Thank you for this. I'm not an advanced user but I do use some advanced features, and having to fight the OS in order for it to make what I want is not in my list of desirable "features".
Do you still have to quit and restart the entire application after you give the permission? Holy shit mac users are gonna become a meme in meetings.
MacOS is turning into quite the poo log lately. I respect that Apple has every right to completely destroy the legacy of the Macintosh, but they are slow playing it so that it's just a little bit better than the alternatives. The end result is my life gets just a little bit more difficult with every release.
I feel like the freaking frog on the stove while the water slowly heats up. When is it time to jump out?
Ironically, the last time I checked, the built in screencapture command-line program hadn’t been updated to use ScreenCaptureKit yet. The company I was contracting for ended up shelling out to it because its window picking UX was a lot better than ScreenCapureKit’s. (You can’t do this if you’re sandboxed, though, AFAIK).
You do not, providing you have given permission previously. Most Video Conferencing solutions have you test your hardware prior to joining a call, so shouldn't be an invasive issue.
> I feel like the freaking frog on the stove while the water slowly heats up. When is it time to jump out?
Whenever you feel like it. Just like frogs do:
> While some 19th-century experiments suggested that the underlying premise is true if the heating is sufficiently gradual, according to modern biologists the premise is false: changing location is a natural thermoregulation strategy for frogs and other ectotherms, and is necessary for survival in the wild. A frog that is gradually heated will jump out.
> I respect that Apple has every right to completely destroy the legacy of the Macintosh
I disagree. Apple's various machinations to control the best available supply lines (deals with TSMC, etc...) make me feel quite entitled in saying what is and is not acceptable behavior on their part. This feeling amplifies with every "courageous" announcement they make sunsetting some useful feature they no longer feel like supporting.
I would also add that since Apple chose to lock their software and support of various file format/data storage to their own hardware solely; they have a responsibility toward their longtime customer to provide a good long-term experience.
Otherwise, the only "solution" is to get stuck in time at a particular OS release and it doesn't work in IT for many different reasons.
There is a large difference in computing devices versus other simple objects, in that they need software and software can change which is problematic but should not be a problem for the customer/user...
In my opinion Apple is largely failing at providing a worthwhile platform, when they don't just discontinue stuff for their bottom line, most of the changes are for marketing reasons or increasing lockdown to extract more money from customers.
There is not a whole lot of useful stuff that have been added in the last 5 OS iterations but a lot of major annoyance or downgrades/roadblock/complications for usage, etc...
> Do you still have to quit and restart the entire application after you give the permission?
The funny thing about this, even on Sonoma - I could click the button to allow it, when it said "restart app" I closed the box (or clicked cancel), and it worked anyway. Specifically, I noticed it more on things like Teams/Zoom where I was doing a screen share, it just "worked" - no need to restart the entire application.
And how are our parents going to do this without us being there? It once took be 3 hours to accomplish it with my father. He’s 3000 miles away but it was only marginally better than a plane trip.
macOS is very gradually moving in the wrong direction for me. I never really saw myself considering desktop Linux again but I’m almost starting to get excited by the idea. For now I’ll just hold off on the update as none of it seems particularly compelling, especially as a happy Rectangle user (with all its key bindings nicely isolated from macOS preferences and synced along with the rest of my dotfiles)
I feel the same and decided my next update would be to Asahi (Fedora or Ubuntu). I switched from Linux to macOS a few years ago, but I never really felt like I was the target user for this environment. It always feels like I have to adapt to the walled garden of Apple's ecosystem, rather than it adapting to me.
The iShittification of the Mac platform continues ... I predicted this a long time ago when Apple released its first Mac mini with soldered SSD. Then the ones with security chip. And now we have soldered RAM + SSD behind a custom SoC that can only run macOS (yes, it is a macOS only system despite the PR of "ARM Linux / xBSD on M1+" because all these are crippled version of OS that cannot fully exploit the hardware because there are no literature on it for system developers, and they have to literally reverse engineer at a slow pace to make the OS run on it).
As the hardware iShittification continued, macOS too was also being slowly stripped of features to ensure Apple controlled your data and what you could run on it. Support for independent Kernel extension (outside of Apple's control) was removed mainly to cripple existing independent Application Firewall and virtualisation software. Apple-made OS APIs for these were integrated to the newer macOS and offered as replacement to ensure Apple controlled how Application Firewalls and Virtualisations should / would work on macOS. (Such restriction on the kernel extensions for independent system developers is also meant to prevent support for other filesystem, like ZFS for example - the OpenZFS project is maturing fast on Linux, Windows and macOS and can be a game changer as its usage has the potential to "free" our data from a closed and controlling ecosystem, to be used on any platform of our choice.
Whether you are a developer or a user, a "consumer relationship" with Apple feels like a relationship with a controlling and abusive spouse who repeatedly gaslights you that you are imagining things and are the one at fault because "you just don't understand them".
> The right-click/control-click option for easily opening unsigned apps is no longer available. Users who want to open unsigned software will now need to go the long way around to do it: first, try to launch the app and dismiss the dialog box telling you that it can't be opened. Then, open Settings, go to the Privacy & Security screen, scroll all the way to the bottom to get to the Security section, and click the Open Anyway button that appears for the last unsigned app you tried to run.
Wow, this is really hostile design. They obviously know they can't ban third-party software on macos like they did on iphone, but they surely intend to come as close to it as possible, and make it as inconvenient as possible to install any.
Oh, but I was assured by Cupertino sycophants that you "just" need to CTRL-click open an unnotarized app and there is no protection racket for distributing apps, no big deal. The frog continues boiling.
Really? This is _huge_ to you? How many unsigned apps are you downloading and running?
This is one of those features where the benefits seem to very obviously outweigh the drawbacks. 99.9% of users just aren't running unsigned software, so the moment that happens, it is most certainly malware.
If you're developing software yourself, this isn't an issue either, since all the relevant toolchains, debuggers, etc., work just fine under this model. That's a supported workflow. The only thing that isn't supported is downloading some random unverified app bundle from who knows where and treating it as if you could trust it. You 100% can't.
And yes, I also believe that if an OSS project considers "muggles" their target audience, they should prioritize setting up code-signing. Consider it a service to their users. If the fee is a problem, it's important enough to spend the effort to find a way to finance it. If you can't find someone who is willing to put their name on it, you shouldn't ask people to run your software on their machines in the first place.
> How many unsigned apps are you downloading and running?
For me, quite a few? Internal tools at work, open source projects which publish builds on their github, that sort of stuff.
(And no, paying Apple a yearly subscription for the privilege of letting users run an app is not a reasonable expectation of small open source projects)
Yeah, but you only need to approve an app once. I think I Ctrl+Open an app like once a quarter on average, sometimes going most of a year. This really isn't a big deal.
As a creator of a programming language that can compile binaries of any supported platform from any platform it is an unsolveable problem.
I can't do the signing as it requires Apple stuff. Not to mention it is unethical to require it as it's used for gatekeeping not just security (requiring Apple to decide if you can run an executable is unacceptable).
Compare it to Android where you can use self-signed certificates and it has an actual function, it allows updates signed with the same certificate to access the existing stored data on the device. It improves security without gatekeeping. At least that was on the older Androids, haven't done work on any newer ones.
I can't do some kind of universal launcher that is signed by me because it would allow to run arbitrary code and therefore it would be banned.
Therefore the only solution is to search for various workarounds (eg. by teaching the users how to run the software) or if not possible anymore stop supporting newer versions of MacOS and rely on web applications to support the platform (like it's the only way on iOS).
Which would be even worse on the desktop as the usability can be quite bad, but at least users would have some chance to use the applications even on their closed system.
I hope you're able to see how your use case is incredibly niche, and should not be a priority for a general security model for an operating system.
Your problems are extremely insignificant in the big picture, where the priority of a serious operating system should be to support regular people in avoiding malware and malicious social engineering. macOS is a general purpose operating system, not a hobbyist or tinkerer OS, and the vast majority of its users are non-technical.
I get that it's annoying, but pushing the work on you is a massive benefit to your users.
You're right that as a developer of the language it's quite niche position, however the language is then used by developers to create actual applications and they're affected by this, or rather the users are.
It also allows to be used from a C/C++ project so you can do all the required steps, but it's quite more involved compared to simply building the software for all platforms at once.
It's also not related to how popular my language is. It affects any language including C/C++ if you want to have unified cross-compilation to all supported platforms (which is quite typical for any serious project).
You may not be aware but Apple has put roadblocks for such usages as well, you can't rent a Mac VM for automatic builds, it has to be rented for 24 hours at minimum. Using someone's private Mac for building may not be a good idea for various reasons.
And then you compare it to other platforms that don't require anything like this. I even mentioned Android which shows that you can use signing to provide a security aspect without the gatekeeping aspect.
The issue is wider and basically it's an anticompetitive behavior of Apple to any competitor to Xcode.
A paid developer account would be required by every developer wishing to publish their cross-platform application also on MacOS. Even if it was free it would be an issue because it would require an extra registration and workflow that requires internet access and having Apple to arbitrarily decide that your application (or you as a developer) is banned.
Therefore instructions how the users can run the application is the only solution.
Quite a lot apparently considering how often I have to bypass gatekeeper.
I don't really see how the average user is positively affected by these changes - it's not like they will accidentally open terminal and enter random strings infinite monkey theorem style until they hit sudo spctl –master-disable.
Ctrl-click was at least possible to stumble over, but I see no good reason not to at least provide a .plist setting to re-enable that behavior. Except to bully more devs into getting signing certs.
The problem is not - and has never been - accidentally stumbling on insecure features. The problem is social engineering, where inexperienced users are guided by malware operators to run insecure software, either over the phone or through countless malware sites on the web that claim to solve their problems.
> How many unsigned apps are you downloading and running?
Enough for this to be annoying. Plenty of tiny tools don't pay for the privilege of doing free work, so aren't signed
> This is one of those features where the benefits seem to very obviously outweigh the drawbacks. 99.9% of users just aren't running unsigned software, so the moment that happens, it is most certainly malware.
You're obviously wrong with your made up stats (you don't need to be a power '1% user to want to install some a single useful unsigned app over the whole lifetime of using a Mac) and ignore the fact that part of the reason why it's 99% and not 88% is precisely because of features like this that make it harder to do so.
But there is an easy way to reconcile - make the old behavior configurable then the imaginary nonexisting 0.0000% users can continue without permanent disruptions
> This is one of those features where the benefits seem to very obviously outweigh the drawbacks
That has never been true. Neither for pro- nor casual users. This might be good for the bottom line of Apple, but I doubt that too, since they squander their reputation. This is non-engineers calling the shots, just like Jobs warned us about.
I do run quite a few unsigned apps and I don't even use a mac that often. This is just stupid...
Are you suggesting that Apple is making it less convenient for users to run unsigned binaries, because they want to increase developer program revenue?
Not developer program revenue. At every turn where they have a choice, Apple does the same thing: sell devices increasingly locked to their own ecosystem, and sell it as a feature to protect folks. This strategy works really well: they actually have folks arguing that giving all Apple users fewer choices is a feature.
They have been ratcheting down on freedom in OS X (and then MacOS) since 2011 or so when I stopped using Apple for personal use. The introduction of the Mac App Store, subsequent lackluster performance, and introduction of scary warnings about running unsigned code in MacOS tell most all of the story. This latest update is just another step in that direction, making running unsigned code that much more difficult. The obvious endgame is to raise the next generation of Mac users to only use the Mac App Store for software, effectively replicating the golden goose that the iOS App Store has proven to be.
I don't think I agree with your conclusion about their endgame being a replication of the iOS App Store golden goose, but I do see how it could come about. The reason I disagree is because changes like this oft remind me of the problems Facebook used to have (still do?) with stolen tokens and cookies that would come about from people pasting JavaScript into their browser's devtools console.
Some poor schmuck would find a viral comment that said something like "Mark Zuckerberg doesn't want you to know how to get Facebook Premium! Copy and paste this code into your browser, ignore Facebook's warnings, they don't want you to get it for free!" And badabing badaboom, stolen credentials get sent to some server.
