macOS Monterey

I just upgraded to Monterey on my Macbook Pro 2018 15-inch and after rebooting, all of the USB-C ports stopped working, including the power adapter. I spent some time on the phone with Apple Support trying to figure out how to fix it. After about an hour and a half there was about 18% battery left before I started to panic and figure out how I was going to back everything up.<p>After panicking, the 3rd Apple Support Representative and I endeavoured to try and reset the System Management Controller (SMC) [1] once again. At this point I had realised that the first few times that I tried this with a previous support representative would not have worked, as I was holding shift on the left-hand side of the keyboard (the previous support representative did not specify) and not the right-hand side as outlined in the support article for Macs with the T2 chip.<p>Good luck!<p>1. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.apple.com&#x2F;en-au&#x2F;HT201295" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.apple.com&#x2F;en-au&#x2F;HT201295</a>

I haven’t seen this anywhere when I’ve looked, so I’ll ask here on the slim chance maybe they really added something I badly want and somebody knows…<p>Is there any application forced sandboxing feature yet?<p>Something users can control to forcibly stop bad behavior from certain “must have” apps. Chrome, for example, has been caught doing entire drive scans on Windows, and I’m not sure I entirely trust Zoom either. So I’d like to lock down what they can access in terms of files, paths, devices and so on and be fully confident that even if my employer demands I run some software installer provided by their “partners” that it hasn’t installed some creepy daemon and configured launchd to keep it running after I kill the app or even kill -9 the process.<p>Yes we can use VMs for this, but Mac laptops aren’t generally beefy machines, so that’s not an optimal solution.<p>There used to be sandbox_exec, but I’ve heard they removed it entirely from this version. We’re now supposed to get things from the (cr)App Store, which guarantees the app will only have entitlements that Apple approves. But vendors are abandoning the App Store in droves for many good reasons, and after recent events I don’t totally trust Apple to prevent malicious use piggybacking on top of a legit entitlement.

SharePlay to Mac (I tested audio) is utterly broken. Shockingly so. I just tried it again, and my music isn&#x27;t paused, yet is stuck at 0:02. Pausing and unpausing it, and the song starts ticking, 0:03, 0:04, and so on, but you can&#x27;t hear any audio. Pause it again. It goes back to 0:02. Now try this with AirPods connected to your Mac. Connect your iPhone&#x27;s Apple Music to AirPlay to Mac. The YouTube video you had playing on your Mac gets paused, for no reason. But at least you hear your iPhone&#x27;s audio on your Mac. Now pickup your iPhone. Your AirPods have now switched to your iPhone, that&#x27;s still AirPlaying to Mac. You can&#x27;t hear your music anymore. You reconnect the AirPods to your Mac. You can hear your iPhone music for a few minutes. Suddenly you can&#x27;t hear anything. Pick up your phone, the volume slider in the Music app went all the way to the left. You can&#x27;t move the volume slider to the right, like it&#x27;s frozen; but the song is still playing. You go to Control Center, and finally manage to increase the volume. A minute later, the volume goes to zero again. If you were hoping to compensate for Spotify Connect not being on Apple Music, you&#x27;ll be disappointed.<p>Also, Safari has a bug that ignores your setting to not reopen non-private windows, and reopens them anyway, so if that&#x27;s important to you, you may want to temporarily switch to another browser.<p>And yes, it still has the &quot;occasionally laggy trackpad cursor&quot; bug on M1 for me.<p>But other than that, it seems quite a bit faster than Big Sur, and so far (past 2 weeks), very stable on the core stuff.

I&#x27;ve been away from MacOS for about 10 years. Big Sur now. Kinda hate it. I keep accidentally invoking extra layers of UI everywhere. That&#x27;s fine I guess.<p>But what I ran into that I LOVE is making EVERY app full-screen, pretending there is no desktop or window management, and just swiping right&#x2F;left among them.<p>I wish there was a way to smooth out the UX so that this feels first-class and I stop accidentally breaking this illusion at times.

If any apple product managers are reading this, the biggest thing holding MacOS back is that it global searches when you search a folder. I know there&#x27;s a config setting for it, but dammit I want the default to be local file name search and full text search should be an off-by-default option, and search the whole hard drive should be a different also off by default option.

