I wonder how atypical I am as there was literally nothing in the list I cared about. In particular the widgets seems unfathomably pointless. I don't even use them on the phone, but at least there I can kind of see the point.
This release does add AV1 support, just only for devices with hardware decoding support [1]. I’m not entirely sure that restriction applies to desktop as well as mobile, it doesn’t work on my Mac without hardware support even after enabling the disabled feature flags, but I only upgraded Safari, not macOS.
Hardware-only is the right move IMO. Literally earlier today I was dealing with stuttering video that turned out to be caused by Chrome putting me on a software implementation of a “better” codec. These new codecs are only better on devices that can run them without stuttering, heating up, and chewing through battery.
<pendantic>That's not a macOS update, but a Safari update, and it wasn't there when I wrote that</pedantic>
Wow, that's actually great news. It's the first I have seen of Apple actually supporting it in any way (despite being a member of the consortium that created it).
I don't disagree wrt. phones and tablets, but my MBP laughs at decoding AV1 videos; it's really not that taxing for an M2. Anyway, the more important story here is that A17 (based on this) appears to have AV1 hardware. That's an important first step.
I empathize with your feeling, each OS release has been less and less interesting.
Widgets? I didn’t care for them on Leopard or iOS, why would I clutter my desktop with them now?
Notifications have gotten worse and worse to handle. System Preferences is awful to use now. All the cutesy apps you can’t uninstall…
I’d be happy to pay again for macOS if the list of ‘features’ included fixing long-standing bugs and annoyances, making things more stable, and bringing back features and UI that were both simple and effective.
Meanwhile there's still no support for AV1.