I never really understood the appeal of tiling window managers. I've gotten used to having overlapping windows with appropriate parts peek out out behind others. e.g. tail of a log behind an editor running a program, and I can bring it to the foreground to see older lines and/or scroll. To do the same with a tiling manager, I would zoom the logging pane. I suppose I just prefer less layout changes. Same for Slack, I have just enough peeping out to know there's some messages but I can't see the message text so I can ignore them until I'm ready.
Are there situations that make more sense to use a tiling manager like on larger (where all the tiles are usable) or smaller screens (where full expansion makes sense)?
For me it was a couple of X11 features not often found on mac or windows that made me think about the desktop in a desktop environment and what I want out of my window manager. My timeline sort of goes as follows.
1. focus follows mouse, the window you are pointing at gets the focus. This feels very strange at first. but pulls a surprising amount of friction out of working with multiple apps. However you have to pair this with.
2. don't raise on focus. this let you work on a lower window. to raise you click on a specific part of the window, usually the title bar. if you don't have this focus follows mouse is terrible. this lets you have the main window(usually the documentation or reference) open on top while you type away on the lower window.
3. At this point I heard of i3 and it made perfect sense to me. I have never said "boy I sure am glad this window is half covered up" I ether want one app full screen, two apps side by side(reference and work) or many small apps(terminals). why not just have the window manager enforce this instead of me fiddling with windows. these days I use mainly use spectrwm because it fills that perfect middle ground between too sparse(dwm) and too featured(i3).
That said, for my day to day operations(I sys-admin, so lots of terminals) it works great. however there are many apps that do not play well. for example, I recently set up a linux box for steam games and steam was not happy with i3(all menus were separate windows) this is probably fixable but I just went with a normal wm. And when I do actual work on it I am reminded why I like tiling wm's as I find myself shuffling windows all the time.
Closing thoughts, an example of a tiling wm internal to an app is blender, even before I started using tiling wm's I thought blender had a very good ui for getting work done, much better than the mdi type apps that were common at the time. so just imagine your whole desktop working that way. And tabs, really tabbed interfaces should be a function of your window manager not the app, but that ship has sailed and I don't think there is any way to fix it now.
I generally agree with you. I use my Mac with most of the windows overlapped most of the time. But occasionally I need them side-by-side to do some work. Typically referencing documents or code. Fortunately the introduction of this looks to just be an optional feature rather than a dictated "way things are".
An overlapped/stacked interface is fine a lot of the time, but the flexibility is important.
What really drives me crazy is the 100% tiled-interface. I feel like something important is just below the tiles, but I can't see it.
I used to use Slate[0] to manage my windows but have since switched to Raycast since it was a more enjoyable experience.
I have a 49" ultrawide so it's super useful to have precise control over where a window goes. I also use 3 desktops (as Apple calls them) and have different windows sizes depending on what I'm doing. Having overlapping windows would just be super annoying now!
I don't know how one can't see the appeal. Once I installed Rectangle on macOS I can quickly put windows side-by-side with a couple of keystrokes, and change which windows I want side-by-side extremely quickly
Fiddling with the mouse to resize windows manually or having windows overlapping and covering up information on each other is not really a great way to interface with them. Maybe it's helpful to locate the windows and bring them into focus, but once they're in focus and in use, I want to be maximizing their screen real estate and making sure they're 100% readable.
And, really, it's something the OS should have had at the very least as an optional feature for over a decade now. Windows introduced this feature in Windows 7. It's been a sore spot of a missing feature and it's especially detracting for the Windows users that Apple wants to have switch over to the Mac platform.
3x 27" monitors provides lots of space for multiple usable windows it helps to also be able to switch workspaces per monitor so you switch monitors with a hotkey rather than switching windows.
Compared to peek and switch it provides more usable space since windows can be maximized without leaving space for another window to peek out, less manual arrangement since Windows need not be carefully arranged. Also I normally switch because I want to do another task or in resource to a notification.
