12 ms·

macOS Monterey Preview

104 points by 0xedb 5y ago

dvfjsdhgfv 5y ago
They seem to mainly feature minor things like the ability to run FaceApp with other apps - that's very good, I hope they take time to stabilize the system instead of adding new features.
- tonyaiken 5y ago
  They did this last year.
butz 5y ago
Look at those new "tabs" in Safari. Firefox probably knew...
- contriban 5y ago
  They do look similar, but are fundamentally different in that they are also URL fields. If thought under that light, the shape makes sense. I honestly don’t know what made Firefox entirely ditch the “tab” style.
mmastrac 5y ago
The menubar looks oddly off-centered vertically. Is this a new style?
merb 5y ago
uf, this page definitly says that I'm not the target audience anymore. the 2019 16" model was probably my last one (the build quality, etc. is so much worse), besides that i loved the 2013 15" late model.
- vladvasiliu 5y ago
  I have a late 2013 15" that's still going strong. This machine is plenty powerful for my needs, I'm pretty disappointed that it won't support the latest OS version, especially since, from what I read, Linux support is sketchy on this model...
  - merb 5y ago
    yeah on my machine the battery blew up, we fixed it in the end, but we still ordered the 2019, because if a self repair would've gone wrong, I could've gone into holidays ;-) (another factor was, that I was running out of storage) we actually lent it (to another company) during covid for home office purposes and it still works fine.
    - vladvasiliu 5y ago
      I changed the battery in mine around april 2018 with a kit from iFixit. The procedure was surprisingly easy, given the horror stories I had heard about having to fully take everything apart and use solvents. I just opened up the case, unplugged the battery and went at it with one of the tools. It came off in like 10 minutes. Sure, it would've been better for it to not be glued, but oh well... In my case it started swelling, so I figured I'd better change it before it burns down my house or something. I rarely use it on battery, so the battery life itself wasn't an issue. It was still able to run some 2-3 hours. The replaced one gets me around 4-5 hours, similar to my work provided 2018 HP ProBook 13" with an 8th gen i5u, which is also noticeably slower.
      - merb 5y ago
        > In my case it started swelling, so I figured I'd better change it before it burns down my house or something. > I rarely use it on battery my problem aswell, sadly we didn't fix it and let it swell, so it killed the touchpad, but I did not use that as much anyways.
ulzeraj 5y ago
So I guess eGPUs on ARM are pretty much a dead thing by now aren't they?
- Gaelan 5y ago
  My understanding (from the work of marcan et al) is that the hardware's there, macOS just doesn't have the drivers. Is there something in the announcement that made you think this will never happen, or just a "if they were planning on doing it any time soon, they'd have announced it by now" situation?
  - ulzeraj 5y ago
    > My understanding (from the work of marcan et al) is that the hardware's there, macOS just doesn't have the drivers. Jeff Geerling's work on Raspberry Pi modules and extension boards found out its not possible at least on the PI4: From https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2020/external-gpus-and-raspberry-pi-compute-module-4 https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2020/external-gpus-and-ras... "... so far, the answer seems to be 'no.' Partly it's due to lack of support for I/O BAR space on the BCM2711 ARM SoC, and partly it may be due to driver bugs or features that are only supported on X86 or certain ARM architectures." So I wonder when people like Marcan say the hardware is there do they mean that the M1 doesn't have such I/O limitations? I know Tallos Blackbird POWER9 boards can work with discrete GPUs. I don't know if they are making use but I imagine amdgpu kernel module should work just as fine on a different arch. > just a "if they were planning on doing it any time soon, they'd have announced it by now" situation? Yes that's the case.
    - TazeTSchnitzel 5y ago
      The Raspberry Pi has a very different SoC from Apple's M1, why would it be relevant?
      - ulzeraj 5y ago
        I was just wondering if PCI-E discrete GPUs can work on ARM platforms at all.
MarkSweep 5y ago
It’s cool to see the “move your mouse between computers” concept become more widely available. I worked as an intern at TideBreak in 2007. Their product PointRight was based on work the founder did at Stanford in 2000. It let you move your mouse from one computer to another: http://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/pointright/ http://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/pointright/
- ftio 5y ago
