A few macOS betas ago, a bunch of sites started failing to play video in Safari. Disney+, Netflix, YouTube and some other sites will sit at a black screen for a few seconds and then give me an error. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes certain videos will reliably fail while others reliably work fine. I thought this was related to Safari's autoplay protections, but I tried giving permission to autoplay all videos and that doesn't seem to change anything. Not sure if that fits the definition of a Snow Leopard update. Apple needs at least a few more Snow Leopard updates at this rate. I'd also like to see them fix the issue where Liquid Glass uses a downscaled background image even at the most transparent setting. (Except for Siri AI which they seem to have added a special exception for, exactly because the pre-downscaling is super ugly)
Maybe, but it's weird that it started across all these different sites after an OS update. Netflix finally stopped accusing me of not being in the "household", but trying to disable Private Relay hasn't been able to make videos play when they don't want to work.
I imagine the author saw this release as "macOS Tahoe but not sucky"
I liken it to Windows Vista and Windows 7. Although fundamentally similar operating systems under the hood, Windows 7 smoothed out Vista's kinks and brought forth additional polish.
I wouldn't mind if they (unofficially) adopted a tick-tock release cycle. New features on even years, refinement and under-the-hood changes on odd years.
I've been pleasantly surprised with Golden Gate. It's fresh-looking, works well, got rid of a lot of the ugly flat stuff they did over the last few releases (pre-Tahoe), supports more hidpi modes that make my work machine better...
But honestly, I don't think the average person should feel excitement for an OS release; boring means it just works and they don't have to learn a bunch of new features and different ways of doing things.
I'm stuck trying to figure out what new stuff they could add. Sidecar was neat, but I never need it. I'm very happy on Cinnamon on Linux, which is probably less featured than KDE (haven't daily driven it to confirm), which just confirms I don't actually need or want user-facing new features. I need stability.
I think Apple realise this. There are no genuine new OS features to be added, so they just shuffle things around so that things are changing and thus seem fresh and hip. For anyone who cares about stability and doesn't want to relearn everything the shuffle around, this is nothing but a negative, but Apple et al. have no other levers to pull (well, there's the AI lever, but that's also generally not a positive in and of itself).
Maybe there are new OS features that could be useful, but creating and integrating them in a way that's actually helpful is just such an ordeal that nobody will do it.
FWIW I use aerospace and break up those 22 windows into ~4-6 windows with ~3-5 tabs each, then move each window to a different virtual workspace that I switch to with option + hotkey like opt+1, opt+2, opt+3 or even opt+D and so on
Cinnamon was what I used before KDE, I like KDE a great deal but I also liked Cinnamon a great deal, if I had to go back it wouldn't cause me any issues, I only switched for Wayland support.
So if you are happy on Cinnamon stay there (and it's Wayland support has caught up a lot).
They both do an excellent job of not causing me pain, working the way I want and respecting me as a user, that's what a DE should be, if I have to consider the DE more than in passing it's failing at been a DE.
Early on with OSX I would update early because the new features in the OS were truely interesting (AFP, Dtrace, Spotlight, Early Siri, Messages sync with iPhone). Yes all very developer oriented, but I am a developer and that's primarily what I use my machines for. Releases like Snow Leopard and Tiger were full of novel features. Now I find most of the copy is dedicated to things I couldn't care less about like generative AI images or questionable redesigns of the UI.
I would love a review of the new developer and OS level features for macOS releases. The WWDC content is close to unwatchable, it never goes into enough depth and the video only delivery is not the primary way I want to consume technical content. Give me the cool highlights of the virtualisation framework, what still works with Dtrace , explain the infernal code signing permissions system, etc.
So far I've kept to Sequoia as the least annoying version, and avoided the Liquid Glass rounded corners mess.
Debian+KDE here. It's what I use to get away from OS excitement. I miss the 90's when nobody ever updated anything, and if they did it was on purpose and not something that happened behind your back.
For example, the other day Google "updated" the clock/alarm/timer app on Android with pointless and annoying changes. A clock app does not need an update, ever.
"But..." No! /usr/share/zoneinfo handles that. Stop it.
Major version upgrades every couple of years will usually bring a new wallpaper and make a few tweaks to the default apps. Annual Firefox ESR updates will bring a handful of improvements to the browser. And, of course, security and critical bugfixes chug away in the background without making any fuss.