The Macbook Pro 16&quot; thermal throttling problems with external monitors [1] finally seems to be fixed with Monterey by enabling low power mode. (At least with 16:9 60Hz monitors).<p>I&#x27;ve been dealing with `kernel_task` hitting 900% CPU usage and the entire window server running at 2 FPS when using external monitors since I got the mbp 16&quot; a year ago. Good riddance.<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;forums.macrumors.com&#x2F;threads&#x2F;16-is-hot-noisy-with-an-external-monitor.2211747&#x2F;page-220" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;forums.macrumors.com&#x2F;threads&#x2F;16-is-hot-noisy-with-an...</a>

Sort of a mini review. Using it at home on my MacBook Pro 2015 Intel Machine.<p>Big Sur on M1 was fine ( if not great ), mostly because M1 is extremely fast. But Big Sir on x86 was slow, really slow. I am in the group that reported Big Sur was slower than Catalina, and Catalina was slower than Mojave. That is with both the OS itself and Safari. So Big Sur was not a smooth experience for me.<p>Monterey so far brings back the speed &#x2F; snappiness of Mojave. Safari feels so much more responsive under normal use and under heavy tab usage. Lots micro-pause ( Jank ) and lag are gone. As if they put back all the optimisation for x86 previously left out.<p>Far less Kernel_Task CPU usage and stupid disk write for whatever reason. My guess this is mostly a Safari problem given they have implemented Tab Groups they have at least taken into account of heavy tab usage in mind. This is also apparent when they fix the long standing Tab Overview bug, where it will load ( and reload ) every single Tabs you have trying to generate thumbnail. Imagine you accidentally press the Tab Overview button in the tool bar, or three finger swap in Safari when you have <i>hundreds</i> of tabs. You will instantly get a few <i>hundreds</i> GB of Disk Write paging trying load everything. It is literally a feature that kills your SSD. I have reported this bug for over three years, it is finally fixed. Cloudd and Bookmark &#x2F; History &#x2F; Tab Sync pause &#x2F; Jank is still not fix though. That is 3 years+ and counting.<p>Still wish they do a list of tabs like Chrome instead of Thumbnails when it is over certain Tabs Number. It is easier to track when you have lots of Tabs. Easier to do Manual Garbage Collection of Tabs.<p>Bug that causes IINA to crash when viewing video in portrait mode is gone. One of the biggest complain when updating to Big Sur.<p>WindowsServer also uses far less CPU. It used to hover over 30% for no apparent reason. Now it is back to a normal 5-15% in most cases.<p>Safari &quot;classic&quot; tabs are back. Along with a very long list of webkit improvement. Far from perfect but at least things are moving.<p>I am also feeling Apps that are using Swift and SwiftUI are snappier than before and uses less memory. An observation mostly from using Stocks App.<p>Many other minor details, may be worth reading Ars&#x27; review [1]. It is solid release, which along with M1 MacBook Pro sadly dampens my motivation to move away from Apple.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arstechnica.com&#x2F;gadgets&#x2F;2021&#x2F;10&#x2F;macos-12-monterey-the-ars-technica-review&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arstechnica.com&#x2F;gadgets&#x2F;2021&#x2F;10&#x2F;macos-12-monterey-th...</a>

Any of the awful UX functions been rolled back? Notifications and the bluetooth menus are an abomination.

I&#x27;ve been enjoying Safari&#x27;s tab group feature quite a lot. It&#x27;s helped me wrangle the usual set of 5+ windows of tabs related to various tasks down into a single window, with the groups lined up neatly in a side list and auto-sleeping tabs.<p>For me at least it&#x27;s much better than the implementation Chrome has gone for which tries to shoehorn groups into an already overburdened tab bar.

Are all features available on all recent Macs (Intel + M1)? iirc there were some features that there were some exclusive M1 features to come, but also overheard rumors that they&#x27;d still roll out on &quot;old&quot; Intel Macs.<p>Edit: Apparently some features are indeed M1 only. Those features are<p>- portrait mode in FaceTime<p>- apparently the new Apple Maps design<p>- the interactive globe<p>Seems like the most important features (for me it&#x27;s livetext) are available on both architectures.

So Private Relay is available on both iOS and macOS stable releases now.<p>Have there been expert opinions about how private this is? I understand they built a Tor-light, by hopping through one Apple server, then one external server, with some sort of anonymisation between the two?

Am I the only one that&#x27;s really excited about Universal Control? If nothing else, it&#x27;s extremely impressive from an engineering perspective (if it works as seamlessly as they make it seem). To be able to take your work from your iPad to your iMac like that would be pretty incredible.

