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The End of OS X

• emersonrsantos 6y ago
  Intel version is still 10.16, new ARM version is 11.0.
  • timw4mail 6y ago
    Source?
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  • gjsman-1000 6y ago
    I can confirm this is false. I have MacOS Big Sur on my MacBook Pro 2017, and it identifies as 11.0.
    • amatecha 6y ago
      What does it say if you run: sw_vers -productVersion
      • gjsman-1000 6y ago
        10.16. However, it is clear that Apple wants to move everything to 11. Xcode also says 10.16, but Apple Developer Docs say 11. My suspicion is just that the developers of Xcode and other parts of the OS weren't aware of the switch yet.
        • amatecha 6y ago
          Ahh interesting! Yeah, it doesn't surprise me. It's 10.16 now, but I wouldn't be surprised if all of those version numbers will be updated to say 11.0 upon the final production release.
        • kps 6y ago
          It's a marketing number, just like System 7.7 got renamed to Mac OS 8 at the last minute so that Jobs could weasel out of System 7 contracts.
  • gluecode 6y ago
    My Intel MacBook Pro says 11.0 Beta (20A4299v). So, I don't think it's 10.6 for Intel.
• codemonkey-zeta 6y ago
  As a younger hacker, who has never been into the Apple ecosystem and doesn't know much about Steve Jobs, the video presentation of the funeral for MacOS 9 sort of blew me away. It was so funny and theatrical, but got the message of Apple's new direction across so clearly. You can even see people in the front rows standing up and gawking, trying desperately to figure out what was going on. What a fascinating production.
  • Yhippa 6y ago
    Got a good link?
    • codemonkey-zeta 6y ago
      It's the first video in the original post. https://videopress.com/v/cTvJLHm8 https://videopress.com/v/cTvJLHm8
• drunkpotato 6y ago
  I know this is about the coming MacOS 11.0, but Catalina was the end of OS X for me, and the end of Macs in general for me. I will not be migrating from Mojave to Catalina, and will use my current generation of Macs until they are obsolete, while finally making the transition to Linux. Mac and I had a good run, but I'm clearly no longer the target demographic and their corporate goals aren't aligned with mine as a customer any more.
  • stouset 6y ago
    I suspect you're being downvoted because this is an empty, meaningless comment without some elaboration on why you've decided this. As it stands, there's no room for discussion: the only paths forward are for others to simply agree or disagree, or to try their best to guess at what your concerns are in order to further the conversation.
    • pumanoir 6y ago
      The comment states the why clearly when read within the context of the article: "I'm clearly no longer the target demographic and their corporate goals aren't aligned with mine as a customer any more"
      • HatchedLake721 6y ago
        Did we miss a memo where Apple suddenly changed their target demographic and corporate goals? I don't think they did. The comment seems like an emotional nostalgic conclusion they have after watching the WWDC, without any mentions why they think future will be worse than what we have now or what we had in the past.
        • brnt 6y ago
          Those things are rarely (publicly) unambiguously stated, so no, we didn't miss the memo because there wasn't one. Does not mean that over the course of time a target demo can change for a company though. Apple would hardly be the only company who did. Pity though, Snow Leopard was something to be envious of.
• coliveira 6y ago
  OS X (the name) is gone for a while, it was replaced by macOS. The numbering change now is inconsequential.
  • thedjinn 6y ago
    Most people probably don't even refer to the macOS versions by number but by codename.
    • gregoriol 6y ago
      Sure, but version names are hard to order: was Catalina before or after X? who will remember? (maybe if it at least was like Ubuntu with names following alphabetic order)
    • saagarjha 6y ago
      Nit: Big Sur is a marketing name, not a codename. Apple has their own names for this things ;)
  • chrisseaton 6y ago
    macOS, not MacOS.
    • amatecha 6y ago
      At least they didn't call it "MAC", haha
      • saagarjha 6y ago
        Interestingly in iOS 14 the feature that lets you change your MAC address labels it as your "Wi-Fi Address".
    • coliveira 6y ago
      Thanks, I always forget that Apple uses reverse capitalization.
• fierarul 6y ago
  I know that Java is not hip nowadays (was it ever?) but at some point Jobs bragged Macs are the best Java workstations. Clearly Apple not only does not care about Java but hates it. macOS Catalina is also pretty scary. So, I am enthusiastically waiting on getting a new laptop with the Ryzen 4800 CPU to run Linux on. I do some Java tooling projects and I will just use the existing Mac gear to support them, for a while. As weird as it sounds, even Windows is starting to look like a good target OS for somebody spending lots of time in the terminal and doing some Java.
  • pjmlp 6y ago
    That was in the OS X early days, as Apple wasn't sure developers would buy into Objective-C, they jumped into Java as alternative, having their own VM and Cocoa bindings. As it became clear that they would gladly use Objective-C, they killed the other horse.
