macOS Sonoma is available today | Hacker News Reader

macOS Sonoma is available today

apple.com

435 pointsmfiguiere668 comments

I wish Apple would separate the updates of their bundleware from their OS. Some of the major updates have meaningful changes to the underlying OS (gatekeeper, SIP, etc.), but others - like this one - are primarily changes to frills like Messages, Notes, Safari and other Apple-native apps that I don't even use.

I have no problem with Apple bundling these apps and making them work seamlessly together, and I don't even mind that they're all updated simultaneously (except for Safari, which I wish I could update independently without relying on the "Technology Preview" beta channel). But I do have a problem with upgrading my entire OS and disabling the new bloatware features just because I want to keep auto-updates enabled. I used to delay updating and then would end up way behind, which is why I enrolled in auto-update. But now it feels like I'm being held hostage to their update schedule.

And for what benefit? There are hardly any useful OS-level changes in this release, but there are a bunch of new features I'll need to disable (while hoping the next auto-update doesn't break my external monitor), all powered by freshly written code contributing to an expanded attack surface. If I had my way, then I'd take the OS updates and skip all the apps. Keep the attack surface small while still meaningfully improving the core. I don't care about the rest.

You know what would be even better? If you could reliably uninstall all this junk or not even install it at all.

Every time I hit some button on my keyboard and the Music app opens asking me to create an account I am reminded how hostile all commercial operating systems are.

It's interesting, I've been using OpenBSD for the past couple years and it has _not once_ enraged me the way Windows and Mac do. I still use Windows for work, and own a ton of Macs (probably getting close to ~30 by now), but OpenBSD is the OS I use for most general computing stuff.

I mean, I'm using a GUI that is really primitive by comparison to Win/Mac (i3wm) but it's actually great. Extremely fast, efficient, and stays out of my way. There is literally no mechanism in the OS to pop up a notification or bounce an icon or blink anything at me. It couldn't interrupt me and piss me off even if some piece of software wanted to. It's amazing. Nothing updates on its own, and the OS runs very very few services or other background stuff -- basically only whatever I have explicitly configured and enabled. Again, awesome. I'm easily aware of every single process that runs on this machine, and if there's one I don't know about, there's comprehensive documentation about it, including how to configure it. That's honestly effectively impossible for someone using Mac or Windows.

Oh, I just installed a security patch in about 20 seconds. Open terminal (winkey->enter), "doas syspatch -c", type pass, see there's a patch, "doas syspatch" to apply it, done in 2 seconds. Once I reboot the newly-patched kernel is active. There is full documentation of the patch, including why it's needed, how the patch resolves the issue, and a diff of the patch is included.

Oh man, it gets worse than that. After updating to iOS 17 the other day, I said to my phone "play OverCast" (my podcast app). It used to start playing from that app. This time, it started playing a band called Overcast, and told me I had just started a 7 day free trial of Apple Music. What the actual fuck.

You absolutely need this: https://github.com/tombonez/noTunes

Somehow on migrating to a new iPhone the music app decided it needed full notification permissions, apparently because a new Taylor swift album is of the same notification level as an incoming missile strike.

At least it’s easy enough to turn off.

Reliably removing the U2 album from Apple Music seems impossible. Deleting the album which has helpfully redownloaded itself is now a ritual before I start my car - otherwise it starts playing as soon as bluetooth connects - which is just what I need when I'm pulling away in busy traffic.

I agree with you. Apple Music is particularly annoying. I recommend this free little utility: https://github.com/tombonez/noTunes

I have similar feelings. Apple did a wonderful job with M1/M2, but on the software side, I have mixed feelings. Xcode is a mess, and Swift UI is not a complete replacement for Cocoa.

And on the OS side, I feel like Apple is creating features that I instantly disable because they do the exact opposite of what I want.

Apple's hardware is incredible but the software is increasingly grating for any kind of power usage. Xcode is frustrating, the permissions system is flagrantly designed for Apple's self interest, window, monitor, and app management is rife with ancient bugs and half baked design decisions.

XCode is refusing to install. Fails with some error, and asks me to download XCode again. Also now the system needs 70-80 GB of free space to install XCode. One of the funny upgrades so far

Is SwiftUI supposed to be a complete replacement of Cocoa in 2023? I thought that was a nebulous goal for the distant future?

Xcode is a mess in many fronts. For example my Xcode updated automatically to a version which couldn't support Ventura anymore, the OS I'm still running. I had to uninstall the app store version and manually download older one to fix the situation.

You are being utterly charitable by saying you’ve mixed feelings about Apple’s software prowess (or rather lack of).

Safari is updated independently of macOS. Today I installed Safari 17 on Ventura. It’s available in Monterey as well.

> I wish Apple would separate the updates of their bundleware from their OS.

In a way it's a bit of a philosophical standpoint: macOS is the whole indivisible thing developed, built, and released in lockstep, kinda like FreeBSB base is the whole indivisible thing developed, built, and released in lockstep (and the rest is ports). In a way, removing tcsh from a FreeBSD install because you only ever use bash from ports does not make sense and may break things; so you just ignore it and pretend it doesn't exist.

Yeah, I get that, but I think there could be a middleground. They could ship all their apps as a bundle, and their raw base OS separately.

Something cool however is you can actually build the open-source WebKit browser engine yourself and make closed-source Safari use your locally built version.

Do you have a link or something ? I couldn’t really find where you’d do that

> except for Safari, which I wish I could update independently without relying on the "Technology Preview" beta channel

For me the Safari update is always a seperate update in System Preferences which I can install without updateing the OS

For tech minded folk, the upgrade-everyting-or-nothing is indeed unwanted.

But I love the facts that I can tell my family to upgrade and they will have all the new stuff at once, like with an iPhone or iPad. That is for most users what they want and/or need.

Maybe Apple should consider dev editions for MacOS that allows more customization during setup. MacOS is still heavily used by web and mobile developers, so I'm sure this would be received well.

I do end up removing many of the Apple apps, but recently started using Safari, Notes, and Reminders more. Apple does an excellent job making their apps work seamlessly within the Apple ecosystem.

As weird as it sounds this model makes it at least clear that you update your os regularly and it gets attention.

Microsoft has the issue that it's hard to sell why you would need to upgrade and not just update.

Messages, notes, Safari. All awesome. Can you imagine installing crap like chrome, ever notes, or fake e2e what’s app?

> Can you imagine installing crap like chrome

I can. Great dev tools, and usually is ahead of other browsers in implementing web apis.