A lot of these changes seem to be pandemic-driven, which makes sense, but it&#x27;s telling that smaller competitors hacked together all these same features within weeks of WFH and the largest and most advanced company in the world is finally here 18 months later.

There seems to be some kind of a negative space exponential law. Margins and paddings increase with every release because designers can’t resist minimalism over density and usefulness.

Literally the only interesting feature, to me, is Low Power Mode

How stable is Monterey for those that have been using it?<p>Ironically I just upgraded to Big Sur yesterday from Catalina. I think I&#x27;ll probably wait again to let 3rd-party apps catch up.

Okay macOS, if you’re gonna deprecate kexts, please give us a VFS API that fulfills the role of macFUSE, not the syncthing-esque API of FileProvider.

Are there any api changes? I’d love to see a new version moving to feature parity with vulkan.

Given how stable Big Sur was until 11.15.6 I don&#x27;t think I&#x27;ll be hastily upgrading! [Edited]

That Focus mode would be killer if it integrated some sort of pomodoro &#x2F; calendar integration.

Yet another release that misses a crucial feature.<p>With the recent years push to store &quot;everything in the cloud&quot;, macOS sorely needs a way to backup cloud content. Currently the only way to do so, is to create a &quot;server&quot; machine that pulls everything from the cloud and stores it locally, which you can then backup.<p>Since most modern computers are sold with harddrives size equivalent of a USB Stick, and cloud storage is typically 2-10 times larger, this means you need to add even more hardware just to hold the data you just want to backup.<p>Considering that Apple is pretty vague with regards to exactly how protected your iCloud data is, and they themselves strongly recommend that you backup your iCloud data, i find it an odd omision that the only way to do it is part manual process, part synchronize stuff locally before backing it up.<p>All it would take (on the UI end) was an option in Time Machine to include &quot;mac optimized storage&quot;. Third party support gets a bit more complicated. Where Microsoft OneDrive, Google Drive and Dropbox all use placeholder files, iCloud placeholders apparently only exists inside &quot;Finder&quot;, so most third party backup software won&#x27;t be able to see these files.

If you own an apple computer that has just dropped support, try the open core legcy patcher (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dortania.github.io&#x2F;OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dortania.github.io&#x2F;OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher&#x2F;</a>) after doing a backup(always!). I just upgraded my dear MacBook Air 11 from 2014 to Monterey and it just runs ... so 3 more years of patches for this machine :-D.

I bought a 2019 iMac with a Fusion drive.<p>In the next major update (High Sierra), Apple switched to APFS, which has issues with Fusion drives.<p>It often shows as having no empty space, even with 40% empty.<p>Much, much worse, it stops writing to disk without giving any indication (the non written items show in finder, etc.) - for some ten hours or more - and then suddenly crashes and you find that the entire days worth of work is completely gone. Not on disk, not on external backup, not in Time Machine.<p>This happens EVERY DAY, at least once a day, when using heavy programs such as Photoshop.<p>There are many threads about the issue, and the only solution is to get a new non-Fusion drive and copy over everything. Much easier said than done.<p>I cannot even begin to describe how much aggravation Apple has caused, and how little faith I have in them testing their upgrades.<p>And of course, the whole play with searching my hard drive for something their algorithm thinks goes against my local government [which plays for keeps, thank you] - doesn&#x27;t help.

is CSAM scanning included?

Wait. Is this normal cross platform FaceTime? Or is this like a different FaceTime because FaceTime is awesome.

Big Sur is the first macOS since I have been using macOS (I distinctly recall being extremely excited to install System 7) where the next major version (Monterey) came out before I had installed it onto any of my daily driver systems.<p>I&#x27;m not really sure what this says about macOS product management decisions, but I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s a good thing.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.jwz.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2021&#x2F;10&#x2F;fucking-apple-4&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.jwz.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2021&#x2F;10&#x2F;fucking-apple-4&#x2F;</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.jwz.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2021&#x2F;10&#x2F;can-light-gray-text-on-light-gray-backgrounds-please-stop-being-a-thing&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.jwz.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2021&#x2F;10&#x2F;can-light-gray-text-on-ligh...</a>

I&#x27;m still on Mojave. Is it possible to jump versions, or must I upgrade incrementally?

Betting that the next incremental update will be named macOS Carmel.

Private replay in macOS Monterey is not compatible with content restrictions in screen time. If you use screen time to block some websites, private relay won’t work.<p>Has Anyone found a solution yet?

