"...Golden Gate needed a whopping 17GB more space on the M1 MacBook Air, thanks to a mandatory multi-gigabyte language model download that kicks in automatically the first time you connect a freshly restored Golden Gate Mac to the Internet."
This is the main thing stopping me from updating iOS/macOS. It's completely unacceptable to park a bunch of space on my devices right when that storage is at its most expensive it's ever been.
My phone is on iOS 26, and even with Apple Intelligence turned off, there's ~13GB made unusable. My phone ran out of space while recording a bike trip, and yet the model I have no use for remained.
Phones should have separate storage for their OS so that when you buy a specific phone with specific storage it actually is that much storage available to the user
Yes, the disrespect Apple/Google/MS has for their users (on equipment they have purchased!) is palpable. They seem to have a real sense of entitlement these days.
It used to be universally accepted that losing or corrupting user data was a (if not THE) cardinal sin in development.
In many ways we get what we tolerate, but the lack of viable alternatives in some spaces (esp cellphones and TVs) makes it very hard to hold the big players to any kind of account economically. At least no one is holding a gun to our heads to use MacOS or other proprietary systems on our desktops/laptops/servers for the most part.
If there is no way to remove this 17 GB model, then the OS is simply not for me anymore. I'll stick with Sequoia for another year and use it until it stops receiving security updates and then I'm back to being a full-time Linux user.
I dread new macOS releases, because it signifies one year less support for my current version (I'm on Sequoia now, having jumped from Ventura) being supported.
Every new version wrecks my workflow a little. macOS 28 will partially remove Rosetta 2, which means that I'll need to find replacements for some of the ancient Intel apps that never got updated to Apple Silicon.
I'm stuck trying to figure out what new stuff they could add. Sidecar was neat, but I never need it. I'm very happy on Cinnamon on Linux, which is probably less featured than KDE (haven't daily driven it to confirm), which just confirms I don't actually need or want user-facing new features. I need stability.
I think Apple realise this. There are no genuine new OS features to be added, so they just shuffle things around so that things are changing and thus seem fresh and hip. For anyone who cares about stability and doesn't want to relearn everything they shuffle around, this is nothing but a negative, but Apple et al. have no other levers to pull (well, there's the AI lever, but that's also generally not a positive in and of itself).
Maybe there are new OS features that could be useful, but creating and integrating them in a way that's actually helpful is just such an ordeal that nobody will do it.
Early on with OSX I would update early because the new features in the OS were truely interesting (AFP, Dtrace, Spotlight, Early Siri, Messages sync with iPhone). Yes all very developer oriented, but I am a developer and that's primarily what I use my machines for. Releases like Snow Leopard and Tiger were full of novel features. Now I find most of the copy is dedicated to things I couldn't care less about like generative AI images or questionable redesigns of the UI.
I would love a review of the new developer and OS level features for macOS releases. The WWDC content is close to unwatchable, it never goes into enough depth and the video only delivery is not the primary way I want to consume technical content. Give me the cool highlights of the virtualisation framework, what still works with Dtrace , explain the infernal code signing permissions system, etc.
So far I've kept to Sequoia as the least annoying version, and avoided the Liquid Glass rounded corners mess.
Cinnamon was what I used before KDE, I like KDE a great deal but I also liked Cinnamon a great deal, if I had to go back it wouldn't cause me any issues, I only switched for Wayland support.
So if you are happy on Cinnamon stay there (and it's Wayland support has caught up a lot).
They both do an excellent job of not causing me pain, working the way I want and respecting me as a user, that's what a DE should be, if I have to consider the DE more than in passing it's failing at been a DE.
On some level, this is probably something your terminal emulator should handle, just as your web browser should handle a mess of 22 tabs, but I don't think we've really come up with good solutions there either. It's hard to implement features nobody's though of.