  Ages ago, when I had a small Hackintosh netbook and a Mac mini, I used a great little app called Teleport to do this, and it was great. Apple's UI for establishing the connection — the little squish and pop thing that happens on the first attempt — is really brilliant. I think it's likely to cause some consternation when it doesn't work perfectly (as is their bias), but if it works well it'll be a great boon for those of us who like to use multiple computers at once. I wonder how they detect device orientation. That part is utterly magical to me.
  - jbverschoor 5y ago
    Probably UHF, but could also be some sonic thing.
- gre 5y ago
  There was a program called CosmoSynergy in 1996 that lets you share a mouse between computers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synergy_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synergy_(software)
  - niksakl 5y ago
    There is a fork of it called "barrier". Using it every day. https://github.com/debauchee/barrier https://github.com/debauchee/barrier
  - kugutsumen 5y ago
    I used x2x as well for X11 a very long time ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X2x https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X2x
dillondoyle 5y ago
Universal control + airplay for mac is enough to bring back target display mode?!! The universal control example talks about shared keyboards but does drag a PSD layer from ipad to mac which is pretty cool. and the airplay says mirror or extend monitor, cross platform is pretty cool imho.
Etheryte 5y ago
The new focus feature is great and something I've been looking forward to for ages — so much so that I built a hacky version of it myself a while ago. Essentially, I used to put on do not disturb for deep work but forget to turn it off later, missing out on important notifications. I really enjoy turning things off for an hour or two and then get back to being social. Having the feature baked into the OS instead of my hacky workaround app is great.
- zeitg3ist 5y ago
  Well, with Big Sur you can already set Do Not Disturb "for one hour". It's what I usually choose, for the same reason.
  - Etheryte 5y ago
    Thanks for the heads up, I haven't jumped to Big Sur yet because it simply does not play well with some virtualization tools.
- jbverschoor 5y ago
  Focus, to me, looks like the first move to an actual focus mode, one where you actually have a personal and work workspace, where some apps hide, and some apps hide certain windows. This is a key thing for my productivity..
lifty 5y ago
I’m curious if Microsoft is regretting not pursuing the Windows phone and universal apps strategy with more pathos, seeing now how successfully is Apple executing incremental changes to get to a homogenous cross device experience. At this point there is no other company that even comes close in terms of replicating this kind of experience, natively across 3 classes of devices (phone, tablet, computer). I’m really wondering what is Google and Microsoft strategizing when they see Apple’s progress.
- dmitriid 5y ago
  Microsoft always relied on external partners to deliver physical products for Microsoft software. That's why Zune was 10 years late. That's why they still don't do much beyond Surface. As the saying goes, "it's in their DNA". Additionally, Microsoft doesn't have a good tradition of clean breaks (they are rightly anal about backwards compatibility and decades-long support windows). And they've never had to cannibalize their own products with new, better products. As for Google, Google never understood why it would ever need hardware. Their livelihood is online ads and tracking people behaviour across devices. Custom Google-only hardware is a colossal money sink with negative-to-zero ROI compared to their software that is currently anywhere and everywhere thanks to Android and Chrome.
  - muterad_murilax 5y ago
    What about Xbox?
    - dmitriid 5y ago
      I was thinking about Xbox, but that never translated into whatever I wrote :D Xbox has always been a weird one for Microsoft, it seems: they never made money on the actual hardware, and it originally existed only to compete with Sony as the media box for the living room. I'd say Microsoft still doesn't really know what to do with it because it's so far removed from everything else Microsoft does.
  - canadianfella 5y ago
neilpanchal 5y ago
All I can see these days is purple-magenta gradients and babyfication of UI with rounded corners. Designers follow this recipe without independent thought or opinion about graphic design. I'd love to see UI based on the International style (aka Swiss typographic style) typified by the designers of the bygone era of 1970's and 80's. Ultra functional and less about aesthetics.
- orhmeh09 5y ago
  Rounded corners have been a hallmark of OS X design for more than 20 years. https://www.howtogeek.com/689489/20-years-later-how-the-mac-os-x-public-beta-saved-the-mac/ https://www.howtogeek.com/689489/20-years-later-how-the-mac-...
  - neilpanchal 5y ago