I don't work at Apple and can only speculate on their motive, but since I advise my family to use macOS, it's my hope that this change would prevent them from reading something like "download this scary blob and then ctrl+click on it to open it for free Photoshop! Ignore Apple's warning, Adobe has paid them because they don't want you to get it for free!"
It does make it slightly more inconvenient for me, but I think chromedriver may be the only unsigned code that I run regularly.
Precisely the kind of hidden feature that makes it easy for power users to bypass the "rules" Apple imposes on the platform, while still making it highly likely every day users won't know how to bypass the rules meant to protect them.
More and more, I find that these sorts of "we know best" attitudes towards security utterly distasteful and the total opposite of empowering. Infantilizing, more like.
These rules do not protect the normal user. At some point they fail to install something they want to have and then my phone rings because their OS is shitty.
If these features need to be forced by legislative action, the product itself is probably shit. And most importantly, not in the interest of users, like some like to argue.
If you zoom out and look at the trajectory release after release, all of these things are obviously coming. Every release we act surprised that it's slightly more difficult to run unsigned, un-notarized, un-sanctioned code, but somehow that Voice Of The Fanboy within us has us convinced that "surely this last change is where Apple will draw the line and stop!"
Microsoft figured out long ago that having developers use your platform is a small direct source of revenue but a massive indirect one, not to mention the thing that keeps your platform relevant.
Driving them off Mac would be a gigantic mistake that over time would lead to the fading of the whole Apple ecosystem.
Well yeah but you need someone that has some understanding of what he is actually selling to come to that realization, not the greedy bitch that is Tim Cook.
I think the mistake already happened, you can see fewer and fewer macOS only software and there is very little in the way of novelty/exclusivity (both iOS/macOS). Devs are now more and platform stuff more and more (mostly web technologies because it makes for good UI even though performance is not the best, it doesn't matter with today's powerful machines.
I'll add that one key point that Apple was better on is becoming very moot: software optimisation (performance and UI) matters a lot less in today's cheap powerful computing. Apple is supposedly selling top of the line hardware but skimping every way possible so in the end, when price matched, competitive hardware does not do worse no matter how bad the softwares are optimized on concurrent platform.
Yeah, but such concerns are from a long ago and it didn't happen yet. So the best approach is (and has been) to just support the platform until it is not possible anymore and don't be emotional about it. We just know that one (still quite distant) day it will happen.
Then the usage of the platform will end for many users & developers. One could still live a quite long time on the older systems to ease the transition out.
But why should I develop for a platform that is doomed to be shitty in the near future.
I do create macOS binaries, although they mostly are just a byproduct if targeting it is trivial. Of course I do not sign any of them, to me that is more or less a scam comparable to ransomware.
Totally understandable. My motivation is that I want to reach out to the users as much as possible, doing an extra amount of work if needed. They benefit from cross-platform applications. And I need it to do just once in my programming language as any application using it benefits automatically.
This way I support Windows 2000 or newer, MacOS 10.6+, up to 15 years old Linux distributions with the same small binary for each platform, I did an extra mile in supporting WebAssembly target so it's easy to compile the applications to the web. This also allows to create applications for smartphones without the need for approval and having to follow any weird arbitrary rules.
Why support such old versions? Real world users are often stuck with old versions for various reasons, it's a minority of users but they can be the most important ones. And technically because the difference between these old systems and new systems is not that big. Often it just means to use some older API or do a few extra steps. It's all hidden in code that handles multiplatform stuff so it's not in the way. It doesn't add bloat either.
Before this update you could hold control and click the application, then select "open" from the menu. It would give you a warning and let you confirm you'd like to run it anyway.
I’m having difficulties with the keyboard shortcuts for the new window snapping stuff. My desk keyboard doesn’t have a Globe key (like most non-Apple keyboards), but the shortcuts don’t work with Caps Lock remapped to Globe. It doesn’t work with the MacBook’s built-in keyboard either, so I think it’s a bug rather than an issue with my keyboard.
Apple locking down the OS even more by making Gatekeeper harder to bypass makes me want to skip this version for as long as possible.
The screen recording permission thing also doesn't help since I'm using Ice (https://github.com/jordanbaird/Ice) because somehow Apple still can't Sherlock this feature.
The way it's even implemented now is like the nightmare realized from everything Richard Stallman warned about for decades. Especially for non-technical users, they've practically implemented a system where Apple decides what software you are and aren't allowed to run on your own computer. They can muddy the issue by claiming it's for safety/security but I don't buy it. They could have made the override still clear but much easier to access.
Especially for non-technical users, they've practically implemented a system where Apple decides what software you are and aren't allowed to run on your own computer.
For non-technical users the choice is simple: either Apple decides what is allowed to run on their computer or cybercriminals do. After years of getting burned, non-technical users made their choice. I think it was the right one but the jury's still out for the future.
Perhaps one day these users will get squeezed out of computing entirely. That will be a terrible shame. The same thing is playing out with everything else though. Look at cars and household appliances.
Also, let's not fool ourselves. I'm not sure even most technical people running macOS or Linux would know if they had malware running. I probably wouldn't. It's not like antivirus is commonplace on those platforms.
The notion that you can reasonably have knowledge of and control over all the software that is actually running on your machine has not been realistic for decades.
My router was pwned, not once but possibly 3 times, and the major compromise I only discovered due to the third-party DNS filtering service I'd set up on it. It is practically impossible for any consumer to detect a compromised router, due to their embedded systems and lack of meaningful logging or diagnostics. Therefore I concluded that consumer routers are the weakest link in anyone's home network, and I was pleased as punch to begin renting one that my ISP manages. Peace of mind indeed.
My Windows 10 box became so bogged down that I was convinced it was running some undetectable malware. AV detected nothing, but after a critical look at open ports I just decided to wipe and go to Windows 11.
Here are some of the biggest risks today. Running third-party apps at all, unless they are absolutely necessary. I try to do everything possible with Google-provided apps within the Google ecosystem on my Android phone and the other devices as well, which limits the third-party attack surfaces. My Windows machine runs practically nothing outside of MS or Google. I don't need to.
Other big threats are beyond personal devices at this point. Connecting third-party SaaS to your accounts is a real problem. Facebook, Google Workspace, Slack, GitHub, any service that acts as a platform and runs third-party integrations, that's where you'll get bitten nowadays, and your local AV scans are powerless to shield you from footguns. Just to use HP printer features, HP wanted full, unscoped, read/write/delete access to my Google Drive!
Everyone's "hacked Facebook account" has really been just some stupid game that went rogue. Supply-chain attacks through browser extensions and the rest. Extremely difficult to police from the end-user's position, but deadly and dangerous, because they're out on the net and in the cloud.
I’m a fan of Stallman and his ideology toward computing as much as anyone but tend to think that the ship has sailed long ago. We are not living in a world where everyone who touches a computer has the knowledge or skill set to know a good idea from a bad one. Long-gone are the days when our passwords could be blank because the other guy using the system was also a kernel developer. And so unfortunately Stallman’s ideas are mostly a thing of computing utopia fiction.
It’s fine to let the experts worry about securing our systems. The Internet is safer for it. And it’s fine to not think so, too. But for those people, realize that the product may not be for you. That’s why we have a dozen flavors of Linux.
Defaults to. You can tell it to compile yourself, if that matters to you. I don’t see what the issue is here. Why is it a problem that it defaults to binary distribution?
> The biggest problem is that the defaulting to binary distribution also means that building from source is unsupported.
I don't think it means that at all. They're both clearly supported by homebrew — one just happens to be the default. You can always use -s or --build-from-source to build whatever package you are installing.
It's running the same compilation steps that the binaries are produced from. If you can get a binary through homebrew, you can compile it from source. It's just unsupported in the sense that the developers don't want to spend their time chasing down build issues on individual user's systems. You're on your own if you break your local build environment.
(Ignoring the packages that are just wrappers around closed source software and fetch binaries whether you compile from source or not. Those are the exception, not the rule.)
I mean, you can download source if you want to run it. It isn’t a complete nightmare yet. I think we’re still in a grey area. This will help some people still, though it’ll definitely hinder others (myself included).
Once you need to be in the apple developer program to build and run from source or something, that’ll be a legitimate nightmare. But we’re nowhere near that yet.
> Once you need to be in the apple developer program to build and run from source or something, that’ll be a legitimate nightmare. But we’re nowhere near that yet.
When Quarantine was released in Leopard, and Gatekeeper in Lion, and System Integrity Protection in El Capitan, and then "Allow from Anywhere" was removed as an option in Sierra... Each time, people were saying similar things. "Yea, it's bad, and it's getting consistently worse with every release, but surely we are nowhere near 'really bad' yet!"
To me these are clear security improvements; things are not getting worse. And there is absolutely no reason to think they'll be dropping support for endusers running their own compiled software.
The obvious end point would be the same as iOS, which is to say - you can run it to your heart's content, provided that you shell out for a dev certificate.
The fact that macOS is increasingly becoming iOS-like in both UX and approach to security is not obvious? It's pretty obvious to me from the past few macOS releases.
There are huge, important segments of the macOS user base that require the ability to compile and run their own applications, locally. macOS has pretty much taken over all of academic science & education, & personal workstations for government research. It is the default platform for developers of all kinds in Silicon Valley. As Steve Balmer once argued, it's developers that matter to the long-term health of a platform. Apple deftly captured that market by providing a beautiful and easy to use UNIX-like environment with high quality hardware and good design. If Apple locked down macOS the same way they lock down iOS, it would be the largest foot-gun in the history of computing.
Simultaneously, while the user interface of macOS has converged on iOS over the last half dozen releases and the ecosystems are more tightly integrated, not a single one of these changes has gotten in the way of developers running their own code. The situation now is no different than it was in 2006, for example. What has been made more difficult is running untrusted binaries downloaded from the internet. That's not the same thing.
One argument in favor of removing it (not saying it’s the reason or that they didn’t have other options) is that ctrl-click and open did not obviously do anything different. That is, whether you ctrl-click and open a signed app or an unsigned app, the command in the menu was just “open”, with no indication that you were overriding a security policy. Then the dialog it popped up wasn’t particularly distinct from the “first time run” dialog. There is an argument to be made that going to the security settings and specifically allowing an app is a more clear expression of intent. Kind of in the same way you probably want to open a file you download from the web, but good security practices means the browser doesn’t open it for you on download, you need to explicitly go do it.
That said there’s no reason they couldn’t have fixed either of those issues instead
> Once you need to be in the apple developer program to build and run from source or something, that’ll be a legitimate nightmare. But we’re nowhere near that yet.
This is the case for building and running things with restricted entitlements and system extensions.
Unless you disable system integrity protection entirely, which locks you out of your purchased App Store software, DRM content, etc.
What I'm referencing is that they removed `spctl --master-disable`. This was referenced in release notes that I read upon upgrading, and testing it on my own system confirms it is gone.
Care to explain the nightmare to someone who seriously doesn't get it?
I can run any open-source software I want. Other people can't run my precompiled binaries unless I opt into an attestation system that lets the OS respond to and pre-emptively block binaries from developers found to be issuing malware. Open source is unaffected.
I challenge you to find old software that still runs on modern Macs which was never code signed. Note that support for 32-bit applications has been retired, and x86 applications will eventually be sunsetted as well. This isn't Windows.
Indeed, the current state of affairs on the Mac is the consequence of Apple repeatedly making this kind of choice. That doesn't make it any less frustrating when things that worked before, stop working after.
> They could have made the override still clear but much easier to access.
The level of difficulty is absolutely intentional. For you, it's a small speed bump. For the guy on the phone with my grandma trying to hack her computer, it's more of a hill to climb.
And it is not even true and pure FUD. The most widely spread attack surfaces are different today, people wouldn't try to install malware on your machine.
And even if, we had issue with malware infecting iPhones like Pegasus. Locking down environments with these specific mechanisms isn't improving security.