FWIW I use aerospace and break up those 22 windows into ~4-6 windows with ~3-5 tabs each, then move each window to a different virtual workspace that I switch to with option + hotkey like opt+1, opt+2, opt+3 or even opt+D and so on
Window management (and indeed, desktop environments in general) are rather subjective I think. As someone who's been using Macs in some capacity since 1996 I'd be upset if macOS suddenly resembled a traditional Windows desktop or tiling WM thing, and the absence of Mac-like desktops on Linux (no, GNOME and elementary/Pantheon are not that) is one of the primary factors keeping me from switching.
Window management got better in Mac os but only recently with the addition of window snapping. You could do it before, but you had to drag from the green stoplight button which was an annoying mouse target vs the entire top bar.
Personally I do like the windows approach where there's a bar at the top with a few preselected zones you can use that shows up when dragging a window but the state of things on Mac os now is fine enough that things like that can reasonably be left up to extensions.
What exactly do you miss about the Mac desktops when using gnome's? For me the only thing I've noticed is lack of independent desktops per monitor though Windows also suffers that deficiency.
> What exactly do you miss about the Mac desktops when using gnome's? For me the only thing I've noticed is lack of independent desktops per monitor though Windows also suffers that deficiency.
No independent desktops is indeed a big one and irks me just as much under Windows (which somehow in 2026 still can't even set per-monitor desktop pictures without glueing images together in Paint).
On a whole, GNOME is just too simplistic. Where the Mac Way™ (especially in the 2000s) is thoughtfully implemented progressive disclosure of advanced features, the GNOME Way™ is to check if they make the cut for the app's toolbar or "junk drawer" hamburger menu and if not, strip the feature entirely.
It almost feels like they took a tablet OS and then adapted it somewhat to desktop use. That's the vibe I get from the DE itself as well as from the barebones (if pretty) apps that its community tends to produce. It's not as locked down as a tablet OS obviously — there's full fat Linux sitting underneath after all — but I'm always fighting it trying to turn it into a proper desktop experience with GNOME Tweaks and extensions (which constantly break).
An easy way to see the difference in philosophies is to compare the number of settings surfaced in GNOME Settings to that of the settings app for any Mac OS made in the past 20 years. GNOME Settings offers relatively little to tweak where System (Preferences|Settings) has a list that's closer (though not as long) to that of the KDE Settings app.
And of course, no global menubar. KDE lets users enable this but unfortunately many apps do not populate it.
> It almost feels like they took a tablet OS and then adapted it somewhat to desktop use.
GNOME is designed to be touch-agnostic, which makes better use of padded UIs than macOS 11+ does. With a rumored touchscreen Macbook still coming down the line, I think GTK and the GNOME developers skated to where the puck was headed. macOS and iPadOS are both constrained for touchscreen users. GNOME is kinda the perfect UI for where Apple sees hardware converging.
I don't think GNOME can adopt any more macOS idiosyncrasies without being a worse holistic experience. The Overview/search accelerator on the Super key is faster than Spotlight search. The desktop switcher is a better-supported use of the menubar than forcing an unsupported global cluster. GNOME could try to cram these round pegs into their square hole, but they know it wouldn't improve things.
Someone who does need a window system can use many of the hundreds of tools available, or use something custom. Regular uses don't really care about window management systems.
I've never had so much stuff break than with the macOS updates. I can get some of it, like drivers or programs hooking onto OS features that change. But so much "normal" software just breaks. Or can't even run without the dev recompiling for the new ui kit version or something. While on Windows I can run any random old tool not touched in two decades and it'll work.
Snow Leopard was solid, but when I went back and used it I was surprised by how I missed some little bits of polish that'd been added since.
My ideal would probably be Mavericks 10.9.5 with the Leopard/Snow Leopard 2D grid virtual desktop model hacked back in. The linear version of Spaces that's been in place since 10.7 is needlessly simplistic.
Yesterday I managed to update a 2015 MacBookAir7,2 from El Capitan (last update Sep. 2015) to Sonoma (last update Aug 6th 2026). I was excited when it finally worked.
Thanks to the OpenCore Legacy Patcher who show that not supporting old devices is a choice made by Apple.
