I also installed Monterey on a 2016 MacBook Pro, but that was primarily to track down a Safari bug that has since been fixed.Īs an aside, I’m an even bigger fan of the M1 iMac than I was when I first reviewed it, something I’ll be writing about more for Club MacStories+ members soon. In fact, I’ve done the vast majority of all my work on this iMac since June.
That’s the Mac that I’ve spent 99% of my time working on with Monterey. Shortly before WWDC, Apple sent me an M1 iMac that I reviewed in July. My testing was a little different this year than in the past. I’ve spent over 1,000 hours working on the M1 iMac using Monterey since June.
Let’s dig in and see where things work, where they don’t, and what lies ahead when you install macOS Monterey.Įxclusive Extras eBook and MacStories Unplugged Podcast That’s not to say I haven’t enjoyed any upside using Shortcuts on my Mac, and it has improved over the course of the beta period, but it still gets in my way more often than it should.Īlright, that’s enough looking back. As optimistic and excited as I remain for Shortcuts to be the future of automation on the Mac, it’s too frustrating to use at launch. Every OS release has its rough spots, but this year, Shortcuts is especially rough.
However, as much as it pleases me to see the groundwork laid in years past pay dividends in the form of new features being rolled out simultaneously on all platforms, Monterey’s payoff isn’t an unqualified success. More than ever before, Apple is advancing system apps across all of its platforms at the same time. With the technical building blocks in place and a refined design out of the way, Monterey is one of the most tangible, user-facing payoffs of the past three years of transition. Monterey’s focus is all about system apps, a topic near and dear to me. Monterey harmonizes system app updates across all of Apple’s platforms.
Nor does it help that despite the added clarity, technologies like SwiftUI still have a long way to go to reach their full potential.
The situation is more clear today, but at the same time, the question of how to approach building a Mac app is best answered with ‘it depends.’ That isn’t a very satisfying answer. Early communications about Mac Catalyst and SwiftUI left developers and observers confused about the role of each. Users’ fears have also been fueled by Apple’s institutional secrecy and the multi-year scope of the company’s undertaking. The Pro’s hardware has been infrequently updated, and the performance of the Apple silicon processors they’ve run on has outpaced what the apps on the platform can do. The realignment has been rocky for iPad users, too, especially for iPad Pro uses. Unfortunately, many early Mac Catalyst apps weren’t very inspiring. The Mac’s apps had historically been held out as a shining example of the kind of user experiences and designs to which developers who cared about their apps could aspire.
It didn’t help that those first Catalyst apps that were part of the 2018 Sneak Peek – Home, News, Stocks, and Voice Memos – were rough around the edges and a departure from long-held beliefs about what constitutes a great Mac app.