That said however we choose to analyze it it's in part subjective matter of taste. There is no singular correct answer.
I have a 55” 4k television that wasn’t being used, and as a joke plugged it into my Mac Mini, and with a tiling window manager it’s functionally 4 decent sized FHD monitors at once. I have left it plugged in much longer than I thought I would, it’s really much more functional than I’d imagined. I still probably prefer a regular 1440p display, for most tasks.
Now so just need a clipboard history manager, a way to make cmd+tab behave like Windows alt+tab, a way to mute the mic in the status bar, and a different setting for the trackpad/mouse wheel direction, and I won’t need to install random apps for basic features anymore.
don't forget per-app volume control, linear scroll wheel speed, some reasonable way to manage menu bar icons and ensure all can actually be accesses and used, a way to prevent the system from going to sleep (the built-in `caffeinate` command hasn't worked for years!), and searching through open windows by typing!
Oh man, I couldn't live without Alfred's clipboard manager [paid] feature. I started using Alfred eons ago, bought their Powerpack, and haven't looked back since. The ability to resurface text or images I copied up to 3 months ago has saved my bacon too many times to remember.
Nailed it. It's honestly criminal and something I consider UX terrorism the way macOS lacks this basic functionality when even something like ChromeOS ships these by default. Wonderful hardware, but boy is the OS rough 20+ years later.
You still haven't seen that day, have you? macOS still offers only a floating window manager, now with some window snapping capabilities. But there is no mode or window manager built into macOS where new windows are arranged in tiles spanning the whole screen by default.
Exactly, by the description of it on the announcement, this is not "tiling window management" as we're used in Linux, this is just "Window Snaping" that been available on Windows and Linux for what, a decade now?
I really hope there is a "automatic tiling" option, otherwise this is just mouse support for the current "Move Window"/"Tile Window" options already available on the OS (and easily bindable via custom shortcuts).
I wonder if they made horizontal 50/50 split possible. It is so freaking odd they decided to implement vertical 50/50, but flipping the variables and making a horizontal 50/50 is a no-no. Like no-one at Apple ever used a portrait orientation monitor.
I'm honestly surprised and disappointed that all they appear to have done is Sherlock Rectangle.
Stage Manager was the most interesting and useful thing to happen to window management in over a decade, and I was really hoping we'd see Apple do more with it. Its dynamic nature (windows don't always live in just a single context!) solved a lot of problems inherent in Spaces, and yet there's still plenty of room to build on its foundation.
I was hoping we'd at least see the window snapping behavior ported over from iPadOS. It's a really well-thought-out way to simplify window resizing and overlapping, and it would go a long way on MacOS (perhaps with a toggle in Control Center for those edge cases where you actually want pixel precision). Maybe in MacOS 16...
I disabled Stage Manager after trying it out for a week or so. How the hell does that thing make any sense? Really, this is a legit question. How is that thing useful?
> Stage Manager was the most interesting and useful thing to happen to window management in over a decade
… really? I’ve tried to use it a few times but it’s just… not good. Not very intuitive, full of idiosyncrasies, and it doesn’t solve the basic "I want to snap 2 windows side by side" problem. Maybe it’s more interesting on iPad?
I’m glad they finally bring window snapping to Mac.
TBH, we still need to see how it integrates with the keyboard.
Ever since I've been using a Mac since Nov. 2023 that's been one of the things that I've battled with, and I've assigned a heck tons of shortcuts to make that happen.
My corp desktop is an iMac Pro (2018). For a long time, it was the best way to get a Retina-quality desktop without getting into VFX budgets. It was also in that weird period in Apple's product calendar when the one-and-done trash can was obsolete, but its replacement hadn't been released. Work usually issues whatever panels they can buy in bulk from overseas, but for a magical window, we could get a nice screen with no shenanigans by ordering an iMac Pro.