OCLP is excellent but it's all coming to an end for Intel Macs unfortunately. Even Homebrew just dropped the ball a few days ago (this is the final draw for me, I'll keep a Sequoia partition but my MBP2015 daily drives on NixOS + GNOME)
Snow Leopard is right up there with System 7.5.3 for me. I’m happy with their current OS trends compared to the flat OS trend of the past decade. They definitely need detail work and I think they default to turning features on that I would prefer off. Many of the new features I don’t use come off as a spastic GUI.
I've been pleasantly surprised with Golden Gate. It's fresh-looking, works well, got rid of a lot of the ugly flat stuff they did over the last few releases (pre-Tahoe), supports more hidpi modes that make my work machine better...
But honestly, I don't think the average person should feel excitement for an OS release; boring means it just works and they don't have to learn a bunch of new features and different ways of doing things.
10.5 Leopard because 10.4 Tiger was my first interaction with Mac OS X and it blew me away. I couldn't wait to see what was next and how they could improve upon perfection.
If only KDE actually paid attention to UX and maybe cared about the looks and consistency a bit more. I'm sorry for being blunt but their visual design people's have no taste...
There's little margins and whitespace and this bothered me like hell before making the switch. It's funny, now I kind of like it. A lot is happening too. The latest Plasma had a very high degree of polish IMO.
It's far more consistent than Windows 11, but you have to pick Qt/KDE software, not GTK/GNOME for that to be true. I always choose the more KDE native option.
Like a decade for me now. I don’t read or watch anything anymore. I just buy whatever the new version is when I need it and live with it. I yearn for something truly exciting, groundbreaking, and accessible (price) from Apple. iPod era was so dope.
Debian+KDE here. It's what I use to get away from OS excitement. I miss the 90's when nobody ever updated anything, and if they did it was on purpose and not something that happened behind your back.
For example, the other day Google "updated" the clock/alarm/timer app on Android with pointless and annoying changes. A clock app does not need an update, ever.
"But..." No! /usr/share/zoneinfo handles that. Stop it.
I've found today after going to MacOS27 (I skipped 26 fully) that Chrome extensions don't load properly. They're super, super slow. I've found one or two other bug reports of this from older Dev builds but that's it. Bizarre. Time to flip back to Safari I suppose.
Hmm, I remember when Ars Technica macOS reviews were the gold standard. This one isn't bad, but I miss having more in-depth information about the improvements.
In my opinion, the details here complement the Ars Technica article nicely:
Will I get prompted to give Chrome permissions to the Local Network on every update? This is literally the one feature I'd like from Apple because I'm happy with everything else. The update looks cool, but nothing I actually want/need.
So happy they’ve finally added Ethernet status to the menu bar. It has always bugged me there wasn’t an easy way to quickly check if my Mac was using Ethernet or not
A few macOS betas ago, a bunch of sites started failing to play video for me in Safari. Disney+, Netflix, YouTube and some other sites will sit at a black screen for a few seconds and then give me an error. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes certain videos will reliably fail while others reliably work fine. I thought this was related to Safari's autoplay protections, but I tried giving permission to autoplay all videos and that doesn't seem to change anything. Not sure if that fits the definition of a Snow Leopard update. If so, Apple needs at least a few more Snow Leopard updates at this rate. I'd also like to see them fix the issue where Liquid Glass uses a downscaled background image even at the most transparent setting. (Except for Siri AI which they seem to have added a special exception for, exactly because the pre-downscaling is super ugly)
All of my stuff updated to the 27 versions today. During indoor cycling class, I kept getting health alerts on my watch about high heart rate while stationary. Despite currently having the very same apple watch tracking my indoor cycling workout.
heart recovery is one of several headline new features they mention on first run (and in app ref info) will calibrate over time
as often the case when Apple makes its move, their implementations -- while late compared to e.g. Garmin which has had them for years -- purport to be leading accuracy on these features among wearables
I imagine the author saw this release as "macOS Tahoe but not sucky"
I liken it to Windows Vista and Windows 7. Although fundamentally similar operating systems under the hood, Windows 7 smoothed out Vista's kinks and brought forth additional polish.
