A few macOS betas ago, a bunch of sites started failing to play video for me in Safari. Disney+, Netflix, YouTube and some other sites will sit at a black screen for a few seconds and then give me an error. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes certain videos will reliably fail while others reliably work fine. I thought this was related to Safari's autoplay protections, but I tried giving permission to autoplay all videos and that doesn't seem to change anything. Not sure if that fits the definition of a Snow Leopard update. If so, Apple needs at least a few more Snow Leopard updates at this rate. I'd also like to see them fix the issue where Liquid Glass uses a downscaled background image even at the most transparent setting. (Except for Siri AI which they seem to have added a special exception for, exactly because the pre-downscaling is super ugly)
I imagine the author saw this release as "macOS Tahoe but not sucky"
I liken it to Windows Vista and Windows 7. Although fundamentally similar operating systems under the hood, Windows 7 smoothed out Vista's kinks and brought forth additional polish.
If only KDE actually paid attention to UX and maybe cared about the looks and consistency a bit more. I'm sorry for being blunt but their visual design people's have no taste...
There's little margins and whitespace and this bothered me like hell before making the switch. It's funny, now I kind of like it. A lot is happening too. The latest Plasma had a very high degree of polish IMO.
It's far more consistent than Windows 11, but you have to pick Qt/KDE software, not GTK/GNOME for that to be true. I always choose the more KDE native option.
Like a decade for me now. I don’t read or watch anything anymore. I just buy whatever the new version is when I need it and live with it. I yearn for something truly exciting, groundbreaking, and accessible (price) from Apple. iPod era was so dope.
Yesterday I managed to update a 2015 MacBookAir7,2 from El Capitan (last update Sep. 2015) to Sonoma (last update Aug 6th 2026). I was excited when it finally worked.
Thanks to the OpenCore Legacy Patcher who show that not supporting old devices is a choice made by Apple.
OCLP is excellent but it's all coming to an end for Intel Macs unfortunately. Even Homebrew just dropped the ball a few days ago (this is the final draw for me, I'll keep a Sequoia partition but my MBP2015 daily drives on NixOS + GNOME)
I've been pleasantly surprised with Golden Gate. It's fresh-looking, works well, got rid of a lot of the ugly flat stuff they did over the last few releases (pre-Tahoe), supports more hidpi modes that make my work machine better...
But honestly, I don't think the average person should feel excitement for an OS release; boring means it just works and they don't have to learn a bunch of new features and different ways of doing things.
I'm stuck trying to figure out what new stuff they could add. Sidecar was neat, but I never need it. I'm very happy on Cinnamon on Linux, which is probably less featured than KDE (haven't daily driven it to confirm), which just confirms I don't actually need or want user-facing new features. I need stability.
I think Apple realise this. There are no genuine new OS features to be added, so they just shuffle things around so that things are changing and thus seem fresh and hip. For anyone who cares about stability and doesn't want to relearn everything they shuffle around, this is nothing but a negative, but Apple et al. have no other levers to pull (well, there's the AI lever, but that's also generally not a positive in and of itself).
Maybe there are new OS features that could be useful, but creating and integrating them in a way that's actually helpful is just such an ordeal that nobody will do it.
Window management (and indeed, desktop environments in general) are rather subjective I think. As someone who's been using Macs in some capacity since 1996 I'd be upset if macOS suddenly resembled a traditional Windows desktop, and the absence of Mac-like desktops on Linux (no, GNOME and elementary/Pantheon are not that) is one of the primary factors keeping me from switching.
Debian+KDE here. It's what I use to get away from OS excitement. I miss the 90's when nobody ever updated anything, and if they did it was on purpose and not something that happened behind your back.
For example, the other day Google "updated" the clock/alarm/timer app on Android with pointless and annoying changes. A clock app does not need an update, ever.
"But..." No! /usr/share/zoneinfo handles that. Stop it.
All of my stuff updated to the 27 versions today. During indoor cycling class, I kept getting health alerts on my watch about high heart rate while stationary. Despite currently having the very same apple watch tracking my indoor cycling workout.