My heart dropped for a second when I saw Sequoia only supports iMacs from 2019, until I saw it supports iMac Pros from 2017. I wonder how much longer I have before Apple stops releasing updates, and corp IT decides the iMac Pro is now e-waste.
It's really unfortunate that they don't do Target Display Mode anymore. These iMacs have panels that are still top-of-the-line 6 years later. (A Studio Display is basically an iMac Pro with Apple Silicon in Target Display Mode.) I wonder if there will be a Linux distribution to convert these things into monitors when they go obsolete.
A few different people have figured out how to convert these panels into stand-alone displays. It's a pity that it would be impractical to make a small business out of this.
I've done this and it's amazing-it's the only monitor that I can use for my workstation (Linux/Windows) and my laptop (macOS) because even the (relatively) cheap LG UltraFine monitors don't work with the Nvidia GPU on my workstation.
I've got so much perfectly-working e-waste from Apple. It's so sad. I'm on a Late 2014 Mac mini that's stuck on Monterey macOS 12 and a Late 2014 retina iMac that's stuck on Big Sur macOS 11(!!) An iPhone7 that's stuck on iOS15. The display on that iMac is still IMO second to none. These computers do everything I need, yet their software support is stuck back in time. And 3rd party developers are terrible about supporting previous version of macOS. They alway seem to assume you are running the latest and greatest, and deliberately remove support for earlier OSs.
Hell, I have an O.G. iPad 1 that still works perfectly as it did the day I bought it, but most of the built-in software no longer works, and the App Store is basically empty. What a sad state of affairs.
One thing I can tell you though is that Intel has EOL’ed the chip in the iMac Pro. Meaning no more security support for the chip.
So I’m not sure the iMac Pro will get the next update. Though possible Apple has found a way to mitigate any security issues.
This is the best article I found on the topic. Note also that once the iMac Pro is out of support, it’s os will still get security updates for two years past that.
So with this announcement today we are guaranteed security support until Oct 2027 or so.
I own an iMac Pro and was pleasantly surprised today. Had been concerned the Intel EOL might end things.
Unfortunately, I don't think our IT dept will support an old OS if a newer one is available; even if the old one gets security patches and the new one doesn't work on some machines.
I wonder how the "seamlessly drag and drop files, photos, and videos between your iPhone and Mac" will work. Right now, if you just want to grab the raw files of your photos and videos and not deal with the Photos app, your best bet is Image Capture, a 20+ year old seemingly unmaintained program that seems to glitch out disturbingly frequently. I really hope they can introduce something that seamlessly lets you drag photos off your phone and into your filesystem, just in the Finder.
I frequently just airdrop stuff between my iphone and mac, that's the best thing coming from android, that and pasting text between devices, eg iban, passwords, etc.
AirDrop is great in theory, but in practice 80% of the time I try to send a photo to my partner using AirDrop, it simply fails to bring up a notification on her devices. In my experience, Apple often delivers well much of the time, but will allow mysterious bugs like this to pervade a feature for years without finding a fix despite much discussion in their customer forums. I wish they did a better job of fixing such problems.
I want the source list to be the Finder on my Mac, not "All Photos" on the iPhone. I frequently have 2000+ photos to bring over at once; I hate dragging through all of them to select them, with one mis-touch resetting the selection. I've also found AirDrop to be very unreliable at that scale (does it even work? I've never used it for more than ~a dozen items), and want reliable file transfer functionality that can pick up where it left off if it gets interrupted.
It's already been working for quite some time: shared clipboard on iOS and macOS has supported photos and videos since more than 2 years ago. I'd expect drag-and-drop works the same way.
Like I mentioned in another comment, I've got 2000+ photos to dump onto an external hard drive (Samba share technically, but I can always move from local disk to SMB easily). I'm not going to cut & paste 2000 photos individually. Hell, I don't even want to select 2000 photos for a batch operation.
