Do any macOS users actually want unification? I do not, but I'm just one data point.
Being able to use mobile apps on a computer is a clear win, but that's a purely additive change—you don't need change the existing OS appearance or functionality to accomplish it.
I worry that "unification" will be realized by dumbing down the desktop rather than empowering the mobile device.
I use macs but don't use iphones/ipads and instead prefer Android. In general, I don't really use a lot of the services and apps that come with macs. I don't use iCloud. I don't use iMail. I don't use Safari. I don't use Facetime. I don't use keynote, pages, iMovie, Garageband, etc. So, like with most OS X / Mac OS releases of the last half decade, there's actually very little (if anything) I can point at that actually genuinely is an improvement for me.
The base OS has mostly gotten worse actually. It's gotten a lot more anal about requiring signed binaries and micromanaging permissions. Dropping 32 bit means my steam library is now full of stuff that no longer works. OpenGL support is a deprecated afterthought meaning that a lot of OSS stuff either won't work or barely works. I recently updated my macbook pro but aside from some minor icon rearranging in the menu bar, I can't really tell the difference with last year's edition. Most of this review is about applications that Apple bundles with the OS that compete with third party stuff that I use and prefer. Couldn't care less about any of that. But I appreciate that it's nice for people buying into the whole Apple everything experience.
The reason I use macs is mainly because it's nice hardware with a unix like OS. Most of the tools I use are open source. I user Firefox for browsing, homebrew, docker, Intellij, VS Code, Darktable for photos, etc. I could easily switch to Linux or Windows and use the same tools. But macs are convenient. For now. It seems MS is much more on top of making Windows developer friendly than Apple is currently. It wouldn't be hard to do for Apple but for some reason they are not interested in that anymore.
I also use Mac as a glorified unix OS with an WiFi that works, printing that works, laptop sleep and awake that works, and UI that works across external monitors with various DPI settings seamlessly.
I know many of the aforementioned issues have been fixed (to some extent) for linux. I'd be willing to give the Linux desktop another try but:
1. I really love my LG 5k external monitor. It's still hard to find hardware for linux that can drive it (especially laptops)
2. I got used to how fonts are rendered on macos
3. Keyboard shortcuts systematically different (CMD/meta vs Ctrl) make it harder to occasionally switch between the two systems. I know it sounds silly. But it's hard to remap those modifiers in a way that keeps everything else working the same.
I wish I could say the same. I have tasted the dark side(seamless integration between iPhone and Mac) and can’t imagine moving away from it without a significant irritation of reduced productivity.
Some examples of perks to be had because of giving in to the ecosystem..
1. Copy something on phone, and paste it on any application on Mac (and vice versa)
2. Instantly access all photos taken on iPhone for quick edits on Mac, or even to upload somewhere on a website(passport, dr.license and such).
3. Notes.app that is the same on iPhone and Mac because of iCloud. Notes has become my knowledge base.
4. I also have an iPad. Need to sign a PDF document? Right click and send to iPad where I can use my Apple Pencil. Save the document and it is instantly on my iCloud Desktop.
I can’t imagine the independent way of doing things again :-(
> I also have an iPad. Need to sign a PDF document? Right click and send to iPad where I can use my Apple Pencil. Save the document and it is instantly on my iCloud Desktop.
Similarly, you can right click on the Mac desktop and scan a document with your iPhone. Massive productivity booster for anyone shuffling lots of papers.
I did not know either. The I decided to check if I could do the same anywhere on the finder and guess what it is possible. I does not work on my network drive, but this is cool. :)
Back when I used android there were ways to do all of these. I can’t recall the clipboard app, but 2 and 3 are just Google photos and Google keep. #4 doesn’t even require an extra device. You can import a signature from a signed piece of paper into Preview directly.
KDEConnect covers a lot of this, including clipboard sync across multiple devices running the daemon.
It's nowhere as polished and Just Works® as Apple's Continuity, but it's great for me with a desktop and laptop running Fedora, and mobile devices running LineageOS.
That does not seems to be unique. You can do all that on linux (or windows) with android as well either out of the box or after installing kdeconnect. Also then you are not tied to icloud but can use google drive/one drive/dropbox/... .
Yes. You can jump through a bunch of hoops to get a similar desktop / phone integration with Linux (or Windows) and Android using a variety of different apps...or you could just use it out-of-the-box since it's all baked in to macOS and iOS. You can tell yourself that it's 'all the same' all you want, but I've tried, and it's not the same.
I took a photo signature many years ago and have been pasting into pdfs rasterized by gimp since then.
The whole concept is kinda ridiculous, but I never would have thought that it takes a Mac and iphone to do it.
There are also privacy implications to all that integration that honestly have me a bit wary of sharing any personal information with my work Mac.
Just to pick on another, the idea that anyone would be uploading photos of their passport and drivers license is a bit crazy. That said, I could easily with Ubuntu.
Is cutting and pasting a tough one? Maybe the big word scared ya? I could have written open, with no change in meaning.
If it's not clear I didn't sign it in the technical sense, no one would know what to do with it, there's not a widely supported standard for that. These were business folks who wanted a png/jpeg image of the form with my scribble on it.
An image editor is perfect for that it turns out, and it takes two steps, three if you count save.
I'm in the same boat. Mac-as-a-developer-workstation, not Mac-as-a-consumer-dvice. Apple seems entirely disinterested in the former market segment. Perhaps it never was: the mass adoption of macs in the early-mid 2000s might just have been a fortuitous accident, not somethgin Apple ever courted.
Either way:
> It seems MS is much more on top of making Windows developer friendly than Apple is currently.
I see that too and it worries me. Not because I'm avidly anti-Microsoft, but because all the portents are we're heading back to the place where Microsoft dominates the desktop, with no practical alternatives. That wasn't good first time around and I don't see it being any better if repeated.
Microsoft is being very smart - and successful - in their strategy. Whereas the original Windows commoditised the underlying hardware, current "Windows" is commoditising operating systems. Hence subsuming Android and Linux into the platform.
"Windows", though, is really not the way to think about the platform. The deep integration of Teams into W11 is a pivotal step. Teams - with office365 - is the new "Windows" - the platform that Microsoft wants to dominate end-user computing with on the front end. With Azure on the back.
As a developer, I don't want to only have a single choice. But I don't see anyone meaningfully challenging Microsoft. Apple seems only interested in consumers. I wouldn't personally touch a Chromebook given Google's insatiable desire to monetise my every keystroke. Amazon seems only interested in the back end and, actually, that seems like strategic myopia. Microsoft really understands that owning the end-user experience is key. What future for AWS if all developers are using Windows, and it already "just works" with Azure?
So I'm not optimistic for the future. On the plus side, it's why I bought a laptop from System76, and paid ElementaryOS to use their distro. It's noise level compared to Windows/Mac, but that might just be what ensures there's a tiny crack of hope for desktop diversity.
>Microsoft really understands that owning the end-user experience is key.
Since upgrading to Catalina, I repartitioned my Mac to have a 1GB Windows partition for games, particularly 32-bit retro stuff. Other than my locked down work VDI, this is my first experience of seriously using Windows as a desktop OS in over a decade.
OMG is this thing horrible. Gah, my heart sinks every time I boot into it. Two Start Menus? A horrible, kafka-esque maze of settings and config in half a dozen different UI interfaces, all of them ugly as sin. One of my kids used it for a few days, and now I've already got some invasive search toolbar crap I can't get rid of, and I've shared a Mac with my kids almost all their lives (17 and 16). Ads built into the OS. The user experience on Windows is as godawful as it's ever been.
They've definitely upped their game on technology, WSL2 looks really nice. Power Shell looks pretty decent. They're making interesting moves with making .NET truly cross-platform. I can see the dev argument for sure, but the user experience on Windows is as much, if not more of an inconsiderate, abusive relationship as it's ever been.
>-mid 2000s might just have been a fortuitous accident, not somethgin Apple ever courted.
yea, I think you are probably right.
I was a linux user from 95-05 then switched to mac from 05-13 now back to linux.
I'm well aware of the "this is the year of the linux desktop" joke, but honestly over past 4-5 years I think linux has reached the point that its fairly painless for 95% of common desktop usecases.
This has been Apple’s primary focus for the last decade, increasingly so each year. Apple has paid lip service to the education sector and business sector with managed accounts and profile based management but it is severely lacking and in many ways needlessly crippled. Apple is focused on the most profitable sector home / consumer market. They have exited the server market, exited itunes university, exited iweb, really excited anything self-creation or self-managed or self-hosted … in favor of ad friendly click to subscribe model and a locked down primarily content consumption device.
>> we're heading back to the place where Microsoft dominates the desktop,
Total side note to this, but there are apps that only work on Windows like Adobe Creative Cloud. If some of these companies were to support Linux, you would see a huge migration off of Windows to Linux.
Adobe has steadfastly refused to support Linux. Even after years of Linux users saying they would gladly pay to use Adobe products on virtually ANY Linux OS. All to no avail. So here I sit, stuck between two operating systems. One I love, and needing the other strictly out of necessity to run a specific set of software.
Unrelated, but there was a time when I vastly preferred Microsoft Entourage and Microsoft Word on a Mac to the Windows versions. They both had features that their windows counterparts didn't for quite a while!
Then they unified the teams that made their products for the different platforms and we ended up with the ribbon toolbar UI, which was a pure example of "good looking UI over functionality". I remember using excel with the ribbon toolbar, and it was really easy to put a funky pattern on my bar charts, but annoyingly fiddly to extrapolate data - ie. to actually use excel for science...