    Sure. I guess I am speaking about the larger trends. Firefox just recently went full rounded corners on the tab 'buttons'. Google did the same 2-3 years ago. Purple-gradients has been the trend that began with Stripe and spread around in design circles, landed at Apple sometime in 2018.
    - orhmeh09 5y ago
      With what product, specifically, did purple gradients land at Apple? Looking at the screenshots of Monterey it seems to me that the purple you see is probably from the desktop background, which is visible through the translucent UI elements. There are purple gradient elements on the web page itself, but I don't think that's particularly relevant to the actual software.
  - bombcar 5y ago
    Closer to 40 years, depending on how you look at it: https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Round_Rects_Are_Everywhere.txt https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Round_Rects_Are_...
- ulzeraj 5y ago
  > Swiss typographic style Interesting. Do you know any OS or UI that made use of this concept?
mulmen 5y ago
I’m nervous about the changes to Finder. How much collateral damage will be done to existing workflows? Lots of changes to notifications again. Will they reintroduce coherent gestures (swipe to dismiss, default action on click) or reinvent the wheel yet again? I’m still not used to Big Sur’s changes and Apple is yanking the rug out from under me again.
egypturnash 5y ago
Damn, I sure am not seeing anything that makes my solitary, works-offline self want to upgrade when this goes public. I just kinda got off the upgrade train when 10.15 killed off all 32-bit apps because Neko never got recompiled for 64-bit and I didn't wanna lose the cute desktop kitty. I'll be three versions behind when this comes out in Fall.
- astrange 5y ago
  Sounds like Neko is more than 3 versions behind since x86-64 macOS was introduced in 2007!
spinningarrow 5y ago
Really happy to see the updates to FaceTime making it a more fully-fledged video conferencing tool, no longer limited to users on the Apple ecosystem. It's rivalled only by Zoom in terms of call and video quality on low-bandwidth connections so I really hope that continues with this update!
- MajorBee 5y ago
  Personally, I have found FaceTime to struggle with sketchy connections; WhatsApp video calls do much better there. Video quality of FaceTime (when you have a sufficiently good connection) blows everything else out of the water, though.
pier25 5y ago
This is going to be controversial... but if Apple is going to choose a Spanish word for a _very popular_ product name, they should at least pick one that is properly written. Monterrey in Spanish is written with 2 Rs. Yes, I know the city in California is spelled with just a single R. Its original name was actually "Puerto de Monterrey". It probably changed to a single R when Mexico sold California (and other territories) to the US in the mid 1800s. Edit: See, told you this would offend US sensibilities.
- bluepizza 5y ago
  They didn't choose a Spanish word. They chose a city name. It is spelled correctly - in regards to the city name.
  - pier25 5y ago
    Indeed, but my point is that, considering there are more native Spanish speakers in the world than English native speakers, it would have been a good idea to pick another word. Edit: Imagine a super popular Mexican company had chosen "Niu York" as the name of one of the most popular software products in the world. Wouldn't that bother you?
    - simondw 5y ago
      Does your hypothetical Mexican company have an established pattern of naming its products after cities in Mexico? And, in this scenario, is there an actual city in Mexico called "Niu York"?
    - dragonwriter 5y ago
      > Indeed, but my point is that, considering there are more native Spanish speakers in the world than English native speakers, it would have been a good idea to pick another word. AFAIK “Monterrey”, “Monte Rey”, and “Monterey” are all alternate spellings from the Spanish-speaking world of “Monterrei”, the place name in Galicia from which many uses of the name (including the California place name) come, often (again, as in the California case) with personal titles of nobility as intermediaries. > Imagine a super popular Mexican company had chosen "Niu York" as the name of one of the most popular software products in the world. Wouldn't that bother you? Well, if I cared about the company or product, it might bother me a little that they failed to get the usual Spanish version of the place name (Nueva York) right, which most Spanish uses, including in product names, tend to use. But probably not even that, no. Maybe mildly amused.
cuddlybacon 5y ago
