Apple on Melabit

macOS Tahoe: let's free the icons!

Mon, 24 Nov 2025 18:00:00 +0000

It is not just a matter of disk icons. As soon as I saw what Tahoe had done to the icons of many applications installed on my Mac, I decided I had to do something to restore the original look of the icons.

I tried several times, using Apple’s home‑automation tools, Automator and Shortcuts, but nothing worked and there was always some function missing. Or maybe I’m just not very good at using them.

Then I discovered fileicon, a library available on Homebrew that lets you programmatically modify file and folder icons. With that, the problem was practically solved.

– Source: Hennie Stander on Unsplash.

The squircle jail

With Tahoe Apple introduced a new icon format that now has to conform to the default shape of a squircle, a cross between a square and a circle (or a superellipse, for those who enjoy mathematics).

Apple redesigned its application icons to fit the new format and the aesthetic standards of Liquid Glass, although the final effect is often quite debatable. Even John Gruber doesn’t spare criticism of this aspect, going so far as to call the designer of the Automator icon a hack who never should have even gotten a job working at Apple (and how can one say he’s wrong?).

The problem, however, isn’t just that many Apple application icons lost meaning or are outright ugly, but also that many third‑party application icons don’t fit properly into the jail represented by the squircle.

It happens with all those applications that have beatifully-crafted icons, such as Audio Hijack, BBEdit, Alfred, Amphetamine, VLC, NValt, Gemini 2, HandBrake, Keyboard Maestro and so on.

These are all well-known applications built by medium-to-large teams. Yet overe these months they haven’t deemed it necessary (or useful) to adapt their gorgeous icons to the new standard imposed by Tahoe.

And imagine if the smaller developers, or those building cross‑platform applications where a unique, recognizable look is essential, have done it either.

What happens in those cases? Tahoe automatically shrinks the icons of these applications and encloses them within the squircle. Moreover, almost as if to remind developers to hurry up and comply with Cupertino’s dictates, it places these icons on a gray background which calling ugly would be an understatement.

In the first beta of Tahoe the final result was simply hawful, as you can see in the images from my first article on Tahoe. Moreover, this brutal treatment made some icons almost invisible (Tunnelblick, QGIS, OpenMV IDE, Thonny).

In the public version of Tahoe, released in September, and in the subsequent updates, Apple toned down some of the transparency excesses of Liquid Glass and also lightened the gray background of the icons that refused to fit within the squircle.

The final effect is undoubtedly better.¹ However, the gray‑bordered icons are still ugly and much smaller than they could (and should) be.

Can we do something to bring back the look they had before the Tahoe treatment?

Let’s Free the Icons

Obviously the answer is yes, otherwise I wouldn’t have written this post.

The manual method is described very well here and requires right‑clicking the application icon, selecting Get Info and replacing the icon thumbnail with the one that lives inside the application bundle itself.

To find it, right‑click the application icon again, choose Show Package Contents, click on the Contents folder, then on Resources and look for the file with the .icns extension (keeping in mind that some applications may contain more than one such file) and drag it onto the thumbnail in the Get Info window.

It sounds complicated but, with a bit of practice, it becomes fairly quick. This manual method works fine if you only have a few applications to fix. But if, as in my case, there are more than 20 applications, it quickly becomes tedious and error-prone. And, as if that weren’t enough, you’ll probably have to repeat the process every time the application is updated.

Better to let your Mac do everything automatically. And that’s where IconLib comes in.

IconLib

IconLib is a simple Bash script that automates the whole process, relying on the fileicon library to actually perform the icon modification. All you have to do is provide it with a file containing the list of applications to update – and sometimes the name of the .icns file too, because, darn it!, many developers use icon filenames that have nothing to do with the application name and often bundle multiple .icns files inside the application bundle – and it does the rest.

If you’re not happy with the result, you can run the script again with the -u switch (for undo), restoring the Tahoe icons.

You can also run IconLib on a list of applications, and then later edit the list to restore the icons for only the selected applications, leaving the others in their pre-Tahoe state.

All the details are in the README file of the GitHub repository and I won’t repeat them here. Instead I’ll just show how the icons look after fixing them with IconLib.

Even though the old icons don’t follow the stylistic dictates of the squircle, the richer, less constrained look and the absence of the gray background make me prefer them, at least until developers roll out new icons better suited for Tahoe.

Bare Bones Software just did it for BBEdit. The fact that such a major software house took so long indicates it’s no easy task, or that developers hoped (in vain) for months that Apple would backtrack. And if BBEdit took that long, it’s hard to imagine other cross‑platform or niche applications adapting quickly.

Conclusions

IconLib is not a must‑have program at all and it serves an admittedly narrow audience.

First of all, it is useful for people like me, who have many programs installed on their Macs, often produced by indie developers or by specialist teams that lack the time, desire, or expertise to deal with subtle graphics issues (think, for example, of Tunnelblick, for managing VPNs, Thonny, a must‑have for those who program microcontrollers in Python, or JASP, one of the best statistical programs for those who know little about statistics).

It also helps anyone who is dissatisfied with the jail that Tahoe enforces around the formerly magnificent icons of many applications.

Finally, it assists those who think Apple is overdoing this trend in macOS, which increasingly feels like an offshoot of iOS rather than a standalone system deserving its own life.

And lastly, it serves those who think Apple is going too far with this drift in macOS, which increasingly seems more like a by-product of iOS than an operating system worth its own independent existence.

While they were at it, couldn’t they have used a white background? ↩︎

macOS Tahoe, again

Mon, 10 Nov 2025 18:00:00 +0000

After less than two months since the official release, Tahoe seems poised to become another one of those macOS versions to be forgotten, like Lion, Mavericks, Sierra, Catalina, or Ventura.

Aside from Liquid Glass, which I’ll discuss in a moment, what does Tahoe have that’s memorable? There’s the telephone‑call filter, which actually belongs more to iOS than macOS and still has many limitations, and there are also improvements to Spotlight search. But is it really worth upgrading an operating system just for that?¹

Liquid Glass should be the real novelty of macOS 26 Tahoe, but Macworld first compared it to Vista and then declared it dead in the cradle. If Macworld says so – not PCWorld, not Linux Pro -— there’s definitely something to be concerned about!

Moreover, Liquid Glass went wrong from the very beginning, when some joker thought of inverting the colors of the Finder icon. Without any particular reason, just for sake of change.

The criticism was so destructive that Apple had to backtrack quickly, restoring the historic design of the Finder icon, the one we’ve known for thirty years and that is one of macOS’s distinctive marks.

Haowever, when it came to disk icons Apple managed to do even worse. In the very early betas of Tahoe the disk icons were identical to the ones we’ve been used to for years: the image of a mechanical hard‑disk for internal drives and a rounded orange rectangular prism for external drives. Very skeuomorphic, but also very clear and even pleasant to look at, with all those little screws, colored LEDs, and even a label warning us not to open the disk.

With the fifth beta of Tahoe, Apple throws the old hard‑disk icon into the trash and replaces it with a more stylized image that should represent the SSD installed in all Macs for years.² While it’s at it, it also freshens up the other disk icons (external, network, and removable) and the result is shown below, where the top row displays the disk icons up to Sequoia and the earliest Tahoe betas, while the bottom row shows the updated icons.

– Source: Ars Technica.

Soon after, the internal‑disk icon loses all front elements, that perhaps were meant to represent ventilation slots or activity LEDs, and becomes as minimal as the others.

Admittedly, the new icons are bland, having lost all detail in favour of greater simplicity, just as has happened to the rest of the graphical interface built around Liquid Glass. But so far that’s fine.

What’s incomprehensible is why the icons were redesigned to appear narrower in the front and wider in the back, defying the laws of perspective and how we’ve been accustomed to seeing them up to Sequoia. It’s merely an optical illusion; in reality (I checked) the icons have perfectly parallel sides, but the play of light and shadow makes them look odd and out of place.

The effect worsens when the icons are placed side-by-side, because the differing reflections make the gray internal‑disk icon look more natural and less distorted compared to the external units.

Now, I can understand the need to adopt a homogeneous and well-defined graphic language, but wasn’t it possible to design icons that looked more natural? Susan Kare managed it with just 32×32 pixels, how can we think that today’s Apple designers, who today have immense fields of pixels at their disposal, can’t do the same?

If Cupertino can’t even produce a convincing disk icon, how can we trust that Tahoe and Liquid Glass are serious projects?

The annual macOS update cycle is good for marketing, but from a technical point of view it makes very little sense. Not only because it’s hard to invent truly novel features for each annual release of macOS, but also because this relentless quest for novelty distracts from equally important activities such as fixing bugs in the current version and optimizing system performance. ↩︎
Actually, the new internal‑disk icon has nothing to do with an actual internal SSD image, but we won’t be too pedantic about it. ↩︎

Surviving Don Rodrigo

Sun, 24 Aug 2025 06:00:00 +0000

– Source: Macworld.

The contrast between the two characters is striking. Tim Cook was born into a working-class family of the Deep South and rose to lead the world’s most important technology company through his own hard work and talent. He is openly gay and proud of it, as well as a defender of the rights of minorities.

Donald Trump is a spoiled rich kid who managed to fail in all his business ventures. He is a convicted rapist and a close friend of pedophiles. He likes to act like a boss, but he is actually just a cowardly chick.

Seeing Tim Cook forced to bow down before this petty Don Rodrigo is truly heartbreaking.¹

Still, Intel fared much worse, being forced to hand 10% of its shares to these new henchmen in suits and ties.

The only crumb of solace is that, at the end of the story, the plague will strike, and Don Rodrigo and his henchmen will get what they deserve.

Don Rodrigo is the main antagonist of Alessandro Manzoni’s novel I Promessi Sposi (The Betrothed). He is a petty lord who uses his social status and influence to prevent the marriage of the protagonists, Renzo and Lucia, out of pride and a desire to prove his power. Though a powerful figure in the novel’s setting of 17th-century Italy, Don Rodrigo is depicted as a morally weak and mediocre character, embodying the corruption and abuse of power prevalent at the time. For English readers, the figure that most closely mirrors Don Rodrigo is Judge Pyncheon in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables, a corrupt authority figure, feared in his community yet ultimately pathetic and doomed. ↩︎

MDR Dasher vs. Flow 2: fashion or common sense?

