macOS Monterey (opens in new tab)

I've been eagerly awaiting a new Macbook to completely rid myself of Adobe software.

Over the past decade I've considered installing Adobe software but always held back because of how intrusive and shady the software is (I checked on friends' computers). I've been able to work around having to edit PDFs and used Figma in place of Photoshop for my very basic graphical needs.

Well a few months ago I needed to fill out customs form 5106. This form uses some kind of proprietary Adobe PDF form creation software thing. In order to do anything with it I need Adobe Acrobat. At least that's how far my research took me before I buckled and purchased Adobe Acrobat. I was extremely busy that week and didn't have time to figure out a hacky alternative.

After having installed Creative Cloud all I can say is... it's straight up malware. I doubt I'd be able to get rid of all the junk it installs even if I wanted to. And what's worse is the products are extremely buggy. It's just a mess!

I just checked and Adobe has TWENTY EIGHT processes running in the background. A lot of them are running as root. And of course two of them are NodeJS servers.

These processes are constantly phoning home at such a ridiculous rate that it's impossible to know what to block and what not to. Looking at Little Snitch right now, there are 13 distinct Adobe applications that have been making HTTP requests since I booted my laptop 30 minutes ago. I haven't used a single Adobe product since boot.

I wasn't surprised when, after installing Creative Cloud and restarting my computer, next time I launched Chrome I got a popup telling me that Adobe installed an extension. THANK YOU GOOGLE for taking the time to alert me about this. At no point during the installation process was it clear to me that Adobe would be hijacking my browser too.

I was going to do a fresh wipe to get rid of this junk for good but I wanted to wait until the Macbook was released. Once that laptop arrives I'm never touching Adobe software ever again unless there's a way to completely sandbox it.

https://mybyways.com/blog/creating-a-macos-sandbox-to-run-ko...

Yes it's been there for a while. But like flatpak and all other attempts to sandbox applications they tend to ask for coarse permissions like Home Directory and once you give that, it can read everything important.

The newest ones with M1/M1 Pro are actually pretty beefy, and even the Macbook Air has benchmarks that beat literally everything else in the Apple lineup except the iMac Pros and the new-model Mac Pros.

This doesn't help much with current equipment, but it should make future planning easier.

OS perms should do the rest. I don't know if OSX has a firejail equivalent but that would be nice too.

I just upgraded to Monterey and OneDrive asked for permissions to a bunch of folders it didn’t need. I denied them. I doubt it’s bad behavior, probably just lazy permissions requests, but I’m glad I had the option.

On Linux you can use flatpak where you can manually limit the permissions on a per application basis.

This is revisionist computing history of a sort that is becoming more common these days as certain people retire.

The concept of files predates the concept of "a desktop" by decades. There is a much deeper metaphor to "files" than there is to "files on a desktop", and one that is hard to dispense with even if you have extraordinarily smart search available.

> Mobile OSs have been rather successful in getting rid of this implementation detail.

Almost entirely by shrinking the scope of what can be done to a point that would be useless for what is currently understod as a desktop computer. You want that model? Get a big, powerful tablet.

I don't want an OS that "doesn't make me pick between iCloud or ~/Documents". That just means turning macOS into ChromeOS. An OS with just a search bar would break a ridiculous amount of uses, from shared computers or cloud drives where everyone knows to put the files in the right folder, but your colleagues have weird naming conventions, so you can't search by name, but if the files were side-by-side it would be common sense which one you want; to the dangers of ambiguity between cloud and local storage; to the reality that many use personal computers for work and would get fired if certain personal files/media showed up in a File Search for work documents. You imply that iOS-style file management is easier for average users, but at a previous workplace, there was a central Mac that had important text files with .odt extensions, all organised on the desktop, that opened in TextEdit since LibreOffice/OpenOffice was for some reason never installed. How would TextEdit show those files if all you had was the Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion-esque TextEdit iCloud open box? The documents wouldn't show up, since it would only show TextEdit documents, i.e. rich text files (.rtd). If it makes sense to keep multiple types of files together, like text files and spreadsheets, you'd have to put them in a folder, not app-specific storage. But that sounds identical to what we have now. How would I open any random local text file in Google Docs? Wouldn't that be a huge privacy flaw, that Apple would never build into Safari anyway? You'd just end up with silos within each app, with no idea how to move things around, since I think the iOS metaphor is actually less intuitive than putting folders on your desktop with things inside them.

Everyone likes imagining better ways to manage files, but no one has been able to come up with one that's intuitive, not even Apple with iOS. The only reason they get away with it, is very few people actually ever interact with files on iOS. Instagram, Snapchat, Reminders, Clock, Safari don't involve documents, and for many people, that's what they use their phone for, period. Google Docs are in the app; how would they open in any other app anyway? As for iPad users, people might create something in ProCreate, and then export it. I don't think iPads are used as file storage devices, just as inputs to bring somewhere else.

Dear God, the lack of proper file management on mobile is absolutely awful and makes so many things harder than they need to be. I really hope desktop OSes don't go down that path.

