The update is cool but the update process was not.
-Update available, wanna install?
Sure
-OK don't mind me I'm gonna need a while
OK
-HA HA I LIED I"M READY TO TERMINATE EVERYTHING BYEEEE
WTF
5 reboots with just an Apple icon and a progress bar
The progress bar also moves backwards sometimes
I guess it's a metaphor for life, which is how long this seems to be taking
-OK hello I am back but I need 10 minutes of alone time
-Here is some unfamiliar wallpaper but you can log in I guess
-Oh it's you again, do you want to share analytics with us
-OK here is your familiar desktop, I am not telling you what has changed
Um preferences
-Oh hai I'm called Settings now and I reorganized everything
Yikes but OK this is sorta well laid out I guess
-Hello I am Stage Manager, I put a desktop on your desktop so you can work while you work
Sorta neat, can I configure some things differently though
-No
Funnily enough I had just started reading the Ars Technica review when the upgrade took place so that helped with navigating the changes but it was an oddly jarring transition. I get that Apple doesn't like burdening users with too much technical information (as in 'any') but given how significantly the Settings app has changed I'm surprised there was no Release notes or feature tour of any kind.
I am ethically obliged to supplement my original summary
[hours later]
-Ha ha just kidding of course there's a feature tour do you want to see it now
Hmm OK
-Have you ever wished I was a phone? (8 slides)
Really? Let's have a talk about Preferences
-They are Settings
OK, let's have a talk about Settings
-No
Everyone still has a phone, and it doesn't force me to buy an Apple phone, it just means the iPad is worth less to me. I'm left stuffing around with Skype or some other horrible voip system because Apple don't like the look of a phone icon on an iPad -- even if you're using AirPods!
> Um preferences
-Oh hai I'm called Settings now and I reorganized everything
Oh good. I find it by typing "settings" 100% of the time because I can never remember what it's called ("System Preferences", evidently) but that works less-well than it might since that's not the name—it doesn't fully match until I've typed the whole word.
I gave up a while ago trying to remember in which preference pane each setting was. There are just too many buttons that are moved every other version. I cannot live without Spotlight in system preferences.
I gave up when a bunch of easily-accessible settings for mouses/mousepads/keyboards went to the "Accessibility" pane. It was annoying to see the Accessibility pane become a catch-all pane for power-user features...
I was a college student the time and decided to spend hundreds of dollars on the SSD upgrade (going from 500gb HDD to 128gb SSD) for my Macbook Pro. Best decision ever. It was amazing to see the machine booting completely to the desktop in under 10 seconds, not even my M1 MAX MPB boots that quickly.
In recent years I've been using the search bar a lot anyway, since the modal nature of the old System Preferences app wasn't great for quickly checking through several settings screens. And I often forget where some settings are — the taxonomy is not always so clear.
The new Settings app seems like an improvement to me. The vertical list of settings categories is easier to quickly scan, and it remains visible all the time. That alone is a great improvement, and makes it quite a bit easier to navigate the (huge) list of available settings.
>The new Settings app seems like an improvement to me.
While using Gnome's style for the settings application is a huge improvement, the implementation is laggy and doesn't scroll smoothly. And it takes a while for each Stack item to load and render when it's selected. x86_64 here.
Yeah, the items could load more snappily. On my M1 there's a delay (0.2 – 0.5 seconds?) between clicking an item and it showing up — enough to make it feel annoyingly laggy.
I haven't used Gnome in decades. To me it looks just like the iPad Settings app, or iPhone's in horizontal mode.
That doesn't imply it should be slow; that should imply it should be fast.
At least, given that macOS is using a copy-on-write filesystem such that you can share blocks between multiple volumes/snapshots — which it is; and that the OS base-image is a sealed "everyone has the same cryptographic checksum" volume — which it is; and that Apple are using a binary-diff-based "create aside" OS-image update process, like ChromiumOS/CoreOS — which they are. They should only have to write out disk pages for the changes, and then just link the existing pages in to form the rest of the extents. Like a `btrfs receive`.
But for some reason, despite all that fancy tech, it's still slow; and the install process still requires rebooting into a separate Recovery OS to do parts of the installation. Which, given the "create aside" part especially, is just ridiculous. You should be able to just run the installer in the background as you're using your device, and eventually be told "when you reboot, it'll be into the new OS."
If we assume the drive can write 500MB/s (conservative), and an OS install takes up 50GB of space (conservative), it should take less than 2 minutes to write the partition. Where does the other 58 minutes go?
I wondered the same about Linux installers. I'm installing some kind of debian minimal which will take 300 MB on disk. It should be installed in a fraction of the second. Instead it takes minutes. All installer should do is: dd pre-assembled Ext3 filesystem from ISO to disk; extend filesystem to the desired size; write some configs like fstab. It could be really fast.
My guess is that nobody really took the time to optimize it. Installation is only one-time procedure and even it if takes a hour, who cares.
Yeah, I know, my point is that ordinary installer should do the same with ordinary installer UI rather than trying to install every deb package over and over again, running its pre/post scripts, etc. What's the point? It should be deterministic anyway.
I jumped on the upgrade bandwagon quickly this morning and the entire upgrade took about 15 minutes on my M1 MBP 13".
Presumably, you're experiencing the same download issues my work MBP is experiencing. It's been downloading for over an hour and is just barely past 50%. My Internet bandwidth is 10G real-world and un-busy, so presumably Apple's CDN is getting hit good.
At much of it, the OS and even applications actually seem to be running. I remember a macOS update with the full-screen progress bar, where a few minutes in, a browser tab suddenly started playing music, with no way to turn it off...
This isn't really a viable excuse. Silverblue is also immutable and updates are applied in under 10 seconds prior to reboot (which is never affected by updates).
Coming from Windows and Linux, macOS had been a very unpleasant experience for me. It's full of papercuts.
> Coming from Windows and Linux, macOS had been a very unpleasant experience for me. It's full of papercuts.
The same could be said to the opposite transition, from macOS to Linux and/or Windows. All of these OSs are mature and old enough to have thousands of papercuts different from the thousands of papercuts of the other OSs, the impression is mostly based on what you are used to.
I used to be staunchly anti-Apple/Mac up to 2010-ish, nowadays I simply can't work and feel productive with a Windows machine. Linux can be a bit more pleasant until I get to the edges of the Linux-on-desktop UX and the experience crumbles.
Windows is definitely the most unpleasant experience I've ever had on desktop OSs, and I was a user all the way from Win3.11 to Windows 7 (latest iterations only on a gaming computer though).
Windows' updates got much less granular since Windows 10. It used to be that updates were delivered in individual packages that can be installed and uninstalled independently (within reason).
Nowadays more and more updates come in a "rollup" package which is a bundle of many updates and it's take it or leave it. Even worse, some of the bigger feature updates are actually full OS reinstalls under the hood.
My previous experience with Windows (~3 years ago) was that every single update took ~2 hours to complete, and they were asking to update weekly.
I used to game weekly with my friends, and because of the above problem, I would have to turn on my computer the night before and start the update so I would be able to reliably play a game the following day - otherwise, there was an extremely good chance that they would start gaming at 8pm and I wouldn't be able to join until roughly 10pm due to the Windows updates.
At the time, this was Windows 10. I eventually just switch to an old Xbox (ironically, still Microsoft), which was far more reliable (although XBox updates take forever too), because we could cross-play Apex Legends. But that is an 8 year old XBox One and it finally has crapped out on me.
I'm currently finishing up getting parts for a new PC build, which will have Windows 11, and I really dread it. I wish Apex was for Linux because I just want to have a Linux-based gaming environment.
--
Anyway - all this to say... macOS major updates might be slow, but they happen so infrequently, that it's not nearly a big deal. Minor security patches are almost never that slow for me, especially compared to Windows.
> My previous experience with Windows (~3 years ago) was that every single update took ~2 hours to complete, and they were asking to update weekly.
Unless you manually seek preview updates, Windows gets updates once per month, on Patch Tuesday (a twenty-year tradition now).
Two hours for "every single update" sounds implausible for Windows 10 because Microsoft has implemented changes to minimize the "offline phase" of the updates to mere minutes - even on HDDs.
Which brings to my last point. If updates were taking long, then your OS was most certainly installed on a HDD. Everyone knows HDDs are slow as hell.
Seriously, what was the point of replying with complaints about Windows on slow hardware and comparing it to mac OS on fast hardware? It almost feels dishonest.