Thu, 14 Aug 2025 06:00:00 +0000

It all started with Severance, the cult TV series that almost everyone liked.

To promote the final episode of the second season, Apple launched a webpage showcasing the Lumon Terminal Pro, the computer used by Lumon Industries employees – a replica of a vintage Data General terminal (more images available here and here). This sparked a race among fans to own a keyboard inspired by that terminal.

– Source: Apple.

– Source: Data General Dasher 6053 Terminal on Tech Tangents.

Someone built it themselves. Someone else started a company promising to produce the keyboard, and launched a Kickstarter campaign which will go live on 19 August. The first (lucky?) backers will be able to get the so-called MDR Dasher Keyboard at the discounted price of $599, which will rise to $699 for those who pre-order it after the Kickstarter launch. Those who buy it later through official channels will have to shell out $899, virtually the price of an iPhone 16!

I could be among those lucky ones, but I’ll gladly pass. I already use a keyboard that satisfies me 100%; actually I have two identical ones for my Macs at home and at the office. And I don’t even like the MDR Dasher: it’s too big, too tall, and too uncomfortable for my taste.

Above all, I don’t buy a product just because it’s trendy and looks like something from a TV series. And I definitely wouldn’t buy anything from an unknown company with a fake address, that was created just to capitalise on the current trend.

Instead, a keyboard that I would buy without hesitation is the Flow 2, a mechanical keyboard that has raised almost a million dollars on Kickstarter, one hundred times the initial request. This is not only because it is much more affordable – and very convenient overall for a mechanical keyboard – but because behind it is a reputable company that has been producing quality mechanical keyboards for years.

The Flow 2, in particular, is crafted from a single block of aluminium and features a refined, minimalist design, reminiscent of the Macs we all know and love. Even though it is a mechanical keyboard, you can choose a silent version, which is perfect for those who use the computer at night, or who simply don’t want to disturb family members or colleagues with the excruciating typewriter-like clicking that can be produced by a standard mechanical keyboard.

As the title suggests, on the one hand there’s fashion, hype and shameless marketing; on the other, common sense and a somewhat boring tranquillity. The choice is yours.

Last but not least, Happy Ferragosto to everyone! Unplug, switch off your devices, and enjoy a day of relaxation and good company.

macOS Tahoe: Developer Beta 3

Tue, 22 Jul 2025 06:00:00 +0000

A few days ago, right on schedule, Apple released to developers the third update of the macOS 26 Developer Beta, better known as Tahoe.

Once the update is complete, it doesn’t take long to realize that Apple is (slowly) modifying something in the Liquid Glass graphical interface of the latest version of its operating system.¹

Perhaps this is also to address the many criticisms it has received over the last month from big names like Riccardo Mori – whatever you think, his first article on MacOS Tahoe and Liquid Glass is a must-read (but his first and second follow-ups are also worth reading) – as well as from John Gruber, Craig Hockenberry, Francisco Tolmasky, Louie Mantia, Marco Arment and many others, as can be read in one of Michael Tsai’s masterful collections.² As well as, in my own humble and far less masterful writings (here and here).

It’s a beta

Let’s clear up a misunderstanding: constructively criticizing the beta version of an operating system, such as macOS, is a good and right thing to do.

When Apple releases a beta, they’re not doing us a favor by letting us preview an unreleased product. Rather, we’re doing Apple a favor by analyzing and dissecting their software in ways that might never have occurred to their official developers and testers.

To argue, as many do, that “you have to be patient, it’s just a beta” or that “betas always have bugs,” is utter nonsense, because it is precisely at this stage, when the product is tested in the field, that flaws emerge which official developers, accustomed to working on it every day for months, no longer notice.³

After all, if Apple has extended access to its Developer Betas to a much wider audience in recent years, it means that what is done in this phase is indeed useful to them!

The Wallpaper

The first thing you notice when you access your Mac after the update is the new default wallpaper, which now shows the rocky shore of Lake Tahoe, surrounded by a long chain of snow-capped mountains (in Nevada?).

I don’t particularly like these natural wallpapers; there are too many details that distract and prevent a clear view of what’s on the Desktop. However, compared to the anonymous wallpaper we had before (and which is still among the available wallpapers), this one is much better, so it’s all right. And the subtle ripple effect of the waves, which unfortunately isn’t visible in the screenshot, is truly delightful!

However, changing the active default wallpaper on the fly seems to hint some issues in the development direction of Tahoe/Liquid Glass, as will become even more apparent in the next section.

This, to be fair, is a change introduced in the previous beta, which I didn’t get a chance to write about here, yet. Apple has added an option to restore the menu bar background (System Settings > Menu Bar > Show menu bar background), just like in Sequoia and previous versions of macOS.

In my opinion, this is an excellent decision because, after using macOS Tahoe for a few weeks, I realized that having a transparent menu bar available is useless. For at least two reasons.

The first is that with a transparent bar, menu items and icons tend to blend into the background image, becoming much less legible. This effect is particularly severe when the wallpaper is full of details and gradients, as in the example below.

The difference in clarity when the menu bar has a background is evident.

The second reason is that, even if the menu bar is transparent, it cannot (rightly) be occupied by application windows, so you don’t gain useful space for applications.

What is the real purpose of a transparent menu bar if it is less legible and doesn’t provide more useful space for applications? It is just to achieve a (questionable) more homogeneous visual effect without any functional advantage?

Most people use their computers to work. They don’t spend all day admiring the desktop. Why should they struggle to read the menu items or the battery level, the Wi-Fi strength, and all the other icons that are there for a specific purpose, just because some dime-a-dozen designer decided that the menu bar should blend in with the desktop?

It is striking, though, that after no less than two Developer Beta releases, this setting has still not been translated into Italian and, I imagine, other languages. It is a small detail, but that gives the impression of a half-baked, thrown-together thing, something that the team working on this part of Tahoe is still not quite clear on.

This reinforces doubts about how Tahoe’s development is progressing, as expressed very well by Craig Grannelli.

[this change] also makes me question Apple�s confidence in its design work. When Apple starts hedging its bets, it signals that it knows something is wrong, but lacks the conviction to course-correct. Or perhaps such settings are a means to temporarily shut people up, while default choices reveal the true intent and direction of travel.

System Settings

In my first article on Tahoe, I reported that the new Appearance item in System Settings behaved strangely: setting the Auto mode in the section related to Dark, Clear, and Tinted icon (and widget) styles apparently had no effect.

In the article, I supposed that this mode would allow the operating system to automatically adapt the display details of the chosen icon and widget style to the active Light or Dark mode. However, I also noted that the implementation seemed rather confusing.

Actually, it wasn’t a poorly implemented feature; it was a true bug, as reported in the Release Notes for this beta.

Finder
Resolved Issues

Fixed: Finder does not display Dark Mode app icons or tinted folder colors when the Folder Color setting in System Settings > Appearance is set to Automatic. (152193702)

Unfortunately, even though Apple claims to have fixed the problem, I don’t see any improvement. However, I clearly see that certain combinations of settings still result in such low icon contrast that it becomes difficult to tell them apart.

The Finder

As soon as I opened the Finder, I had the impression that Apple had reduced the shadow intensity of the separate groups of icons that now make up the Toolbar.

Unfortunately, this is not the case; the shadow intensity, as well as the icon transparency, is identical to before, producing the same color mess described in the previous article whenever the more colorful icons in the main Finder window end up beneath those in the Toolbar.

To avoid this, it would be enough for the Finder’s Toolbar to retain the white background present since Big Sur (that replaced the previous metallic one). This way, the icons shown in the main Finder window would be visible only in that window, without spilling over into the area reserved for the Toolbar.⁴

The more I use Tahoe’s new-Finder, the more I wonder what’s the point of this confusion, where the Toolbar – which isn’t there for beauty but to manage files and navigate the file system – has to blend and overlap with the files themselves, in an indistinct mix that isn’t even aesthetically pleasing?

Even Apple’s developers seem to have doubts about their choices, as switching from Icon to List view shows the usual clear separation between the main window and the Toolbar (apart from the three-dimensional effect added to the latter by Liquid Glass).

If we switch to Column view, we find a third, intermediate mode between the previous two. In this mode, the Toolbar has a white background, but where the icons of applications and files are blurred well before they reach the Toolbar, as happens in the normal Icon view.

This confusion in the display mode of the Toolbar is not only present in the Finder but also in applications like Notes where, depending on the chosen display mode, you can find yourself with a transparent Toolbar that blurs everything that ends up underneath it,

or with a normal Toolbar with a white background, as we are used to seeing since Big Sur.

Something similar also happens with Font Book, albeit with slightly different modes, while it doesn’t happen with Freeform or Preview, which always have a transparent Toolbar. Reminders is another special case, but I’ll leave you the pleasure to figure out why.

In short, there seems to be a great deal of confusion in Cupertino, and even the developers cannot decide what to do with the new Liquid Glass-style Toolbar.

Application Icons

I want to give the new application icons in the Finder their own section because, in this case, it’s no longer a simple matter of taste, but of the relationship between Apple and developers. After all, developers are fundamental to the success of a platform.

But first, let’s briefly recap the issue.

In macOS Tahoe, Apple has introduced a new icon format for applications, borrowed from iOS. The new icons have the shape of a squircle, a geometric shape intermediate between a circle and a square, and can be created with the new Icon Composer. This new format allows, among other things, to dynamically adapt the icons to the chosen style, or rather Appearance (see the System Settings section).

So far, so good.

The problem arises from the fact that there is no choice: the icons of all applications installed on the Mac can no longer have a customized shape, such as that of BBEdit which I am using to write this post, but must obligatorily adopt the squircle shape.

All application icons that have not yet adapted to the new style imposed by Liquid Glass are automatically enclosed in a squircle with an horrible dark gray background behind them, which seems to be placed there specifically to flag those bad products that have not yet conformed to Apple’s new guidelines.⁵

But redesigning icons is no piece of cake. For example, Bare Bones Software, which is certainly not an indie software house, has not complied yet. Its flagship product, BBEdit, was given a major update just a few days ago, but retained its traditional icon.

