Hands-On With macOS 10.14 Mojave: Dark Mode, Revamped Mac App Store, Desktop Stacks and More

[Greymacuser]

You confused "we need polished and reliable" with "we don't need a better desktop". Polished and reliable IS better.

"Play with your phone and watch"? What's that supposed to mean? Anyone who does serious work on their Mac will tell you that we need better performance, less bugs and more stability rather than "new features". In fact, it's quite the oposite - the flashy "innovative" things you want belong on phones and watches, not on productivity devices such as Macs. The last thing we need is some experimental weird attempt to make Mac into something new just for the sake of being new.

People have established workflows on their Macs - they need reliability and iterative, quality of life improvements which Mojave brings. You want something shockingly new and OMGAMAZING - that's what the iPhone is for. Let Macs be Macs.

Nice edit of your original post to remove the "we don't need a better desktop" part.
I don't want flashy. I want intuitive and competitive with ever other computer company out there to creat a better workstation. Not reheated left-overs that we already had. That's what I'm saying.

 

[jephrey]

Does anyone know if you get full metadata and editing in columns view in Mojave? I prefer columns view but really like the full metadata display and editing capabilities in the new view.

 

[aevan]

Nice edit of your original post to remove the "we don't need a better desktop" part.
I don't want flashy. I want intuitive and competitive with ever other computer company out there to creat a better workstation. Not reheated left-overs that we already had. That's what I'm saying.

What are you talking about? I didn’t edit anything. I never said we don’t need a better desktop, that makes no sense. I said we don’t need “innovation” in the desktop world.

Who doesn’t want things they use to be better? I use my Mac for work every single day. Trust me, I want it to be as good as possible and I hope it gets better with every update. I honestly don’t know what you’re talking about.

As for “creating better workstations” - what do you find better in those terms in Windows? (Not talking about hardware). What do you want to see? What would make Mojave good for you?

 

[nav4568]

macOS mojave is so futuristic that they even used photos from the "future" (May-September 2018).
Did they mean upcoming mac/ios device release?

 

[jecowa]

There was a discussion of this on the most recent MacBreak Weekly podcast/YouTube, and I think that sounds like the direction it is going if I recall the discussion correctly.

Wow, that video is over 2 hours long. I skipped to somewhere around 25 minutes in where they started talking about it, but then ended up listening to most of the rest of it. It's here if any are interested:

 

[GoodWheaties]

Yeah I agree, sorry it sounded like that. I meant it as in I won’t get to try it.

If you really want to get it, dosdude1 will probably make a patched installer for older macs eventually. He makes it really easy to use. Unless no Metal support makes older macs not run stable, but there is no way to find out till someone tries it out.

 

[Winni]

Metal is here to replace them.

Yeah, sure -- an we all know that this is just another nail in the coffin for gaming on macOS. It's one of those genius decisions at Apple: "Let's get rid of multi-platform technologies, that will certainly encourage developers to write code for our minority platform!" (And, yes, macOS still is a minority platform.)

We have certain scientific software here at work that's not being ported to macOS not only because Apple still sells inferior graphics hardware, but according to the developers mainly because Apple's OpenGL implementation sucks so badly -- hence that software only exists in the original Linux and in ported Windows versions.
[doublepost=1528551930][/doublepost]

Apple is deprecating OpenGL and OpenCL in Mojave, not dumping them. OpenGL and OpenCL are both still present in Mojave.

Deprecation is a warning to developers to start moving to other APIs because Apple won't continue to improve the deprecated APIs and might dump them sometime in the future.

Apple won't remove OpenGL or OpenCL before macOS 10.15, and possibly not even then, but at that point most of our old OpenGL apps and games won't run anymore in any event because Apple is removing support for 32-bit apps in 10.15.

At which point those of us who care will have to keep a Mojave boot volume around, and eventually an older Mac that can boot from it (just as I have a mid-2010 iMac to run Snow Leopard for PPC games that require Rosetta, and a Power Mac G5 to run Tiger for games that require the Classic environment, and Power Mac G4 somewhere for games that require booting natively into Mac OS 9 - hardly any of which I ever bother booting up, to be honest), but so it goes.