Many of the Facetime features would have been great for the pandemic. Too bad that would have resulted in an insane schedule for the engineers. I love the idea of the different Focus modes. Hopefully they have some good profiles out-of-the-box. I imagine without a good set of profiles, most people will never end up touching it. Hopefully shortcuts can interact with the current focus mode. The Safari changes are quite aggressive. I'll have to try it before judging it. I don't really use the tab bar that much. I tend to find tab expose works better for me. If that still works, this change will make little difference for me. The tab groups seems neat. I know that is a thing people are always asking for. What is interesting is the contrast it has Firefox changes announced recently. Those changes got a lot of flack on HN for decreasing the vertical space available for the webpage. These Safari changes go in the opposite direction. The color changing feature further indications that the focus is on the webpage and not the browser. Overall, I predict this version of Safari will be pretty unpopular on Hacker News.
- kugutsumen 5y ago
  Loving the changes in Safari already. The tab groups are amazing.
DCKing 5y ago
The hell is Apple doing with their supported machines? * iMac Late 2014 - Haswell 4th gen CPU with AMD GCN 1.0 or 1.2 GPU - not supported * Mac Mini Late 2014 - Haswell 4th gen CPU and GPU - supported (this came out the same day as aforementioned iMac) * Mac Pro Late 2013 - Ivy Bridge 3rd gen CPU with AMD GCN 1.0 GPU - supported * Macbook Late 2015 - Broadwell 5th gen CPU and GPU - not supported * Macbook Air Early 2015 - Broadwell 5th gen CPU and GPU - supported I was thinking I could get consistent, somewhat predictable 10 year support out of Apple when buying a new machine - counting 2 years of security updates after the last supported major release. Usually Apple lets go old stuff for specific architecture features in the CPU or GPU, meaning there's some technical reason albeit unstated. But this looks like a random crapshoot? This doesn't inspire confidence for my intended new purchase this year - because the 10 years on my previous purchase is running out. It's rough especially for people that spent thousands of dollars on the 27" 5K iMac in 2014 to be cut off in this release - really at the earliest end for Apple. That was a halo product on release and is still a damn fine computer, and will still be a damn fine computer two years from now. If you had instead bought a cheap Mac Mini the same day you'd have one more year of support at least...
- bombcar 5y ago
  There's always people who work out what's needed to get the older OS running via things like https://github.com/barrykn/big-sur-micropatcher https://github.com/barrykn/big-sur-micropatcher - and that 2014 iMac will still be supported on Big Sur for awhile before updates for that stop. Sometimes it works relatively well, other times there are major performance issues (often if the graphics card is missing support for a feature needed).
  - DCKing 5y ago
    This announcement puts the expiry date for software updates on the 2014 iMac in late 2023, which is 9 years of support on a potentially 3000 dollar machine at the time. I'm aware of patching projects that will likely give it a longer lease on life, and you can run Windows or Linux on it at that point, but should that really be necessary for a machine of that calibre? Usually Apple cut off machines along the lines of "doesn't support these CPU instructions" or "doesn't support GPU features for Metal". This list isn't that. On the face of it, this list is random. If there is some weird thing like wifi chips that's still on Apple to make work, that's not even on the spec sheet (certainly not theirs). Apple may be intending to support Big Sur for three years instead of two though, so I'll hold my breath for a sec. That doesn't take away that Apple seems to be axing things randomly now.
towergratis 5y ago
Moving north I see.I guess the next one will be called Santa Cruz macOs, or SCO.
- danellis 5y ago
  What kind of operation would they be running if they did that?
snug 5y ago
Wonder if this airplay will finally allow me to airplay fitness+ to my macbook
riffic 5y ago
Hey Apple, can we have native OS/kernel-level containerization yet? edit: what I mean by this is support for cgroups and network namespaces within xnu: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25447835 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25447835
ossusermivami 5y ago
> Focus helps you stay in the moment when you need to concentrate or step away. Choose a Focus that only allows the notifications you want — you can get work done while you’re in the zone, or enjoy a distraction-free dinner. Pick from a list of suggested Focus options or create your own. distraction-free dinner? Why would people use their computer while eating dinner? I find such a weird thing to say in a feature highlight(ps: i am not american)
- Jcowell 5y ago
  I use my phone during dinner since I reach and watch content during dinner.
- cuddlybacon 5y ago
  You don't need to be using your computer for the notification to be distracting. Your computer can be in the other room but if you hear 'ping' every time an iMessage comes in, it is still going to be distracting.