And for the record, Ventura is installing on the Mac as I type this on my Windows machine. The 22H2 update for Windows 11 had an offline phase of under 10 minutes and I have a non-NMVe SSD here. The Mac has already been down for about 15 and it's not even done yet.
If you don’t use windows for your daily driver, then you absolutely get into this situation. Even on NVMe, rarely is a windows 10 update (still running it here) less than an hour. Then there’s connection speed. Even on a gig line you won’t get gig speeds. And again, if you’re not on it everyday then you may have to update multiple drivers and other windows updates.
> Unless you manually seek preview updates, Windows gets updates once per month, on Patch Tuesday (a twenty-year tradition now).
That's weird, there have been multiple occasions when my gaming desktop (Win10 Pro) installed updates for multiple consecutive shutdowns and I definitely haven't opted into any additional update channels. I don't use it all that often, so those were spaced out over two weeks maybe, but definitely less than a month. They tend to take quite a while for me, too, I'd say 20-ish minutes at the least? Typical minor macOS updates take less time for me (2020 Intel 13" MBP; desktop does have a NVMe SSD and is a bit older than the Macbook). At least with Windows Pro you can postpone them like on macOS, I've used Home for a bit and forced reboots mid-game are just crazy frustrating. No idea about Windows 11, my desktop apparently can't run it, which is weird, too; I thought backward compatibility was a big thing with Windows. Same with a few Windows XP era games, apparently I have to buy remastered versions, can't get the originals to run anymore.
That's kind of a theme with me and Windows; I start out expecting things to be as good or better as on macOS (their user base is massive, surely they'll polish everything really nicely), but then reality is kinda underwhelming and frustrating. If I hibernate my PC, it invariably turns itself back on at 2 AM and won't go back to sleep even if configured to. It won't do WOL no matter what I try, scanning via a HP all-in-one device requires a HP cloud account, funnels me into an ink subscription, upload scans to their cloud and then crashes mid-scan (on macOS, that "just works" via the built-in Printers and Scanners app), the bundled Office app doesn't actually have the standalone apps (need to download the "real" Office installer for those, which they tell you nowhere at all; why don't they just bundle them like the iWork apps?), ... so at this point I've simply accepted that Windows is a bit like Linux in that as a non-expert user you have to live with a couple of weird and broken things at all times, but you can save money on hardware and can get setups Apple doesn't sell (like a comparatively inexpensive gaming desktop, though my desktop wasn't exactly cheap either). If I could have modded PC games on a more console-like platform, I'd probably move my gaming there.
This whole "tribalism" nonsense over companies is just insane. If you like windows, great. If you like MacOS, great.
I don't get why people feel a personal attachment to things like which OS they use. What really confuses me is when they become unpaid advocates for their company of choice?
Personally, I've never been a big fan of Microsoft and used Ubuntu/Mint for many years. Recently i moved to MacOS.
None of this has caused me to develop some sort of personal attachment with what OS I use. I'm not going to spend my time doing as the OP did - write a dishonest review to flog my OS of choice.
PS.
I do have a windows laptop which i haven't used in months. I used it last week and it did take a while to upgrade as there were many missing updates. I also upgraded my pc from Monterey to Ventura. Both took around the same time so i really dont get the OP's point?
This is not tribalism. I’m detailing a history of why I stopped using Windows, because the updates were frustratingly annoying.
If it wasn’t every week, it certainly felt like it - perhaps it was every other week. But it’s not dishonest to claim that Windows updates took up far more time than macOS updates. If I update my Mac twice a year, but Windows has to update bi-weekly (or monthly, as the person responded to me claimed is the only possible way), that is still several hours more time dedicated to Windows updates overall.
Additionally I can go far longer without updating my Mac - I’m not sure if there was a setting for this on Windows, but their updates seemed more-or-less forced.
—-
It’s interesting you believe someone to have had a negative experience with Windows to be a dishonest experience.
Sure it is.. this whole "i'm an apple user and you are a windows user" is tribalism.
Try spending some time on any discussion boards and read the blatant misinformation floating around.
> It’s interesting you believe someone to have had a negative experience with Windows to be a dishonest experience.
I stopped using windows personally around the Windows NT days, mostly because the negative experiences so i absolutely can believe the negative experiences.
Did you have an SSD on your PC ~3 years ago? I never found it to be that bad or for it to take that long!
I kicked off the Ventura update today on the M1 Pro, went out to get lunch, it had finished by the time I got back.
I've been on the 'insider preview' track on Windows 10 and 11 for around 18 months. You get big updates maybe 2-4 times per month and they do take around 20 minutes to install.
Stick on the regular updates track, make sure you get an SSD, and your new Windows 11 experience will be fine just fine :) Check out WSL too, it is pretty good. I'm split on Linux vs Windows vs MacOS for development, it's all a game of tradeoffs. The trick is to have a few computers!
Hi guys, about MacOsVentura and ApexLegends: Is it native playable with Metal3? No Apex Legends for Windows only
Updating with Ventura now; I look to play Apex on Macbook Pro16 since 12months been lose with Geforce (cloud); is bootcamp useable now with Apple chip?
Let me know if you can provide key for this ; seson 15 coming soon and havent played the 14 only got BP, pseudo Jiemx lvl 500+(2400 reset)
Update MacOsV 30mins up and running
also what you think of Apex mod scripts legits; is it of use?
anyone up to scripts for stocks markets or what thread for it (on trading view?
I'll be honest, I couldn't parse most of what you said, but I can at least confirm that there is no Bootcamp on Apple silicon, Apple didn't port it. So if you depend on Bootcamp for gaming, I fear you're out of luck on recent Macbooks.
Windows does frequent incremental updates and makes them pretty painless, but has a bad habit of just letting the installation files pile up and fill your storage. If you or your PC supplier have the habit of having a small-medium boot disk (or partition) for just your OS and applications this can yield unwelcome surprises.
Windows updates when you don't want it to and does that often. Tons of horror stories out there. macOS updates much less frequently and never "surprises" you (at least it hasn't done to me)
There doesn't seem to be a good reason for the slowness, but a reasonably good technical write-up on the update mechanism is available at [0]. The time spent rebooting does seem excessive, especially when using image-based updates.
This is only about 5-10 minutes on modern hardware. Historically a lot of developers saw it as slow because it moved the contents of /usr/local in a naive loop which meant that systems using something like Homebrew spent 90% of the total time moving a million files one by one.
Wait until you buy a NOS Windows PC for the first time. I had a T495 take nearly two hours to run all updates in. About 20 minutes of that was it fannying around working out what to do.
My MBP took 10 mins to update earlier. That's fine.
Last time I checked the logs after an update, what I understood had happened was that the installer was installing the new files one by one, and logging each one of them. Which is a lot of files. I've no idea if this is still done this way, but I suspect it's part of the reason for the slowness.
Strange. I started the update, had breakfast and after saying no to analytics could get back to work with everything looking basically the same. Yes, there are a boatload of new things. No, they don't pop up in your face and force you to change how you work.
I did the upgrade without issues but when it rebooted the final time it signed me on and automatically started everything I had running before and I didn't even realize it had completed until I checked the OS version in the about. Probably the least noticeable difference in OS upgrades in a while.
People like to complain, don't they? I let it upgrade while having dinner. When I came back I had forgot about the upgrade and was surprised that my background changed!
You forgot the part where macOS "restores all the windows", which it never gets right, so you get pop-ups from Notes, Maps, Music, etc. telling you at the same time "Here's what's new".
Plus if any audio was playing, it attempts to resume it during the final restart even though you can't mute it for several minutes since it is finally into the user login.
So that’s why parallels kept throwing up the password screen while updating the last beta. I guess the VM can’t autologin and I was about to give up thinking it was permanently stuck in reboot
Countless person-years of engineering effort, and Spotlight is still mostly useless.
All I want is to hit Command-F to quickly search the filenames in the current folder (not start a sluggish scan of my entire hard disk). There used to be workarounds for this, but then they removed "Find by Name..." from Finder just to make our lives harder. Does anyone know a workable alternative?
I'm interested in what you mean by "setup script" - I assume you have a script of some sort you run when / if you re-install the OS? I'd love to hear more about this!
I have a simple shell script that does a bunch of setup for me to automate things.
It grabs my dot files and restores them, installs Homebrew and a bunch of programs, restores their plists (I have backup script that backs up all their plists) and writes a bunch of macOS settings via the `defaults write` command.
