The base OS has mostly gotten worse actually. It's gotten a lot more anal about requiring signed binaries and micromanaging permissions. Dropping 32 bit means my steam library is now full of stuff that no longer works. OpenGL support is a deprecated afterthought meaning that a lot of OSS stuff either won't work or barely works. I recently updated my macbook pro but aside from some minor icon rearranging in the menu bar, I can't really tell the difference with last year's edition. Most of this review is about applications that Apple bundles with the OS that compete with third party stuff that I use and prefer. Couldn't care less about any of that. But I appreciate that it's nice for people buying into the whole Apple everything experience.

The reason I use macs is mainly because it's nice hardware with a unix like OS. Most of the tools I use are open source. I user Firefox for browsing, homebrew, docker, Intellij, VS Code, Darktable for photos, etc. I could easily switch to Linux or Windows and use the same tools. But macs are convenient. For now. It seems MS is much more on top of making Windows developer friendly than Apple is currently. It wouldn't be hard to do for Apple but for some reason they are not interested in that anymore.

I know many of the aforementioned issues have been fixed (to some extent) for linux. I'd be willing to give the Linux desktop another try but:

1. I really love my LG 5k external monitor. It's still hard to find hardware for linux that can drive it (especially laptops)

2. I got used to how fonts are rendered on macos

3. Keyboard shortcuts systematically different (CMD/meta vs Ctrl) make it harder to occasionally switch between the two systems. I know it sounds silly. But it's hard to remap those modifiers in a way that keeps everything else working the same.

Some examples of perks to be had because of giving in to the ecosystem..

1. Copy something on phone, and paste it on any application on Mac (and vice versa)

2. Instantly access all photos taken on iPhone for quick edits on Mac, or even to upload somewhere on a website(passport, dr.license and such).

3. Notes.app that is the same on iPhone and Mac because of iCloud. Notes has become my knowledge base.

4. I also have an iPad. Need to sign a PDF document? Right click and send to iPad where I can use my Apple Pencil. Save the document and it is instantly on my iCloud Desktop.

I can’t imagine the independent way of doing things again :-(

Similarly, you can right click on the Mac desktop and scan a document with your iPhone. Massive productivity booster for anyone shuffling lots of papers.

> right click on the Mac desktop and scan a document with your iPhone

Had no idea that was an option, until you mentioned it. Hiding right under my nose. Handy feature.

You can save your signature in the Preview app and then it's available to paste into any PDF.

https://support.apple.com/guide/preview/fill-out-and-sign-pd...

It's nowhere as polished and Just Works® as Apple's Continuity, but it's great for me with a desktop and laptop running Fedora, and mobile devices running LineageOS.

It definitely cost me a weekend for the photos thing, but at least I'm not locked in.

The whole concept is kinda ridiculous, but I never would have thought that it takes a Mac and iphone to do it.

There are also privacy implications to all that integration that honestly have me a bit wary of sharing any personal information with my work Mac.

Just to pick on another, the idea that anyone would be uploading photos of their passport and drivers license is a bit crazy. That said, I could easily with Ubuntu.

Is any normal user going to do that? Why the hell should I have to open a image editing app to sign a PDF?!

Why has no Linux PDF viewer added signatures as an option so far?

This is why I left Linux for MacOS

If it's not clear I didn't sign it in the technical sense, no one would know what to do with it, there's not a widely supported standard for that. These were business folks who wanted a png/jpeg image of the form with my scribble on it.

An image editor is perfect for that it turns out, and it takes two steps, three if you count save.

One is hardly a "variety of different apps".

Either way:

> It seems MS is much more on top of making Windows developer friendly than Apple is currently.

I see that too and it worries me. Not because I'm avidly anti-Microsoft, but because all the portents are we're heading back to the place where Microsoft dominates the desktop, with no practical alternatives. That wasn't good first time around and I don't see it being any better if repeated.

Microsoft is being very smart - and successful - in their strategy. Whereas the original Windows commoditised the underlying hardware, current "Windows" is commoditising operating systems. Hence subsuming Android and Linux into the platform.

"Windows", though, is really not the way to think about the platform. The deep integration of Teams into W11 is a pivotal step. Teams - with office365 - is the new "Windows" - the platform that Microsoft wants to dominate end-user computing with on the front end. With Azure on the back.

As a developer, I don't want to only have a single choice. But I don't see anyone meaningfully challenging Microsoft. Apple seems only interested in consumers. I wouldn't personally touch a Chromebook given Google's insatiable desire to monetise my every keystroke. Amazon seems only interested in the back end and, actually, that seems like strategic myopia. Microsoft really understands that owning the end-user experience is key. What future for AWS if all developers are using Windows, and it already "just works" with Azure?

