Golden Gate Release Candidate

Flog everyone who shilled this as a "Snow Leopard" release.

Liquid Ass improved to Liquid Trash, but it feels like there's more bugs than fixes overall (typical Apple workmanship).

Another macOS 27 bug that drives me crazy, and is probably related to what Ron Elemans describes:

For as long as I can remember, in Finder’s list view, you used to be able to click and drag anywhere in the list except on an icon or item name to create a selection. Starting the drag on an icon or filename would pick up that item instead.

In macOS Golden Gate, this distinction is gone. Wherever you start the drag, on the icon/name or in the empty space next to it, you always grab the item. It’s no longer possible to create a selection this way.

Of course I filled a bug report many preview releases ago. Still in the RC.

@Nico Both the table and list bugs seem like they’re dropping features that won’t work with touch screens. But the system knows the input method so it could still allow them when using a mouse or trackpad.

Flog everyone who shilled this as a "Snow Leopard" release.

I wouldn’t break out the whip and gimp mask just yet — “way better than macOS 26, generally, not even including the Liquid Glass changes” and “has a load of showstopping bugs for a handful of people in the .0 release” aren’t mutually exclusive.

I’m really disappointed it’s not possible to delete AI. I don’t like or plan to use AI and it takes up 30 GB. MacOS is already kind of bloated on my 256GB Mac Mini. It would be unusable taking up 30 extra gigabytes

So I’m still stuck on Sequoia

>Michael Tsai: “Both the table and list bugs seem like they’re dropping features that won’t work with touch screens.”

If this is their reasoning, it’s ridiculous. A touch screen is *not* a great input device for MacOS. Worsening Mac users’ experience for an incompatible form of input is what Microsoft did with Windows 8. And look how that turned out: they backpedaled on almost every change

I fully expect Mac touch screens to be like the Touch Bar. Especially now that they’re removing features for them

The barely visible buttons now have a barely visible border. In Mail when I drag multiple emails the shadows for the drag images are added. With 30 emails I get a black area around the drag image. If I make a screenshot of a dialog the edges of the rectangle outside of the dialog are highlighted. The app icons are even worse than before. Preview isn't recognizable at all. The colors are more intense than before.

And I saw this in the first minutes of working with Golden Gate. This is not a Snow Leopard release but just lipstick on a pig.

Mission Control has been turned into a piece of sh*t. As far as I noticed:
1. A fullscreen app/space takes up the whole window title as name, so a fullscreen Safari shows the current tab's (probably very long) name as the space name, causing janky animation when you move the cursor to the space strip.
2. App icons and titles are gone, and you can only see the app title on hover. Why do they have to hide everything??
3. We used to be able to Option-click a space to "preview" the space without actually activating/going to that space. Now that's gone too.

F.

Sounds like a typical macOS release. A few things get better, more things get worse.

I wonder if we'll ever have another experience of using a computer that was as good as macOS 10.6 through 10.14 -- pick your favorite in there, any one of those is far better than what we have now. I have a bad feeling we'll never see that level of UX again. macOS will never be there again, and obviously Windows getting there is laughable. Even as Linux improves it seems unlikely it'll ever get to that point of consistent, polished design and "it just works". Because of the realities of the industry, it's just not feasible for a new OS to come along. Could it really be that computers as a whole peaked 15 years ago?

Even as Linux improves it seems unlikely it'll ever get to that point of consistent, polished design and "it just works”.

I doubt LLMs will help much with consistent, polished design but they’re great at burning down backlogs. Linux everything has enormously long backlogs, just like any other collection of nontrivial software projects, and the cost of A-grade nerdery has fallen through the floor. Granted, performance optimizations are possibly one of the easiest things for LLMs to handle (“number go down? great! make a PR!”), but I saw a picture of a MacBook pointed at a mirror so Astra or Fable or whatever could improve Asahi Linux’s video drivers without having to wait for a human to give thumbs-up/thumbs-down reactions. As someone who expects to keep his computers longer than Apple can be expected to update macOS for them, all I can say is faster, please.

I don’t know if it’s the culture of Mastodon and/or Bluesky or what, but it seems like there’s only a tiny handful of public personas who are genuinely excited about using LLMs to make better, more reliable, more featureful, faster software (off the top of my head: dhh, Mitchell Hashimoto, Andreas Kling, George Nachman, Michael “rands” Lopp, Dan Luu). Everybody else seems to only be interested in business as usual, maybe with a 10% speedup in development at best.

>Michael Tsai: “Both the table and list bugs seem like they’re dropping features that won’t work with touch screens.”

> If this is their reasoning, it’s ridiculous. A touch screen is *not* a great input device for MacOS.

Steve Jobs is dead and so is this kind of thinking inside of Apple, unfortunately.

>Why do they have to hide everything??

They have long been obsessed with “removing clutter”, even at the expense of removing useful information.

I wonder if we'll see dedicated websites for the Sequoia stragglers soon. We already got Mavericks Forever and Back to Catalina on GitHub to port over the 10.15 Catalina UI, starting from Ventura to Tahoe (and soon Golden Gate). Not to mention the various Snow Leopard reminisces, or even the sites dedicated to OS 9 and prior!

Just looking at the bugs reported here and elsewhere, it goes to show that even with the UI slowly improving after Dye's exit, there's still a long way to go with fixing the underlying code before we can definitively say that Mac OS has turned the corner.

Was able to stay on Sequoia so far. From the replies above it seems I'll be happy to extend that one more year. One of my work desktops is on Debian and an absolute pleasure to use (even for non dev stuff). Switching full time seems more attractive and realistic now than ever.

quoth Max Oakland:

> So I’m still stuck on Sequoia

You don't realise how great that is.

I see people talking about how they're sticking with macOS 15, and how that's where they drew their line in the sand. And I think back to me drawing the line in the sand all the way back with macOS 10.14 -- the last good version of macOS -- and how long I stuck with it before I begrudgingly downgraded to macOS 13, and it makes me want to weep bitter tears. I'm still on macOS 13 and loathing the day I'm going to have to downgrade again. It's really hard to feel good about using macs as I watch everything continue to get worse and worse. All I can do is scream out into the void in spaces like this one. 😞

>And I think back to me drawing the line in the sand all the way back with macOS 10.14 -- the last good version of macOS

Yeah, it's pretty great by comparison! I did switch to 10.15 on my "new" 2014 MBP, where I don't need 32-bit support. If I could change one thing it would be a return to full-width blue scrollbars, but I've mostly made peace with Mojave's UI.

Sadly, a TeX Live Utility user reported that Golden Gate broke AuthorizationExecuteWithPrivileges such that spawned tasks no longer inherit PATH of the calling process, and apparently this behavior is still present in GM. I'll have to rely on users to test a workaround, as my build machine is on Big Sur for maximum backward compatibility (presently 10.9, IIRC) and I don't want to give that up.