It's got to be said that if it was my company I would still have unified the teams. I probably would have ok'd the ribbon toolbar too, as I imagine that if I was running Microsoft I probably wasn't doing a lot of data analysis myself and I wouldn't know any better.
Mac-as-a-developer-workstation has always worked quite well for those of us that don't really care about UNIX, there are other developer platforms out there to care about.
I really want to like Safari and I try every release, but I can't use it for more than a few minutes because the adverts that get through are just so unbelievably bad (to someone that isn't used to seeing any). The Apple-recommended strategy of using simple OS-level Content Blockers just doesn't cut it unfortunately. It's such a shame (to me) that all that developer effort on Safari is effectively wasted because of the relentless scurge of ads.
I understand why Apple decided to prevent the install of integrated Ad blockers directly in the browser because it's a security risk, but the reality is that the web is unusable without them. I really hope that there is an Apple Engineer reading this, and that some day Apple will find a solution :-)
Perhaps the solution is as simple as Apple curating their own approved blocking database similar to that used by popular adblockers and baking it into Safari in a secure fashion. Then again, that might open them to legal challenges.
I use Safari as my daily browser, with AdGuard as my adblocker. (It's the second result on the Mac App Store for "ad blocker"—the first after AdBlock Pro, which I won't use because it sells whitelist space, AIUI.)
I...don't see ads.
It's not as hyper-configurable as uMatrix, and there are certainly annoyances that don't get filtered out (first-party videos, "subscribe to our newsletter" overlays, etc), but it's got some decent user input, such that I could probably block more of those if I cared to spend some effort, and...well, I just don't see ads in my common usage.
Ooh. Thanks danaris! I thought I'd already tried AdGuard in the past... but I may be mistaken. Will install today and give it a spin.
Ah cool: The Adguard website says that they've just added M1 support. I think M1 support was probably part of the issue when I was last trying the available blockers.
Hmmm... just tried AdGuard on a couple of high profile web sites using Safari. Sure, Adguard is working to some extent.
On the first site - no ads. Whitespace where the ads would have been because content blockers can't interfere with the DOM and remove fragments.... but not bad.
Then I went to the NYT. Absolutely massive banner ad, full width of the screen taking up 25% of my screen real estate.. and then repeated again further down below the content. Looks utterly gross.
Now of course I don't have to use the NYT and could choose never to go to that site ever again, but this is the problem with Content Blockers that I'm talking about - they aren't enough on their own. So again, Safari is not usable with this approach.
Do you really see no ads, danaris? Perhaps you just don't go to these sorts of websites. Go and look at nytimes.com, using only AdGuard and Safari under macos and tell me what to see.
The claims on the AdGuard website are misleading... get this:
"No ads on YouTube - We'd wager you like watching YouTube and you don't like ads. The same for us! Luckily, AdGuard remover knows how to get rid of ads on Mac (even video ads)".
So I go to YT ... click on the first video on the homepage and there you go: advert... straight in. I mean I expected this, but again, the claims are just misleading. I mean perhaps that works on other OSes.
Whereas, with a browser-integrated blocking solution in Firefox - no video ads. I don't see how macos / iOS Content Blockers can't really be good enough when only inspecting traffic to the browser.
Like I said, I don't see ads in my common usage. I don't regularly go to the NYT, so it's possible they don't cover that as well—but I don't see ads on YouTube in Safari, so I'm not sure what's missing on your end.
Fair enough. I just checked the AdGuard support forums. They agree that this feature can't work with the Content Blocker approach on macos. There's no way they can get any hooks into the browser, so interstitial ads will remain just that: interstitial.
I can see that AdGuard is probably a decent product for most other current browsers, though. Thanks for suggesting it anyway.
Another solution would be to boycott all websites where you encounter obtrusive ads. This leads to me getting sucked back into the parts of the internet that got me hooked originally in the 90's like underground cultures.
Yeah, I'm in a similar boat to you. Unfortunately we're not the majority of the users in the Apple ecosystem, so our use cases aren't really what the design changes focus on.
The only changes I've noticed in the last few years are telnet, emacs, and ftp aren't included anymore and I have to install them manually. Changing to zsh was good though.
I wouldn't be surprised if they continue and eventually I find out that things like grep, awk, sed, uniq, etc are all slowly taken out.
Do I believe that I'm Apple's target market? No. Do I believe they care about me as an individual? No, not really.
However...
I'm not seeing how your comment is relevant to my statement that I don't want to use Apple's browser in its current state, when I can easily use many other browsers in what you've described as their "walled prison", and I do use them.
Whilst the situation may change for the worse in the future (resulting in a true walled garden), I can currently install anything I like on macos - you don't have to use the app store. This isn't iOS.
I don't feel abused by Apple at all. Conversely, I have been relentlessly abused by Microsoft in the past, however; (no choice in some old jobs)... and recent news stories concerning Windows 11 suggest that they're still at it. My experience suggests that things really aren't as bad as you're implying.
On IOS you actually in effect can't use any browser except Safari or Safari with a firefox or chrome skin because you aren't allowed to distribute anything else and you aren't allowed to manually install anything outside the store.
There is no particular reason to believe this wont eventually be the case on Mac
Why are you even bothering to type such things? I'm not talking about iOS in this sub-thread. The discussion here is about Safari on macos in the present day, not the effed up macos of the future. Can we just have a discussion about the present day please?
Seriously, you guys are relentless and exhausting! It might be time for me to bow out of Hacker News for good, if this sort of nonsense keeps up in the comments. Getting to be as bad for discourse as Reddit.
All I'm saying is that the browser-external Content Blocking approach Apple has chosen doesn't work very well and is disappointing in practice, even if it's a better proposition in terms of browser security. This currently has nothing to do with walled gardens on macos, whilst one can choose to use other browsers and add in-browser extensions that filter ads more effectively (as well as being able to remove DOM elements).
If you've got a helpful suggestion about Safari and the advertising situation, then please comment about that. As it happens, I'm not using Safari, but I remain interested in trying it again under macos, if Apple or someone else can offer proper ad blocking / ad removal.
Chrome is going that way too (it is proposed to remove permissions for integrated blocker extensions), but that _does_ have more to do with Google's nefarious ambitions with respect to advertising income, just as much as it is to do with security, I suspect.
> I worry that "unification" will be realized by dumbing down the desktop rather than empowering the mobile device.
This appears to be their plan. It has steadily ramped up since Mojave, and Big Sur was the inflection point.
I have used OS X exclusively since 2008, and last year I made the choice to no longer upgrade any of my machines beyond Catalina. I'm slowly getting used to the fact that I won't be able to use Macs for my work in the near future, and am making adjustments to my workflow accordingly.
I know this is probably the life-long FruitCo® fan in me speaking, but I'm genuinely distraught about this. My absolute favourite software platform in the world is being chipped away at to appeal to the lowest common denominator. Even worse, most people seem to be cheering them on for doing it. Really upsets me.
Apart from questionable changes to the user interface, I don’t see how Apple have been “dumbing down” macOS in terms of usability so dramatically. Could you point to some concrete examples?
Not being able to edit huge portions of the file system, even as root. Apps not having file system access at all until you grant it, and then it’s folder by folder. Those control panel plug-in things just stopped being supported at all, so good bye custom mouse drivers and such.
I completely agree. In fact, many years ago, when FreeBSD was my main OS (including on notebook) I went as far as to isolate each app that used internet into its own custom-setup jail [0][1].
I had Firefox, Thunderbird, Pidgin and a few others running in complete isolation from the base system, and from each other. I even had a separate Firefox jail that was only allowed to get out via a Tor socks proxy to avoid leaks (more of an experiment than a necessity, to be fair).
Communication between jails was done via commonly mounted nullfs. I have also setup QoS via PF for each of them.
They were all running on the host’s Xorg, which was probably also the weakness of this setup.
It was a pretty sweet setup, but required quite a bit of effort to maintain, even tho I automated most of the stuff.
Now I use macOS, and I would like more control over what apps do what. I’m not particularly impressed with the direction of the UI (it also doesn’t bother me terribly), but I welcome the finer grained security control.
Eactly, I'm moving much more towards FreeBSD now because Apple is taking so much away from us power users. Its jails (and the ports collection) are amazing.
For one thing: I always require certificate logins on SSH. On Mac I used to simply change /etc/ssh/sshd_config to this effect, but since Catalina macOS reverts this with every update. Clearly they don't want me poking around in there :(
IMO if you offer SSH you should offer certificate-only access as well, either with a glitzy on/off button or with a config file change, whatever. But nope...
With Apple you get a lot of security for 'free', however you give up a lot of customisation in return, even in terms of security features.
Not really as sshd is compiled to look for it there.
You can override it with a commandline flag but that would mean changing the launchdaemon which is protected by SIP as far as I know. But I will have a look for that to doublecheck.
Thanks :). If I'll find the time, I'll have to dig them up.
Or maybe I'll attempt to contribute the important parts to an established project, like ezjail [0][1], which seems to be quite competent at handling jails, but is specialized on running services.
Exactly. These are restrictions that have been viewed as favorable for security purposes for decades. It’s nice to see a mainstream OS actually implementing them.
The resistance to them seems to be largely due to lazy developers: it would be EASIER if the system let a developer do whatever they want with a “trust me, I’m smart” justification. But we can’t design for the occasional safe and smart developer: we need to design for the sloppy ones and the malicious ones. The smart and safe ones can find a way to work within the constraints. As for lazy and sloppy ones who can’t adapt to the constraints - adapt.