I tend to not really care about these things as long as powerusers have a way around it. Yeah, it'd be great if everyone was technically literate, but most people simply don't care to be, and I think that's okay?
IMHO there's a huge difference between no freedom for anyone (iOS) and secure-by-default, freedom only for powerusers (macOS / Android / Chromebooks / ARM Windows devices) ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
the permission for screen access is only for apps that failed to start using the new API where the OS lets the user select a window/screen they want to share.
Not sure if it is broken, but I took the opportunity when upgrading today to say No and just disable it. The product is EOL anyway, there are a few upstarts in the open source world, and I am hoping the best for Apples on-device SLMs (or oss ones) mooting the requirement for OpenAI.
Of all the apps I use that record my screen, literally all of them have updated to this new API ages ago. That includes Discord, Slack, Teams, Zoom, FaceTime, OBS, and Safari. I want to say that Firefox has as well but can't remember for certain.
Is there some way to get things like strace working? Recently it's got weird and strange with the OS protecting me from myself. Or content makers from me breaking their DRM. Or something.
Some app tries to open a file and fails. Doesn't tell me what the file name is. I just want to see the open() call.
There's a separate entitlement used for remote access software without the repeated prompts (com.apple.developer.persistent-content-capture), so you basically need Apple's permission to build that category of software now, and open source remote access software is not possible.
So the category of software will still have some working entries (existing players will try to get approved, and probably will), but it's hard to imagine anyone will want to build a new one knowing its viability on modern macOS completely depends on filling out a form and hoping Apple's approval bureaucracy likes you.
Anyone who's used these unusually locked down entitlements know whether you can apply for it before building the software, or if App Review needs to have their hands on something functional first to approve it?
Window tiling! If you drag a single window to the top does it maximize, and unmaximize when you drag it away? That's been my most wanted feature in macOS since forever (yes I have tried the third party ones).
I don't really care about tiling multiple windows, but I've always hated the macOS full screen behavior, and before that the old green button behavior, so an alternative that finally works well (the way Windows has for many years) would be amazing.
Hm, I've been really happy with Rectangle (https://rectangleapp.com) and its shortcuts have become second nature to me, but if the native version is equally keyboard friendly I might give it a go.
(btw, have you tried Rectangle and if so - what didn't you like?)
Genuine q: is cmd–backspace too much? I’m in general pretty satisfied with the Finder keyboard navigation/editing. Especially with “enter” for rename, copy/paste/cut/move and deletion too…
I never understood the enter for rename shortcut. People open (or "execute", which is the general understanding of the action for the "enter" key) files far more than they rename them.
It makes sense if one considers the angle of how single-key shortcuts are much more disaster-prone.
For example, if the user has a large number of files selected and accidentally triggers the open shortcut by hitting enter, their computer is going to be stuck spinning its wheels for a while (the more files involved and the heavier the applications they open in, the worse it'll be) unless they force restart. Involving a modifier key filters for intention pretty well, and so while this scenario is possible with ⌘O, it's far less likely.
Most Mac shortcuts seem to follow this, with those that are single-key by default doing relatively harmless and easily reversible things.
> It makes sense if one considers the angle of how single-key shortcuts are much more disaster-prone.
> ...
> Most Mac shortcuts seem to follow this, with those that are single-key by default doing relatively harmless and easily reversible things.
The enter-to-rename behavior has been in Mac OS since near the beginning, when versions were just named something like "System N.M").
IIRC, I've heard they had very detailed UI design documents back then, that explained their choices (e.g. I've heard they explained the reason for the menu bar being at the top of the screen rather than the top of a window was the cursor will just stop there, requiring less mousing precision).
So if that's the case, there should be documents confirming or denying your speculation.
The Mac didn’t have a CLI in the first 16 years or so, so there’s no traditional “execute” meaning for the Enter key. I’d argue that the thought here was that by pressing that key, you’d want to enter a new name for the selected file.
That's not a bad thought, but traditiona Mac keyboards didn't even have an "enter" key. (And nor do their current tenkeyless ones.) They just had a "return" key. The "enter" key only came around when the 10-key numpad was introduced, and it gave a different key code than the return key (which lives/lived where "enter" lives on PC keyboards).
I don't recall whether "enter" renamed files, and I can't check whether it does at the moment because all my mac keyboards within reach are tenkeyless, but "return" always has.
If it worked like that in other Mac apps, I wouldn’t mind. Then you would just adjust to “this is how MacOS does cut-and-paste” and after an initial adjustment it would make complete sense.
But in every other Mac app, even in TextEdit, you would Cmd-X to cut a piece of text and Cmd-V to then paste it somewhere else. The same logic is used to e.g. move an image within a note or email, which is also a file.
So Finder is simply inconsistent with the rest of the OS, and after 4 years as a Mac user I have just given up and use either drag-and-drop or a terminal when I need to move stuff.
The finder probably chooses this paradigm because cut + paste is destructive. If you cut text and never paste it, the next time you copy out cut you lose that text forever. So if you used the same paradigm for files in the finder, you could accidentally and permanently delete a file because you cut it and then fat fingered copy instead of paste. If this happens with text from a file you can often just close the file and not save to get your text back, or hit undo because cut text is part of your undo history (usually). But storing whole files in some undo history seems like it could go wrong real quick since either you couldn’t actually delete the file from disk until the history expired or the finder was restarted, or an undo might take a significant amount of time because you moved between file systems. Or imagine if the destination file system crashed during transfer or unmounted after. Then you couldn’t undo at all.
I use the "Multitouch" app from the same developer which integrates Rectangle with some other things.
Trying out the new macOS version.. it's a little fiddly to activate sometimes didn't want to go. Then the margin/spacing between the edge of the screens was annoying. Though I discovered that there is an option under "Desktop & Dock" in settings you can turn off called "Tiled windows have margins".
What I haven't figured out is if you can create a keyboard shortcut to tile left or right without using the mouse... so far have not figured out how to do that. Couldn't see an option for it.
Those settings revealed another option though to "Hold key while dragging windows to file". If you hold that key you don't actually have to drag to the edge, just move it to the correct side of the monitor (or not really move it at all if it's already on that side). Interesting alternative.
But I really often specifically use a keyboard shortcut for tile left, tile right or tile left third/middle third/right third (on a 35" Ultrawide).
Same, install Rectangle, learn shortcuts, never look back. I would happily remove it if the exact same functionality were ported to macOS (remove one more supply chain concern), but it seems it hasn’t been?
I don't know which ones you've tried, but the most popular ones (Magnet and Rectangle) have worked perfectly for me for years. I routinely forget that I have Rectangle installed.
I've been happy with Divvy for many years. It's not autotiling but the one-time config setup is intuitive after which my kbd shortcuts put things exactly where I want em, so I hardly ever think about it.
I have to use XQuartz for some apps I run in macOS. Magnet (and other apps I've tried) don't understand those windows. ShiftIt does, but it's buggy and no longer maintained.
Had to make an account just to say thanks! You literally solved one of my biggest gripes with macOS. This site honestly feels like the internet of the late aughts' last bastion. I think I'll stick around.
You can also double click the title bar to expand to fill the screen, and double click it again to return to the previous size. One caveat to this is if your application saves window sizes on close and you close with a full screen window and re-open, it won’t shrink again because the “original size” was full screen when the window was opened
Setting the "Double-click a window's title bar" action to Zoom just fills the vertical space. It doesn't adjust the width to fill available space, which is usually what I want. Finder, as an example, almost never sets the width to something usable.
True, it would be more accurate to say that what "zoom" is designed to do is expand the window as much as possible to display all the content, however the application defines that. For many applications, the result is a fully maximized window. On my MBA, Notes, Messages, Calendar, iTerm, Solvspace, and Mail all just fill the screen. For other applications that report specific content area to the OS that can mean something different. A finder window generally reshapes to show all the icons in icon view, or to maximize columns and names in list view.
The most annoying one is Safari, which arbitrarily decides on what the "best" window width is, even if the website could easily reflow to fit a wider window.
I didn't know about this one, thank you for posting.
Also, on most windows, you can option-click the green window bar button and get this same behavior. However, some apps, like Safari, will instead expand the window to "a reasonably large size" that will not necessarily cover the whole screen.
It annoys the hell out of me that there’s never been an option to invert this. I actually like the old size-to-fit behaviour and I never ever want the iOS-style full screen, I don’t want to have to hold Option to get what was once the default behaviour.
We may actually be seeing the moment where Moom[1] is no longer an essential OS X app. It can solve both window tiling and the "maximize problem" on mac and has been my first install for many years. Here's to hoping that Apple can get one basic OS feature right once.
The 'cycle' option in Rectangle.app allows just this. I use the hotkey(s) + bracket keys to cycle 1/3, 1/2, 2/3 screen windows justified left or right, and the hotkey + pipe key to cycle center justified.
These three shortcuts are embarrassingly effective and cover 99% of my window tiling. Others include the standard hotkey(s) + return for fullscreen and hotkey(s) + backspace for the previous window size..
It maximises, but slightly smaller than full maximisation, which is driving me crazy. Eg there's a 30px or so gap, and if you double tap the chrome it fills the remaining space.
If you hold option while dragging the window, yes. Otherwise dragging the window to the top of the screen is the method of moving it between spaces (e.g. separate desktop workspaces).
Raycast has window management and it has been amazing. Very easy to move windows between displays and different configurations of window size and placement.
Thanks for this! By the way, does anyone know anyone of the icon designers of Windows 3, 3.1? I would be very happy to meet them or know more about them. For some reason I'm still fascinated with those icons even after all those years.
Did you mistype or are you actually somehow using a 57 inch monitor?
If really 57”, are these multiple separate screens?
I went up from 32 to 40 and regret it, to be honest. It’s m nice for Xcode, but for any other use, it’s too big for me. For instance, I miss notifications that pop up in the top right corner, it’s just out of my field of vision.
The original Aero Snap was almost perfect. But I find the newer variation in Win11 a bit annoying as it adds a bunch of UI for tiling that is too easy to activate by accident.
BetterTouchTool used to be a mandatory install for every Mac for me. Unfortunately, at some point it started putting all my screens to sleep a few times a day. I have no idea why, and it persisted across multiple devices. I switched to Magnet once I narrowed the issue to BetterTouchTool.
For the first time Apple responded to my bug report through the Feedback Assistant and requested more information, so kind of feel involved in this :)
So the bug was about the screen recording permission needed for some apps, Shottr specifically. Despite me allowing screen recording previously macOS Sequoia kept asking me to go into the settings and give the permission. According to Apple, that should have had happened once a week, so I gave a follow up feedback about definitely me not wanting to repeat this more than once. Fingers crossed I won't have to fiddle with permission when taking a screenshot.
tccutil(1) is already a thing, which by its name you'd think would give you full CLI control over the macOS permission system (TCC), but strangely it only has one command as of now: "reset" (in Sonoma at least, haven't checked Sequoia yet).
> For the first time Apple responded to my bug report through the Feedback Assistant and requested more information, so kind of feel involved in this :)
Same here! I think it was re: locatedb not working? Although I was much more interested in my Feedback re: why dtrace was causing crashes after sleep.
As much as I wish Apple were a more open company, if they just responded to Bug Reports, that would be amazing!
It's especially frustrating since you always stumble upon it when you have something else in mind, this your flow is broken to re-confirm something you did a month ago.
I'm not aware of a fix, hopefully more people will write a feedback about it.
Does it mean macOS will periodically ask me again and again that Teams/Zoom/etc need screen recording permissions? As if I didn’t have enough pop-ups and prompts in my life already
I think that's the case. It's doing it for Shottr(screenshots app) and Ice(toolbar management app), the two apps I regularly use and require that permission.
It seems like they could just give you a notification reminder once a month that apps have that permission, without forcing you to grant it over and over
For some reason, I find it kinda funny you don't just ask the LLM to extract the values for you. Practically, your solution makes a lot of sense -- way fewer tokens, less likely to make weird one-off errors, can verify the response makes basic sense or re-use the code off-line or with sensitive data...