So I'm not optimistic for the future. On the plus side, it's why I bought a laptop from System76, and paid ElementaryOS to use their distro. It's noise level compared to Windows/Mac, but that might just be what ensures there's a tiny crack of hope for desktop diversity.

>Microsoft really understands that owning the end-user experience is key.

Since upgrading to Catalina, I repartitioned my Mac to have a 1GB Windows partition for games, particularly 32-bit retro stuff. Other than my locked down work VDI, this is my first experience of seriously using Windows as a desktop OS in over a decade.

OMG is this thing horrible. Gah, my heart sinks every time I boot into it. Two Start Menus? A horrible, kafka-esque maze of settings and config in half a dozen different UI interfaces, all of them ugly as sin. One of my kids used it for a few days, and now I've already got some invasive search toolbar crap I can't get rid of, and I've shared a Mac with my kids almost all their lives (17 and 16). Ads built into the OS. The user experience on Windows is as godawful as it's ever been.

They've definitely upped their game on technology, WSL2 looks really nice. Power Shell looks pretty decent. They're making interesting moves with making .NET truly cross-platform. I can see the dev argument for sure, but the user experience on Windows is as much, if not more of an inconsiderate, abusive relationship as it's ever been.

Is this the same Microsoft that just decided to get rid of Local user accounts on Windows 11 Home?

yea, I think you are probably right. I was a linux user from 95-05 then switched to mac from 05-13 now back to linux. I'm well aware of the "this is the year of the linux desktop" joke, but honestly over past 4-5 years I think linux has reached the point that its fairly painless for 95% of common desktop usecases.

This has been Apple’s primary focus for the last decade, increasingly so each year. Apple has paid lip service to the education sector and business sector with managed accounts and profile based management but it is severely lacking and in many ways needlessly crippled. Apple is focused on the most profitable sector home / consumer market. They have exited the server market, exited itunes university, exited iweb, really excited anything self-creation or self-managed or self-hosted … in favor of ad friendly click to subscribe model and a locked down primarily content consumption device.

Total side note to this, but there are apps that only work on Windows like Adobe Creative Cloud. If some of these companies were to support Linux, you would see a huge migration off of Windows to Linux.

Adobe has steadfastly refused to support Linux. Even after years of Linux users saying they would gladly pay to use Adobe products on virtually ANY Linux OS. All to no avail. So here I sit, stuck between two operating systems. One I love, and needing the other strictly out of necessity to run a specific set of software.

Then they unified the teams that made their products for the different platforms and we ended up with the ribbon toolbar UI, which was a pure example of "good looking UI over functionality". I remember using excel with the ribbon toolbar, and it was really easy to put a funky pattern on my bar charts, but annoyingly fiddly to extrapolate data - ie. to actually use excel for science...

It's got to be said that if it was my company I would still have unified the teams. I probably would have ok'd the ribbon toolbar too, as I imagine that if I was running Microsoft I probably wasn't doing a lot of data analysis myself and I wouldn't know any better.

I really want to like Safari and I try every release, but I can't use it for more than a few minutes because the adverts that get through are just so unbelievably bad (to someone that isn't used to seeing any). The Apple-recommended strategy of using simple OS-level Content Blockers just doesn't cut it unfortunately. It's such a shame (to me) that all that developer effort on Safari is effectively wasted because of the relentless scurge of ads.

I understand why Apple decided to prevent the install of integrated Ad blockers directly in the browser because it's a security risk, but the reality is that the web is unusable without them. I really hope that there is an Apple Engineer reading this, and that some day Apple will find a solution :-)

Perhaps the solution is as simple as Apple curating their own approved blocking database similar to that used by popular adblockers and baking it into Safari in a secure fashion. Then again, that might open them to legal challenges.

I...don't see ads.

It's not as hyper-configurable as uMatrix, and there are certainly annoyances that don't get filtered out (first-party videos, "subscribe to our newsletter" overlays, etc), but it's got some decent user input, such that I could probably block more of those if I cared to spend some effort, and...well, I just don't see ads in my common usage.

Ah cool: The Adguard website says that they've just added M1 support. I think M1 support was probably part of the issue when I was last trying the available blockers.

On the first site - no ads. Whitespace where the ads would have been because content blockers can't interfere with the DOM and remove fragments.... but not bad.

Then I went to the NYT. Absolutely massive banner ad, full width of the screen taking up 25% of my screen real estate.. and then repeated again further down below the content. Looks utterly gross.

Now of course I don't have to use the NYT and could choose never to go to that site ever again, but this is the problem with Content Blockers that I'm talking about - they aren't enough on their own. So again, Safari is not usable with this approach.

Do you really see no ads, danaris? Perhaps you just don't go to these sorts of websites. Go and look at nytimes.com, using only AdGuard and Safari under macos and tell me what to see.

