@siracusa What do you think Photos for macOS is doing when it's "Preparing for cleanup..." when you want to do photo cleanup? Every time.

Initially it quite surprisingly had to download some component the first time cleanup was used, now it just "prepares" for about 10 seconds - and this is on a Mac Studio M1 Max with 32GB RAM.

#ATPPodcast #macOS #Mac

I think people, when assessing the power of the Apple A18 Pro phone chip being used at the heart of the new MacBook Neo, should remember this graph from AnandTech, posted at the time of the Apple M1's debut.

Note the performance trajectory of Intel's top tier consumer CPUs vs. that of Apple's A-series phone chips. In 2020, the Apple A14 Bionic SoC in the iPhone 12 outperformed, in single-core performance, Intel's i9-10900K CPU. That's right. This performance trajectory of Apple's phone chips vs. Intel's mainline CPUs was a major factor in Apple deciding to start rolling their own M-series CPUs for the Mac. (And the M1 grew out of the same A14 SoC shown here.)

This puts into question just how apt a descriptor of performance the term "phone chip" really is, I think.

cc @siracusa

#Apple #AppleSilicon #Mac #macOS #MacBookNeo #A18 #A18Pro #iPhone #CPU #GPU #cellphone #tech #technews #performance #Intel #SoC #AppleNews #technology #ATPPodcast

@siracusa Why are you guys saying "naked robotic" all of a sudden? Where does this come from?

#ATPpodcast

@siracusa I still have a few of my iPod Socks. They wear pretty well; I only had to darn a couple of 'em!

#ATPpodcast #iPod #iPhone #Apple #iPodSocks #vintageApple #iPhonePocket #nostalgia #photo

Could this be the new slider control coming in Liquid Glass in macOS 26.2?? Only time will tell...

https://docs.swmansion.com/TypeGPU/examples/#example=rendering--jelly-slider

#Mac #macOS #LiquidGlass #macOS26 #macOSTahoe #Tahoe #ATPpodcast cc @siracusa

After listening to a summer of reporting on the progressive betas of Apple's 2025 operating systems ( thanks #ATPpodcast ), I delayed installing macOS 26 Tahoe to give it some time for a few post-launch tweaks.

Last night I finally installed it on my Mac Studio, and I must say that so much of the interface changes feel like an awkward and ill-conceived jump back to the early days of the Aqua aesthetic of the early 2000s. Well, let me rephrase that -- it feels like looking back at the early days of Aqua from the perspective of today, where the dramatic aspects of it seem rather gaudy or garish in retrospect.

The amount of workspace lost to the enormous rounding radius of so many of the interface rectangles and to the compounding margins and padding (to use web terms) on these floating islands of controls -- that need not be floating islands at all -- is jarring to me still, after hours of use, here.

And, in grabbing a screenshot for the Aqua example ( thanks @512pixels ), I was treated to a Safari window that I assumed had glitched / broken, but -- and I'm not positive -- I don't ..think.. it's a glitch, but the intended behavior of the interface. (Shot attached, there are three tabs in that window, apparently.)

From a UX/UI perspective, macOS seems basically wrecked. Updates from @siracusa tell me that the interface was worse in early betas, and so I have hope that things will continue to evolve back out from the bizarre.

I have scarcely seen a better example of form over function -- but to what victory? macOS Tahoe's form looks very wrong to my eyes.

( As it happens, I have installed iPadOS 26 on my iPad Pro and don't find its interface as jarring and it feels less "broken." I still hold off installing it on my iPhone, though I do get a text every few days from my daughter in college who has installed it on her phone and writes to express her confusion and frustration with it. )

#Apple #Mac #macOS #macOSTahoe #Tahoe #OSX #OS #liquidglass #UXUI #interface #aesthetic #operatingsystem #fail #screenshot #beta #computers #tech #technews #opinion #iOS #iPadOS

@siracusa My daughter just texted me from her dorm room:

"This new iPhone update is .. weird -- it's all messed up.

Why is it like this?"

#Apple #LiquidGlass #iOS26 #ATPpodcast