Independent developers are even less enthusiastic about having to redo all their application icons following the new format imposed by Apple.

One of them is Howard Oakley, who ironically calls macOS Tahoe the iconoclast, and equates the squircle with the gray background to a sin bin, as the area of the field where a player who has committed a foul is temporarily confined.⁶ Someone else goes even harder and calls the squircle a true prison.

Even those who decide to comply have problems because, as Howard Oakley tells us, updated icons for Tahoe may not work correctly in previous versions of macOS.

Half of the applications installed on the Mac that I updated to macOS Tahoe have grey icons. In the month and a half between the release of the first Developer Beta and today, I believe none of them have adopted the new icon format. This includes Google Chrome, which certainly has the resources to adapt quickly. Some Apple applications, such as GarageBand and Xcode, don’t even follow their own guidelines. The latter is particularly significant given that Xcode is the main tool for developing Mac applications.

My impression is that Tahoe’s graphical interface is not carved in stone -� oops, in glass – and that developers prefer to wait for the final version before conforming to Apple’s dictates.

After all, between Developer Beta 1 and Beta 2, Apple has already changed the Finder icon due to popular outcry, and has added the option to restore the menu bar background. So it’s clear that Apple is not insensitive to the criticisms expressed by those who are previewing Tahoe.⁷

I almost forgot: you can even restore the usual oddly-shaped icons in Tahoe. However, it’s a manual and rather tedious process, that must be repeated for each affected application and for each Mac. I’ll pass.

Performance

The third Developer Beta of macOS Tahoe seems much slower than the two previous versions. For example, Firefox takes forever to launch and restore previous tabs, but almost all applications seem more sluggish, especially at startup, than is reasonable to expect on Apple Silicon. Some ‘System Settings’ panels appear completely empty at first and take several seconds to display the available options.

As annoying as it is, this is normal behavior in a beta, which by its nature is filled with debug code and immature or poorly tested functions that may generate memory leaks, erroneous cache usage, and the like. I only mention it here because the first two Developer Betas appeared much more responsive than this one.

In any case, restarting the system solves the problem, at least temporarily, while we await the release of the final version.

Conclusions

In a few days, perhaps even tomorrow, Apple will make the Tahoe beta available to everyone, so that it can be tested by a much wider and more diverse audience.

As I said earlier, the fact that the Finder icon was changed mid-development demonstrates that Apple is listening to criticism about the new macOS interface. So there is hope that other issues will be resolved in the two months remaining until the official release of the new macOS version.

If someone thinks that critical posts like those cited above, and maybe even the little notes you’ve just read, are written solely for the purpose of getting easy clicks… well, never mind, the authors will come to terms with it.

If someone thinks that critical posts like the ones mentioned above, or maybe even the humble piece you’ve just read, are written purely to get easy clicks, well, never mind… the authors will come to terms with it.

Apple is doing the same with the corresponding version of iPadOS (which I’m testing on my iPad Pro) and iOS (which I’m leaving alone for now). ↩︎
Riccardo Mori describes himself as a translator and writer, but in reality he also has extensive expertise in the field of design and typography. John Gruber has been writing one of the most important blogs dedicated to the Apple universe for more years than I can remember and is the inventor of Markdown. Craig Hockenberry is a developer who has produced, among other things, Tot, which I adore, and is one of the souls of Iconfactory. Francisco Tolmasky was a member of the original iPhone team, where he helped develop Safari for iOS, and is the creator of Objective-J, a superset of JavaScript, and Cappuccino, an “open source framework that simplifies the creation of desktop-class applications running in a web browser”. Louie Mantia is an artist and graphic designer specializing in icon design. Marco Arment is an iOS and web application developer, as well as a “writer, podcast producer, geek, and coffee lover.” ↩︎
More or less the same thing happens when writing: if you have a text read by a third person, they will much more easily notice errors that the author, who now knows the text by heart, no longer pays attention to. ↩︎
As has always been the case, not just in macOS (or Mac OS X, or whatever you prefer to call it), from Sequoia all the way back to Cheetah, but also in the versions of Mac OS released throughout the ’80s and ’90s. ↩︎
To make a sporting comparison, Apple seems more or less like that soccer referee who pulls out a yellow card while warning the striker that “one more silly mistake and I’ll send you off.” ↩︎
I swear that when I wrote the soccer comparison in the previous note, I had not yet read this comment by Howard Oakley. ↩︎
I can’t help but think that if Steve Jobs had seen what some of his Finder icons have become, he would have kicked those responsible right out the window. ↩︎

macOS Tahoe: where is my Terminal?

Tue, 08 Jul 2025 06:00:00 +0000

– Image generated by Google Gemini.

Take macOS Tahoe, updated to version 26.0 Developer Beta 2, and open the Terminal. Actually, don’t just open one Terminal; open two, three, four different Terminals, each in its own tab. More or less like this:

Now tell me: which is the active Terminal?

In order to answer you need to look closely. Only then you will notice that the title bar of the active Terminal has a slightly darker background and that the title itself is in bold.

Do the same with Sequoia, or any other previous version of macOS, and the Terminal in use will be apparent at first glance.

Actually, there is also a way to tell which Terminal is active in Tahoe, but it is counterintuitive and requires the use of the mouse. If you hover the mouse over the active tab, nothing changes visually,

while, when you move the mouse over an inactive tab, its background gets darker.

To many, it may seem like a minor detail, but the Terminal is an essential tool for interacting with the operating system at a low level. Those who use it can’t afford to waste time figuring out which panel is the right one, nor can they risk running a dangerous command in the wrong Terminal.

To give a practical example: for managing this blog, I use three different Terminal panels, each of which is dedicated to a specific task. In one panel, I work via ssh on a test site, which I use to check that everything works properly before uploading the blog to the live server. Since this is only a test environment, I’m accustomed to wiping everything out with the command rm -r *. I can do that without worry because I can tell at a glance that I’m in the right Terminal, without even reading. However, with Tahoe, I’ll have to change my habits because running that same command in the wrong Terminal could have catastrophic consequences.

Among all the inconsistencies in macOS Tahoe, this is perhaps the most baffling. And potentially the most dangerous.

At this point, one can’t help but wonder: do Apple’s developers actually use the products they create?

macOS Tahoe: see you in September

Sat, 28 Jun 2025 06:00:00 +0000

It’s becoming a habit. Earlier this year, instead of waiting, like I usually do, for the next version of macOS to be ready (or nearly ready) before installing the current one, I installed Sequoia on all my Macs. A few days ago, I decided to take the plunge and install the very first developer beta of Tahoe on a Mac that I don’t use much, mainly to try out the new Liquid Glass interface on macOS.¹

Since this is my first time trying a macOS beta, I cannot say whether previous versions were more or less mature than Tahoe at this stage of development, which admittedly is still far from the official release.

Therefore, I will share my first impressions of the new interface here, focusing in particular on the Finder, which is one of the most frequently used applications, and on System Settings, which is essential when getting familiar with a new operating system. After the official release in September, there will be time for a more in-depth evaluation.

Update

The update from Sequoia 15.5 to Tahoe 26 Beta weighs just over 7 GB, which seems in line with previous updates, and perhaps even slightly below average.

The installation of the new operating system is fast. I dont’t know exactly how long it took, but I was surprised when I found out that it was already finished.

After the update, the first thing you see is this screen, which gives a preview of Liquid Glass, with the buttons raised above the rest of the window. Here, there is no visible transparency effect yet, but there will be time for that, too.

Desktop and widgets

Once you click Continue, the Tahoe Welcome Screen appears, which, poor boy! looks like toothpaste writing overlaid on my Mac’s default background. Sadly, the days of the magnificent Welcome Videos of the early macOS versions with the big cat names are long gone.

From here, you go straight to the Mac Desktop, which now displays a few widgets on the left-hand side of the screen (some of the widgets do not show any information just because the screenshots were taken late at night, with an inactive internet connection).

I’ve never really liked widgets. On Tiger and later versions, I used a few, but only because they were neatly tucked away on a separate screen, the now forgotten Dashboard. Having them on the Desktop, which I use all day, just annoys me. I already know that, as soon as I finish this post, I’ll remove them without hesitation.

But there’s time for that. For now, I’m just going to change the wallpaper to Tahoe’s default.²

I’m not thrilled with the new wallpaper: there are too many details and gradients for my taste, and the contrast with light icons, such as the disk icon, is too low. But no one is forcing me to use this exact wallpaper, so this is a non-issue.

Finder

A true problem, however, are the application icons with the dark gray background, which literally make me jump out of my seat when I first opened the Finder.³

The original icons had a transparent background, which can be noticed simply by changing the background of the Applications folder in Sequoia or earlier macOS versions. For reasons beyond understanding, in Tahoe this invisible background is replaced by a dark gray tone, that is an understatement to define as ugly.

Clearly, Apple applications do not have this issue. However, as shown in the previous image, some of the most popular ones are affected by it, with Google Chrome being one of the main examples.

However, when I scroll down towards the less popular apps, I find lots of ugly icons bordered in gray! In some cases, the icons have even been shrunk, presumably due to the new dynamic scaling rules of Liquid Glass, making the gray area around them even larger. Who on earth came up with something like this?

This is not the only questionable aspect of the new Finder. Here, the familiar Toolbar has been replaced by separate groups of translucent icons that seem to float above the main window.

The change feels somewhat rushed, especially since they forgot to raise also the folder name. That said, the new toolbar can be considered acceptable, even if inconsistent, when there is a light background behind the icons (as shown in some of the images above).

But when the translucent icons of the Toolbar overlap the most colorful icons of the main Finder window (as shown in the image below), the result is a chaotic, unpleasant mix of colors, that makes it hard to tell one Toolbar icon from another.

Maybe using a stronger blur effect or reducing the transparency might help to avoid the issue. However, wouldn’t it be better to just stick with the old white toolbar, with the new floating icons on top?

And yes, I understand that everything must speak the liquid concept now, but was it really necessary to turn the cursor in the Finder’s status bar (the one in the bottom right corner that lets you resize the icons) into such a huge yet barely visible capsule?