But if I were watching Star Trek, they would definitely just ask the computer to grab the fields and it would be a done deal!
jq's syntax is different, but well worth remembering.
i have some flash cards if you'd like. a teensy amount of effort pays huge dividends with swiss knife software like this (and things like matplotlib, tar CLI options, etc)
Wow, that might be the best part of the update. System Integrity Protection shields /usr, /bin, and /sbin, so I prefer to use the system provided executables in those directories when possible.
"dirty" usually means that the commit doesn't correspond to any specific version tag in the repo (or whatever other mechanism is used to map commits to versions).
Best new feature: Passwords are a separate app again instead of being a shitty, illegible panel in the inexplicably-unresizable, cramped, tiny-text hell of the iOSified system prefs.
Maybe in a couple more major versions we'll have a re-re-designed system prefs app that actually looks like a desktop app again!
I have been using a little app called Rectangle[1] for years now, and it solves every possible window positioning need I have ever had. No ads, no cost.
As far as the conversation goes, 1st party implementation by Apple would be nice and all, but 3rd party doesn't bother me in the slightest. (at least in this case)
I mean I use rectangle, and used spectacle before it, and I’m very grateful to the developers for maintaining it and making it available for free, but this really should be part of the OS and I will be very happy to get rid of that app after updating to Sequoia.
I also use an app that reverses the scroll direction of an attached USB mouse, without affecting the (natural) trackpad scroll direction, because MacOS does not allow changing them independently (looks like they are separate options for mouse and trackpad but they are in fact the same).
The App is called Scroll Reverser [1] it is free and works flawlessly, but it really should not have to exist, it’s ridiculous.
> And easily access and understand your home electricity use with new Electricity Usage and Rates features[14]
> 14: Eligible users include Pacific Gas and Electric Company customers who have residential electrical service, including areas served by Community Choice Aggregators. Users must be the utility account owner or authorized user of the utility account.
what an extraordinarily specific feature to put into Home.app. I guess California is a pretty big state, with a pretty big portion of their target market, but still
New features are often launched with partner companies, and then all the PMs have a real life example to go point at to convince their conservative stakeholders to adopt the new thingy. Looking at your power usage is not an apple thing, it's a power company thing to implement.
The way Apple product management works is that everyone is always demoing stuff up the chain and ultimately to Tim. They’re reverentially referred to as “Tim demos” internally. If Tim likes it, you get tons of resources.
The downside may be that in the pathological case you’re implementing stuff just for Tim. Another downside is you can’t really demo e.g. high-quality backwards-compatible SDKs to an exec.
The upside is you end up with a pretty coherent and un-fickle set of products. Unlike Google, Apple doesn’t have a roster of five (?) competing chat apps that it constantly changes.
Ah I really wanted this too but it seems like it's not available in the EU.
Does anyone understand why? Is it apple having a flap about recent DMA/Whatever regulations they don't like or is there an actual technical reason why what's probably a fancy version of VNC can't work without breaching European regulations?
They haven't given a detailed reason, but pundits who have paid more attention to the DMA suggest that it's because the feature does not allow 3rd parties to offer the same integration.
While the DMA's changes to the app store received the most publicity, the DMA mandates for modularity for any feature where a home-advantage could be granted by the gate keeper. Since features like AI and screen mirroring are already established markets with competitors, Apple offering these as built in functions could be interpreted as actions against the DMA unless they offer a way for others to tap into it via APIs.
However this is just a guess. There is a cynical rhetoric that it's to punish the EU but this is a pretty flimsy idea since it's clear that Apple is relying on these new features to propel upgrades to M series macs and new iPhones. Currently there exists no tentpole feature for people in the EU to upgrade. The other reason is that it's pretty tenuous to think that the EU masses will rise up against the EC because they don't have screen mirroring or image playground.
This is an interesting one because, to my knowledge, and unlike alternative App Stores etc on iOS, there’s surely nothing stopping an Android phone manufacturer from developing a Mac app to offer equivalent functionality?
I’m unsure whether the DMA compels them to provide specific APIs beyond the ability to connect to arbitrary devices and draw to the screen, and it’s maybe a little bit concerning if it does. My understanding was that nothing in the DMA specifically compelled Apple to create e.g. MarketplaceKit, it’s just that the alternative would be to open up iOS far more than Apple is willing to do.
I can install a whole number of AppStore or opensource apps that allow me to access other machines graphically. I really don't see why accessing the GUI on an iPhone should be treated any differently than accessing the GUI on a terminal server or an android or linux box or something.. The argument doesn't really make sense to me..
While your guess is as good as mine. I can see that the screen sharing feature goes beyond what is currently possible with 3rd party mirroring tools, including apple's own earlier tools. For example right clicking brings up extensive contextual menus that aren't accessible in iOS, and I can see these also leverage the continuity features between the platforms.
It's DMA. Certainly part of it is punitive, but it makes sense, too - building and especially supporting interoperability for these protocols is a burden that they can avoid by not shipping features to the EU. They're free to change the key exchange, APIs, wire format, etc. without having to deal with documentation, key issuance, etc. outside of their walls. And, being forced to open up Screen Mirroring would reduce its value as a moat, since someone would presumably be able to build an Android client quickly and with no reverse engineering work.
> And, being forced to open up Screen Mirroring would reduce its value as a moat, since someone would presumably be able to build an Android client quickly and with no reverse engineering work.
Which is everything wrong about current Apple. How far the Apple has fallen off the tree. Back in the resurgence of the Mac after Steve Jobs returned, the policy was to make everything as open as possible, now it's entirely the reverse.
If the iPhone/Mac were a competitive product as they are, there would be no need to retort to that sort of shenanigan, the whole thing would be openly documented but implementation quality would be the deciding factor.
It is not surprising that Apple doesn't want to compete because they wouldn't necessarily win, before even talking about price.
In any case, while it's a nice feature to have, it can only be considered worthwhile because all of Apple's strategies for convergence have failed pretty hard (after mocking Microsoft) and there are now too many annoying things you need to do specifically on a smartphone (because of Apps, Auths, or other nonsense of the sort).
If anything, it is extremely dumb (considering the price and marketing around ecosystem) that you cannot just use whatever data is on the phone but with correct desktop app implementation even (and especially) for Apple first party app.
As a Mac user that is getting old (I remember System 7 from my youth, and I used System 9 for a bit) I feel extremely saddened that we are now celebrating what is basically a custom implementation of VNC/Remote Desktop for a completely locked device/OS.
This feature was considered essential/basic 20 years ago, having to use it to access a limited device because a company can't figure out proper convergence, largely out of pure greed, is really not something to be happy about.
I'm sure one day they'll figure out how to make a Mac App to properly exploit all the health/sport data of their very expensive Watch products (that require an iPhone for no good reason).
But when this day will come I probably won't be a customer anymore so whatever...
> Back in the resurgence of the Mac after Steve Jobs returned, the policy was to make everything as open as possible
My perception is quite different. One of the first things Steve did after his return was to revoke the licenses for Mac clones (Power Computing, Daystar, UMAX, etc). Also, the iPod, iPhone and iPad were created under his leadership and have always been very far from open in their designs, regarding both hardware and software.
Apple was (and still is) very open when it helps them, e.g. by adopting and enforcing USB (original iMac) or USB C (laptops from ca 2015 on).
So do I understand it correctly; the problem is not MacOS having a client app, the problem is iOS acting as the server with only apple approved client implementation?
I really don't see how it falls outside of the DMA.
> supporting interoperability for these protocols is a burden
Also an unprecedented and unacceptable privacy and security risk.
You would be allowing third parties the ability to continuously record your iPhone's screen. Which includes websites you browse, apps you open, health information, text messages etc.
And the Mac is so much open that you could do this, have a local model to transcribe it and ship it to a remote server without the user noticing.
There isn't a government or advertising company on this planet that wouldn't want to get at this information.
> Also an unprecedented and unacceptable privacy and security risk.
> You would be allowing third parties the ability to continuously record your iPhone's screen. Which includes websites you browse, apps you open, health information, text messages etc.
> And the Mac is so much open that you could do this, have a local model to transcribe it and ship it to a remote server without the user noticing.
MacOS is not secure in the way you would like to think it's secure. This is already risk. And Apple really could do this right: make screen mirroring use the DRM playback paths, and open up the API to trigger it to competitors (who would get precisely the same DRM-playback-pathed result of a screen mirror showing up in a window from which they cannot read). I don't really know why a competitor would want to compete here, but they could.
Most people interact with apps like Health on their phone not their Mac.
And there are also many third party apps that never made Mac versions.
So the amount of data we are talking about exposing is significantly higher.
And the issue is that the DMA is ambiguous about what competition and interoperability specifically means and so it would just take one company to complain about your solution for Apple to be fined 10% of global revenue.
Many people log into their Mac using the same credentials (Apple ID) that give access to the Health data, and in fact Apple makes it really hard or even impossible to use it without (you can't selectively grant access, you need to use a separate Apple ID but then you lose some useful features such as universal clipboard, etc).
This is again a misinformed take. Your Mac can already get all your iPhone's data from the cloud where it is synced without viable opt-out or compartmentalization.
> Only if the data is available in iCloud and it is stored in files and it is not encrypted.
Health data is available in there, just to go after your example. iPhone backups are also available in there.
At no point am I being asked anything else beyond my Apple ID, password, and two-step approval on another device (such as the Mac) to set up a new iPhone and download all my data.
Thus the outcome is that the Mac indeed has everything it needs to get access to all your iCloud data. In fact, reverse-engineering how to get it directly is unnecessary work - instead, just reverse-engineer enough to capture the Apple ID password (or prompt to it - given there's still no way for the user to tell a real system dialog from one drawn by malware) and approve the 2FA prompt, get an actual, real iPhone and sign into the person's account and then extract all the data from there (via screenshots if necessary).
There’s a universe in which your Mac is a locked down device like your iPhone, with a proper immutable filesystem, carefully controlled persistent state, and a strong sandbox in which the terminal, Homebrew, and apps (App Store and otherwise) can act within the sandbox but cannot do things like, say, reading your entire iMessage database.
We do not live in this universe. Consider getting a Chromebook instead if you want to be in that universe. (But then you have a tradeoff: Apple itself seems pretty good about not using your data inappropriately. Google, not so much.)
>You would be allowing third parties the ability to continuously record your iPhone's screen
Apple is first-party to the device, but third-party to me, the user. Why are they more trustworthy than a free open-source tool? Who the hell are they to tell me who I can and cannot trust?
It is sad to see such a misinformed take on a technical forum. You can already do everything you want. It will take some reverse-engineering work, but it's possible.
Similar things were said about iMessage interoperability with Android, until Beeper proved them wrong. They managed to reverse-engineer it, build a compatible client and clearly proved Apple's claims were BS (and no, this didn't lead to a mass-scale compromise of iMessage, contradicting fanboys' claims).
If the feature allows to pull up the iPhone's screen without any user consent, then it is vulnerable to begin with - the reverse-engineering requirement would become an insignificant hurdle compared to the value of such a vulnerability. Presumably however, there will be a consent step, either on the spot or prior (maybe it can reuse the cryptographic pairing mechanism that happens when the phone asks you to "trust this computer?" the first time), and no third-party (whether using an approved API or reverse-engineered) would be able to bypass it without the user intentionally consenting.
> the reverse-engineering requirement would become an insignificant hurdle compared to the value of such a vulnerability
The idea that breaking device attestation that is secured through Secure Enclave hardware i.e. not accessible from user code is an insignificant hurdle is hilariously ridiculous. It is borderline impossible for any ordinary developer.
And people that bring up the "just ask the user" argument clearly don't remember how poorly that has worked in the past e.g. Microsoft Vista. Users will blindly approve any dialog which is why Apple has been so careful to limit them to targeted actions which a "do you approve this app to record everything on your iPhone" is not.
You're approaching this from the idea that the impenetrability by third-parties is the primary security feature.