I can install/wipe macOS, follow the initial setting screens then when on the desktop I just connect to my NAS, copy over one script and run it in the Terminal to get my machine setup how I like it. It isn't perfect but it does about 97% of the work for me with the added bonus that it is consistent/reproducible for the most part so avoids me forgetting to change a setting some place.
I don't go crazy with it as I don't wipe my machine often enough to justify going all out with a fully automated system. Honestly it is less to save time and more to maintain consistency and have a 'documented as code' record of my environment setup (not quite infrastructure as code levels :)
# Trackpad: enable tap to click for this user and for the login screen
# Trackpad: map bottom right corner to right-click
# Disable “natural” (Lion-style) scrolling
I have a lifetime/powerpack Alfred license, and i don't use it much, if at all. I have it installed, but in my experience Spotlight has gotten a lot better in recent years, at least to the point where i just use that.
My only excuse for using Alfred is Dash (https://kapeli.com/dash), which integrates with Alfred, but these days so does just about every editor i use (including Vim, Emacs and Sublime Text), so i very rarely find myself using Alfred for it anymore.
BTT does work with the TouchBar, but the "Touch" in the name comes from "touchpad" since it originally was used to add various macros/gestures to the touchpad and mouse. TouchBar support was added later.
Most new Macs come with full-size function keys, including a massive escape key the same size as the tab key. (At least on the en-US layout; can't speak to others.)
Interesting. What other gestures do you use?
I've tried to setup BTT to emulate cmd+tab with swipe right or left but it wasn't a smooth experience so I've made Touch-Tab https://github.com/ris58h/Touch-Tab
++2 for Alfred. AND it has plugins so you can search your Chrome or Brave tabs with Alfred as well. I just hit CMD + Shift + T and it'll search all my open tabs without the browser being in focus. I had to pay but it wasn't much. Use it everyday! https://github.com/epilande/alfred-browser-tabs
wow - how is this not the default? It's always the behavior that I expect to happen, and I'm pretty much always surprised and disappointed when it does a global search instead.
This is just speculation, but based on a conversation with my partner, there are two types of computer users. The first group makes use of hierarchical storage, consistent naming conventions, and other organizational tricks to give them a rough idea of where any file might be. The second group has never heard the term "file systems" and just stores everything with an arbitrary name in whatever location the originating application uses by default.
The first group would prefer to search the given directory, because the supplied context (of which folder to start the search in) drastically improves/speeds search results. The second group prefers to search the entire disk, because supplying that additional context is impossible - any file might appear anywhere.
The set intersection between the first group and "people who change their default settings" is much higher than it is with the second group. Consequently, the whole disk search is enabled by default.
Additionally, given the addition of an "All My Files" view in Finder (a feature which the first group would probably find baffling), Apple may also believe that the latter group outnumbers the former.
Very much an intentional goal of the OS when it came out, the hope being that the concepts of files and folders might never be needed. A bold move to get rid of a mental overhead for using a computer that was never natural or intuitive to non-tech users. They eventually had to back off a bit, but it’s an amazing accomplishment that most users can still use these devices as if files weren’t a thing.
Yeah this is true, friends that are professors say they now have to have a basic class early in the semester that explains folders, files, and other basics to students.
Funny, I'm in the first group but I'd much rather have it search everything by default: because I organize my files, if I'm searching for one that means that I don't know where it is, so I need to look everywhere.
To me this is definitely it. Using non-technical people's computers is eye-opening. Thousands of files scattered around on the Desktop, Documents, or wherever they just happened to go. Finding something in a specific directory would be a completely foreign concept.
Well, count me in the third group: I make use of hierarchical storage, consistent naming conventions, and other organizational tricks to give me a rough idea of where any file might be. I also fail miserably at it (apart from dev/programming stuff, which all is in `~/dev/<project name>`) and rely heavily on search to find anything again.
As search is fast enough nowadays with indexing, I'd rather have it search the whole disk every time than the directory I'm in just to realize I've put it someplace else.
Windows also defaults to full text file searches instead of filenames, which is super annoying when you have thousands upon thousands of documents. It's often faster to open a terminal window, type 'dir search string and open the file from the terminal.
Short answer
Large number of users don’t use folders to organize their files. They just depend on searching everywhere to find files that may have dropped in any random location. Those people are less likely to find the setting that makes current folder the default search target.
That searches the _contents_ of the files in the current folder. I just want to search the names (the way Cmd-F works in, you know, every other application: it searches what you see in the window).
No they didn't. Find by Name… still exists. It's ⌃⇧⌘F (ctrl-shift-cmd-F). You might have missed it because it's a dynamic menu item (Find turns into Find by Name… once you press ⌃⇧).
Tip: Use the Help menu to search menu items. I just pressed ⌘? and typed "Find" and Find by Name… popped up.
Ctrl-Shift-Cmd-F? Are you forking kidding me? I know sometimes you can press Option to show secret menu items (which I bet <10% of Mac users know) but Ctrl and Shift too? So now you have to press 7 different combinations of modifier keys just to discover what menu commands are available. Just wow.
Thank you for showing me that menu command! That'll be a lifesaver going forward. Usability achieved despite Apple design, not because of it.
The "Help" menu item is a major lifesaver and especially in complex apps (that is, those which actually take advantage of macOS' native menus, which sadly isn't a given nowadays).
For example Photoshop (and its colleagues) is darn near impossible for me to use on Windows — and at least 50% of the reason is absence of the "Help" menu search feature.
Fyi, it does not work. I get this error when opening Finda on macOS Ventura 13.0 (22A380):
"This version of Finda (629.0.0+df7956) is not compatible with your operating system version (22.1.0). Press Enter to download the latest version or Command+ to quit."
EDIT: e-mailed the Developer, beta release coming tomorrow...
I continue to not understand this -- The Everything app was capable of instant search on Windows in like 2008, and yet on modern devices, with SSDs, far more RAM, and faster CPUs, I have to wait a good 2-3s for results to appear.
How did one dev managed to achieve what, apparently, no corporate entity ever has?
sometimes I think MSFT should buy Everything and replace Windows search with it. There are some plugins that use it for other file managers.
But then again, they will almost certainly screw it up, given that Windows Search still can't search my start menu reliably without pauses. And their history with acquisitions and integrating tech isn't very good.
Things like that infuriate me and make me want to throw my laptop out of the window. There's no excuse for the start menu search not being instantaneous, but Windows isn't the only offender. Searching for an app on Android is also slow.
With Windows, it is death by a thousand paper cuts. With Linux, you might get your arm chopped off while getting every device (or sleep) to work flawlessly, but once it works, it stays working. And small things like search work like you expect them to.
I actually solved that by using the native macOS fsevents API which can watch the whole filesystem for changes, and I can instantly update the SQLite db I use for the index through that.
The problem is actually enumerating and searching the whole database, that's the slow part. Right now I have over 5 million rows in it and passing the SELECT results to fzf is the slowest part, taking a few seconds at least on an M1 Max.
I'm not sure how Everything presented the results so fast, with metadata and everything.
The fsevents part is interesting, didn't know that!
To your point regarding the slowness - in that case it's not really acting as an index though, is it, if you're scanning the whole list and passing it to fzf?
A proper fuzzy text search index (I think elastic and similar engines have these built-in) should yield orders of magnitude better performance.
Yes, you're right. I did try Meilisearch for this but I wanted close-to-instant Smith-Waterman fuzzy searching which is why I settled on FZF.
In the end I might have to reimplement that in Swift with an always cached index and native Spotlight like search bar to really make this as easy to use as I want.
It's not practical to reach for the browser or Terminal to do this search.
One trick is to know that spotlight indexes content and metadata separately, and most search interfaces default to content. Typing in "README.md" in system spotlight will look for documents that contain a reference to that name, while "name:README.MD" will look for ones marked as _having_ that name.
The search interface in finder has a builder for predicates (start a search then hit the plus on the right side of the search bar). There you can start to see some of the friendly prefixes for filesystem items such as extension:, kind:, date:, tag:.
You can also see the mass of file specific metadata - like width, audio bit rate, city, genre.
I have not, however, found a handy way to translate between English description, friendly prefix, and the internal query names like kMDItemContentType.
Fun aside - some of these used to work in the Mac app store - for instance, you could search for listed applications which could open exotic document types.
The "uselessness" IMHO is mostly in that it exposes the most simplistic interface possible, and people just don't know where to go from there (other than terminal users going `man mdfind` I suppose). That gap is only widened by how different it is from other filesystem-based mechanisms for power users, which have more established commonalities like regex and filesystem globbing.