    • rbanffy 6y ago
      A lot of their backend is Java. Prior to acquiring Apple for one Steve Jobs (and getting 400 million dollars in change), NeXT had a Java web framework called WebObjects.
    • rsynnott 6y ago
      Well, they lost interest in it. They didn't actually kill off Apple Java until the Oracle Thing happened, and they weren't alone there; a lot of companies backed slowly away from Sun stuff after its acquisition (remember when MacOS was going to have ZFS support any day now?)
      • pjmlp 6y ago
        That happened during Sun days still, and they keep using WebObjects among other Java stuff on their backends, as per job offers.
  • pron 6y ago
    Apple is a huge Java shop. They're quite secretive but a very large portion (the great majority?) of their backend is Java. OpenJDK has a Linux/AArch64 port, and it will have a macOS/AArch64 port, too.
• amatecha 6y ago
  Wow, I totally missed that version number in the About box. Very interesting! I guess 10.16 will be the last version of "OS X" as we knew it (even though it was already called macOS). The end of an era, indeed.
  • timw4mail 6y ago
    10.15, you mean?
    • amatecha 6y ago
      Yeah maybe! Some other commenters were saying the intel version is still called 10.16 but it depends where you look in the OS... My guess is it will be updated everywhere to be called 11.0 , so I guess yeah 10.15 would be the last of the "OS X" generation (even if it was renamed macOS already).
• gjvc 6y ago
  Snow Leopard (version 10.6) was the peak of OS X. Everything since then has been downhill. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_Snow_Leopard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_Snow_Leopard
  • perardi 6y ago
    I would not go that far. Security changes. iOS integration with AirDrop and Messages. Laptop trackpad gestures. But note what I'm highlighting for the most part: mobile features. They've added good stuff for laptops, and for interfacing with iOS devices. But for desktops, and laptops living on a desk? Not so much. If you're using a full keyboard and a mouse, sans trackpad, I can't think of a lot of real UI enhancements since 10.6. (Which makes total since, given they sell so, so many more laptops than desktops. But still. I get it.)
  • yardie 6y ago
    Snow Leopard was a development bump for all the things that were broken/unoptimized in the switch from PPC to x86. I wouldn't call it the peak of OS X. In hindsight it was the last true developer release. Most of the restrictions weren't in place. As they moved to polish the MacOS for customer use they also buttoned it up.
• gjsman-1000 6y ago
  I mainly program web apps on my MacBook Pro 2017, and upgrading to Big Sur hasn't changed almost any of this for me. I can still install brew and do my work. The UI is a rough around the edges in some areas, but I actually don't really mind, and some of the new features are pretty nice.
• crmrc114 6y ago
  That family tree is wrong, right? 1. Unix was first, then BSD came from Unix... then Mach was built quite a bit later. 2. NextStep was then built by jobs after he was let go from apple by Mr. Soda man. 3. Jobs comes back to apple, brings NextStep- reads the tea leaves with OS7-9 and sets up NextStep as the successor with OSX. Apple branded NextStep becomes OSX. Is my chronology correct?
  • k__ 6y ago
    I think so. OSX was bought, NT was bought, Android was bought. Which big OS vendor build their own OS? Maybe Google with Fuchsia?
    • pjmlp 6y ago
      NT wasn't bought.
      • homarp 6y ago
        Maybe a shortcut of Dave Cutler plus what Wikipedia said "While creating Windows NT, Microsoft developers rewrote VMS in C. Although they added the Win32 API, NTFS file system, GUI, and backwards compatibility with DOS, OS/2, and Win16, DEC engineers almost immediately noticed the two operating systems' internal similarities; parts of VAX/VMS Internals and Data Structures, published by Digital Press, accurately describe Windows NT internals using VMS terms. Instead of a lawsuit, Microsoft agreed to pay DEC $65–100 million, help market VMS, train Digital personnel on Windows NT, and continue Windows NT support for DEC Alpha" Also https://www.itprotoday.com/compute-engines/windows-nt-and-vms-rest-story https://www.itprotoday.com/compute-engines/windows-nt-and-vm...
        • mycall 6y ago
          Using VMS in the 80s at my university, it was a solid foundation for creating a proper OS that NT became.
      • kps 6y ago
• ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
  > what the company perceives as a weakness: the paucity of apps in the Mac App Store. I think that the issue with the Mac App store, is that it imposes restrictions on a once-free-for-all development environment. I know many app developers that have abandoned it, after giving it a damn fair shake. Mac developers just got used to being able to wander all over the house, poking their noses into whatever they liked. iOS, on the other hand, started off restricted. iOS developers have never known the freedom that Mac developers have had. To be completely fair to Apple, the iOS model is the one that needs to be followed, if security and privacy are the goals, and I think that a big part of MacOS 11 will be to add restrictions. I suspect that non-App Store apps for the Mac may be seeing the twilight. I am not looking forward to the restrictions on the Mac, but it has been quite some time since I've stepped outside the walled garden, myself.