If this is true, then my worry isn't even about malicious attackers, it's my neighbor (with a real Mac) being able to (accidentally!) eavesdrop on my phone screen (since according to you this is the primary security measure).
It's obviously ridiculous, and the primary security measure is that there must be a prior key exchange and consent step. If that part is secure, then it would be secure against a third-party.
If that part is not secure, then no Secure Enclave-ing will help you, because worst case scenario, the attacker can just use a real Mac as part of his attack to pass the secure-enclave-protected authentication step, or just exploit the good old "analog hole" by using the real Mac as the main attack vector (and then just capture its HDMI output and feed in inputs via a USB-capable microcontroller simulating a keyboard).
> It is sad to see such a misinformed take on a technical forum.
If you’re going to make such a claim, you should be very careful to ensure you’re not misinformed yourself.
> Similar things were said about iMessage interoperability with Android, until Beeper proved them wrong.
No, they did not. We already knew Apple not allowing iMessage on Android was a lock-in choice. The trial with Epic brought that unambiguously to light, years before the release of Beeper Mini¹.
“Due to the regulatory uncertainties brought about by the Digital Markets Act, we do not believe that we will be able to roll out three of these [new] features — iPhone Mirroring, SharePlay Screen Sharing enhancements and Apple Intelligence — to our EU users this year.”
Considering the pricing in the EU it was already hard to consider the effort to value worthwhile but now we are officially getting a substandard product.
Before there were many stuffs like Apple News never making it but at least there was some pretense of working on it.
Since EU people are getting a less featureful product, they should get products priced accordingly.
Otherwise, Apple should just fuck off EU if it doesn't want to play ball, they started the whole thing by being consumer hostile and the greediest corporation ever, they make Microsoft look like the good guys.
I've been waiting a year for the summarize AI to (not) make it to my Google Pixel 8 Pro. It should be known that everyone outside of the US get a different product than what is advertised online and reviewed on YouTube.
Publish the protocol docs. That's literally all that's required from them. Actually they don't even need to - they can just promise not to sue anyone who reverse-engineers it and publishes a commercial client.
That's how adversarial interoperability worked for decades (and gave free software the ability to interoperate with proprietary formats, see LibreOffice for example) before abusing the DMCA and/or threatening legal action to take down compatible implementations became common practice. I do not recall of any security breaches as a result of this.
Apple are however not going to do that, because doing so would overnight destroy their moat around Universal Clipboard and all their existing interoperability features. So instead they make up some bullshit that non-technical governments and courts will take years to disprove, buying them more time to operate anti-competitively.
It is however sad to see a member of a technical forum gobble up said bullshit.
Can you articulate where in the DMA where it says that all Apple has to do "is promise not to sue anyone" to be in compliance. Or where it talks about protocol publication.
The DMA is about preventing gatekeepers from using arbitrary restrictions to prevent competition. It does not try to predict and anticipate every possible example nor solution.
The existence of competitor would by itself be enough proof to the fact that Apple is not restricting competition. But for such a competitor to exist, they would require enough assurance that the business will be viable and they won't get sued out of existence.
Apple either publishing the protocol or at the very least publishing an official licensing agreement allowing anyone to reverse-engineer and reimplement said protocol would achieve this.
Evidence could be that Microsoft isn't in trouble for shipping Windows with RDP servers/clients in Europe, which is equivalent to this iPhone mirroring feature.
Why is Microsoft able to do it just fine (without running afoul of the DMA) while Apple supposedly can't, despite MS having an ever larger marketshare of its field than Apple and this would warrant even more scrutiny?
The multitude of third-party RDP clients (and nobody being threatened with legal action for implementing one) out there may be at least part of the answer.
I know that Apple wants their cake and eat it too, looking for ways to wiggle out of this while still dodging their responsibilities. This is why they need years and a small army of lawyers.
Pretty simple really. The EU can't fine Apple for not doing business in EU countries, including not rolling out a feature. But if they do roll out a feature, EU has decided it can fine them 20% of global revenue if it isn't just how the EU wants it to be.
Not doing so only costs Apple whatever marginal business they expect to lose in EU for not offering this or that feature. So I'd expect more of this going forward.
It's only a matter of time before the EU gets wise to this - this move is simply to delay the inevitable and buy themselves some more time to act anticompetitively. When they feel like the EU is closer to disproving their argument (because there is no technical reason this can't be opened to third-parties in a secure way), they will suddenly announce that they have found some magic and miraculous way to do it and release the feature, bringing them back into compliance.
> It's only a matter of time before the EU gets wise to this
"gets wise to this" how, exactly? The EU can certainly set conditions which Apple must meet to ship a feature. They have no legal grounds whatsoever to demand that Apple ship that feature to Europe, specially modified to meet their exacting requirements.
How would that even work? One way to comply with the EU's demands that a product work a certain way, is to not sell that product in the EU. Is your stance that EU has a right to force companies to sell their wares in the EU?
Gets wise that this is blatant malicious compliance, and use this to inform potential enforcement action and/or revisions to the regulation.
It could very well become that after enough of this, DMA 2.0 would have a provision stipulating that any feature withheld in the EU would need to have a valid technical justification that passes review by a panel of independent experts.
Yep, I hope they work on something like that. Maybe we could get a chance for another competitive OS in the EU.
Sometimes I wish they tax the hell out of those US behemoth in a way that would open space for EU companies to become competitive.
The network effects are too big when it comes to IT, it's not very wise to let the US be the sole beneficiary of such an industry.
It is surprisingly slow, though. Like, awfully slow. There's a very noticeable latency that's unacceptable for a local device sitting right next to the computer.
Apple has been doing low latency screen mirroring for, I don’t know, a decade. If you find the latency unacceptable, consider looking into your network performance.
Great way to tell you have low standard and can't detect latency. The same thing has been said about the iPad Mirroring, expect it's effectively unusable for anyone half serious if you don't use the wired mode.
For a quick tech demo, it's all fun and games, but when there is real shit to do, nobody wants to fight their tools.
As someone who dislikes the “you’re holding it wrong” argument, I don’t think that’s what’s happening here. Your network latency is outside of Apple’s control.
So what phone link has been doing for years. But I suppose with the integration Apple can do you can just open the notification on your mac? Phone link very unhelpfully bings the notifying app name...
On supported devices (Samsung and OnePlus, off the top of my head), Phone Link can mirror apps to your PC and will open them up in this mode when you click a notification. There are some rough edges, like needing to manually unlock your phone—unless you do what I did and rig up a complicated Tasker flow to automate the process. This update makes jumping over to the Apple ecosystem surprisingly tempting, since Continuity with mirroring sounds like a more polished version of Phone Link. I can't imagine giving up my ThinkPad, though.
NSUserActivity didn't forward notifications, it just provided a way to move whatever you were doing on your other Apple devices to the one you're currently using and only covered things that the dev specifically implemented.
Oh interesting! Does it mean that the content of these forwarded notifications goest through Apple servers then? With no way for the source app to prevent it?
I haven't picked it apart, but if it's like the other Continuity features it all takes place locally over bluetooth and ad-hoc wifi. There's a possibility that their servers are just sending the notifications to the user's Macs in the same push that sends them to the phone though.
Can you elaborate on why it's nice? How do I do multi-touch gestures with a single cursor? Is the main benefit be able to use iPhone apps on a bigger screen? Can iPhone apps display more content (maybe let the app pretend it's being displayed on an iPad or at least a larger screen than the physical screen size)?
At least in Sonoma, Screen Time requests crash Messages, fail to work properly on iPadOS, but work fine on iPhone. Now I can approve requests without having to dig my phone out my pocket. A small convenience, but I can’t expect them to fix Screen Time on macOS any time soon.
But with a trackpad you cannot see what you are touching. You see a single cursor on the screen. If you touch two things on your iPhone you know exactly which two things you are manipulating. With a single cursor on the Mac, no matter how many fingers you use you only manipulate one thing.
This seems to me a difficult challenge in mashing up the wildly different interaction paradigms. I'd love to see how Apple solves it in their new feature.
Imagine a game that's supposed to played with a landscape orientation. Your left hand control (up/down/left/right) is located on the lower left corner. Your right hand control (A/B/X/Y) is located on the lower right corner. You are expected to touch two controls simultaneously.
I don't even like Apple as a company but I have high expectations of their products and I assume their product is meticulously designed for a variety of use cases. Why should I as a consumer expect half-assed implementations? Just because all software are half-assed these days?
Apple says "With iPhone Mirroring, users can now fully access and engage with their iPhone right from Mac while iPhone remains locked nearby." And nowhere does Apple say this feature doesn't work for games.
I didn't discount anything. Where did I say that? I merely have high expectations and I'm asking about the feature and whether it satisfies the high expectations, and if so, how. This is called curiosity.
I'm never the kind of person who discounts a feature before I even use it. And I clearly said I haven't used it.
Zooming into a map, a picture, a webpage, or quite frankly most things would be rather awkward if you didn’t know where it would zoom in (or if it would always zoom into the center of the screen, for instance).
As another comment mentioned, it appears to use the cursor position as the pinch-gesture location.
Let us know if you're actually using it in a week or so. (I tried it a couple of times in the beta. It is slow. It is clunky. It is an impractical way to interact with your iPhone.)
Well, it's basically VNC over Wifi with a custom layer for touch events and other special iOS cases, so yeah.
VNC over wifi is worse than RDP'ing a server across a country if you have good wired fiber connection. But I guess in a pinch if you don't want to look for your iPhone and need a quick interaction.
But I agree that in any case it's largely a gimmick and mainly something for marketing reasons around the ecosystem and all that jazz. It's just like the failed attempt at porting iOS/iPadOS apps to the Mac: makes for a great release announcement/keynote, in practice barely worth using.
That’s not what your parent comment is saying. They’re commenting on how there’s no official Instagram app for Desktop, except now there kind of is: you use the mobile app on a mirror of the iPhone on the Desktop. That is “kind of wild” because it’s so roundabout. The comment criticises Instagram (and their lack of a Desktop app), not Apple.
I feel left out sometimes given that I'm still on Mojave. Everyone else is enjoying their new features.
But I also like running 32-bit apps and knowing where the system preferences are (because they haven't changed every year for me). So swings and roundabouts.
I'm thinking of going back. I can't stand the horrific "flat" UI and the crappy white-on-grey-on-light-grey, I hate not having separate window title bars, the combined title/tool bars, the inscrutable buttons labeled with nothing but a squiggle, it's just hideous now.
Even though Mojave and Catalina still carry scars from the crimes committed in Yosemite towards good adherence to the HIG, they're miles better.
> inscrutable buttons labeled with nothing but a squiggle
Something you learn to really like on Windows is how well "described" most of the UI is on hover.
In macOS even for seasoned users there are always some things you are never quite sure do and you have to Google much of it. Plenty of the UI is not discoverable, Windows got that part way better.
> With many of the Apple Intelligence models running entirely on device, as well as the introduction of Private Cloud Compute — which extends the privacy and security of Apple devices into the cloud to unlock even more intelligence — Apple Intelligence introduces an extraordinary step forward for privacy in artificial intelligence.
They've said this in every mention of Apple AI since the WWDC, but they haven't mentioned at all if you can disable the cloud calls. I'm assuming you won't be able to, but if you can, that will be a very neat guarantee to have. If that same ability comes to an iPhone, I'll be very tempted to break my 10+ year Android tenure.
In the beta builds with Apple Intelligence, it is possible to turn the entire feature set off (including cloud calls). Don’t think you can keep the local features and skip the cloud though.
Looks like the new security has made it very difficult to use third-party QuickLook plugins. I'm messing with qlmanage and xattr now but so far no luck. A starting point: https://github.com/sindresorhus/quick-look-plugins
- iphone mirroring keeps going into "paused" mode, showing a "resume" button
- iphone mirroring doesn't unblock apps that need face Id, e.g. whatsapp says "passcode required" without prompting for some form of auth (auto auth is enabled, but no luck)
- iphone mirroring is not really "mirroring": one cannot use both app and phone at the same time, and see what is going on.