What Safari team presented at WWDC this year regarding PWAs as something revolutionary has been available in Chrome for years.

You can install Safari separately.

Wow, so much unwarranted hate. It's one download and you have everything updated. If you believe you do not need a new OS version for your laptop for whatever reason, you can always keep using Ventura or whatever you're running now and update that until it is end of support.

I don't think you understand how helpful it is for "normal" users to push a button and have a brand new version of everything. And being afraid of new features that you don't use... pretty irrational.

It is by no means irrational to hesitate on a new major release of an Apple operating system. MacOS upgrades have caused many people all kinds of issues, for instance a Big Sur update broke a metric fuckton of USB-C hubs and they didn't address it for 6 months.

So it goes...

  Warning: You are using macOS 11.
  We (and Apple) do not provide support for this old version.
  It is expected behaviour that some formulae will fail to build in this old version.
  It is expected behaviour that Homebrew will be buggy and slow.
  Do not create any issues about this on Homebrew's GitHub repositories.
  Do not create any issues even if you think this message is unrelated.
  Any opened issues will be immediately closed without response.
  Do not ask for help from Homebrew or its maintainers on social media.
  You may ask for help in Homebrew's discussions but are unlikely to receive a response.
  Try to figure out the problem yourself and submit a fix as a pull request.
  We will review it but may or may not accept it.

Yea the homebrew dev team is pretty user hostile tbh. The more you read their github, the more you realize how insufferable and arrogant they are. It leaves a very bad impression.

Also, if you are not going along in the upgrade rabbit race, homebrew gets really annoying and actually in your way at some point.

I see myself moving to macports soon, if brew gets worse and the stability of my setup is compromised (lots of php versions with valet for example).

I guess brew is now more targeted at “prosumers” now since it is imposing unnecessary limits on what “pro” users want and need.

I always expect endless support from free products, built by the community, that I'm not paying for or contributing to.

How much is your support contract with them?

Ah, the usual flip replies of how you can expect nothing from open source. Software projects, naturally, wanting for neither goodwill nor users.

Please return homebrew for a full refund.

The alternative is orders of magnitude more work for them as they need to maintain old versions of packages and old versions of operating systems.

Another alternative that might be worth looking into is the Nix package manager.

Just use Nix

https://nixos.org/download.html#nix-install-macos

The homebrew team seems incredibly burnt-out, to the point of hostility. I've really enjoyed the nixpkgs community so far and encourage others to check it out; it hasn't replaced homebrew entirely for me (yet), but it's getting closer every day.

I want to like Nix but those installation instructions for macOS (and their removal friend) are just crazypants as compared to the `sudo mkdir /nix && sudo chown $USER /nix` from the Linux version

And that's not even getting into the "waaa?" from `du -hs /nix` although I am open to that being a misleading number due to hardlinks and other trickery that du may not correctly surface

Yes, the Homebrew message does seem unnecessarily hostile. Not everyone can afford to buy a brand new computer every year.

My issue with Nix is that you are forced to install packages in a global location. Why is it that every package manager assumes I’m an administrator on my machine? Even if I am, how does it make sense to take over a global directory as a single user?

Is there a good guide on how to replace homebrew with nix? I've been curious for a while but always end up with 30 tabs open and giving up.

These warnings keep getting longer every homebrew release. You may want to try macPorts, which goes out of their way to explicitly support releases all the way down to 10.5.

One of the cooler experiences I've had with MacPorts was seeing some people go out of their way to ensure builds still worked on PPC Tiger and PPC Leopard.

I remember seeing SBCL builds broken on Darwin/ppc for a long while, and eventually SBCL decided to drop support for Darwin/ppc altogether. Still, these ports maintainers did not give up and eventually found a way to fix SBCL builds on PPC: https://trac.macports.org/ticket/65484

I recall seeing some work to bring back PPC support upstream, but I am not sure what the progress on that is. It's still cool seeing downstream users fix builds that simply didn't work (and to the point where upstream decides to remove support entirely since they couldn't build it anyway).

MacPorts over homebrew 100% all the time.

It’s better suited for a multiuser system (and I share my desktop with my wife who has a different login) and is more stable, too.

Wow! That's quite impressive. Meanwhile there was a latent bug in the Homebrew formula for Rust that affected 10.13 for a year until I finally spent a few hours to investigate it.

Or pkgsrc from source (I think updated binary support is for Big Sur and newer.)

As a part time nerd that’s falling behind on how to use ever changing tools, I started to fear homebrew. I just didn’t get how it worked.

Then I used macports. What a nice experience. Provided what I’m after is listen on there!

"If you see a Homebrew maintainer walking down the street in your direction, find the nearest wall and bury your face in it in shame and deference until they pass."

This is exactly the kind of vibe they give off on their Github repo too. They're not the nicest people to interact with.

Do people care about this?

All I see is, they protect themself from each and every script kiddy that runs to reddit or github when something doesn't work because of their own config issues.

Come over to MacPorts. It’s friendlier over here and stuff is supported and no one uses words like formulae.

They use Tcl, though, but I guess there is always bound to be an abomination in every project…

Oh oh, it's getting closer. Currently on MacOS 12 with my trusted 2015 Macbook Pro. It still goes strong, but looks like the next major release may see the end of homebrew for this one. There's really no issue with this computer other than 16gb of RAM being a bit tight when every modern app is using Electron. Oh well, see how we go.

(Message also for your parent) Last week, I saw the writing on the wall. I installed OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher on two MBPs from 2015, updating 12.7 to 13.6. It is a MBP 13" 2015 (early 2016 variant) and a MBP 15" 2015 (late 2015?). Works very well but you need to follow the guide. Both machines are still working well, 'cept for the battery (already replaced on the 13"). Esp the 15" is still in good condition, my wife happily uses it and insists on needing a 15". So a replacement would be expensive.

[1] https://dortania.github.io/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher/INSTALLER...

Fedora mostly works out of the box on my 2015 MBP

Use MacPorts instead.

I run:

$ sudo bash

# port selfupdate && port -u -c upgrade outdated && port reclaim

once a week.

When I upgraded to Ventura (from Big Sur), I followed the instructions for an OS upgrade and everything moved across cleanly.

It installs itself in /opt

It works with MacOS's Frameworks for stuff like python and java.

It allows you to run multiple versions with "port select".

Why would I want to run anything else?

  export HOMEBREW_NO_ANALYTICS=1

Time to move to MacPorts.