The claims on the AdGuard website are misleading... get this:

"No ads on YouTube - We'd wager you like watching YouTube and you don't like ads. The same for us! Luckily, AdGuard remover knows how to get rid of ads on Mac (even video ads)".

So I go to YT ... click on the first video on the homepage and there you go: advert... straight in. I mean I expected this, but again, the claims are just misleading. I mean perhaps that works on other OSes.

Whereas, with a browser-integrated blocking solution in Firefox - no video ads. I don't see how macos / iOS Content Blockers can't really be good enough when only inspecting traffic to the browser.

I can see that AdGuard is probably a decent product for most other current browsers, though. Thanks for suggesting it anyway.

The only changes I've noticed in the last few years are telnet, emacs, and ftp aren't included anymore and I have to install them manually. Changing to zsh was good though.

I wouldn't be surprised if they continue and eventually I find out that things like grep, awk, sed, uniq, etc are all slowly taken out.

It's best to either enjoy the walled Prison or escape. You can't really enjoy freedom and Apple.

However...

I'm not seeing how your comment is relevant to my statement that I don't want to use Apple's browser in its current state, when I can easily use many other browsers in what you've described as their "walled prison", and I do use them.

Whilst the situation may change for the worse in the future (resulting in a true walled garden), I can currently install anything I like on macos - you don't have to use the app store. This isn't iOS.

I don't feel abused by Apple at all. Conversely, I have been relentlessly abused by Microsoft in the past, however; (no choice in some old jobs)... and recent news stories concerning Windows 11 suggest that they're still at it. My experience suggests that things really aren't as bad as you're implying.

There is no particular reason to believe this wont eventually be the case on Mac

Seriously, you guys are relentless and exhausting! It might be time for me to bow out of Hacker News for good, if this sort of nonsense keeps up in the comments. Getting to be as bad for discourse as Reddit.

All I'm saying is that the browser-external Content Blocking approach Apple has chosen doesn't work very well and is disappointing in practice, even if it's a better proposition in terms of browser security. This currently has nothing to do with walled gardens on macos, whilst one can choose to use other browsers and add in-browser extensions that filter ads more effectively (as well as being able to remove DOM elements).

If you've got a helpful suggestion about Safari and the advertising situation, then please comment about that. As it happens, I'm not using Safari, but I remain interested in trying it again under macos, if Apple or someone else can offer proper ad blocking / ad removal.

Chrome is going that way too (it is proposed to remove permissions for integrated blocker extensions), but that _does_ have more to do with Google's nefarious ambitions with respect to advertising income, just as much as it is to do with security, I suspect.

This appears to be their plan. It has steadily ramped up since Mojave, and Big Sur was the inflection point. I have used OS X exclusively since 2008, and last year I made the choice to no longer upgrade any of my machines beyond Catalina. I'm slowly getting used to the fact that I won't be able to use Macs for my work in the near future, and am making adjustments to my workflow accordingly. I know this is probably the life-long FruitCo® fan in me speaking, but I'm genuinely distraught about this. My absolute favourite software platform in the world is being chipped away at to appeal to the lowest common denominator. Even worse, most people seem to be cheering them on for doing it. Really upsets me.

Apps shouldn’t be able to read my entire hard drive unless I give it permission. And the core OS should be immutable.

Also not sure what you’re talking about. Custom mouse drivers of course still work.

I had Firefox, Thunderbird, Pidgin and a few others running in complete isolation from the base system, and from each other. I even had a separate Firefox jail that was only allowed to get out via a Tor socks proxy to avoid leaks (more of an experiment than a necessity, to be fair).

Communication between jails was done via commonly mounted nullfs. I have also setup QoS via PF for each of them.

They were all running on the host’s Xorg, which was probably also the weakness of this setup.

It was a pretty sweet setup, but required quite a bit of effort to maintain, even tho I automated most of the stuff.

Now I use macOS, and I would like more control over what apps do what. I’m not particularly impressed with the direction of the UI (it also doesn’t bother me terribly), but I welcome the finer grained security control.

References:

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreeBSD_jail

[1]: https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=jail&sektion=8&for...

For one thing: I always require certificate logins on SSH. On Mac I used to simply change /etc/ssh/sshd_config to this effect, but since Catalina macOS reverts this with every update. Clearly they don't want me poking around in there :(

IMO if you offer SSH you should offer certificate-only access as well, either with a glitzy on/off button or with a config file change, whatever. But nope...

With Apple you get a lot of security for 'free', however you give up a lot of customisation in return, even in terms of security features.

You can override it with a commandline flag but that would mean changing the launchdaemon which is protected by SIP as far as I know. But I will have a look for that to doublecheck.

Or maybe I'll attempt to contribute the important parts to an established project, like ezjail [0][1], which seems to be quite competent at handling jails, but is specialized on running services.

