High Sierra for me, since it's the latest that would've been able to run any recent NVIDIA GPUs (assuming NVIDIA stayed dedicated to releasing Web Drivers).
The lack of Nvidia support is a major bummer. My KDE desktop at home is configured to look identical to Mojave (albeit with a different color palette and a dock integrated with the menubar), just so I can pretend like I'm living my dream...
I've kind of indirect experience: my girlfriend is an iOS developer, and has been using it on her only Mac for a while.
In the beginning it was awful for her. A lot of failures. However, after a couple of months it became quite stable, and she stopped complaining. The only thing that was kind of a nightmare was Xcode.
I'm updating it, and if I were you, I'd update right away too. There are many improvements.
Have been using since June and haven't ran into any bugs/issues that prevents me from doing work. Unlike previous macOS betas were often there was at least one or two that would break things.
Been better than Big Sur so far for me, on 16". Have had temperature issues with Big Sur, resulting in decreased perf due to clocking down (even with TG Pro). Now consistently 5-10 degrees cooler and less fan noise. Using "Intel Power gadget" to see the CPU frequency.
That's exactly what I do each autumn: Update to the macOS version from autumn last year.
So far I was fine with it though of course sometimes it's annoying to get the latest XCode (and iOS sdk) version for development, so I have to resort to a VM from time to time.
If it is your work machine than you probably shouldn't upgrade right away, give it a week or two (esp. if you work with old/outdated dependencies or packages). For personal machines I would be less cautious.
It's been pretty good, although it still has some strange bugs, but those might be a me problem. Namely, Mission Control crashes on me about 15 times a day. I have to 'killall Dock' to bring it back. Also, using Cmd-Space to launch apps is janky -- if I type say Saf, it will say "Safari.app" for about .7 seconds and then the autocomplete goes away. So I have to enter in those .7 seconds.
Other than those two things, it's been pretty solid lately.
SharePlay to Mac is utterly broken, see my other comment.
Other than that, it seems more stable and faster than Big Sur, and that's without a clean install. Notes used to take 4 bounces to open on M1, now opens instantly. Haven't seen any crashing. No broken features that aren't brand new. I've only found one bug: Safari reopens private windows even if you turn that off. But no problem if you don't use Safari.
The beta was terrible, up to memory leaks in applications in the latest release candidate. As a new user I under-estimated the amount of irritating bugs they would ship. I sure hope the release is better.
> Ironically I just upgraded to Big Sur yesterday from Catalina.
I intended to do the same this morning and literally witnessed the "Upgrade Now" change from Big Sur to Monterey as I was about to click it. Took me a while to find the appropriate link for Big Sur in the Mac App Store.
Only if the client-side scanning includes end-to-end encryption, which was never part of the deal. It was a possible future feature. Also, only if the-client side scanning only scans images being uploaded to iCloud and not literally everything.
Also any kind of content scanning is always strictly worse than no scanning at all.
One thing that was slightly confusing in the initial announcement was that it was said to be released on a day when no OS update was happening[0]. I've been unable to find details of how the rollout was supposed to happen, but if no OS update was needed the code would have had to already be deployed in a previous update before it was officially disclosed by Apple, wouldn't it? I don't know of any sources that show it was present and if so whether it has been verified that it was removed, but if such sources exist I would appreciate references.
EDIT: This announcement from Apple says it was to be included in an iOS 15 update when ready [1] so unlikely it was just dormant in some previous update.
The macOS Finder still displays Windows machines on the network as CRT monitors showing the BSOD I believe. I’m not in front of my Mac now so can’t check.
I found it absolutely hilarious when it was done about 15 years ago. That was when we Apple users were pretty much the underdogs and expected the platform to die any day.
But now that Windows users feel threatened by Apple and are sensitive about this, it should probably be changed. Although it's a fun relic of the olden times.
This is the same company that displays Windows machines it finds on the network with a Blue Screen of Death. You have to really zoom in on that icon to see it, but it's there. As a Certified Apple Fanboi(tm), such pettiness bothers me. I'd go as far as to call it unprofessional. But macOS rules and Windoze droolz, amirite?
