At first sight, it might appear that boot volume groups and overall disk layout in Ventura are exactly the same as those in Big Sur and Monterey. This article shows their similarity, and how they differ significantly.
Kbase Article of the Week: What’s New in the Updates for macOS Ventura ⇢
macOS Ventura makes the things you do most on Mac even better, with big updates to the apps you use everyday, including Mail, Messages, and Safari. You can use your iPhone as a webcam for your Mac with Continuity Camera. There’s also an entirely new way to automatically organize your windows with Stage Manager. And when you upgrade, you get the latest security and privacy protections for your Mac.
macOS Ventura Launched
A very happy macOS Ventura Day to all who celebrate. If you have a Mac from 2016 or older, you are unfortunately not invited to the party.
While I did not write a review, a couple of my buddies have:
On the next episode of Mac Power Users, David and I will be getting into the weeds on this release of macOS.
Lastly, I have updated my macOS Screenshot Library with images of Ventura — including its new mostly-bad System Settings application. You can explore those images over on this page, and if you want 6K versions of Ventura’s wallpaper, I’ve got you covered there as well:
Tech Haiku #4: A Review of Stage Manager
a new iPad mode
moving windows overlap
until it crashes
For a lot more detail, go read Viticci’s article on the topic.
The Tale of Two iPads
Reviews of the M2 iPad Pro and the 10th-generation iPad are out.
Here’s Federico Viticci:
These are relatively easy iPads to review with a fairly straightforward narrative around them. The new iPad Pro is an iterative update that shows us Apple has seemingly hit a plateau in terms of innovation with this particular design – save for one feature that truly surprised me. The new base model iPad is a massive update compared to its predecessor, adding an all-new, iPad Pro-inspired design and a brand new accessory – the Magic Keyboard Folio – that has turned out to be one of my favorite accessories Apple has launched in recent years. I’ve had a ton of fun playing around and working with the new iPad over the weekend; if you’re in the market for an 11″ tablet, you shouldn’t sleep on this one.
It’s a real shame that the Magic Keyboard Folio is only available for this iPad. It’s also a shame that the best colors we’ve ever seen on an iPad are on the base model:
Over on Six Colors, Jason Snell wrote about this iPad’s Apple Pencil support in his review:
Unfortunately, if you’re a fan of the Apple Pencil, I don’t think I can really recommend this iPad. The 10th-generation iPad only supports the first-generation Apple Pencil, which was supplanted four years ago by the Apple Pencil 2. Since it charges via Lightning, and this iPad doesn’t have a Lightning port, Apple has ginned up an awkward $9 adapter that lets you charge the Pencil via a USB-C cable. It’s small and will be easy to lose, and if your Pencil runs out of battery when it’s not around, you’re mostly out of luck. (Though if you’ve got an iPhone, you can plug it into that, and it’ll suck some power and charge itself back up.)
This is a ridiculous situation, but Apple has painted itself into a corner thanks to its design decisions with the two Pencil models and its choice not to bite the bullet and add Pencil 2 compatibility on this iPad. If you don’t need pressure sensitivity in your stylus, consider using the $70 Logitech Crayon, which is compatible with most modern iPad models and charges via USB-C.
At the Verge, Dan Seifert opens his review with a discussion of price:
At its core, this iPad is an excellent tablet with fast performance, reliable battery life, and a vast library of optimized apps to make use of its large touchscreen.
But along with those upgrades comes a higher price: the 10th-gen iPad starts at $449, $120 more than the previous model, and can be kitted out to over $1,000 with storage, cellular, and accessory upgrades. This is for the entry-level iPad with no qualifier after its name, the one that you buy for casual use, kids, schoolwork, travel, and content consumption — it’s not really a device to replace your laptop with.
Sponsor: MarsEdit ⇢
MarsEdit 4 is a native Mac interface to WordPress and other blogging systems that focuses on one thing: blogging! As WordPress gets increasingly complicated with an emphasis on BLOCKS and whole-site design, MarsEdit sticks to the classic idea that:
- There would be an editor.
- You could write in it.
- You could publish it to your blog.
If you’re annoyed by the increasing complexity of WordPress’s browser-based editor, download MarsEdit and give it a try. It’s the “Cadillac” of classic editors. You’ll see why many of the best bloggers in the Apple ecosystem rely on MarsEdit’s native, reliable, intuitive Mac interface.
