With Apple firing on all cylinders when it comes to hardware, now is no time to let macOS stall. Unfortunately, Ventura doesn’t move that ball forward in a meaningful way. I want to see the Mac continue to grow and flourish, and I’m convinced more than ever that aligning it and the iPad is one of the ways to accomplish that. However, while the issues with Ventura may not be immediate, they’re still important because they threaten the viability of the Mac in the midst of its hardware renaissance. And Systems Settings are, after all, just settings that may not be great to look at, but they still work. I may feel constrained by the lack of some actions in Shortcuts on my Mac, but at the same time, I’ve got Shortcuts on the Mac, something I’d hoped for for years. My day-to-day work on the Mac isn’t affected by whether the iPadOS version of Stage Manager is buggy. For most users, macOS is in a very good place. Instead, it’s a clear example of why you can’t just graft iOS or iPadOS design onto macOS and call it quits.Īlthough each of the items above concerns me, it’s equally important to put them in context. System Preferences was long overdue for a refresh, but System Settings isn’t the redesign we needed. System Settings: So much of the design work we saw introduced with Big Sur was so carefully considered to harmonize macOS with iPadOS while retaining its Mac nature that System Settings is a shock to, well, the system.A lot of resources undoubtedly went into stabilizing Shortcuts on the Mac over the past year, which is understandable, but unfortunately, those efforts seem to have been at the expense of introducing new system-level actions or maintaining parity with new actions on iOS and iPadOS. More concerning to me, though, is the lack of new system-level actions on the Mac. The app is in a much better place today, although bugs continue to be a problem. Shortcuts: Shortcuts was in rough shape when it launched on the Mac last year.There’s lots of room for improvement, which I’ll cover below, but my concern extends beyond the Mac-specific issues to what the feature’s problems on the iPad mean for Mac users long-term, which is something I covered last month for Club MacStories members and will expand on below. In fact, I’ve been using it every day since WWDC and will continue to do so. Stage Manager: Stage Manager is in far better technical shape on the Mac than on the iPad.So, with Monterey’s success of moving system apps forward in unison across all OSes looking more like a trend than a one-off novelty, what are the clouds I’m seeing on the horizon? There are three: The familiar interface and feature set across multiple platforms are one of the biggest and most tangible achievements of the past few years. It’s a fundamental transformation of both hardware and software that has taken shape over years, beginning publicly with Craig Federighi’s WWDC Sneak Peek in 2018. As I wrote in last year’s macOS Monterey review, it started five years ago:įor the past few years, no narrative thread has been more important to the Mac and its operating system than their realignment within Apple’s product lineup. The story of macOS Ventura didn’t begin at WWDC in June. Supported By Backblazeīackblaze: Astonishingly Easy And Unlimited Cloud Backup. Each fall release is a marker laid down by Apple that says something about where the Mac has been and where it’s going. The release of Ventura is just one moment in time along macOS’s evolutionary path, but it’s an important one. And yet, I worry about the clouds on the horizon. So, from an everyday workflow standpoint, Ventura is an excellent release that delivers on the promise of an OS that moves in step with Apple’s other OSes and erases artificial barriers to users coming from iOS and iPadOS. Features like Continuity Camera, iCloud Shared Photo Library, and the many system app updates have, on the whole, been stable, worked as advertised, and helped me do more with my Mac. I’ve been running it for months, and it’s been running well for all my everyday work and personal tasks. MacOS Ventura is a hard release to pin down.
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