(Please direct any and all comments about how Macs aren't suitable for gaming, which surely will have never occurred to me, to the new-Mac-Pro-shaped file under my desk, where I promise faithfully to give them all the consideration they deserve.)

marksatt, who's in a position actually to know what he's talking about, has an informed and helpful perspective on the impact of this deprecation in this post.

Yeah, good for him who does that kind of porting for a living. There's a universe of (small, non-AAA) developers out there who will most likely decide not to invest time into macOS versions of anything.

I have a Mac Pro at work and while that generally is a much better machine than its reputation would make you believe, it certainly is not what I would consider a state-of-the-art gaming rig. Mostly because of the operating system that is pre-installed on it and the actual quality of the game ports that are available for it... If a piece of software was not primarily written for macOS right from the start, you will always be better off with a Windows or even Linux version of that software -- and the reality is that most software still is written for Windows first.

As for gaming when you're a Mac owner... Just suck it up and buy a PS4 or an Xbox One.

 

[dwaite]

They should've at least announced their intentions back when Metal was first introduced. That would've given devs ample time to figure out what they would do instead of doing this so abruptly.

That is exactly what they are doing now. Apple OpenGL/OpenCL aren't going to be removed for years, similar to OpenSSL which is *still there*.

The only platform with OpenGL de-facto supported is Linux. The only platform with OpenGL ES supported (now that apple is deprecating it) is Android. Vulkan, what people hope is the replacement for OpenGL, is not officially supported on any platform (it is an optional component on Android, and a separate download for most linux distributions).

We will likely (years from now) have either third party OpenGL libraries by the video card makers (such as the case on windows), or shipped within apps as shims on top of Metal.
[doublepost=1528569371][/doublepost]

Why bring in Microsoft? They have nothing to do with it. This is purely about APPLE wanting total control. APPLE are the ones using a single platform API.

You mean like how Microsoft only supports a single proprietary platform API for 3D (Direct3D)? Maybe thats why they brought it up?

 

[lec0rsaire]

You mean like how Microsoft only supports a single proprietary platform API for 3D (Direct3D)? Maybe thats why they brought it up?

MS made DirectX pretty much necessary if you want to make anything close to a AAA game. With the PC and especially Xbox they have made sure that everyone develops using it. Metal is a good thing though and Apple needed something like this. We probably won’t see the fruit until 5-10 years down the road. If they developed a gaming console that people would buy this would make Metal a major player.

 

[dwaite]

Sign of the times indeed. What I loved about the original Mac (and it's predecessor Lisa) was the black text on white background. This was a time of WYSIWYG.

I guess printing, like many other physical forms of media, are dead and buried.

Apps like TextMate and Pages specifically do not give you black page/white text because they are meant to be WYSIWYG. Tools do honor dark mode though.

Not sure if dark mode is good for the eyes though? I often see a lot of "coders" doing the multi-coloured text on black. That can NOT be good for the eyes, surely?

Some of the color choices seem to be a bit too dark for the text imho. However, multi-colored text is used to leverage the computer's understanding of the source (what is a variable, keyword, function name, etc) for developers to be able to more quickly identify and comprehend code. Its not just because they like florescent rainbow text.

Bring on the new hardware. PLEASE. Mac Mini and Pro... hurry up already!

The Mac mini is weird because they have underserved the desktop/workstation market so badly that people have adopted loaded-out minis to do real work. The machine is meant primarily for switchers who aren't willing to invest in an iMac and get this new integrated screen.

As a result, its releases are locked into when Apple can do a revision without affecting functionality or margins. For instance, replacing a bunch of the USB-A/HDMI ports with USB-C/Thunderbolt would be a negative, because part of the sell is you can hook it up to your existing wired keyboard/mouse/monitor/printer, ditching the PC at the center for a Mac.

I'm hoping apple uses the supposed modularity of the Pro to have a wide target of builds, including machines that are price competitive with the fully loaded minis. As in, I hope nobody who does serious work with their computer *cares* about the mini having long spans between updates, because it is obvious the mini is there to hit a price point and not a product lineup gap. We'll see if that is what happens with the pro, though - I'm not putting money on it.
[doublepost=1528605920][/doublepost]

I have not read every post in detail so maybe you have an answer already. My Fusion machine is now APFS but Time Machine is still HFS+ and I see no way to change that. I have to assume Time Machine will remain HFS+. I read something someplace about it a while back, I know that is a general statement but whatever it was I read I recall some named reasons for keeping HFS+ and I think it has to do with the typical backup being a spinning drive and APFS being no real help for that.