That may have been true in the past, and I usually wait for the first point release, but macOS and iOS 27 seem to be a definite improvement. My 5 year old phone is much snappier!
> I’m not a particularly big fan of generative AI. I do not use and have never used it at any stage of the research, outlining, or writing process for any article I’ve ever written, except for the times when I’m testing it so I can write about it.
This is wild from a "tech" site. I used to read their articles fairly religiously, but this bent by their writers and commenters is really telling, and a signal to start looking elsewhere.
It's not to write the article. I would hope they don't do that; I wouldn't want to read it.
But I do want them using it to help them research, find interesting contrary views on a subject, gut-check assertions (how many weirdly wrong statements in articles would have been caught by feeding it to an LLM and asking it to question unfounded or incorrect claims?), check technical accuracy of things outside the writer's core domain, track interview transcripts, search/summarize across prior work, do data exploration of public/government reports. Etc. It's a very empowering tool for journalism!
Instead, it's become a religious issue that is more or less at the level of "one drop" theory.
What does it tell you? It gives me much more confidence in their output tbh. Reading generated text is unpleasant; feels like mediated and averaged-out humanity.
Continuing the quote gives more context, which I agree with:
"The obviously AI-generated flyers that come home from school with my kid or that get circulated around neighborhood groups strike me as benign but deeply tacky; the kinds of AI-generated images that get passed around by politicians online don’t even have the benefit of being benign.
More than anything, I’m just tired of seeing it everywhere, tired of being on the lookout for it, tired of it polluting every stream of information I have access to. Wasting time actively trying to avoid auto-generated slop is now a daily fixture of my life."
Obviously, one should be able to entertain an idea without necessarily accepting it, and much like any tool that can be misused, just because some malign actor (or dumb actor) uses it "wrong" doesn't mean you should also not use it.
It costs money, but I've been enjoying my Pangram subscription for this. Saves me slop on the internet and confirms whether or not my colleagues' words are what i'm reading or not.
"...Golden Gate needed a whopping 17GB more space on the M1 MacBook Air, thanks to a mandatory multi-gigabyte language model download that kicks in automatically the first time you connect a freshly restored Golden Gate Mac to the Internet."
This is the main thing stopping me from updating iOS/macOS. It's completely unacceptable to park a bunch of space on my devices right when that storage is at its most expensive it's ever been.
My phone is on iOS 26, and even with Apple Intelligence turned off, there's ~13GB made unusable. My phone ran out of space while recording a bike trip, and yet the model I have no use for remained.
Phones should have separate storage for their OS so that when you buy a specific phone with specific storage it actually is that much storage available to the user
[delayed]
17GB when a large majority of the devices sold for it shipped with 128GB of storage is wild. You should be able to opt out of it during install.
Yes, the disrespect Apple/Google/MS has for their users (on equipment they have purchased!) is palpable. They seem to have a real sense of entitlement these days. It used to be universally accepted that losing or corrupting user data was a (if not THE) cardinal sin in development. In many ways we get what we tolerate, but the lack of viable alternatives in some spaces (esp cellphones and TVs) makes it very hard to hold the big players to any kind of account economically. At least no one is holding a gun to our heads to use MacOS or other proprietary systems on our desktops/laptops/servers for the most part.
If there is no way to remove this 17 GB model, then the OS is simply not for me anymore. I'll stick with Sequoia for another year and use it until it stops receiving security updates and then I'm back to being a full-time Linux user.
Same. It feels pretty messed up to lose that much storage on a 256gb device.
You can always buy more iCloud storage!!!
> right when that storage is at its most expensive it's ever been.
How easily we forget the exponential improvements of decades past...
When was the last time you felt excitement for a macOS release?
Me? Snow Leopard.
When I transitioned to Linux I rediscovered OS excitement. I'm on KDE Plasma now and every update has exciting features that serves my interests.
I dread new macOS releases, because it signifies one year less support for my current version (I'm on Sequoia now, having jumped from Ventura) being supported.