Refs:

[0]: http://erdgeist.org/arts/software/ezjail/

[1]: https://www-legacy.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/han...

The resistance to them seems to be largely due to lazy developers: it would be EASIER if the system let a developer do whatever they want with a “trust me, I’m smart” justification. But we can’t design for the occasional safe and smart developer: we need to design for the sloppy ones and the malicious ones. The smart and safe ones can find a way to work within the constraints. As for lazy and sloppy ones who can’t adapt to the constraints - adapt.

OS security is generally a shit show anyway. I don't think it's bad to lock down the OS for most users, but it should still be possible for expert users to get expert access.

If there are security consequences, they should be trusted to learn how to deal with them.

Most will - and the rest will have bad experiences.

Last I checked, it still is—IIRC, you have to run some specific commands in Recovery Mode to disable the protections, but for "trust me, I'm smart" developers, that shouldn't be a problem.

Personally, I haven't seen any particular need to do that. I can count the number of times I've been blocked by SIP from doing things I wanted to do on one hand, and none of them were critical.

Unix file access permissions designed 50 years ago for multi-user shells are not adequate when dealing with potentially hostile applications accessing your data.

Today I'm more worried of a random App encrypting $HOME or hoovering up all my PII.

Now if some people just give access to everything instead of using ACLs, that is another matter.

Also, actively circumvent protection devices is proof of malice and possibly even criminal intent (remember DMCA?) so I don't see your point.

I don’t think so.

I've been trying unsuccessfully to childproof a Big Sur laptop for a 12 year old for some time now — disable access to some built-in apps etc. I have yet to figure out how, without resorting to disable SIP.

There is Screentime, but that's an unreliable joke which has caused us a massive amount of headaches on iOS due to unreliability, has very limited features and can only be protected by a 4-digit PIN.

"Configuring which programs a restricted user can run" is _such_ an elementary task for an OS that I cannot believe that recent macOS has no provisions for that. I _must_ be missing something.

Now how do I turn off the dozens of daemons that go everywhere on the internet without my control, uploading telemetry, etc? I've still not figured out how.

https://sneak.berlin/20210202/macos-11.2-network-privacy/

I’m not saying it’s bad. More security is great! My kids use MacOS. I’m grateful for it. I love iOS too. But it’s absolutely dumbing the OS down and making it less of a professional machine.

- docker - you need to be able to bind any folder

- IDE - you need to be able to edit basically anything

- office software beyond "I have some things in 'Documents'" - same

- python, ruby, any other interpreter - same

- brew, or any other package manager - same

etc. This simply doesn't work well for many developer workflows. I tried to use a dedicated app for per-app security control like that (can't remember the name anymore) - but for development it was a disaster. It just makes you click "allow" on a popup 10 times a day until you stop paying attention. Now, macos is not at that level yet, but the direction towards that is the complaint usually.

Consider: An interpreter needs to run homebrew which installs new app, but the same interpreter running a script for your project should not read anything apart from those project files. Same interpreter needs to update local packages via bundle and git, but a random script you run shouldn't be able to access your ssh key via git commands. This is basically impossible to achieve without large compromises outside of selinux right now.

So how would you apply this principle to the python interpreter or to a program that gets compiled to a new executable many times during development?

I like the idea of granting folder permissions to regular third party apps I install and use. I always wanted that and I'm glad Apple is moving in this direction with the Mac.

But contrary to regular apps, language runtimes and software under development do not have a specific purpose. The whole point of software development is to create and test arbitrary code. It is pointless to grant privileges to code that changes in arbitrary ways with every keystroke.

During development, privileges have to be granted to the developer account, not to any particular software artifact. I generally think that granting privileges to software and granting privileges to people each has its legitimate place. One isn't generally better or worse than the other.

..and, office?! Do you keep spreadsheets in system folders?

I keep spreadsheets in project folders. Allowing full writes to a project folder allows taking over the shell. See above.

Folder-level permissions are not sufficient. Sorry, I shortened it too much, but basically - there's almost no practical difference between allowing writes to a dev project folder and allowing writes everywhere. (It would stop some really trivial attempts) Your actual system folders are safe of course... but who cares about those really?

This is actually a feature I wish Windows had. On Windows you can enable "protected folders" and mark folders as protected. Applications cannot access those folders until you grant it.

On Windows when granting an app permission to a protected folder you grant it access to all of your protected folders.

You cannot grant a specific application access to a specific folder only eg. grant VLC access to your video folder only but will have to grant VLC permission to all your protected folders. In the default configuration this includes all your personal documents.

I wish Microsoft would make the protected folder feature just as granular as I can hear it is an a mac.