  • gjsman-1000 6y ago
    "I suspect that non-App Store apps for the Mac may be seeing the twilight." What about MacOS 11 makes you think this? Literally almost nothing of consequence has changed since Catalina in OS security. Gatekeeper hasn't gotten tighter, you can still disable SIP, homebrew works great.
    • ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
      The move towards "iOSing" the OS. It won't be GateKeeper. It will be policies. They won't make it obvious at all, because they know how unpopular it will be. Let's see what the future brings. I'm not thrilled with it (for example, I have one app that I've written, that uses ffmpeg[0], and ffmpeg no likee sandbox). [0] https://github.com/RiftValleySoftware/RVS_MediaServer https://github.com/RiftValleySoftware/RVS_MediaServer
      • gjsman-1000 6y ago
        But once again, the only "iOS-ing" that has happened so far is the theme. Yes, the theme looks more iOS-like, but that's about it. There are almost no technical differences whatsoever underneath since Catalina and almost no security changes.
• meddlepal 6y ago
  OS X was a marketing name and was dead for a while now. Besides the CPU arch change and a slightly refined UI it is pretty much the same.
  • gjsman-1000 6y ago
    Homebrew packages work fine, you can still disable SIP, Gatekeeper hasn't gotten tighter. Everything is almost exactly the same as Catalina. There's really no substance whatsoever to the claims that MacOS 11 is locking the OS down. You could make this claim for Catalina, but Big Sur isn't changing anything of consequence at all.
    • xinsight 6y ago
      Maybe people are only just now starting to see Apple's intentions of locking down their system. I remember it being a bad omen a few releases back when i found i could no longer (easily) delete the Chess.app.
    • zerkten 6y ago
      I see some smart decisions here then. They don't have to admit to the issues with the changes they made last time. Apple would probably argue that developers haven't moved quickly enough in the right direction while those outside would argue differently. It'll be interesting to see what things look like later since this architecture transition will weed out some problems Apple see, but in a different way. On the other side of the transition they can make further changes to lock down the OS with fewer issues. This has to be Apple's ultimate goal because it's what serves their needs best from many perspectives. I wouldn't suggest it serves the needs of many devs though.
• peternicky 6y ago
  I’ve been unhappy with macOS and Apple for the past few years and in January switched back to developing on a windows PC. I could not be happier with that decision and with the “roadmap” Apple provided yesterday, I expect it will be a long time before I go back to macOS, if ever.
  • goatinaboat 6y ago
    Windows 10 with WSL on premium hardware like Surface is more Mac than Mac at this point
  • defnotashton2 6y ago
    I don't understand how you can get anything done without fighting windows nonsense proprietary tools.
    • peternicky 6y ago
      Not sure what you are trying to say, windows like macOS is not perfect but with patience I was able to replicate my existing development workflows and improve some. Which “nonsense” tools are you taking about?
    • tootie 6y ago
      You're complaining about proprietary tools in advocacy of Apple? Developing on Windows is a breeze. Unless you're specifically talking about Microsoft's dev stack (ie Visual Studio).
    • sudosysgen 6y ago
      I've had to help people in my classes fight Apple nonsense proprietary tools because no one could understand why Apple won't let you open a file using your own code. If there wasn't anyone there that understood the issue (and that was almost the case) they'd have to use Windows. Trust me, macOS is much worse on that front than Windows is. At least on Windows if you have issues with your OneDrive account folders won't start disappearing from your Desktop.
    • mrlala 6y ago
• pjmlp 6y ago
  What many UNIX fans that abandoned their Linux and BSD distributions for OS X fail to understand is that Apple culture was never about CLI, shell scripts and daemons. Mac OS was never like that, A/UX was a failed attempt into UNIX market while keeping the Mac OS spirit, and for NeXT is was a way to embrace UNIX workstation market and extend it with NeXTSTEP Objective-C frameworks. Steve's opinion regarding UNIX is well known. And then there was BeOS on the race or the failed Copland project, both without any major UNIX story.
  • runjake 6y ago
    Apple marketed directly to UNIX and Linux power users with their famous advertisement: https://julxrp.files.wordpress.com/2015/08/apple_unix_ad.jpg https://julxrp.files.wordpress.com/2015/08/apple_unix_ad.jpg In this era, they were all about marketing to UNIX people.
    • pjmlp 6y ago
      When the ship is sinking anything goes, they also had sessions at CERN back in the day, but that was never a central role in Apple culture, nor its users for the most part.
      • mixmastamyk 6y ago
        That ad was well after the rebound.