Every new version wrecks my workflow a little. macOS 28 will partially remove Rosetta 2, which means that I'll need to find replacements for some of the ancient Intel apps that never got updated to Apple Silicon.
I'm stuck trying to figure out what new stuff they could add. Sidecar was neat, but I never need it. I'm very happy on Cinnamon on Linux, which is probably less featured than KDE (haven't daily driven it to confirm), which just confirms I don't actually need or want user-facing new features. I need stability.
I think Apple realise this. There are no genuine new OS features to be added, so they just shuffle things around so that things are changing and thus seem fresh and hip. For anyone who cares about stability and doesn't want to relearn everything they shuffle around, this is nothing but a negative, but Apple et al. have no other levers to pull (well, there's the AI lever, but that's also generally not a positive in and of itself).
Maybe there are new OS features that could be useful, but creating and integrating them in a way that's actually helpful is just such an ordeal that nobody will do it.
Early on with OSX I would update early because the new features in the OS were truely interesting (AFP, Dtrace, Spotlight, Early Siri, Messages sync with iPhone). Yes all very developer oriented, but I am a developer and that's primarily what I use my machines for. Releases like Snow Leopard and Tiger were full of novel features. Now I find most of the copy is dedicated to things I couldn't care less about like generative AI images or questionable redesigns of the UI.
I would love a review of the new developer and OS level features for macOS releases. The WWDC content is close to unwatchable, it never goes into enough depth and the video only delivery is not the primary way I want to consume technical content. Give me the cool highlights of the virtualisation framework, what still works with Dtrace , explain the infernal code signing permissions system, etc.
So far I've kept to Sequoia as the least annoying version, and avoided the Liquid Glass rounded corners mess.
Cinnamon was what I used before KDE, I like KDE a great deal but I also liked Cinnamon a great deal, if I had to go back it wouldn't cause me any issues, I only switched for Wayland support.
So if you are happy on Cinnamon stay there (and it's Wayland support has caught up a lot).
They both do an excellent job of not causing me pain, working the way I want and respecting me as a user, that's what a DE should be, if I have to consider the DE more than in passing it's failing at been a DE.
Something to improve my mess of ~22 active terminal windows comes to mind.
Have you tried other 3rd party terminal applications? (Iterm, ghostel, CMux)
They have many quality of life improvements over the basic terminal.
Christ.
On some level, this is probably something your terminal emulator should handle, just as your web browser should handle a mess of 22 tabs, but I don't think we've really come up with good solutions there either. It's hard to implement features nobody's though of.
Terminal should be responsibility of OS. God knows it’s deep enough. It could be so much better—and it matters!
I know expecting UX innovation from Apple is laughable, but there was a time…
FWIW I use aerospace and break up those 22 windows into ~4-6 windows with ~3-5 tabs each, then move each window to a different virtual workspace that I switch to with option + hotkey like opt+1, opt+2, opt+3 or even opt+D and so on
A functioning window system would drastically enhance OSX productivity.
Window management (and indeed, desktop environments in general) are rather subjective I think. As someone who's been using Macs in some capacity since 1996 I'd be upset if macOS suddenly resembled a traditional Windows desktop or tiling WM thing, and the absence of Mac-like desktops on Linux (no, GNOME and elementary/Pantheon are not that) is one of the primary factors keeping me from switching.
Window management got better in Mac os but only recently with the addition of window snapping. You could do it before, but you had to drag from the green stoplight button which was an annoying mouse target vs the entire top bar.
Personally I do like the windows approach where there's a bar at the top with a few preselected zones you can use that shows up when dragging a window but the state of things on Mac os now is fine enough that things like that can reasonably be left up to extensions.
What exactly do you miss about the Mac desktops when using gnome's? For me the only thing I've noticed is lack of independent desktops per monitor though Windows also suffers that deficiency.
> What exactly do you miss about the Mac desktops when using gnome's? For me the only thing I've noticed is lack of independent desktops per monitor though Windows also suffers that deficiency.
