I completely agree, since doing rebase our history looks fantastic and it makes finding things, cherrypicking and generating changelogs really simple. Why not be neat, it's cost us nothing and you can make yourself a tutorial on Claude if you don't understand rebasing pretty easily.
Usually I like Apple’s OS updates but Tahoe is absolutely awful from the glass to the noddy sizing of everything. MacOS does not have to harmonise with VisionOS at all and it’s been a disaster for macOS to try.
Maybe it looks better on a nicer monitor or something. To me there's nothing terribly broken about the Tahoe UI, but it's clearly rushed because there are a ton of weird little things that just look off.
The dock is suppose to look like the icons float in a class panel, but the reflections in the glass look pixilated and the effect isn't there. The dock icons are centred in the dock, but the activity indicator on the "glass" pane make it look like they're not.
In the control panel, and other windows with a left panel, it's clear that the window curve and the panel curve aren't the same and the transparency of the panel makes it even more clear. I don't understand why some panels can be transparent, but other parts of the window isn't. There's no reason for the transparency.
The Tahoe looks like Gnome theme from 2005, it's interesting, sort of pretty, but the details makes it clear that the authors doesn't quite have the skills to perfect it.
Apple have been slacking in the UI quality control department in the past few years. I have similar issues on my iPhone SE, Apple (and app authors) clearly doesn't test on this phone, because UI elements frequently overlap.
Also I'm still annoyed about the control panel being ported over from iOS. You can't find anything and the window can't even be made wider.
I'm sure this is true, and that there will always be a (likely disproportionately) loud group of complainers, many of whom will forget about their complaints. I haven't really publicly complained about Tahoe before, and I don't intend on whining about it again. But...
It's fine. I'm not going to rail about how it's unusable, or say that it makes me want to gouge out my eyes, or whatever. But it's enough to dissuade me from ever wanting to buy another Mac, if I have the option of using a desktop Linux system.
That's a pretty big caveat. But those curved window borders and the rounded widgets in e.g. the settings menu are kind of awful. Not unusable. But every time I open a terminal and I deal with the choice of either having obscene padding around my content or seeing a few pixels of my prompt's corners shaved off, I get just a little more irritated, and a little less likely to pick up my Macbook the next time I'm deciding which device to use.
Good UI for tools, physical or digitial, should reduce the friction between picking it up and using it for something, that's the problem at the core of design. With the small caveat that sometimes technically good but perhaps unethical design solves stupid business problems well, like deliberately making chairs uncomfortable to keep traffic moving through a busy cafe, or making anti-homeless benches, design should not dissuade you from using something you purchased to solve other problems; it's unprincipled.
I've always been "pro-change" for UIs, as opposed to the bunch of people in the "bring the old UI back" camp, but Tahoe looked like fecal matter from the moment it was introduced.
On iOS it's manageable with reduced transparency, but on macOS it's just so awful I won't upgrade.
So I’ve enabled reduced transparency and all the other accessibility settings I can find to remove the terribleness.
The UI is now mono-coloured gray and looks like MacOS back in the days before OS X was a thing - but it’s still better than what Apple “envisioned” with Tahoe.
> looking at older versions of MacOS just looks old fashioned
It’s an operating system, not a dress to parade around on a catwalk. I don’t want it to be fashionable and change with the seasons, I want it to be usable and intuitive. And yes, it should look good (which Tahoe doesn’t) but to the extent that it makes usability better, never in detriment of it.
I got a Mac mini and was very positively surprised that it still ran the older version. I can use the size setting I'm comfortable with in the display menu. When I use Tahoe, I need to make the setting smaller to have a reasonable amount of apps open, but then it's uncomfortable to read.
That's actually a problem with Tahoe, it is not something new and bold, it's old-fashioned. Transparency already has come and gone as a UI fad, and it doesn't really make any big difference if you throw computationally expensive effects at it.
They'll do what they always do, it'll be the greatest thing ever just getting minor tweaks for 3-4 releases and then will be superseded by the greatest thing ever.
I’d even say pipe dream of just Apple commentators and pundits. I’ve yet to hear from a normal, real-life Mac user who legitimately wishes for a touchscreen MacBook.
Sorry to break your streak but I'm a "real-life Mac user who legitimately wishes for a touchscreen MacBook", but maybe you may argue that I'm holding it wrong and my wish is illegitimate :)
Nope, no bad faith here, I’d genuinely like to hear your use cases for the touchscreen.
I just hope you could exclude speculative new interfaces and gestures in future macOS that straight-up cannot be done with a mouse. In which case, yeah, the TouchBook would be degrading the experience for me and a huge portion of Mac users, thus making me sad.
I just don't want to switch to an ipad when I want to sketch something. Also some tagging interfaces for photo review work exceptionally well with a touch screen. So I don't want to carry a macbook pro and and ipad, long story short.
> I just hope you could exclude speculative new interfaces and gestures in future macOS that straight-up cannot be done with a mouse
I agree 100%. I'm already annoyed about how some stuff that's easy to do with a touchpad are straight-up broken with a normal mouse.
A kid raised on an animal sounds toy keyboard might also expect the computer to go “moo” when pressing the “M” key, but that doesn’t mean Apple should build that in. Expectations from previous platforms sometimes don’t fit others, and can be unlearned.
Just swap to Linux if you don’t have a true reason to stay on Mac. I flipped last April and man, it is wonderful. Bazzite boot, no windows partition or anything. It just works.
Plus I have a 2016 MBpro I keep around in case I absolutely need a Mac (rare). Usually it’s an old drive formatted for Mac and I don’t feel like futzing around with software that allows it to read on my main computer.
A lot of the controls are unreadable depending on the background behind it, for example. Which is crazy. Sometimes it's also hard to figure out if something is a control, part of a site/application, a visual bug, or something else.
They've even doubled down on it, I don't see this going away in the next 2 major OS versions. I expect them to have a lot of WWDC sessions about it again this year.
That said, Apple's own apps are a crazy mixed up mess of different design systems and technologies, so maybe it will all fall apart and something new comes along in ±3 years time.
My Tahoe issue was that when I shared screen with zoom I used to have some weird bug where the screenshare had issues. It was fixed in the last 2 updates. Either a tahoe issue or a zoom issue but you'd think that they'd have a beta program to fix such issues in the testing phase.
I kinda want a new mac because the hardware looks so ... performant. But I can't bear this tahoe glass bullshit, every screenshot I see of it looks terrible. I just don't get what Apple's play is here.
I’ve seen this in other “follow the leader” businesses too, they are not looking to even have working features, just parity on a spreadsheet with the market leader… I’m looking at you Gitlab.
Is it correct that there's zero improvement in performance between M4 (+Pro/Max) and M5 (+Pro/Max) the data looks identical. Also the memory does not seem to improve performance on larger models when I thought it would have?
Love the idea though!
EDIT: Okay the whole thing is nonsense and just some rough guesswork or asking an LLM to estimate the values. You should have real data (I'm sure people here can help) and put ESTIMATE next to any of the combinations you are guessing.
It’s not even the largest part, just prefill so I think maybe M5 Max is 30% faster overall. Still pretty good I think but the 4x nonsense is just marketing!
All vigilantism has issues. For example, if I was ever to do something horrific online I’d probably hack someone unrelated to me first and tunnel through their computer and online presence to make sure if I got caught it would not blowback onto me so easily. Not that I’ve thought about it or anything :-/
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