I'm tired of granting every other app accessibility permissions for reasons I'm not even sure of, tired of having to grant access to my documents. It's just endless hassle and I don't feel like I'm actually safer. Every new version seems to bring something like this.

The important part is that system integrity protection can be disabled.

- scroll bars have been removed (but they can be enabled again), not sure when this happened, Catalina maybe?

- Ok/Cancel style dialog boxes are vertically stacked (since Big Sur)

- the completely intuitive "Save As..." action has been replaced with "Duplicate" (at least in Apple tools), no idea what's the reasoning behind this is TBH, this wouldn't make sense on iPhones either

- more vertical space wasted for window chrome since Big Sur, especially in the Finder

- "Natural Scrolling" (can also still be reversed thankfully)

- ...and probably a few more subtle changes which I don't care much about

I am a long-time Unix user, hardly an iOS user at risk of feeling lost on Macs, and while I have immediately turned back on my scroll bars, I was delighted by "natural scrolling," and I love that "Duplicate" makes it more clear that my documents are being auto-saved, as they should be.

These things aren't "dumbing down," they're just changes from the way things used to be. Some are better, some are worse, and both of those are opinions. I think labeling them as "dumbing down" and sneering dismissively at people who use iOS is unseemly, speaking of opinions.

Just to take one example, scroll bars were turned optional with default off -- a simpler UX that's in favor of less visible user interactions for the sake of reducing user complexity is usually considered dumbing down.

Now, in Apple Land, far behind the Reality Distortion Field, they may refer to the reduction of user interaction options as 'beautification' -- but everyone else usually just calls it 'simplification', which is often (diminutively, perhaps) referred to as 'dumbing down'.

(in reply to "scrollbars only disappear without a mouse" , so what? That's still a reduction in user-visible information -- do touch users somehow not need to be told that an active view can be scrolled by anything other than visual gestures and cues? It's a nice pipe-dream, indicative design, but there isn't any design standard that suggests that may be or even could be the case.)

tl;dr : when a user loses visible indications, and loses possible interactions, it's not uncommon to phrase the state as being 'dumbed down'.

But seriously: What you call "dumbing down" I'd mostly rather call "making peoples' lives easier".

If I had to guess, it's because Apple wants to remind you they already have your data in their cloud, so saving anything locally is creating a duplicate.

But yeah the waste of more vertical space in Big Sur was really surprising to me, considering Apple also tries to minimise it in other apps like Safari. Weird.

> scroll bars have been removed

Awesome! Less clutter. I only care about my position in a list or its length when I actually scroll.

> Ok/Cancel style dialog boxes are vertically stacked

Looks sightly weird, but it enlarges click targets and makes a crucial dialog easier to see and use. I guess that makes sense.

> more vertical space wasted for window chrome

I generally like the new style, but yeah, they went over board here 1/3 or 1/4 less height would be about optimal.

> Natural Scrolling

Why would you move your finger against the direction in which you're scrolling?

I do have it disabled on my mouse, so I can more easily flick it to navigate down pages.

Sort of. When the the scroll bar (thumb) is the thing that you want to grab in order to scroll though — where is it?

Because I'm scrolling *down* to reveal new content towards the bottom of the screen. Why should I move my finger "up" if I want to scroll "down" ;)

For touch screens it makes sense, no doubt, but for touchpad and mouse it's debatable. It's clearly a personal preference though, I just hope they never remove the settings option.

Except when you don't realize there is more content to be scrolled in any direction including left and right because there is zero indication.

> Why would you move your finger against the direction in which you're scrolling?

It makes absolutely no sense with a scroll wheel and yet, by default it's on for them.

Does it fail to work properly on Intel Macs? All of my x86 Macs are far too old to try Big Sur.

EDIT: Oh, I see -- first-party Apple apps can stream unlimited data, tracking your activity. Egads...

https://sneak.berlin/20210202/macos-11.2-network-privacy/

Now I am ok. Catalina is the last Apple OS that I will run on my computers. Figma is in the browser. Blender is working under Linux perfectly. Windows is horrible, but if used properly for specific tasks it will perform. The big problem was to move away from Logic, but where there's a will, there's a way.

I am deeply thankful for all those years of Desktop Bliss, but Apple nowadays is marketing and shareholders driven company and this is the opposite of Jobs philosophy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4VBqTViEx4

I would caution you about pigeon-holing "Jobs' philosophy". I have observed that his philosophy often suited the circumstances he found himself in at various points in his fascinating career. ;-)

Frankly, I think that the design changes Apple has been making are very much in line with how Jobs would have done things.

Would he have made it exactly the same? No, certainly not; he was a different person who was very opinionated, so there would be differences—but the direction of the changes would, I think, be very similar.

However, I think it's also pretty irrelevant, given that Jobs himself explicitly said "Don't try to do things the way I would do them. Just do the right things." (Paraphrased from memory.)