About showing their products in the best light, it seems they also chose to limit the view of the notch of their brand new MBP to one (kind of small) picture... among pictures of 30 devices.
The initial implication, "Dell's webcam implementation sucks. Apple's is better because of the resolution and position, which allows facial recognition".
Apple's resolution was equally as bad as Dell's until eight days ago.
Dell's position allows facial recognition without cutting into the screen.
So my point is that contrary to several comments implying how "obvious" it is that Apple's webcam implementation is superior, it's not necessarily obvious, nor superior.
Why can't the most valuable company in the world just engineer a solution? Dell was able to fit infrared facial unlock inside that tiny bezel too, so I don't really buy the "it's for faceID" argument (especially since they didn't include the hardware this time). It's a ridiculous decision by a company that deserves to be ridiculed for cutting corners on a professional device.
So taste maybe subjective. But there is simply no argument that if you care about performance or battery life then the MacBook Pro is objectively better.
Looks about like the hardware you'd get for a N2040 laptop or a prepaid unlocked phone. Half of the stuff on the shelf at Walmart looks like this today. Just because Apple doesn't make entry-level hardware doesn't mean they're under any obligation to pretend that other companies don't. I think the image illustrates quite well what this update means -- FaceTime isn't just a rich-kid platform anymore.
So I just took a few minutes to lookup for the picture of an "N2040" (or various random low cost laptops, N4020 seems more likely if it's about a Celeron CPU, but I actually found one laptop model named "N2040") and they have bezels clearly thinner than what Apple shows for the laptop PC picture.
Focus …. by adding gazillions of notification options, and also get more notifications for "weekly screen time"… yeah, I really needed even more useless information to process instead of living my life. If i want time off i’ll just put the device down, what a concept :/
I don't know how Monterey differs from iOS, but while I initially dismissed the new focus features as irrelevant, I quickly realized how useful they can be. Specifically I blocked all work-related notifications when I was on vacation.
Allowing for one-time customizations doesn't add to my ongoing "useless information to process" queue.
It's just another means to an end that isn't much harder than what you could do before. I'm on mojave and ios 13 and I do the same by going to system preferences and hitting the checkboxes in my work account section.
More importantly, it gives us granular isolation and automated ways of activating them, rather than just having a single Do Not Disturb option that does all-or-nothing. It’s a feature that I have really come to like during the betas and definitely helps me to stay on top of information overload, allowing notifications from certain apps at certain times of day (e.g. work hours, sleep hours) or places (e.g. gym).
I don't think it's as complicated as you make it out to be. It's just adding to the "Do not disturb" option that's been there for ages. You can still use that indiscriminate DND option and ignore the rest.
But some of us do want certain messages to breach while we're working.
MacOS major version release are so underwhelming to me. They're not so much OS updates as they're updates to built-in apps I don't use or use at a very surface level: Safari, Facetime, Apple Maps, Messages, etc.
I'm not really sure what I'd want out of a new MacOS, though. It's been stable and (for my purposes) feature-complete for many years now. I don't remember the last time a MacOS upgrade added a feature I wanted but didn't yet have, nor the last time they added a feature I didn't realize I wanted because I'd never imagined it. The latter used to be what made Apple products stand out to me.
Same here. Looking through recent release highlights, Mojave adding Dark Mode is the mot recent stand-out I spotted, and even that I don't really care about all that much.
I personally prefer the incremental yearly updates to huge changes on a longer timeframe. I'm pretty excited about Live Text, personally. I've been getting a lot of great use out of it on iOS.
If we're talking about other recent releases, ARM (/iOS app interoperability) support was definitely a huge change :)
At least they've managed to optimize and make the OS faster. Mojave feels faster on my 2014 MPB than previous installations did. Would wish they would focus on the apps and not revamping the system each time they do an update.
I would love a more detailed change log of the actual OS level changes because sometimes there’s useful tidbits but you often have to be watching the WWDC content in order to see what will be in the upcoming OS. There have been some under the hood things like the APFS switch, Rosetta, and other under the hood changes that can significantly impact the OS. In this release I saw that there is a new copy mechanism in the finder which seems pretty significant but there isn’t a lot of detail about the technology behind it. I am also interested in the universal control and the ability to use your mac as an airplay device so now you can stream another Mac which used to be some thing then I did using a lunar display adapter. I also saw there’s a built in TOTP feature now which might be handy. I agree though most changes seem like app changes and services that could be decoupled from an OS update.