It would be more sensible to assume that "trust me, I'm smart" developers will eventually work out what they need to do - possibly after the third or fourth time they lose all their work to ransomware, but more realistically, by following the inevitable online tutorials which will appear.
OS security is generally a shit show anyway. I don't think it's bad to lock down the OS for most users, but it should still be possible for expert users to get expert access.
If there are security consequences, they should be trusted to learn how to deal with them.
Most will - and the rest will have bad experiences.
> OS security is generally a shit show anyway. I don't think it's bad to lock down the OS for most users, but it should still be possible for expert users to get expert access.
Last I checked, it still is—IIRC, you have to run some specific commands in Recovery Mode to disable the protections, but for "trust me, I'm smart" developers, that shouldn't be a problem.
Personally, I haven't seen any particular need to do that. I can count the number of times I've been blocked by SIP from doing things I wanted to do on one hand, and none of them were critical.
Usually its not about smart. Its about fixing something that is broken in the OS and SIP is blocking fixing it. A missing monitor geometry. Or an incompatibility in a default cone in. Getting rid of unwanted built in apps like News.app.
I agree... I'm looking forward to see on the desktop this capability model pioneered in mobile devices.
Unix file access permissions designed 50 years ago for multi-user shells are not adequate when dealing with potentially hostile applications accessing your data.
Today I'm more worried of a random App encrypting $HOME or hoovering up all my PII.
Are you really any more secure after you make the initial mistake installing the app? It's not like an attacker is unaware of the security measures in place.
Well, I still lock the front door with the deadbolt at night although it won't stop a mob from breaking in, it's good enough to keep me reasonably safe against normal threats.
Also, actively circumvent protection devices is proof of malice and possibly even criminal intent (remember DMCA?) so I don't see your point.
Has there been any one year period in the last twenty years (NeXTSTEP for the first few years for MacOS) where there were not plentiful kernel exploits for Linux, MacOS, and Windows?
For me it's more the "no access even as root" issue that is highly problematic.
I've been trying unsuccessfully to childproof a Big Sur laptop for a 12 year old for some time now — disable access to some built-in apps etc. I have yet to figure out how, without resorting to disable SIP.
There is Screentime, but that's an unreliable joke which has caused us a massive amount of headaches on iOS due to unreliability, has very limited features and can only be protected by a 4-digit PIN.
As a last resort, that is what I will do. But that would mean to fight the system, which is rarely a good thing in the long run. When it comes to system setup, I prefer to color inside the lines if at all possible.
"Configuring which programs a restricted user can run" is _such_ an elementary task for an OS that I cannot believe that recent macOS has no provisions for that. I _must_ be missing something.
Now how do I turn off the dozens of daemons that go everywhere on the internet without my control, uploading telemetry, etc? I've still not figured out how.
Core OS? It’s stuff like the iMessage database. Mac OS ain’t Silverblue. :)
I’m not saying it’s bad. More security is great! My kids use MacOS. I’m grateful for it. I love iOS too. But it’s absolutely dumbing the OS down and making it less of a professional machine.
It really depends on your usage. It can be a security feature for many contexts, but otherwise:
- docker - you need to be able to bind any folder
- IDE - you need to be able to edit basically anything
- office software beyond "I have some things in 'Documents'" - same
- python, ruby, any other interpreter - same
- brew, or any other package manager - same
etc. This simply doesn't work well for many developer workflows. I tried to use a dedicated app for per-app security control like that (can't remember the name anymore) - but for development it was a disaster. It just makes you click "allow" on a popup 10 times a day until you stop paying attention. Now, macos is not at that level yet, but the direction towards that is the complaint usually.
The problem is that your 'developer workflow' sounds like you are assuming a particular level of insecurity that is unwarranted. Learn about the principle of least authority and try to apply it to your workflows. None of the applications you mention need complete access to the filesystem and in every one of those cases the access could be easily limited to a few directories and you would probably never notice.
Yes/no. The security policies as they are implemented today just aren't possible to effectively use by developers. I've got a project in progress which allows you to go into the context of a specific project as a selinux policy and then work on it that way. It's hard, it's a lot of work, and there are endless edge cases. This is not me giving up, it's actually hard to build a system where you both enforce realistic restrictions and don't end up going "yeah, whatever, I've got enough of those permission questions" after a week.
Consider: An interpreter needs to run homebrew which installs new app, but the same interpreter running a script for your project should not read anything apart from those project files. Same interpreter needs to update local packages via bundle and git, but a random script you run shouldn't be able to access your ssh key via git commands. This is basically impossible to achieve without large compromises outside of selinux right now.
>Learn about the principle of least authority and try to apply it to your workflows
So how would you apply this principle to the python interpreter or to a program that gets compiled to a new executable many times during development?
I like the idea of granting folder permissions to regular third party apps I install and use. I always wanted that and I'm glad Apple is moving in this direction with the Mac.
But contrary to regular apps, language runtimes and software under development do not have a specific purpose. The whole point of software development is to create and test arbitrary code. It is pointless to grant privileges to code that changes in arbitrary ways with every keystroke.
During development, privileges have to be granted to the developer account, not to any particular software artifact. I generally think that granting privileges to software and granting privileges to people each has its legitimate place. One isn't generally better or worse than the other.
Docker bind to a project folder (common for development) allows the image to take over the shell. Taking over the shell allows taking over the package manager. That allows taking over the system.
I keep spreadsheets in project folders. Allowing full writes to a project folder allows taking over the shell. See above.
Folder-level permissions are not sufficient. Sorry, I shortened it too much, but basically - there's almost no practical difference between allowing writes to a dev project folder and allowing writes everywhere. (It would stop some really trivial attempts) Your actual system folders are safe of course... but who cares about those really?
> Apps not having file system access at all until you grant it, and then it’s folder by folder.
This is actually a feature I wish Windows had. On Windows you can enable "protected folders" and mark folders as protected. Applications cannot access those folders until you grant it.
On Windows when granting an app permission to a protected folder you grant it access to all of your protected folders.
You cannot grant a specific application access to a specific folder only eg. grant VLC access to your video folder only but will have to grant VLC permission to all your protected folders. In the default configuration this includes all your personal documents.
I wish Microsoft would make the protected folder feature just as granular as I can hear it is an a mac.
If you’re referring to Gatekeeper, that was introduced long before even Mojave. Likewise the third party kernel extension lock down was also a security move. The former can be disabled in recovery mode and you can add exceptions to the latter. Apple usually allows power users to work around their security features. Besides the introduction of new bugs, most changes in recent years have been cosmetic and the unification features are bloat at worst, for users that don’t want them.
There's other little changes. You used to be able to install and use GDB and debug stuff without doing anything. Now you need to dick around with certificates and code signing to get it to work. I never could despite following different sets of instructions to the letter multiple times because of some bug. I gave up and switched to the built in lldb as that worked at least. I think in Catalina or Big Sur they made another change, hardened runtimes, so now if I need to upgrade R I have to install it like it's 1985 and extract a tarball in root. It's shit. Every single version they seem to do something where I need to waste time tracking down some workaround to deal with "security".
I'm tired of granting every other app accessibility permissions for reasons I'm not even sure of, tired of having to grant access to my documents. It's just endless hassle and I don't feel like I'm actually safer. Every new version seems to bring something like this.
Some examples I noticed (haven't look at Monterey yet though), most of those changes make sense on a small portrait display with touch interaction (e.g. iPhone), but not on a notebook display in landscape orientation (most of those fall under "questionable changes to the user interface", but I still think it's important to point them out, because IMHO they don't make sense on a notebook-style computer):
- scroll bars have been removed (but they can be enabled again), not sure when this happened, Catalina maybe?
- Ok/Cancel style dialog boxes are vertically stacked (since Big Sur)
- the completely intuitive "Save As..." action has been replaced with "Duplicate" (at least in Apple tools), no idea what's the reasoning behind this is TBH, this wouldn't make sense on iPhones either
- more vertical space wasted for window chrome since Big Sur, especially in the Finder
- "Natural Scrolling" (can also still be reversed thankfully)
- ...and probably a few more subtle changes which I don't care much about
I feel these are preferences, that you don’t like - which is perfectly valid.
Except “Save As…”, it’s not intuitive. The wording implies renaming the existing file. The actual action is more accurately worded “Save a copy as…”, or more succinctly “Duplicate”.
Well, apparently those changes are made to appease iOS users so they don't feel lost on Macs. I just can assume that Apple thinks this user group is too dumb to adapt to a different user interface philosophy? Don't know :)
So you assume these changes are made to "appease" a group of people you've decided is stupid, or that Apple thinks they're stupid?
I am a long-time Unix user, hardly an iOS user at risk of feeling lost on Macs, and while I have immediately turned back on my scroll bars, I was delighted by "natural scrolling," and I love that "Duplicate" makes it more clear that my documents are being auto-saved, as they should be.
These things aren't "dumbing down," they're just changes from the way things used to be. Some are better, some are worse, and both of those are opinions. I think labeling them as "dumbing down" and sneering dismissively at people who use iOS is unseemly, speaking of opinions.
unless we formally define 'dumbing down', I think that's just opinion.
Just to take one example, scroll bars were turned optional with default off -- a simpler UX that's in favor of less visible user interactions for the sake of reducing user complexity is usually considered dumbing down.