Nothing breaks unexpectedly. Behaviour never changes without your knowledge and permission. Bliss.
Snow Leopard is right up there with System 7.5.3 for me. I’m happy with their current OS trends compared to the flat OS trend of the past decade. They definitely need detail work and I think they default to turning features on that I would prefer off. Many of the new features I don’t use come off as a spastic GUI.
Snow Leopard was solid, but when I went back and used it I was surprised by how I missed some little bits of polish that'd been added since.
My ideal would probably be Mavericks 10.9.5 with the Leopard/Snow Leopard 2D grid virtual desktop model hacked back in. The linear version of Spaces that's been in place since 10.7 is needlessly simplistic.
I dread new macOS releases, because it signifies one year less support for my current version (I'm on Sequoia now, having jumped from Ventura) being supported.
Every new version wrecks my workflow a little. macOS 28 will partially remove Rosetta 2, which means that I'll need to find replacements for some of the ancient Intel apps that never got updated to Apple Silicon.
I've never had so much stuff break than with the macOS updates. I can get some of it, like drivers or programs hooking onto OS features that change. But so much "normal" software just breaks. Or can't even run without the dev recompiling for the new ui kit version or something. While on Windows I can run any random old tool not touched in two decades and it'll work.
10.5 Leopard because 10.4 Tiger was my first interaction with Mac OS X and it blew me away. I couldn't wait to see what was next and how they could improve upon perfection.
At the beginning of the century, I used to live from October to September looking forward to the next OS release to fix the bugs I would encounter. Maybe because I was not aware that it would eventually choke my low tier machine. Now, I dread the day I will upgrade the OS
I've had this (first) work mac for 2 years and the upside is that every new version is usually only slightly worse than a new Windows version, which is generally a big step down.
For Linux I've been kinda indifferent for 15 years. Maybe it's me.
I wasn’t excited about Tahoe but it was the best release I’ve encountered. They fixed spotlight and window management enough that I no longer need to rely on third party tools to replace those native features (I still use Rectangle for the keyboard shortcuts, but not for window snapping).
I also appreciate that it comes with dynamic wallpaper of the lake where I got the worst sunburn of my life.
All of my stuff updated to the 27 versions today. During indoor cycling class, I kept getting health alerts on my watch about high heart rate while stationary. Despite currently having the very same apple watch tracking my indoor cycling workout.
heart recovery is one of several headline new features they mention on first run (and in app ref info) will calibrate over time
as often the case when Apple makes its move, their implementations -- while late compared to e.g. Garmin which has had them for years -- purport to be leading accuracy on these features among wearables
> I’m not a particularly big fan of generative AI. I do not use and have never used it at any stage of the research, outlining, or writing process for any article I’ve ever written, except for the times when I’m testing it so I can write about it.
This is wild from a "tech" site. I used to read their articles fairly religiously, but this bent by their writers and commenters is really telling, and a signal to start looking elsewhere.
Continuing the quote gives more context, which I agree with:
"The obviously AI-generated flyers that come home from school with my kid or that get circulated around neighborhood groups strike me as benign but deeply tacky; the kinds of AI-generated images that get passed around by politicians online don’t even have the benefit of being benign.
More than anything, I’m just tired of seeing it everywhere, tired of being on the lookout for it, tired of it polluting every stream of information I have access to. Wasting time actively trying to avoid auto-generated slop is now a daily fixture of my life."
Obviously, one should be able to entertain an idea without necessarily accepting it, and much like any tool that can be misused, just because some malign actor (or dumb actor) uses it "wrong" doesn't mean you should also not use it.
This is a completely reasonable take from a normal human being. YK some people become journalists because they enjoy the act of research, writing and investigating. And in all honesty, LLMs are still INCREDIBLY bad at communication. They get stuff done, sure, but god, for something named "large language model" all their attempts at human style communication makes me want to turn off the computer for good.
"...Golden Gate needed a whopping 17GB more space on the M1 MacBook Air, thanks to a mandatory multi-gigabyte language model download that kicks in automatically the first time you connect a freshly restored Golden Gate Mac to the Internet."
This is the main thing stopping me from updating iOS/macOS. It's completely unacceptable to park a bunch of space on my devices right when that storage is at its most expensive it's ever been.
My phone is on iOS 26, and even with Apple Intelligence turned off, there's ~13GB made unusable. My phone ran out of space while recording a bike trip, and yet the space for a model I have no use for remained.