Macbook Pro 2020 13-inch doesn&#x27;t turn on after this actions:<p>1) Downloaded Monterey update. In the end appeared error message that some package with strange name can&#x27;t be unpacked<p>2) Downloaded Big Sur 1.16.1 update, because information about Monterey disappeared and there were not any button to install new OS.<p>3) System was automatically rebooted after 2), started update screen in few minutes and macbook completely turned off with no signs of power.<p>Resseting SMC, NVRAM didn&#x27;t help. Battery was 73% when started updates.

Did they fix the misplaced keyboard focus and missing tab order when you mistype a password on the lock screen?<p>That&#x27;s been making me crazy for the last few macOS releases.

Not advertised. But with the new 16 in MBP and “M1 Max” CPU, it supports up to 3 6K displays - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.apple.com&#x2F;guide&#x2F;macbook-pro&#x2F;use-an-external-display-apd8cdd74f57&#x2F;mac" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.apple.com&#x2F;guide&#x2F;macbook-pro&#x2F;use-an-external-...</a>. There must be at least one reviewer out there with 3 of the pro xdr displays.<p>(this is roughly $28K by the way)

I hope Apple will add an accessibility option to disable temporal dithering in the OS.<p>It causes a minority of people eyestrain, vertigo and migraines. See LEDstrain.org.

I tend to just surf through MacOS releases. It&#x27;s mostly just updates to the native apps which I don&#x27;t use anyways, so I&#x27;m rarely affected neither positively nor negatively. Well, Big Sur made the notification widget&#x2F;area worse for me, but other than that I can&#x27;t remember any significant changes in the past 5 years since I&#x27;ve been using Mac.

Have they finally fixed the issue of when you click something, and it suddenly changes, you end up clicking the wrong thing?

Monterey seems to have fixed audio stutter I was constantly experiencing on Bluetooth headphones (AKG Y500). On BigSur every time the headphones reconnected I had to reset the Bluetooth module - btw, the reset option seems to be missing in Monterey.<p>So that&#x27;s a big improvement in my book.

Any word on the fate of OpenGL?<p>Yes, it was deprecated ages ago in favor of Metal, but Apple still shipped an OpenGL implementation. However, I read some rumors that in Monterey they have finally ripped it out.<p>Can anyone confirm or deny?

Looks like a lot of great upgrades to apps I&#x27;ve never used.

The most infuriating bug for me is that Preview opens each PDF in a new <i>window</i> instead of tabs (even with &#x27;Prefer tabs always&#x27; selected in Sys Pref).

It is frustrating to see how stagnant desktop OS&#x27;s have become. Both macOS and Windows 11 have added incremental features that are surely nice to have, but no one dares to improve on the human-computer-interaction which has remained the same for decades now.<p>With the advances in AI and the ridiculous compute power of modern CPUs, we should be able to have OSs that are Digital Assistants.<p>Just one example:<p>- file management: Why even? Why expose most <i>regular</i> users to this metaphor in the first place. Mobile OSs have been rather successful in getting rid of this implementation detail. If I write a lot of documents and need to come up with names for them, I expect that to be sufficient. My Assistant will sort&#x2F;group&#x2F;maintain them for me and if I want to open the &quot;status report to vendor X from last week&quot;, then that should be enough. Make sure my documents are safely stored, encrypted and all that jazz. Don&#x27;t make me pick between &quot;iCloud&quot; or &quot;OneDrive&quot; or &quot;C:\&quot; or &quot;Document&quot; or &quot;Desktop&quot;. Index all the content I&#x27;m producing semantically. Just DoWhatIMean? (tm) Have this be consistent throughout the applications I&#x27;m using - including web apps. (And why even make <i>that</i> distinction. Who here doesn&#x27;t have relatives who have trouble understanding the differences between locally installed applications, apps on their phone and web apps in the browser?)<p>Regular users are consistently struggling with low-level concepts like &#x27;files&#x27; and similar remnants of trying to emulate desktop metaphors from the workplaces of the 80ies.<p>&quot;Do you want to change the extension to .doc or change it to .txt&quot;? What?!? &quot;Do you want to overwrite file &quot;xyz.xls&quot;? Overwriting sounds bad, what happens if I say no though?<p>That is just the tip of the iceberg where we are somehow tied to ideas of HCI that are rooted in the 70s&#x2F;80s.<p>I do appreciate being able to tell my phone &quot;Set a timer for 10 minutes&quot;, but where is &quot;Plan a trip to Dallas for next week Friday&quot; - and the Digital Assistant knowing exactly what to do (since that ain&#x27;t its first rodeo)?