Don't move today, because the Sonoma release is not out yet. https://www.macports.org/install.php

Context? Homebrew is working fine on Sonoma here. I do not get that or a similar message.

Apparently hating on homebrew is super popular right now. I run brew on osx and linux and have zero issues.

He is talking about MAC OS 11 Big Sur

I'm surprise Apple doesn't, even unofficially, upstream fixes to Homebrew before a new macOS version is released. Why let Homebrew break for so many macOS users on day 0? I know Apple is secretive about unreleased products, but the type of fixes for Homebrew wouldn't reveal too many Apple secrets. Do Apple engineers not use Homebrew on their own Macs while developing macOS?

> Why let Homebrew break for so many macOS users on day 0?

why pay for work when it would've been done for free and apple gets to reap the financial benefits?

Since I've changed to MacPorts many years ago, I never had any such trouble.

I see other replies as well, but I just want to tell you guys I came here to recommend mac ports. It’s a shame brew is so popular and mac ports having only a fraction of that attention.

Out of date OS doesn’t receive support.

I for one, am shocked.

Maintainers of popular free, open source community tool are tired of being asked to support out of date OS.

Colour me even more surprised!

I assume that the message means that Homebrew is incorrectly identifying the installation of MacOS Sonoma as “out of date”, and that means updating Hombbrew is a side-effect of updating the OS.

Oof. I think I gotta switch to Linux. I already loathe brew.

My blood pressure is rising just reading this...

You get what you pay for

Once again a good time to remember that there were multiple perfectly good package managers available when Homebrew was invented, they were more future-proof (by eg not putting files in /usr/local), and everyone only switched to it because for some reason Ruby programmers wanted all of their tools to be written in Ruby (and possibly by people with waxed mustaches.)

I switched to it because it worked much better out of the box and required next to no fiddle-fucking to install tools I need, so I can spend my time doing what I'm actually paid for, and good at. I have no idea whether the alternatives improved in the intervening 10-ish years, any I have no good reason to look into it since homebrew still works.

I don't care what language Homebrew uses, it just works. When I got my M1 MacBook in 2021 I saw some of this negativity about Homebrew, and since I was doing a clean install anyway I decided to try out MacPorts. I quickly ran into problems and switched back to Homebrew and it's been smooth sailing.

Ultimately users will go where the package maintainers are. There are more people out there willing and able to write Ruby today than Perl (Fink) or TCL (MacPorts).

I'm sure someone will start a macOS package manager based on python and yum to signal the waning days of those technologies.

That is absolutely not true. The other available package managers would work 70% of the time on a good day. Homebrew is bulletproof on a current OS.

I switched because Macports reliably borked itself doing ordinary operations every 4-6 months, and Brew didn’t. That was like 2012 to be fair, but Brew’s never given me much trouble and the package selection is insanely good, so I’ve had no reason to look at other options since.

Its being in ruby is a strike against it, for me. I use it anyway. It’s probably my favorite package manager, all things considered, and I’ve used a lot.

People switched to it because MacPorts was constantly broken and took ages to install new packages due to compiling everything.

I'm sure some Ruby programmers were attracted to Homebrew because it felt more familiar than something written in a language like Tcl.

But Homebrew's fundamental tradeoff w/r/t purity was also a huge boost to installation speed at a time when most package managers for macOS still required you to build most things from source.

That and the slick, user-friendly UI were probably the biggest factors for Homebrew's success when it came out.

That's a false trip down the memory lane, nothing was "perfectly good" back then, arguably even now there are big issues with all the package managers

It works well now though—do you prefer any of the other package managers still?

Does anyone else have no idea what macOS version is which? Which came first? Is there some hidden naming protocol that I just don't grasp?

I've only started using a mac part-time while I've been developing an iOS app over the past few weeks, and I keep seeing different names for the OS version. I have no idea what version I'm on, or if Big Sur came before Sierra, or what. I know I could look it up, but it seems that in the name of good user-experience, I shouldn't need to.

You'd think they'd at a minimum say "people aren't going to be able to figure out which is which, so let's go in alphabetical order with our naming.

Yeah, at this point I wish they'd just use numbers like iOS.

So we're at iOS 17 and macOS 14.

Because honestly I stopped caring about keeping track of the names long ago. It's cute if you care, they can still put it in the About window for the sake of tradition, but it would be a lot more helpful if it were just referred to as macOS 14 in the press and documentation.

It says the <Name> <Version> in the "About This Mac" Apple menu item. In this case, it will be Sonoma 14.0.

Historically versioning is weird due to the integration of NextSTEP after Job's return to the company. First it was versioned up to 9, then the NextSTEP integration was 10, then subsequent major releases were minor bumps (ie 10.1, 10.2) as OSX was a brand unto itself until 11 which rebranded to MacOS and full versions were used again. So Sonoma is the 14th release from the NextSTEP integration. I think referring to them by names eased the confusion some.

This gives a good rundown:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacOS_version_history

Sonoma is the 21st release of a Mac operating system based on NeXTSTEP. The switch to 11 marked the transition to Apple Silicon. The code names have been used as an alternate name since 10.2 Jaguar as a way at the time to differentiate from and shame Microsoft’s Longhorn (Vista).

1. Mac OS X Public Beta (Kodiak) - 2000

2. Mac OS X 10.0 (Cheetah) - 2001

3. Mac OS X 10.1 (Puma) - 2001

4. Mac OS X 10.2 (Jaguar) - 2002

5. Mac OS X 10.3 (Panther) - 2003

6. Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) - 2005

7. Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) - 2007

8. Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) - 2009

9. Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion) - 2011

10. OS X 10.8 (Mountain Lion) - 2012

11. OS X 10.9 (Mavericks) - 2013

12. OS X 10.10 (Yosemite) - 2014

13. OS X 10.11 (El Capitan) - 2015

14. macOS 10.12 (Sierra) - 2016

15. macOS 10.13 (High Sierra) - 2017

16. macOS 10.14 (Mojave) - 2018

17. macOS 10.15 (Catalina) - 2019

18. macOS 11 (Big Sur) - 2020

19. macOS 12 (Monterey) - 2021

20. macOS 13 (Ventura) - 2022

21. macOS 14 (Sonoma) - 2023

I went to the wikipedia page, which is kinda the point. No other OS requires you too look it up. Even WatchOS and iOS directly use version numbers.

Saying it's due to NextStep integration sounds like a strange defense of this naming strategy (if that was your intention). They have version numbers, but they decide to use the "code name" as a product name.