The mechanisms for doing APFS for time machine are likely dramatically simpler due to snapshots, but there are still some technical challenges (some of which due to apple not implementing content/block checksums). They also have lots of places for integration, such as system recovery, and I suspect they are working on a migration system rather than supporting both HFS+ and APFS time machine volumes.

Given all that, existing HFS+ time machine means they've can take their time and get it right before they announce it.

 

[LucidDreamer]

To be honest I really don't feel like giving Apple my money anymore.....

I've upgraded my iphone every release from the iphone 5s
I've upgraded a 2010 macbook to a 2017 macbook pro.

The most developed aspect of the apple line are their phones. This is so true it hurts my soul.

I think in every aspect Macs are 5 years from a PC laptop at the same price (ie: a Gaming Laptop)

I am pissed off there is no improvement with hardware except at the highest tier devices. Everything is just such an obvious marketing ploy. Touch of genius my arse.

1. The introduction of the stupid touchbar that doesn't even work in windows bootcamp. Oh by the way that's still not fixed.... So while you can still install windows on macs you still have to Restart and hold down option/alt to switch OS....Thanks for the hard work Apple....

2. So because apple has a feud with social media sites or it's more like someone said "Oh how dare they mine for user data on our machines!" It has nothing to do with protecting user data it has to do with a company defining to the public how it's machines should be used and how they're going to make it extremely difficult to use it outside of their forced suggested usage.... But what this results to is that any app that was able to use my automated fb log-in is now going to have weird issue oh and aren't going to be supported anymore because I can't control what I want to be on my device anymore....

3. Nearly 90% of these features we already have on our machines 80% of this just a facelift for things we already have. Oh yay a dynamic desktop that IS BASICALLY A REDESIGNED NIGHT SHIFT MODE that was stolen from the company that developed flux:
https://justgetflux.com/
I wish the company had sued the **** out of apple and windows.

---Themes is something that is already present in windows 10, that was already available on Lion and Mavericks, apple locked the feature down.

----These Apps that are introduced from the iphone are already on the Mac under notifications why we needs these as standalone apps I'm not really sure... We get push notifications for news networks we subscribe to I think this will just introduce more subscription based crap being pushed to consumers.

----- Apple books ??????? Really??????
The epub file was not created by apple... ibooks was fine???
..

4.Apple's updates aren't hardware specific so if you have a macbook pro base model without the touch bar you'll be downloading unnecessary updates for that as well that will bloat your device.

5. Windows 10 looks like a MacOS El Captian clone even with all the Microsoft trackware at least Cortana can understand when I want to be reminded I have a meeting at 2:30pm and not be reminded of 230 meeting.

I fell in love with Macs when I was in middle school our computer labs had the bright colorful imac G3 in different colors and the fun bright clamsehll imacs of 2000s. They made you want to use them something about them made me want to create,discover, an learn more (lol I remember sneaking and playing Oregon trail deluxe on them it was such an old game but it was just fun).

Apple focuses on what makes the most money and what keeps shareholders happy. If that means releasing a new phone every year and forcing updates that will bloat previous model because they come packed with features previous devices can't use then that's what they'll continue to do.

They ignore user complaints and have yet to address the stupid issues with their current hardware and software. I'm with the author I don't need a better desktop... I would like a more integrative and stable operating system that works with it's native features not new ones that I'll barely notice after a month.

I'm trying to stay strong but I've been looking at a nice HP OMEN with a 1TB HDD and 4GB Dedicated GPU and 16GB of RAM for 700$ that is already VR ready.... Apple's 1 year support is outdone with HP's 3 year support and Windows support.

I mean seriously Apple now is addressing VR that has been available from 2010.... There are limitations to everyone's knowledge, and stifling creativity as a company culture doesn't help that. Yet it's worse when someone who is in charge of a company can be so convoluted ignorant arrogant at the same time. Yes the machines are beautiful but are obnoxiously inefficient to use and clash with the primary audience and their price no longer justifies their lack of adapability to modern entertainment and computing needs.