- window tiling shortcut requires dragging a window first, Rectangle is much more flexible ie the window only need to be active
- UX for security got worse with "ask every month". Apple doesn't trust us knowing what we're doing, ie there should be a "trust forever" somewhere if I want to
- tagging people in Photos is still extremely buggy
- sequoia is hard to spell (when googling for info) (just me? lol)
I have an M1 Air 8GB and a 2018 MBP 16GB. Performance feels about the same until the Air hits swap, then the old Intel MBP still outperforms the M1 Air.
My 2018 MBP 15 is the i7 model, while it gets warm it never had the overheating issues the i9 models had. I also had the battery replaced under AppleCare about 10 months ago so it still gets 7-9 hours of battery life.
Thank you all for beta testing Sequoia for the rest of us!
Jokes apart: I tend to wait 2-3 months at least before upgrading. There's usually a number of security fixes, and a number of bug fixes, in the first, well, 2-3 months after a new Mac OS goes live. After that, things become quite stable.
Yearly reminder to not jump ahead directly if you care about your productivity. Just wait a few months, there is no rush to upgrade, you won’t miss anything critical by delaying a bit. macOS releases always come up with issues that are solved in minor/patch versions in the first 3-6 months.
Always solid advice. Still, I updated a sacrificial laptop to the public beta on day 1 and it’s been one of the most boring-in-a-good-way releases in a while. Save for things like Rogue Amoeba having to update their software to a new API, which is an annual tradition, I honestly don’t recall anything that didn’t work from the start.
Although I don’t use MacOS, the fact that you can now control an iPhone from a Mac will probably be reverse engineered to allow Linux to do the same at some point. A lot of automation opportunities
"Available on Mac computers with Apple silicon and Intel-based Mac computers with a T2 Security Chip. Requires that your iPhone and Mac are signed in with the same Apple ID using two-factor authentication" https://www.apple.com/macos/macos-sequoia/
Bot farms will love that. A lot of websites are using reCAPTCHA and similar to prevent automation, but a lot of apps do not have anything similar. Maybe they do a jailbreak check and that's it.
I’m curious about the name. Since the move from cats to California regions, they’ve seemed to be regionally or biom grouped. We were in sierra regions for a while (10.10-10.13) then beach regions (10.13-13). 14 was Sonoma so I would’ve expect Napa, but seems we’re back to sierra mountain regions.
I wonder what goes into the product discussions over the name. Is there a rhyme or reason or is it just want sounds best to the PMs and marketers?
It's been awhile since I've done a clean install, and my MacBook feels a little crusty/bloated with stuff so I think it's about time. What's the recommended process these days for a direct clean install?
If I factory reset my MacBook Pro M1 it'll go back to Ventura, then I have to manually upgrade to Sequoia.
I asked ChatGPT and it suggested I create a bootable USB drive install media for Sequoia instead (after downloading Sequoia from the app store):
If you really really want to clean it all out, you’ll want to do a DFU wipe and install. Basically you plug a USB-C cable from one MacBook to another and then you upgrade the recoveryOS from the second MacBook which lets you bypass all that resetting to Ventura and then upgrading.
Can’t say I’ve done this recently, but I think if I were doing this today I’d probably install it on the current machine and then boot into recovery mode and reinstall from there.
There really doesn't seem to be much here that's worthwhile? I'd love it if someone made a better macOS settings app, the current one feels like it's made to be used on an ipad or touchscreen device.
None of my ATVs have the upgrade option yet; I’m a bit worried, as all the homepods and other devices are on 18, and historically version mismatches can wreak havoc on Homekit. I am pretty excited for Siri to start to stop sucking though!
Apple is making if harder and harder to install kernel extensions and so requiring the macfuse dependency is becoming a big burden on your tool and thus that raises the barrier to entry for user space filesystems on mac
I feel a little disappointed as most new features announced pertain to applications shipped with the OS, rather than the OS itself. Many of these apps I do not use, as I prefer third-party alternatives. For example, I use Firefox instead of Safari, Signal instead of Messages, and 1Password instead of Passwords, Google Maps instead of Maps.
The only OS-level features mentioned are windows tiling and iPhone mirroring. As an Android user, I do not care about the latter, either.
It’s not like OS-level features and improvements aren’t in every release—Apple’s been talking about them since WWDC in developer channels. Read the release notes.
It also doesn't do half the shit Keychain Access did other than hold onto passwords. At least they didn't rip it out of the OS altogether, it's in /System/Library/CoreServices/Applications now.
Well I've decided not to renew 1password. I have very basic use cases, and am happing to stay within Apple eco system. So, to me, 1password is just too much money.
I agree with you, our small business pays around $1200 per year for 1Password for a handful of users.
Apple passwords doesn’t have to be ABSOLUTELY AMAZING to make financial sense to us, it just has to work well enough where previously we didn’t really have any free options we liked.
15GB for some crappy generative AI. No thanks. Will stick with Monterey as long as possible. This new generative AI thing may just be the thing to make me install Asahi Linux on my computer. Hopefully it's feature-complete enough soon.
I dug into this. Apple's incentives aside, the bulk of intel's chips in macs are no longer supported by Intel or soon won't be. The more time passes the harder it is to keep those machines secure.
This is the best article I found on the topic. Note that once a mac is no longer supported for a new os the old os will get security updates for two years after that.
The old OS will generally get most security updates for two years, but that is not a written policy or rule, and Apple has not patched CVEs on older OSes in the past that were well within the N-2 assumption.
Most of the time they do, but depending on the data you work with and the risk you can accept, that might not be an acceptable policy.
I'll note that anyone running an out of date MacOS should use Chrome or Firefox. Safari gets its updates via OS updates, whereas third party browsers have their own update cycle.
Both iOS and macOS seem to have a strange number of their updates "coming later" and that is not even including Apple Intelligence which they really made the cornerstone of the updates in initial marketing. Very bizarre.
No, the DMA very likely bans it. The EU won't say in advance and has been loudly threatening fines of 10% of global revenue.
DMA forbids using your platform's data or position to support a service without giving third parties equal access. Third parties are pretty clearly excluded from screen mirroring or running ai on device, so these seem like things Apple can't legally launch in the EU.
I'm sitting here thinking - man, how is it possible that they can make the best laptop hardware no contest, and yet I still get blurry icons when connecting to a non-retina external display? Something that the cheapest Windows laptop money can buy would do flawlessly?
Macs are great and so is macOS, but it's not that good, at the end of the day it's just a computer
I realize it's a very Apple ecosystem thing to shore up gaps in macOS with 3rd party apps, but BetterDisplay can do this for you: https://github.com/waydabber/BetterDisplay
(Run non-retina displays at 2X frame buffer for proper anti-aliasing)
This is awesome. I had just written off the reduced quality of my external displays and gotten used to it. I feel like I just put my contacts in after turning on HiDPI. Just wanted to say thanks!
Edit: Also want to mention that window sizes and various UI elements also snapped into their 'intended' locations. Two screens, both 1440p, one ultrawide for anyone reading. YMMV.
Interesting, I've never seen a big Github project with only a `README.md` before. It looks like they moved the open source part to a new branch[1], before halting the open development completely (I don't mind, just observing).
Thanks for the advice! I tried downloading this app and set both displays to HiDPI and UI elements seemed to sharpen, but certain icons are still blurry. I didn't see any options related to setting the framebuffer, I assume this happens automatically. Will keep experimenting...
I have not looked very hard but I don't think this app fixes the fundamental issues: which is the removal of proper sub-pixel antialiasing for anything that isn't considered a retina class display by their standard.
This sort of app might get a better output by forcing the 2x rendering and then scaling it to the native display resolution but it cannot possibly be of the same quality as what we had before, unless they rewrote rendering or something like that.
As far as I know there are 2 "real solutions": you buy a display that is retina class in one of their historically supported resolutions or you accept to lose a bit of desktop space by running a "sub-retina" class display at x2.
For example, a 27 inch "4k" (they are 3840x2160) display will get you a desktop space of 1920/1080 in HiDPI mode.
That is sad because a 27-inch iMac from the early 2000 had more desktop space, an image not as sharp but it wasn't bad as long as they kept sub-pixel antialiasing.
As far as I'm concerned, it is that way because they went the lazy way around implementing HiDPI and being able to market it like they were so much better than Microsoft. But that only works if you solely buy their hardware because nobody followed them on the desktop specs (even though it's slowly coming lately it seems).
This issue in my opinion is a testament of how much anti-consumer and disdainful Apple is; because it couldn't possible have cost them a lot of engineering to be able to support both, it is clearly for their bottom line and that's it.
What does "retina" mean exactly? From what I can tell it's a general Apple marketing term rather than something concrete. Are 4K monitors unsupported by macOS? I've been using one with my MacBook for a while and I haven't noticed blurriness.
AFAICT “Retina” is a marketing term used by Apple to refer to their first party displays with high pixel density. I use a QHD display with much lower pixel density and get blurry icons. Since writing the comment I realized I was using a very specific term in a general way, which is technically incorrect, but I thought that’s what the problem was.
From reading the comments in these threads and some additional resources, it does seem that the problem is not whether or not the display is “retina” per say, but that macOS is designed to run on high density displays and can have problems with low density ones. My mistake I guess.
I think the point that Apple should have better support for a wider range of displays still stands. It is not unreasonable to want your general purpose, professional-grade computer which costs thousands to work correctly with a variety of displays and resolutions, especially when lesser machines do it better.
At this point I’m just whinging bitterly though, the blurry icons are not the end of the world and buying new displays or a new computer just to fix them would be silly.
I already own two 2560x1440 non-Apple displays that work flawlessly with my Windows PC, they cost $250 apiece, and there is absolutely no way in hell I am selling them and buying a $1599 display because Apple can't fix their egregiously bad software. I'll just live with slightly blurry icons whenever I want to use them with my Mac.
Yes, but these are the ones I already own and that’s also completely besides the point, which is that they look great on Ubuntu, Windows 10/11, and pretty much every OS that’s not macOS
That's more on Microsoft's sudden shift to enshittification as a business model rather than making good software.
Apple has is actually enshittifying too (dumb UI changes, worse apps - see "Catalyst", etc), it's just that Microsoft has became a trailblazer in that field so Apple still feels good in comparison, despite the many downgrades.
Meanwhile, Wall Street and normies call Satya Nadella a genius and will be shocked in 5 to 10 years when their tabloid news operation/tech company starts looking more like IBM.
Pedant: Enshittification means something different, involving a company making one group’s experience worse so they can extract more money from another. It’s not “just” making a product worse.
From TFA: ‘Highlights automatically surfaces directions for a location’
Is that a mistype? In an apple advertisement? Regardless, the whole thing feels like it has been written by a high school student. Try reading the following without wincing:
‘A redesigned Reader allows users to read articles more quickly with a streamlined view, a summary, and a table of contents, and a new Viewer helps users put videos front and center while still giving them full access to system playback controls.’
I understand that, but even so the sentence makes no sense. I assumed that they meant to write: ‘Highlights automatically searches directions for a location’. Pardon my pedantry, but how is it possible to ‘surface’ a direction. Am I missing something?
My point stands… the quality of writing in this article is very poor: overly long sentences, clunky information reveal etc. it feels more like a first draft.
Yes, System Settings > Keyboard > Keyboard shortcuts > App Shortcuts > All Applications [0]. Pretty cumbersome, and I only get it to remap to "Top Left" and friends, but not just "Left" and "Right". Very frustrating.
When the apps are shipped bundled with the OS by the same company, and use new system framework/API features that are part of the OS what is really the distinction?
iPhone mirroring, video conferencing and window tiling actually use system frameworks, so it's okay to present them as OS features.
New versions of Safari are already available for older macOS versions through System Update for a few years, I've already downloaded Safari 18 on my Sonoma. And for Passwords, Messages, Notes and Maps there's no legit reasons why newer versions can't be distributed through App Store, other than using their new features as a promo for their new macOS...