104 points by 0xedb 5y ago

They seem to mainly feature minor things like the ability to run FaceApp with other apps - that's very good, I hope they take time to stabilize the system instead of adding new features.

tonyaiken 5y ago
They did this last year.

butz 5y ago

Look at those new "tabs" in Safari. Firefox probably knew...

contriban 5y ago
They do look similar, but are fundamentally different in that they are also URL fields. If thought under that light, the shape makes sense. I honestly don’t know what made Firefox entirely ditch the “tab” style.

mmastrac 5y ago

The menubar looks oddly off-centered vertically. Is this a new style?

merb 5y ago

uf, this page definitly says that I'm not the target audience anymore. the 2019 16" model was probably my last one (the build quality, etc. is so much worse), besides that i loved the 2013 15" late model.

vladvasiliu 5y ago
I have a late 2013 15" that's still going strong. This machine is plenty powerful for my needs, I'm pretty disappointed that it won't support the latest OS version, especially since, from what I read, Linux support is sketchy on this model...
- merb 5y ago
  yeah on my machine the battery blew up, we fixed it in the end, but we still ordered the 2019, because if a self repair would've gone wrong, I could've gone into holidays ;-) (another factor was, that I was running out of storage) we actually lent it (to another company) during covid for home office purposes and it still works fine.
  - vladvasiliu 5y ago
    I changed the battery in mine around april 2018 with a kit from iFixit. The procedure was surprisingly easy, given the horror stories I had heard about having to fully take everything apart and use solvents. I just opened up the case, unplugged the battery and went at it with one of the tools. It came off in like 10 minutes. Sure, it would've been better for it to not be glued, but oh well... In my case it started swelling, so I figured I'd better change it before it burns down my house or something. I rarely use it on battery, so the battery life itself wasn't an issue. It was still able to run some 2-3 hours. The replaced one gets me around 4-5 hours, similar to my work provided 2018 HP ProBook 13" with an 8th gen i5u, which is also noticeably slower.
    - merb 5y ago
      > In my case it started swelling, so I figured I'd better change it before it burns down my house or something. > I rarely use it on battery my problem aswell, sadly we didn't fix it and let it swell, so it killed the touchpad, but I did not use that as much anyways.

ulzeraj 5y ago

So I guess eGPUs on ARM are pretty much a dead thing by now aren't they?

Gaelan 5y ago
My understanding (from the work of marcan et al) is that the hardware's there, macOS just doesn't have the drivers. Is there something in the announcement that made you think this will never happen, or just a "if they were planning on doing it any time soon, they'd have announced it by now" situation?
- ulzeraj 5y ago
  > My understanding (from the work of marcan et al) is that the hardware's there, macOS just doesn't have the drivers. Jeff Geerling's work on Raspberry Pi modules and extension boards found out its not possible at least on the PI4: From https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2020/external-gpus-and-raspberry-pi-compute-module-4 https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2020/external-gpus-and-ras... "... so far, the answer seems to be 'no.' Partly it's due to lack of support for I/O BAR space on the BCM2711 ARM SoC, and partly it may be due to driver bugs or features that are only supported on X86 or certain ARM architectures." So I wonder when people like Marcan say the hardware is there do they mean that the M1 doesn't have such I/O limitations? I know Tallos Blackbird POWER9 boards can work with discrete GPUs. I don't know if they are making use but I imagine amdgpu kernel module should work just as fine on a different arch. > just a "if they were planning on doing it any time soon, they'd have announced it by now" situation? Yes that's the case.
  - TazeTSchnitzel 5y ago
    The Raspberry Pi has a very different SoC from Apple's M1, why would it be relevant?
    - ulzeraj 5y ago
      I was just wondering if PCI-E discrete GPUs can work on ARM platforms at all.