And that is exactly what they did. The right thing they ( Tim Cook ) thought was to extract as much money from their product line and user.

I moved to Ableton years ago because I wanted a cross-platform DAW.

I spend more time on the command line now than I did 10 years ago on macOS and I don’t see that changing any time soon.

It’s been a three release arc, starting with Catalina, to Big Sur and now Monterey, that started off pretty rocky and seemingly coming to fruition with this release.

I’m using the public beta of Monterey as my daily driver and the transition couldn’t have gone any smoother, especially given it’s still months away from being released. So much better than Catalina which was ridiculously bad two years ago.

I also don’t agree this is the lowest common denominator; since iPadOS, iOS and macOS all have the same core operating system, it only makes sense there should be a baseline of functionality and that users are able to use the appropriate platform for a given task. But that doesn’t mean unfettered access to everything on the Mac; given the world we live in, that’s a a recipe for disaster, which is why we can’t have nice things.

For laptops, I've decided to go back to Windows after 15 years of using Macs; I replaced my 2013 MacBook Air with a Microsoft Surface Pro 7 running Windows 10. I'm happy with the purchase; the Surface Pro 7 is an excellent tablet, and Windows Subsystem for Linux has made using Windows more pleasant for me since I spend a lot of time in the terminal. For desktops, as of this moment I'm still using a 2013 Mac Pro as my daily driver, running Mojave. Eventually I would like to replace this with a Ryzen 7 or Ryzen 9 build that will probably run FreeBSD.

I'm keeping my eye on the Hello desktop (https://hellosystem.github.io/docs/) for FreeBSD, which appears to have the goal of providing a desktop environment that is heavily influenced by pre-Yosemite Mac OS X's Aqua interface. If this desktop gains traction, then hopefully there will be applications written that are conformant to Hello's UI guidelines, which are based on pre-Yosemite's Apple Human Interface Guidelines.

I lament the state of personal computing these days, and I wish there were more investment in desktop computing; I talk more about it here (http://mmcthrow-musings.blogspot.com/2020/10/where-did-perso...). If I were independently wealthy, then I'd work on this.

Hello desktop looks good indeed, though a but too early for me too. Right now I use KDE on FreeBSD. It's a bit too 'Windowsy' but Gnome is far too much 'new Apple', taking away user choice, so it's not an option for me.

I don't think these people will be fond of the sweeping changes made in Win11's UI that are dedicated to touch interfaces/tablets, and to the big new feature of running Android apps "natively" on Windows, along with an Android app store.

The ability to run Linux software is also mostly irrelevant, as MacOS/Darwin has largely been able to run those same programs natively since the beginning. It's never needed a POSIX compatibility layer -- it was built to support that functionality from day 1. e.g. Apple didn't need to build a compatibility shim to tunnel Wayland/X11 applications because Quartz was designed from the start to support that use case.

Windows 11 is a much better compromise of usability on both, and I like the idea of panes, it is sorta kinda heading towards a tiling window system which really appeals to me.

And the android thing and Amazon's involvement. Yeah a lot written about this and I don't agree with it either. But you don't have to use it.

Basically Windows 11 presents the opportunity to unify all the kernel and related OS infrastructure to pretend the road started with Windows 8 never happened.

The COM improvements done in WinRT, are ported into Win32 land, .NET Native goes away replaced by .NET 6 AOT, app sandoxing gets replaced by MSIX sandoxing, .....

Thus pretending that all those improvements happened as if Windows 11 suceeded Windows 7, and a couple of years from now, the UWP branch will be dropped from Windows SCM.

But this sounds like a good thing to me overall. I was never a fan of UWP as most of the apps were too tablet focused. The same issue I have with Mac Catalyst apps. Too dumbed down and basic. I know it's not technically necessary to do so, but these unified platforms seem to stimulate that kind of app. I was also very happy to see that live tiles are going away (It always takes some time for me to rid the start menu of them).

If Microsoft would adopt a more privacy friendly stance e.g. no telemetry or MS accounts required at all, I'd actually consider using it again for more purposes privately.

UWP dropped from WinUI roadmap and desktop focus,

https://github.com/microsoft/microsoft-ui-xaml/blob/main/doc...

While Project Reunion gets renamed into Windows App SDK

https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/2021/06/24/what-w...

C++/WinRT also does COM anyway,

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/uwp/cpp-and-winrt-a...

All Language/WinRT SDKs become /windows,

https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/2021/05/06/announ...

https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/2021/01/21/making...

Microsoft Game Development Kit makes it clear that for AAA titles, the Win32 + GDK model is the future, while WinRT APIs are being deprecated, and only community support is planned for UWP, not from Microft XBox teams.

https://github.com/microsoft/GDK

So one just needs to read between the lines, combine it with years of experience with previous technology reboots from Microsoft, and it is relatively clear where they are heading with Windows 11.