I'm impressed. People really will never be satisfied.
A relatively low-key, under-the-hood Mac release? "Man I miss when the Mac was innovative. These releases are a snooze fest."
A big release, packed with features? "Man I miss when Apple cared about their OS stability. We need a new zero features snooze fest like 10.6. Take me back to Snow Leopard :("
Only HN can pull off such astounding mood swings. I know this site isn't a monolith of opinions, but come on.
You can do both things at the same time, add new features that don't alienate their powerusers while also having a stable OS. Maybe if Apple delivered on both counts more in recent years people wouldn't feel the need to complain so much. It was complaining after all that got them to wake up and kill the touchbar and that butterfly keyboard.
I find them worse than underwhelming. Generally, the thing that usually pushes me to upgrade is EOL of the OS I'm on, or escaping some abomination perpetrated by the OS I'm on. It's almost never a compelling feature, because I need an OS to run applications, mostly.
The abomination that would get me off of Big Sur is the ridiculously low contrast difference for titlebars between foreground and background apps. Turning on the contrast accessibility option looks horrible. However, it's looking like thanks to HazeOver, this is a wait-for-EOL cycle.
If you're on iOS/macOS, you can send someone a web link to join a FaceTime call with you. Not sure how the browser support is offhand. There's no client for anything else and others can't initiate calls.
For the Focus feature, I find it a bit unexpected that someone messaging me can tell if I'm Driving, Sleeping, Coding, or Reading, etc. Does anyone else find this a bit strange/awkward? I know you can turn it off (and I did) within iMessage, but it seems a bit poorly considered. Curious if people like that aspect of the feature!
Ah wonderful. I misunderstood "focus status" to mean the actual name of your focus was displayed, rather the generic "Evan has notifications silenced" message. Thank you for the clarification!
As to what notifications have been helpful: I ended up making Reading and Listening focuses to make personal stuff like reading and podcasting more enjoyable. Then for work I separated out Communicating (email, slack, asana, collaborative docs) from Coding (everything off) as it seemed those had quite different notification needs.
The first time i opened Messages on iOS 15 is prompted me for if I wanted to alert contacts when i'm on do not disturb, and there's an option in settings to toggle it as well.
That’s unfortunate, you can set focus modes from shortcuts on ios.
When i turn on my Bluetooth speaker in the shower room it goes into a focus mode that diverts all calls for 15 mins and resumes my podcasts. I thought the experience on macos was supposed to be a superset of the ios one. Really poor decision by apple then.
Shortcuts on iPadOS and whatever beta of Monterey I'm running on this computer can both set and clear focus modes. I use that on my iPad to set a focus mode, which also updates my home screens, and launch AudioBus in one go by running my shortcut. Weirdly it can't check what the current focus mode is.
Am I the only one that's really excited about Universal Control? If nothing else, it's extremely impressive from an engineering perspective (if it works as seamlessly as they make it seem). To be able to take your work from your iPad to your iMac like that would be pretty incredible.
I think quite a lot of that has been available by copy/paste over Handoff, it seems like the major change here is that it's available with a shared pointing device. Still impressive!
It doesn't work very well in office environments unfortunately. I gave it a try with my work MBP and Mac Pro, and the amount of cursor judder / keyboard lag was wild. It'd also just plain not work at times. I think things are better when the environment is less busy and devices can talk to eachother over the same WiFi network (instead of WiFi direct), but it has proven to be unusable in the one scenario where I'd have liked to use it.
Thanks for sharing your experience. That's what I was afraid of when I saw this first advertised. It's a bummer, because it's a feature I could see being useful in a lot of different (ad hoc) scenarios.
Why can't this be a predictable hold and drag, like everything else?
They expect users to... what read a manual?
There is an alternative, make it so that users can intuitively discover features by playing around. I believe Steve Jobs told some pretentious story along that line when he launched the iPad.