On the other hand, the new Trashcan isn’t bad at all; it looks more modern than the classic cylindrical one we have always had. I do wonder how it would stand upright, but it is clear that skeuomorphism has been dead for a while now.

Still on the topic of the Finder: could someone explain why the Settings window in the Finder still has the slightly rounded corners from Sequoia, and why its icons look thinner than those in the sidebar of the main window?

The new Apps

The new Apps application, on the other hand, isn’t bad at all: it groups installed apps in a logical way, more or less as iOS already does. It definitely looks better than Launchpad, which I tried to use but quickly gave up on,⁴ though I don’t like the fact that it takes two clicks to access the apps in a given group.

Mission Control hasn’t changed, and I’m totally fine with that. I use it a lot, and I wouldn’t like to break my habits. The same goes for Chess, which I never play because I always lose, but that has been a part of macOS since… forever (and was present in its forefather, NeXTSTEP, too).

The other default applications don’t seem to have changed much either, but I’ll save a more detailed analysis for later.

System Settings

Lastly, a look at System Settings. I won’t to comment on how confusing it has become. Up to Monterey, a quick glance was enough to find what you needed. But ever since macOS started mimicking iOS, you basically have to rely on the search function every time you need to find some setting.⁵

What I will comment on is the new feature that globally changes the color of macOS Tahoe icons and widgets. Here you can see the Default icon (and widget) style which, aside from the grayish border I mentioned earlier, is what we have always been used to seeing.

This image shows what happens when the Dark style is enabled. While all the Apple icons visible in the Dock do change, the application icons shown in the Finder do not —- probably because they need to be updated to support this new style. However, the Light theme doesn’t really do this new style justice,

whereas with the Dark theme, it’s a whole different story.

However, if I enable the Dark style and select the Auto mode, the entire interface reverts to looking exactly like the Default style. You can see it in the two images below: the first shows the Mac screen with the Dark style and Auto mode enabled, while the second shows the Default style.

I assume that the Auto mode is supposed to allow the operating system to automatically select the styling that best fits the current Light or Dark mode. While this makes sense, it might need a different implementation; as it stands, it just ends up being confusing.

The other two styles, Clear and Tinted, are nice enough, but personally I don’t like the idea of having all the icons in the same colour. I’m sure plenty of people will appreciate these new uniform styles, but I doubt I’ll ever use them myself.

Even with these styles, the Auto mode automatically adjusts the appearance to match the active theme. Here too, I think that both the placement and the labeling of the automatic mode needs some improvement.

Not bad at all, the option to change the accent color of the user interface.

I’m not really into these things, but a lot of people like them, and since they don’t overhaul the interface, why not?

The final gem is the huge switch that toggles Bluetooth (as well as Wi-Fi and VPN). True, even in Sequoia these switches were larger than the others, but don’t you think Apple has gone a bit too far this time?

Conclusions (for now)

This ends up my quick overview of macOS Tahoe and its Liquid Glass interface. If I gave the impression that I’m not thrilled about it, well, that’s exactly how I feel.

I really appreciate that Apple had the courage to change, aiming to develop a consistent interface across all its devices. Liquid Glass definitely has a lot of potential, but it’s still quite immature on macOS, perhaps even more so than on the iPad. It reminds me of the metallic transition of Leopard, which needed several subsequent macOS releases to refine.

In any case, Liquid Glass is the future, and we’ll have to live with it for quite a few years. So it’s best to start appreciating its positive aspects now, and be patient with the negatives.

In the meantime, Apple’s developers have fixed the flipped Finder icon, which caused quite a stir. Hopefully, before the official September release, they’ll do the same for the many other oddities and inconsistencies.

On the iPad, Liquid Glass is very interesting, though still quite immature. ↩︎
Unless they’re really ugly, like some Linux wallpapers, I always stick with the default backgrounds. I’m not a fan of extreme system customization, and using the default wallpaper helps me to instantly recognize which OS version I’m running. Besides, macOS default wallpapers are almost always really beautiful. ↩︎
Actually, these grayish icons were already showing up in the Dock. But due to the late hour or the low contrast, I hadn’t really paid attention to them. ↩︎
For example, because it used to lose the carefully set layout and didn’t allow syncing it across multiple Macs. ↩︎
Some might suggest that having a similar layout between macOS and iOS is a good thing. Indeed it is, but unfortunately iOS settings have always been one of the most confusing things I’ve ever seen. Therefore, it would have made more sense to adapt the macOS settings model to iOS, instead. ↩︎

WWDC 25

Thu, 12 Jun 2025 06:00:00 +0000

When was the latest truly memorable WWDC? I’d say in 2020, a year that was already memorable in itself, when Apple unveiled the new Macs with Apple Silicon processors, capable of outperforming their equivalent Intel-based models.

I don’t know if what was presented at this year’s WWDC will be just as memorable, but there’s no doubt that Apple has came up with some interesting innovations.

First and foremost, there is an update to iPadOS that finally introduces (why did it take so long?) overlapping windows and a more decent file system management, virtually retiring Stage Manager.

I never liked Stage Manager. I’ve always found it annoying and too limited, with its four-and-no-more-than-four side mini-windows that come and go, with no way to pin one in place once and for all. I think few people will miss it.

The new overlapping windows in iPadOS 26 may have an “old-school” vibe, but they’ve been around for 40 years and are definitely more intuitive and easier to manage. If I have to adapt to something new, Apple should to offer me something better, not worse.

Getting Preview and Calculator on the iPad is no small bonus. As a more-than-satisfied Preview user, I’m really curious to try it on the iPad.

The other major new feature is the new “Liquid Glass” user interface, which will be rolled out across all Apple platforms, from Macs to iPhones and even Vision Pros. Beyond its look, glassy today, who knows tomorrow, what really matters is that from now on, all Apple platforms will speak the same visual language, with clear benefits in terms of ease of use and, I believe, also app development.

That Liquid Glass is the modern version of Aqua seems obvious at first glance. In the early 2000s, I switched back to the Mac from Linux not only because it had UNIX under the hood, but also because I absolutely loved Aqua.

The later shift to a metallic theme and to today’s muted gray tones, elegant as they may be, never really excited me, so I’m very curious to see Aqua 2.0 in action.

As for the rest of the keynote, I’ll admit that I don’t remember much. The fact that the Apple Watch now tries to convince me that I run better than Jacobs matters to me about as much as nothing. The same goes for the time that stretches or shrinks depending on the iPhone wallpaper. Or the ever-present Memojis. But if they get so much stage time, it must mean people like them, so maybe I’m the one who is out of sync with the times.

Apple improving the built-in apps in its operating systems should be standard practice. But this obsession with hiding features is getting a bit pathological (thinking of you, Camera).

Call Screening, on the other hand, could be a real game changer, assuming it actually works in my country.

And the fact that Federighi didn’t burst out laughing while claiming that over the past year Apple Intelligence has been relevant says a lot about how many times that scene was rehearsed.

Almost forgot: the new version numbering for the operating systems. Having a unified scheme for all platforms might be a good thing, but was it really necessary to use the year (and get it wrong, too)? Microsoft already tried that with Windows 95, Windows 98, and Windows 2000. Was it really impossible to come up with something more original?

Anyway, this unification will force Apple to release a new version of half a dozen different operating systems every year, even when they will not have a single noteworthy new feature. Personally, I think an annual release cycle is excessive and unsustainable in the long run. But apparently, Apple’s marketing always needs something new, whether it’s useful or even works is another story.

A last, fairly sad note. How could Tim Cook and his team not find a minute during their hour-and-a-half-long keynote to remember Bill Atkinson? And at a developer conference, no less!

Apple wouldn’t be what it is today without his contributions. RIP.

Apple, we fixed some issues: from Sonoma to Sequoia

Tue, 04 Feb 2025 06:00:00 +0000

– Image generated by Microsoft Designer AI.

In the past few months, I have written four posts about macOS Sonoma bugs (a complete list is at the end of this post) because I found it unbelievable that this macOS version was released with such glaring issues in the Finder and in disk management.

In the latest Sonoma versions, some reported bugs – such as the erratic emptying of the Trash, the default file name when virtually printing a web page to PDF, or the failure to display a new file or folder in Snap to Grid mode — have been fixed, but the most annoying ones remained untouched.

A couple of days ago, after testing macOS Sequoia on a spare machine, I decided to upgrade my home Mac Mini M1 to Sequoia 15.3. To my great satisfaction, I can say that all, or almost all, of the major bugs reported in my previous posts have disappeared.¹

Bug #1: If we have a folder full of files and drag icons below the bottom of the window while holding down the CMD (⌘) key, the bottom of the window now correctly expands to show the lower icons without making them look like they have disappeared. The only exception is when the folder does not have an active scrollbar because it contains too few files. In this case, the icons still disappear, just like in Sonoma, but now you can simply click the < icon in the upper left corner of the toolbar and return to the original folder to restore full file visibility.

Bug #2: If we have two overlapping Finder windows in a Space and use the CTRL(⌃)-1, CTRL–2 (and so on) shortcuts to move the top window from one Space to another, upon returning to the original Space the traveling window now appears on top of the one that stayed put, as it should. The same applies when more than two overlapping windows are present.

Bug #3: The flickering issue that was highly visible in Sonoma when dragging a Finder window from one Space to another has now disappeared. Seeing such a thing was simply outrageous, not only because it was happening on machines powered by the powerful Apple Silicon processors, but also because before Sonoma such flickering had never been seen on much, much less powerful machines, like the Intel-based MacBook Air.

Bug #4: Sequoia has also fixed the bug related to the popup window that disappeared faster than a Formula 1 car when connecting a USB stick to a laptop, but I had already written about that.

Bug #5: Finder has finally returned to normal when displaying folders on an external USB drive containing hundreds of files. The sluggishness (to put it mildly) experienced in Sonoma was truly frustrating, and I was fed up with having to wait dozens of seconds every time I accessed a somewhat full external folder.