What do you mean from Android to Windows? How exactly can that happen? I have an android phone in my hand now and a windows desktop in front, and no clue how to even begin this drag and drop operation. Where would I even start dragging in Android?
Universal Access (Control? Whatever it's called) between multiple Macs not only allows sharing input methods but also dragging files back and forth, and works pretty seamlessly. I imagine the same mechanism is at work here.
iMazing might be worth checking out, for photo and video import/export.
It also has a Quick Transfer feature so you just drag and drop a file to your target device, and iMazing gives you a choice of apps to send the file to. It's similar to AirDrop but also works for Windows and seems a bit faster and more stable.
Drag and dropping photos and other files from iPhone (plugged via USB) works well on Linux in the file browser. Too bad it seems Apple can’t figure it out on their own OS, though maybe they have now.
Why not use the current, up-to-date default app for photo import that has been there since 2002 to literally serve this purpose? Yes it has a lot of extra functionality, but that doesn’t mean you have to use it. You can get originals from Photos and be done with it…
Based on what? AirPlay mirroring is great today, and this is that with data in the other direction. Current Wifi is perfectly capable of bidirectional voice and video. Adding touch/key events is incremental.
Apple would not be releasing iPhone mirroring if the latency were terrible. If they had a low bar for latency, they’d have released iPhone mirroring ten years ago. Apple's Human Interface Guidelines do not specify an exact maximum number of milliseconds for interface latency. However, they emphasize the importance of responsiveness and recommend that any user interface should feel instantaneous and fluid to create a positive user experience. The general goal is to keep latency as low as possible to ensure interactions feel immediate and natural.
I'd like to use it for watching Netflix/Hulu/etc on a plane on a larger screen than my phone without being forced to carry an iPad.
I really wish Apple would just force companies to enable their iPhone/iPad apps on Apple Silicon. But if I could display a video from my phone onto my 15" laptop screen, that would be a nearly as nice.
You can already AirPlay from an iOS device to a Mac– doing this on a plane is a bit trickier because of the networking setup though. I think I have managed to successfully do it once by either
1. doing some sort of tethering/creating a local wifi network on my Mac
2. connecting both devices to the in flight wifi
I use AirPlay to my Mac (and external monitors) even at home since I can watch the 4K feed from apps, which isn't available for some services if you use the web browser (cough HBO cough),
This is occasionally quite useful. A few weeks ago, my phone's display went haywire, and the only way I could operate it to secure a backup was through the somewhat hidden mirroring functionality via QuickTime screen recording.
The only use case for iPhone Mirroring I can think of is online shopping, when I'm trying to finalize transaction on my Mac, but then realize that I have to login to my banking app to confirm payment, and my iPhone is in another room... I guess you can call that "an emergency".
And of course, there are all those MFA apps which I need for work...
I’m fully expecting this to just be a ported version of the Vision Pro’s feature that allows a Virtual Desktop of your Mac. In that context, it seemed to have extremely low latency.
I hate the notification centre on macOS. Don't see why I need to have notifications appear both on my iPhone and Mac, it's just an annoyance. I'd rather have the notification centre widgets (weather, clock, calendar, etc) always appear without notifications.
(Also, I miss the old widget Dashboard from old versions of macOS. Wish they'd bring that back with the new widgets tech).
> I'd rather have the notification centre widgets (weather, clock, calendar, etc) always appear without notifications.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding you, but did you know you can pin widgets to your desktop in Sonoma? They don’t have to be tucked away in the Notification Center anymore; the entire bottom half of my second monitor is a big widget dashboard.
That does sound like an improvement: in combination with the "Show Desktop" keyboard shortcut it will give quicker access to widgets than going through the clunky notification centre. And it will mean the widgets stay in one place and don't move around because some tiresome notifications got piled up above it.