Raycast is great. imo better than Alfred. Love the menu-search functionality.
But I still use both, because Raycast doesn't support "folder search". I use folders in general because they don't change, and I usually know what I'm looking for. It (should be)/is also faster than searching all files.
When I'm looking for a file or it's contents, I'll fall back to spotlight
It should be embarrassing how much faster Alfred's search is. Using Alfred to just search feels like using a Ferrari to pick up groceries, but it really is just better – and has been for as long as I can remember.
Like in a Finder window? I just start typing a filename and it jumps to the letters I typed. In the column view, you can use tab and shift-tab to switch between columns, allowing quick navigation into a directory tree. I may be misunderstanding you?
Having grown tired of the design of Alfread and not wanting to commit to VC-backed Raycast, this is a nice discovery! Edit: A plugin system is on the TODO and that'd be the clincher.
I still use it as fast calculator. And sometimes it can convert units ... sometimes. That's it. I don't think it has EVERY found the file I'm looking for, but Windows search ain't much better. As someone who develops on all three OSes daily, nothing beats `find | grep` or `find | xargs grep`.
Spotlight is great for those lone cold weather nights: whenever I feel down, it will start indexing and spin up all the fans and make a lot of heat and noise, making me feel warm and loved
Personally I have Spotlight indexing completely disabled, except to index items in `/Applications` so I can use it as a quick-launcher. This was not easy to configure, and I'll probably have to do it again next time I update the OS. But it did seem to help with performance - Spotlight was often the cause of unpredictably high CPU usage spikes.
Just start typing the name. Not in the search field of Finder. You'll get focus on a file or folder that starts with whatever symbols you just typed. Very convenient and fast. Having "sort by name" by default in every folder helps a lot too.
Mentioned elsewhere, Everything search by voidtools: https://www.voidtools.com. It does funky things with monitoring some component of the NTFS filesystem to maintain a up-to-date index of every filename on your computer, and makes them searchable literally as fast as you can type.
There seems to be two kind of searching people do. Some people want a search tool that searches in documents. Some people want a search tool that searches filenames.
Everything search is exclusively the second. I think I can count on one hand the number of times I've wanted to search inside documents in the last 10+ years (and for those cases, grep has worked fine, even on windows!).
For some reason, searching inside documents seems to be the default for both windows and os x search, and it's super annoying.
> I think I can count on one hand the number of times I've wanted to search inside documents in the last 10+ years
If you want to search documents you have created, I can imagine that you may not use the feature much. But e.g. for research papers, the downloaded copy rarely reflects the contents/authors, so it is really handy to be able to search the contents.
> For some reason, searching inside documents seems to be the default for both windows and os x search, and it's super annoying.
Weird. For me windows don't seem to search inside documents, or at least not in all documents.
A Spotlight search never starts a scan of your disk. The disk is always fully indexed and returns results out of the index very fast. The only exception is typically when the system is updated (or some other big event) and it reindexes everything.
That being said, as others have pointed out, there is a setting to make a Finder window search apply only to the directory in the current window.
Basic file search is broken. Still nothing like VoidTools Everything-like SMB share indexing either. Maybe Spacedrive will have these things when released? *crosses fingers
Finder and File organization is the worst part of Mac experience, it's terrible - I still can't get used to it after 3 years.
Windows Explorer is so much better.
Aswell as not searching the current folder, I find it so infuriating that Save-As does not default to the Current folder, just picks a random one!!
My friend has some issues with using the `scp` command on Ventura to copy files to a Synology NAS.
It turns out the `scp` has been updated to use sftp protocol since OpenSSH 8.9 and Synology seems to use a different port for sftp, causing some hard to understand errors.
Wow, clamshell to external monitor support is vastly improved. I couldn't believe it when it happened the first time.
I have a MBA M2 going USB-C -> HDMI on a 4k Dell monitor. You can open and close the laptop and it switches the external from secondary to primary and back almost instantaneously.
I'd describe this as a major improvement over every prior MacOS.
My M1 Macbook Pro did this already when I bought it last year, but it stopped working on a minor OS update. I wonder if this update will make it work again.
I updated and it does work again! Although it didn't at first when I plugged in my monitor. After about a minute the screen flickered off and on and then after that it supports the instant switch again... Strange
It supported clamshell and open, and has for as long as I remember.
But the toggle between the modes had been this slow experience that seemed similar in delay to switching resolutions.
Now it is this blip—-this is your main display, and you can toggle it if you rapidly open and close it, which I can’t really recommend except to cement in your mind that this is the new normal.
I own M1 MBP16. While closed laptop technically works... One nasty bug makes it unusable. I can't reliably switch keyboard layouts using globe button. This bug is absolutely weird and ridiculous and I have no idea how it's even possible. When laptop is opened, I press globe button and my keyboard layout is switched. Actually it does not work 100% reliably, but it's OK. With laptop closed it works like 20% of time.
Have no idea about ventura, will not update before first patch, I guess.
I wonder if it's also possible to just leave the Macbook "opened", but disable only the Macbooks display and not the external display (so you'd get the same result as clamshell)...?
I’m usually excited about macOS releases but this one is an underwhelming update and don’t see any reason to update any time soon.
Stage manager seems like a half measure to introduce better window management in macOS and it doesn’t help that it doesn’t support a keyboard only workflow, from what I can tell from the demos.
Coming from i3wm, I found Yabai to be an excellent keyboard-first window manager. I do wish something like Yabai was built into macOS.
I've been testing Stage Manager since the first developer beta of Ventura and it did feel awkward, as it had no keyboard control, and I feel slower when pointing and clicking to switch apps.
But after adding support for it in my rcmd app (https://lowtechguys.com/rcmd), and tuning yabai's grid a bit, I found it quite useful for my workflow.
Here's a video on how I use Stage Manager with the keyboard shortcuts in rcmd, if you'd like to see if the same workflow would be useful for you: https://youtu.be/dlwjSf7aIy8
I'm also giving out some promo codes for rcmd to give people a chance to try this functionality and see if they like it:
Not to diminish the work put into making this workflow easier to use, but you can completely replicate this workflow (and then some) with out of the box macOS tooling by creating an "Open <xyz.app>" script in Shortcuts, moving them into the Quick Actions folder and then jumping to System Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts > Services and then assigning key combinations to launch Shortcuts.app Quick Actions.
For sure you can. I had this workflow with manually added keybindings through many methods over the years: skhd, Hammerspoon, BetterTouchTool etc.
I just found that the functionality is useful enough to warrant an app that can dynamically assign these hotkeys based on the apps I use.
For example I change browsers often to test new additions. And because I have rcmd-B set to focus/launch/hide my current browser app, I can keep my muscle memory even after switching from Safari to Firefox. In rcmd I just press rcmd-ralt-B to reassign that hotkey, in previous workflows this involved editing a specific file, or opening a preferences window and finding the right setting to change.
The experimental window switching/opening using Right Option is also something very useful and really hard to replicate using default macOS tools.
Mac App Store app, click your user name in the lower left corner. Now the upper right corner has a link button "Redeem Gift Card". Click that, enter the code.
Why can’t we have no features AND unstability? If the rumor spreads that Apple doesn’t succeed to fine enough OS-level programmers, it’s precisely because all of usability + stability + innovation are going down at the same time. Gone are the days where you’d expect Apple to launch a new APFS, encryption, or a general SSO solution for employees across all Apple devices.
Which is sorely needed.
Because honestly I’m afraid of paying $12 to $24 per device per employee and per month for an SSO+MDM solution that would make me depend on a dodgy Windows-style UI (Jamf) or worse, all my employees’ ability to login would depend on Okta.
> it’s precisely because all of usability + stability + innovation are going down at the same time
What are you basing that claim on? The only part recognizable from experience for me is the innovation claim and even that is dubious since the entire industry is plateauing as things mature.
Historically, the uninspiring and underwhelming major releases of OS X and macOS have ended up being the ones that users ended up having the most positive feelings about over the long term. They have tended to focus on faster performance, refining past features, and security improvements without the simultaneous introduction of fresh annoyances.
However, since you aren't really missing anything in terms of new features, it also doesn't hurt to wait for a couple point releases to let other people find remaining bugs first.
I’ve been on the betas all summer; Continuity Camera is probably the most Apple-like feature in Ventura. It seems almost magical in how it “just works”.
I don't understand why it is not avaliable for iPad. Usually, I am using my macbook lid closed and I have an iPad in my desk. It would be very good to use its camera and mics for video calls.