Bug #6: But the real highlight of Sequoia, the one that earns it a solid B at the end of the first term, is that, for the first time in years, the macOS update did not mess up the arrangement of icons in the Applications folder. There will be very few people, like me, who prefer to keep installed applications organized visually rather than alphabetically. But I still want to represent these few users and sincerely thank Apple developers for a fix we had been waiting for through countless macOS versions.²

What else can I say? I am really pleased that Apple has managed to fix so many embarrassing Sonoma bugs with Sequoia. Especially because the ones I reported were not related to exotic features of the operating system or of the file system, but rather easily visible issues for anyone using the graphical user interface of macOS.

I doubt that someone in Cupertino is avidly reading Melabit. But this also means that the issues reported in my previous posts were real and evident to other users and Apple developers alike, not just the imaginary concerns of an overly meticulous user.

The core problem remains: it makes no sense to continue with this policy of annual macOS (and iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, etc.) releases, each packed with shiny, but mostly useless new features that are inevitably under-tested and may introduce new bugs into the core of the system, without allowing enough time to fix existing bugs.

An annual release cycle may be great for marketing, but is it really what users really need?

For those interested in my saga about macOS Sonoma’s bugs (and more), here are links to previous installments:

So much so that soon afterwards, I also updated the Mac Studio I use for work. ↩︎
It seems clear to me that there was no technical reason behind this issue (such as the strict separation between the default macOS applications and those installed by the user), but simply a lack of attention to a detail that may be minor, yet is quite annoying for those who rely on it. ↩︎

Frozen Mac? How to recover it using DFU mode

Tue, 19 Nov 2024 06:00:00 +0000

– Source: Apple Support.

Experimenting can sometimes lead to issues. That’s exactly what happened to me after a failed macOS installation, which resulted in a big question mark with a prompt to visit the Mac restore page.

For some years now, when a Mac is unable to boot macOS and cannot even run macOS Recovery to repair or reinstall the OS, the only way to bring it back to life is to enable DFU Mode (Device Firmware Upgrade). This mode is stored in ROM and cannot be erased under any circumstances.¹

DFU Mode has been used for years (forever?) to revive an iPhone or iPad (as well as iPod, Apple TV, and Apple Watch). To use this mode, you connect the device to a Mac, press a specific key combination, and proceed with the restore directly from the computer.

With Intel Macs, recovery used to be different. By pressing specific key combinations, such as CMD (⌘) and R, ALT (⌥), CMD (⌘) and R, or SHIFT (⇧), ALT (⌥), CMD (⌘) and R, you could boot into macOS Recovery from Apple servers to download and reinstall macOS.

In 2018, with the introduction of the T2 Security Chip, internet-based recovery was phased out, and DFU Mode became the only way to restore an unbootable Mac. The downside? You need a second working Mac, which fortunately can be either Apple Silicon or Intel.

But that’s not all. Besides a second Mac, you’ll need three other items and a bit of coordination.

First, you need a USB-C cable to connect the sick Mac to the functioning one, which acts as the doctor. In theory, third-party cables don’t work, but one from my collection activates DFU Mode without issues. If you want to play it safe, I recommend Apple’s 1-meter cable, which is reasonably priced and long enough. Alternatively, there’s the 2-meter cable, though it’s more expensive. Either way, buying a cable costs much less than a trip to the nearest Apple Store.

If the doctor Mac lacks a USB-C port, you can use a USB-A port with an adapter, such as this one or this one, which I’ve personally tested.

The cable connects to the DFU port of the Mac being restored (any USB port works for the doctor Mac). Which port is the DFU port? It varies, and you can find the details here. On the MacBook I restored, it was the port closest to the screen. Wouldn’t it be easier to just mark the correct port?

Lastly, download Apple Configurator 2 from the App Store onto the doctor Mac. Though recent macOS versions allow using Finder, I find Apple Configurator more convenient.

Once everything is ready, open Apple Configurator 2 on the doctor Mac and keep it in the foreground.

If restoring a desktop Mac, unplug the power cable, press the power button while reconnecting it, and wait 10 seconds. A large DFU square will appear on Apple Configurator, signaling success.

For a MacBook, patience is key, as activating DFU Mode may take several tries. Following Apple’s official instructions, which suggest holding four keys for around 10 seconds, didn’t work for me. Pressing for longer didn’t help either.

Fortunately, I found this video by Mr. Macintosh, followed his steps, and finally succeeded in enabling DFU Mode.²

Once DFU Mode is enabled, you have two options. The first is to try reviving the Mac by restoring macOS Recovery without erasing the system disk. Right-click on the DFU square in Apple Configurator, select Advanced, then Revive, and wait while the Mac downloads the macOS Recovery image and transfers it to the sick Mac. If successful, your Mac will be fully operational with all files and applications intact.

If Revive fails, you’ll need to perform a more drastic Restore, which will reset the Mac to factory settings and install the latest macOS version.

To Restore, right-click on the DFU square and select Restore. Apple Configurator will confirm if you’re sure about resetting the Mac to factory settings. The process, which can take an hour or more depending on your network speed, will download and reinstall macOS.

When the reinstallation of macOS is complete, your Mac will be fully functional but all files and applications will be lost. Not a big deal if you can restore everything from Time Machine (because you always use Time Machine, right?).

Unless there’s hardware failure, in which case service is required. ↩︎
There’s also a newer video with two additional methods to enable DFU Mode on a MacBook, though the original method should usually suffice. ↩︎

Apple, we have a problem: a new macOS Sonoma bug

Thu, 14 Nov 2024 06:00:00 +0000

– Image generated by Microsoft Designer AI.

Sonoma’s bugs never fail to surprise, and here I describe a fresh one, which luckily has been fixed in Sequoia.

Take a new MacBook Air or Pro, where you’ve just installed Sonoma, or a MacBook where you erased the startup disk before installing Sonoma (what happens when simply updating from a previous version might be different).

Try inserting a USB stick or external USB drive (or even an SD card, when available). What you’ll see is this:

That is, you’ll see practically nothing, even in slow motion.

In theory, macOS should display a pop-up window asking the user whether they want to allow the connection of the USB accessory (as Apple calls it) to the Mac. The problem is, as shown in the video, the pop-up disappears faster than a Formula 1 car.

I must say that the first few times this happened, I didn’t even see it. Only after several unsuccessful and increasingly frustrating attempts, a very quick shadow on the screen made me suspect an overly zealous disappearing window.

This bug occurs with macOS Sonoma 14.6; I have no idea if previous versions are affected. To work around the issue, you need to go to System Settings under Privacy & Security and change the Allow accessory connections option from Ask Every Time, or Ask for New Accessories, to Always.

Once the USB drive is connected, for added security, you can return to selecting the Ask for New Accessories option—just remember to repeat the procedure every time you insert a new USB stick (or external drive).

At first glance, it seems strange that the consent request for connecting new accessories only appears on MacBooks and not on desktop Macs.

But thinking about it, it makes sense. I don’t believe macOS developers want to prevent us from connecting our own USB drives or those of people we know. Instead, I think they want to prevent someone from surreptitiously inserting a malicious USB stick (also known as a Rubber Ducky), which can now even be made at home with a low-cost Raspberry Pi Pico.

These sticks are programmable and can cause serious damage to a computer, from automatically transferring sensitive files onto the stick,¹ to erasing—if the programmer has the admin account password—the entire system disk.

It goes without saying that such an attack is more likely to happen on a MacBook, often left unattended, rather than on a desktop computer, which remains in more controlled environments like home or the office.

Including this type of security check in the operating system is therefore a great idea; what’s terrible is how it’s implemented in macOS Sonoma.

The good news is that in macOS Sequoia, the bug has been fixed, and the pop-up remains clearly visible on the screen until the user makes a choice.

For those interested in my saga on macOS Sonoma bugs (and more), here are links to previous posts:

It’s not just stealth aircraft designers at risk of this happening, as it could just as easily involve documents from a divorce case or a financial dispute. ↩︎

Right to repair: Apple products

Mon, 11 Nov 2024 18:00:00 +0000

I’m not the kind of guy that longs for the “good old days” which, in truth, weren’t that great anyway. Life expectancy was twenty years shorter than it is today, infant mortality was high, and those who survived aged faster – people in their fifties already looked elderly. Food may have been more natural, but it was scarce, forget year-round meat and fish. In some parts of Italy, winter diet consisted mostly of polenta and little else. Homes were cold in winter, and cars turned into ovens in summer. And the list could go on.

But there’s one thing I do miss about the past: the ability to tinker with computers, replacing key components like the hard drive or RAM, and for desktops, even the graphics card or processor.

To be clear, today’s computers are powerhouses compared to those of 10–15 years ago, thanks in part (though not exclusively) to the increased integration of components. This integration has made modern computers unique systems, far less modular than their predecessors. However, it’s also made them harder to take apart than a Japanese puzzle box.

– Source: Image of a Japanese puzzle box generated by DALL-E via ChatGPT.

In this respect, Apple was a pioneer. If memory serves, it was the first company to push the integration of components in its hardware products. Sometimes this was justified, as with iPhones, where integrated batteries prolong their lifespan while reducing weight, or AirPods and the Apple Watch, which couldn’t exist without such integration.

But with Macs, this integration has led to an excessive closing-off of the final product, undermining the idea of computers that change the world and allow us to think different.

Take the iMac. The iMac G5, introduced in 2004, could be opened from the back by unscrewing three screws, giving access to the entire interior of the machine and allowing you to replace practically everything, even the LCD display.

But at some point, certain designers who prioritized design over functionality decided the iMac’s body should be a single piece of aluminum (unibody), with the LCD screen becoming the sole access point to the computer’s interior.

Removing a 20+ inch LCD screen isn’t something everyone can do, especially when it’s held in place not by simple screws (I can already picture the disdainful looks of the aforementioned designers) but by powerful magnets or, worse, by ultra-adhesive strips.

Once you overcome this first hurdle, even tasks like replacing the RAM or the internal battery become operations that require dismantling the entire computer, despite the Mac’s interior being almost empty.¹

Today, it’s even worse. When purchasing a Mac with an Apple Silicon processor, you must decide upfront how much RAM and SSD storage you want. Since these components are integrated into the processor (RAM) or soldered onto the logic board (SSD), their size cannot be changed later unless you replace the entire logic board (or attempt risky DIY modifications).

