Thursday 9 July 2020

Mac OS Big Sur - Stop Futzing Already

I have seen at least three You Tube reviews of macOS Big Sur. Which is supposed to be an operating system. 85 new features later, nothing about the operating system. Emojis, searching in messages, some pointless new options in Music, face recognition in the Home App, and a bunch of other stuff in the Apps.

What about changes to the actual operating system? Does it use less RAM than Catalina? Does it load apps faster? How about the firewall? Improvements to the music playing software? Does it sandbox like iOS does? Any new features I might like to know about as a developer?

When the **** is Apple going to give us proper window management, because Windows still does that better than anyone. When are they going to detect all the hard drives and other equipment on my network, and re-connect to them, like Windows does, even if the devices aren't in Apple's ecosystem? And WHEN will they get the album art in Music sorted out? It works if I have all my files on my Air, but on the NAS? Half the images would go missing and the loading time was awful. My Sonos and File Manager apps on the iPod Touch did a better job. And please can we have the same wonderfully functional File Open / Save dialogs that Windows does so much better.

I get the feeling that Apple do a lot of hard-core OS-stuff to improve performance. They should crow about it some more. But maybe they don't, because they can fix it on the chip, in a way that Microsoft can't.

It may also be the reviewers, who assume their audience want to know about the awful battery icon more than the way Apple have (maybe) improved battery life by doing something with the battery management algorithm. I'd rather know about the algorithms. I can see the awful design for myself.

What makes a computer operating system is flawless multi-tasking, powerful peripheral management, and simple multi-user management. If I can't run Nora En Pure on my browser on one screen, while typing in Evernote and downloading some Amazon music, while rendering a movie clip, then it's not a real computer. So I would expect to hear about improvements to those things as well.

But OMG the desktop art on Big Sur! I suspect it's going to be a while before this late adopter adopts it.

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