No independent desktops is indeed a big one and irks me just as much under Windows (which somehow in 2026 still can't even set per-monitor desktop pictures without glueing images together in Paint).
On a whole, GNOME is just too simplistic. Where the Mac Way™ (especially in the 2000s) is thoughtfully implemented progressive disclosure of advanced features, the GNOME Way™ is to check if they make the cut for the app's toolbar or "junk drawer" hamburger menu and if not, strip the feature entirely.
It almost feels like they took a tablet OS and then adapted it somewhat to desktop use. That's the vibe I get from the DE itself as well as from the barebones (if pretty) apps that its community tends to produce. It's not as locked down as a tablet OS obviously — there's full fat Linux sitting underneath after all — but I'm always fighting it trying to turn it into a proper desktop experience with GNOME Tweaks and extensions (which constantly break).
An easy way to see the difference in philosophies is to compare the number of settings surfaced in GNOME Settings to that of the settings app for any Mac OS made in the past 20 years. GNOME Settings offers relatively little to tweak where System (Preferences|Settings) has a list that's closer (though not as long) to that of the KDE Settings app.
And of course, no global menubar. KDE lets users enable this but unfortunately many apps do not populate it.
> It almost feels like they took a tablet OS and then adapted it somewhat to desktop use.
GNOME is designed to be touch-agnostic, which makes better use of padded UIs than macOS 11+ does. With a rumored touchscreen Macbook still coming down the line, I think GTK and the GNOME developers skated to where the puck was headed. macOS and iPadOS are both constrained for touchscreen users. GNOME is kinda the perfect UI for where Apple sees hardware converging.
I don't think GNOME can adopt any more macOS idiosyncrasies without being a worse holistic experience. The Overview/search accelerator on the Super key is faster than Spotlight search. The desktop switcher is a better-supported use of the menubar than forcing an unsupported global cluster. GNOME could try to cram these round pegs into their square hole, but they know it wouldn't improve things.
Someone who does need a window system can use many of the hundreds of tools available, or use something custom. Regular uses don't really care about window management systems.
I've never had so much stuff break than with the macOS updates. I can get some of it, like drivers or programs hooking onto OS features that change. But so much "normal" software just breaks. Or can't even run without the dev recompiling for the new ui kit version or something. While on Windows I can run any random old tool not touched in two decades and it'll work.
I dread updating Macs.
Well, it is easy to be excited on a system that is lagging on features.
Using macOS and KDE for almost the same time (~20 years), I still find that I need yet another app on macOS for a standard KDE feature.
Interesting observation, that is.
Like what?
Snow Leopard was solid, but when I went back and used it I was surprised by how I missed some little bits of polish that'd been added since.
My ideal would probably be Mavericks 10.9.5 with the Leopard/Snow Leopard 2D grid virtual desktop model hacked back in. The linear version of Spaces that's been in place since 10.7 is needlessly simplistic.
Yesterday I managed to update a 2015 MacBookAir7,2 from El Capitan (last update Sep. 2015) to Sonoma (last update Aug 6th 2026). I was excited when it finally worked.
Thanks to the OpenCore Legacy Patcher who show that not supporting old devices is a choice made by Apple.
OCLP is excellent but it's all coming to an end for Intel Macs unfortunately. Even Homebrew just dropped the ball a few days ago (this is the final draw for me, I'll keep a Sequoia partition but my MBP2015 daily drives on NixOS + GNOME)
Yes. If anyone reads this in the future: you need to clone the brew repo and use v7.0.2 and install it manually.
Snow Leopard is right up there with System 7.5.3 for me. I’m happy with their current OS trends compared to the flat OS trend of the past decade. They definitely need detail work and I think they default to turning features on that I would prefer off. Many of the new features I don’t use come off as a spastic GUI.
I've been pleasantly surprised with Golden Gate. It's fresh-looking, works well, got rid of a lot of the ugly flat stuff they did over the last few releases (pre-Tahoe), supports more hidpi modes that make my work machine better...
