October 24, 2022link

macOS Updates Just Don't Really Matter to Me

I was reading John Voorhees' excellent macOS Ventura review today and something dawned on me: none of this matters to me.

Truly, I've been using Ventura on my personal Mac all summer and Monterey on my work Mac, and I use them both exactly the same. Literally the biggest difference in my day-to-day life is the new share menu in the Finder, and the only other two things I noticed were the new Weather and System Settings apps.

But wait, aren't I the guy who recently said he needs the Mac in his life more than the iPad? If I like the Mac so much, why don't I care about its updates all that much?

I think it comes down to the fact that the Mac enables software creators to make effectively anything they want already, so new system features don't really do much for me. The ceiling for app quality on the Mac is the developer's imagination, not necessarily what Apple makes available to them. A great example of this is 1Password, which added their own system-wide autofill even though Apple hasn't made this possible through any official means.

Meanwhile, app developers are completely reliant on Apple to make things possible on the iPhone and iPad, so I'm much more interested in seeing those updates as they will determine what sort of innovation we see on those platforms in the coming year. For example, Apple added live activities today, which surely means that will be the point of innovation for the year.

That's not the say the Mac doesn't get anything useful, and if you spend most of your time in Apple's own apps, then you'll get more with macOS updates, but as someone who uses close to zero stock apps, it's an odd phenomenon to install this new update and feel like nothing has changed.