Ah yes, another year of “what will Apple break in my workflow this time” tradition.
I can’t recall the last time I upgraded immediately. Maybe 2018? Been waiting for minor and patch releases of the bug ridden OS before upgrading myself (if personal device is eligible)
However, we can't guess whether the judgment is good or not, we need to collect power consumption and loading speed values to prove that the new version is indeed good or not
Weird how the title says, "macOS Sequoia is available today, bringing iPhone Mirroring, Apple Intelligence, and more to Mac"
Then you look at the paragraph for this and it says, "Coming Soon: Apple Intelligence"
They announced this in June, and it's just loosely coming "this fall." I have a feeling they are finding it very difficult to do anything with any kind of consistency or value on their 8gb RAM phones / Macbooks. Their models they have demonstrated so far are a relatively low parameter count with LoRA adapters for various use cases.
I have a feeling that the majority of Apple Intelligence will eventually just be farmed out to their "secure cloud" or whatever they were calling it.
I wouldn't be surprised if they're struggling full-stop. Doing anything with "apple-level" polish and reliability on current-gen LLMs is a challenge. It looks great in demos and maybe even 95% of real-world use cases, but the remaining 5% tends to be embarrassing.
And it's not just a case of "the last 5% takes 95% of the work", it's more like "the last 5% is an open research problem".
That is the biggest hurdle, in my opinion. If we could even reply with, "sorry, I don't know about that", it would be such an improvement over what we have today. Sadly, from what I understand, the only way to say "sorry, I don't know about that" is to just say that to every single question?
There's no specific reason why LLMs couldn't be trained to say "Don't know" when they don't know. Indeed, some close examination shows separate calculation patterns when it's telling the truth, when it's making a mistake and when it's deliberately bullshitting, with the latter being painfully common.
The problem is we don't train them that way. They're trained on what data is on the internet, and people... people really aren't good at saying "I don't know".
Applying RLHF on top of that at least helps reduce the deliberate lies, but it isn't normal to give a thumbs-up to an "I don't know" response either.
> There's no specific reason why LLMs couldn't be trained to say "Don't know" when they don't know.
Yes there is, it's that we don't know how. We don't have anywhere close to the level of understanding to know when an LLM knows something and when it doesn't.
Training on material that includes "I don't know" will not work. That's not the solution.
If we knew how, we'd be doing it, since that's the #1 user complaint, and the company that fixed it would win.
Do you think it's really a training set problem? I don't think you learn to say that you don't understand by observing people say it, you learn to say it by being introspective about how much you have actually comprehended, understanding when your thinking is going in multiple conflicting directions and you don't know which is correct, etc.
Kids learn to express confusion and uncertainty in an environment where their parents are always very confident of everything.
Overall though, I agree that this is the biggest issue right now in the AI space; instead of being able to cut itself off, the system just rambles and hallucinates and makes stuff up out of whole cloth.
> Do you think it's really a training set problem? I don't think you learn to say that you don't understand by observing people say it, you learn to say it by being introspective about how much you have actually comprehended, understanding when your thinking is going in multiple conflicting directions and you don't know which is correct, etc.
I really do think it's a training set problem. It's been amply proven that the models often do know when they lie.
Sure, that's not how children learn to do this... is it? I think in some cases, and to some degree, it is. They also learn by valuing consistency and separately learning morals. LLMs also seem to learn morals to some degree, but to the degree they're even able to reason about consistency, it certainly doesn't feed back into their training.
---
So yeah, I think it's a training set issue, and the reason children don't need this is because they have capabilities the LLMs lack. This would be a workaround.
iOS 18.1 and macOS 15.1 -- the versions with the full Apple Intelligence -- are both in betas, and there are enormous numbers of people blogging and vlogging about their experiences. And yes we all realize that on-device models aren't going to be competing with trillion parameter models, but people are finding it pretty useful.
They just don't feel like it's release ready so they're refining. Apple has done this with major releases over several iterations now where a couple of features are held back for the .1 release while it's perfected.
At least in Photos, the model is not what one would consider working. A quick example: "Halloween with [x]" works, because Halloween is recognized as a specific date. It works well. Christmas throws it for a loop. Christmas isn't thought of as a time but a state. So it'll show photos that look appropriately Christmassy, but the picks appear semi-random: it'll show one of about five taken in quick succession, but the one it picks is someone wearing a Santa hat in profile, but the other 4 are straight on and one would think more likely to be returned.
I don't think anyone can say with a straight face that being unable to properly grok the biggest holiday of the year for many Western countries is sufficient.
That isn't "Apple Intelligence" (which is the generative stuff held over to the .1 releases). What you're describing is inference metadata + basic search logic and has been in iOS and macOS for several major versions now, constantly improving.
And given that Christmas resolves to a date (it actually offers up the autocomplete of "Christmas Day" to make it easier, then simply making the search criteria a calendar date), for me it literally shows all photos on Dec 25. I guess mileage varies.
Well, except Apple specifically calls out this exact photo and video search function on their page titled "Apple Intelligence." Sure they've had some basic search already, but in their demos and advertising, they promise that Apple Intelligence is used to find photos by descriptions.
>Search for photos and videos in the Photos app simply by describing what you’re looking for. Apple Intelligence can even find a particular moment in a video clip that fits your search description and take you right to it.
If we accept Apple's claim that Apple AI is coming in beta in fall 2024 (or per the Canada page December 2024), and I have the release of 18 which by that restriction is not Apple AI enabled, I can already do complex semantic search which means that functionality can't be "Apple AI", right? And person on date has been in iOS for at least two prior generations as well. iOS has been allowing you to search by people in images, places, events, and text appearing in the image, along with broad categorizations like "sunset", "beach", etc, for at least two generations.
However when you're typing in a search, for each term it tries to contextualize it via selections. For instance if you already had "{Person} on " and then typed Christmas, it will let you pick if you mean Christmas the event, Christmas an "object", or Christmas the literal text (an icon of a couple of lines of text in a photo frame). I suspect the poster selected, probably unintentionally, Christmas the text and it gave them images where that text appears somewhere in the image. Just out of curiosity I did that and it gave me a set of images that I thought must be mistaken, but on each image somewhere the text Christmas could be found. In one it was a crazily distorted cursive writing on a table cloth hanging over the edge of a shelf, which is just crazy.
"iterated" implies that there is no improvement. Why do you thing 15.1 wouldn't be an improvement over 15.0? I do agree with you that "perfected" is also not the correct word choice. I think I would have gone with "refined" or "improved"
Unless it can be completely turned off I will never upgrade and I guess I will be selling my year-old M3 Max in favor of some shitty PC (or I’ll eventually just run Asahi once it supports my hardware well).
Apples pretty decent about putting toggle switches on stuff, for instance you don't have to enable iCloud or even associate it with an Apple account if you don't care for FindMy and remote erase etc
But I'm with you, since Apple signaled going all-in on "an assistant that has access to everything" I switched to an android with the intention of never enabling Google services and certainly not the voice assistant. Unfortunately I've found it too annoying to go completely without Google, I've read that RCS messaging won't work with an unlocked bootloader, nor will precise location, so I'm stuck with some evil in the name of features parity.
I find that a little hard to believe. I would suppose the vast majority of customers don't think a lot about the timing of software features in a purchase decision.
absolutely anecdotal, but from my experience, people who are normally excited for iPhones really don’t care about AI at all.
i think Apple hyping AI so much was a mistake, doesn’t have nearly the same impact to them as hyping up a new camera feature or a new screen or a new color or something.
The same AI features are coming to the entire iPhone 16 line. The major benefit of the 16 Pro, just as with prior generations, is a faster SoC and better cameras.
The only reason the iPhone 15 Pro was the only of the 15 generation to get the AI stuff is that they happened to put 8GB in that device, giving it enough headroom to not majorly impact user enjoyment trying to cram a multi-GB model into memory. But all of the iPhone 16s have 8GB (+?)
Ming-Chi Kuo is the golden standard for reports on Apple's production apparatus. He has the best sources, the best leaks, the best insight into very specific discussions regarding parts acquisition for Apple.
When it comes to what Apple does with those parts, or market segmentation, or sale projection, he's got no special knowledge. In this specific case, pardon the technical language, but he's full of ...
> I would suppose the vast majority of customers don't think a lot about the timing of software features in a purchase decision.
The ones who buy on day one do. I don’t find it surprising that the people who even know about and anticipate the release date of a product are the ones who are eager for specific features. If those aren’t there yet, there’s no rush to buy.
I’m no analyst but I expect demand in the EU won’t be that (comparatively) great either. When the flagship feature isn’t available, there’s little reason to spend the extra money.
It’s not as if the hardware features on the 16 Pro are groundbreaking — a slightly nicer camera, a slightly nicer display, a slightly nicer battery life, and a $600 upgrade fee. No, thank you, the software features are what make-or-break the upgrade.
Phones nowadays are made to last years, even 6+ years easily. So the update this year is not for the people who bought it last year but for people with an iPhone X or 11. They will see major improvements. But it’s silly to update (any) flagship phone every year.
Okay, but then, why upgrade to a 16 Pro instead of the much cheaper 15 Pro? The price difference applies there too — there needs to be some reason to get the newest, most expensive one. This generation it is not hardware.
Well this applies to everything then. Why buy the latest AMD or Intel CPU or Nvidia GPU ?
Some people upgrade from iPhone X to 15 this year because it’s cheaper. Some have an old iPhone and just want the latest model to go for 6 or 7 more years.
Even incremental upgrades like this year are welcome. Before there was an S model every other year. This year it’s the « iPhone 15S pro ». Slightly better and more powerful. The other thing is, I think it’s pretty hard to say « well last year model was good enough, we’ll go on a 2 year cycle this time ». It could send the wrong message to investors so they’re trapped in the race maybe ?
Usually because there’s some advantage — you actually need/want the performance offered by Zen4 over Zen3, you need four-cycle AXV512, you have a target framerate in a game, you need RTX or CUDA14… because if you don’t, obviously buying older and used saves you money and you don’t need the new stuff anyway.
I would guess that the vast majority of customers don’t even know when a new iPhone is released and therefore don’t buy in the first few weeks after it’s released. Of the customers that are aware of the release, I would assume that most are aware because they’re anticipating new features
My understanding is that 8GB is plenty enough to play with small models (7B or so) in a lightly quantized version. (Especially since model params are kept on disk and only really "mapped" to RAM, with it acting as a cache.) 4GB is where it gets dicey, as you're constrained to tiny models that just don't do anything very interesting.
Thing is, you do need all the params usually, so if the model is only partially mapped to RAM, it's the equivalent of an app swapping in and out as it runs. Which is to say, it means that inference is much slower.
Local Apple models are likely in the 2-3B range, but fine-tuned to specific tasks.
I think it's actually easier on macOS because you can just swap everything if necessary. For some reason I don't understand, iOS does not employ swap, so while it can kill background apps, it can't kill foreground app.
That is true. I'm not sure why iOS doesn't do that while macOS does. Maybe mobile storage isn't performant enough? At least when iOS was originally developed.
This is such an Apple brainwash, like how many apps in background you think has everyone else, my linuxbox has almost none, the rest is just non-linux from third party, unless you only install apps from Apple and like having a subpar experience, everything you install is just from third party on which they have no control on. And killing apps doesn't mean anything for AI, it doesn't run anything useful on 8GB, doesn't run anything useful on 8GB, no matter if you kill all the processes. I wish I could just have a conversation where people doesn't cyborgically repeats Apple's marketing bullshit and turn on the human brain
Because other OSes don't kill OOM apps? Or any app they want? It is only Apple and only possible on mobile? The only thing that apple has, is the inability to have background apps, so that if you want to use third party sync services, like syncthing, you can't and have to stick to apple products, the rest is just like anyone else
iOS isn’t killing OOM apps. It’s killing inactive apps. It’s something that wouldn’t fly on a desktop or server OS under general use, but works reasonably well in the mobile space.