> There is an alternative, make it so that users can intuitively discover features by playing around. I believe Steve Jobs told some pretentious story along that line when he launched the iPad.
And of course the technology hasn't evolved since then. Society hasn't gotten more complex. The problems we're solving are the same. Nothing has changed and people aren't asking for new things and demanding more convenience.
> technology hasn't evolved since then... everything is static.
Maybe read again, no one said that. If anything it used to be the norm to have clunky products that require a manual. Many products these days don't need manuals.
I mentioned Steve Jobs to say he was full of shit, I don't believe for a second that Apple did actually pursuit that philosophy, let alone that they should stay doing it
Apple took away a key feature, where you pressed a key combo (shift+alt) and clicked on the Bluetooth menu bar item, and you'd get an option to reset Bluetooth; this helped for the inevitable case where people have bugs and devices won't connect, or Bluetooth just won't work.
How are secret features better than the now-discoverable option of simply shutting it off and turning it back on? It's an all-time computing classic and now it's using the UI classic toggle language. This seems superb to me.
Ok, I understand. That is a regression. The UI piece as a whole is still superior in my opinion, wrt UX at least, even if this is a regression in functionality
...are you sure? When bluetooth was broken as all hell in the Monterey betas I believe that the reset trick was the go-to for people to get it to reconnect to devices properly.
Unless they removed it entirely in a later beta and I'm simply unaware.
been using since first public betas months ago. hated this for a couple weeks, but then once I realized it how it unified everything in one place, now I love it. It took a while for me to adjust to though.
Just having functional bluetooth would be nice? Bluetooth on my MBP recently decided to turn "off", and clicking/sliding the on/off slider just does nothing. The slider doesn't move to "on", and I get no feedback, errors, information or anything about why I can't re-enable it.
Prior to that BT devices would just drop the connection, AFAICT.
Bi-directional file transfer has never worked properly.
And that's only BT…
IDK what's actually that bad about the BT menu UI though? The recent UX changes on notifications have been bad, though. Especially where sometimes clicking the X doesn't dismiss the notification. (There's some bait&switch b/c there's like multiple notifications stacked up… or something.) And that (for a while now) Calendar hasn't reliably notified me, which has been great, as it results in lateness to meetings, since there's no longer an office mate to say "hey, it's time".
BT is broken everywhere. I daily-drive MacOS, Windows 10, and PopOS, all on pretty solid hardware. All 3 have countless issues with BT stuff, whether it's UI and issues with connecting/remembering, or dropouts, or it just failing to work on random days, or audio glitches, or not finding some generic peripherals that the other OSes do find, etc etc.
I use BT a lot, half a dozen devices I use every single day, and I have issues with every single peripheral on at least 1 (usually 2) of the 3 OSes I use.
BT itself seems like such a simple thing to get right too... not sure what I'm missing about it that makes it so technically hard to just work as expected.
That’s a thing on 13” MBP as well, it happened to me. I needed to use some super antiquated BT USB adapter and provide the digital equivalent of an indigenous rain dance in order to revive it. Apparently Apple was just straight up replacing motherboards because of it but I really didn’t want to be without my machine for a week plus during peak COVID.
No. It is all still the same dumpster fire. I think they may have actually made it worse.
I got a calendar notification of a cancelled event. The notification itself had no buttons to interact with. A hover where the close button would be (top left of the nmotification) causes it to appear and also causes a "delete" button to appear in the bottom right. But if I move my mouse off the "close" button to click "delete" both the close and delete buttons disappear. The only way to delete it is to click it (opening the calendar) wait for the calendar to open (5-10s on a 2019 i7 MBP) then open the event itself to delete it.
It’s one of the least user friendly patterns in the OS that I can think of off hand, yet one that I have to interact with dozens of times per day. It’s bizarre.
I just realized that the button is impossible to interact with on Monterey. The only way to get the "options" drop down (something that used to be individual buttons on the notification) to appear is to hover over the "X" but if you move the mouse away from that the options drop down disappears. There's actually no way to do something like snooze a notification from the notification itself.
It's an astonishing regression in functionality, even for Apple. And with Apple's recent UI "improvements" I'm not sure if it is a bug or deliberate. I'm probably holding it wrong but I can't figure out the combination of interactions to get that button to persist.