Yes, the disrespect Apple/Google/MS has for their users (on equipment they have purchased!) is palpable. They seem to have a real sense of entitlement these days.
It used to be universally accepted that losing or corrupting user data was a (if not THE) cardinal sin in development.
In many ways we get what we tolerate, but the lack of viable alternatives in some spaces (esp cellphones and TVs) makes it very hard to hold the big players to any kind of account economically. At least no one is holding a gun to our heads to use MacOS or other proprietary systems on our desktops/laptops/servers for the most part.
If there is no way to remove this 17 GB model, then the OS is simply not for me anymore. I'll stick with Sequoia for another year and use it until it stops receiving security updates and then I'm back to being a full-time Linux user.
Phones should have separate storage for their OS so that when you buy a specific phone with specific storage it actually is that much storage available to the user
Android used to work kinda like that. You got the system partition that's a fixed size, and that's it. You also had the data partition for apps and their data on the same internal flash. For everything else, you inserted a micro SD card. You could move some apps to the SD card as well.
Maybe macOS 26 was lot bigger... but I went straight from Sequoia to Golden Gate and freed up like 30 GBs. I didn't have enough disk space to download the update prior, so the extra 30 GB wasn't that... but could've been caches I guess. I assumed it was dropping Intel?
Unfortunately I don't know yet because I updated for Xcode 27 + iPhone dev, so having an iPhone plugged in 24/7 is heavily spewing the results towards "much worse".
If I can still reply mid-to-late next week I'll let you know.
The real problem with iOS is that there’s no way to clear an app’s cache without uninstalling it. Every non-indie internet-connected app on my phone has a massive and unneeded cache that consumes gigabytes of space.
Yeah, and a pound of sugar cost 8oz of gold a few thousand years ago, so inflation isn't real and food scarcity is a myth.
If you want a fair comparison you should look at the price of storage at the capacity required for typical contemporaneous workloads. Don't quote numbers in the billions when that amount of storage didn't even exist on the entire planet at the time.
this is pointless pedantry. there's an implicit "functionally equivalent, for modern (apple) devices" bit.
> It would really help perspective sometimes
It objectively and absolutely doesn't help this discussion at all. Even if taken as hyperbole, the frustration with Apple charging $200 for 256 added gigs, and filling up ~20gigs of it without consent or requirement, is unaffected by floppy prices in the 80s.
Ok, let’s talk apples to apples. I’ll talk about RAM instead of disk, and I have a workload example for you.
As a graduate student in AI in 1995, I bought (with granting body’s money) a workstation for running my PhD experiments. It was a Sun Sparcstation 5, and it had 192MB of RAM. That was a lot of RAM in those days, and we spent the money so we could do experiments at what was then the frontier of personal workstation performance (though not big iron).
The 192MB of RAM DIMMs cost $27K in 1995 dollars, or $58K in 2026 dollars.
Ever since Apple switched to the yearly September release cycle, MacOS releases have felt extremely rushed and I normally wait until February before upgrading my main Macs. 5 or 6 months is usually long enough to shake out the big bugs.
For MacOS 26, I waited until just a few weeks ago, the longest I've ever put it off.
For MacOS 27, I will probably be upgrading a lot sooner, just to deal with the general awfulness of 26. I'll still wait for .1 or .2 before pulling the trigger.
I've found today after going to MacOS27 (I skipped 26 fully) that Chrome extensions don't load properly. They're super, super slow. I've found one or two other bug reports of this from older Dev builds but that's it. Bizarre. Time to flip back to Safari I suppose.
Ironically in macOS 27 I've had a bunch of issues with Safari extensions. 50% of the time they don't load on their whitelisted domains. Click on their toolbar icon and they pop in.
As a developer I've only updated my Mac around release date once. Faced so many bugs and incompatibilities that now I wait at least 2 months so both Apple & third party iron out the kinks.
Will I get prompted to give Chrome permissions to the Local Network on every update? This is literally the one feature I'd like from Apple because I'm happy with everything else. The update looks cool, but nothing I'd actually want.
It happens with any Chromium based browser, like Edge. Apple and Chromium keeps pointing fingers at one another, but the reality is that this only happens on Apple machines. Windows and Linux have no such problem.
can someone figure out the right invocation of defaults write to script it? I think it would be pretty ironic if that same person used an LLM to achieve it :)
So happy they’ve finally added Ethernet status to the menu bar. It has always bugged me there wasn’t an easy way to quickly check if my Mac was using Ethernet or not
That may have been true in the past, and I usually wait for the first point release, but macOS and iOS 27 seem to be a definite improvement. My 5 year old phone is much snappier!