I’m not a particularly big fan of generative AI. I do not use and have never used it at any stage of the research, outlining, or writing process for any article I’ve ever written, except for the times when I’m testing it so I can write about it.
This is wild from a "tech" site. I used to read their articles fairly religiously, but this bent by their writers and commenters is really telling, and a signal to start looking elsewhere.
What does it tell you? It gives me much more confidence in their output tbh. Reading generated text is unpleasant; feels like mediated and averaged-out humanity.
Continuing the quote gives more context, which I agree with:
"The obviously AI-generated flyers that come home from school with my kid or that get circulated around neighborhood groups strike me as benign but deeply tacky; the kinds of AI-generated images that get passed around by politicians online don’t even have the benefit of being benign.
More than anything, I’m just tired of seeing it everywhere, tired of being on the lookout for it, tired of it polluting every stream of information I have access to. Wasting time actively trying to avoid auto-generated slop is now a daily fixture of my life."
Obviously, one should be able to entertain an idea without necessarily accepting it, and much like any tool that can be misused, just because some malign actor (or dumb actor) uses it "wrong" doesn't mean you should also not use it.
It costs money, but I've been enjoying my Pangram subscription for this. Saves me slop on the internet and confirms whether or not my colleagues' words are what i'm reading or not.
It's not to write the article. I would hope they don't do that; I wouldn't want to read it.
But I do want them using it to help them research, find interesting contrary views on a subject, gut-check assertions (how many weirdly wrong statements in articles would have been caught by feeding it to an LLM and asking it to question unfounded or incorrect claims?), check technical accuracy of things outside the writer's core domain, track interview transcripts, search/summarize across prior work, do data exploration of public/government reports. Etc. It's a very empowering tool for journalism!
Instead, it's become a religious issue that is more or less at the level of "one drop" theory.
"...Golden Gate needed a whopping 17GB more space on the M1 MacBook Air, thanks to a mandatory multi-gigabyte language model download that kicks in automatically the first time you connect a freshly restored Golden Gate Mac to the Internet."
This is the main thing stopping me from updating iOS/macOS. It's completely unacceptable to park a bunch of space on my devices right when that storage is at its most expensive it's ever been.
My phone is on iOS 26, and even with Apple Intelligence turned off, there's ~13GB made unusable. My phone ran out of space while recording a bike trip, and yet the model I have no use for remained.
I've found today after going to MacOS27 (I skipped 26 fully) that Chrome extensions don't load properly. They're super, super slow. I've found one or two other bug reports of this from older Dev builds but that's it. Bizarre. Time to flip back to Safari I suppose.
Will I get prompted to give Chrome permissions to the Local Network on every update? This is literally the one feature I'd like from Apple because I'm happy with everything else. The update looks cool, but nothing I actually want/need.
So happy they’ve finally added Ethernet status to the menu bar. It has always bugged me there wasn’t an easy way to quickly check if my Mac was using Ethernet or not
A few macOS betas ago, a bunch of sites started failing to play video for me in Safari. Disney+, Netflix, YouTube and some other sites will sit at a black screen for a few seconds and then give me an error. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes certain videos will reliably fail while others reliably work fine. I thought this was related to Safari's autoplay protections, but I tried giving permission to autoplay all videos and that doesn't seem to change anything. Not sure if that fits the definition of a Snow Leopard update. If so, Apple needs at least a few more Snow Leopard updates at this rate. I'd also like to see them fix the issue where Liquid Glass uses a downscaled background image even at the most transparent setting. (Except for Siri AI which they seem to have added a special exception for, exactly because the pre-downscaling is super ugly)
Hey sorry to be the debugging guy in the comments, but maybe your network issues could be related to iCloud relay? I’ve had similar issues
No. It wouldn't. Snow Leopard was two years in the making, and then took another few years to actually become the Snow Leopard people remember.
Fixing some transparency and re-drawing a few icons is not a Snow Leopard release.
Like, which features in this 150000-character blog post actually warrant the title of "Snow Leopard release"?