But honestly, I don't think the average person should feel excitement for an OS release; boring means it just works and they don't have to learn a bunch of new features and different ways of doing things.
10.5 Leopard because 10.4 Tiger was my first interaction with Mac OS X and it blew me away. I couldn't wait to see what was next and how they could improve upon perfection.
100% Snow Leopard, followed closely by Mavericks.
Whatever the last one you had to install with a CD/DVD was.
So Snow Leopard, as parent poster had said.
If only KDE actually paid attention to UX and maybe cared about the looks and consistency a bit more. I'm sorry for being blunt but their visual design people's have no taste...
There's little margins and whitespace and this bothered me like hell before making the switch. It's funny, now I kind of like it. A lot is happening too. The latest Plasma had a very high degree of polish IMO.
It's far more consistent than Windows 11, but you have to pick Qt/KDE software, not GTK/GNOME for that to be true. I always choose the more KDE native option.
Like a decade for me now. I don’t read or watch anything anymore. I just buy whatever the new version is when I need it and live with it. I yearn for something truly exciting, groundbreaking, and accessible (price) from Apple. iPod era was so dope.
When Siracusa wrote the last review.
Mavericks maybe?
>OS excitement
Debian+KDE here. It's what I use to get away from OS excitement. I miss the 90's when nobody ever updated anything, and if they did it was on purpose and not something that happened behind your back.
For example, the other day Google "updated" the clock/alarm/timer app on Android with pointless and annoying changes. A clock app does not need an update, ever.
"But..." No! /usr/share/zoneinfo handles that. Stop it.
I've found today after going to MacOS27 (I skipped 26 fully) that Chrome extensions don't load properly. They're super, super slow. I've found one or two other bug reports of this from older Dev builds but that's it. Bizarre. Time to flip back to Safari I suppose.
When are they gonna make "macOS South Central"?
At the rate we're going, it would be "macOS America"
Don't give him ideas...
Don't be a menace.
It comes between macOS Fresno and macOS Calexico.
how to disable gen ai features
https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-250012366
it used to be one toggle
Read the post. It doesn't look possible. Motives unknown.
Hmm, I remember when Ars Technica macOS reviews were the gold standard. This one isn't bad, but I miss having more in-depth information about the improvements.
In my opinion, the details here complement the Ars Technica article nicely:
https://www.macstories.net/stories/macos-27-the-macstories-r...
My macbook only has about 3GB of spare disk space currently, so I guess this isn't for me
Will I get prompted to give Chrome permissions to the Local Network on every update? This is literally the one feature I'd like from Apple because I'm happy with everything else. The update looks cool, but nothing I actually want/need.
Do we have proper dictation?
Apple seems to be doing a lot better job at integrating LLMs into OS, than Microsoft.
it's okay but I wish it would be optional. Why force it on me when I don't want it? E.g. with disk space...
Does it fix the hideous floating sidebar UI?
That's the headline feature.
So happy they’ve finally added Ethernet status to the menu bar. It has always bugged me there wasn’t an easy way to quickly check if my Mac was using Ethernet or not
For me, macOS 27 was great for the first 3 betas, then it became horrible. And the release version still has some weird bugs, even iOS 27.
It's as if their Claude credits ran out halfway through
A few macOS betas ago, a bunch of sites started failing to play video for me in Safari. Disney+, Netflix, YouTube and some other sites will sit at a black screen for a few seconds and then give me an error. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes certain videos will reliably fail while others reliably work fine. I thought this was related to Safari's autoplay protections, but I tried giving permission to autoplay all videos and that doesn't seem to change anything. Not sure if that fits the definition of a Snow Leopard update. If so, Apple needs at least a few more Snow Leopard updates at this rate. I'd also like to see them fix the issue where Liquid Glass uses a downscaled background image even at the most transparent setting. (Except for Siri AI which they seem to have added a special exception for, exactly because the pre-downscaling is super ugly)
Hey sorry to be the debugging guy in the comments, but maybe your network issues could be related to iCloud relay? I’ve had similar issues
All of my stuff updated to the 27 versions today. During indoor cycling class, I kept getting health alerts on my watch about high heart rate while stationary. Despite currently having the very same apple watch tracking my indoor cycling workout.