Hmm, I remember when Ars Technica macOS reviews were the gold standard. This one isn't bad, but I miss having more in-depth information about the improvements.
In my opinion, the details here complement the Ars Technica article nicely:
Agreed. While Andrew's done an okay job stepping into some big shoes, I too miss the reviews John Siracusa used to do for Ars. Same could be said for a lot of the old internet when you had people like Siracusa, Anand Lal Shimpi at AnandTech among others, providing very detailed deep dives on the latest technology.
> Golden Gate is our second consecutive release named for a body of water, following a stretch of releases named for towns/regions (Big Sur, Monterey, Ventura, Sonoma, Sequoia)
The new Siri AI is so incredibly disappointing. I only wanted one thing, and one thing only -- enhanced automation. I don't give a fuck if Siri AI can edit little pictures or some bullshit. I wanted something that could actually replace AppleScript/Automator to a useful degree. Something that actually could interact with the system. Of course, that is asking for too much.
Still no way to move an application window from one space to another without a mouse. If you have a disability, then I guess you cannot really use spaces, which is poor design. But it's not like Apple cares. Snow Leopard had this ability back in 2010. Why it was removed is beyond me.
I am die hard Apple fanboy, but I feel ashamed for having hope in '27.
Other than the 17G LM and associate features I won't use and will attempt at least to ignore, looks like a boring release with some good bug fixes including cosmetic. So, alright.
I'm happy to have gotten the max SSD when I got this thing, and I'm already juggling external drives (mostly for large media projects). I guess business as usual.
116 comments
[ 0.21 ms ] story [ 82.6 ms ] threadNo. It wouldn't. Snow Leopard was two years in the making, and then took another few years to actually become the Snow Leopard people remember.
Fixing some transparency and re-drawing a few icons is not a Snow Leopard release.
Like, which features in this 150000-character blog post actually warrant the title of "Snow Leopard release"?
I liken it to Windows Vista and Windows 7. Although fundamentally similar operating systems under the hood, Windows 7 smoothed out Vista's kinks and brought forth additional polish.
Me? Snow Leopard.
When I transitioned to Linux I rediscovered OS excitement. I'm on KDE Plasma now and every update has exciting features that serves my interests.
But honestly, I don't think the average person should feel excitement for an OS release; boring means it just works and they don't have to learn a bunch of new features and different ways of doing things.
I think Apple realise this. There are no genuine new OS features to be added, so they just shuffle things around so that things are changing and thus seem fresh and hip. For anyone who cares about stability and doesn't want to relearn everything the shuffle around, this is nothing but a negative, but Apple et al. have no other levers to pull (well, there's the AI lever, but that's also generally not a positive in and of itself).
Maybe there are new OS features that could be useful, but creating and integrating them in a way that's actually helpful is just such an ordeal that nobody will do it.
They have many quality of life improvements over the basic terminal.
I think we can do better. It’s a hard problem, admittedly. But important.
So if you are happy on Cinnamon stay there (and it's Wayland support has caught up a lot).
They both do an excellent job of not causing me pain, working the way I want and respecting me as a user, that's what a DE should be, if I have to consider the DE more than in passing it's failing at been a DE.
I would love a review of the new developer and OS level features for macOS releases. The WWDC content is close to unwatchable, it never goes into enough depth and the video only delivery is not the primary way I want to consume technical content. Give me the cool highlights of the virtualisation framework, what still works with Dtrace , explain the infernal code signing permissions system, etc.
So far I've kept to Sequoia as the least annoying version, and avoided the Liquid Glass rounded corners mess.
Debian+KDE here. It's what I use to get away from OS excitement. I miss the 90's when nobody ever updated anything, and if they did it was on purpose and not something that happened behind your back.
For example, the other day Google "updated" the clock/alarm/timer app on Android with pointless and annoying changes. A clock app does not need an update, ever.
"But..." No! /usr/share/zoneinfo handles that. Stop it.
Major version upgrades every couple of years will usually bring a new wallpaper and make a few tweaks to the default apps. Annual Firefox ESR updates will bring a handful of improvements to the browser. And, of course, security and critical bugfixes chug away in the background without making any fuss.