      • runjake 6y ago
        I would argue that their UNIX focus was a major contributor to the popularity of the (post-OPENSTEP) Mac. It attracted UNIX nerds, which attracted other nerds and all those nerds spread the word to family, friends, and coworkers and helped spur adoption in a significant way. That's how I seem to remember it, anyway.
• gjsman-1000 6y ago
  What I think a lot of us programmers miss is the experience of the end-users who are likely to buy a Mac. The fact of the matter is, 99.9% of people who buy a Mac are not going to know what subpixel hinting is. Or care too much that they can't delete Chess.app. To them, the Mac is nicer looking and easier to use than ever. Will iOS devs care? Not at all - developing for the Mac has become easier with Catalyst. It's easy and cheap to get a new audience for your apps. Will web devs care? Not while homebrew and all of the packages in it still work fine. I, as a web dev, have everything working great on the Big Sur beta already. And as for some saying that MacOS is becoming more iOS like: Yes, it's been happening since Mac OS X Lion with the fullscreen Launchpad. Nothing has changed.
  • hckr_news 6y ago
    Overheating is still a concern for me.
    • alharith 6y ago
      I recently purchased a new 13" pro, upgraded to the top processor. I installed Bootcamp and played hours of The Witcher 3 (on low settings, of course, but still). There were no overheating issues. Fan was going full blast the whole time, but it kept up just fine. Hopefully my little anecdote instills a little confidence. The new 13" is as close to a perfect machine to me as I have ever owned. It's compact, portable, light but a completely full powered functional 100% dev workhorse (with a great keyboard AND a physical escape key to boot). I couldn't be happier. Kudos to Apple for this one.
  • Wowfunhappy 6y ago
    > And as for some saying that MacOS is becoming more iOS like: Yes, it's been happening since Mac OS X Lion with the fullscreen Launchpad. Nothing has changed. I'd say a lot has changed, because everything is a matter of degrees. As soon as I realized Launchpad was a piece of crap, I put an Applications folder stack in my dock a la the Leopard default, and forgot that Launchpad exists. Can't really ignore it anymore...
• shmerl 6y ago
  > an open platform on top of the tremendous hardware innovation being driven by the iPhone sounds amazing. macOS is anything but open though. If anything, it's completely the opposite, in many senses of being not open. If you want an open platform, use Linux.
  • oneplane 6y ago
    Depends on what you call open and what the 'opposite' you refer to is. Open as in 'welcoming to users'? Open as in 'it has hinges on the device that open'? Open means many things. If you refer to Open Source in terms of the OSI, then no, macOS is not that kind of open. It's also not entirely closed as there is plenty of 1-to-1 source code available, also under OSI-approved licenses (but not all of it). If you refer to Open in terms to 'the ability to add and remove at least some components so you can do your work', then macOS is plenty open. Want to get rid of Pages and install Microsoft Word? No problem.
    • shmerl 6y ago
      Apple for example refused to support Vulkan and don't allow anyone else to provide drivers for it. It means they have control over what features you can use - you have no say in it. Even Windows being as closed as it is doesn't have such restrictions. So I'd say macOS is closed to a sickening level and it's completely disingenuous to call it open. May be if you compare it to iOS which is closed in even worse ways, you could say macOS is "open". But it's like comparing something that's rotten to something that's rotten even more. Both are rotten.
      • oneplane 6y ago
        That's a rather extremistic view. Apple doesn't support vulkan because they tried to get OpenGL and OpenCL working. Nvidia didn't play ball and AMD wasn't in the picture back then. The result was that Apple had to come up with something else (Metal) and that has worked out great with them. But unless you are writing a graphics engine (which almost no user does) that doesn't even matter. Regarding your openness, you still haven't provided with a description as to what you describe as open or closed. Is Windows open? No. None of it is, except a few example apps and things like the calculator. You don't get kernel sources, you don't get library sources, and you can't run any custom versions. With macOS you can. Same goes for DirectX if you want to stay with graphics stacks (Direct 3D to be more specific). That's about as closed as it gets: you can't remove it, you can't use it elsewhere, you can't get the sources and you can't modify it. You can still run Vulkan on macOS if you want -- you are free to implement it, run it, make shims or layers if you wish etc, just not with Apple's support. What you call open or closed isn't clear, but the fact that you use the word 'rotten' signals to me that you are emotional about it and probably not really looking for a discussion.
• lordleft 6y ago
  I've looked at the trajectory of Apple these past few years with mounting bitter-sweetness. At its best, MacOS really felt like the best of Unix combined with the consumer focus alluded to in the article. I still adore the craftsmanship of the latest Macbooks, but my 2015 Macbook felt like the apex of Mac's design. It was the kind of device that was such a pleasure to develop on. You could leverage the power of Unix in a UI designed with thoughtfulness and care. It reminded you that power and accessibility to end-users can be balanced. And now that balance has tipped away from the power-user, the developers, to the end-user, and in doing so I question my commitment to this extraordinary ecosystem. Why develop on a platform that contends with me every step of the way? Because the users and the money are there? That was never what brought me to the Macbook. EDIT: I suppose most users in the Apple ecosystem aren't on Macbooks, but iPhones.