Mac OS X Server version 1.0 was Rhapsody 5.3. It still doesn't make sense even if you know the MacOS System was renamed to OS 8 to kill the clone license.

No, I have no clue. I don't even know my current version (number nor codename). But when I need to check, I click the Apple logo in the top left, "about this mac," note the version number and then search Google for "latest macOS version" (it took a long time to break the habit of typing "OS X").

The name is meaningless. It’s just marketing; every version is named for another location across California. Before that they were named for big cats.

Each version has a number that is sequential though. I think it’s just an effect of sheer quantity. They release a new version every year. It’s hard to keep track.

I wish they’d just get iOS, the iPhone, and macOS or whatever it is called now all the same. Today I should be running iOS 15 on an iPhone 15 talking to macOS 15.

I do wonder the longevity of alphabet-based naming...

It _sort of_ reminds me of a time I spoke to a colleague and said I wanted to try a project (only a couple of years ago) that required Red Hat Linux 5 and he said "oh sure, here's some CDs" and realised, "nope, not RHEL" (to which the response was.. "oh, here be dragons")..

If you loop the alphabet and I reckon you'll inevitably get confusion.

"Hey, Android Juniper has been released" - "Ah cool, I can upgrade from Ice-cream".. "oh no, wait, mine's 27 releases old!".. "No, sorry, it's actually 53 releases old"

> If you loop the alphabet and I reckon you'll inevitably get confusion.

These releases tend to be yearly or half-yearly at most (e.g. android or ubuntu). So a wrap around happens after 13 years at the earliest. Having a 13 year old completely un-upgraded phone (or AR brain worm or whatever we will have in 13 years) wrapping around seems quite unlikely to cause any surprise.

If you have weekly releases or something, then I would see your point.

At least better than random naming.

When there were multiple years between Mac OS releases, it was not as difficult. I also found big cat names easier to remember (perhaps because I’m more familiar with them than California landmarks). I also liked the Leopard/Snow Leopard and Lion/Mountain Lion cadence.

Perhaps I just don’t put as many cycles into following Apple anymore.

These pages help identify your Mac model and the newest compatible operating system it can be upgraded to:

MacBook Pro https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201300

MacBook Air https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201862

iMac/iMac Pro https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201634

Mac Pro https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202888

Mac Studio https://www.apple.com/mac-studio/

Mac Mini https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201894

Usually...

It works like airplanes. Some people see Tomcat and know immediately what it refers to. Others prefer the numeric F-14. I still remember NATO codenames from 40 years ago, without the letter/number. Sidewinder, for example.

I have the issue you describe with Ubuntu and (less so) Debian codenames and also with Android codenames. With Ubuntu though, the number is descriptive, like Russian tanks (T-90 etc), so using it is worth more.

Wait the Tomcat and the F-14 are the same?

Reminds me of getting horribly confused reading War and Peace h til I realized one character had like fifty names.

I think you have to either maintain a map between names and version numbers in your head or dispense with the names entirely.

> in the name of good user-experience, I shouldn't need to.

That ship has long since sailed with Apple, on so many fronts.

Instead of sorting by alphabet there's a pretty good thing called time, so adding the last two digits of the release year would solve the issue

No, I also have no clue, but it's no more annoying than keeping track of which Ubuntu version is called something inane like Jaunty Jackalope.

But it's alphabetical, if you see Ignorant Ibex and Jaundiced Jackalope, you know that (after singing the alphabet song to yourself quietly) that II came before JJ.

At least Ubuntu has an LTS version you can use to ignore the names for a few years.

> The implementations of the exfat and msdos file systems on macOS have changed; these file systems are now provided by services running in user-space instead of by kernel extensions.

This sounds interesting!

I really wish there was a native FUSE alternative on macOS; just recently I found myself in a pickle due to not being able to mount an ext4 boot volume on an SD card on my Mac at all. (Passing through to a VM works only via USB.)

This and a container story are glaring holes in macOS.

Instead we get widgets on the desktop like it’s 2005 again.

Good ol' Windows Vista

I always get downvoted for this for Craig Ferengi is a pretty boy and has to go.

> I really wish there was a native FUSE alternative on macOS

Isn’t that what DriverKit can be used for?

https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/security/secd0a47c14c:

“DriverKit is the framework that allows developers to create device drivers that the user installs on their Mac. Drivers built with DriverKit run in user space, rather than as kernel extensions, for improved system security and stability. This makes for easier installation and increases the stability and security of macOS“

It seems like the only two types of drivers are generic USB device drivers and HID input drivers, though.

There needs to be some OS-side FUSE-like kernel interface for userspace drivers like this to be able to actually mount them in the VFS.

macFUSE - https://osxfuse.github.io/

Yes – I mean a native alternative to this (or even an implementation of it!) which does not need a third-party kernel extension.

I wish they did something so deleting files from the bin wouldn't take millenia on my iMac Pro. Yes, it's an old computer, but shouldn't that be a solved problem?

Not a real fix but doing it from the command line is usually strikingly faster.

I'm genuinely curious, why does this take so long?

I can't even begin to imagine. If I'm deleting 200 files on my M1 MBA, that's still going to take 30-45 seconds.

It's doing something. What is it doing? Does it have something to do with Time Machine or file versioning or secure erase or what?

Everything else is blazingly fast as it should be.

This wasn’t slow for me unless I was deleting a node_modules folder or something with a gazillion files in it. Sounds like something’s weird on your not-that-old iMac Pro.

Meanwhile Windows still struggles with getting files to the bin.

I reluctantly did buy Extfs from Paragon for this. It's too expensive I think, but there are just no free opensource solutions.

Doesn't that require breaking glass in Secure Boot these days, just like macFUSE?

I'm not really willing to install a third-party kernel extension just for a custom file system I need once every few months anymore, especially given that Apple's native exFAT drivers now apparently run in the userspace.

They should just make that capability available to the actual-userspace!

Complete list of new features in macOS Sonoma:

https://www.apple.com/macos/sonoma/pdf/macOS_All_New_Feature...

> Explicit language handling. The keyboard will add explicit language that you use to your personal vocabulary list and will learn this usage for each different app. Explicit language that is learned is used for autocorrect and suggestions

This is ducking great.

> and will learn this usage for each different app.

Yes, not in Outlook, please.

I fixed that issue by adding a few text replacements. The downsides is that I can never talk about ducks

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.

Meanwhile there's still no support for AV1.

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.

[1]: https://webkit.org/blog/14445/webkit-features-in-safari-17-0...