Now, in Apple Land, far behind the Reality Distortion Field, they may refer to the reduction of user interaction options as 'beautification' -- but everyone else usually just calls it 'simplification', which is often (diminutively, perhaps) referred to as 'dumbing down'.
(in reply to "scrollbars only disappear without a mouse" , so what? That's still a reduction in user-visible information -- do touch users somehow not need to be told that an active view can be scrolled by anything other than visual gestures and cues? It's a nice pipe-dream, indicative design, but there isn't any design standard that suggests that may be or even could be the case.)
tl;dr : when a user loses visible indications, and loses possible interactions, it's not uncommon to phrase the state as being 'dumbed down'.
"Save As..." action has been replaced with "Duplicate" (at least in Apple tools), no idea what's the reasoning behind this is
If I had to guess, it's because Apple wants to remind you they already have your data in their cloud, so saving anything locally is creating a duplicate.
Scroll bars only disappear if you don't have a mouse plugged in (or connected over BT).
But yeah the waste of more vertical space in Big Sur was really surprising to me, considering Apple also tries to minimise it in other apps like Safari. Weird.
> Why would you move your finger against the direction in which you're scrolling?
Because I'm scrolling *down* to reveal new content towards the bottom of the screen. Why should I move my finger "up" if I want to scroll "down" ;)
For touch screens it makes sense, no doubt, but for touchpad and mouse it's debatable. It's clearly a personal preference though, I just hope they never remove the settings option.
Kernel Extensions are gone -- regular users would never care about this sort of thing but you can't use products like Little Snitch properly on Big Sur and onwards. Kexts were also used for making Hackintoshes -- again not something normal Apple users would care for. mac OS is simply becoming less versatile and more locked down.
Well, Hackintosh users at least definitely don't care whether Apple is signing third party kexts, because they were never signing Hackintosh kexts anyway. The ability to load kexts in general is still used extensively by Apple and isn't going away any time soon. (Hackintosh's days are numbered anyway due to Apple Silicon.)
Even the changes to the UI are following current design trends in general. More space, bigger elements, and removing what can be removed for simplicity. See the upcoming Android 12. For years the industry moved towards more and more information density, and is now moving back. Whether macOS is a good implementation of this trend can be debated.
A random example: desktop Spaces has been arbitrarily limited to a single row of max 9 desktops (with Lion I believe). Before you could arrange the desktops in a matrix (up to 16 desktops IIRC).
Also the removal of RSS support, X11, emacs.
I think the lament has some justificiation if you remember Mac OSX as the de-facto developer dream workstation circa 2009. As a consumer platform desktop macOS will be great, for a non-apple developer workload... not so sure.
I was in shock, when realised that everything that I love about Mac Desktop since beginning of OSX era will be showed away in the name of vertical integration.
Now I am ok. Catalina is the last Apple OS that I will run on my computers. Figma is in the browser. Blender is working under Linux perfectly. Windows is horrible, but if used properly for specific tasks it will perform. The big problem was to move away from Logic, but where there's a will, there's a way.
I am deeply thankful for all those years of Desktop Bliss, but Apple nowadays is marketing and shareholders driven company and this is the opposite of Jobs philosophy.
I would caution you about pigeon-holing "Jobs' philosophy". I have observed that his philosophy often suited the circumstances he found himself in at various points in his fascinating career. ;-)
Frankly, I think that the design changes Apple has been making are very much in line with how Jobs would have done things.
Would he have made it exactly the same? No, certainly not; he was a different person who was very opinionated, so there would be differences—but the direction of the changes would, I think, be very similar.
However, I think it's also pretty irrelevant, given that Jobs himself explicitly said "Don't try to do things the way I would do them. Just do the right things." (Paraphrased from memory.)
May be you are right. My understanding of Jobs way of thinking is "product/user" first. In the context of a Desktop user interaction is not touch oriented. User interface must give options with minimal cognitive overload. Translating iOS to Desktop is serving only the vertical integration of Apple.
Implementation is everything. I don't have any doubt that under Jobs the results of this process would be better.
I disagree that macOS is being “dumbed down”. Unfortunately, the days of easy access to system volumes, kernel extensions had to end because the internet isn’t a friendly place and we just can’t have nice things.
I spend more time on the command line now than I did 10 years ago on macOS and I don’t see that changing any time soon.
It’s been a three release arc, starting with Catalina, to Big Sur and now Monterey, that started off pretty rocky and seemingly coming to fruition with this release.
I’m using the public beta of Monterey as my daily driver and the transition couldn’t have gone any smoother, especially given it’s still months away from being released. So much better than Catalina which was ridiculously bad two years ago.
I also don’t agree this is the lowest common denominator; since iPadOS, iOS and macOS all have the same core operating system, it only makes sense there should be a baseline of functionality and that users are able to use the appropriate platform for a given task. But that doesn’t mean unfettered access to everything on the Mac; given the world we live in, that’s a a recipe for disaster, which is why we can’t have nice things.
Question is, what alternatives do you plan to use that are better for you? Many of the same sorts of interface and "unification" changes seem to be coming to Windows, and Linux is sort of in another world as far as usability goes. Great for some people, but if you don't already prefer it, are the changes to MacOS bad enough to accept the similarly-changing Windows or the many caveats Linux desktop?
That is the part that upsets me the most - there are no viable alternatives. Linux I can get by with, but it's a huge compromise on all fronts except the terminal experience. Windows is obviously out of the question completely.
For the past few years I've felt the same way; I've been wrestling with these feelings since the release of the 2016 MacBook Pro. I haven't upgraded my Macs past Mojave due to the loss of 32-bit application support in Catalina (I still depend on some 32-bit applications) and due to the increased iOS-ification of macOS (e.g., certain UI decisions, notarization). However, for a while I lamented the lack of alternatives that are as polished as even Snow Leopard was, which was released in 2009. I would be very happy if there were a version of Snow Leopard with security updates.
For laptops, I've decided to go back to Windows after 15 years of using Macs; I replaced my 2013 MacBook Air with a Microsoft Surface Pro 7 running Windows 10. I'm happy with the purchase; the Surface Pro 7 is an excellent tablet, and Windows Subsystem for Linux has made using Windows more pleasant for me since I spend a lot of time in the terminal. For desktops, as of this moment I'm still using a 2013 Mac Pro as my daily driver, running Mojave. Eventually I would like to replace this with a Ryzen 7 or Ryzen 9 build that will probably run FreeBSD.
I'm keeping my eye on the Hello desktop (https://hellosystem.github.io/docs/) for FreeBSD, which appears to have the goal of providing a desktop environment that is heavily influenced by pre-Yosemite Mac OS X's Aqua interface. If this desktop gains traction, then hopefully there will be applications written that are conformant to Hello's UI guidelines, which are based on pre-Yosemite's Apple Human Interface Guidelines.
I lament the state of personal computing these days, and I wish there were more investment in desktop computing; I talk more about it here (http://mmcthrow-musings.blogspot.com/2020/10/where-did-perso...). If I were independently wealthy, then I'd work on this.
Notarisation actually appeared in Mojave, though it was not yet required. I also don't like Apple having to validate every app I run. Sure it adds security but in this case it depends on the decisions of hundred-billion-dollar company. Whose interests are probably not 100% aligned with my own. I miss the ability to override things when I deem it necessary.
Hello desktop looks good indeed, though a but too early for me too. Right now I use KDE on FreeBSD. It's a bit too 'Windowsy' but Gnome is far too much 'new Apple', taking away user choice, so it's not an option for me.
People who think Apple is killing MacOS generally do because they think Apple is sacrificing the utility of the desktop in favor of sharing code/UI with their mobile platforms.
I don't think these people will be fond of the sweeping changes made in Win11's UI that are dedicated to touch interfaces/tablets, and to the big new feature of running Android apps "natively" on Windows, along with an Android app store.
The ability to run Linux software is also mostly irrelevant, as MacOS/Darwin has largely been able to run those same programs natively since the beginning. It's never needed a POSIX compatibility layer -- it was built to support that functionality from day 1. e.g. Apple didn't need to build a compatibility shim to tunnel Wayland/X11 applications because Quartz was designed from the start to support that use case.
The changes in Windows 11 are much more mellow than those in Windows 8, which were ridiculously geared towards tablets and totally ignored the existence of desktops, which happened to be 99% of the Windows userbase :/
Windows 11 is a much better compromise of usability on both, and I like the idea of panes, it is sorta kinda heading towards a tiling window system which really appeals to me.
And the android thing and Amazon's involvement. Yeah a lot written about this and I don't agree with it either. But you don't have to use it.
Actually the changes on Windows 11 are quite deep, even if they appear mellow to those not following Windows dev scene.
Basically Windows 11 presents the opportunity to unify all the kernel and related OS infrastructure to pretend the road started with Windows 8 never happened.
The COM improvements done in WinRT, are ported into Win32 land, .NET Native goes away replaced by .NET 6 AOT, app sandoxing gets replaced by MSIX sandoxing, .....
Thus pretending that all those improvements happened as if Windows 11 suceeded Windows 7, and a couple of years from now, the UWP branch will be dropped from Windows SCM.
Ok I do indeed not follow this too intensely. Windows for me privately is only relevant to my game box. And while I manage endpoints at work, the windows side is a different team :) I'm just waiting for Windows 11 to hit MSDN so I can try it out. I don't really want to do the whole insider thing. I was indeed referring to what I've seen in the videos.