However, it still doesn't sound as good as the old Dashboard, where widgets effectively got their own desktop (available for quick access at any time with a single keypress or touchpad gesture). This would also be more consistent with iOS, where you can just swipe to the left-most home screen to see a dashboard of widgets.
I like to maintain a "clean desktop" look so not sure if I love the idea of cluttering it up with widgets, but I'll give it a try!
Not a huge fan either – mainly because it’s hard to interact with it purely via the keyboard.
Depending on the implementation, I am however looking forward to this. I need to use some systems that only provide 2FA via a mobile app (i.e. Push OTP), and having to reach for my phone during work hours is pretty bad for my productivity and flow.
(I really prefer TOTP, which I can just let 1Password handle…)
Should have called it Sherlock as they seem to be Sherlocking a lot of apps. For instance I only use Fantastical because I can see my reminders with my events, I assume many people will also switch from a paid password manager to this as well.
I'm guessing (and Apple is probably betting) that far more new users of Passwords will be switching from not having used a password manager at all, not switching from a different password manager. I pay for Bitwarden, and will probably continue doing so because I can't be bothered to switch.
Math Notes certainly appears to be moving into Soulver/Numi territory. I'm a bit surprised by this one as while I personally love Soulver I didn't know how appealing it would be to Apple's overall user base.
Isn't the Passwords app essentially just existing features of the OSes extracted into an app? Or does it add new capabilities as well (other than obviously the Windows app)?
I don’t see myself switching from 1password simply because I don’t think Apple passwords autofill will work natively with non-safari browsers or Linux, both of which I also use. Also, I find the handy 1password mini source pretty convenient.
Other browsers could add support for the native macOS password autofill apis (introduced back in 2020 in macOS Big Sur). So far both Chrome[1] and Firefox[2] have refused to add support.
I haven't determined yet whether the new Passwords app will support my killer feature for 1Password: non-password-stuff.
I keep family members' social security numbers, security questions and answers, passport numbers, etc in there, and I don't want to split that data between a passwords app & secure notes.
It already works for Chrome. Apple has an official extension. However, it’s a bit annoying since you need to authenticate each new browser session with MFA
Can you use an arbitrary account in the new password app ?
The screenshots had no indication of it, and it doesn't seem to have a web counterpart.
One of the major PITA for keychain was the association with your logged in AppleID. If it 's still that way, I don't see a real appeal for people who already went their way to pay for a full-fledge product.
Imagine killing your phone and asking a nearby friend to borrow theirs to quickly cancel an appointment to give you time to deal with it. That's the kind of situation that should be gracefully handled by a password manager service.
Honestly, I support it. I got burnt by Tijme Gommers selling Raivo to someone shady and getting all my passwords locked behind a subscription (and subsequently lost). I don't want to have to check once a day to see if my TOTP app has been sold to some guy in Morocco and my passwords monetised.
It is not illegal to push your own products by bundling them with other products. Both MacOS and Windows have dozens or hundreds of their own bundled products.
That can result in anti-trust action if you have a monopoly, which isn't true for Apple in the U.S. The EU has different rules which I don't pretend to understand.
> Watson became very popular, and stayed that way right until Apple released Mac OS X 10.2 with Sherlock 3. In that release, Apple added just about everything Watson could do to Sherlock's own interface.
I'm very productive in Windows, but Microsoft's recent behavior (jamming Windows full of Edge dark patterns and ads) and the improvement of window management in macOS tempts me to give it another try.
I've used Windows solely for gaming and MacOS solely for MacOS/iOS development (work).
But now...
- Windows is full of AI/Adware bloat with more getting added every few months
- Linux's gaming/nvivia support has come such a long way that in some games it's beating Windows in some benchmarks now
- Apple's app store policies over the last 10 years have caused so many issues that our company is switching everything to webapps.
So I'll probably be switching from Windows+MacOS+Linux this year to just Linux next year.
Thinking of using the KDE or Cosmic desktop environments for personal computer and NixOS for development computer (just so I can test/rollback changes, and if the computer ever dies I can be up and running again in under an hour if I need to meet a deadline).