To ensure their new Mac lasts longer, many users opt for higher specs from the start. But this means accepting Apple’s outrageous prices: €230 more to upgrade from the tiny 256 GB SSD to a more reasonable 512 GB, €460 for a 1 TB upgrade, or €230 for every additional 8 GB of RAM.²

The ironic part? Today’s iMacs are as thin as a MacBook Air but are practically empty inside. And they’re once again easy to disassemble. With so much free space, would it have been so hard to include a connector for adding a second SSD or extra RAM? These components might not be as efficient as the integrated ones, but they’d make the machine more adaptable to users’ evolving needs.

Some might argue that these engineering choices make Macs more reliable, as there are fewer connectors to wear out. Simplifying connections on the logic board also makes it smaller, easier to design, and cheaper to produce.

All true. But what good is a tiny logic board in an already large iMac? Moreover, while it may be cheaper for Apple to produce, the end user sees no benefit: replacing the board can cost around €1,000, making it more economical to buy a new Mac.

What applies to the iMac applies even more to the Mac Studio and Mac Pro—professional machines with much higher costs and larger sizes. Yet, the Mac Studio cannot be upgraded after purchase, and the Mac Pro can only be upgraded to a very limited extent, using mostly proprietary Apple components.

Does this make sense? Macs are products that last for years, and people buy them not just because they look good but mainly for the excellent integration of hardware, software, and the broader Apple ecosystem. Making these machines more accessible and upgradable would also make them more adaptable, a masterstroke for Apple’s image, which lately seems a bit tarnished.

Except for a few 27" models that retained a hatch for easy RAM access. ↩︎
The fact that these prices are always the same shows there’s no technical justification, just a marketing choice. ↩︎

Apple, we have a problem: a look at macOS Sonoma bugs (update)

Fri, 31 May 2024 06:00:00 +0000

– Image generated by Microsoft Designer AI.

A couple of months ago, I listed some more or less serious bugs in Sonoma that I noticed while getting familiar with the latest version of macOS, first on the new Mac Studio M2 Ultra and then on the household Mac Mini M1.

At that time, I was using macOS Sonoma 14.3, which I soon updated on the Mini to version 14.3.1. With this minor release, Apple fixed a couple of the bugs I described, specifically the one about emptying the Trash into a random Space and the issue that prevented giving decent names to PDF files generated by the Print function.

Since I primarily use the Print (virtual) function for PDFs in Firefox, I suspected this bug might be tied to the browser rather than the operating system. But that’s not the case. On the updated Mini, the issue disappeared, but the Mac Studio, which stayed on version 14.3 longer, continued to bother me despite having the exact same browser as the Mini.

Now both machines have macOS 14.5 installed, and the PDF naming issue has disappeared on the Mac Studio as well. However, all the other bugs I reported still happily persist. In fact, with this post, I’m adding two new bugs, one of which immediately climbed to the top of my list of annoyances.

The first bug was pointed out to me by Mimmo (thanks!) back in the days of Sonoma 14.3. It involved Safari occasionally hiding the text within a selection, as shown in the image below.

It’s not a major issue, I admit, but it’s surprising in a product from a company as detail-oriented as Apple. Apparently, Cupertino thought so too, as it seems to have been fixed in the transition from version 14.3 to 14.5. That’s better.

The other bug is so obvious that I can’t understand how I missed it before: every time I open a folder with a large number of files, Sonoma’s Finder takes an eternity to display them.

For years, I’ve used an external USB drive to store everything I want to keep but don’t need daily. Some folders contain thousands and thousands of files, but until now, viewing their contents was always instantaneous, or nearly so. And this was even with a mechanical drive—high quality but still mechanical.

With Sonoma, everything suddenly changed: every time I open a very full folder, I have to wait several dozen seconds before seeing its contents. And when I say dozens of seconds, I mean 40, 50, even 60 seconds for a folder with 1,000–2,000 items. That’s a lot, sure, but it’s not the end of the world.

What’s strange is that until Monterey, with the same external drive, viewing was practically instantaneous, so I don’t think it’s a disk or connection speed issue.

To rule out doubts, I even purchased a 2 TB NVMe SSD, which I installed in an external hub connected to the Mini via USB-C. Now folder contents load faster (as expected!) but still much slower than what would normally be expected. Roughly speaking, it takes half the time it did before, which for an NVMe SSD—even an external one—still seems unacceptable to me.

I hope Apple has noticed the problem and will fix it with macOS 15. Otherwise, I might actually have to file a bug report, and I really don’t feel like doing that.

From Intel to Apple Silicon

Mon, 11 Mar 2024 06:00:00 +0000

– Source: Viktor Forgacs on Unsplash.

The transition is complete: since a few days, all the computers I use for work are running on Apple Silicon ARM processors. This includes a Mac Studio M2 Ultra, which I’ve already talked about extensively and which sits on my office desk; a Mac Mini M1 with 16 GB RAM and 1 TB SSD – previously neglected on a shelf for reasons I won’t go into here – now in my home office; and a very basic MacBook Air M1 (just 8 GB RAM and 256 GB SSD, half the specs of my wife’s) for light use and when I’m on the go.

Oh, and let’s not forget: since last summer, I’ve also been using an 11" iPad Pro M1, which is an absolute gem and deserves a post of its own.

The Mac Studio and Mini are running Sonoma, which I’m not thrilled about, but it’s here to stay. Meanwhile, the Air is still on Monterey. I’ll update it to Sonoma soon to ensure consistency across all my machines.

Needless to say, compared to the Intel models I’ve used up until now, the performance is on another level. The benchmarks already say a lot, but the daily experience speaks volumes more: programs that open instantly, the fluidity of even the most resource-hungry applications, Python or R scripts that used to take minutes now finishing almost before I can blink.

Another clear indication of the speed of these machines is the time it takes to install (as usual) the operating system and all the applications I need from scratch (and there are quite a few).

With the Mini, I completed everything in a single day (around 100 applications to download, register, and configure one by one). I spent a second day on finer details, such as transferring files between Macs, tweaking system settings (a rather complicated process that, thankfully, most users can skip), and installing essential command-line tools like homebrew and conda for my work.

Rosetta installed itself automatically the first time I opened an Intel-only application, and so far, all the apps I’ve installed run without issue – even the more niche ones that require specialized libraries. After all, it’s been over three years since the introduction of the first M1 Macs, and the early challenges should have been resolved long ago.

In short, the transition from Intel to Apple Silicon has been smooth – easier than I initially expected and perhaps even simpler than the previous switch from PowerPC to Intel. And in any case, much easier than crossing a busy street in Rome in the 1960s.

P.S. What about my old Macs? As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, I have a new project in mind to repurpose them effectively. The initial tests look very promising, but I’d rather be sure about certain details before writing about it. Stay tuned!

Sonoma: there is some good around

Mon, 26 Feb 2024 06:00:00 +0000

– Image generated by Microsoft Designer AI.

Sonoma is still raw and comes with a fair number of bugs, but fortunately, there is something good here too.

As far as I’m concerned, I like that Screen Sharing has finally gained its rightful place on the Mac, taking its spot in the Utilities folder within Applications, instead of being relegated to /System/Library/CoreServices/Applications, as it had been until now.

I could be wrong, but I remember a similar application, Apple Remote Desktop, was present in Utilities several years ago (around the time of Tiger or Leopard, maybe among the optional tools you could choose during installation). However, Apple quickly reversed course, hiding the remote access application within macOS system services and accessing it through the Finder menu Go > Connect to Server or via the Locations section of the sidebar.¹

But back to today and Sonoma: the most interesting thing about the new Screen Sharing is that the application now shows a history of all past connections, making it easy to reconnect to frequently used computers and to create consistent groups of connections for the various machines we use.

Having a dedicated application also means being able to configure it according to personal preferences. This was technically possible even with the pre-Sonoma application, but I only realized it while writing these lines.

Why am I so enthusiastic about Screen Sharing? Because I often work over the network, and I find it very interesting to have a native tool that offers more advanced functions than those previously available. It’s just a pity that Apple uses the vnc protocol to connect to remote Macs—a protocol with numerous security issues, often blocked by firewalls, which effectively limits the use of Screen Sharing to local networks only.

A real shame, because after years of partial remote work, I can say that Screen Sharing is much more efficient than Teamviewer (which I stopped using a long time ago) or Chrome Remote Desktop, which I currently use even though it doesn’t completely satisfy me.

These last four years have taught us that remote work is possible, but it requires the right tools. So, after many criticisms, Apple deserves a well-done here.

An advanced version of Apple Remote Desktop is also available on the App Store for €89.99. A price not exactly popular for those who only need it occasionally, but absolutely fair for professionals who rely on it. ↩︎

Apple, we have other problems: a look at macOS vintage bugs

Thu, 22 Feb 2024 06:00:00 +0000

– Image generated by Microsoft Designer AI.

In the last post, I described some very recent bugs present in Sonoma, the latest version of macOS.

The bugs reported here, however, have persisted across several versions of macOS, and it seems that Apple has no intention of fixing them or doesn’t even consider them to be bugs. These issues, unlike other reports, don’t occur under extreme conditions or after opening a zillion files but during completely normal use, which makes it even stranger that they’ve never been resolved.

The first two are more user interface inconsistencies, which are surprising given the almost obsessive attention Apple dedicates to the design details of its products.

The scrollbar for the list of purchased apps in the App Store is partially hidden by the window title and only appears after scrolling through a certain number of apps (the exact number depends on the total apps in the list—if there are many, you’ll have to scroll quite a bit to see the scrollbar).
The same thing happens on the App Store home page when you move the mouse to the top of the window, causing the title to appear. However, since this page contains fewer elements, part of the scrollbar remains visible.

This one, however, is an old bug related to Terminal.

I’ve configured System Settings > Desktop & Dock so that the Prefer tabs when opening documents option is always active. This way, every time I open a new window in applications that support this feature (including Terminal), macOS creates a new tab instead of a new window.

But if I’m using Terminal with a custom configuration (e.g., mine is set to 120 columns x 40 rows) and I select the menu option New Window with a profile of a different size (e.g., the default of 80 columns x 24 rows), a new tab is indeed created, but the entire Terminal changes size to match the profile just chosen.