But this sounds like a good thing to me overall. I was never a fan of UWP as most of the apps were too tablet focused. The same issue I have with Mac Catalyst apps. Too dumbed down and basic. I know it's not technically necessary to do so, but these unified platforms seem to stimulate that kind of app. I was also very happy to see that live tiles are going away (It always takes some time for me to rid the start menu of them).
If Microsoft would adopt a more privacy friendly stance e.g. no telemetry or MS accounts required at all, I'd actually consider using it again for more purposes privately.
Microsoft Game Development Kit makes it clear that for AAA titles, the Win32 + GDK model is the future, while WinRT APIs are being deprecated, and only community support is planned for UWP, not from Microft XBox teams.
So one just needs to read between the lines, combine it with years of experience with previous technology reboots from Microsoft, and it is relatively clear where they are heading with Windows 11.
Naturaly when playing futurology games there is always a possibility of being wrong.
Thanks for the summary. I think all these are pretty good changes actually. I was never a fan of UWP at all. Not because of the tech per se, but because it tended to lead to crappy tablet/mobile-style apps that didn't suit the desktop. Same as with macOS Catalyst. I really don't want my desktop being a big iPad. At least Microsoft gets this now, but Apple still doesn't.
Windows hasn't even figured out text rendering yet. My eyes hurt every time I have to read text on my gaming PC. Japanese text is especially bad.
WSL isn't that great either. I've tried to make it so that I can SSH into my WSL instance from other machines - doesn't work. Windows seems to always assign a random IP address to the WSL instance, so I can't actually forward SSH traffic to it. Well, I can but it stops working after I shut down the WSL instance.
It's nice for playing games but I don't see the appeal in any other part of the system. Setting up GPG and Git on a Windows machine is also so much worse than on other operating systems.
Why not just ssh to the windows side and then invoke wsl.exe. You could even set the default shell to WSL so it happens automatically. No need to mess with redirection and making sure it is online.
Windows appears to be doing the same thing, also the "+Linux" is just a VM with X11 forwarding, something everyone has been doing since XP and it's not as great as it looks.
Same thing happened to me too. I prepared myself for a year or so by replacing everything with an equivalent open-source project. Taught myself Vim so I could use those bindings in editors instead of the standard Apple ones. Then I made the switch, and it was pretty seamless.
The reality is that Mac OS only has a chance to survive in a good enough shape if any feature that comes to iOS can also easily come to Mac OS.
Practically all of those features are stuff that are on its face a positive additions (OCR for photos, Shortcuts).
In the past it wasn’t at all obvious that iOS features would always also benefit Mac OS and often there was a time delay. Mac OS was neglected. During that past few years Apple seems to have created the infrastructure to bring all things to all platforms in a way that’s realistically doable for them and I think that is exactly the right decision.
The billion dollar monster iOS will always suck oxygen out of the room for Mac OS, so better for the Mac OS to optimally benefit from that billion dollar monster.
In terms of the UI paradigm Mac OS certainly does some weird shit and that’s always sad (though if we are honest with ourselves not exactly a new development – Mac OS always had some weird quirks and corners) but I don’t think that’s down to iOS or unification or anything like that. For Apple platform unification seems to mean bringing features to all platforms, not unifying the UI (and that’s the right call).
That doesn’t mean that the UI team for Mac OS can’t make wrong decisions. (One example: Mac OS notifications heavily rely on hover states, to an extent that leads to a poor user experience. This is an interaction model iOS doesn’t even have, so we can’t and shouldn’t blame that on iOS. This is all the fault of the Mac OS team and design direction and not a result of unification.)
Designers seem to be collectively forgetting two simple things:
1. The UI is a tool, not an art piece. It's something people use to get their job done. They don't admire its beauty and "cleanliness". Every time you move things around to "make it more aesthetically pleasing" or "refresh it", you're messing with people's muscle memory. People hate when their muscle memory is messed with.
2. The UI should be designed to make most of the input devices with which it will be used most of the time. This means huge paddings, large fonts, and borderless buttons have no place in a desktop OS.
Apple's initial idea about iOS being for touchscreens only, and macOS being for mice and keyboards only, was great. Now they're diluting macOS by allowing iOS apps to run on it, and by borrowing iOS UI patterns that were clearly designed for touchscreens.
Except I couldn't care less about Safari. There are better browsers out there anyway. And all the stuff that requires Apple servers is also irrelevant to me.
>Every time you move things around to "make it more aesthetically pleasing" or "refresh it", you're messing with people's muscle memory. People hate when their muscle memory is messed with.
While I agree with you, no one does this as much/often as Apple and somehow people still praise it.
As a long-time Android user, I can assure you Google does this way too often. They just can't leave the notification shade alone, they always redesign something in a subtle and annoying way in there. This year they ran out of ideas, but the marketing department demanded a big release, so they invented this "material you" crap.
So far unification just seems to be about additive capabilities coming to both platforms. Auto-recognising text in images, tab groups in Safari, shortcuts. Would you rather these came to iOS only like so much has before?
I am concerned they might at some point start taking things away. For now we still have Automator, but maybe not for ever.
I’ll start complaining when valuable MacOS features actually start to be pulled, not before. People freaked out when Microsoft brought out the Metro style UI in Windows 8, saying Apple was going to do the same thing on the Mac, well 9 years later nope, still no sign of anything even close to that drastic. The Mac is still very clearly optimised for mouse and keyboard, and the convergence is just about shared technology.
> For now we still have Automator, but maybe not for ever.
Shortcuts is buggy as hell in the beta, but it looks like it will be better than Automator when it's done - even for advanced tasks. What's most important is that third party apps actually support it, and that's way easier with Shortcuts.
I'm not concerned with dumbing down the desktop -- not a whole lot has changed in 15 years really. Big Sur really changed precisely nothing about how I use the computer. Certainly it's still highly functional and mostly gets out of the way. I'd be more concerned with locking down like iOS -- but that too, Apple has been measured and slow.
Although, I'm pretty disturbed by the locked-down trend. Kernel extensions are pretty much dead. It does feel like a matter of time until it becomes as locked-down as iOS.
I would love unification if it could be sensibly achieved (ie if a best of both scenario is possible).
My 12.9 inch iPad is great for casual reading, browsing, casual games, drawing etc
My 13 inch Mac is great for serious work - programming, PowerPoint, excel, and anything slightly more complex that requires productivity.
Inside both of these devices is the same M1 processor, the same amount of ram, approximately the same screen size and I can add a keyboard to my iPad - so why should I carry two devices?
(I know I don’t have to carry both devices and I could just pick one, but some things are just better on the other side of the fence. My dream laptop is an iPad that can dual boot iOS and Mac OSX, but if a unified OS can be achieved without compromises that’s even better!)
I've wished for the same thing—I spent 95% of my working time at a desk docked to a monitor, but that 5% when I need to be elsewhere is still critical.
I would generally prefer a desktop computer when I'm at my desk, so it would be great if I could use the iPad Pro I already own to achieve that last 5% instead of needing a laptop that almost never moves (that said, I mind a lot less since I ditched the hot, noisy 16" MacBook Pro for a MacBook Air M1).
Unfortunately, because my work is software development (specifically web development), I can't do any of it without also involving a "traditional" computer to do most of the heavy lifting. A lot of people will think it's stupid to want a way to spin up local servers on an iPad—a system which has never even claimed to entertain such capabilities—but the hardware is more than sufficient. It's a shame to not be able to use it to its potential.
I agree with this. There have been numerous products and fantasies of a phone that could dock to use as a laptop. And now for the first time we have a single platform for all devices.
If they are sensible about it, unification would be fantastic.
Arbitrary window tiling (think basically the same pane-dragging UI that, say, VS Code has) and the ability to mark specific apps as 'keep alive indefinitely in the background' would go a long way towards making iPads useful as all-around computers without even needing other major changes.
I also don't. I only use Macs, not iOS as that's too limited for me. I also use many desktop OSes mixed together (also Windows, Linux, FreeBSD) so many of Apple's cloud services are irrelevant to me as I can't use them on the other platforms. I just need the Mac to be a good desktop computer. I already stopped using Safari for this reason also, as its sync only works on Apple platforms.
However I do think I'm an outlyer. Most people go all-in on an ecosystem. This will never work for me. I used to use iOS too until Android caught up and really started being good for power users. I already stopped using Macs privately because they became too locked-down. I always loved macOS (since 2004) for being a powerful POSIX system with a consistent UI and third party app support. But it's becoming too much like an "iPad Plus" now. Something like that has no place in my life, sadly.
I've found digital life is much better if you don't make the platform part of your identity. It's comforting when there's something familiar like bash or POSIX or your favourite open source software available out of the box. But it's better not to assume that when something's missing the platform is devoid of value, and to keep your vendor lock in as low as possible.
I've used macs because the frequency of terrible hardware is low (with huge caveat for og touchbar mbp) and work often requires targeting iOS. The unix bits help me get productive and the integration is good.
However I'm also perfectly ok with Windows. I quite like their text rendering and found powershell quite good. MSVC is very good if you want a heavy C++ IDE.
Also have had no problems using any common Linux distro - once driver stuff is figured out.
All the platforms have both ideological and technical problems, but I don't feel the need to rehash them here. What is most important to me is owning root and the trend away from that is disturbing. I'm ok with various sandbox and security technologies, as long as I have the master key when I really need it.
Exactly! Security is important and sandboxing is a good way to achieve some of that. However a lot of vendors combine that with taking away our control as the user.
Having security shouldn't have to mean giving up the keys to our digital kingdom. Apple takes the easy way too much. Sure you can disable things like SIP but then you lose the security aspect completely as well. It shouldn't have to be all or nothing.