Naturaly when playing futurology games there is always a possibility of being wrong.

WSL isn't that great either. I've tried to make it so that I can SSH into my WSL instance from other machines - doesn't work. Windows seems to always assign a random IP address to the WSL instance, so I can't actually forward SSH traffic to it. Well, I can but it stops working after I shut down the WSL instance.

It's nice for playing games but I don't see the appeal in any other part of the system. Setting up GPG and Git on a Windows machine is also so much worse than on other operating systems.

Practically all of those features are stuff that are on its face a positive additions (OCR for photos, Shortcuts).

In the past it wasn’t at all obvious that iOS features would always also benefit Mac OS and often there was a time delay. Mac OS was neglected. During that past few years Apple seems to have created the infrastructure to bring all things to all platforms in a way that’s realistically doable for them and I think that is exactly the right decision.

The billion dollar monster iOS will always suck oxygen out of the room for Mac OS, so better for the Mac OS to optimally benefit from that billion dollar monster.

In terms of the UI paradigm Mac OS certainly does some weird shit and that’s always sad (though if we are honest with ourselves not exactly a new development – Mac OS always had some weird quirks and corners) but I don’t think that’s down to iOS or unification or anything like that. For Apple platform unification seems to mean bringing features to all platforms, not unifying the UI (and that’s the right call).

That doesn’t mean that the UI team for Mac OS can’t make wrong decisions. (One example: Mac OS notifications heavily rely on hover states, to an extent that leads to a poor user experience. This is an interaction model iOS doesn’t even have, so we can’t and shouldn’t blame that on iOS. This is all the fault of the Mac OS team and design direction and not a result of unification.)

1. The UI is a tool, not an art piece. It's something people use to get their job done. They don't admire its beauty and "cleanliness". Every time you move things around to "make it more aesthetically pleasing" or "refresh it", you're messing with people's muscle memory. People hate when their muscle memory is messed with.

2. The UI should be designed to make most of the input devices with which it will be used most of the time. This means huge paddings, large fonts, and borderless buttons have no place in a desktop OS.

Apple's initial idea about iOS being for touchscreens only, and macOS being for mice and keyboards only, was great. Now they're diluting macOS by allowing iOS apps to run on it, and by borrowing iOS UI patterns that were clearly designed for touchscreens.

Except I couldn't care less about Safari. There are better browsers out there anyway. And all the stuff that requires Apple servers is also irrelevant to me.

While I agree with you, no one does this as much/often as Apple and somehow people still praise it.

I am concerned they might at some point start taking things away. For now we still have Automator, but maybe not for ever.

I’ll start complaining when valuable MacOS features actually start to be pulled, not before. People freaked out when Microsoft brought out the Metro style UI in Windows 8, saying Apple was going to do the same thing on the Mac, well 9 years later nope, still no sign of anything even close to that drastic. The Mac is still very clearly optimised for mouse and keyboard, and the convergence is just about shared technology.

Shortcuts is buggy as hell in the beta, but it looks like it will be better than Automator when it's done - even for advanced tasks. What's most important is that third party apps actually support it, and that's way easier with Shortcuts.

Although, I'm pretty disturbed by the locked-down trend. Kernel extensions are pretty much dead. It does feel like a matter of time until it becomes as locked-down as iOS.

My 12.9 inch iPad is great for casual reading, browsing, casual games, drawing etc

My 13 inch Mac is great for serious work - programming, PowerPoint, excel, and anything slightly more complex that requires productivity.

Inside both of these devices is the same M1 processor, the same amount of ram, approximately the same screen size and I can add a keyboard to my iPad - so why should I carry two devices?

(I know I don’t have to carry both devices and I could just pick one, but some things are just better on the other side of the fence. My dream laptop is an iPad that can dual boot iOS and Mac OSX, but if a unified OS can be achieved without compromises that’s even better!)

I would generally prefer a desktop computer when I'm at my desk, so it would be great if I could use the iPad Pro I already own to achieve that last 5% instead of needing a laptop that almost never moves (that said, I mind a lot less since I ditched the hot, noisy 16" MacBook Pro for a MacBook Air M1).

Unfortunately, because my work is software development (specifically web development), I can't do any of it without also involving a "traditional" computer to do most of the heavy lifting. A lot of people will think it's stupid to want a way to spin up local servers on an iPad—a system which has never even claimed to entertain such capabilities—but the hardware is more than sufficient. It's a shame to not be able to use it to its potential.

If they are sensible about it, unification would be fantastic.