I think people are referring to the speed improvements touted by Apple https://www.newegg.com/insider/ios-27-performance-boost-ever...
I imagine the author saw this release as "macOS Tahoe but not sucky"
I liken it to Windows Vista and Windows 7. Although fundamentally similar operating systems under the hood, Windows 7 smoothed out Vista's kinks and brought forth additional polish.
When was the last time you felt excitement for a macOS release?
Me? Snow Leopard.
When I transitioned to Linux I rediscovered OS excitement. I'm on KDE Plasma now and every update has exciting features that serves my interests.
Mavericks maybe?
When Siracusa wrote the last review.
If only KDE actually paid attention to UX and maybe cared about the looks and consistency a bit more. I'm sorry for being blunt but their visual design people's have no taste...
There's little margins and whitespace and this bothered me like hell before making the switch. It's funny, now I kind of like it. A lot is happening too. The latest Plasma had a very high degree of polish IMO.
It's far more consistent than Windows 11, but you have to pick Qt/KDE software, not GTK/GNOME for that to be true. I always choose the more KDE native option.
Like a decade for me now. I don’t read or watch anything anymore. I just buy whatever the new version is when I need it and live with it. I yearn for something truly exciting, groundbreaking, and accessible (price) from Apple. iPod era was so dope.
Yesterday I managed to update a 2015 MacBookAir7,2 from El Capitan (last update Sep. 2015) to Sonoma (last update Aug 6th 2026). I was excited when it finally worked.
Thanks to the OpenCore Legacy Patcher who show that not supporting old devices is a choice made by Apple.
OCLP is excellent but it's all coming to an end for Intel Macs unfortunately. Even Homebrew just dropped the ball a few days ago (this is the final draw for me, I'll keep a Sequoia partition but my MBP2015 daily drives on NixOS + GNOME)
Whatever the last one you had to install with a CD/DVD was.
So Snow Leopard, as parent poster had said.
I've been pleasantly surprised with Golden Gate. It's fresh-looking, works well, got rid of a lot of the ugly flat stuff they did over the last few releases (pre-Tahoe), supports more hidpi modes that make my work machine better...
But honestly, I don't think the average person should feel excitement for an OS release; boring means it just works and they don't have to learn a bunch of new features and different ways of doing things.
I'm stuck trying to figure out what new stuff they could add. Sidecar was neat, but I never need it. I'm very happy on Cinnamon on Linux, which is probably less featured than KDE (haven't daily driven it to confirm), which just confirms I don't actually need or want user-facing new features. I need stability.
I think Apple realise this. There are no genuine new OS features to be added, so they just shuffle things around so that things are changing and thus seem fresh and hip. For anyone who cares about stability and doesn't want to relearn everything they shuffle around, this is nothing but a negative, but Apple et al. have no other levers to pull (well, there's the AI lever, but that's also generally not a positive in and of itself).
Maybe there are new OS features that could be useful, but creating and integrating them in a way that's actually helpful is just such an ordeal that nobody will do it.
A functioning window system would drastically enhance OSX productivity.
Window management (and indeed, desktop environments in general) are rather subjective I think. As someone who's been using Macs in some capacity since 1996 I'd be upset if macOS suddenly resembled a traditional Windows desktop, and the absence of Mac-like desktops on Linux (no, GNOME and elementary/Pantheon are not that) is one of the primary factors keeping me from switching.
Debian+KDE here. It's what I use to get away from OS excitement. I miss the 90's when nobody ever updated anything, and if they did it was on purpose and not something that happened behind your back.
For example, the other day Google "updated" the clock/alarm/timer app on Android with pointless and annoying changes. A clock app does not need an update, ever.
"But..." No! /usr/share/zoneinfo handles that. Stop it.
When are they gonna make "macOS South Central"?
At the rate we're going, it would be "macOS America"
All of my stuff updated to the 27 versions today. During indoor cycling class, I kept getting health alerts on my watch about high heart rate while stationary. Despite currently having the very same apple watch tracking my indoor cycling workout.