Actually, can't recall any recent release of Mac OS that excited me. It's mostly updates to apps I don't use or don't plan to use plus minor tweaks and window dressing. I usually just wait a few months until they fix all the "oops we bricked your hardware bugs" or "oops, this stuff is now broken" bugs.
Safari, Mail, Messages, Photos, I don't use any of it. So couldn't care less about that. This is not an OS update but a list of app updates. Other than that it's mostly window dressing. Some tweaks to settings and a new stage manager thing to replace the launcher thing that I also don't use.
What intrigues me is the ios webcam support and the fact that they use mac book pros without a notch in the mockups of that. Yay to no notch. But does that mean they are removing the web cam in future macs? Kind of relevant because I have an Android phone and no interest in switching to IOS. And I do use the webcam. If not, what's the point of this? Maybe they should just put better cameras in their screens and laptops? Also, what holds up the phone here? This looks very gimmicky to me. Anyway, absolutely nobody I know uses Facetime (I live in Europe, just not a thing here; same with iMessage) and I bet it doesn't work outside of that. I use macs at work, so things like Zoom, MS Live, Meets, Webex, etc. are where I use a webcam.
So, short, stage manager thingy, spotlight tweaks, some deckchair rearranging in the settings and metal 3.
Guys, which freaking keyboard-only window management yall looking for so hard? My daily workflow is jumping between 10 apps on different spaces, some of them are full-screen, some are just piled on one desktop, and the CMD+Tab just works perfectly all the time, you just press the CMD+Tab, select the app you need, jump to it, no focus lost, only distraction is the damned sliding animation (which
everyone wants to turn off for 10 years). What other damn bicycle you need to jump between apps lol
I agree with you but take it further, what's the point of different spaces? Just put all apps to full screen size (not "fullscreen") on the first screen and alt tab instantly
I like some of my apps full-screen, like nvim in the iterm should be full-screen. The top bar, tab bar and controls is not something i wanna see all the time there, as i'm using only keyboard in my workflow. I'm mostly into zen black screen with 100 columns of text in the center when it comes to editing documents, and nvim + iterm can provide such flawless black zen screen. Also games, books, graphic apps, all look better taking 100% of the height not 80%, as the 20% on top is usually mouse controls for those who don't remember any hotkeys
It helps if your problem is only the visuals, but sadly reduce motion keeps all the delays the same. There's a 1.5 second delay when switching spaces with the touchpad gesture (on 120Hz screens; the animation takes longer the higher FPS it's running at), and that animation turns into a 1.5 second fade animation with reduce motion. The new space doesn't gain focus any faster.
Yeah, it used to be possible, but hasn't been for a long time. There are some old stackoverflow posts with `defaults write` commands in them, but they don't work anymore.
I used to be a fairly heavy spaces user with 60Hz macbooks; the delay was too high, but just low enough to not drive me completely insane. But after I got one of the new 120Hz ones, I've almost entirely stopped using spaces, since I just can't stand the extremely long wait where my keyboard inputs still go to the application I'm coming from.
Wouldn't it be awesome if Apple added window-snapping, and i3wm-like keyboard support? They'd leapfrog every other OS in an area where they've been behind for a while, and gain tons of praise from power users. There's so much low-hanging power-user-fruits that Apple's bizzarely not picking, like uBlock Origin support in Safari, better window management, and a Homebrew-like package manager.
Yeah, that's what I use. There's just no good reason not to Sherlock it; if not for the fact that every single Mac power user would expect Apple to bundle a crippled, simplified version, to "dumb it down for the masses". Sigh.
Honestly, the somewhat limited experience works for me as every time I touch linux I get distracted by (endlessly) tweaking it. That's more of a problem with me I suppose!
The feature that made me jump into beta is that Shortcuts now appear in the share sheet so it’s the same experience like iOS. Much easier to create/test shortcuts on the mac
Cmd-Tab -> switch apps, in most recently used order, keep Cmd held down and repeatedly tap Tab to cycle though the switcher bar
Cmd-` -> switch windows of current app
Cmd-H -> hide current app
Cmd-Opt-H -> hide other apps
For IT/Security folks looking for a good rundown of what's new we put this together, talks about Passkeys, RSR, Gatekeeper improvements, and Lockdown mode.
They’ve been listing it as a Ventura upgrade, and all the marketing (more or less) points to this as a Ventura-and-later feature, but it’s on Big Sur and Monterey too.
I ended up skipping Monterey on my 2013 Mac Pro entirely because it wouldn't let me install it because my original SSD broke and I replaced it with a non-Apple SSD. Starting with Monterey, that's not cool anymore because reasons.
Supposedly if you install the original SSD it will update some firmware somewhere and you'll be able to use the 3rd party SSD after that. But, like I said, mine's broken. You can supposedly also buy a used genuine SSD off eBay, but that seems a slightly expensive way to do a free OS upgrade.
Interesting story, Apple will not sell you a replacement or upgrade SSD for your 2013 Mac Pro - not for any price. They're only available for warranty replacements, and these computers haven't been under warranty for a long time.
Another thing I assume is still not fixed: The ability to permanently disable VRR for monitors that don't behave well with Apple's VRR implementation. That one's been annoying me with Monterey on my work laptop. Every time the computer sleeps, it turns VRR back on, and my screen blinks and flickers away until I manually turn it off again.
Apple's playbook is to use hardware support as a reason to drop software support to encourage (nudge?) customers to buy more hardware. Recently it has been dropping new macOS versions for non-metal GPUs and now (Monterey) not supporting SSDs without T2/Secure Enclave, and there are other examples before those. You get bit by this and decide if you want to stay on that train or get off. I was one-and-done with that ecosystem and my Late 2013 MacBook Pro.
Also you can still update that Mac Pro of yours to Monterey if you use the Open Core bootloader. It just requires going off the beaten path.
> Apple's playbook is to use hardware support as a reason to drop software support to encourage (nudge?) customers to buy more hardware.
I mean, Apple was making new versions of macOS that supported the 2013 Mac Pro until literally today. If that's their playbook, they're not doing great.
I think it's pretty wild my trashcan has had OS updates for almost 10 years. And researching these tools y'all are recommending it looks like it might actually still be possible to run Ventura on it.
This is actually probably my most favorite desktop computer I've ever owned. It's beautiful, and thanks to Intel's mediocre progress over the last decade, it's actually still pretty fast in all but the graphics department. Even still, it can play some modern games on low to medium settings just fine!
I just bought a new 14" M1 MacBook Pro because they stopped doing OS updates for my 2014 Intel MacBook Pro. Kinda sad, as the 2014 MacBook Pro is still, STILL - in 2022!, one of the best laptops I've had (including for running Windows via Bootcamp). Being it had no trade-in value, I'll keep using it as a test machine for Intel builds of my app.
But yeah, the new Apple Silicon laptops are incredible, and I'm happy with the new purchase. If I get 8 years out of this one too, I'll be more than happy. To me, that's a reasonable length of time to support OSes on old hardware.
> Interesting story, Apple will not sell you a replacement or upgrade SSD for your 2013 Mac Pro - not for any price. They're only available for warranty replacements, and these computers haven't been under warranty for a long time.
This is bullshit. Think about all the PR they have about eco-friendliness, yet they do this
Well to be fair the macOS PM's probably didn't give the marketing team anything to work with. Likely told them to just file radars/feedback if they had any questions.
And the legions of System Settings, Control Center, and Share Panel accessibility problems remain intact. I don't even understand the point of filing bugs during these betas anymore; macOS seems destined to be an unusable quagmire.
They have fixed date to release. They can't postpone release because of bugs they don't consider critical. Any mature and big project has thousands of known bugs which will never be fixed as it makes no financial sense. Sad but true.
Some bugs probably will be fixed in the upcoming patches. Some will not.
"We could increase the BOM cost putting a bigger camera in but the thickness of the laptop lid is so thin it would never be as good as the phone you most likely already own, so we made it easer for you to use that".
It's all a matter of perspective. :) I love the ability to use my phone as a webcam.
Try https://getlumina.com/ for a phone quality looking webcam with nice background blur and center-stage type auto-framing. Or, Logitech Brio w/ Xsplit Vcam https://www.xsplit.com/vcam (but Lumina does a better job auto-starting with videoconf tools).
Alternatively, get Reincubate's Camo to do Continuity with both iPhones and Android phones, and tons more features:
And yet they insist on putting a notch on all new MacBooks. Seems like adding a webcam-free option and expanding Continuity Camera support to Android would be a pretty easy win.