  • brightball 6y ago
    Every time there’s a new Apple announcement, I’m happier and happier that I switched to Linux a couple of years ago. Power users want freedom and control of their own machines and hardware. The moment that Apple started soldering parts into place, I started looking elsewhere because it was a signal of the thought process.
    • scarface74 6y ago
      As does most other high end laptops....
      • brightball 6y ago
        There’s a lot more options for high end laptops for Linux.
        • rorykoehler 6y ago
          Apart from the Dell XPS13 what other options are comparable to the MacBook Pro?
    • 6y ago
• crazygringo 6y ago
  First OS X was big cats, then it was mountains. Very surprised they didn't switch to a new naming theme! I guess an architecture change was as good a reason as any to revert back to a normal, sane versioning system where the first number increments like most programs. But it's just weird how "unannounced" or unacknowledged it is.
  • dhosek 6y ago
    Not mountains, but California landmarks.
  • deleuze 6y ago
    The naming scheme is "places in California" not mountains.
  • nfoz 6y ago
    Big Cats was way better IMO. I was surprised they switched to landmarks, and I'm more surprised that they haven't changed to something else entirely yet.
  • codetrotter 6y ago
    > I guess an architecture change was as good a reason as any to revert back to a normal, sane versioning system where the first number increments like most programs. But it's just weird how "unannounced" or unacknowledged it is. There are many ways to version software. They changed the major version from 9 to 10 when they went from classic Mac OS to the NeXTSTEP-based Mac OS X. Arguably they could have bumped the major version a couple of times between them and now, for example when they dropped support for the PPC architecture back in 10.6 Snow Leopard. Likewise, when they deprecated Carbon in 10.8 Mountain Lion (alternatively, with the release of macOS 10.15 Catalina when Carbon was officially discontinued and removed entirely). And probably they could have had other major version bumps along the way too. Nonetheless, the fact that they didn’t hasn’t really seemed that strange to me for a long while, given like I said, that there are a lot of ways to version software. Choosing Big Sur as the name for the first major version bump in a long while seems like no coincidence to me. From the Wikipedia article about Big Sur, California: > It is frequently praised for its dramatic scenery. Big Sur has been called the "longest and most scenic stretch of undeveloped coastline in the contiguous United States," a "national treasure that demands extraordinary procedures to protect it from development" and "one of the most beautiful coastlines anywhere in the world, an isolated stretch of road, mythic in reputation." > The stunning views, redwood forests, hiking, beaches, and other recreational opportunities have made Big Sur a popular destination for about 7 million people who live within a day's drive and visitors from across the world. It is among the top 35 tourist destinations world-wide. > The region receives about the same number of visitors as Yosemite National Park [...] Seems to me that the release of this version of macOS is a big deal to Apple, and I would agree that it is. With the introduction of their upcoming computers that will be running ARM CPUs, I can see how they would want to signify that this is something really worth noting both in the version number and in the name. Personally I am really excited to see these new upcoming computers, and to use them and the macOS 11 Big Sur.
• RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
  Mac OS 11 feels like it might end up being the Windows 8 of Mac OS. A company is taking/took a well-loved and highly productive desktop/laptop optimized operating system (OS X for Apple, Windows 7 for Microsoft) and is making/made it more like a tablet/phone operating system. Unfortunately, that made it less optimized for the desktop/laptop use case.
  • rvz 6y ago
    That could be true of macOS 11 but it's too early to tell unless they completely removed Finder.app and blew it up into a new user interface for macOS, which Windows 8 did for the start icon that destroyed the user experience, but we'll see. If that's the 'Windows 8 of Mac OS' I don't want to see what the 'Window 8 of the Linux Desktop' is.
    • arexxbifs 6y ago
      I think Gnome 3 is the "Windows 8" of Linux: It's pushing touch, it's moving away from tried and true desktop concepts and its release led to the creation of numerous "alternative" desktop environments for people who liked the old Gnome.
  • Tagbert 6y ago
    I don’t see anything that makes it less optimized for desktop. Yes, the styling joins the family look of the iPad, but this doesn’t mean that it becomes a focus on touch. Mac is still very committed to a mouse/trackpad/keyboard interaction model. I think that 11 looks good and brings in some useful features from iPad and lends some good UI elements like sidebars to the iPad. It’s a good marriage but not a merging.