Nothing breaks unexpectedly. Behaviour never changes without your knowledge and permission. Bliss.
My ideal would probably be Mavericks 10.9.5 with the Leopard/Snow Leopard 2D grid virtual desktop model hacked back in. The linear version of Spaces that's been in place since 10.7 is needlessly simplistic.
Every new version wrecks my workflow a little. macOS 28 will partially remove Rosetta 2, which means that I'll need to find replacements for some of the ancient Intel apps that never got updated to Apple Silicon.
I dread updating Macs.
For Linux I've been kinda indifferent for 15 years. Maybe it's me.
I also appreciate that it comes with dynamic wallpaper of the lake where I got the worst sunburn of my life.
I guess Claude doesn’t take spinning classes
as often the case when Apple makes its move, their implementations -- while late compared to e.g. Garmin which has had them for years -- purport to be leading accuracy on these features among wearables
This is wild from a "tech" site. I used to read their articles fairly religiously, but this bent by their writers and commenters is really telling, and a signal to start looking elsewhere.
"The obviously AI-generated flyers that come home from school with my kid or that get circulated around neighborhood groups strike me as benign but deeply tacky; the kinds of AI-generated images that get passed around by politicians online don’t even have the benefit of being benign.
More than anything, I’m just tired of seeing it everywhere, tired of being on the lookout for it, tired of it polluting every stream of information I have access to. Wasting time actively trying to avoid auto-generated slop is now a daily fixture of my life."
Obviously, one should be able to entertain an idea without necessarily accepting it, and much like any tool that can be misused, just because some malign actor (or dumb actor) uses it "wrong" doesn't mean you should also not use it.
nobody tell my boss
This is the main thing stopping me from updating iOS/macOS. It's completely unacceptable to park a bunch of space on my devices right when that storage is at its most expensive it's ever been.
My phone is on iOS 26, and even with Apple Intelligence turned off, there's ~13GB made unusable. My phone ran out of space while recording a bike trip, and yet the space for a model I have no use for remained.
How easily we forget the exponential improvements of decades past...
If I can still reply mid-to-late next week I'll let you know.
Most expensive it's been for a handful of years.
1TB of spinny disk cost a million dollars as recently as 1994.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/historical-cost-of-comput...
If you want a fair comparison you should look at the price of storage at the capacity required for typical contemporaneous workloads. Don't quote numbers in the billions when that amount of storage didn't even exist on the entire planet at the time.
Storage - even normalized for a contemporary workload - has been a lot cheaper, but it has also been much more expensive.
I’ve paid it myself on several occasions.
> It would really help perspective sometimes
It objectively and absolutely doesn't help this discussion at all. Even if taken as hyperbole, the frustration with Apple charging $200 for 256 added gigs, and filling up ~20gigs of it without consent or requirement, is unaffected by floppy prices in the 80s.
We’ll go with that feeling.
As a graduate student in AI in 1995, I bought (with granting body’s money) a workstation for running my PhD experiments. It was a Sun Sparcstation 5, and it had 192MB of RAM. That was a lot of RAM in those days, and we spent the money so we could do experiments at what was then the frontier of personal workstation performance (though not big iron).
The 192MB of RAM DIMMs cost $27K in 1995 dollars, or $58K in 2026 dollars.
It's as if their Claude credits ran out halfway through
For MacOS 26, I waited until just a few weeks ago, the longest I've ever put it off.
For MacOS 27, I will probably be upgrading a lot sooner, just to deal with the general awfulness of 26. I'll still wait for .1 or .2 before pulling the trigger.
https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-250012366
it used to be one toggle
Just do it 70 times, no sweat.
In my opinion, the details here complement the Ars Technica article nicely:
https://www.macstories.net/stories/macos-27-the-macstories-r...
Probably not what you had in mind though...
Monterey is a body of water tho: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monterey_Bay
So is Sonoma if you're talking about the Creek instead of the Valley surrounding the creek: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonoma_Creek https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napa_Sonoma_Marsh
Still no way to move an application window from one space to another without a mouse. If you have a disability, then I guess you cannot really use spaces, which is poor design. But it's not like Apple cares. Snow Leopard had this ability back in 2010. Why it was removed is beyond me.
I am die hard Apple fanboy, but I feel ashamed for having hope in '27.
I'm happy to have gotten the max SSD when I got this thing, and I'm already juggling external drives (mostly for large media projects). I guess business as usual.