This might even be a deliberate design choice. However, it contrasts with what happens when the Prefer tabs when opening documents option is only active in full-screen mode, where the new tab adopts the size of the existing one.

To be fair, it was worse in High Sierra: every time a new tab was opened, Terminal would lose a row. Fortunately, this bug was fixed in the next version of macOS.

For me, who always uses the Align to Grid option in Finder windows, organizes file icons visually in a logical order (at least for me), and often leaves empty spaces, this next bug is a major nuisance.

Until El Capitan, if I moved icons in a folder below the bottom edge of the window, Finder kept their order intact, leaving a blank space where the icons were originally located. Starting with Sierra, however, the bottom edge of the Finder window became a sort of impenetrable barrier, causing icons dragged below it to “bounce” back to the top of the window, leaving the bottom empty.

To avoid this, you have to drag the icons while holding the CMD (⌘) key, which in theory bypasses the grid alignment, but then you’ll need to manually restore their order afterward.

This final gem, undoubtedly my favorite macOS bug, isn’t just an annoyance, it’s a royal pain in the neck.

Just like with documents, I organize applications visually, grouping them by type and usage frequency, aligning the icons to Finder’s virtual grid.

As a result, I place all pre-installed Apple apps (Pages, Numbers, Keynote, Xcode, iMovie, GarageBand, etc.) at the top of the Applications folder, followed by office tools (Office 365, LibreOffice, PDF managers), communication apps (Teams, Webex, Skype), browsers, and remote access apps. Further down are apps specific to my work—note-taking, code editing, image editing—and at the bottom, utilities for monitoring Mac temperature, managing the clipboard, unzipping files, recording the screen, and occasionally running an antivirus scan (MalwareBytes).¹

This organization allows me to quickly locate the app I need, as I know exactly where it should be even if I don’t remember its name.²

Unfortunately, for several macOS versions now, every time I update the OS, app icons are always reordered alphabetically. Since alphabetical order is the default for the Applications folder, most users don’t notice this. But for those like me, who prefer custom order, it means having to reorganize everything after every update.

Why do I consider this a bug and not a feature? The reason is simple: Finder allows different sorting options for any folder—alphabetically, by date, by size, by type—and also lets you align items to a grid or leave them unordered. So why should the Applications folder behave differently?

Are there technical reasons for this decision? Under normal use, the Applications folder can be customized like any other Finder folder, so why should Finder reset customizations after every OS update, even minor ones?

In my humble opinion, this issue, along with the one mentioned above, is tied to a problem with the pesky .DS_Store files that manage each Finder folder’s configuration. The file format is more secretive than Area 51.

If anyone from Apple’s development team is reading this, could you spare an hour to fix these bugs? It shouldn’t be too difficult—please take a look, a loyal user would be grateful.

The ability to organize apps and documents visually is one of macOS’s features that makes me prefer it over Linux or—horror!—Windows, where this workflow simply doesn’t exist. ↩︎
On the Mac I’m using to write this, I have 148 installed apps, which, for my habits, isn’t even that many. Remembering all their names isn’t for me, so I’ve never used alphabetical sorting or apps like Alfred and the like. ↩︎

Apple, we have a problem: a look at macOS Sonoma bugs

Mon, 12 Feb 2024 06:00:00 +0000

– Image generated by Microsoft Designer AI.

I use my Mac for work, so I’m always reluctant to update macOS too quickly. I usually prefer to wait until the current version matures, and sometimes I skip it entirely, maybe because I’ve read particularly negative reports or because I wasn’t convinced after using it on a friend’s or colleague’s computer (as I did with Sierra, Catalina, and Ventura).¹

Until now, all the Macs under my control—both the ones I personally use and those in my family—were running Monterey. I like it because it’s stable, fast, and compatible with all the applications I use daily (and there are quite a few).

However, with my new Mac Studio, I had to make an exception because it came with Sonoma pre-installed and is likely not compatible with Monterey. It might work with Ventura, but Ventura is one of the versions on my blacklist, so what’s the point in using it?

Introduction

Sonoma irked me from the day I read that it would no longer natively allow conversion of PostScript or EPS (Encapsulated PostScript) files to PDF. I know that few people use PostScript today, and I can still use Ghostscript or an emulator to convert my old EPS files instead of relying on Preview. But it’s almost a philosophical matter: macOS is a very complex operating system made up of thousands upon thousands of interconnected components. Was there really no more room to maintain support for PostScript/EPS files? ²

As soon as I started using Sonoma on the Mac Studio, I realized my initial skepticism was well-founded. Sonoma is plagued by quite a few baffling bugs that fail to do justice to the potential of the Mac Studio.

Sonoma Bugs

Most of the Sonoma bugs I’ve noticed occur in the Finder and Spaces. The Finder is widely used by all macOS users, while Spaces is less popular among everyday users but presumably favored by the operating system’s developers. Some of these bugs are so obvious that I find it strange they weren’t fixed during the beta testing phase or in the updates released over the past months. In any case, all these bugs are present in Sonoma 14.3, the version currently installed on my Mac Studio.

The following list is roughly ordered by (personal) importance, starting with the more minor bugs—small annoyances that don’t greatly impact the macOS Sonoma experience—and ending with the truly critical and unjustifiable ones.

Right after installing Sonoma, when browsing the network from another Mac, the Mac Studio icon appears as a question mark, while icons for other pre-Sonoma Macs appear normal. After a few hours, the Mac Studio icon returns to normal.
Occasionally, the confirmation message for emptying the Trash appears in a Space different from the one where the command was executed. This also happens in Monterey, but in that version, the Finder automatically switches to the Space with the message, allowing the user to click the confirmation button. In Sonoma, this doesn’t happen, and since the message isn’t visible, users keep trying to empty the Trash unsuccessfully.
When using the Print function to generate a PDF of a document or a webpage, the PDF file no longer automatically inherits the name of the source document and is instead named Untitled. This never happened before and is incredibly annoying. Is it possible that macOS developers never generate PDF files?

I suspect the bug is related to the removal of PostScript support, but I’m not entirely sure.
In a Finder window set to Align to Grid mode, if we drag a group of files below the window’s bottom edge while holding the CMD (⌘) key and then release the mouse, the lower icons disappear from view, giving the impression that the files are lost.³

To make them reappear, you must switch the view mode (e.g., use CMD (⌘)-2 to switch to list view and then return to icon view with CMD (⌘)-1). Alternatively, you can navigate up one folder level and then back, or simply close the current window and reopen it, selecting the same folder again.

The images below illustrate what happens. The first image shows a Finder folder containing a collection of documents and other folders.

Here, I selected some files and dragged them downward while holding the CMD (⌘) key (if I didn’t, the lower files would move to the top of the window once they passed the bottom edge). This action should expand the Finder’s virtual window, causing a scroll bar to appear. However, in Sonoma, this doesn’t happen, and it seems as if the files have disappeared.⁴

Switching to list view and back to icon view finally displays the scroll bar, revealing the files below the bottom edge.
Closely related to the previous bug: if I open a Finder folder in Align to Grid mode and add a new file, it sometimes isn’t visible until I perform one of the actions mentioned above. The same issue occurs when creating or copying a new folder. To make matters worse, this bug happens randomly—sometimes everything works fine, sometimes it doesn’t—causing even more confusion for users dealing with Sonoma’s Finder.
Suppose you have two overlapping windows in a Space, let’s say Space 1. If you click on the top window’s title bar, hold down the mouse button, and use the CTRL (⌃) + 2 and CTRL + 1 shortcuts to move to Space 2 and back, the traveling window always ends up below the stationary one when you return to the original Space.

If there are three or more partially overlapping windows, the window that moves between Spaces always ends up below the window that had focus before the traveling window but above all other Finder windows.

This behavior only affects Finder windows: if you overlap a Finder window with, say, a Safari window, the Finder window that moves between Spaces will reappear in the original Space always on top of Safari, as it should.
Those who watched the videos above may have noticed another very serious problem: every time any window is dragged between Spaces, there is a noticeable flickering of the window’s background. This may be related to the code responsible for redrawing the window.

This happens on the powerful Mac Studio as well as on less capable Macs (thanks, Mimmo!). It has never, ever happened in any previous macOS version.⁵

The strange thing is that this is a very common operation for regular Spaces users. It’s baffling that the developers didn’t notice it or, if they did, didn’t address it before releasing the operating system. Seriously, with today’s ultra-powerful computers, must we really wait half a second to redraw a window?

Conclusions

These are the Sonoma bugs I’ve personally noticed so far. The list is certainly not exhaustive but reflects my particular way of using macOS, including constant use of Spaces (which I find much more convenient than a multi-monitor setup), frequent drag-and-drop operations in the Finder, and reliance on keyboard shortcuts.

As we’ve just seen, Sonoma introduced several bugs of varying severity. However, macOS also suffers from many vintage bugs—issues that have existed for years and that Apple either refuses to fix or doesn’t consider problematic. But you’ll read about those in the next post.

I’m not as critical as Riccardo Mori regarding the more recent macOS versions, but I admit that what he writes strikes a nerve. ↩︎
At this point, I could launch into a long rant about how our digital documents risk becoming unreadable in just a few years unless we’ve printed hard copies, but I’ll spare you that since it’s not the main topic of this post. ↩︎
What’s the purpose of such an operation? For example, to make space for new files that, for some reason, you want to place before the existing ones while maintaining the order of the already-present icons, or to manually rearrange files. ↩︎
Needless to say, in System Settings, I’ve chosen to keep the scroll bars always visible. ↩︎
I can’t speak for Ventura, which I’ve never tested thoroughly, but this certainly never happened in Monterey and earlier versions of macOS. ↩︎

Mac Studio!

Sun, 04 Feb 2024 06:00:00 +0000

And here it is, the Mac Studio. I had to go through a long bureaucratic process to get it, but I finally managed, and now it’s right here in front of me.

The first thing you notice is that the box is heavy, very heavy. The specs state that the Mac Studio is large and weighs about as much as three Mac Minis stacked on top of each other (19.7 x 19.7 x 9.5 cm^3 and 3.6 kg for the Mac Studio versus 19.7 x 19.7 x 3.6 cm^3 and 1.2 kg for the Mac Mini). I’ve never held three Mac Minis together, but the box gives a strong impression of solidity, which is definitely a positive for such an expensive device.