This.
The Bluetooth menu icon used to change if a device was connected. Also devices under the Bluetooth menu used to say connected, and not just turn a light-blue shade.
I still don’t understand why clicking the menu date/time opens the notifications? Someone at Apple was paid $million/year to implement that? It still trips me up once a day.
Are all features available on all recent Macs (Intel + M1)? iirc there were some features that there were some exclusive M1 features to come, but also overheard rumors that they'd still roll out on "old" Intel Macs.
Edit: Apparently some features are indeed M1 only. Those features are
- portrait mode in FaceTime
- apparently the new Apple Maps design
- the interactive globe
Seems like the most important features (for me it's livetext) are available on both architectures.
Sort of a mini review. Using it at home on my MacBook Pro 2015 Intel Machine.
Big Sur on M1 was fine ( if not great ), mostly because M1 is extremely fast. But Big Sir on x86 was slow, really slow. I am in the group that reported Big Sur was slower than Catalina, and Catalina was slower than Mojave. That is with both the OS itself and Safari. So Big Sur was not a smooth experience for me.
Monterey so far brings back the speed / snappiness of Mojave. Safari feels so much more responsive under normal use and under heavy tab usage. Lots micro-pause ( Jank ) and lag are gone. As if they put back all the optimisation for x86 previously left out.
Far less Kernel_Task CPU usage and stupid disk write for whatever reason. My guess this is mostly a Safari problem given they have implemented Tab Groups they have at least taken into account of heavy tab usage in mind. This is also apparent when they fix the long standing Tab Overview bug, where it will load ( and reload ) every single Tabs you have trying to generate thumbnail. Imagine you accidentally press the Tab Overview button in the tool bar, or three finger swap in Safari when you have hundreds of tabs. You will instantly get a few hundreds GB of Disk Write paging trying load everything. It is literally a feature that kills your SSD. I have reported this bug for over three years, it is finally fixed. Cloudd and Bookmark / History / Tab Sync pause / Jank is still not fix though. That is 3 years+ and counting.
Still wish they do a list of tabs like Chrome instead of Thumbnails when it is over certain Tabs Number. It is easier to track when you have lots of Tabs. Easier to do Manual Garbage Collection of Tabs.
Bug that causes IINA to crash when viewing video in portrait mode is gone. One of the biggest complain when updating to Big Sur.
WindowsServer also uses far less CPU. It used to hover over 30% for no apparent reason. Now it is back to a normal 5-15% in most cases.
Safari "classic" tabs are back. Along with a very long list of webkit improvement. Far from perfect but at least things are moving.
I am also feeling Apps that are using Swift and SwiftUI are snappier than before and uses less memory. An observation mostly from using Stocks App.
Many other minor details, may be worth reading Ars' review [1]. It is solid release, which along with M1 MacBook Pro sadly dampens my motivation to move away from Apple.
Big Sur feels sluggish, it's not that it's slow, but it feels slow. I don't remember what OS my MacBook came with, but every update made it slower, especially Mail.app, which takes good 10 seconds to launch. Downloading Monterey now, hopefully will see improvements!
edit: but my biggest macOS complaint yet has to be the space used by "Other", which at the moment is about 50GB and 70GB at times
I was just helping a family member with this same issue (large amount of “Other” space) and turns out it was some unmounted volumes that had somehow been created. We couldn’t track down what was on them in the time period I had to help, but doing a clean wipe cleared it all up. Not the best answer to the problem.
So Private Relay is available on both iOS and macOS stable releases now.
Have there been expert opinions about how private this is? I understand they built a Tor-light, by hopping through one Apple server, then one external server, with some sort of anonymisation between the two?
The external servers are like cloudflare and fastly. Private relay doesn’t make any claims to be as private or anonymous as tor. It’s designed more to keep ISPs less aware of your browsing history and prevent websites from tracking you with IP.
In my experience so far, Private Relay just turns off and back on randomly. There’s no safari indicator that private relay is off, just push notifications to inform you of the status. Private relay and mail privacy protection also completely disable when using another VPN. That said I’m very happy to get private relay with iCloud+ as it means phone is approaching the point where carrier can’t associate me with browsing history for to sell to whatever creepy business offers them money.