I know your situation very well, I still develop a lot on Windows, but my main computer is a Mac. I find the hardware amazing, and the software a joy to use.
Windows 11 is behaving more and more like the viruses and adwares I spent so many years defending against.
Windows with multiple displays makes me tear my hair out, no matter what you do to the settings. I try to use Playnite on my TV in extended display mode and it is the most maddening thing.
Windows 11 can’t even move a window in “overview mode” from one screen to another. Something single-men projects trivially do. It is absolutely useless, I rather use Gnome than that.
A cool tidbit shown in one of the screenshots is that Apple Pay will be unlocked to other browsers. It is not clear whether they will need to be running WebKit or not for this to work, but looking forward to support in Orion.
Given that all relevant browsers on macOS either bring their own WebKit build or run another engine, system-WebKit only would be close to false advertising, so I really hope it's not.
I'm really looking forward to this – big fan of Apple Pay, but I'm not switching to Safari and rebuilding my shopping cart for non-logged-in purchases, and that's where it's arguably most useful.
Readit News
Are there situations that make more sense to use a tiling manager like on larger (where all the tiles are usable) or smaller screens (where full expansion makes sense)?
1. focus follows mouse, the window you are pointing at gets the focus. This feels very strange at first. but pulls a surprising amount of friction out of working with multiple apps. However you have to pair this with.
2. don't raise on focus. this let you work on a lower window. to raise you click on a specific part of the window, usually the title bar. if you don't have this focus follows mouse is terrible. this lets you have the main window(usually the documentation or reference) open on top while you type away on the lower window.
3. At this point I heard of i3 and it made perfect sense to me. I have never said "boy I sure am glad this window is half covered up" I ether want one app full screen, two apps side by side(reference and work) or many small apps(terminals). why not just have the window manager enforce this instead of me fiddling with windows. these days I use mainly use spectrwm because it fills that perfect middle ground between too sparse(dwm) and too featured(i3).
That said, for my day to day operations(I sys-admin, so lots of terminals) it works great. however there are many apps that do not play well. for example, I recently set up a linux box for steam games and steam was not happy with i3(all menus were separate windows) this is probably fixable but I just went with a normal wm. And when I do actual work on it I am reminded why I like tiling wm's as I find myself shuffling windows all the time.
Closing thoughts, an example of a tiling wm internal to an app is blender, even before I started using tiling wm's I thought blender had a very good ui for getting work done, much better than the mdi type apps that were common at the time. so just imagine your whole desktop working that way. And tabs, really tabbed interfaces should be a function of your window manager not the app, but that ship has sailed and I don't think there is any way to fix it now.
An overlapped/stacked interface is fine a lot of the time, but the flexibility is important.
What really drives me crazy is the 100% tiled-interface. I feel like something important is just below the tiles, but I can't see it.
I have a 49" ultrawide so it's super useful to have precise control over where a window goes. I also use 3 desktops (as Apple calls them) and have different windows sizes depending on what I'm doing. Having overlapping windows would just be super annoying now!
[0] https://github.com/jigish/slate
Fiddling with the mouse to resize windows manually or having windows overlapping and covering up information on each other is not really a great way to interface with them. Maybe it's helpful to locate the windows and bring them into focus, but once they're in focus and in use, I want to be maximizing their screen real estate and making sure they're 100% readable.
And, really, it's something the OS should have had at the very least as an optional feature for over a decade now. Windows introduced this feature in Windows 7. It's been a sore spot of a missing feature and it's especially detracting for the Windows users that Apple wants to have switch over to the Mac platform.
Compared to peek and switch it provides more usable space since windows can be maximized without leaving space for another window to peek out, less manual arrangement since Windows need not be carefully arranged. Also I normally switch because I want to do another task or in resource to a notification.