Hahaha. Don't hold your breath. It's not going to happen for a couple of reasons. The large variety of Android devices would make reliability and support quite challening, mostly at Apple's expense. Which brings us to the second point: Tim Cook says "buy your mom an iPhone".
It's nice to have the option of buying and using a single brand of smartphone to use as your laptop's webcam; but I'd prefer to use the laptop's webcam as the laptop's webcam, or use my phone as a webcam. It's all a matter of perspective. :)
That sounds like a US thing to me. I know many people who use Macs because they're good value for money, but also use $300 Androids because they're good enough and they're JUST PHONES after all. The cheapest plain iPhone 14 costs $1070 here (or $80 cheaper from my carrier, but that's with an expensive contract, so fuck that).
I got my first iPhone after over 8 years of daily-driving a MacBook, and it's the most expensive phone I've ever had.
This is actually the feature I upgraded for this morning. I always use a USB webcam on a stand in front of my 43" display. The laptop positioned usefully would block a huge part of my view. Now one less cable cluttering my desk and much higher quality (it's night and day honestly vs the Logitech I was using).
I'm surprised they released this. I try to participate in every macOS beta I can. This is by far the most unstable release I've experienced.
- Settings app has a lot of weird bugs and performance issues. After a restart I have to wait a few minutes before the Settings app actually functions. Overall the Settings app has felt like a step back in terms of UX and performance
- Lots of weird issues with Docker (might be on Docker's side though)
- My screen goes black after disconnecting my external monitor and requires a restart to fix the issue
Performance of the Settings app is disappointing. Most of its views are just a handful of basic controls with a fixed layout, and yet switching to not-yet-cached views has a noticeable lag.
I'm flabbergasted that Apple's latest UI struggles to beat web apps not just on design (RIP Aqua), but also performance.
Installed fine on my 2018 15" MacBook Pro. Still a good machine that I use as my main machine. Took about 20 minutes I guess, didn't time it but was ready quicker than I expected.
None of the changes are life changing but oh well, isn't often a desktop OS really surprises me with something new these days. Hopefully it is as stable as Monterey was for me which didn't have a single crash in the whole year.
Stage Manager is interesting but a very minimal effort by Apple. They really need to work on better overall window management in macOS. Snapping and tighter keyboard management for moving and resizing windows is badly needed. Either that or they need to relax their accessibility restrictions for apps so that we can get some good third-party options without needing to disable SIP.
Overall it seems to be mostly quality of life improvements, a few related to their primary services (such as Photo Library sharing) which will obviously be handy for up-selling iCloud/Apple One paid upgrades.
I am interested to see the new virtualisation framework stuff. Wondering if things like Distrobox (podman) can make use of it.
I’ve been using Rectangle for window management. Works well for my workflow since I’ll usually just pin two apps side by side, and jump them around different screens.
It would be nice to have this feature natively though.
Yeah I have been using Magnet since longer than I can remember. It is limited though. It's fine for basic snapping side by side or in quads but can't do multi-resizing (i.e. resizing two windows snapped side by side that are not fullscreen), doesn't have layouts, can't place a window when it is opened (e.g. auto snap terminal to bottom left if first Terminal window opened), etc.
I would love to see a full manual or dynamic tiling window manager for macOS that didn't require disabling SIP like yabai does and wasn't super janky.
You can use most of yabai without disabling SIP, and as a regular user the most jank in yabai IMO is some reflow that happens whenever your display config changes, which I think is largely forgivable.
What's the best place to read technical details about new Mac releases? This has a bit, as do other sites like https://www.macrumors.com/roundup/macos-13/, but I wonder if there's something with a more exhaustive list -- something that reads like actual "patch notes".
They stopped being thorough after John Siracusa stopped writing them.
Seriously, back in the days John Siracusa would dive into internal details. For example in 10.7 Lion (in 2011) Apple introduced full disk encryption. John didn't just stop at the usual description of the functionality, screenshots and performance metrics. He described Apple's then-new logical volume manager implementation to get this feature to work. He then speculated on Apple's future plans for the technology (pooled storage aka a single logical volume group spanning multiple physical drives) which became the reality in 2012 with Fusion Drive. This is the kind of review I wanted to read.
What is with that extended scrolling thing though. I want to look at the scrollbar to know how long a document (including a web page) is, not have it keep changing as I move farther into it.
'Oh people don't like looking at long documents' - then they're not your target customers and you should just ignore them and stop listening to the ad sales person who is paid by commission.
The Ars Technica review is thorough, and acts as a good set of "release notes", but it's published upon release, and obviously doesn't cover the stuff that devs and users discover throughout the following year.
I recommend the excellent EclecticLight blog (by H. Oakley). He doesn't try to do a comprehensive overview (you have Ars for that), but has done many technical deep-dives covering changes that haven't been talked about anywhere else, and I can't praise him enough for that.
Michael Tsai also has a great blog (mjtsai.com/blog/) that functions as a news agregator for Apple stories and commentary, and though his blog's not dedicated to only macOS, you'll find regular stories on technical details there.
Apple used to feel to me like a company that sold user experiences and the hardware was a means to that end. Now it feels like an electronics company that sells consumer hardware, and the user experience is just a necessary cost to be minimized.
It's macOS alright. The addition of a weather app is great. Otherwise I feel like macOS has mostly regressed since the redesign with Big Sur.
I still miss the old design and performance has steadily declined with each version.
Stage manager feels like this years version of "What if instead implementing window snapping we make up a new clunky way to disimprove multitasking.
It looks like Ventura drops support for the 2nd generation (Late 2010 to 2017) MacBook Airs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacBook_Air). So let's figure one more year for Big Sur, then another year for (edit) Monterey, then I guess they will need to migrate to Linux.
Ventura even drops support for the 2016 (Touchbar) Macbook Pros which is frustrating. The machines are certainly powerful enough. But support for Intel Macs will probably be dropped sooner rather than later.
I’m specifically peeved about this. My personal 2016 mbp has nearly identical specs to my work 2017 mbp but my personal one is being left behind. Maybe there’s some minuscule hardware issue they couldn’t be bothered to work out but 5-6 years of OS updates is upsettingly short. I’d expect that for an android phone but not a high end laptop…
There does seem to be a dev working on porting over the OS if anyone has an earlier mac and really wants the new OS.
Very excited about the ability to run x86 VMs through Rosetta. This will make x86 virtualization a lot more straightforward on Apple Silicon (no more reliance on qemu).
Ventura and iPadOS 16 dropped (along with iOS 16.1), but not Xcode 14.1 (which is still RC). I don't recall them ever not releasing Xcode at the same time as an OS update.
I’ve been running Homebrew on Ventura beta all summer; if you don’t want to install the entire colossal Xcode 14.1, you probably just need the latest command line tools [1].
iOS 15.7 got a bunch of security updates [1] last month; it’s still a supported operating system. There’s no reason to believe there won’t be future security updates if they’re necessary.
Apple released a security update for iOS 12 a couple of months ago [2], an operating system released a little over 4 years ago. I think you’re good.
> iOS 15.7 got a bunch of security updates [1] last month
And nothing this month which means it's already vulnerable to pretty much all of the vulnerabilities that got fixed. Some could be iOS 16 specific but the vast majority are not.
> Apple released a security update for iOS 12 a couple of months ago
And fixed a single vulnerability because it was actively exploited in the wild, leaving the OS with hundreds of other vulnerabilities unfixed.
Not arguing Apple should keep OS versions supported forever but the reality is that unless you're on the latest major version you're pretty much out of luck.
And nothing this month which means it's already vulnerable to pretty much all of the vulnerabilities that got fixed. Some could be iOS 16 specific but the vast majority are not.
The fact that there hasn’t been a second security update for iOS 15 doesn’t mean another one isn’t coming which it almost certainly is.
unless you're on the latest major version you're pretty much out of luck
As I just mentioned, iOS 12, a 4-year old operating system got updated a couple of month ago and iOS 15 will continue getting updates obviously.
To put things in perspective, updating iOS 12 means devices as old as the iPhone 5s were updated. The iPhone 5s first shipped September 2013—over 9 years ago!
I suspect Android devices released 9 years ago haven’t been updated in a long long time.
Besides, by the summer of 2023, something like 80+% of the installed base will be on iOS 16, which is what happens every year. iOS 16 is already a little ahead of where iOS 15 installs were at the same time last year [1].
Depending on your Android version the equivalent is either webview or Chrome.
The requirements for which are Android 5 and Android 4 respectively (according to a 3rd party website I found- the play store annoyingly doesn't list system requirements).