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.

Bah.

Yeah, as a person who uses an M1 MBP for work and literally not a single other Apple product, the listed features are all completely irrelevant to me.

The number of 'system' features for an OS update is small. The most interesting one to me is the AirPods variable noise cancellation which is more along the lines of hardware accessory support. There's something not quite right when an OS update mainly updates web browser, apps, widgets, etc.

Is there another set of notes that has all the underlying API changes supported that 3rd parties can use?

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/technologies?chang...

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/macos-release-note...

I've been using this for a few days and it is _fantastic_! AirPods have to be the biggest thing I'd miss if I ever left the Apple ecosystem

I was just about to say that there isn't any changes worthwhile in this release and that Apple employees x people in the marketing sub department that takes care of the yearly releases and they will – regardless of anything else – do the yearly release fanfare with all the bells and whistles :-).

Well, I'm very much enjoying Gaming Mode which has certtainly bumped up my FPS in various games

Was looking for this. Thank you!

Every time a new MacOS version is announced the 1Password staff must be all sitting around praying Apple doesn't add any more bells and whistles to Keychain.

I doubt they care about Mac customers. If they did, they would have avoided ruining the app's UI so that customers don't have a good reason to jump ship at the first opportunity.

They started with a huge advantage and squandered it with a buggy cloud subscription model and an electron downgrade. Their fate is their own at this point.

This was the release that got me to migrate from 1P to Keychain. Keychain finally has enough features and the 1P’s browser extension has been finicky for me and the UX of 1P8’s desktop app feels like a considerable downgrade from 7.

In Safari, keychain and 1password certainly are fighting harder for my attention than they have in the past. I want to use a workflow where passkeys live in iCloud and normal login pairs live in 1Password. 1Password's passkeys implementation is a nice way to keep keychain from being the only player in the game but I like how much faster they work stored inside of the OS better.

I think this is one reason why 1Password is pivoting to enterprise.

Consumer password management companies compete on the multi-device angle, including Android and Windows. That's not something Apple's going to touch for awhile.

Apple is also certainly not going to touch the more enterprise aspects of password management.

1Password overdid it a while ago for me and I switched to KeePassXC. It is certainly not as polished as 1Password but the developer team is very responsive and since I started using it, especially on macOS, things have improved a lot already. It is a pleasure to watch things evolve and Passkey support is the next big thing that will be added. Compared to Keychain Access, KeePassXC works cross platform and I need that, since my devices are cross platform. Also helps to avoid vendor lock-in.

I believe Apple offered to acquire them but they chose to go the VC money route instead, adding features for corporate customers.

That's why they switched to focus on Enterprise customers a while ago. It's all about being a secret store for Kubernetes and other deployments now. I doubt they lose a lot of sleep over personal licenses and the loud group of people complaining about the non-native macOS UI (Including myself there).

I've been using Keychain for years now, and it's the only password manager a regular user will ever need imo.

It’s a matter of time that they get sherlocked

I’ve been on the release candidates and the OS is very stable and I haven’t found any major breakages or random crashes . Also, homebrew has been working great and lots of other open source software S

Same for me, mostly. I had bumped into problems with apps I use:

* Little Snitch needs a nightly build (status: fixed)

* SoundSource doesn't work (status: fixed)

* SpamSieve v2 doesn't work because Mail.app removed plugin support in favor of extensions. (status: SpamSieve v3 is out now and works)

* Marked 2 broke on docs shorter than 999 visible bytes (status: still broken. Workaround: BBEdit text filter to add a bunch of lorem ipsum)

* Bartender 4 doesn't work. (status: Bartender 5 is out and works)

The OS itself and 1st-party apps have been mostly fine from the first beta.

Good to know! I was debating whether or not I should wait for a *.1 update.

There were a lot of problems early on, but it quickly became stable for me

Have been using macOS Sonoma since DB1, this is probably the most favorite update of the OS that I had in a while:

1. Safari Profiles. I used this browser as my primary browser for a long time, but had to use another browser (Chrome) for work, to be able to separate sessions, etc. Since DB1 I use only Safari. And it works great.

2. Widgets. I have two monitors, and love that in one of them I can see widgets with some useful information. Just wish more apps were ready with widgets.

And a quick self-promotion. I am developer of the application OpenIn, and for macOS Sonoma I have added support for Safari Profiles https://loshadki.app/blog/2023-08-23-openin-4-1-beta/, this is the only (as far as I know) app that will let you redirect links to a specific Safari Profile based on various configurations you make.

I am pretty happy with how my M1 mac performs on Monterey. Would you share your opinion/guess on if I will feel a difference going from Monterey to Sonoma? I will go look through the details later. However, you are in the trenches so perhaps you have thoughts?

Would you share what widgets with useful information you have? I found it to be distracting and useless but perhaps missing something

I’ve been using your app for a year or two and really enjoy it. Keep up the good work!

FINALLY we've come full circle and can have widgets on the desktop again!

It's not like a revolutionary killer feature for me, but I just always preferred having information always in my "peripheral" instead of having to actively check a separate menu.

It failed before because system resources and horsepower were too low to make it work smoothly (&, let's be honest, because there were often poor UI choices going hand-in-hand with poor speed/smoothness). Plenty of ideas resurface, not because they were bad & people think they just might work, but because they weren't practical when they came up. There are plenty of faded-away applications & forgotten old OSes with ideas way ahead of the curve, needed speed and/or memory, & were laughed at & called stupid because of system limitations that will show up again in our systems, someday.

I haven’t seen my desktop in years…

Next thing I'm waiting for: Apple removes the useless Stage Manager "feature" (it's not a feature, it's a bug).

Wait when were widgets ever available on the desktop before?

Years ago they were on a separate dashboard screen but that wasn't the desktop.

This seems entirely new, not any kind of full circle.

Edit: just to clarify, I'm talking about on Macs, not Windows.

This time it can mirror widgets from iPhone though, which makes it much more useful.

god yes I miss Dashboard so much, it'll be absolutely hilarious if old Dashboard widgets turn out to work on the new widget thing.

I used to love the in depth reviews of macOS from John Siracusa. They aren’t the same since then, but I still tend to look to Ars for a full review before upgrading. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/09/macos-14-sonoma-the-...

I agree, no one does it like Siracusa did. But I do quite like the MacStories reviews of macOS by John Voorhees: https://www.macstories.net/stories/macos-sonoma-the-macstori...

Those reviews were the best. But you could tell they took a lot of time to write and prepare. Talk about thorough!