Please don't touch my OS.

>Regular users are consistently struggling with low-level concepts like 'files' and similar remnants of trying to emulate desktop metaphors from the workplaces of the 80ies.

I'm going to make argument that regular users are struggling with directory structures because of how OSes are increasingly "helpful". In DOS 2.0, it was simple: each physical disk has filesystem with tree structure, no shortcuts, no symlinks. I doubt anybody was confused by that. But let's pretend I don't know about usual quirks and see how that goes in Windows: where the hell is "Desktop"? Does everything is contained inside it? After all, "My Computer" icon is there, and clicking "dir up" in My Computer goes back to Desktop! But then, Desktop itself is contained in My Computer, so hmm... And why on Desktop there are shortcuts there that.. doesn't seem to be in Desktop directory? Ah, because they are in some magic place "C:/Users/Public/Desktop". And by the way, why it is usually called "Pulpit" (localized name in my language), but when in path it's not localized and just "Desktop"? Where my browser stores browsing history? Surely it must be in some file? Right, probably in user directory... wait, how do I open user directory? Documents folder surely must be stored inside it, so let's click "dir up" there. Uh, it went back to dreaded My Computer. Fine, I will go there manually through C:/Users/. So the browser files will be in AppData.. but it isn't here.. ah right, it is hidden for some reason. But there's still something fishy about the Documents, it doesn't behave like a normal directory. Let's see in Properties dialog, there's Location tab, so it looks like it works like shortcut to it, simple enough. Uh.. actually no, because it is part of "Libraries" mechanism, and is actually configured in AppData/Roaming/Microsoft/Windows/Libraries. Documents (and other libraries) might be actually configured to squash multiple directories in their virtual view. Now, why OneDrive is another special directory, and even worse, MS Office seems to have special relationship with it? And so on and so on...

Really, it's no wonder that most regular people are confused about it.

On not having files, you may not remember that iOS did go that route until ~2018, and it was terrible. Tying documents to a single app, proprietary formats and awkward sharing facilities made for a very poor experience. I’m glad they returned to sanity and introduced the Files app.

As others have mentioned, a lot of these concepts predate modern OSes and are tied to universal HCI principles. Some of the best work in the area was done in the 60s.

Regular computers have to maintain some backward compatibility and it's nice for power users to still be allowed to fiddle with file extensions and system internals.

Desktops have been slowly edging in that direction, but I don't think it helps. I guess it depends on what kind of brain you have, but I can't do this. I need something spatial, a quite rigid structure. I use shallow hierarchies (folders!).

- Business: there isn't a strong business need to re-think the desktop UI. There are needs on mobile and the web, but improving the classic desktop doesn't give a competitive advantage (unless you can combine it with the web and mobile, which is exactly what Apple, Google, and MS are trying to do).

- Developers: you need to attract developers to your platform too. Devs will ignore your unique features if they are not attractive enough to justify the change, and they are not cross-platform. Examples:

  - Smalltalk envs are like an extremely hackable Desktop OS (eg. Squeak or Pharo). They don't use the files as the storage unit, and the technology to scale the object image existed for a long time (eg. GemStone/St). The first complaint that you'll hear about St is: "where are my files and version control?". There is no interest in the dev community to make files go away because it breaks the tools that you use every day. 

  - macOS has features to support version history, or conveniently handle files (eg. auto-save, rename in place, cloud support). But, those features are not cross-platform, and they are ignored by the cross-platform "pro" software: VSCode, JetBrains IDEs, Adobe Products, Figma.

Maybe the next generation "desktop" is not a classic desktop but an evolution of the web browser. The sad part is that all the new environments (iOS, iPadOS, Android, ChromeOS, SaaS apps) are extremely closed and hostile to tinker with the system.

Finder -> Preferences -> Advanced -> When performing search: Search the current folder

So far I was fine with it though of course sometimes it's annoying to get the latest XCode (and iOS sdk) version for development, so I have to resort to a VM from time to time.

Helpful website: https://xcodereleases.com/

In the beginning it was awful for her. A lot of failures. However, after a couple of months it became quite stable, and she stopped complaining. The only thing that was kind of a nightmare was Xcode.

I'm updating it, and if I were you, I'd update right away too. There are many improvements.

EDIT: I did not install it until the RC.

I intended to do the same this morning and literally witnessed the "Upgrade Now" change from Big Sur to Monterey as I was about to click it. Took me a while to find the appropriate link for Big Sur in the Mac App Store.

Other than those two things, it's been pretty solid lately.

Other than that, it seems more stable and faster than Big Sur, and that's without a clean install. Notes used to take 4 bounces to open on M1, now opens instantly. Haven't seen any crashing. No broken features that aren't brand new. I've only found one bug: Safari reopens private windows even if you turn that off. But no problem if you don't use Safari.

I’m running out of ideas on how to fix this.

[0] https://github.com/rugarciap/Turbo-Boost-Switcher

I still to this day can’t believe it was never brought up in any reviews of that machine. Connecting to any external monitor causes the slightest stress to have the fans absolutely screaming.