These were released 2014 and 2011.
Sometimes I think Google should be more in your face about app updates, especially ones that would be considered part of the operating system in other ecosystems.
The iOS 12 update was a one-off fix to an actively exploited vulnerability in Safari. Plenty of other bugs are still unpatched.
Plenty of old Android devices get some security updates too. For example, Chrome on Android is updated to the latest version on all phones running Android 6, which was released in 2015. Android long-term support isn't great, but that doesn't mean that old versions receive no security patches at all.
I don't use Safari, Mail, Photos, iCloud or Spotlight (except to start apps - I deselect all the other options), and only activate the sidebar/widgets on accident (out of sight, out of mind). Nor do I own an iPad or play games on my Mac. I'm sure I'll never use Stage Manager and hope it's something I can turn off.
In short, this upgrade is simply an hour or so of annoyance, but Apple is Apple. You take the good with the bad. I have a dream - which will never happen - of a "MinMac" setting on install where you just get the least amount of cruft possible.
Was anyone able to resist upgrading from 12.6.1 to 13.0?
I've never been enthusiastic about Apple's annual upgrade schedule for macOS, biannual was far more comfortable. When responsible for users' desktops, I tend to wait for months after at least .1 is released and even then only start with one lucky user for weeks of trial period, and I do the same with application updates. Invariably, users ask for upgrades, and I make them tell me what new features or security enhancements they can't do without, and that usually calms them down.
At home, I'm still holding out on 10.14.6, but this old mini is only supported up to 10.15.7, so I figured I might as well freeze upgrading on Mojave so I can still run legacy 32-bit software if I want it. I may even downgrade to 10.13 so I can build Basilisk II and other 32-bit only software, but I suppose I can still use binaries, so not absolutely necessary. I just don't need new hardware yet, so I have the luxury of waiting until after Apple stops selling M1 minis. They're so reasonable to begin with, my hope is they can soon after be found for a song. I really want a 2018 Mini, also, but they'll take longer to come down in price, unfortunately and for no particularly great reason.
Updated my MacBook Pro, worked well (as expected), then proceeded to upgrade my M1 Mini headless "server". Update in itself went OK, though it doesn't respect that i have user accounts on an external SSD, so i had to ssh in as my "admin account", delete the /Volumes/Homes mount and reboot.
Now, my mini mirrors our cloud data locally for backups, and as such every user is signed in, and one way of doing that is simply a remote desktop and "switch user". It's cumbersome, and i wish it would just "magically" synchronize data once the user had registered on it, but it only needs to be done every time it restarts, which is when i new patch/version is released.
Anyway, i clicked "switch user" and poof lost connection. Following tries gave an "invalid desktop size 0x0" error, or it simply produced noise on the remote desktop window.
Logging in the user directly through remote desktop worked, but just be aware there may be dragons.
In my experience using linux vms mainly for database workloads Parallels is nearly 10x faster than both UTM using Qemu and even Apple Virtualization (just tested it this morning using Ventura and the latest UTM 4.0 version with Ventura updates).
What I didn't know, is that you can hide "Recent Apps" (the app thumbnails on the left) in System Settings. It supplements Mission Control & Spaces, and makes it quite easy to switch between apps. You can also group multiple windows together to switch to them in one tap. Pretty neat.
So for what its worth, I just upgraded to Ventura and was able to continue using Windows 11 on Parallels 17, so I'm not really sure what is going on with their confusing messaging.
Focus on Mac could be so much better, but sadly like file tags, it remains half-baked.
I'd love to be able to set, say a "Programming" Focus, and have everything else disappear: All my desktop spaces would change, including their wallpapers (replaced by the Matrix green rain) and only the apps that I allowed would be visible, and even the files/folders and websites which I didn't include in that Focus should not be accessible (from the GUI or Terminal at least).
Basically it should be sort of like logging into a different user account, without logging into a different user account (i.e. keeping all your data and state, just temporarily filtering it).
In fact I think all operating systems should adopt the notion of a "focus" as a fundamental sub-level under the user account: Bob may have a social networking focus, office focus, or no focus, and so on.
Yes, the out-of-the-box extensibility/scriptability of macOS is often overlooked by people coming from Windows thinking uglier==smarter && prettier==dumber.
I've actually had a decent experience on my M1. You're not going to be playing AAA games, but League of Legends, Civ, Minecraft, Factorio -- all play pretty well at medium-ish settings.
How about fixing the damn MIDI server which is crashing since Yosemite?
Seriously, another big update feels like a pack of minor changes which could fit in a small patch, marketed as "whole new level with groundbreaking capabilities"
So they keep providing updates mostly focusing on people that heavily rely on the Apple ecosystem (iPhone, Mail & Safari, ...), without seriously improving the fundamental features of the OS. Well: very disappointed, again.
All those improvements and the Mail experience is still lousy when you need to quickly move messages to folders. I have been relying on MsgFiler[1] for years, but it's been over two decades and Mail.app has not improved much (and mind you, I still prefer using Mail.app over anything else on a Mac). Thank goodness we still have plugins.
I hope they fixed Night Shift. It was always turning off when it was supposed to turn on. Whatever checkboxes checked. Like 6pm screen goes blueish, wtf.
They are preparing us for when they put phone grade cams in the MacBook: “We compressed everything you love about the iPhone camera, and it’s entire ecosystem, into this tiny, adorable little bump on the lid” complete with a $5M, 30 second video intro. And then it will be the coolest wart ever.
wtf is this foto, like how is this iphone half the size of the mac? also, is it taped to the mac? I bet it would actually just drag the lid down with its weight. so it stands on something?
> like how is this iphone half the size of the mac?
That part looks correct to me?
I don't have an iPhone to compare, but my phone is easily half the size of a 14" MacBook Pro when placed like that... and Google tells me that some iPhones are basically the same size as my phone.
Given that Steve Jobs actively colluded with Eric Schmidt to depress worker wages, maybe he was just a bad person and should be memory-holed. We can build a better world without him.
I never checked before but just assumed my MBP from 2016 would be supported. It’s not. Really sucks since the current latest version works really well and the machine was maxed out (i7, 16gb ram) and is more than capable of handling Ventura. Apple seems to be aggressively dropping support for x86 macs, quicker than historically they did.
It's OK to double up trademarked brands as long as it's in a different market. But you have to pretend to be upset about it in court to avoid claims that you have abandoned your trademark, which is why Apple sues every company with a name like 'Apple fruit company'.
Some very nice additions, specially in the backend (like improvements to the virtualization framework and metal 3). But I still despise this new iOS-inspired UI. They should make iOS prettier and more usable not macOS uglier and less usable.
Lockdown mode looks very usable despite the messaging that it is "designed for the very few individuals." Users can even exclude applications from Lockdown mode.
When Lockdown Mode is enabled, some apps and features will function differently, including:
Messages - Most message attachment types are blocked, other than certain images, video, and audio. Some features, such as links and link previews, are unavailable.
Web browsing - Certain complex web technologies are blocked, which might cause some websites to load more slowly or not operate correctly. In addition, web fonts might not be displayed, and images might be replaced with a missing image icon.
FaceTime - Incoming FaceTime calls are blocked unless you have previously called that person or contact.
Apple Services - Incoming invitations for Apple Services, such as invitations to manage a home in the Home app, are blocked unless you have previously invited that person.
Shared albums - Shared albums are removed from the Photos app, and new Shared Album invitations are blocked. You can still view these shared albums on other devices that don’t have Lockdown Mode enabled.
USB accessories - To connect your device to a USB accessory or another computer, the device needs to be unlocked.
Configuration profiles - Configuration profiles can’t be installed, and the device can’t be enrolled in Mobile Device Management or device supervision while in Lockdown Mode.
Phone calls and plain text messages continue to work while Lockdown Mode is enabled. Emergency features, such as SOS emergency calls, are not affected.
Lockdown mode looks very usable despite the messaging that it is "designed for the very few individuals.”
Apple said at the rollout that relatively few people should need this, which is likely correct. The vast majority of people don’t have a state-level attacker going after them.
Also it makes sense that the UI/UX is accessible; many of the people who need this aren’t necessarily tech experts. And even if you are a tech expert, you don’t want a complex UI when you’re under attack.
Web Push won't come to iOS until a mid-cycle release, probably by March, maybe a bit sooner.
Personally I hope they have some sort of scoring to alert people if they are subscribed to notifications that others have reported as being scammy. They hopefully learned from the Calendar spam problems.