MarkSweep 5y ago

It’s cool to see the “move your mouse between computers” concept become more widely available. I worked as an intern at TideBreak in 2007. Their product PointRight was based on work the founder did at Stanford in 2000. It let you move your mouse from one computer to another: http://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/pointright/ http://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/pointright/

ftio 5y ago
Ages ago, when I had a small Hackintosh netbook and a Mac mini, I used a great little app called Teleport to do this, and it was great. Apple's UI for establishing the connection — the little squish and pop thing that happens on the first attempt — is really brilliant. I think it's likely to cause some consternation when it doesn't work perfectly (as is their bias), but if it works well it'll be a great boon for those of us who like to use multiple computers at once. I wonder how they detect device orientation. That part is utterly magical to me.
- jbverschoor 5y ago
  Probably UHF, but could also be some sonic thing.
gre 5y ago
There was a program called CosmoSynergy in 1996 that lets you share a mouse between computers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synergy_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synergy_(software)
- niksakl 5y ago
  There is a fork of it called "barrier". Using it every day. https://github.com/debauchee/barrier https://github.com/debauchee/barrier
- kugutsumen 5y ago
  I used x2x as well for X11 a very long time ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X2x https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X2x

dillondoyle 5y ago

Universal control + airplay for mac is enough to bring back target display mode?!! The universal control example talks about shared keyboards but does drag a PSD layer from ipad to mac which is pretty cool. and the airplay says mirror or extend monitor, cross platform is pretty cool imho.

Etheryte 5y ago

The new focus feature is great and something I've been looking forward to for ages — so much so that I built a hacky version of it myself a while ago. Essentially, I used to put on do not disturb for deep work but forget to turn it off later, missing out on important notifications. I really enjoy turning things off for an hour or two and then get back to being social. Having the feature baked into the OS instead of my hacky workaround app is great.

zeitg3ist 5y ago
Well, with Big Sur you can already set Do Not Disturb "for one hour". It's what I usually choose, for the same reason.
- Etheryte 5y ago
  Thanks for the heads up, I haven't jumped to Big Sur yet because it simply does not play well with some virtualization tools.
jbverschoor 5y ago
Focus, to me, looks like the first move to an actual focus mode, one where you actually have a personal and work workspace, where some apps hide, and some apps hide certain windows. This is a key thing for my productivity..

lifty 5y ago

I’m curious if Microsoft is regretting not pursuing the Windows phone and universal apps strategy with more pathos, seeing now how successfully is Apple executing incremental changes to get to a homogenous cross device experience. At this point there is no other company that even comes close in terms of replicating this kind of experience, natively across 3 classes of devices (phone, tablet, computer). I’m really wondering what is Google and Microsoft strategizing when they see Apple’s progress.

dmitriid 5y ago
Microsoft always relied on external partners to deliver physical products for Microsoft software. That's why Zune was 10 years late. That's why they still don't do much beyond Surface. As the saying goes, "it's in their DNA". Additionally, Microsoft doesn't have a good tradition of clean breaks (they are rightly anal about backwards compatibility and decades-long support windows). And they've never had to cannibalize their own products with new, better products. As for Google, Google never understood why it would ever need hardware. Their livelihood is online ads and tracking people behaviour across devices. Custom Google-only hardware is a colossal money sink with negative-to-zero ROI compared to their software that is currently anywhere and everywhere thanks to Android and Chrome.
- muterad_murilax 5y ago
  What about Xbox?
  - dmitriid 5y ago
    I was thinking about Xbox, but that never translated into whatever I wrote :D Xbox has always been a weird one for Microsoft, it seems: they never made money on the actual hardware, and it originally existed only to compete with Sony as the media box for the living room. I'd say Microsoft still doesn't really know what to do with it because it's so far removed from everything else Microsoft does.
- canadianfella 5y ago

neilpanchal 5y ago

All I can see these days is purple-magenta gradients and babyfication of UI with rounded corners. Designers follow this recipe without independent thought or opinion about graphic design. I'd love to see UI based on the International style (aka Swiss typographic style) typified by the designers of the bygone era of 1970's and 80's. Ultra functional and less about aesthetics.