• quijoteuniv 6y ago
  One of the big turndowns from Apple for me was when they did not give me a choice but to upgrade an Ipad 2 i had loaded with cool music apps. The ipad was 1 instrument more un my studio, could trigger MIDi or have good apps. I can remember why i had to upgrade, but waited as long as i could. After the upgrade the ipad became unresponsive, they slowed down the processor but it did not came out untill they got sued. I gave the ipad to my mother and never again bought one. I still use a Mac pro in the studio. I run El capitan, with newish protools and Ableton, and have another partition with 10.6 with legacy Pro Tools and a ton of nice plugins. But when i need to do office or programming i boot in Linux. I have also and old macbook air that is in the process of be turned into Linux. For music it was and it is amazing to be able to run withouth trouble, it was always a hassle to update as music software was a year behind at least. Apple was cool, now is just another big corporation.
  • scarface74 6y ago
    Apple never got sued for slowing down the iPad.
    • quijoteuniv 6y ago
      True. «Fined« and it was Iphones https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-51413724 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-51413724 but the exact same thing happened to my Ipad. After the upgrade it was slow
      • scarface74 6y ago
        Again, that's not true either. It was specifically about iPhones and specifically about older batteries. Apple still doesn't have the type of battery management for iPads. The article you cited specifically lists the devices affected.
        • xigency 6y ago
          I believe Apple has faced multiple class action lawsuits over this type of issue. Here is the pretty broad result of one: "Friday’s settlement covers U.S. owners of the iPhone 6, 6 Plus, 6s, 6s Plus, 7, 7Plus or SE that ran the iOS 10.2.1 or later operating system. It also covers U.S. owners of the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus that ran iOS 11.2 or later before Dec. 21, 2017. Consumers contended that their phones’ performance suffered after they installed Apple software updates. They said this misled them into believing their phones were near the end of their lifecycles, requiring replacements or new batteries." [0] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-iphones-settlement/apple-to-pay-up-to-500-million-to-settle-u-s-lawsuit-over-slow-iphones-idUSKBN20P2E7 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-iphones-settlement/...
• parasubvert 6y ago
  I personally think that the MacBook Pro 16 inch is the world’s best laptop, and look forward to see what the next generations can do. But the whole point has been MacOS. I’m not sure what to think of the changes. If they stabilize the mess that was Catalina, then they’re doing the right things, even with the increased iOS-ification of the Mac. If they just slap more Windows 8 style touch gloss on deep and unresolvable system level issues, then Apple has reverted to all the reasons that Classic MacOS was so unstable. That said, after 20 years with the Mac I recently added an Alienware Aurora R9 desktop to my life. Wanted to PC game again, and use VR. Also wanted to catch up with Windows, as I hadn’t really used it regularly for 10 years. Early Windows 10 did not impress me. I have been surprisingly really happy with Windows 10 build 2004 and Windows Subsystem for Linux v2. To the point it’s my main dev box now. (With COVID there’s less need for a laptop!). Some weirdness with cut and paste, but file system sharing and networking has mostly been smoothed from what I remember. Docker runs well integrated, as does Kubernetes. Everything is blazing fast. The main thing I miss is Spotlight search, but there are third party replacements for that. I really can’t see myself moving back to Linux, which was my go to prior to the Mac from 1995-1999. I tend to follow the JWZ adage, Linux is only free if your time has no value. I use it as a server OS plenty, but don’t really need it on my desktop.
  • _bxg1 6y ago
    > Linux is only free if your time has no value Hah, that's great. I'll have to tuck that one away.
    • PaulHoule 6y ago
      It's true if you want to run GUI apps more complex than xeyes (anything that draws text)
    • badRNG 6y ago
      That was probably a fair assessment a decade ago, but Linux seriously "just works" now. About a year ago I bought a Dell XPS 13, I've thrown Pop!_OS on there, and it worked out of the box, no driver downloads, no sneakernetting Wi-Fi drivers, no codec installs, no track-pad problems (two fingers to right click works!), no scaling issues, no 3rd party repos. It just works. (I'm sure FOSS folks may dislike the distribution of 3rd party binaries, but I don't use Linux because I'm a FOSS purist.) Pop!_OS comes with a built-in tiling manager you can toggle on that completely changes the game for development. If you have never used a tiling manager, you owe it to yourself to do it at least once. The built in software manager is excellent, and is the one-stop-shop for installing VSCode, Android Studio, Steam, Chromium and IntelliJ all at once. No finding/adding repos, automatic updates, it just works. Even gaming (on Steam and Lutris) is a breeze. It honestly requires zero tinkering (on Steam at least) to get 90% of my library to run (including AAA titles.) If you haven't used desktop Linux since 2010, it is a radically different experience. It honestly is easier to use and get what I want it to do than a MBP today. (Disclaimer, I'm sure mileage varies depending on your environment, hardware, and chosen distro, just sharing my experience. I prefer to compare the XPS + Linux experience to MBP + macOS)
• gdubs 6y ago
  I have fond memories of when the first OS X CDs arrived at our college computer lab, and we installed them on a PowerMac G4. The aqua UI felt so futuristic, and it matched the hardware!