> The Weather and Clock apps come to Mac with all of the features users know and love from iPhone, and do things like check local forecasts, create alarms, set timers, and more.
I hear you that it took forever, they did a really good job with the dark sky acquisition and building a high quality app though. I find the new weather app more compelling than third party apps. Nice snappy radar, surprisingly good rain push notifications (I’ve gotten 5+ accurate push notifications for some unexpected San Diego rain this week!) and the air quality integration is far better than I would have anticipated!
To switch to another window, we already had Command-Tab, Mission Control, Expose (now part of Mission Control if I understand correctly), and also clicking on the icons in the Dock. And now we have Stage Manager. I had to use Windows 10 as my main workstation for a few weeks at work, and I'm starting to think windows management is – perhaps – one of the rare things Windows does better than macOS. But of course I should probably try Stage Manager before ranting about it here :)
A fairly good description of what's (optionally) new and what hasn't changed at all.
>Apple wisely takes an ain't-broke-don't-fix-it approach to macOS's standard multitasking model in Ventura by turning Stage Manager off by default and making people go hunting for it if they want to use it. You can't change your Mac's UI in a major way by accident.
If you haven't used it, Stage Manager differs from standard macOS multitasking by offering a column of recently used apps on the side of your screen (it's the left-hand side by default, but it will switch if you've got your Dock set to use the left-hand side of your screen instead). But unlike minimizing or maximizing an app from the Dock, each "stage" can contain multiple app windows from multiple apps; switch from one stage to another, and every window on that stage will pop back up on your screen in exactly the arrangement you were using before.
Within a given stage, app windows work exactly as they do anywhere else on your Mac. You can move, resize, and rearrange them any way you want, including shoving them all the way to the edges of the screen. The recent apps column will persist on the side of the screen by default, but it will get out of the way if you move an app window over it; you can bring the apps back up by moving your cursor to the right edge of the screen.
Stage Manager integrates seamlessly with macOS's other window management systems. Do you still want to use some apps in Full Screen mode? Great—they don't appear in your recent apps tray, and you can access them with a trackpad swipe, the same as you could before. Do you like Mission Control? Also cool. Apps in your tray slide gracefully up into Mission Control mode, along with any open apps that aren't in your tray.
I disagree. Nothing beats macOS's multiple desktops that you can swap between by swiping with three fingers. I know exactly where my windows are, exactly how to get to them from anywhere, and their order is never changed. Leagues better than alt+tab.
Great shout. Just sounds like typical marketing nonsense naming on iPad/Mac and also doesn’t seem to immediately bring much to the table but makes total sense if this is the case. Fits in with Shakespeare’s famous observation that “all the world’s a stage”.
I concluded that Windows has a better window management too. It is no coincidence that Mac users have hundreds of windows open while Windows users stay relatively organized.
> It is no coincidence that Mac users have hundreds of windows open while Windows users stay relatively organized.
Personally, I leave tons of windows open because I feel no need to keep things "organized". I rarely feel the need to constantly micro manage things that are running because cmd+tab and cmd+` along with mission control/expose/spaces makes it pretty simple to find what I'm looking for. My individual windows go into pretty specific positions and they rarely move, and I also rarely fully close applications.
Windows has such great window management its users have much less windows open and thus manage much less windows than the MacOS, which has such bad window management its users manage hundreds of windows.
Windows has great window management = less chaos, less orphan open windows
Mac OS has inferior window management = chaos, hundreds of open windows
The main reasons stems from the fact that Windows open window discoverability is higher. Open windows are always displayed in the menu bar. MacOS only displays the app icon but provides no information about the open windows except for pressing F3.
Mac OS displays exactly the same information, Windows groups windows under one icon as well. Windows shows miniatures of the windows on hover, Mac OS pops them all up to the foreground if you click the icon and lists them on right click/control click.
This theory is a subtle UX difference with larger outcomes. MacOS requires additional steps to see open windows while Windows does not.
The right click Mac OS solution is the best example. By default, right click on MacOS is deactivated. Even if someone right clicks on an app icon, that person has to click AND process the titles windows instead of seeing a visual preview as on Windows of the window.
So when you start asking questions, that terrible UI becomes a subtle UX difference.
That’s why this is all armchair designery about pet issues. You may like the way Windows works, that’s fine. But that doesn’t mean MacOS works ‘terribly’. It’s mostly just different from what you’re used to.
Nobody said that macOS has "terrible UI". Some people expressed that the window management in MacOS is inferior to Windows. I laid out UX reasons why macOS window management is inferior to Windows.
In my experience, the miniatures showed by Windows on hover are very convenient. I miss them a bit on Mac. And also the ability to quickly snap windows on sides or corners.
option + < on german systems/keyboards. keyboard shortcuts are not very accessible to the beginner user though. When my older relatives open youtube videos in fullscreen mode, they do not find their other browser window anymore
I've been maximizing the windows for every app on the built-in screen since forever. More recently I've been using Rectangle when my MBP is connected to my new 27" screen. It works quite well but the layouts require a bit of nannying, I guess it's just a matter of me familiarizing myself with the keyboard shortcuts.
For my usage/preferences, the Windows taskbar and alt-tab switcher scale extremely poorly. They drive me to keep no more than 3-4 windows open, because any additional windows beyond that make my desktop progressively more difficult to manage which feels utterly absurd on a tower with a 5950X and 32GB of RAM which I should feel empowered to heavily multitask with.
Good point. Never thought about it. Probably did not use Windows long enough. What is not scaling well with that model? The miniatures are taking too much vertical space when hovering an app icon in the task bar?
For the taskbar, what doesn’t scale nicely is its window buttons.
Keeping the taskbar in its icon only default mode makes it basically like the Mac dock, which isn’t too bad, except that having more than one window open in a program which causes the button to “stack” for each window, then requiring an additional click or an awkward hover-dance to surface one of that program’s windows. If I disable stacking and enable window names, making it like the Win9x taskbar, I get back single click window summoning but the taskbar fills up very quickly and becomes noisy. Either way comes with drawbacks.
Alt-tab scales badly simply because of the sheer number of tab-taps it takes to switch to any given window when you have more than a handful of windows open. Without any logical grouping (like with macOS Command-Tab app grouping), it gets too full too quickly.
Windows also lacks a universal shortcut to cycle through only windows of a single application (Command-` on macOS) which I often miss.
Well, the new Mission Control is the same as the old Exposé, just a rebrand with a few changes. But you forgot Command-` (backtick) which cycles windows from the same (current) app.
My ability to accidentally hit Command-Q instead of Command-Tab, even after years of doing it astounds me. You'd think muscle memory, or at least the size of the keys would give my fingers and brain a clue, but nope. Some apps will give you quit prompts but many just disappear instantly, leaving me befuddled about what the hell I just did.
I assume some Chrome product manager is as clumsy as I am (bless their heart), so it will insist you hold down the Q key. If only that was the default.
Completely agree. I use Rectangle, largely for the most basic thing that MacOS gets wrong: maximizing windows. It shouldn't be the same as "full screen". I know that you can double tap a window's top bar to maximize, but this should be swapped with the full-screen toggle. And cmd+shift+f should maximize the window instead of going to full-screen.
I feel I've regained some sanity with https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai - even without messing with System Integrity Protection. It's a shame there's no real Api to enable proper screen/desktop/wm on macos though.
There's a few nice quality of life features in Ventura, but MacOS really seems way down Apple's priority list nowadays.
They're using all software building resources for iOS and then just slap any reusable features on their desktop OS whenever possible. Great when it works for apps that are quite similar (e.g. messages), terrible for things that simply work very differently on a desktop OS (system settings, stage manager is pointless etc.).
Good opportunity for Windows to finally beat MacOS in UI/UX, since they don't have a mobile OS to worry about?
> Good opportunity for Windows to finally beat MacOS in UI/UX, since they don't have a mobile OS to worry about?
Given how much of a step back every Windows release is, starting after Win2k, in terms of *consistency* of the user experience - I would argue both companies are their own worst enemies here.
I'm gonna guess you have not tried continuity camera....Then again maybe you don't care but it solidly upgraded my camera experience on the Mac through my Apple phone. I mean. This.Is.What.We're.Talking.About.With.EcoSystem. Today, I was finally glad to be drinking the coolaid (and I'm typing this from an x86 machine).
That said, I share your frustration, I do happen to have a cluster of PopOS machines behind me for my kids (and I am sincerely digging that OS, but it also has it's warts)