Since he has left his day job I was hoping he would start writing them again but that hasn't happened.

This is a year of work by a trillion dollar company? Steve Jobs would have kicked someone’s ass.

Feels more like a bug fix release. Feels more snappier on M1.

Plus they fixed the god awful auto switching for AirPods (phone to mac). Much more seamless

Steve Jobs released Snow Leopard. The ass kicking might have been to make something like Sonoma.

RTO productivity!

I’ve used Nativefier for years and am excited for this new feature described in the release notes:

> Web apps let you use any website like an app, complete with an icon in the Dock for faster access and a simplified toolbar for easier browsing.

The first app I enabled it for is Slack. The calling functionality doesn't seem enabled there but everything else looked and felt great. Finally, don't need to use all my cutting-edge tech's capabilities just to run a bunch of chromiums side by side.

Is that the PWA install feature thing?

Windows/Chrome has that feature. For example accessing https://github.com shows an install button, which creates icon for direct access and allows GitHub to have a dedicated window and notifications.

https://i.imgur.com/IjxsMpA.png

Are these separate instances/containers with regards to cache and cookies and such? I would love to have this because I have multiple Atlassian accounts I need to juggle and it is a pain today.

Like Fluid, kinda

Chrome has supported those PWA shortcuts in macOS at least several years...

First thing I did was set up Discord. 5x reduction in memory usage.

I hope it can do DisplayPort Multi Stream Transport. Currently I have to connect one screen through TB4, and the other one through HDMI despite the TB4 screen being able to daisy chain through DisplayPort.

One screen is a 32 inch UHD 60Hz monitor and the other one is a 24 inch 2560x1440 90Hz screen which is rotated by 90 degrees.

The hardware supports it fine, if you ran any other OS it'd work.

OSX refuses to support it because it eats into their monitor sales that use an alternative TB-based multiplexing protocol (which is only available on Apple devices, which are, well, not the world's best monitors, yet somehow the most expensive per square inch in a lot of cases).

All the various incarnations as far back as Ivy Bridge's TB2 should have working support in Windows and Linux. I have physically tested it on my MBPR from that era, and it worked, and I know of other people's newer OS-swapped Macs also working.

Lack of MST support in OSX has historically blocked 4k early adopters: 4k screens exported themselves as two logical displays due to 4k monitors coming out ahead of HBR2-capable controllers.

As for ARM-era Macs, as far as I know, they licensed a common ASIC block for their DisplayPort transceiver, which is also what AMD, Nvidia, and Intel have done. So, their hardware should still support it fine, but I have no clue if Asahi's work on the GPU driver has gotten MST to work.

It is a device connected at "up to 20 Gb/s x1" that converts to display port and then the displays are chained.

My records indicate it is this: https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MMEL2AM/A/thunderbolt-3-u...

I drive two 34UM88 with it.

I need to check how I have my four displays attached to my MacBook, because I know one is the HDMI, one is HDMI via the dock, but I swear two are connected via some form of daisy chain.

Most notable change to me:

> Notes: Users can view PDFs and scans of presentations, assignments, research papers, and more right inside Notes. They can also create links from one note to another to relate ideas and content.

Can I annotate on PDFs in Notes as well, obviating the need for Goodnotes and friends?

PDF Annotation is already a system-wide OS-level feature thanks to Preview so you should be able to.

Still hoping for the death of .DS_Store every macOS release.

Yeah. I don't know why they didn't just move it to an extended attribute as part of the APFS transition.

For those curious, yes Apple did fix the Sonoma firewall bug reported by Mullvad.

https://mullvad.net/en/blog/2023/9/22/macos-14-sonoma-firewa...

I was about to submit the same comment. This was the thing that would have prevented me from upgrading. I searched if it waa fixed. As it would have affected Little snitch and Mullvad VPN which is essential apps on my mac.

Yep, OrbStack's networking issue (similar PF bug) was also fixed in RC 2.

Does the built-in Apple firewall allow blocking of specific applications sending outbound traffic? I know you can block inbound traffic per application.

Have this affected other VPN clients as well?

I love the included high quality wallpapers. Apple's spent a lot of money filming these around the world and they serve as a nice blend of vibrant but without being so high contrast I can't see my icons.

I hope it finally sped up the slooow animation when switching spaces... but am not holding my breath...

I scanned the updates hoping for this exact same thing, but alas did not find it there. I am not comfortable disabling SIP to fix this issue personally.

Yabai can eliminate it entirely (after it's updated for Sonoma), if you don't mind disabling SIP.

If you're not concerned about losing other animations, you can enable the Reduced Motion setting in Accessibility preferences. It completely removes that animation.

X/Twitter running as a new "Web App" is pretty solid, and a huge upgrade from the older, unmaintained Twitter macOS app. Everything pretty much works as expected & feels native, though not sure if Dock icon badge counts are supported.

I prefer mastodon.social, and nitter.net (for when I need to see something on the old site)

FWIW it took 30 minutes for the update on my M2 Max MacBook Pro.

cmd+f'd this... I wish we had more of the simple need-to-know in one place like

--------------------

30 min average upgrade time on M1/M2 macs

--------------------

+ New features

- Removed features

--------------------

Fixed:

- Bugs

--------------------

Broke:

- Old feature

--------------------

Third Party Breaking Changes:

- Old software, feedback from dev with ETA

.1 update ETA: 6 weeks

Meanwhile Microsoft dropped their major Windows update today too, enabling me to ungroup taskbar items. Put THAT in your Apple and smoke it!

I switched to the beta of Win11 just so I could start using ungrouped taskbar items when I got tired of waiting for explorerpatcher to be updated. It is still a bit janky but I'm so glad it is there.

I don't get why they removed this in the first place

Update: simscitizen has confirmed below that 1Password 7 still works in Sonoma.

This will be the first macOS upgrade I won’t be doing for a while.

I’d like to try it out, but I need to figure out how to migrate off of 1Password 7 (standalone) first or to make sure it still works with Sonoma. (Edit: I'm expecting that 1Password 7 will break with the new OS and make me convert to their subscription product.)

Why does this upgrade require migrating off 1Password?

Does this not work well with 1Password?

Which features lacking from the passwords system in Sonoma keeps you in 1Password?

>Reminders: Intelligent grocery lists in Reminders streamline weekly trips to the store by organizing lists into sections and arranging them horizontally using a new column view.

Not much left to improve, I guess.