orhmeh09 5y ago
Rounded corners have been a hallmark of OS X design for more than 20 years. https://www.howtogeek.com/689489/20-years-later-how-the-mac-os-x-public-beta-saved-the-mac/ https://www.howtogeek.com/689489/20-years-later-how-the-mac-...
- neilpanchal 5y ago
  Sure. I guess I am speaking about the larger trends. Firefox just recently went full rounded corners on the tab 'buttons'. Google did the same 2-3 years ago. Purple-gradients has been the trend that began with Stripe and spread around in design circles, landed at Apple sometime in 2018.
  - orhmeh09 5y ago
    With what product, specifically, did purple gradients land at Apple? Looking at the screenshots of Monterey it seems to me that the purple you see is probably from the desktop background, which is visible through the translucent UI elements. There are purple gradient elements on the web page itself, but I don't think that's particularly relevant to the actual software.
- bombcar 5y ago
  Closer to 40 years, depending on how you look at it: https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Round_Rects_Are_Everywhere.txt https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Round_Rects_Are_...
ulzeraj 5y ago
> Swiss typographic style Interesting. Do you know any OS or UI that made use of this concept?

mulmen 5y ago

I’m nervous about the changes to Finder. How much collateral damage will be done to existing workflows? Lots of changes to notifications again. Will they reintroduce coherent gestures (swipe to dismiss, default action on click) or reinvent the wheel yet again? I’m still not used to Big Sur’s changes and Apple is yanking the rug out from under me again.

egypturnash 5y ago

Damn, I sure am not seeing anything that makes my solitary, works-offline self want to upgrade when this goes public. I just kinda got off the upgrade train when 10.15 killed off all 32-bit apps because Neko never got recompiled for 64-bit and I didn't wanna lose the cute desktop kitty. I'll be three versions behind when this comes out in Fall.

astrange 5y ago
Sounds like Neko is more than 3 versions behind since x86-64 macOS was introduced in 2007!

spinningarrow 5y ago

Really happy to see the updates to FaceTime making it a more fully-fledged video conferencing tool, no longer limited to users on the Apple ecosystem. It's rivalled only by Zoom in terms of call and video quality on low-bandwidth connections so I really hope that continues with this update!

MajorBee 5y ago
Personally, I have found FaceTime to struggle with sketchy connections; WhatsApp video calls do much better there. Video quality of FaceTime (when you have a sufficiently good connection) blows everything else out of the water, though.

pier25 5y ago

This is going to be controversial... but if Apple is going to choose a Spanish word for a _very popular_ product name, they should at least pick one that is properly written. Monterrey in Spanish is written with 2 Rs. Yes, I know the city in California is spelled with just a single R. Its original name was actually "Puerto de Monterrey". It probably changed to a single R when Mexico sold California (and other territories) to the US in the mid 1800s. Edit: See, told you this would offend US sensibilities.

bluepizza 5y ago
They didn't choose a Spanish word. They chose a city name. It is spelled correctly - in regards to the city name.
- pier25 5y ago
  Indeed, but my point is that, considering there are more native Spanish speakers in the world than English native speakers, it would have been a good idea to pick another word. Edit: Imagine a super popular Mexican company had chosen "Niu York" as the name of one of the most popular software products in the world. Wouldn't that bother you?
  - simondw 5y ago
    Does your hypothetical Mexican company have an established pattern of naming its products after cities in Mexico? And, in this scenario, is there an actual city in Mexico called "Niu York"?
  - dragonwriter 5y ago
    > Indeed, but my point is that, considering there are more native Spanish speakers in the world than English native speakers, it would have been a good idea to pick another word. AFAIK “Monterrey”, “Monte Rey”, and “Monterey” are all alternate spellings from the Spanish-speaking world of “Monterrei”, the place name in Galicia from which many uses of the name (including the California place name) come, often (again, as in the California case) with personal titles of nobility as intermediaries. > Imagine a super popular Mexican company had chosen "Niu York" as the name of one of the most popular software products in the world. Wouldn't that bother you? Well, if I cared about the company or product, it might bother me a little that they failed to get the usual Spanish version of the place name (Nueva York) right, which most Spanish uses, including in product names, tend to use. But probably not even that, no. Maybe mildly amused.