And we can see already where this leads to with iOS. Emulators? Nope, not permitted. Browsers with their own engine? Nope. No, the Mac isn't there yet but it's sure heading there.
I appreciate feature parity with iOS at least, it felt like macOS was being left behind for years. A lot of the stuff added from Mountain Lion to Yosemite was rotting away.
The App Store, for instance, felt like terrible abandonware for years. Same with Messages. On Big Sur I can pretty much do everything I used my phone for now, which is what I personally wanted.
There are billions of people who are adept at using cell phones but have never owned a personal computer. Some of them can afford Apple products, but may not have thought they needed or wanted a different form factor before this year. Apple is betting that they will want a device that can act as a seamless extension of the computer they already have (their cell phone). Apple is doing this by gradually purging all things that aren't first-class on mobile, be they user interface affordances or the x86 instruction set.
> There are billions of people who are adept at using cell phones but have never owned a personal computer
Further, a big chunk of this not-so-young generation of kids whose primary interactions with computers has been through iOS, iPadOS or ChromeOS (remember, ChromeOS is dominant in education, while iOS dominates teen personal devices). These kids will soon be entering college, and a lot of them will be buying Macs.
I worry that "unification" will be realized by dumbing down the desktop
This seems to be a commonly espoused view about what’s happening to the Mac, but I don’t really see why. The UI has changed a bit, in some ways making it visually closer to iOS. But that’s basically it - core functionality is mostly the same. It’s not “dumber” or “smarter” - it’s just “a bit different”. Took maybe a day to get used to.
Not so much the UI, but certainly for the features.
Location based do-not-disturb. Wifi QR code sharing. Bug free airplay. Sharetangle integration with social media. iCloud files experience. One-stop config for mail / calendar / notes.
All of these are gradually unifying. iOS always seems to have more useful OS features. The more of these that appear on my laptop, the better.
There is runtime unification but the user interfaces are still well separated based on the target device and screen size. I suspect the end game is one app package that runs on phone, tablet and desktop with specialist UI for each platform.
So far they are doing extremely well. I can hop between all devices mostly transparently. And the desktop has not been dumbed down; all interfaces have been improved on their target devices. I have got to the point my iPad is my go to machine now.
Not really, but I'm fine with more alignment. Having the designs closer together is fine, being able to run iOS apps can be handy, shortcuts moving over is great news. As long as I don't start loosing access to the terminal, or the ability to load apps from any source then I'm pretty happy.
Unification as goal seems foolish, but I'm not entirely sure that's what Apple is doing. So far they're mostly unifying things that make sense, and avoiding things that don't. The Safari changes may change my mind once I actually use them, though.
I think the bigger issue from Apple is that they seem to feel the need to change something visible and obvious about MacOS with every release, and while not all of those changes are in service of unification with iOS, many of those changes seem unnecessary at best, and counter-productive at worst.
The "unification" label is more a product of observers than Apple themselves. They have repeatedly stated explicitly that they have no intention of merging the two OSes, and I believe them on that. So far.
I absolutely do not and this unification trend has pushed me to finally spin up a separate BSD desktop and keep OS X around solely for iOS development.
I was so optimistic when the iPad launched with iOS. It made sense that a tablet running a very limited OS would make the perfect user-facing device that could potentially free up OSX to evolve in a more developer/power user direction, since you could now offload the general purpose users to iOS.
Instead the opposite has happened and macOS has evovled closer to iOS, thus causing me to lose all hope in the future of the macOS platform. C'est la vie.
The only part I don't like so far are Catalyst apps, these are apps that have been ported from the iPad. Music is a bit of a dog on the Mac and TV isn't great either.
Hopefully Catalyst will disappear once SwiftUI matures.
The article dose say:
The good news is, for all the recent fears among Mac users that Apple might be attempting to collapse Mac, iPhone, and iPad into a single amorphous product, macOS Monterey still feels unreservedly like a Mac.
Music isn't even Catalyst, it's the old iTunes codebase with the non-music features ripped out and a fresh coat of paint.
It's possibly the worst app I use day-to-day on the Mac. It's crashy, buggy (I regularly have AirPlay playback just stop after 10 seconds for no reason), and because the entire Apple Music feature set is just embedded web views, it's also incredibly slow and janky.
You're going to get it if you like it or not. It's hard to imagine a future 10 years from now where MacBooks are not running an iPad OS ancestor rather than a MacOS ancestor.
Just gotta roleplay being a senior member of Apple where you know just how much money comes from iOS and just how many users there are of iOS vs their computers. iOS/iPadOS is the norm, MacOS is the weird odd one out.
Apple has put a ton of effort into making pointer + keyboard interaction on iPadOS a first class citizen, and most of the iPad’s marketing material nowadays shows it with a keyboard and trackpad attached. While l I don’t think iPadOS will replace macOS, I do believe that an iPadOS based notebook is inevitable.
What I believe Apple are heading towards: iOS on Macs, but with window management, external monitor support, etc. so that it’s hardly a different user experience from MacOS, but with the security of iOS. The ‘big’ apps will still work as they do on MacOS (not as cut down iOS versions). There will still be a shell - though it might work in a VM / container.
What's the point of a shell though if it's restricted to a container? I use the shell mainly to poke around inside the OS to change things Apple doesn't make fancy on/off switches for :)
I don’t know if that’s the kind of mechanism they would use, as I don’t know if it actually helps with security compared to the sandboxing already applied to apps.
I don't want unification so much as the ability to run full macOS off of my phone when docked to a display. It is a simple request on the face of it and Apple is about the experience and hiding complexity, so even if it is hard to implement, once the hardware is capable (and it has been for a while) this is arguably a very nice feature to have for many.
I don't even want mobile apps on my desktop. I can't think of any mobile native app I've wanted on macOS in this fashion. Apps designed to take advantage of a finger, or pen, on a screen are unlikely to ever be a great experience on my Mac. And the side effects on macOS are doubly unwelcome.
IMO the “desktop” metaphor for GUI computing was incredibly dumb the day it was introduced, and so it sort of cracks me up when people worry about it being dumbed down. It’s always dumb! That’s why it works for so many people.
As long as MacOS supports powerful keyboard shortcuts, trackpad gestures, and the Unixy Terminal, I feel confident it will remain productive for me. I don’t really care about running mobile apps on desktop, but I also don’t really care about changes to window toolbars and aesthetics either. I learned MacOS once; I’m confident I can learn the 10% that is different from release to release.
It’s funny because when Windows 8/10 touted unification, the response from Apple talking heads was they would always need two distinct OSes…and here we are.
Unification is important for developers to dog food. The average “consumer” (us versus them) will be integrated into this design system. They will expect UI behavior across the apple ecosystem to be homogeneous.
If we as developers do not take part in this and dog food the universal OS, we will be blind to all the problems users are facing, and be unable to innovate in this marketplace.
I’ve waited for bug fixes to malfunctioning bluetooth connection and support for two (or more) external monitors for whole BigSur cycle. Needless to say, I can still use only one external monitor and I still need to regularly reboot to get my dual bluetooth headset setup working.
If anyone at Apple is reading this: Please fix the basic functionality before introducing new version that will break even more basic functionality. The current state of affairs is horrible.
You know what would make bugs even less prevalent? rolling releases.
The fact that people think that slowing down release cadence would make MacOS somehow more stable seems to be missing the core fact that "changing 100 things at once" _is the problem_!
They give this stuff out for free, and I know there's marketing associated to OS releases, but stuff would be a lot more stable if they just shipped stuff over the year instead of deciding to break everyone's computer consistently once a year.
Have people on a rolling-release beta track or something, at least.
I vehemently disagree that rolling releases are a good idea.
I've found myself disabling auto updates on quite a few applications as of late, because I am tired of constant interruptions to my workflow, breakages and UI changes.
Being able to at least concentrate those inevitable annoyances and interruptions into one point in time is a good thing for me. The alternative has turned out to be death by a thousand papercuts.
What's the issue with dual external displays? I ask because I'm using the built-in display on my 16-inch MacBook Pro (macOS 11.3) as well as two 27-inch 2560x1440 displays as I write this.
As crooked-v noted, there is no native support within the M1 Macbooks for multiple external displays. Apple states this on the tech specs page in the Video Support section: https://www.apple.com/macbook-pro-13/specs/
You can workaround the issue with a Displaylink dock though. I've been using the Dell D6000 dock to run two displays on my M1 Macbook Pro since launch. It's definitely not a perfect solution (with buggy wake-from-sleep quite often) but it's a good compromise until there's native support.
Apple has stated that they will provide software fix for this eventually but have not done so so far. Instead we are getting these new releases with all kinds of fancy UI upgrades and what nots. Also, my bluetooth requires reboots almost on daily basis.
Perhaps the PR person didn’t talk to the hardware people first to see if it was actually possible. I doubt it’s ever going to happen. You should be looking to get the M2 and not wait for a fix that will never come.
And when I just have bought M1 machine and shared my impressions here I was heavily downvoted because I've stated: "It's the buggiest machine I ever had"
If such basic functionality as bluetooth support is not working what is wrong with such statement?
People were claiming (without any proof) that I simply stumble on malfunctioning hardware ... The hardware is still ok till this very day according to all tests and all problems were and are software related. I have discovered that many of them are well known too.
So, no dears, it's not hardware. I've just seen better quality before. I should repeat: This is the buggiest machine I ever had and I am going to repeat it untill it is fixed. But looks like they have something more important to do then care about quality and customers. For instance downvoting what real people experience. Downvote reality as mush as you wish. Good luck with that.