I had a computer shop clean the inside of my laptop in August and haven't seen kernel_task ever since.

Prior to that BT devices would just drop the connection, AFAICT.

Bi-directional file transfer has never worked properly.

And that's only BT…

IDK what's actually that bad about the BT menu UI though? The recent UX changes on notifications have been bad, though. Especially where sometimes clicking the X doesn't dismiss the notification. (There's some bait&switch b/c there's like multiple notifications stacked up… or something.) And that (for a while now) Calendar hasn't reliably notified me, which has been great, as it results in lateness to meetings, since there's no longer an office mate to say "hey, it's time".

I got a calendar notification of a cancelled event. The notification itself had no buttons to interact with. A hover where the close button would be (top left of the nmotification) causes it to appear and also causes a "delete" button to appear in the bottom right. But if I move my mouse off the "close" button to click "delete" both the close and delete buttons disappear. The only way to delete it is to click it (opening the calendar) wait for the calendar to open (5-10s on a 2019 i7 MBP) then open the event itself to delete it.

Shoving everything into a sub-menu made device statuses invisible and involved extra clicks to interact with them. It's user-hostile design.

I'm sitting on catalina for as long as possible on my non-work laptop

I recently got one to use as a secondary display just for Slack /Discord/etc, but after connecting a trackpad & keyboard I totally fell in love. It's a very simplistic environment, but it's actually quite nice as an alternative to the full-blown macOS.

Split is kind of useless with an ultrawide monitor though, I wish it was 3 columns

This is probably not what you meant by "smooth out the UX", but I like to enable "reduce motion" under System Preferences -> Accessibility -> Display. It means when you move between apps, the sideways pan is replaced by a fade, which is nice if you do this a lot.

I play my music though an Airport Express at home. It has always been a bit flaky at times, but most of the time, it worked fine. With my M1 mac, though, it pretty much stopped working. If I try, the airplay icon in the Music app turns from blue to black with some sort of error indicator on it. I have gotten it to work a few times, but mostly after a reboot of both the mac and the airport express. And, ironically, once when I wanted to listen to music through headphones, and it played on the airport express instead.

My current solution is to play music from an old iphone 6s, sharing music from the Mac. But it often loses its authorization to share music from the mac, so I have to restart the app and reconnect. This takes time, as it seems to need to download all the metadata from my music library each time. Also, sometimes the volume drops to zero and cannot be moved. This is cured by switching output to the iphone speakers and back to airplay. Not at all a great experience. So now I am looking for a non-apple way to play music at home. Most likely a raspberry pi or something like that.

i have a MacBook Pro with Intel as well

Big Sur feels sluggish, it's not that it's slow, but it feels slow. I don't remember what OS my MacBook came with, but every update made it slower, especially Mail.app, which takes good 10 seconds to launch. Downloading Monterey now, hopefully will see improvements!

edit: but my biggest macOS complaint yet has to be the space used by "Other", which at the moment is about 50GB and 70GB at times

This typically means the machine is thermally throttled, not that the kernel is actually using the CPU.

Upgrading to a new OS on release day without a prior backup. You like to live dangerously, do you?

Thanks everyone that ever owned Intel Macs with T2 chips. I am so glad I never owned anything from that generation, and I appreciate your sacrifice. <3

I thank you and other early adopters (AKA QA testers) for your service.

Same it has always been and no different to every other service.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212619

Point Reyes is my bet.

Edit: It looks like shortcuts won't be able to set (or clear) focus modes, so that'll have to wait. Bummer.

> This is a sophisticated boot loader used to inject and patch data in memory, instead of on disk.

I suppose that works because old MacBooks didn't have signed bootloaders?

I 100% agree though, as someone who supports a wide range of macs, APFS can absolutely cripple anything with a fusion drive / hard drive, and it's particularly infuriating because Apple sold models with JUST spinning rust for wayyyyy too long.

But what does it have to do with the topic at hand: the new version of macOS?

They've been released pretty close to every 11-13 months since 10.7, which was nearly 2 years after 10.6. That happened a decade ago now, so it's not something that's changed recently.

Their OS releases have been yearly for about the past decade I think.

I often find myself clicking links from apps (e.g. Slack), then keep working and loading project related sites. After a while I suddenly have 12 tabs open in the default tab group that all should have been in the project tab group.

It’s not very visible which group you’re currently in. When it switches group from under your feet I often miss that and keep thinking I’m in the old group.

In my experience so far, Private Relay just turns off and back on randomly. There’s no safari indicator that private relay is off, just push notifications to inform you of the status. Private relay and mail privacy protection also completely disable when using another VPN. That said I’m very happy to get private relay with iCloud+ as it means phone is approaching the point where carrier can’t associate me with browsing history for to sell to whatever creepy business offers them money.

That’s the thing. Apple doesn’t want a feature to look like a hack, and they also have to consider how every feature plays with everything else in their OS and ecosystem.

Not saying it's like this in every case. Just something to consider.

But some of us do want certain messages to breach while we're working.