macOS 15.2

Good to see Apple discover what release notes are.

This one little bullet point is my favorite feature in perhaps the entire 15.x release cycle: "Presenter preview lets you choose what to share — an app or your whole screen — before you share it when connecting to an external display or using AirPlay"

Suppose you're in a meeting room, with everyone facing a big display. You could previously mirror your internal display, but now you can't take any private notes that the others aren't supposed to see. Or you could use "extend" mode, but if you're sitting on either side, you'd be navigating that big display at a very awkward angle. What I really often find myself wanting is to mirror _just one window_ — and with 15.2, I finally can!

15.2 also still has my least favorite 15.x feature: non-configurable, on by default keyboard shortcuts for the new window titling stuff, which steal away from shortcuts I need in RDP. (For now, per someone's suggestion, I've overwritten "Left" and "Right" to shortcuts I'm unlikely to ever want to use.)

Ah, finally, humanity’s greatest challenge—custom AI-generated emojis—has been conquered by Apple! And yet, in a twist worthy of Shakespearean tragedy, Mac users are left emoji-less while iOS basks in the glory. How will we ever cope? The unfixed bugs, the years of neglect—fine, that's not a problem—but no Genmoji?! NO!!!! Bravo, Cook and co. A triumph of priorities, truly.

I wholeheartedly support Matthew's snark here.

It took years of work and commitment on the part of Tim Cook & his gang, to turn my "I can't wait to hear about all the new features in Mac OS!" into "I couldn't give a bigger shit about what's new in Mac OS". Disheartening.

It's even worse for me. I actively dread what's coming in the new macOS!

@Bri ditto here...

Also this bug.

Re: Old Unix Geek's post
It pains me to see the authors of good software like SuperDuper! just having throw up their hands and say there's nothing that can be done, because Apple broke our shit and there's no way to work around it since they intentionally locked down the system and made it impossible for us, the users, to do what we want.

Remember when copying a system was as simple as just copying the System Folder to another drive? How far we've fallen.

> Remember when copying a system was as simple as just copying the System Folder to another drive?

I do. We still have a tiny piece of that when we "install" an app by just dragging it to /Applications, or ~/Applications, or literally anywhere we'd like. Or "uninstall" it by dragging it to the trash. It establishes transparency, freedom, and consent.

But the Mac App Store took that away for many other apps. (IIRC, you can't even keep an app updated when you've moved it elsewhere, because the Mac App Store won't look for it there?)

And Mac OS X itself took away dragging the System Folder. It took away a _lot_ of transparency in the file system, to the point where it 1) creates all these silly dirs like /etc and /var, but then 2) is also embarrassed about it and hides them. I wish Apple of ca. 2000 had been bold enough to say no to that, and tell Unix-y tools to shove it and expect their system-wide paths to be _inside_ /System.

After all, remnants of "you can just drag the item" are still there. Apple _could've_ still made it so that, say, dragging a preference pane or font or whatever onto /System asks whether you want to install system-wide or per-user, and then have an almost System 7-like experience.

(The details are more complicated because we also have /Library, but that seems like a solvable problem.)

I don't love that we've trended towards "the file system is scary; let's make it intransparent".

On that note, I feel that all of the APFS shenanigans that Apple has introduced has been a huge step backwards. It didn't really add any features to macOS that actually benefit any users, because in general we can't do anything new that we weren't able to before. (Except having different APFS volumes in a container share space. That one feature is neat. But not at the cost of everything else.)

On the other hand, we have a huge increase in complexity with the file system that has resulted in a ton of bugs and breakages. Plus Apple made it nigh impossible to modify the system volume any longer. And now there's no third party tools for managing APFS filesystems. Time Machine has become unreliable. So much of it is a buggy black box.

Perhaps worst of all, we can't even get a reliable reading for how much free space is left on a volume! How in the hell did they screw that up?

APFS is a microcosm of everything that is currently going wrong at Apple.

@Bri I agree that there are problems with APFS, but snapshots are great.

IME, APFS-based networked Time Machine is slow and unreliable, just like HFS+-based Time Machine was slow and unreliable.

But, at least on paper, features like shared volumes in a container, cloning, snapshots, and generally higher integrity were a (frankly overdue) improvement over HFS+.

@Sören Yeah, network Time Machine is still not great. But with snapshots you can restore recent files from the boot drive without even needing to go to the network.

I guess that's a feature I never really make use of, because I can just get old versions of the file through Time Machine. I also have a script I run often that deletes all local snapshots on my system drive, because otherwise I don't have any free space available and things start breaking.

> Remember when copying a system was as simple as just copying the System Folder to another drive? How far we've fallen

I do. That was lovely! Those were the days...

And there's no reason why /var /lib etc couldn't be hardcoded into the filesystem driver to behave like symlinks into /System, even if they're not actually written to the disk. If there's a will, there's a way. The thing is that the will is gone.

Part of the problem, IMO, is that when then Mac was first developed the idea was that engineers were making a work of art, and were fully involved in making things better. Hey, they even got to sign the inside of the first Mac's body. IIRC, each app on the first Macs had an About menu item that told you who worked on the app.

But now engineers are nameless cogs who simply do what their project managers tell them to do. Decisions about functionality are left to the "creatives" or "idea people" who don't understand engineering consistency as deeply as (good) engineers do. As an engineer, you deliver what you're told to make as fast as possible, and the consequences aren't really your problem as long as you delivered the feature. And since the ideas people don't even notice the consequences, they just fester. Hence the overall collapse in software quality.