That said however we choose to analyze it it's in part subjective matter of taste. There is no singular correct answer.
Now so just need a clipboard history manager, a way to make cmd+tab behave like Windows alt+tab, a way to mute the mic in the status bar, and a different setting for the trackpad/mouse wheel direction, and I won’t need to install random apps for basic features anymore.
Cmd+Tab: AltTab (https://alt-tab-macos.netlify.app/)
Different setting for the trackpad/mouse wheel: Mac Mouse Fix (https://macmousefix.com) or LinearMouse (https://linearmouse.app/) or Mos (https://mos.caldis.me/)
I really hope there is a "automatic tiling" option, otherwise this is just mouse support for the current "Move Window"/"Tile Window" options already available on the OS (and easily bindable via custom shortcuts).
It took them a decade to release a "Send Later" feature? How's that for innovation? Snobs!
Stage Manager was the most interesting and useful thing to happen to window management in over a decade, and I was really hoping we'd see Apple do more with it. Its dynamic nature (windows don't always live in just a single context!) solved a lot of problems inherent in Spaces, and yet there's still plenty of room to build on its foundation.
I was hoping we'd at least see the window snapping behavior ported over from iPadOS. It's a really well-thought-out way to simplify window resizing and overlapping, and it would go a long way on MacOS (perhaps with a toggle in Control Center for those edge cases where you actually want pixel precision). Maybe in MacOS 16...
… really? I’ve tried to use it a few times but it’s just… not good. Not very intuitive, full of idiosyncrasies, and it doesn’t solve the basic "I want to snap 2 windows side by side" problem. Maybe it’s more interesting on iPad?
I’m glad they finally bring window snapping to Mac.
Ever since I've been using a Mac since Nov. 2023 that's been one of the things that I've battled with, and I've assigned a heck tons of shortcuts to make that happen.
My heart dropped for a second when I saw Sequoia only supports iMacs from 2019, until I saw it supports iMac Pros from 2017. I wonder how much longer I have before Apple stops releasing updates, and corp IT decides the iMac Pro is now e-waste.
It's really unfortunate that they don't do Target Display Mode anymore. These iMacs have panels that are still top-of-the-line 6 years later. (A Studio Display is basically an iMac Pro with Apple Silicon in Target Display Mode.) I wonder if there will be a Linux distribution to convert these things into monitors when they go obsolete.
A few different people have figured out how to convert these panels into stand-alone displays. It's a pity that it would be impractical to make a small business out of this.
- https://ohmypizza.com/2023/04/converting-a-5k-imac-into-an-e... - https://mschmitt.org/blog/convert-5k-27-imac-external-displa...
Wild that a hobby project I've never heard of has a whole outfit in China supporting it: http://chiyakeji.com/
I wonder if I'll be able to expense one of those when/if Apple finally deprecates the iMac Pro on my desk.
Hell, I have an O.G. iPad 1 that still works perfectly as it did the day I bought it, but most of the built-in software no longer works, and the App Store is basically empty. What a sad state of affairs.
One thing I can tell you though is that Intel has EOL’ed the chip in the iMac Pro. Meaning no more security support for the chip.
So I’m not sure the iMac Pro will get the next update. Though possible Apple has found a way to mitigate any security issues.
This is the best article I found on the topic. Note also that once the iMac Pro is out of support, it’s os will still get security updates for two years past that.
So with this announcement today we are guaranteed security support until Oct 2027 or so.
I own an iMac Pro and was pleasantly surprised today. Had been concerned the Intel EOL might end things.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/07/with-macos-sonoma-in...
Deleted Comment
5-6 years of fully functioning hardware with official OS updates is much better than the Android phones I had before it.
Well worth checking out.
If this is a better AirDrop I'm all here for it. AirDrop was already leaps and bounds better than email my android phone to my PC.
https://xkcd.com/949/
It also has a Quick Transfer feature so you just drag and drop a file to your target device, and iMazing gives you a choice of apps to send the file to. It's similar to AirDrop but also works for Windows and seems a bit faster and more stable.