However I do think I'm an outlyer. Most people go all-in on an ecosystem. This will never work for me. I used to use iOS too until Android caught up and really started being good for power users. I already stopped using Macs privately because they became too locked-down. I always loved macOS (since 2004) for being a powerful POSIX system with a consistent UI and third party app support. But it's becoming too much like an "iPad Plus" now. Something like that has no place in my life, sadly.

I've found digital life is much better if you don't make the platform part of your identity. It's comforting when there's something familiar like bash or POSIX or your favourite open source software available out of the box. But it's better not to assume that when something's missing the platform is devoid of value, and to keep your vendor lock in as low as possible.

I've used macs because the frequency of terrible hardware is low (with huge caveat for og touchbar mbp) and work often requires targeting iOS. The unix bits help me get productive and the integration is good.

However I'm also perfectly ok with Windows. I quite like their text rendering and found powershell quite good. MSVC is very good if you want a heavy C++ IDE.

Also have had no problems using any common Linux distro - once driver stuff is figured out.

All the platforms have both ideological and technical problems, but I don't feel the need to rehash them here. What is most important to me is owning root and the trend away from that is disturbing. I'm ok with various sandbox and security technologies, as long as I have the master key when I really need it.

Having security shouldn't have to mean giving up the keys to our digital kingdom. Apple takes the easy way too much. Sure you can disable things like SIP but then you lose the security aspect completely as well. It shouldn't have to be all or nothing.

And we can see already where this leads to with iOS. Emulators? Nope, not permitted. Browsers with their own engine? Nope. No, the Mac isn't there yet but it's sure heading there.

The App Store, for instance, felt like terrible abandonware for years. Same with Messages. On Big Sur I can pretty much do everything I used my phone for now, which is what I personally wanted.

Further, a big chunk of this not-so-young generation of kids whose primary interactions with computers has been through iOS, iPadOS or ChromeOS (remember, ChromeOS is dominant in education, while iOS dominates teen personal devices). These kids will soon be entering college, and a lot of them will be buying Macs.

This seems to be a commonly espoused view about what’s happening to the Mac, but I don’t really see why. The UI has changed a bit, in some ways making it visually closer to iOS. But that’s basically it - core functionality is mostly the same. It’s not “dumber” or “smarter” - it’s just “a bit different”. Took maybe a day to get used to.

Location based do-not-disturb. Wifi QR code sharing. Bug free airplay. Sharetangle integration with social media. iCloud files experience. One-stop config for mail / calendar / notes.

All of these are gradually unifying. iOS always seems to have more useful OS features. The more of these that appear on my laptop, the better.

So far they are doing extremely well. I can hop between all devices mostly transparently. And the desktop has not been dumbed down; all interfaces have been improved on their target devices. I have got to the point my iPad is my go to machine now.

I think the bigger issue from Apple is that they seem to feel the need to change something visible and obvious about MacOS with every release, and while not all of those changes are in service of unification with iOS, many of those changes seem unnecessary at best, and counter-productive at worst.

The "unification" label is more a product of observers than Apple themselves. They have repeatedly stated explicitly that they have no intention of merging the two OSes, and I believe them on that. So far.

I was so optimistic when the iPad launched with iOS. It made sense that a tablet running a very limited OS would make the perfect user-facing device that could potentially free up OSX to evolve in a more developer/power user direction, since you could now offload the general purpose users to iOS.

Instead the opposite has happened and macOS has evovled closer to iOS, thus causing me to lose all hope in the future of the macOS platform. C'est la vie.

Hopefully Catalyst will disappear once SwiftUI matures.

The article dose say:

The good news is, for all the recent fears among Mac users that Apple might be attempting to collapse Mac, iPhone, and iPad into a single amorphous product, macOS Monterey still feels unreservedly like a Mac.

Music isn't even Catalyst, it's the old iTunes codebase with the non-music features ripped out and a fresh coat of paint.

It's possibly the worst app I use day-to-day on the Mac. It's crashy, buggy (I regularly have AirPlay playback just stop after 10 seconds for no reason), and because the entire Apple Music feature set is just embedded web views, it's also incredibly slow and janky.

Just gotta roleplay being a senior member of Apple where you know just how much money comes from iOS and just how many users there are of iOS vs their computers. iOS/iPadOS is the norm, MacOS is the weird odd one out.

What I want on my desktop: exactly that.

As long as MacOS supports powerful keyboard shortcuts, trackpad gestures, and the Unixy Terminal, I feel confident it will remain productive for me. I don’t really care about running mobile apps on desktop, but I also don’t really care about changes to window toolbars and aesthetics either. I learned MacOS once; I’m confident I can learn the 10% that is different from release to release.

Acme is an editor/terminal on steroids.

[1] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Convergence

If we as developers do not take part in this and dog food the universal OS, we will be blind to all the problems users are facing, and be unable to innovate in this marketplace.

If you want to sell to users, use what they use.

Quite hard to navigate the features.