The thunderbolt issues follow to the Intel based machines too, not just M1. Hellacious issues if you need to hot unplug a thunderbolt display and take a laptop somewhere; something about USBC not picking back up the thunderbolt assignments when reconnected. The display functions/reasserts itself, but none of the peripheral ports function until after the OS restarts. From this state, if I wake up the device twice from sleep with a Bluetooth mouse the OS will immediately reboot on the second wakeup(kernel panic message).
After reboot the tbolt display functions until the next hot unplug. Rinse, repeat.
First, I am not aware of any operating systems that are developed using agile methods, and second the empirical evidence is in that agile improves quality, so it would be better if they were.
2. And no, my position has nothing whatsoever to do with the "no true scotsman". I am not saying that they couldn't possibly be using agile because they have bad quality. I am saying that I am not aware of any of them using agile, and I was closely associated with at least one of them for a while.
And I also separately cite the evidence that has now been produced that agile improves quality, and conclude that if there are quality problems as you claim, a more agile approach would likely help, at least according to the empirical evidence.
Given your rather patronising replies, I suspect the original joke was lost on you. The issue is not Agile per se, it is organisations assuming that "Agile" will solve all their problems, where "Agile" usually means vendor products, forced rituals and tick boxes. Yet more Agile evangelism does not address this problem.
What organisations need more than anything is open minded individuals that are not slaves to established dogma. The Agile manifesto actually says that all methods should be constantly re-evaluated to see if they fit the particular organisation/team. Your empirical "evidence" likely comes with a lot of context and is unlikely to be applicable to all organisations and/or domains.
This probably isn't everyone's experience but I have Windows 10 Enterprise and it runs for months at a time whilst staying very stable. Can't fault it really.
The interesting thing is that, for me, my Intel Macs with Catalina were, by far, the buggiest Macs I've used: my general experience of Big Sur is that it's probably the best release since High Sierra.
I did for a long time, but I installed it 3 months ago and it’s been fine. The problem with contingent bugs that only occur in rare circumstances is most people will never see them at all, but the few people that regularly do that thin will encounter the bug all the time, so individual anecdotes can be misleading.
With all respect I have experience in QA and I am not talking about individual anecdotes. I am talking about well known problems that are easy to reproduce if you wish to look for them. It took me 10 minutes to discover few of them. Then I've googled and found that many people found them. If I did find it during 10 minutes what makes it impossible for Apple to find it? It wasn't that hard at all for me ... I wasn't even trying hard ... So it's not about individual misleading anecdotes, it's about tendency of poor quality in my opinion.
Could you give any examples? The only bug I've found so far in my m1 macbook pro is an annoying flash of white color on the menu bar when using dark themes. Other than that it's been really smooth
" One of them : My machine just didn't even boot after update ... It didn't boot without 'another' mac. What genius decided that to revive my machine I should have another machine? But even during this process it barely worked after ~10 tries because ... well bugs even there. With all my huge experience I couldn't figure out the scenario that was working for sure ... just pure luck. This is horrible experience I think.
"
But honestly back then I was giving concrete examples and was heavily downvoted for the facts. In my opinion Apple people do it on purpose here. Back then easily reproducable bug was with setting internal mic for screen video recording as audio input source. Then you get delay 2 seconds with each screen shot even when you do not record video. I don't know if it's fixed now. Another one was related to 'do not disturb' mode untill you put moon icon near the clock. Few bugs in disk utility. Bug in textedit . It simply stuck with certain font size. Honesly I've stopped counting. Why should I make tests for them? The do not pay me for that. Let them enjoy it especially since they downvote reporting about it as you can see here again. Good luck with that.
Thanks for the examples. I'll pay closer attention. I've definitely noticed the long delay while taking screenshots, but because this is my first mac I thought it was just the usual delay or something
Maybe your another device is the source of the bluetooth issue. I'm pairing iPhone and Jabra headset every day with m1 Air without any issues (BigSur).
OP has bluetooth problems. I had many other problems and after some googling I've found that all of them were well known and were not fixed. You can digg in my comments for more details. One of them : My machine just didn't even boot after update ... It didn't boot without 'another' mac. What genius decided that to revive my machine I should have another machine? But even during this process it barely worked after ~10 tries because ... well bugs even there. With all my huge experience I couldn't figure out the scenario that was working for sure ... just pure luck. This is horrible experience I think.
For me there is no sense anymore to discuss each and every problem specifically when I sense tendency. I wouldn't make noise about few unfixed bugs but it's scary to see the tendency toward poor quality when your workflow and your sw project depends on MacOS.
How I suppose to make perfect file manager if underlying OS is not functioning properly?
Around 10 years ago, Steve Jobs said the iPad was the most important product of his career and it seems like Apple is still looking at the iPad the same way. They have invested a ton of R&D into the hardware and they’re cautiously developing a tablet UI from the ground up.
I’m using both an iPad Pro and a MacBook Air and iPadOS is more modern and more fun to use in literally every way. I will ditch the Mac immediately when Swift Playgrounds on iPadOS reaches parity with Xcode. That will probably be 5-10 years from now.
I honestly believe that Apple wanted to relegate the Mac to be a platform for legacy apps and Xcode but they realized they were getting ahead of themselves. They needed to cater to developers, of course so they began the focus on the Mac again around 2015-2016 and now here we are …
Agreed. I think the long term strategy is to continue to iterate on iPadOS until it's close to feature parity with macOS and then drop macOS. It may take a decade or longer. Instead of rethinking the desktop UI to fit touch interactions, they're rethinking the touch UI to fit pointer interactions. The last major hurdle to clear is windowing, which you can see small steps towards in iPadOS 15.
I don't think people give enough credit to iPadOS's adaptive pointer. It's a complete rethinking of what a mouse should be in the context of current tech. It's a pointer that can adapt its resolution in different contexts. For UI's that do not need high resolution accuracy, it's much faster to target and click elements.
I agree. I am happier using my iPad Pro, and some languages are supported (Swift Playgrounds, Pythonista, LispPad (nice Scheme implementation) and there is always using Blink as a mosh client for using servers).
I think that Playgrounds will be a good app development environment sooner than you think. The problem is that Swift is by far not my favorite language (those would be Common Lisp, Racket Scheme, Haskell). I don’t doubt that the iPad Pro will soon be a very good Swift and SwiftUI dev kit. Off topic, but I started wring a Swift artificial intelligence book, but I put it on hold. Swift just does not give me the joy that Lisp languages do. However, for most Apple platform developers, Swift and SwiftUI is all they need.
They could have put Xcode on the iPad this whole time, at this point I'm fairly convinced they never will. Eventually they'll kill the Mac off and you'll be expected to use CI artifacts from your feature branches to test your code.
> Low Power Mode. Inspired by the iPhone, the Mac now has a Low Power Mode—and it’s available on both Intel and M1 Macs. Low Power Mode forcibly dims your display and underclocks your processor, all in the hopes of reducing battery drain.
My Macs have been doing that since forever when battery enters <= 5%. The machine crawls to a slow grind, and the battery suddenly lasts forever. Its just not communicated to the user.
Also, according to [1] (linked to from source), some features require the Neural Engine of M1 so are not available on Intel Macs.
A lot of changes to macOS over the years have mostly been just additions, and to be honest I haven't really taken advantage of any of those. But
at it's core, macOS is still an OS for power-users with awesome shortcuts and my beloved hot-corners among other stuff; so I don't mind.
I'm still on Catalina, because for the first time I'm not that happy about a macOS redesign with the heavy iOS influence, but at some point I'm sure I'll update (maybe when the support stops next year).
What I'm more concerned about is that macOS gets increasingly locked down for everything that has not been graciously signed by Apple. I feel like what's an inconvenience now could just be impossible in a couple of versions.
There was also that incident where network filtering through the new API in Big Sur was not applied to Apple owned apps and thus any attempt to block traffic from these apps failed. Very inconvenient for people on limited bandwidth connections and posed a security threat by exposing a way for apps to bypass app firewalls. Of course this was eventually fixed but only after many people (including myself) complained.
Additionally since I have an Intel Mac, I feel like it wouldn’t be taking advantage of the M1 optimizations. I am not using any of the new iOS-like features as well, so I truly have nothing to gain.
Once they stop releasing security patches, I’ll reluctantly upgrade to whatever OS is available at the time.
The lack of change in notifications is the biggest red flag in this review — rather than showing that it has even heard the chorus of hate for BS-style notification buttons, Apple has (so far) continued on its merry way without even a nod toward better usability. This makes me wonder what else they're ignoring from users, and what bothersome changes they will impose on us next.
I wonder how many users even turn on notifications. After all, they are opt-in. I have them enabled for Mail and nothing else. I wonder to what degree notifications are the new desktop widgets: someone's idea of a novel way to interact with computers, but one that will fall by the wayside because the program-window model suffices for most needs.
You may well be right about that. I've used them since Growl (RIP), and have found them useful, so long as they did what they were supposed to do (notify me of something) and otherwise stayed out of the way. They don't do that anymore.
I really hope they dial back that Safari redesign before the final release. Tab legibility is far more important than ~20px of vertical space, even on a 13" laptop screen.
I find it incredible that they hide the title of the current tab. While it's active, you can only see its URL, and you have to switch to another tab to see its title. This is madness, no?