Can anyone confirm if the final build number is the same as 12.0.1 RC2 (21A559)? You can run `$ sw_vers` from the CLI to check it.

Huh. I don&#x27;t use Apple apps, looks pretty similar to me. Nice and snappy. Good job Apple. Late 2020 Macbook Air M1.

&gt; Grid view shows people on your FaceTime call in the same‑size tiles, so you can have better conversations with a large group. The speaker is automatically highlighted so you always know who’s talking.<p>Is none at Apple actually using FaceTime? I remember seeing group FaceTime for the first time approx a year ago. It looked like a 90&#x27; screen saver. I was completely astonished. Like 10 years ago was late for this kind of update.

Still can&#x27;t stream fitness+ to a mac?

It runs really well on my 2012 Macbook Pro thanks to OCLP. Better even than Big Sur so far.

Upgraded M1. No issues, super snappy, looks great.

Doesn&#x27;t work on iMac 5k from late 2014.

any news on whether we can control external monitor brightness with lunar on Monterey with M1? I miss that feature

I&#x27;m not sure I need yet another macOS version, feels like they&#x27;ve opted for a more frequent release cycle. I (genuinely) wonder why...

Still no MST.<p>Is this a hardware or software limitation?

Surprised they are opening the Walled Garden™ to allow FaceTime from Windows and Android.

Oh, the things I&#x27;d give for an LTS version of Mojave...

Focus …. by adding gazillions of notification options, and also get more notifications for &quot;weekly screen time&quot;… yeah, I really needed even more useless information to process instead of living my life. If i want time off i’ll just put the device down, what a concept :&#x2F;<p>They’ve got it completely backwards.

Finally! :)

Funny that they used a very clunky looking Windows laptop and a pretty dated looking Android phone to show off Facetime.

obligatory: why not tabs on the side?

For the Focus feature, I find it a bit unexpected that someone messaging me can tell if I&#x27;m Driving, Sleeping, Coding, or Reading, etc. Does anyone else find this a bit strange&#x2F;awkward? I know you can turn it off (and I did) within iMessage, but it seems a bit poorly considered. Curious if people like that aspect of the feature!

MacOS major version release are so underwhelming to me. They&#x27;re not so much OS updates as they&#x27;re updates to built-in apps I don&#x27;t use or use at a very surface level: Safari, Facetime, Apple Maps, Messages, etc.<p>I&#x27;m not really sure what I&#x27;d want out of a new MacOS, though. It&#x27;s been stable and (for my purposes) feature-complete for many years now. I don&#x27;t remember the last time a MacOS upgrade added a feature I wanted but didn&#x27;t yet have, nor the last time they added a feature I didn&#x27;t realize I wanted because I&#x27;d never imagined it. The latter used to be what made Apple products stand out to me.

Article reads like an ad.

Has anyone shorted Zoom yet? Believe ticker is ZM.

This is so limited. Where is the boldness? Five years ago I thought we would be at MaciOS by now. Precision with a gestural capability.

&gt;Stream movies and TV shows while on a FaceTime call with friends. With synced playback and controls, you’ll see everyone laugh, jump, and react to the same moments at the same time. And the volume automatically adjusts, so you can keep talking while you watch.<p>Pretty sure this is illegal.

the best OS if you are fed up with windoze bloatware and are too lazy to setup a working desktop environment that suits you on linux<p>it has native unix environment, is fast and efficient

I&#x27;ve come to the discovery that I&#x27;m a deeply anti social being. Watching a TV show &quot;together&quot;, remotely, sounds like the stuff of nightmares to me.<p>If you insist, we can do a 2 min review after the show. During the show, you stay quiet. Don&#x27;t ask questions, I didn&#x27;t see the show either. You&#x27;re allowed a laugh, a silent tear or a brief &quot;wow&quot;, keep deeper reflections on how the footage makes you feel to yourself.<p>When you watch, you pay full attention, or leave the room.<p>It would be factually incorrect to say &quot;I must be fun at parties&quot; due to a lack of data.

Dear Apple,<p>I have no interest in using your locked down operating systems. On the other hand, your M1 based hardware is excellent. Please open up your drivers so I can run Linux on it at full performance (instead of using reverse engineered drivers which will probably never reach the performance levels of the proprietary drivers).<p>Thank You