They've been released pretty close to every 11-13 months since 10.7, which was nearly 2 years after 10.6. That happened a decade ago now, so it's not something that's changed recently.
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[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 403 ms ] threadIronically I just upgraded to Big Sur yesterday from Catalina. I think I'll probably wait again to let 3rd-party apps catch up.
In the beginning it was awful for her. A lot of failures. However, after a couple of months it became quite stable, and she stopped complaining. The only thing that was kind of a nightmare was Xcode.
I'm updating it, and if I were you, I'd update right away too. There are many improvements.
Safari is also slightly better, although she dislikes the new way it organizes tabs.
That said, the thing she told me she liked the most, feature-wise related to her daily workflow, is the new Shortcuts app.
EDIT: I did not install it until the RC.
So far I was fine with it though of course sometimes it's annoying to get the latest XCode (and iOS sdk) version for development, so I have to resort to a VM from time to time.
Helpful website: https://xcodereleases.com/
Other than those two things, it's been pretty solid lately.
Other than that, it seems more stable and faster than Big Sur, and that's without a clean install. Notes used to take 4 bounces to open on M1, now opens instantly. Haven't seen any crashing. No broken features that aren't brand new. I've only found one bug: Safari reopens private windows even if you turn that off. But no problem if you don't use Safari.
I’m running out of ideas on how to fix this.
I intended to do the same this morning and literally witnessed the "Upgrade Now" change from Big Sur to Monterey as I was about to click it. Took me a while to find the appropriate link for Big Sur in the Mac App Store.
Same it has always been and no different to every other service.
Also any kind of content scanning is always strictly worse than no scanning at all.
EDIT: This announcement from Apple says it was to be included in an iOS 15 update when ready [1] so unlikely it was just dormant in some previous update.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28068741 [1]: https://www.apple.com/child-safety/
Reminds me of how hugely offended some people were that the icon for a Windows PC in Mac OS X’s network browser was a blue screened monitor.
But now that Windows users feel threatened by Apple and are sensitive about this, it should probably be changed. Although it's a fun relic of the olden times.
And the notch gives them room for a future FaceID sensor stack.
And Dell supports Windows Hello 3D face recognition without a notch.
It's not quite as unbalanced as you imply.
Apple's resolution was equally as bad as Dell's until eight days ago.
Dell's position allows facial recognition without cutting into the screen.
So my point is that contrary to several comments implying how "obvious" it is that Apple's webcam implementation is superior, it's not necessarily obvious, nor superior.
If that's really the reason, why not just delay putting the notch on until they're actually doing that?
Compare the top bezel in a pre-notch mac book and you will see that the camera is basically on the same place as before, but the bezel is now smaller.
And since they are targeting younger people for Facetime maybe not surprising they didn't choose the most expensive, flagship phone.
Taste is subjective. Anyone arguing that the MBP is objectively better than, say, https://icdn.digitaltrends.com/image/digitaltrends/dell-xps-...
is just expressing their preferences. And I say that as someone who is waiting on delivery of the 14" MBP.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performanc...
So taste maybe subjective. But there is simply no argument that if you care about performance or battery life then the MacBook Pro is objectively better.
The iPhone / Android objection still stands.
Ironically, during my research I also found this marvelous few years old MacBook Air https://fr.shopping.rakuten.com/offer/buy/2076960204/portabl... , which is not too far.
So I'm not really convinced that attempt of an excuse makes any sense...
They’ve got it completely backwards.
Allowing for one-time customizations doesn't add to my ongoing "useless information to process" queue.
But some of us do want certain messages to breach while we're working.
I'm not really sure what I'd want out of a new MacOS, though. It's been stable and (for my purposes) feature-complete for many years now. I don't remember the last time a MacOS upgrade added a feature I wanted but didn't yet have, nor the last time they added a feature I didn't realize I wanted because I'd never imagined it. The latter used to be what made Apple products stand out to me.
Universal Control has potential to be valuable.
If we're talking about other recent releases, ARM (/iOS app interoperability) support was definitely a huge change :)
A relatively low-key, under-the-hood Mac release? "Man I miss when the Mac was innovative. These releases are a snooze fest."
