don’t worry, Linux is being rendered much worse at a much faster rate. There is no escape from the awfulness that is modern computing. (Ubuntu 20.04 is full of snap sillynesss, which is like insisting that your mac application installation DMG files remain mounted as filesystems, forever, and you must execute your applications from within them, in a sandbox. Let’s not even begin to discuss how badly the moras of systemd-foo has broken the network stack.) I’m sure it’s just as bad or worse in RedHat land, as they started the rot.
FWIW I think tha the cited article and many of the comments here are wrong. Here in Sydney I’m about as far from Cupertino as the internet allows, and I get first and second shell script execution times of 0.001 seconds or so, which is much shorter than the 170ms round-trip time to SF, so clearly no telemetry going on here. I’m running up to date macOS on a five-year-old iMac 5k, which is still a great workstation.
To say that there hasn’t been any work done on macOS is ridiculous. Catalina is the largest ground-up redesign of fundamental OS structure I’ve ever seen. Major surgery, and yet it upgraded in-place and nothing that I was running broke. Of course I’ve moved off any crufty old 32-bit code long ago: the warnings have been coming for a long time. Three major OS versions is a long time.
“Catalina is the largest ground-up redesign of fundamental OS structure I’ve ever seen.”
I guess you weren’t born when Vista came out? Catalina isn’t even 5% as big an undertaking as Vista – something Windows still profits from more than 15 years later.
OK, yes, that was definitely hyperbole, but it was significant change, which clearly took a lot of work to pull off, refuting the “macOS gets no support” meme.
I don’t remember Vista moving the whole OS to a read-only partition, and doubt that it would be possible.
Yes, Vista did some useful device driver work (which wasn’t handled as well as the Catalina changes, because I remember _lots_ of people complaining about the amount of stuff that it broke, but it was still mostly just WNT with lip gloss.
Actually, the biggest ground-up redesign was probably FreeBSD-5, where they bit the bullet and introduced kernel multithreading to the previously single-threaded BSD kernel. Sun squibbed on that, years before, by just porting the BSD user-land over the already multi-threaded SVR4 kernel. It took years and many more revisions to finish the job, but the fact that it kept working in the mean time was quite a feat. (Linux did much the same thing, in much the same time frame, of course, but they had a lot more big-company help, and I wasn’t watching that transition as closely.)
I am amused by your estimate of my age, of course…
Oh come on.
Microsoft completely rewrote the Windows OS With NT 3.1. If that isn’t the biggest OS rewrite in history, i don’t know what is. Even the M68K to PPC rewrite for MacOS was a huge undertaking.
There’s tonnes of examples of OS rewrites in history. Not all of them get a mention, much like the tireless work of those involved in Y2K, because it mostly worked as intended.
People always moan about vista.
Vista is still the only windwos OS I ever bought. Well bought at full price. Sort of…
XP was though of jjust as badly when it came out and we all hung onto windows 2000 (after moving from win 98 like sane peoople (hell nt4 would have been fine with hardware/updated dx support)).
Many changes were needed and if was always more about the changes upsettign opeople than it being bad. Over nagging in the first release yes, but still a lot better than XP.
Why did I buy it? Well it was time for 64 bit and XP 64 was only ever a test version and so not really supported. So I got a new machine and needed 64 bit windows. So I bought it online from MS. Of course it was not easy since the download (yes a disk came though the post weeks later!) thought the best option was only to work on a 64 bit install! So it was find appropriate tools and convert the odd image format into and iso and burn to dvd! But it was not to hard to do that. And I think all windows from 7 on should not have entertained a 32 bit fresh install. I mean that until the new version of 10 they have is f’ing ridiculous. Upgrades, yes. Special downloads for business, ok. Leaving the general public to think they understand it, no.
Then there was vista.1 (the last ever one they called a service pack iirc). Well that was pretty much win 7 but becuase of the bad press they did a quick facelift and released 7 a bit later with only minor tweaks.
Then we can talk about 8. Yes the same paradigm everywhere was a stupid idiea that was stupid the previous time(s) they tried it. But as an OS it was fine. I mean who spends that much time staring at the os/whatever launching menu they provide? Then came along (lets not call it a service pack, that failed last time!) 8.1 and all was fine.
But to the point. Vists much of a change? Not really. most of the functionaloty was there from 2000 (maybe even prior, 4 or the 3’s were so long ago I can;t remember much!), just not used by default.
So in my view 2000 was the game changer. Bringing in proper DX support was bigger than anything like changing a few default configurations.
Though as always YM (and view) MV.
