As expected, Apple has used the stage at its WWDC 2022 keynote to reveal the features and changes coming to macOS in the next major software update for the platform, macOS 13 Ventura.
Ventura’s headlining feature is a new multitasking interface called Stage Manager. It’s being billed as a way to fight window clutter on a busy desktop—enter Stage Manager mode, and one of your windows floats to the center of the screen, pushing your other windows into a compressed navigation column on the left of the screen. Click a different app window on the left, and it will fly to the center of the screen, knocking the app you were using before into the navigation column.
I’m not entirely sure if adding a second dock to the Mac is going to be a pleasant experience, but I at least like the throwback to a very deep cut – looks-wise, this reminded me a lot of Sun’s Project Looking Glass, a weird, fully 3D *NIX desktop environment with flippable and rotatable windows built in Java. Then again, Apple’s Expose is still one of the best window management features of the past two decades, so after some use this new Stage Manager feature might be of the same pedigree.
Thom Holwerda,
Yes, this is so important!
Well, benchmark-wise the M1 it wins some and looses some. Here’s the m1-max…
https://www.notebookcheck.net/Apple-M1-Max-32-Core-GPU-GPU-Benchmarks-and-Specs.579797.0.html
There was something of a pattern being borne out in gaming benchmarks that suggest the M1’s integrated GPU design is at a disadvantage compared to discrete GPUs.
https://wccftech.com/m1-max-slower-than-laptop-rtx-3080-in-gaming-benchmarks/
https://www.tomsguide.com/news/macbook-pro-2021-benchmarks-how-fast-are-m1-pro-and-m1-max
Of course this is all old news about the M1 and it will be very interesting to see the M2 next to other latest generation CPUs and GPUs. I predict a similar pattern though: individually all the M2 components will be high performance, but using shared memory and sharing thermal headroom could be a bottleneck when all the components need to run at the same time. I think this is why the M1 does relatively well on artificial benchmarks and poorly at games (compared to discrete solutions where CPU and GPU are running more independently).
(Hmm, not sure how it happened, but this post was supposed to be an edit of my post in the M2 article but somehow wordpress put it here and I just noticed)
Alfman,
Yes, the comment looked familiar 🙂
It will only run on 2017 and up Apple hardware.
That’s it! I was trying to remember what Stage Manager reminded me of – it’s Project Looking Glass.
So… Apple went back to 2007 and forked Compiz?
This is the kind of thing that convinces me that Linux desktop problem never was the lack of good ideas, and some of these ideas are DECADES ahead of anything on other OSs.
The real problem is simple lack of polish coupled with the lack of some billion dollar corporation committed to make the Linux desktop one of his core business for other corporations to take it seriously.
I actually like Compiz. I used the cubed interface quite frequently and it seemed simple and intuitive.