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macOS 27 Golden Gate – Review

arstechnica.com

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Re: macOS 27 Golden Gate – Review

#81

Post by bigyabai »

cosmic_cheese wrote: post #67
thefunnyman wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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 t…

> 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.

Re: macOS 27 Golden Gate – Review

#82

Post by lambda_foo »

Telaneo wrote: post #31
mikae1 wrote: post #4

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'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 aro…

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.

Re: macOS 27 Golden Gate – Review

#83

Post by hollandheese »

mediaman wrote: post #32
bradly wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

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.

Re: macOS 27 Golden Gate – Review

#85

Post by airstrike »

dr_dshiv wrote: post #63
Telaneo wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 aro…

Something to improve my mess of ~22 active terminal windows comes to mind.

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

Re: macOS 27 Golden Gate – Review

#86

Post by hollandheese »

levl289 wrote: post #25
whateveracct wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: macOS 27 Golden Gate – Review

#88

Post by [deleted] »

ValentineC wrote: post #64
mikae1 wrote: post #4

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.

[deleted]

Re: macOS 27 Golden Gate – Review

#89

Post by nozzlegear »

bayindirh wrote: post #61
elAhmo wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Re: macOS 27 Golden Gate – Review

#90

Post by teaearlgraycold »

ProfessorLayton wrote: post #27

"...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 i…

> right when that storage is at its most expensive it's ever been.

How easily we forget the exponential improvements of decades past...

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