cuddlybacon 5y ago

Many of the Facetime features would have been great for the pandemic. Too bad that would have resulted in an insane schedule for the engineers. I love the idea of the different Focus modes. Hopefully they have some good profiles out-of-the-box. I imagine without a good set of profiles, most people will never end up touching it. Hopefully shortcuts can interact with the current focus mode. The Safari changes are quite aggressive. I'll have to try it before judging it. I don't really use the tab bar that much. I tend to find tab expose works better for me. If that still works, this change will make little difference for me. The tab groups seems neat. I know that is a thing people are always asking for. What is interesting is the contrast it has Firefox changes announced recently. Those changes got a lot of flack on HN for decreasing the vertical space available for the webpage. These Safari changes go in the opposite direction. The color changing feature further indications that the focus is on the webpage and not the browser. Overall, I predict this version of Safari will be pretty unpopular on Hacker News.

kugutsumen 5y ago
Loving the changes in Safari already. The tab groups are amazing.

DCKing 5y ago

The hell is Apple doing with their supported machines? * iMac Late 2014 - Haswell 4th gen CPU with AMD GCN 1.0 or 1.2 GPU - not supported * Mac Mini Late 2014 - Haswell 4th gen CPU and GPU - supported (this came out the same day as aforementioned iMac) * Mac Pro Late 2013 - Ivy Bridge 3rd gen CPU with AMD GCN 1.0 GPU - supported * Macbook Late 2015 - Broadwell 5th gen CPU and GPU - not supported * Macbook Air Early 2015 - Broadwell 5th gen CPU and GPU - supported I was thinking I could get consistent, somewhat predictable 10 year support out of Apple when buying a new machine - counting 2 years of security updates after the last supported major release. Usually Apple lets go old stuff for specific architecture features in the CPU or GPU, meaning there's some technical reason albeit unstated. But this looks like a random crapshoot? This doesn't inspire confidence for my intended new purchase this year - because the 10 years on my previous purchase is running out. It's rough especially for people that spent thousands of dollars on the 27" 5K iMac in 2014 to be cut off in this release - really at the earliest end for Apple. That was a halo product on release and is still a damn fine computer, and will still be a damn fine computer two years from now. If you had instead bought a cheap Mac Mini the same day you'd have one more year of support at least...

bombcar 5y ago
There's always people who work out what's needed to get the older OS running via things like https://github.com/barrykn/big-sur-micropatcher https://github.com/barrykn/big-sur-micropatcher - and that 2014 iMac will still be supported on Big Sur for awhile before updates for that stop. Sometimes it works relatively well, other times there are major performance issues (often if the graphics card is missing support for a feature needed).
- DCKing 5y ago
  This announcement puts the expiry date for software updates on the 2014 iMac in late 2023, which is 9 years of support on a potentially 3000 dollar machine at the time. I'm aware of patching projects that will likely give it a longer lease on life, and you can run Windows or Linux on it at that point, but should that really be necessary for a machine of that calibre? Usually Apple cut off machines along the lines of "doesn't support these CPU instructions" or "doesn't support GPU features for Metal". This list isn't that. On the face of it, this list is random. If there is some weird thing like wifi chips that's still on Apple to make work, that's not even on the spec sheet (certainly not theirs). Apple may be intending to support Big Sur for three years instead of two though, so I'll hold my breath for a sec. That doesn't take away that Apple seems to be axing things randomly now.

towergratis 5y ago

Moving north I see.I guess the next one will be called Santa Cruz macOs, or SCO.

danellis 5y ago
What kind of operation would they be running if they did that?

snug 5y ago

Wonder if this airplay will finally allow me to airplay fitness+ to my macbook

riffic 5y ago

Hey Apple, can we have native OS/kernel-level containerization yet? edit: what I mean by this is support for cgroups and network namespaces within xnu: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25447835 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25447835

ossusermivami 5y ago

> Focus helps you stay in the moment when you need to concentrate or step away. Choose a Focus that only allows the notifications you want — you can get work done while you’re in the zone, or enjoy a distraction-free dinner. Pick from a list of suggested Focus options or create your own. distraction-free dinner? Why would people use their computer while eating dinner? I find such a weird thing to say in a feature highlight(ps: i am not american)

Jcowell 5y ago
I use my phone during dinner since I reach and watch content during dinner.
cuddlybacon 5y ago
You don't need to be using your computer for the notification to be distracting. Your computer can be in the other room but if you hear 'ping' every time an iMessage comes in, it is still going to be distracting.