Mac Power Users #663: HomeKit Check-In ⇢
With Matter on the horizon, there has never been a better time to get into home automation. Stephen and David talk about how their HomeKit setups have evolved over time and what they hope Apple and others can add to the smart home in the future.
On More Power Users, we tried to sort through last week’s iPad news.
Aperture Script Still Included as Template in Script Editor
Script Editor, the built-in macOS app for creating and dealing with AppleScript and JavaScript automation, comes with a handful of example templates, including this gem for importing files into Aperture:
Aperture was discontinued some eight years ago, but this template is still included in the version of Script Editor bundled with macOS Ventura.
Bono, on ‘Songs of Innocence’ Being Given to All iTunes Customers ⇢
The Guardian has an excerpt from Bono’s memoir, and the excerpt includes a bit on the time Apple and U2 added the band’s newest album to everyone’s iTunes music libraries:
If just getting our music to people who like our music was the idea, that was a good idea. But if the idea was getting our music to people who might not have had a remote interest in our music, maybe there might be some pushback. But what was the worst that could happen? It would be like junk mail. Wouldn’t it? Like taking our bottle of milk and leaving it on the doorstep of every house in the neighbourhood.
Not. Quite. True.
On 9 September 2014, we didn’t just put our bottle of milk at the door but in every fridge in every house in town. In some cases we poured it on to the good people’s cornflakes. And some people like to pour their own milk. And others are lactose intolerant.
I take full responsibility. Not Guy O, not Edge, not Adam, not Larry, not Tim Cook, not Eddy Cue. I’d thought if we could just put our music within reach of people, they might choose to reach out toward it. Not quite. As one social media wisecracker put it, “Woke up this morning to find Bono in my kitchen, drinking my coffee, wearing my dressing gown, reading my paper.” Or, less kind, “The free U2 album is overpriced.” Mea culpa.
[…]
For all the custard pies it brought Apple – who swiftly provided a way to delete the album – Tim Cook never blinked. “You talked us into an experiment,” he said. “We ran with it. It may not have worked, but we have to experiment, because the music business in its present form is not working for everyone.”
The Gateway Astro ⇢
I have never come across this wild all-in-one from 1999 before, but … wow.
Evans Hankey Leaving Apple ⇢
Evans Hankey has been in charge of Apple’s hardware design for three years, but she is now leaving the company according to a new report from Mark Gurman:
The departure was announced inside the Cupertino, California-based technology giant this week, with Hankey telling colleagues that she will remain at Apple for the next six months. The company hasn’t named a replacement. Hankey oversees dozens of industrial designers.
Her pending exit marks the first time that Apple will be without a de facto design chief since Apple co-founder Steve Jobs retook control of the company in the late 1990s and appointed Ive to the job. Richard Howarth, a key designer on both Ive and Hankey’s teams, briefly held the role of head of industrial design, reporting to Ive, between 2015 and 2017.
“Apple’s design team brings together expert creatives from around the world and across many disciplines to imagine products that are undeniably Apple,” a spokesman said in a statement. “The senior design team has strong leaders with decades of experience. Evans plans to stay on as we work through the transition, and we’d like to thank her for her leadership and contributions.”
With the timelines and collaboration at Apple, it’s always a bit tricky to place responsibility for a decision on any one person, but for whatever input Hankey had in the design of the Apple silicon Mac line up, I’m thankful for.
Musk Reportedly Wants to Layoff 75% of Twitter Staff ⇢
Taylor Hatmaker at TechCrunch, writing about a pretty tough story:
Musk has previously gestured at plans for layoffs if he were to buy Twitter, but those cuts could go even deeper than previously imagined.
According to a new report from the Washington Post, Musk plans to purge 75% of Twitter’s workforce, or around 5,600 employees. If Musk’s vision for a much leaner platform comes to fruition, Twitter would be forced to operate with a sliver of its current staff.
Between broader economic factors and ongoing criticisms that Twitter has failed to deliver on its promise (at least as far as investors are concerned), Twitter was always going to trim its workforce. But cutting the staff down by three quarters isn’t what most people had in mind. The Post noted that Twitter already planned to cut around a quarter of its workforce — but leaving a quarter of the workforce is a different situation altogether.
I know people who have already resigned from Twitter over the whole Musk situation, but I didn’t think this sort of thing was going to be in the cards.