Still both for OSX and slower for windows I see them trying to stop being a general purpose OS. Whatever all my files are on the linux box. If windows refuses to connect I shall start using them there. Windows is mainly for games there days. I can see it coming but it would not work for business (apple could not care less about the business market anymore for obvious examples!). But I do see consumer windows and business windows being more of a split than home/pro is these days. Once pro stops playing games though, that is the time for linux. (and office will liekly be native on linux by then the way things are going).
I’m getting slowdowns and beachballs after I DISABLE SIP, opposite to everyone else. Something more complex is probably going on.
Catatonia.
Meanwhile the linux tree which I created with 0.99 and kept moving to newer releases still works, though I did have to tweak when it crossed from Intel to ARM.
I didn’t know about this phoning home thing but I knew I hated Catalina, it was horrible. I went back to Mohave and once it’s out of support I’ll probably move to Linux or something.
I started with MacOS in 1986 (got a job that let me afford a new 512E.) It was great and I refused to use (or develop for) anything else for many years. Even when they gratuitously broke my system extensions (OS8) or bad documentation and bugs (ATSUI, HTML help, Font handling) caused disasters in shipping products, I never gave up. (I was lucky enough to ignore OpenDoc and QuickDraw3D, so I got burned less than many others did.) I remember the thrill of seeing boxed titles I built in the new Apple Store!
The beginning of the end was the open pre-alpha of OS X, otherwise known as 10.0.. It became usable by 10.2 and actually decent with Snow Leopard. Lion was the first of several times I though the next version was too lobotomized to use, but Catalina sounds like a joke.
I finally ended up running Windows on BootCamp until Win 10 appeared and sucked really bad too. Linux is not very convenient, it’s years behind the Big Two in polish, but it works and at least pretends it works for me.
Let me give you a tip: If you think people would be interested in what you did rather than what you think, write an autobiography instead of a comment on a technical news site.
hdjhfds,
Thank goodness you were here to shut him down… we can’t have people talking about their experiences with technology here.
/s
pauls101,
You know I find it funny that whether we were on windows or macos, most of us were more pleased with our respective platforms ~15 years ago. Both platforms have moved in directions that displeased many users. It almost seems like while both are aware of our complaints, they don’t care anymore. I think it’s a byproduct of companies that have too much success, whereas small companies have to fight for customers to survive, large ones get to sit on their asses while still making an absurd amount of money. Meanwhile, it’s obviously true that linux displeases many users too, and I get why people think it’s rough around the edges, but at least it’s actually gotten better over the years for most users. Of course I have my gripes with it, but of all the platforms it’s still the one that I would choose with the benefit of hindsight. I don’t believe that microsoft or apple have consumer interests at heart.
Thank God for older Thinkpads!!! My mother still has a 2012 13″ MBP & yes, it runs much slower now because of Catalina. Versus my household, with T420, T430 & X230 running Windows 10 (& Debian 10 on the X230), perfectly fast. I am happily staying far away from anything made by Apple!
I dual boot Linux and MacOS on my iMac (2015 model) and MacOS is *much* faster than Linux, especially when it comes to starting up. KDE Desktop just takes ages. I have a Fusion drive so I guess parts of the OS load off the SSD while all of Linux has to load off the HDD. But that doesn’t explain it taking minutes to load the desktop even after login. I use Linux Mint on my Lenovo laptop though, and it’s nothing like as sluggish as Kubuntu (though the laptop has an SSD); maybe I should give it a go on my Mac too.
Honestly, i used to like this news site, odd and peculiar news related to the world of computing and OS in general.
Lately though the “Apple rant” section is taking the lead as if to present further justification why you moved to Linux.
You like Linux, fine, great, I’m happy for you. Can you move forward from the phase where you keep complaining about the ex girlfriend you left and keep praising the new one who is sooo much better ?
You know, it looks like actually you still miss the old girlfriend …
“Lately though the “Apple rant” section is taking the lead as if to present further justification why you moved to Linux.”
If you look at the first page of articles you will find 1x Apple and 6x Microsoft.
I think your preception is a bit skewed.
They need to keep telling themselves Linux is better/just as good or they’ll stop tolerating all the inconveniences like being sent to a command line or config file the moment something breaks, Google troubleshooting results not being nearly as helpful if they were on OSX/Windows, etc.
dark2,
That’s quite the generalization. You must understand that not everyone has the same needs or wants as you. I don’t pretend that linux is always perfect, I frequently express my gripes about it here. Windows was never perfect either for that matter. But when it comes to platforms that respect an owner’s control, linux (and it’s FOSS brethren) are at the top of the list and deserve to be there IMHO. Some of us find microsoft and apple policies unacceptable and consequently vote with our feet in migrating to FOSS platforms. Do we represent you or anyone else who disagrees? Of course not, but when it comes to our decisions, respectfully our opinions matter much more than yours.