A big release, packed with features? "Man I miss when Apple cared about their OS stability. We need a new zero features snooze fest like 10.6. Take me back to Snow Leopard :("
Only HN can pull off such astounding mood swings. I know this site isn't a monolith of opinions, but come on.
I was in a line for some food at a Puppet (the config management tool) conference and two guys in front of me were chatting about their Puppet runs.
One turned to the other and said, "My Puppet runs are really slow. It takes 10-15 minutes for it to run and apply state to all 15,000 servers."
I couldn't believe it. The guy was complaining about having to wait 15 minutes to apply state to 15,000 operating systems.
What is wrong with people? You haven't got to go back far to take all of this innovation away and still people aren't pleased.
And bugs linger for years and never get fixed.
I think it's very reasonable to complain.
The abomination that would get me off of Big Sur is the ridiculously low contrast difference for titlebars between foreground and background apps. Turning on the contrast accessibility option looks horrible. However, it's looking like thanks to HazeOver, this is a wait-for-EOL cycle.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212619
As to what notifications have been helpful: I ended up making Reading and Listening focuses to make personal stuff like reading and podcasting more enjoyable. Then for work I separated out Communicating (email, slack, asana, collaborative docs) from Coding (everything off) as it seemed those had quite different notification needs.
edit: nvm, it just shows a generic status message for all people. it does not display the exact status to that person.
Edit: It looks like shortcuts won't be able to set (or clear) focus modes, so that'll have to wait. Bummer.
When i turn on my Bluetooth speaker in the shower room it goes into a focus mode that diverts all calls for 15 mins and resumes my podcasts. I thought the experience on macos was supposed to be a superset of the ios one. Really poor decision by apple then.
it has native unix environment, is fast and efficient
Shoving everything into a sub-menu made device statuses invisible and involved extra clicks to interact with them. It's user-hostile design.
to Apple?
Why can't this be a predictable hold and drag, like everything else?
They expect users to... what read a manual?
There is an alternative, make it so that users can intuitively discover features by playing around. I believe Steve Jobs told some pretentious story along that line when he launched the iPad.
And of course the technology hasn't evolved since then. Society hasn't gotten more complex. The problems we're solving are the same. Nothing has changed and people aren't asking for new things and demanding more convenience.
Everything is static.
?
Maybe read again, no one said that. If anything it used to be the norm to have clunky products that require a manual. Many products these days don't need manuals.
I mentioned Steve Jobs to say he was full of shit, I don't believe for a second that Apple did actually pursuit that philosophy, let alone that they should stay doing it
https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/control-center-mchl...
(Note the Tip sentence.)
Always read, or at least browse, the macOS and iOS/iPadOS User Guide. Even advanced users will learn a thing or few.
https://www.macrumors.com/how-to/reset-mac-bluetooth-module/
That no longer exists on Monterey.
They might be referencing Control Center, though.
Unless they removed it entirely in a later beta and I'm simply unaware.
Prior to that BT devices would just drop the connection, AFAICT.
Bi-directional file transfer has never worked properly.
And that's only BT…
IDK what's actually that bad about the BT menu UI though? The recent UX changes on notifications have been bad, though. Especially where sometimes clicking the X doesn't dismiss the notification. (There's some bait&switch b/c there's like multiple notifications stacked up… or something.) And that (for a while now) Calendar hasn't reliably notified me, which has been great, as it results in lateness to meetings, since there's no longer an office mate to say "hey, it's time".
I use BT a lot, half a dozen devices I use every single day, and I have issues with every single peripheral on at least 1 (usually 2) of the 3 OSes I use.
BT itself seems like such a simple thing to get right too... not sure what I'm missing about it that makes it so technically hard to just work as expected.
good hn thread from 2017:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14752719
I got a calendar notification of a cancelled event. The notification itself had no buttons to interact with. A hover where the close button would be (top left of the nmotification) causes it to appear and also causes a "delete" button to appear in the bottom right. But if I move my mouse off the "close" button to click "delete" both the close and delete buttons disappear. The only way to delete it is to click it (opening the calendar) wait for the calendar to open (5-10s on a 2019 i7 MBP) then open the event itself to delete it.