I guess Claude doesn’t take spinning classes
heart recovery is one of several headline new features they mention on first run (and in app ref info) will calibrate over time
as often the case when Apple makes its move, their implementations -- while late compared to e.g. Garmin which has had them for years -- purport to be leading accuracy on these features among wearables
Wake me up when Apple releases Linux for Macs
You're in for a long hibernation my friend
> an understated update that in other years might have been called a “Snow Leopard release.”
No. It wouldn't. Snow Leopard was two years in the making, and then took another few years to actually become the Snow Leopard people remember.
Fixing some transparency and re-drawing a few icons is not a Snow Leopard release.
Like, which features in this 150000-character blog post actually warrant the title of "Snow Leopard release"?
I imagine the author saw this release as "macOS Tahoe but not sucky"
I liken it to Windows Vista and Windows 7. Although fundamentally similar operating systems under the hood, Windows 7 smoothed out Vista's kinks and brought forth additional polish.
I think people are referring to the speed improvements touted by Apple https://www.newegg.com/insider/ios-27-performance-boost-ever...
If you don't want your mbp to run like garbage, then don't update to the newest version of obsolescenceOS.
That may have been true in the past, and I usually wait for the first point release, but macOS and iOS 27 seem to be a definite improvement. My 5 year old phone is much snappier!
Not even the version explicitly designed to run better?
> I’m not a particularly big fan of generative AI. I do not use and have never used it at any stage of the research, outlining, or writing process for any article I’ve ever written, except for the times when I’m testing it so I can write about it.
This is wild from a "tech" site. I used to read their articles fairly religiously, but this bent by their writers and commenters is really telling, and a signal to start looking elsewhere.
Why? You can type a prompt into the robots if you want their take. Where are you suppose to find out what a human thinks?
It's not to write the article. I would hope they don't do that; I wouldn't want to read it.
But I do want them using it to help them research, find interesting contrary views on a subject, gut-check assertions (how many weirdly wrong statements in articles would have been caught by feeding it to an LLM and asking it to question unfounded or incorrect claims?), check technical accuracy of things outside the writer's core domain, track interview transcripts, search/summarize across prior work, do data exploration of public/government reports. Etc. It's a very empowering tool for journalism!
Instead, it's become a religious issue that is more or less at the level of "one drop" theory.
Why would they need AI to do any of those things? Wrong statements should be caught by editors and fact-checkers.
It more sounds like you're wanting people to shoehorn in AI where it doesn't belong.
I'm not sure who has the religious issue.
wait so not using GenAI makes you persona non grata in "tech" now?
nobody tell my boss
It is a tool in a tool box. If a technician avoided a tool outright, I would (and do) question their biases.
A nuclear weapon is a tool in a tool box. And nobody's used it since WWII for a good reason.
Every technician or craftsman develops some strong opinions about which tools are good tools and which tools are bad tools.
What does it tell you? It gives me much more confidence in their output tbh. Reading generated text is unpleasant; feels like mediated and averaged-out humanity.
Continuing the quote gives more context, which I agree with:
"The obviously AI-generated flyers that come home from school with my kid or that get circulated around neighborhood groups strike me as benign but deeply tacky; the kinds of AI-generated images that get passed around by politicians online don’t even have the benefit of being benign.
More than anything, I’m just tired of seeing it everywhere, tired of being on the lookout for it, tired of it polluting every stream of information I have access to. Wasting time actively trying to avoid auto-generated slop is now a daily fixture of my life."
Obviously, one should be able to entertain an idea without necessarily accepting it, and much like any tool that can be misused, just because some malign actor (or dumb actor) uses it "wrong" doesn't mean you should also not use it.
It costs money, but I've been enjoying my Pangram subscription for this. Saves me slop on the internet and confirms whether or not my colleagues' words are what i'm reading or not.
There is a lot more to tech than gen AI…