• mark_l_watson 6y ago
  Before leaving on my morning hike, I cleaned up some storage, getting 50G free on my MacBook, and downloaded the 9G installer while I was hiking. It turns out that I was still about 12G short in required disk space. I mention this to save other people from lost effort. A question: lots of my 256G of storage is taken up by remote mobile storage in ~/Library. If there an easy way to tell macOS to temporarily not keep local copies, and get them back later from iCloud?
  • saagarjha 6y ago
    Did you happen to have Time Machine enabled? (To answer your question, I think what you're looking for is brctl evict.)
    • mark_l_watson 6y ago
      I deleted ~/.stack and ~/.mvn and had plenty of room. I usually do Haskell dev on a very fast VPS anyway. I am running the macOS Big Sur beta and also the iPadOS 14 beta. Things seem to run slowly on my MacBook, but ti seems like some work is done the first time apps are opened. My $3400 Common Lisp kit does not work on the Big Sur beta, so I will probably revert in a few days, but I am having fun with the beta right now. I have had no problems with the iPadOS 14 beta so far.
• crystaln 6y ago
  So Apple changed their OS numbering system. Is there any more significance to this event?
  • swyx 6y ago
    why exactly did they change the version number? i dont get it
    • jaywalk 6y ago
      I don't think Apple has explicitly said anything, but the fact that this version will support a new CPU architecture seems like a pretty good reason.
      • sudosysgen 6y ago
        Not really, OS X supports PowerPC and Intel (32 and 64 bits) at various stages in it's lifetime.
        • aylmao 6y ago
          macOS 11 will support Intel and ARM.
      • dmitriid 6y ago
        CPU architecture change wasn't enough for the 10.x line to bump the version number. And it was a much bigger deal then that it is now.
  • unethical_ban 6y ago
    From reading the article, it is more about the migration of macOS toward an iOS model in philosophy and, occasionally, system design.
• Helloworldboy 6y ago
  Goddamn, can we go one just one day without an Apple hate thread? How many times can Apple be “over” until these threads stop clogging up the front page?
• toyg 6y ago
  As someone still on Mojave and really disappointed with the Mac strategy from Mavericks onwards, I've resigned myself to the idea that my next laptop will not be an MBP. I was enamoured with the original OSX Look&Feel and its unixy underpins; the former is now dead for good (the Big Sur icons are 2001-gnome-level horrendous, and everything is flatter than flat), and the latter dies a little bit more with each release. I have to admit that I dread going back to the utter boredom of the Microsoft ecosystem, though. I would dearly love a Linux laptop that doesn't make me deaf with fan noise, can last 3 hours of Firefox and Pycharm on a battery charge, and doesn't freak out when waking from sleep. Does such a thing exist yet?
  • acomjean 6y ago
    I have the system76 oryx pro (last years model). I'm moving from my 13" MacBook pro (2015) which I really like but it was time for a new machine (should have bought more RAM/ SSD space..). Its pretty great. Compared to the the MacBook its much faster and has a ton of ports, and everything just works (why you pay a premium for a linux notebook). Build quality isn't as good, but not bad. Its not perfect, However when running Nvidia video the fan does spin up (its not quiet, but not that bad). The battery life is, terrible, (probably about 3 hours), but it runs jet brains software really well. I've only had one problem waking from sleep in the year I've owned it. Even steam runs well on this thing (the video card is a beast). Its the year of linux on the desktop (again....maybe)
  • ngngngng 6y ago
    Just go dell or thinkpad, you'll get your wish list no problem. I'm on a ThinkPad x1 Carbon and Pop! OS. I would recommend fedora though. I'm too lazy to switch but everything just works on fedora better than any other distro I tried, and I tried all of them.
• LockAndLol 6y ago
  Wait... so in a few updates Macbooks will be locked down like iPhones without a possiblity for "sideloading" ?
  • tgv 6y ago
    I hope not. In the presentation they mentioned homebrew, so I suppose that's something.
• pjbster 6y ago
  Am I the only one who wants to call it MacOS 11 Big Bottom? Any Spinal Tap devotees here? Oh never mind.
  • jmull 6y ago
    You can have one chuckle for that.
• Not_John 6y ago
  i switched 2002 from a Mac Powerbook G3 "Wall Street" to Windows. I will switch to a Mac again at the end of the Year when a Mac with an Apple Chip comes to Market. Exciting Times :)
• renewiltord 6y ago
  I predict that Apple will go on from this in strength. Moved some of my VITAX directly into AAPL.