Absolutely. Hiding the title and only showing the favicon when you have too many tabs open sucks too—the first 2-3 characters of a title is a much better identifier than a favicon, especially when you have tons of tabs from the same site open. Safari 14 already does this and it drives me insane.
The latest changes in the past couple years seem not quite user-friendly. If I'd give a Mac to my parents, I wouldn't be sure they would understand how to use it. Same goes with newer iPhones. E.g. the Home Button was such a great and easy way to navigate.
The utter user-interface butchery happening to Safari on the Mac is once again the work of people who put iOS first. People who by now think in iOS terms. People who view the venerable Mac OS user interface as an older person whose traits must be experimented upon, plastic surgery after plastic surgery, until this person looks younger. Unfortunately the effect is more like this person ends up looking… weird.
These people look at the Mac’s UI and (that’s the impression, at least) don’t really understand it. Its foundations come from a past that almost seems inscrutable to them. Usability cues and features are all wrinkles to them. iOS and iPadOS don’t have these strange wrinkles, they muse. We must hide them. We’ll make this spectacular facelift and we’ll hide them, one by one. Mac OS will look as young (and foolish, cough) as iOS!
Nice writeup. I am running betas on macOS, iPadOS, and iOS. I have not tried Shortcuts and Focus yet, looking forward to that.
I like the new Safari changes a lot, but I usually only have two or three tabs open - I find having many tabs open is like living in a messy house.
I have suffered getting my development system fully functional on Monterey and M1. I can’t run a private patch to get LispWorks running because I need a pre-Monterey Mac to run the patch. It took a while getting SBCL running. Anyway, I have a workable setup with Aquamacs and SBCL.
I find that even dev tools like Haskell that run in Rosetta mode are much faster on the M1 Macs and using native M1 Java, Python, Swift, etc. all are faster and makes programming a bit more fun. I am not a UI developer but still I am having fun building a iOS/iPadOS/macOS app using the new SwiftUI 2.
All in all, I really like the more unified experience across Apple devices.
"Or if you’re insatiably curious, consider installing the beta version on an external drive and starting up from that volume for a little operating-system tourism."
Has anyone been able to install macOS on external SSD on MacBook Air M1? I tried installing Big Sur on my external SATA SSD, but it never succeeded.
I have to try installing Monterey, maybe they have fixed the installation. I don't want to install beta macOS on the internal drive next to Big Sur, because there has been cases where beta macOS versions have corrupted the entire disk.
I keep wishing for a Snow Leopard-like release. An OS update that improves stability, takes care of bugs, and increases performances. Who else is MacOS competing with – not Windows really – is it iOS? Is that why we need more features at the expense of everything else? I recently used a 2008 MacBook with Lion and it felt good.
Same here. I mostly assume that people saying this either haven't used windows/desktop linux or haven't used MacOS. The difference between stability is night and day. Also I have been using macos from snow leopard time and could be considered power user. I don't like design changes and things like remove 32 bit binary support, but apart from that the stability has not changed so dramatically as people make out to be. I am fine with opt out security features like SIP and having to click open anyways.
Working on Fedora and MacOS every day and I don't see much difference.
Fedora had its issues. MacOS too (like fuse driver, 32b support, apfs migration issues, randomly dying restore from sleep, sleep auto-wakeups which mean 50% less battery after an unplugged night).
There are some things I just can't do on MacOS at all though - for example custom audio routing and inline effects. (Apparently I could spend a few hundred $ to get it... but yeah, no, I get it for free on Linux)
I sometimes think I live in another reality where I'm not using the same OS as these people. Because the macOS I use for 70+ hours a week just doesn't seem to be the same as I hear described.
I sat here trying to really think about what I could just be ignoring, but all I can come up with is sometimes when I disconnect my dock and then reconnect it later the OS doesn't remember to switch my sound output from laptop speakers to my docks audio output. But that's it I think, everything else just stays out of my way.
If this isn’t a feature release, then surely they’re working more on stability and fixing issues, right? It’s not like Apple has downsized their SW development meaningfully.
I don’t think they have downsized as a whole, but the balance has definitely tipped towards iOS over the last 10 years, both for OS and application development.
I did the opposite and don't want to come back. I install a couple of linux distros every year just see what's up and every time it gets worse in my opinion. Or at least going nowhere
Same, starting around 2012. Was "Windows is for games and Linux is for work" before that. Now it's "Windows is for games, macOS is for work, and Linux for servers... until I get comfortable enough with FreeBSD". Not where I expected to be (holy shit, especially the macOS thing, I used to hate Macs, and now I resent not having other viable options for Serious Business) but here I am.
It's the drivers that are the problem, largely. That and the desktop software generally is just... not as stable as I've come to consider table stakes. Used to be fine, when the other major operating systems were bad, too. Not anymore. An X or Wayland crash is just as bad as a kernel panic, on a desktop, but while macOS and Windows are both a hell of a lot more stable than me-in-1999-2011 would have expected, Linux is... not. It's treading water. A crash of any sort whatsoever—application, OS, windowing system—is shocking now on Windows or macOS. It's a once-a-year thing. Linux? Hahahahaha.
Part of it's that macOS has spoiled me, too. Like, I never even used to try to drag and drop things because there was a 1/3 chance it'd work, a 1/3 chance it wouldn't, and a 1/3 chance it'd make something (a program, or a WM) crash. Simply didn't do it. Now? I expect it to work, and to result in sane handling of the action, and if anything goes wrong it bugs me. Repeat for all kinds of other stuff that I just expect not to do subtle weird shit anymore, which I used to totally overlook.
Same here. My introduction to Linux was Gentoo pre documentation fiasco. Even though I tinkered with it all the time, it just ran and ran well in my Pentium 4. The apps may have not been as polished but it delivered what was promised.
Now I can’t even get Bluetooth to work, wifi is still a pain as back then, but the defense is that back then wifi was relatively new and it was expected to be a bit difficult. However once set up it actually worked. Now wifi won’t connect for ??? reason. No error, just… no. And this is with distros that are supposed to be user friendly (Ubuntu, Mint) even tried Manjaro because I figured the Arch fans would have it more figured out. Nope.
Everything feels so broken and disconnected, carrying legacy bugs, trying to reinvent the wheel.
What the Linux world needs is to get United and a bit more organized, even if that means less “freedom “
>What the Linux world needs is to get United and a bit more organized, even if that means less “freedom “
This.
I want for once to hear about some standard rather than yet another fork of a fork I've been using for a couple of years since the previous "let's split and each of use will do whatever we want" incident.
Same. I'm kind of shocked how poor basic functionalities on MacBooks are. You need a third party app to tile your windows. If you run in "clamshell" mode, connected to a monitor with the lid down you need to do all sorts of hacks to make it work and it drains battery like crazy and the fan is always whirring. In Linux instead you write two config options in a file and it works like a charm.
MacBooks don't even work with multiple displays. Linux is the opposite. Works with all the displays you can connect.
My work makes us use MacBooks, otherwise I don't have much experience with them. Linux I've been running for 8 years now.
My impression is that macOS itself is mostly as solid as ever. But the built-in apps are, with a few exceptions, just not built for people like me anymore.
I'm basically fine with this for now. It means that as a poweruser I get a rock solid OS on which I can run all the third party software I need to make it suit my needs.
Still I feel as though macOS is slowly degrading, whereas Windows has been slowly improving. Even basic stuff like window management is better on stock Windows these days than on stock macOS. macOS had such a big lead 10 years ago, but it's been decreasing over time for a while now. I'm still going to buy a 16" MacBook Pro as my personal device when they come out later this year, but I feel like at the current rate there's a decent chance it might be my last Mac.
I feel the same way. Windows is catering more and more to power users, whereas Apple seems to be catering more and more to iOS users.
Windows got powershell, WSL, now with Windows 11 it's getting a very basic tiling window manager! Real innovation on the serious user side. If only Microsoft were a bit better privacy-wise (allowing to disable telemetry etc)
... Are you referring to the Microsoft product Windows? If so, have you used Windows lately? I use it occasionally when required to work on .NET projects built on pre-.NET Core, and I can say unequivocally Windows is a dumpster fire of epic proportion in comparison to MacOS.
Funnily enough, that's how I've been feeling about macOS lately, ever since they dropped support for 32-bit applications and especially from 11.0 onward.
Apple has chosen to make dramatic interface changes to Safari across not just macOS but iOS and iPadOS as well.
I think the changes work fairly well on the iPad...
they do not: it is just as bad if not worse on ipad, so many taps and swipes just to anything now...
Phew! Apple had almost tempted me back into the fold after about five years with the utter amazingness of the M2 architecture. My bank balance breathes a sigh of relief as I am reminded why I ditched the platform -- it has become and remains an endless stream of compromises made exclusively by media-, knowledge-, and data-produces to satisfy cash-cow iPad and iPhone consumers, all packaged in such a way that screenshots well enough to pass as innovation. Hard pass!
The elephant in the room could be the expansion of icloud subscriptions to include the new apple relay vpn. This could be another step towards the ultimate goal of ensuring that anyone using any apple product needs an icloud subscription to make the product useful. In the end, this is a fitting business model for apple - the hardware is just an enabler for services with really high margins and deep moats.
Private relay isn't an essential feature, it's a paid extra. Someone who doesn't want to create an iCloud account isn't going to miss it. You can always run a 3rd party VPN.
Being able to use mobile apps on a computer is a clear win, but that's a purely additive change—you don't need change the existing OS appearance or functionality to accomplish it.
I worry that "unification" will be realized by dumbing down the desktop rather than empowering the mobile device.