It's an astonishing regression in functionality, even for Apple. And with Apple's recent UI "improvements" I'm not sure if it is a bug or deliberate. I'm probably holding it wrong but I can't figure out the combination of interactions to get that button to persist.
I'm sitting on catalina for as long as possible on my non-work laptop
Edit: Apparently some features are indeed M1 only. Those features are
- portrait mode in FaceTime
- apparently the new Apple Maps design
- the interactive globe
Seems like the most important features (for me it's livetext) are available on both architectures.
Big Sur on M1 was fine ( if not great ), mostly because M1 is extremely fast. But Big Sir on x86 was slow, really slow. I am in the group that reported Big Sur was slower than Catalina, and Catalina was slower than Mojave. That is with both the OS itself and Safari. So Big Sur was not a smooth experience for me.
Monterey so far brings back the speed / snappiness of Mojave. Safari feels so much more responsive under normal use and under heavy tab usage. Lots micro-pause ( Jank ) and lag are gone. As if they put back all the optimisation for x86 previously left out.
Far less Kernel_Task CPU usage and stupid disk write for whatever reason. My guess this is mostly a Safari problem given they have implemented Tab Groups they have at least taken into account of heavy tab usage in mind. This is also apparent when they fix the long standing Tab Overview bug, where it will load ( and reload ) every single Tabs you have trying to generate thumbnail. Imagine you accidentally press the Tab Overview button in the tool bar, or three finger swap in Safari when you have hundreds of tabs. You will instantly get a few hundreds GB of Disk Write paging trying load everything. It is literally a feature that kills your SSD. I have reported this bug for over three years, it is finally fixed. Cloudd and Bookmark / History / Tab Sync pause / Jank is still not fix though. That is 3 years+ and counting.
Still wish they do a list of tabs like Chrome instead of Thumbnails when it is over certain Tabs Number. It is easier to track when you have lots of Tabs. Easier to do Manual Garbage Collection of Tabs.
Bug that causes IINA to crash when viewing video in portrait mode is gone. One of the biggest complain when updating to Big Sur.
WindowsServer also uses far less CPU. It used to hover over 30% for no apparent reason. Now it is back to a normal 5-15% in most cases.
Safari "classic" tabs are back. Along with a very long list of webkit improvement. Far from perfect but at least things are moving.
I am also feeling Apps that are using Swift and SwiftUI are snappier than before and uses less memory. An observation mostly from using Stocks App.
Many other minor details, may be worth reading Ars' review [1]. It is solid release, which along with M1 MacBook Pro sadly dampens my motivation to move away from Apple.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/10/macos-12-monterey-th...
i have a MacBook Pro with Intel as well
Big Sur feels sluggish, it's not that it's slow, but it feels slow. I don't remember what OS my MacBook came with, but every update made it slower, especially Mail.app, which takes good 10 seconds to launch. Downloading Monterey now, hopefully will see improvements!
edit: but my biggest macOS complaint yet has to be the space used by "Other", which at the moment is about 50GB and 70GB at times
It may also be an APFS snapshot, which is _not_ purgeable (indeed macOS boots of signed snapshots now)
You can download the Mojave image from here afterwards: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT211683
Backup your data before doing a clean install.
This typically means the machine is thermally throttled, not that the kernel is actually using the CPU.
https://video-canvas-worker-4k.netlify.app/
Point Reyes is my bet.
Have there been expert opinions about how private this is? I understand they built a Tor-light, by hopping through one Apple server, then one external server, with some sort of anonymisation between the two?
In my experience so far, Private Relay just turns off and back on randomly. There’s no safari indicator that private relay is off, just push notifications to inform you of the status. Private relay and mail privacy protection also completely disable when using another VPN. That said I’m very happy to get private relay with iCloud+ as it means phone is approaching the point where carrier can’t associate me with browsing history for to sell to whatever creepy business offers them money.
Their OS releases have been yearly for about the past decade I think.
They've been released pretty close to every 11-13 months since 10.7, which was nearly 2 years after 10.6. That happened a decade ago now, so it's not something that's changed recently.