Rant ahead; get your sick bags handy. :)
Honestly, I’d be fine with trying out a giant iPad for my daily work, if Apple
were honest in acknowledging their estrangement from the Mac as a proper
workstation OS with proper character and robustness, and were instead committed
to fully transitioning to iOS for everything, because a workstation OS is
something I believe a certain class of computer users (including me and
probably you, Scott, as well) really need. A commenter on OSXDaily ( obsolete
name as of now :) ) by the name of Steve Steele ( awesome name :) ) sums it up
very well:
I hate that Apple has taken OS X from being a super cool and modern UNIX
workstation that started life powering Job’s NeXT Cubes, and turned it into a
candy colored silly sidekick to iOS.
For a few glorious years we had Steve Jobs wanting revenge on the tech world,
and OS X was his centerpiece.
Now we have Tim Cook’s macOS.
I say off with his head and the rest of the focus groups inside of Apple that
have neutered our once lean and mean workstation OS. I seriously now hope there
is a coup happening inside of Apple.
Woz, where are you?
Stay strong osxdaily.
Yeah. This. A thousand times this.
I started seriously with OS X—sorry, macOS—in Leopard, on my own MacBook, in
2008 when Vista was the final straw for me and the iPhone was booming. Others
here will have used Tiger and maybe even the classic Macintosh. Things have
changed a very great deal since Jobs fell in love with his newest iCreations
and Apple became a consumer electronics company. The neglect of the Mac has
gone from being a minor but understandable irritant to a full-scale domestic
assault. Lion was the start of it, you’re right. I should have seen that.
But it did offer exciting new features, and at least one of them, Resume, is
noticeably absent on Snow Leopard and Windows. I won’t rehash my views about
the systemic degradation of OS X since Snow since I’ve flogged it to death on
here before ( and you know how it is with people who think Apple is perfect no
matter what they do :) ), but suffice it to say that I (and, it would appear,
many others) thought I was getting something better at the time Lion came out:
an operating system that combined the robustness of the Mac with some of that
rare, task-oriented simplicity and beauty of iOS. But instead of a pair of
operating systems each suited ideally to its tasks, with its own personality
and paradigm, and perhaps with the ambition to benefit from the others’
virtues, or an inevitable transition to a lean, mean, mobile platform that’s
open enough to be used as a proper computer all by itself, we get a locked-down
toy OS that struggles to be taken seriously as a proper computer OS, despite
the fact that it’s competition is succeeding it in Business (Microsoft
Surface), and an increasingly useless and trivialised desktop OS with nothing
to recommend it over the laughingstock that was its former competition, and
whose usefulness is severely being compromised by its need to lock you in to
Apple’s services, the lack of upgradability of hardware, and the need for
Apple’s other ecosystem devices. Oh my, how things have changed …
Still I hold out hope that the transition will eventually be completed. The
Mac will die (sorry fanboys, but it’s true) and iOS, while it will be inferior
because of its close ties to Apple, will be one platform for doing your
computing. Maybe that’s a version of reality I could cope with. Apple would
cater to the demands of the market, either destroying the Mac’s advantages
(say, by hosting services for you) or improving the hardware. The form factor
that the Mac represents, especially the keyboard-and-mouse interface, or maybe
even the keyboard-and-touchscreen, will be catered for, as will the necessary
peripherals.
Please dispose of your sick bags in the receptacles provided. :)
I’m using VMWare Fusion to run the Mac VM. It’s imperfect (sound a bit
stuttery), but it works well enough.
You can learn more about “Apple File System” (APFS) here:
https://developer.apple.com/wwdc/schedule/#/details/701
Per-object and metadata encryption, sparse files, de-duplication on copy,
low-overhead crash safety, snapshots, atomic directory renames … good show. And
yes, a very big improvement over HFS+, indeed. :)
Just now, using APFS (on disk images and external devices) is a dangerous and
advanced business, fit only for people who have good backups and command-line
foo. If you follow that link, you’ll find documentation. If you Google it,
you’ll find lots of geeky insights, which will really work for you if you like
that kind of depth of understanding. Testing is limited to data files; Time
Machine isn’t supported yet, you can’t export to AFP (HFS legacy, that) and you
can’t actually boot the system from an APFS volume group. But Apple says that
stuff is coming.
Object recognition in photos, like grouping pictures based on related objects,
and identifying particular objects. I’d be interested to see how this
manifests itself in VoiceOver: whether, for instance, we will hear descriptions
of positively-identified objects.
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