The Mac Studio is indeed not cheap. The configuration I chose is almost top-of-the-line — M2 Ultra processor with a 24-core CPU, 60-core GPU, and 32-core Neural Engine, 128 GB of RAM, and a 1 TB SSD. The total cost was just under €7,000 — the price of two Vision Pros.

But quality comes at a price, and for an equivalent workstation from HP, Dell, or Lenovo, you’d have to shell out €1,000 to €4,000 more.¹ In this case, Apple is even competitive.

Unboxing

I’m not a fan of unboxing rituals, but the Mac Studio deserves this initiation ceremony. The box is a tall, sturdy cardboard parallelepiped, more developed in height than width.

Opening the box is incredibly easy: just pull the tab and fold one side of the box open, reminiscent of the opening mechanism of the Mac Pro G4.

Seeing the Mac Studio lying on its side is a bit unsettling — it looks like it could fall at any moment. But the side flaps are much sturdier than they appear, and the Mac Studio is far too large to slip out of their grip.

At this point, you need to lay the box on its side, spread the flaps in the direction of the arrows, remove the protective paper wrapping, and finally hold the Mac Studio in your hands.²

It really does look like a Mac Mini stretched in height, and now it seems appropriately weighted for its size. The additional weight is entirely due to the box, which is clearly designed to provide the best protection for the valuable item inside.

Even the power cable is a piece of engineering — thick yet flexible, with a fabric sheath that reminds me of those on old irons. This one, however, has a much tighter weave and is unquestionably more elegant. Too bad about the plug — I would have preferred a Schuko, but so be it.

Connecting the power cable and the USB-C cable for the monitor is a breeze. Even pairing my wireless keyboard and mouse (Logitech, both excellent) was simple: I just removed the USB dongle from my usual Mac and plugged it into one of the Mac Studio’s ports — no need to configure anything or fuss with Bluetooth.

Finding the power button was a bit trickier. It’s on the bottom-left corner, perfectly flush with the body of the device, and practically imperceptible to touch. But once pressed, badaboom! In a few seconds, the macOS welcome screen appears. A quick system configuration (since I’ll be reinstalling anyway), and the Sonoma desktop appears.

Reinstalling macOS

Call me obsessive, but I always reinstall macOS from scratch on any new Mac I get my hands on. Maybe it’s a habit from the past, a fixation, or just a desire for control, but I’ve never used a Mac without personally installing macOS.

On Apple Silicon Macs, you need to hold down the power button until the Options icon (a gear symbol) appears, usually alongside one or more icons representing the Mac’s disks. Clicking on Options and confirming loads the macOS Recovery utility.

Once Recovery loads, I first initialize the system disk with Disk Utility, giving it a more meaningful name than the default Macintosh HD (usually the same name I use on the network for easy identification). Then, I reinstall macOS using the straightforward guided procedure.

As always, the estimated installation time is wildly inaccurate: the three-plus hours initially shown turn out to be just about 40 minutes — not short, but not excessive for installing a complex OS like macOS.

It’s also curious that after the mandatory reboot, the screen resolution drops significantly, only to return to normal once the macOS welcome screen appears. I’ve never seen this happen with other macOS versions, but it’s worth noting that most of my (re)installations are done on MacBooks, which have more consistent hardware than desktop systems.

After carefully completing the initial macOS setup, I was back on the Sonoma desktop within minutes. Now, I could finally start experiencing how the Mac Studio performs.

How Does the Mac Studio Perform?

The Mac Studio runs beautifully (but was there any doubt?). Everything is smooth, without the slightest hiccup. While this is true for all Apple Silicon Macs, it’s immediately clear that the Studio is a cut above — perhaps even two.

Application installation is instantaneous: double-click the .dmg, drag the icon to the Applications folder, and… done. Even with larger apps like GNU Emacs, GIMP, or Miniconda, the wait is just two or three seconds.

The only app that put up some resistance was QGIS, whose installation took two and a half minutes on the Mac Studio. But that’s understandable for a 3 GB behemoth containing thousands of small files that need to be copied one by one.

I didn’t bother with Geekbench or similar benchmarks to measure the Mac Studio’s performance. The web is already flooded with such data, and my results would only be redundant. Instead, I’m more interested in how the Mac Studio handles demanding applications — I have some early impressions but will wait to share more.

Sonoma, however, is a drag. It’s clear from the start that this operating system is still full of bugs and inconsistencies (which I’ll showcase in the next post), and it doesn’t do justice to what the Mac Studio can really achieve.

Apple has accustomed us to a tick-tock approach for its operating systems (similar to the one Intel followed for years with its processors): one year, they release an innovative but buggy and slow OS, followed by a version focusing almost exclusively on bug fixes and optimizations. This happened with Leopard and Snow Leopard, then with Lion and Mountain Lion. Later, the pattern continued with El Capitan, practically perfect after the horrendous Mavericks and Yosemite, and Mojave, following two mediocre releases like Sierra and High Sierra. Most recently, Monterey was excellent after the disaster of Catalina. Sonoma, theoretically the bug-fix version of Ventura, is a disappointment. Hopefully, Apple will fix things at the next WWDC in June — and big time.

Conclusion

I did all the unboxing and setup of the Mac Studio at home, so I could work in peace away from the usual chaos at the institute. But after a week, the Mac Studio moved to my office, taking pride of place on my desk amid monitors, keyboards, mice, cables, and various gadgets.

And my old High Sierra computer? That’s destined for a new project, and I’m really curious to see what comes of it. Stay tuned!

It’s worth noting that the aforementioned workstations are, at least theoretically, more expandable than the Mac Studio. However, expandability isn’t a critical factor for my specific needs. ↩︎
There’s not a single piece of plastic in the box. It may not be much from an environmental perspective, but it shows that it can be done. ↩︎

Jony Ive quits Apple: a tragedy or a blessing?

Wed, 10 Jul 2019 06:00:00 +0000

– Source: The London Standard.

Jonathan “Jony” Ive, after thirty years, is leaving Apple to start his own company, LoveFrom, which will have Apple as its first client. The news has filled tech (and non-tech) headlines worldwide for days (as you can read here, here, and here). Almost everyone, after overcoming the surprise of the announcement, expressed hope that the collaboration between the English knight¹ and the California-based company could continue just as before.

I know this might be an unpopular opinion, but I think that would be a mistake. Jony Ive was overdoing it.

Jony Ive is (or was?) a great designer, and over the course of his long career, he created outstanding products. I’m thinking of the various iMacs, from the G3 that marked Apple’s revival to the lamp-like G4 and the all-in-one G5. I’m thinking of the iPod, the iPhone, and iOS 7. But, like many star designers, at some point, he went overboard, embracing an anorexic aesthetic that prioritized design over functionality. Everything became too thin and minimalist, with zero accessibility and repairability.

This gave us the ultra-thin MacBook Pro, aesthetically perfect but technically incomprehensible – a laptop that forces you to carry around a plethora of adapters just to connect a basic USB stick. Or the horrendous butterfly keyboard, whose keys feel like tapping on glass and can be rendered unusable by a speck of dust, forcing you to replace the entire top case (and sometimes the whole laptop!) for a single malfunctioning key.

Then there are the AirPods, which, when their battery dies (two years if you’re lucky), have to be thrown away because even Apple can’t replace the battery without destroying them. Or the iMacs, Mac Minis, and MacBook Airs with soldered RAM that can’t be upgraded. Whatever configuration you choose at purchase is what you’re stuck with forever.²

And let’s not forget the most spectacular flop of all: the Mac Pro, now good only as a (very expensive) trash can. A professional computer so minimal that, to truly use it, you need a bunch of external accessories, all precariously connected via cables. A professional computer that’s not upgradeable (it’s still stuck in 2013), a true contradiction for anyone wanting to preserve the hefty investment it requires. A professional computer that overheats, overheats a hell of a lot!, making it unsuitable for the heavy workloads it’s supposed to handle. Is this the fault of engineers who can’t do thermal calculations or a designer who cares little about the actual function of the product?

Is it just a coincidence that the latest Mac Mini once again offers easily upgradable RAM? Or that the new Mac Pro has returned to its old design — a large, perforated metal case for better heat dissipation, easy to open, with plenty of space for adding drives, RAM, and interface cards? Or that the MacBook Pro keyboard is being redesigned for the umpteenth time in three years?

Perhaps Tim Cook and Apple’s board concluded that Jony Ive had gone too far and decided to finally get rid of him, despite the narrative of a mutual agreement.

It was about time. As Apple users, we deserve better.

– Source: The London Standard.

Jony Ive was knighted in 2012. ↩︎
A technical absurdity: the amount of RAM needed to keep a computer running optimally increases over time with advancements in operating systems and applications. Upgrading RAM is one of the most effective ways to significantly extend the life of any computer. ↩︎

Apple on Melabit

macOS Tahoe: let's free the icons!

The squircle jail

Let’s Free the Icons

IconLib

Conclusions

macOS Tahoe, again

Surviving Don Rodrigo

MDR Dasher vs. Flow 2: fashion or common sense?

macOS Tahoe: Developer Beta 3

It’s a beta

The Wallpaper

The Menu Bar

System Settings

The Finder

Application Icons

Performance

Conclusions

macOS Tahoe: where is my Terminal?

macOS Tahoe: see you in September

Update

Desktop and widgets

Finder

The new Apps

System Settings

Conclusions (for now)

WWDC 25

Apple, we fixed some issues: from Sonoma to Sequoia

Frozen Mac? How to recover it using DFU mode

Apple, we have a problem: a new macOS Sonoma bug

Right to repair: Apple products

Apple, we have a problem: a look at macOS Sonoma bugs (update)

From Intel to Apple Silicon

Sonoma: there is some good around

Apple, we have other problems: a look at macOS vintage bugs

Apple, we have a problem: a look at macOS Sonoma bugs

Introduction

Sonoma Bugs

Conclusions

Mac Studio!

Unboxing

Reinstalling macOS

How Does the Mac Studio Perform?

Conclusion

Jony Ive quits Apple: a tragedy or a blessing?