Keep in mind that many of us using linux are developers who are comfortable with linux commands. You may not like it, and that opinion is totally legit, but that does not mean it isn’t genuinely the best choice for many of us. We’re not “telling ourselves linux is better”, it really is better for us!
Apple has Continuously Adding bloatware to their system, I have at leas 15 processes that I don’t use and it’s hogging cpu time/memory. Someone should come up with a utility that’s capable of shutting down items that the USER wants so it doesn’t affect their particular situation. With Catalina and it’s myraid of changes it’s becoming a OS that’s locking down against the USER and not beneficial for them. Apple as Changed since the transition to Cook, To a Bad way. Apple is Disappointing to the long time fans and supporters and is plainly changing to a corporate juggernaut for the money. They have thousands of people on their campus doing what? Not coming up with a new version of Quicktime. Remember Their abandon of skeqmorphism/ the ability to change the theme of macs? Where did that go? They flushed it down the drain for excuses and gave the finger to the Users. Instead of making something for the people they changed it to a corporate forefront. a mac could last more than 10 years, a PC maybe 5. That’s why, they needed to get people buying more. If they can design a lithium battery for a car that’ll last 10 years, why can’t they put that battery in a phone? Product rotation=Profit. The new users in the recent 10 years don’t know the struggles that the users have been through and have supported Apple through the bad times. and Unfortunately Apple has Become the Bad Guy. and We need a revolution or something new. Why the need to cut off 32 bit apps? why the needs to twist the OS and have to call home for? Why the need to have it install/boot in to three partitions? Every change it makes it’s not for the User benefit, But for the Benefit of Apple and it’s ability to make money in the Future, by Cutting out the Old Fat and stuffing new fat in it’s place. Be warned.
I’ve been waiting for a new (Affordable) Mac Pro since 2014, I’m highly disappointed in what we currently got. So I have a choice now, continue to invest in Apple, go PC or do a hybrid. I can construct a Hackintosh for $15oo, but stuck with Catalina or install Windows and run a VM and image mac OS and Run Mojave. thoughts?
I haven’t had any noticeable slowdowns with Catalina, and in fact startup time of the system and overall stability has improved. The only thing I am disappointed by is the plethora of Steam games that are marked incompatible due to the 32-bit crackdown (though apparently it is hit or miss whether they actually are incompatible or not).
Also it should be mentioned that the security benefits of requiring software to be notarized means antivirus software is not necessary. I’m not defending the practice of charging even open-source developers $99 a year to publish notarized binaries, but if we’re just talking about performance here, antivirus software takes a *waaaay* bigger toll on performance – continually – than a 1-second delay the first time you launch an app.
Moochman,
It kind of depends of the specifics of the antivirus though. I’m pretty sure that both google and apple are using antivirus scans internally, it just happens on their infrastructure instead of ours. You get similar benefits with so called “cloud av” where scans can be skipped if the results are already present in the AV database.
Depending on the implementation it doesn’t have to be slow or continuous. The certificates your device uses to verify software is allowed to run may as well be the same kind of certificates that verify your software has been scanned by AV. It’s only when an AV uses behavioral scanning that it needs to run continuously in the background. The advantage of behavioral scanning is the potential to catch malware that hasn’t been identified, but performance is a con. However if you don’t use runtime behavior scanning then there doesn’t have to be a big continuous performance cost.
Because of the lack of any kind of real value in the MacBook Pro line up (especially at the height of the idiotic keyboard debacle) I ended up switching to Windows a year and a half ago. I really missed macOS back then. It’s far superior to Windows, in just about every way (seriously, Microsoft needs to clean that mess up, and has needed to for decades).
But I recently switched over to Pop! OS, and and no longer miss macOS. I use macOS for work (they are a mac office, strangely enough) – and for occasional iOS development. I really love my Linux box for all my own development these days, and don’t miss macOS at all when I’m on it. I even have an escape key, full USB and HDMI ports, function keys – and a touch screen!
> why the needs to twist the OS and have to call home for?
Wouldn’t this add bandwidth to Apple’s servers? Or is there already so much communication with Apple’s servers due to iCloud that the added few bytes from authentications for doesn’t matter? And *how* do you “notarize” that a custom shell script is “authentic”? Isn’t that kind of the definition of “custom”?
Or do they do this to get a few more scraps of anonymized use patterns that their big-data people think they *might* be able to use some way for “monetization”? (: “more people with Macbook Pros use Microsoft Word at night rather than in the morning?”