macOS Catalina has been reviewed, and taking over from John Siracusa’s legendary Mac OS X reviews at Ars Technica is MacStories.
The Mac isn’t in crisis, but it isn’t healthy either. Waiting until the Mac is on life support isn’t viable. Instead, Apple has opted to reimagine the Mac in the context of today’s computing landscape before its survival is threatened. The solution is to tie macOS more closely to iOS and iPadOS, making it an integrated point on the continuum of Apple’s devices that respects the hardware differences of the platform but isn’t different simply for the sake of difference.
Transitions are inherently messy, and so is Catalina in places. It’s a work in process that represents the first steps down a new path, not the destination itself. The destination isn’t clear yet, but Catalina’s purpose is: it’s a bridge, not an island.
You know where to get Catalina, but it might be a good idea to wait a few point releases before diving in.
Apple has done very little for average mac consumers in the past several years. IMHO apple lost interest in the mac platform a decade ago and these events are just ongoing indicators that the ultimate goal is for IOS to replace mac-os.
I guess my next UNIX workstation will be from System76 or somebody then? I mean, I don’t use an iPhone, an iPad, or an Apple Watch. I guess it’ll be nice to be able to use “valgrind” again? Every OS and hardware release since 2015 has made development on Apple hardware just a bit worse and a bit more frustrating.
Looks like Microsoft beat Apple to the punch on a device that’s just two tablets connected with a bespoke hinge though. Did Jony Ives retire too soon to create the iPadBook?
Side car is cool. I’d echo everyone elses’ comments here about the other issues with Macs, but Man if Macs were good, that would be a killer feature that will eventually be on Microsoft/Google products. At that point everyone will say ” Macs have had that for years”, but of course they’ll have forgotten how terrible macs are now. Great features on otherwise terrible platforms are the most frustrating thing.
Isn’t a feature like Sidecar due on the new range of Surface devices? I think I read about it a week or two back in reviews of the Neo or Surface X! A review showed an App/Program being flicked across to another device with a gesture. Two things grabbed me, do the devices need to be in a specific orientation for it to work, how do they know what’s right, left, up or down when at least one or even both devices are portable?
In my industry MacOS lost a lot of commercial users because they had a scorched earth policy of “All that is new is good,” I watched as they made life easier for artists, videogrpahers and real-estate agents, and much much harder for engineers. On the Windows side most haven’t even adopt Windows 10 yet, they remain entrenched on Win 7, and anything that forces a re-think, revision or move towards the unknown and wavering OS is effectively a no-no! That leaves the Mac making marketing websites and a clean desktop for the sales assistant, editing videos or other such creative tasks. While most of the real technical stuff including almost all the coding is happening on a legacy OS like Win 7, it’s a bit sad,
Apple was born in industry, the professional user solution, but it sold it’s soul to retail long ago!