Hooray! Time to update to Ventura

> One-Time verification code AutoFill from Mail helps you quickly sign into sites in Safari, without leaving the browser.

I’ve used SMS for 2FA even though it’s vulnerable to hijacking because AutoFill from SMS makes it so easy. AutoFill from Mail will be a welcome alternative.

So it has access to your mail? That's spooky

First thing I notice is that the notch is now highly visible.

Even with a dark wallpaper or no transparency everything is the wrong shade to hide it.

I'll bet some MBA at Apple thinks it's really import to get that notch into everyone's face. :(

I guess now it's safe for me to install Ventura.

I never had issues with MacOS. And for the past 10 years I would install it as soon as a new version came out. A few years it would take a longer time for HomeBrew to have packages for the new version right of the bat, but today I did a brew update and brew upgrade and there was an upgrade for a package that had a version for Sonoma already. Pretty nifty.

We recently had a thread on HN about how bad iCloud Drive is. Well it struck again... I upgraded to Sonoma and then it promptly started re-syncing all few hundred thousand of my files. It's just not dependable. If I could do it all over again I would have invested in DropBox years ago... but I am so deeply in the Apple ecosystem including needing their Premier bundle for various family services it seems silly not to use this built-in service.

Not all can be upgraded to Sonoma. These pages help identify your Mac model and the newest compatible operating system it can be upgraded to:

MacBook Pro https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201300

MacBook Air https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201862

iMac/iMac Pro https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201634

Mac Pro https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202888

Mac Studio https://www.apple.com/mac-studio/

Mac Mini https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201894

An SDR content brightness slider for a non-apple HDR monitor/projector would be nice. Anyone knows if Sonoma has changes for this in stock?

Edit: Updated now and it seems like nothing changed :(. External monitor still becomes dim for SDR content if I flick on HDR, and no slider in sight to boost the intensity. There is a projector setting as a color profile, but that only changes the contrast and colors, but not the brightness.

If I'm not mistaken, I think you can change the brightness from the projector itself.

Was a bit surprised to learn that my MacBook Pro from 2017 isn't supported. It doesn't look like Sonoma has many new innovations though, so I guess I'm not missing out on much.

Operating systems feel like they've really stagnated in the past decade.

Is there any update to Music.app? 50% of my work on a computer is managing my local music library, and the app is extremely buggy since the rewrite in Big Sur. Want to make sure it doesn't become more buggy in this release.

I wish there was some way to entirely disable the macOS music player when it is not in use.

I am referring in particular to the visual element outlined in the red rectangle in the image below.

https://i.imgur.com/6uOjflM.jpg

It is a small thing, but as annoying in its way to me as the blank space in the Windows 11 Start Menu that remains when the advertisements displayed there by default are disabled.

Sorry if this isn't helpful, but you should consider a Subsonic compatible music manager. I use Navidrome hosted on a server that indexes my music on Dropbox.

I thought it was just me, albums getting duplicated with few one song in one and most in other.

What issues you face with music app ?

Sonoma UI feels great.

I'm also excited that they finally fixed Quartz Debug — the "Enable Vertical Sync" option finally works again when disabled.

My mouse feels snappier and there's noticeably less delay when moving windows around.

Quartz Debug. That’s a name I haven’t heard in a while.

You mean there is less delay when VSync is off, right?

Is that meant to say “disable”?

What is this:

* Screen Sharing: A new high performance mode in the Screen Sharing app delivers incredibly responsive remote access over high-bandwidth connections — enabling creative professionals to accomplish their work remotely.*

See "Better screen sharing": https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/07/five-cool-features-a...

I noticed this for the first time today, despite running the betas on my laptop (you need to connect to Sonoma from Sonoma, and I don't upgrade across the board).

I suspect it's the underlying tech that streams macOS into the Vision Pro. The "High Performance" mode lets you select 1 or 2 virtual displays, and always blacks out the host machine completely.

> Keyboard: Autocorrect receives a comprehensive update with a transformer language model, a state-of-the-art on-device machine learning language model that improves accuracy. A refreshed design makes corrections easier to fix and inline predictions quickly finish sentences. Dictation brings next-level speech recognition and the ability to move fluidly between voice and typing.

duck

Safari finally has the Chrome feature that I miss the most, ability to create separate app like experience for a particular website.

Nice, time for the yearly reinstall. I usually reinstall my MacBook whenever the new OS releases, it keeps my machine clean and fast.

I’ve never reinstalled a Mac. I literally don’t know how to do that. I’ve upgraded my M1 Air to Sonoma yesterday and everything seems to be working, just as it did on Big Sur, Monterey and Ventura. My girlfriend still uses my 2013 MacBook upgraded all the way from Mavericks to Big Sur, and used as a dev machine most of that time, without an issue.

Anyone know if there is any benefit to doing a reinstall vs just installing over current Ventura ? Is it for peace of mind, placebo?... Any quantitative comparisons ?

Used to that... but once I accumulated a heap of AU plugins I just couldn't bear the thought of spending a weekend reinstalling all that again (plus most of them won't work with the new macOS on day one).

Maybe time to upgrade to Ventura now.

Do you have a setup script to automate everything when you got a fresh system? How long does it take to start being productive after a fresh install?

You can keep the machine clean and fast without wasting time with reinstalls

I'm very glad they've fixed the performance issue with stage manager.

Before macOS Sonoma using mission control while having stage manager enabled would be very choppy. This seems to have been resolved and now I can finally use stage manager on macOS.

I guess I should finally upgrade to Ventura now that Sonoma is out.

It's quite telling that they had to invent “Game Mode”. The OS has become so sluggish that you can only run games with the humblest resource requirements.

And remember, never install the .0 version of a macOS on a mission-critical machine, or at least do it on a separate volume.

Anyone know what's up with CGPDFService and why there's so many instances eating up my cpu?

Same. I have 10 CGPDFService processes running for over 24 hours. Two CPU's are at 100%, and together they're using 15GB of RAM. I can SIGKILL but they come back after 5 minutes. Some people believe they're related to the slow-mo screensaver, which I disabled in my settings. It's only happening on my Mac Studio (which isn't logged in), and not on my Macbook Air (which I'm currently using).

they are really going hard on the saturated colors for everything these days

probably just me, but Sonoma sounds like a terrible name. I'm not familiar with the region in California (unlike its predecessors) and it just links to Carcinoma in my mind.