What’s the point of this qualifier?
Why not use the current, up-to-date default app for photo import that has been there since 2002 to literally serve this purpose? Yes it has a lot of extra functionality, but that doesn’t mean you have to use it. You can get originals from Photos and be done with it…
I suspect it will only be useful for emergencies as latency will be terrible, though.
Based on what? AirPlay mirroring is great today, and this is that with data in the other direction. Current Wifi is perfectly capable of bidirectional voice and video. Adding touch/key events is incremental.
Deleted Comment
I really wish Apple would just force companies to enable their iPhone/iPad apps on Apple Silicon. But if I could display a video from my phone onto my 15" laptop screen, that would be a nearly as nice.
I use AirPlay to my Mac (and external monitors) even at home since I can watch the 4K feed from apps, which isn't available for some services if you use the web browser (cough HBO cough),
Also I will use this often to approve okta 2factor requests.
Deleted Comment
> I suspect it will only be useful for emergencies as latency will be terrible, though.
If they can make the macOS display feature in visionOS usable, I imagine they can make this work too.
And of course, there are all those MFA apps which I need for work...
(Also, I miss the old widget Dashboard from old versions of macOS. Wish they'd bring that back with the new widgets tech).
Maybe I’m misunderstanding you, but did you know you can pin widgets to your desktop in Sonoma? They don’t have to be tucked away in the Notification Center anymore; the entire bottom half of my second monitor is a big widget dashboard.
However, it still doesn't sound as good as the old Dashboard, where widgets effectively got their own desktop (available for quick access at any time with a single keypress or touchpad gesture). This would also be more consistent with iOS, where you can just swipe to the left-most home screen to see a dashboard of widgets.
I like to maintain a "clean desktop" look so not sure if I love the idea of cluttering it up with widgets, but I'll give it a try!
Depending on the implementation, I am however looking forward to this. I need to use some systems that only provide 2FA via a mobile app (i.e. Push OTP), and having to reach for my phone during work hours is pretty bad for my productivity and flow.
(I really prefer TOTP, which I can just let 1Password handle…)
[1] https://issues.chromium.org/issues/40744291#comment15
[2] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1650212
I keep family members' social security numbers, security questions and answers, passport numbers, etc in there, and I don't want to split that data between a passwords app & secure notes.
The screenshots had no indication of it, and it doesn't seem to have a web counterpart.
One of the major PITA for keychain was the association with your logged in AppleID. If it 's still that way, I don't see a real appeal for people who already went their way to pay for a full-fledge product.
Imagine killing your phone and asking a nearby friend to borrow theirs to quickly cancel an appointment to give you time to deal with it. That's the kind of situation that should be gracefully handled by a password manager service.
> Watson became very popular, and stayed that way right until Apple released Mac OS X 10.2 with Sherlock 3. In that release, Apple added just about everything Watson could do to Sherlock's own interface.
But now...
- Windows is full of AI/Adware bloat with more getting added every few months
- Linux's gaming/nvivia support has come such a long way that in some games it's beating Windows in some benchmarks now
- Apple's app store policies over the last 10 years have caused so many issues that our company is switching everything to webapps.
So I'll probably be switching from Windows+MacOS+Linux this year to just Linux next year.
Thinking of using the KDE or Cosmic desktop environments for personal computer and NixOS for development computer (just so I can test/rollback changes, and if the computer ever dies I can be up and running again in under an hour if I need to meet a deadline).
Windows 11 is behaving more and more like the viruses and adwares I spent so many years defending against.
Everything I want/need including games via steam run perfectly on it now. I can't see a reason to return to MS or got to Apple.
I'm really looking forward to this – big fan of Apple Pay, but I'm not switching to Safari and rebuilding my shopping cart for non-logged-in purchases, and that's where it's arguably most useful.