I guess Claude doesn’t take spinning classes
This is wild from a "tech" site. I used to read their articles fairly religiously, but this bent by their writers and commenters is really telling, and a signal to start looking elsewhere.
What does it tell you? It gives me much more confidence in their output tbh. Reading generated text is unpleasant; feels like mediated and averaged-out humanity.
There is a lot more to tech than gen AI…
Continuing the quote gives more context, which I agree with:
"The obviously AI-generated flyers that come home from school with my kid or that get circulated around neighborhood groups strike me as benign but deeply tacky; the kinds of AI-generated images that get passed around by politicians online don’t even have the benefit of being benign.
More than anything, I’m just tired of seeing it everywhere, tired of being on the lookout for it, tired of it polluting every stream of information I have access to. Wasting time actively trying to avoid auto-generated slop is now a daily fixture of my life."
Obviously, one should be able to entertain an idea without necessarily accepting it, and much like any tool that can be misused, just because some malign actor (or dumb actor) uses it "wrong" doesn't mean you should also not use it.
It costs money, but I've been enjoying my Pangram subscription for this. Saves me slop on the internet and confirms whether or not my colleagues' words are what i'm reading or not.
wait so not using GenAI makes you persona non grata in "tech" now?
nobody tell my boss
It is a tool in a tool box. If a technician avoided a tool outright, I would (and do) question their biases.
Every technician or craftsman develops some strong opinions about which tools are good tools and which tools are bad tools.
Why? You can type a prompt into the robots if you want their take. Where are you suppose to find out what a human thinks?
It's not to write the article. I would hope they don't do that; I wouldn't want to read it.
But I do want them using it to help them research, find interesting contrary views on a subject, gut-check assertions (how many weirdly wrong statements in articles would have been caught by feeding it to an LLM and asking it to question unfounded or incorrect claims?), check technical accuracy of things outside the writer's core domain, track interview transcripts, search/summarize across prior work, do data exploration of public/government reports. Etc. It's a very empowering tool for journalism!
Instead, it's become a religious issue that is more or less at the level of "one drop" theory.
"...Golden Gate needed a whopping 17GB more space on the M1 MacBook Air, thanks to a mandatory multi-gigabyte language model download that kicks in automatically the first time you connect a freshly restored Golden Gate Mac to the Internet."
This is the main thing stopping me from updating iOS/macOS. It's completely unacceptable to park a bunch of space on my devices right when that storage is at its most expensive it's ever been.
My phone is on iOS 26, and even with Apple Intelligence turned off, there's ~13GB made unusable. My phone ran out of space while recording a bike trip, and yet the model I have no use for remained.
Apple seems to be doing a lot better job at integrating LLMs into OS, than Microsoft.
For me, macOS 27 was great for the first 3 betas, then it became horrible. And the release version still has some weird bugs, even iOS 27.
It's as if their Claude credits ran out halfway through
I've found today after going to MacOS27 (I skipped 26 fully) that Chrome extensions don't load properly. They're super, super slow. I've found one or two other bug reports of this from older Dev builds but that's it. Bizarre. Time to flip back to Safari I suppose.
Will I get prompted to give Chrome permissions to the Local Network on every update? This is literally the one feature I'd like from Apple because I'm happy with everything else. The update looks cool, but nothing I actually want/need.
how to disable gen ai features
https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-250012366
it used to be one toggle
Read the post. It doesn't look possible. Motives unknown.
So happy they’ve finally added Ethernet status to the menu bar. It has always bugged me there wasn’t an easy way to quickly check if my Mac was using Ethernet or not
My macbook only has about 3GB of spare disk space currently, so I guess this isn't for me
If you don't want your mbp to run like garbage, then don't update to the newest version of obsolescenceOS.
Not even the version explicitly designed to run better?
[delayed]
hm, I remember the time the arstechnica macOS reviews were the gold standard. It's not bad but I'm missing more in deep information about improvements
The details here complement the arstechnica article in my opinion:
https://www.macstories.net/stories/macos-27-the-macstories-r...
Does it fix the hideous floating sidebar UI?