The iconic Windows XP photograph was done in Sonoma County, so the focus on new overhead views of Sonoma County which "crest that hill" is probably part of their tongue and cheek goal here.

the only thing this update borked for me is the safari kagi plugin

Huh. I'm using it without problems. Any chance you're using multiple Safari profiles (new feature in Sonoma) and it's not enabled in the profile you have active?

You can use xsearch instead and use a bang for kagy or Redirect Web for Safari.

Same on iOS 17

How do you get it? Not showing in settings.

https://mrmacintosh.com/macos-sonoma-full-installer-database...

Settings -> General -> Software Update, then Command-R if you still don't see it.

Seems strange Safari 17 is still not released for monterey.

I still don't understand why Apple is so bent on coupling application updates together with OS updates.

I just want the new changes to Safari and Notes while I don't care about the other changes, why not have Safari be a normal application downloaded from the App Store, like the rest of us pleebs have to do when publishing apps?

Most of the new app features are tied to OS-wide and OS-APIs wide capabilities, so they can't release "just Notes" without the OS-level frameworks that support those features. Take for example the PDF editing/support in Notes now. Or the Pages compatibility. Or Note widgets for the desktop, etc. Similar case for Safari, as they offer the webkit widget and JSCore as an OS-level APIs too.

Plus of course everything is tested together (which is what Linux distros also do. They update their apps for minor releases and bugfixes but not major releases for the same distro).

No need for a testing matrix (Does version X of app work with version Y of MacOS)?

Not needing to bundle dependencies that you know are provided by your OS environment?

Easy to investigate and fix bugs (You don't need a VM of every MacOS version on your machine)?

I'm not sure why Notes needs to be bundled with the OS update, but Safari isn't. You can download Safari 17 for macOS Ventura as well! Only the features that require integration with other apps (such as auto-filling 2FA codes from Mail) require Sonoma.

This method reduces testing burden by eliminating the combination of an old OS with new app.

They might also see it as an incentive - perhaps new app features act as driver for OS adoption.

Apple knows that you want the app updates. They want you to update to the latest OS for a variety of reasons (support, security, marketing, etc). They also know you paid thousands of dollars for your laptop and aren't likely to switch off of macOS entirely. So, they bundle the app updates to the OS update as an incentive.

macOS is a BSD; the whole point of BSDs is that the OS and "base system" are vertically integrated (and, usually, living in a monorepo together) so that a dev can one day decide to add a new API to replace one currently used by first-party apps, by just adding the code and then doing a big Search+Replace to fix all first-party apps to use it, all in a single commit.

A lot of the app updates are using new APIs that only exist starting with the OS update. Practical way to surface the new OS features.

Safari 17 is also available on Monterey (macOS 12) or Ventura (macOS 13).

I have a company-provided mac, I don't have an App Store account as it requires a phone number (and I'm not going to use my personal phone number to register it, it is not even allowed by policy) so I'm not going to update any app via the store

Cause then no one would update?

You realize OS innovation has ground to a halt when the first feature advertised in a new version is screen savers

Not really. Consumer behavior is not what technical people expect it to be. The main reason people update their phone OS is for new emoji. People love this stuff.

A few years ago, people here were complaining that MacOS was too unstable from all the new features, and that they wish Apple would just do a few feature-less stability releases.

Can't win.

It's a press release, advertised to customers, yes.

If you are a dev, look for the release notes.

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/macos-release-note...

Apple advertises the things that 99% of the people buying their products care about. That doesn't mean that things aren't changing under the hood.

I do wish they had a developer-focused version of these announcements, though. A lot of very interesting stuff usually never gets mentioned officially at all.

It’s their job to get people to click the upgrade button, so developers can rely on the new advanced libraries, and if the impression they make is “basic maintainance update with some colorful snazz” it is more likely to happen.

I upgraded to the beta version and am having a bug with an app that relies on WebKit so for me I wish I’d waited for the .1.

macOS has felt “feature complete” to me for years now. There is nothing I really want from an OS. I only upgrade for the security benefits and so I can keep all my systems on the same release, since new systems can’t be downgraded.

I actually appreciate not doing relentless “innovation” just for the sake of doing it. Microsoft does this by slapping new UIs on top of old every damn release. They often don’t even remove the old stuff, they just mask it with “innovation.” macOS does this too, but not nearly as bad. In Windows there are like 7 different layers of UI. You can click a half dozen times in the settings in Windows 11 and basically time travel back to Windows 2000.

I think the reason I don’t hate this stuff on macOS as much is because most of the changes are iOS-ification, and I use iOS so I somewhat intuitively know how to navigate the changes.

One of the last macOS versions had - click the mouse in the lower right corner and notes pop up. That's a new OS feature, really? I mean, I haven't really thought about it, but what's left for desktop OSes these days that they need to produce new releases every year.

You should see the dismal state of innovation in 'innovation is dead' comments!

The new screen savers were bumped up the priority queue because Apple has a bunch of QD-OLED computers coming next year and they're worried about burn-in.

This is not the first macOS release (well, maybe the first one where they called it "macOS") where the headline feature involved screens and widgets.

it's pretty much for putting a new wallpaper on the yearly hardware iterations so as to differentiate them.

Please, for the love of god, add native window snapping.

I’ve been using Rectangle Pro for more than a year now and it works pretty great. However, I found that I don’t actually use snapping that much (maybe I’m just not used to it). My most used features is actually the move and resize modifier keys, which let me drag/resize a window without having to go through the pain (more or less, depending on the window clutter) of having to move my mouse to that small area where I can do that. Seriously, it’s been such a game changer for me that I wish Apple would make this a built-in feature.

I moved from Fedora to MacOS a few months ago and its unbelievable the shortcuts apple added to make window management bearable and even still, it is impossible without an add-on. I refuse to believe anyone at apple thinks it is okay and is able to actually work at all.

I use the open source system tray app Rectangle for this.

I use sizeup. Small price to pay for great keyboard shortcuts to manage windows. https://www.irradiatedsoftware.com/sizeup/

after spending the last 2 months on desktop linux full time - I'd rather pay $12 and use macos than pay nothing and have a worse open source experience.

By some miracle, the seven-year old version of Slate continues to work with each new macOS update. I'm dreading the day that breaks, although I'm also worried about security vulnerabilities that might exist in it already.

Just because you don't want to have to install a thing, or is there something that native support would be able to do that third-party apps can't?

> Please, for the love of god, add native window snapping.

macOS has had built-in “window snapping” since 2015. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204948

And if/when you need more advanced window management, there’s a plethora of free and paid options.

What does "native window snapping" mean?

macos sodoma?

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