A long time ago I started dreading major updates from corporate providers. They push features they want, not features I want. It got so bad with Microsoft that I fled. Apple's updates have been aggressive in resetting my preferences and pushing things like iCloud and their login to the point that they are on the Microsoft path. I am forced to use mac for work but only because of work.
Apple is most certainly not the company you want to purchase products from if you're afraid of major updates. They are far more aggressive and eager to break things than Microsoft.
Back in 1991, there was an uproar, an uproar I tells you, because System 7 required nearly a megabyte of memory instead of the 600K System 6 could run with. Sure, most users barely had more than a megabyte of memory, but it paints a pattern for sure.
I'm afraid of major updates and I'm using Apple. I usually wait around a year before updating and that works for me. They release security fixes for old versions.
Moving from Windows to Mac because you hate updates is like moving from Ubuntu to Red Hat. It's more of the stuff you hated except you don't realize it; ignorance is bliss?
Or maybe Bluetooth automatically switching to "reduced audio quality" (I know, I know, it's a feature, not a bug...)
Or wait, the kernel panic I get every once in a while would be nice: panic(cpu 1 caller 0xfffffe00318c8a1c): DCP PANIC - ASSERT!AppleDCPDPTXPowerController.cpp:538 No device added after powering on the rails. HPD=0 - dcpav(27)
I haven't had a system that felt so unreliable since Windows 98. :D
> Or maybe Bluetooth automatically switching to "reduced audio quality" (I know, I know, it's a feature, not a bug...)
I don't think I've experienced a single system where Bluetooth is working well. Linux, Windows, MacOS, Android, iOS all have their share of Bluetooth issues. The Bluetooth spec must be beyond broken.
Totally agree. I wish my hearing aids had a proprietary USB-C dongle or something.
On Linux, my experience has been both better and worse. More random disconnects and the need to re-pair is more frequent. The nice thing is I can automate the workarounds on Linux but can only curse on MacOS :D
That kernel panic sounds like a hardware fault just from first blush. Sounds like it's turning on some device but the device isn't responding after being turned on
I always take a full disk snapshot before full upgrades like this (boot into recovery and this is straightforward with a usb disk, or use carbon copy cloner) but yep updates in the Apple eco system are (knock on wood) very painless.
Back in the day before things like homebrew it was far worse... the days of macports and mod_python to run your Django app are fortunately behind us.
MacPorts has a pretty slick migration feature now. Not sure about Django, but this is the smoothest migration I've experienced with MacPorts in over 15+ years.
Times have changed completely since... 2006-2007 when this was relevant. If you are still using mod_python in 2024 please seek a therapist specializing in trauma.
iPhone Mirroring is insanely well-implemented and it's a testament to what only Apple can do. Seamless integration of their products and every just works as you expect.
I disagree. I like all the privacy protections that Safari gives me as a user. And the safari team seems thoughtful (like the other browser teams) in how they consider features to implement. In fact, I'd like MORE competition in the space, and not having one privacy-addicted company dominating the browser market.
Even as a web developer, I haven't encountered enough issues with Safari to warrant that view and what it would mean (fewer privacy protections for web users). In fact, I stopped using Chrome years ago because it used to destroy my battery life. And Safari always felt more snappy and more "native."
Well, something about head and ass. I looked into doing a one time donation to them earlier this year but they pushed so hard for a recurring one that they put me off and didn't even get the one time.
Besides, from other discussions mostly on HN I get the impression that you can donate to them but you don't know if the money will go to the browser or to their latest crypto or "AI" initiative.
Yet, having Google as the default Spotlight Search provider is an intelligent and advisable business partnership that fully benefits Apple users. Thankfully the best type of developers are advocating for those decisions, the ones who care more about their perfect tech diorama than what the users might actually select in a free-market environment.
And no, don't start whining to me about monopoly abuse if Apple willfully contributes to the entrapment. This isn't an ideological plight, it's a Microsoft-level power grab.
As a happy user of Safari, I'd be happy if a lot of web developers just stopped trying to turn my web browser into a buggy, bloated JS House of Cards "operating system" for their crappy SPAs.
As a web developer, specifically one who started my professional career when Internet Explorer 6 had something like 85% marketshare, I'm horrified at the idea of a single browser engine dominating the space again. It will lead to stagnation just as it did back then.
Keep WebKit alive. Open source Presto. Support Ladybird. Hell, I believe that Microsoft should never have abandoned Trident…
Does it count all of the chromium based apps that query some webpage behind the scenes? Because other than a few brave exceptions, my impression is that most apps are nowadays glorified (and bloated) websites.
I recently got bored of Apple ecosystem. Was considering buying System76 for work, but thought that iPhone Mirroring feature would be really neat and decided to wait.
Turns out it’s not available in EU because yadda yadda Apple threw a fit.
And it works perfectly. Pair it with kdeconnect and you have even a better experience of integration between your phone and your PC than with Apple. Only thing that is missing is the ability to take calls from the PC, that to be fair, it's not something that useful to me (if I want to make phone calls from the PC I use my landline number with VOIP).
Again, I see no innovation in the Apple ecosystem, after trying it out I'm happy to have returned to Linux+Android, overall a better experience. I don't miss Apple at all, it was like being in a cage...
I looked up an article to elaborate on the "threw a fit" part. It appears that Apple believes it would have to compromise security aspects of iPhone Mirroring in order to do it in a way that complies with EU law, so it's choosing to just not offer it at all.
The problem I have with this explanation is that it’s 90% available sans the magic update.
It’s possible to Airplay iPhone to window and see what’s on the screen. Continuity with iPad work just well so it’s also possible to control iPad using MacOS.
But combine both and we get into no-no land.
It’s not a secret that Apple brings much more revenue from US than from EU. I named it a fit, but I’m perfectly aware it’s a power struggle between EU and Apple and I think it’s an end of the era.
I've installed Asahi on my mac. Altough I had to recreate some utilities, it's so much worth it. With macOS you have to accept the good and the bad, and the bad are really annoying. It work great for task focused usage, but for personal computing, it's a pain.
How's your experience? I'm tempted but have so many questions:
- Which mac are you using?
- Any missing hardware support?
- Dual booting?
- How's Bluetooth?
- Anything else that was surprising, scary, or disappointing?
Not OP but I use Asahi on my M1 Pro MBP. Hardware support is incomplete (Thunderbolt doesn't work for example) but I don't need it. One surprising thing is the battery life while sleeping but I learned to do a shutdown instead of sleeping on it.
It's both on my Mac Mini and my MBA (both M1). It work great on the Mini. I think bluetooth work, but I have no use for it and have never checked. Everything works great as far as I know (even virtualization with qemu). I don't game on it, so can't say anything about that.
As for the MBA, suspend is still a miss (I read that the asahi team can't get certain devices to go to deep sleep, so they chose a safer low power mode instead). The lack of DP over usb-c is a bit annoying, but I mostly use the laptop display on macOS too, so I don't really mind. I think thunderbolt is not there too, but I have no thunderbolt devices (dock or storage). It boots very fast, but I'd recommend against KDE as the MBA gets hot with it. I'm using Sway. I heard about microphone issue, but I've never used it for calls as I have a usb one on my desktop.
The installation process is as easy as something done in the terminal can be. It's pretty much guided (just make sure you have enough space for the installation). If I had to redo it, I'd choose the minimal installation as I don't like KDE that much and it was some pain to remove it.
Personally if I'm going Linux, I'm out on Mac hardware.
Don't get me wrong, Mac hardware is nice hardware. But there's no reason to own it if you're using alternative operating systems.
The bang for your buck on computing is wildly better on something like a Beelink mini PC than a Mac Mini. Windows laptop hardware has also most definitely caught up to the M1.
And I think we all know you listed off everything that's gonna be broken with Asahi Linux like Bluetooth and microphone as something you "don't use" just because you know it's broken.
Yeah, the macs were all I had, so there was no other option. I'm waiting for my new PCs to arrive and once they get here, I'm going to wipe the Asahi installation and revert to stock macOS (I will still need them as work computers and for XCode)
And I genuinely don't use Bluetooth. Everything is wired, although I use WiFi on the MBA. Neither do I like to use the laptop microphone (noisy environment, so I use a headset or the usb microphone). The only thing I care in a laptop is WiFi, a good enough keyboard, a good enough screen, low temperature and noise, and a battery that last at least 4 hours. My default workstation is the desktop.
But yeah, I do agree with you that it's better to go with PC if you're planning to stick with Linux long term.
The lack of support for the built in microphone is a bit of a catch you don't see mentioned too often. It feels like one of those things that would have come early on and it's not necessarily the first thing you're going to reach for but it can be a bit surprising when you find out it's just not there.
> You're suggesting some kind of emotional immaturity
Depends on who's in charge.
Meta has shit PR primarily because Zuck doesn't like/understand comms.
Hes bollocks deep in AI because he likes it. Even though it costs him shareholder value (dropping those billions on new data centres to run massive loss making AI infra. )
This is unnecessarily pedantic. Personifying the behavior of a company is not some new concept. It’s actually rather common.
Because a company itself cannot express emotions, the externally facing visible decisions are used as a proxy.
For example, a company raising prices to an unexpected level may be described as “greedy”. A company executing a series of decisions that appears misguided or incalculable may be described as “panicking”.
> Personifying the behavior of a company is not some new concept. It’s actually rather common.
I know, it's common and it's wrong and unhelpful. That's my point. It doesn't help us understand the situation better, but actively misleads us if we're interested in actually analyzing problems and coming up with solutions.
And I just looked it up and it appears that Apple isn't supporting it because their reading of the EU law is that they'd have to support iPhone mirroring to third parties like Windows and Linux, where it would be harder or impossible to control the security and privacy.
That's something that can be talked about intelligently, whichever side you're on. Saying they're "throwing a fit" is not. It's false, and makes the conversation worse for all of us.
If you bought into the apple ecosystem with a recent Mac I’d not bother. But for those of your running a PC Ubuntu is incredible and their new App Store makes finding and installing software super easy. My workstation pc with Ubuntu is insanely faster than my Mac Studio when it comes to jetbrains IDEs. It’s so snappy I first couldn’t believe the performance diff.
I don't mean to say your experience isn't real, but that isn't what I encountered at all with my last 12 years "waiting for Ubuntu to get good" (I am quoting myself here).
Every time I tried to install it to test if it was good, something broke for no reason. This happened to me on many PCs and many versions of Ubuntu.
The last time I tried 24.04, the installer crashed in the middle of the installation and I couldn't finish it.
If someone wants to test Ubuntu, I'd say you should try it, but do not get surprised if something very basic seems broken since that's my entire experience with the distro. I'd recommend Fedora instead.
Debian stands out as a Linux distribution that "just works" IME. Fedora isn't even all that bad, but the short support cycle can be problematic if you care about using it reliably in production. Debian doesn't have that issue, their "Stable" release is just rock solid. It can also be surprisingly snappy even on old, very low-end hardware where everything else (including every modern web browser) will visibly chug or not run at all.
Linux user for the past 20 years - I cannot remember the last laptop I had that didn't have multi touch and gestures support. been using mostly ThinkPads & Dells.
I don't know what marketing team created this whole "our trackpad is so different" belief, but they've done a brilliant job!
Multi-touch per se has been pretty common even in tiny junk trackpads. The problem is that it's not particularly useful in that case.
What makes Apple's trackpads so nice is a huge and solid surface. I came from Thinkpads myself and honestly didn't expect that to be as much of a thing as it turned out to be, but yes, they really are that much better. There are a few PC laptops these days with similar trackpads, but you definitely have to look for it when picking one.
1. Screen-recording permission once every week ?
2. No more sudo spctl —master-disable. Alternative way is bit complicated.
2. No more control+ click to bypass gatekeeper.
3. Why tcutil reset Accessibility not working for a specific app? It works for “All” .
4. Script to convert NSURL node ref url to posix url not working.
5. Normal usb Mouse pointer acceleration is not smooth. May be need to re tweak those again.
Anything else ? Otherwise all good.
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