 

[brigante]

anyone experiencing temperature issues with the beta 1 ? i installed it on a macbook pro 13" 2016 and whenever i open safari it starts to get really hot.

 

[Colonel Blimp]

As for gaming when you're a Mac owner... Just suck it up and buy a PS4 or an Xbox One.

No, thank you.

I have no interest in gaming with a console controller, in playing the kinds of games written for a console controller, in buying a TV just to hook up to a console, in playing AAA games at middling resolution, or in paying console prices for AAA games. No interest of any kind whatsoever. No sir.

Keyboard and mouse for me, thank you very much, and my two-and-a-half-year-old 27" iMac gives me better visuals than a PS4 or Xbox One, with decent performance at 2560x1440.

When I have to "suck it up," I boot into Windows, and when this iMac no longer cuts the mustard, I'll buy a new Mac with Thunderbolt 3 and an eGPU (or, depending on the state of eGPU driver support in Boot Camp, maybe I'll succumb to the Dark Side and build a Windows gaming rig ).

 

[John64232]

Yawn, yet another useless update. Staying with ML 10.8.5

 

[campyguy]

Yawn, yet another useless update. Staying with ML 10.8.5

Yet here you are, with an utterly useless post about an OS you'll not use that you've likely not even used, in your second post, no less. Yawn. Buh bye. Nothing more from this guy to see or read here.

 

[LucidDreamer]

Lol I love how Winni deleted their reply to my post:
"Winni said: ↑
As for gaming when you're a Mac owner... Just suck it up and buy a PS4 or an Xbox One."

I have a PS4 I love it! I just don't understand why Apple has decided to just be okay with being "okay"

As far as you go Winni, stand by what you think and by that I mean your reply... don't delete it because it seems f*&^ing stupid... Those are your thought so stand by them. Apple as a whole company is lagging behind and hopes that adding gimmicky features on an attractive layout will get more customers while not providing the computing power their price point should deliver.

Their reliance on the "white woman marketing effect" needs to change just because something is pretty doesn't make it cutting edge or intelligent, or worth 1000$



MacOS 2018 = More IOS just without the iphone and no touch screen...

I also think that Apple's refusal to allow a touch-screen Mac is ironically ignorant.
EVERYTHING IN MACOS is built like IOS other than in-depth searches in finder it is asinine that apple flat out refuses to adopt that kind of support.

The iPad Pro is not a replacement for a MacBook Pro or MacBook or MacBook Air, it doesn't have the computing power but they seem to really believe it does.

Apple's devices are a joke. It's like going to Starbucks for coffee when there is a mom and pop coffee bar down the street you just do it for the name and the status symbol.

So as for gaming when you're a Mac owner it should have been possible when intel started their first dedicated mobile GPU and we shouldn't have to install bootcamp just to get actual usage of our hardware!

 

[tehabe]

Yawn, yet another useless update. Staying with ML 10.8.5

10.8? Real people are still using System 8!

 

[nickk126]

Anyone know where to get a profile to install Mojave? I have iOS 12 and Watch OS 5 already, can't find anything for Mojave though. Thank you

 

[bennyprofane]

Anyone know where to get a profile to install Mojave? I have iOS 12 and Watch OS 5 already, can't find anything for Mojave though. Thank you

 

[nickk126]

Have you tried this download and it’s trusted?

 

[bennyprofane]

Have you tried this download and it’s trusted?

Yeah, it just enables your system to download Mojave from the app store.

 

[10.x]

I'd like to see the new Mac App Store *not* in Dark Mode. Like in Normal Mode. Does someone have a picture or video?

 

[Mildredop]

Watching that video makes me sad that Apple seem to be giving up on Macs.

OS X is such a lovely OS. And a lot of those features are, for me, real "Oooh, what a nice idea" moments.

I really don't want to move to Windows, but my 2014 MBP actually offers me more that the current Mac line-up, but it's getting old and I want an updated computer.

 

[chatin]

The OS should be the frame. Let the developers paint the canvas.

 

[Konigi]

View attachment 767140

Thanks!