• magwa101 6y ago
  The idea that the Unix philosophy of "small programs that can share" is idealized in the shell "pipeline" capability. To imply that this has successfully made it into any GUI programs is flat out wrong. We're still saddled with vertical apps everywhere including within the same ecosystem. The "Unix" on Mac is so woefully out of date that it qualifies only as a marketing label. In fact Windows is now more Unix than Mac, by far. Round it out with a confusing disingenuous nod to "see what the hackers are using" since yeah, it's all about the "i" devices. Obviously Apple is a consumer commercial device maker and the Mac will follow. Push 3rd party developers through the app store and a lot will leave. Look at the music industry, soon, it will be Logic alone on Mac and everyone will have to migrate. Linux will be the last non consumer oriented OS and look for desktop/laptop versions to expand their footprint. Right now, all these big company OSes look like ad delivery platforms and turn you into a sysadmin for their profits.
• Yhippa 6y ago
  Does anybody have any reasons as to why they totally downplayed this major version release of their flagship OS?
  • ShamelessC 6y ago
    They did?
• DrBazza 6y ago
  This is just the 2020 version of Windows 95+NT = XP.
• gumby 6y ago
  So what’s the significance signaled by the numbering change? I often like Thomson’s writing (and have him in my RSS feed) but this meanders a bit too much for me to follow. Can someone help me out?
• fluffything 6y ago
  This blog post is 90 prelude/buildup toward these two claims: * MacOS X was a very good OS for developers, * MacOS X 11 is not. The first claim is discussed in the prelude, but irrelevant for the conclusion. Three arguments are given for the second claim: * macOS11 runs on ARM * macOS11 UI supports touch * macOS11 is not open and good [like macOSX] but easy and good enough That's it. This leaves me quite disappointed. macOS 11 running on ARM, RISCV, x86 or powerpc has little to do whether it is good for developers. I have an intel mac and do a substantial amount of ARM development on it: qemu works just fine. I expect qemu to work as good on arm for developing for x86. macOS11 supporting touch does not say anything either about whether it is good for developers. Windows UI supports touch, and that's quite good, even for developers. I also have a Lenovo Yoga, and I can fold it, and sketch on it, which is great for web meetings. All thanks to having a good touch screen and good OS touch support. So IMO this change could make macOS11 better for devs than macOS10. I haven't heard any information suggesting that macOS11 is less open and less good than macOS10. macOS10 was never great. It has quite old BSD utilities that are often subtly incompatible with their Linux or modern BSD variants for apparently no reason. macOS11 does not make this better or worse. macOS10 requires pretty much every process to grant permissions for everything nowadays, which makes it a bit of a pain to do something in the terminal without granting all permissions to the terminal, but that's only one click away, already "prepared" by apple, and you only have to do this once, etc. Each release of macOS 10 has made it more painful to use for development in some ways, and also better in other ways (zsh as default shell, C++17, C++ modules, dropping CUDA support, no native Vulkan support...). It was never great, it was always kind of a mixed bag.
• MintelIE 6y ago
  Lots of pointless user-facing "innovations," some of which break things with no warning, and very little improvement of the base OS from what a Unix person would notice, combined to cause stagnation. When Apple moved to file 'tags' from comments which one could edit which would be attached to the file, they literally nuked thousands of annotations of mine. I was never warned that they would be blown away. What kind of company just does this?
• ascotan 6y ago
  What's interesting to me after reading a bunch of the threads here is that consumers are constantly re-evaluating your product. Mac became popular, not because of hackers, but because it was a great platform for doing graphic design and artwork. Apple put a lot of time and energy into the human factor and it paid off. That and the iphone basically saved the brand from extinction. It's clear that apple is moving the same direction that Windows did years ago where they're putting the mobile OS on the desktop. I'm wondering how this is going to pay off for desktop/server users. Apples fortunes are in mobile and they're basically ballooning their mobile device inventory with multiple form factors. I think a lot of what keeps apple users buying more expensive laptops/servers is because they simply 'work'. However, apple has been sneaking in a lot of annoying features that I would expect on mobile devices but I have come to dislike on a desktop. No i don't want my email address tied to my purchases, no I don't some random device in my house popup with a MFA code, no I don't want what I do on my home laptop sync'ed to every mobile device I own. Usability and human design has always been the 'win' for apple and it's what Linux/Windows can never match (because they don't control all the parts for a uniform customer experience). However, there has always been a line between phones and mobiles devices. That line is in the fact that my laptop doesn't have a GSM/CDMA cell device in it. Because it would be "silly" to take calls on a laptop (i guess). I'm not sure I really like this line blurred. I'm not really sure that my laptop is just another IoT device running the same OS making annoying popups and tweets that I have to cancel while I'm working. Anywho there is an intangible distinction between a laptop and a phone and by blurring this line I think some people might begin to dislike it. There are other options out there.
• doggydogs94 6y ago
  You spend $6K on a laptop and then Apple kills the product line. Sweet.
• nazgulnarsil 6y ago
  it is frankly unbelievable how unusable the play store is.