macOS Sonoma 14.4: Reasons Not to Update

[theorist9]

Increase contrast is too much for me. It sends modern Macs back into the age of all in one System 6 Macs. There's no way I want the interface on my $4000 colour mac to revert to black and white.

I certainly hear where you're coming from—it would be nice to have both the pretty effects from transparency along with easily readable text, and it's unfortunate that Apple doesn't offer this in its current OS's. But describing Increased Contrast as making everything B&W is quite an exaggeration.

Increased Contrast does remove transparency from certain elements, turning their backgrounds black or gray. But it only does that for the Menu Bar and Dock, and the Toolbars and Sidebars of Apple apps only (Finder, Preview, Safari etc.).

It has, as far as I can tell, no effect on colors anywhere else. It has no effect within the main viewable space of Apple apps (again, affecting the Toolbar and Sidebar only, and not, e.g., how webpages render, which is what you spend most of your time looking at when using Safari). And it has no effect at all on non-Apple apps like Office, Adobe CC, and Mathematica.

For me, and I think for most users, the part of the UI whose color is lost with Increase Contrast represents only a very small fraction of what we spend our time looking at.

Thus, while I can certainly understand your preferences, I hope you can see it's hyperbolic to say Increased Contrast looks like System 6.

Sub-pixel rendering for non-retina monitors: there are tricks to turn some of advanced aliasing back on. I run an HP LP3065 at work After some tinkering with command-line I was able to get text to look good again on the HP LP3065 under Big Sur and then Monterey. Here's my settings with an excellent theoretical article above. Here's detailed discussion at MacRumors.

I was part of that detailed discussion. I was not able to get adequate results in Mojave even after turning subpixel rendering back on:

The subpixel-AA debacle and font rendering

There's a lot of confusion about this issue, so I decided to investigate it myself. I'm using a Dell P2715Q 27" 4K external monitor. I've tried the CGFontRenderingFontSmoothingDisabled workaround in Mojave (along with the various font smoothing value options), and still can't get acceptable...

forums.macrumors.com

I use external non-Apple monitors calibrated with an xRite i1. Current calibration tool is back to BasiCColor as Calibrite is invasive/clumsy/slightly green and free DisplayCal doesn't run right since the security theatre was implemented. I've been calibrating my monitors for about twenty years (first calibration probe was from BasiCColor, bundled with the software).

Yeah, I've been doing it for about the same amount of time. BasiCColor doesn't give any pricing on their site, saying I need to contact them before they can give me a quote. Before I bother to do that, do you know about how much it costs? For $30 I'd be willing to give it a shot. For $300, not so much.

I agree, Calibrite is a bit clunky. But it's not too bad-- I just follow the instructions here:

 

[jagooch]

I wonder why Sonoma is not running on iPads. I'm pretty sure I saw an Apple commercial that said "My iPad is my computer."

 

[foliovision]

BasiCColor doesn't give any pricing on their site, saying I need to contact them before they can give me a quote. Before I bother to do that, do you know about how much it costs? For $30 I'd be willing to give it a shot. For $300, not so much.

BasiCColor pricing is about $60/€60. Yes, not being able to buy online in a store easily is a hassle. The email transaction is relatively easy. I gave current owner/manager Karl Koch hell for not allowing me to just upgrade my three seat license online. In the end, he gave me a reasonable discount to keep three seats (while the license is portable, I loathe wasting time moving licenses around). I believe Herr Koch is an engineer which plays a part in his antipathy against online stores, i.e. he believes the science trumps the economics. It's a mad proposition. After offering to have Foliovision build the BasiCColor store at favourable rates, I can't do more to convince him to solve the issue.

The software works well, it's worth a spin on a single license if you care about colour. Btw, there's a free 14 day trial which actually works. If you create an account (I already had one), you can get a trial on every computer you own.

I hope you can see it's hyperbolic to say Increased Contrast looks like System 6.

Nope. Here's what Reduced Transparency looks like.

Here's what Increased Contrast looks like:

Horrible. Outside of the colour icons, that looks a lot like System 6 to me. Look at the icons on the window bar. Apple can do a lot better than this.

Reduce Transparency is good enough on Monterey I can live with it. Unfortunately I don't have Ventura booted here and am not willing to go to the trouble of rebooting to repeat these shots in Ventura. Perhaps someone else can add Ventura and Sonoma shots for Reduced Transparency and Increased Contrast to provide reference.

 

[theorist9]

BasiCColor pricing is about $60/€60. Yes, not being able to buy online in a store easily is a hassle. The email transaction is relatively easy. I gave current owner/manager Karl Koch hell for not allowing me to just upgrade my three seat license online. In the end, he gave me a reasonable discount to keep three seats (while the license is portable, I loathe wasting time moving licenses around). I believe Herr Koch is an engineer which plays a part in his antipathy against online stores, i.e. he believes the science trumps the economics. It's a mad proposition. After offering to have Foliovision build the BasiCColor store at favourable rates, I can't do more to convince him to solve the issue.

The software works well, it's worth a spin on a single license if you care about colour. Btw, there's a free 14 day trial which actually works. If you create an account (I already had one), you can get a trial on every computer you own.

Thanks for the info.! And that's pretty cool that you are Foliovision--I thought that was just a user name.

Regardless of calibration software used, do you find you need to change the calibration when you change the OS, i.e., that a different OS will result in a different calibration?

Nope. Here's what Reduced Transparency looks like.

Nope. If you're looking at actual content, which is where most people's eyes are focused most of the time, the difference in overall appearance is trivial; and the boxes around the toolbar icons (which I actually like) simply help focus the eye. Plus changing the toolbar's icons and text from gray-on-gray to black-on-gray is so much nicer.

[If anything, I think the main downside of Increased Contrast is that you lose Transparency and thus lose the colored background in the menu bars and dock (which I would have shown, except I wanted to show the same comparison you did), which adds a nice flair—but, again, constitutes only a tiny fraction of what you're viewing.]

And here's System 6 for comparison. Seriously—imagine you made the following claim to, say, 100 of the world's top UI experts. What percentage do you actually think would agree?

Increase contrast ... sends modern Macs back into the age of all in one System 6 Macs. There's no way I want the interface on my $4000 colour mac to revert to black and white.

 

[turbineseaplane]

Thanks for the info.! And that's pretty cool that you are Foliovision--I thought that was just a user name.

Regardless of calibration software used, do you find you need to change the calibration when you change the OS, i.e., that a different OS will result in a different calibration?

Nope. If you're looking at actual content, which is where most people's eyes are focused most of the time, the difference is trivial:

View attachment 2365184

And here's System 6 for comparison. Seriously—imagine you made the following claim to, say, 100 of the world's top UI experts. What percentage do you actually think would agree?


View attachment 2365185

A 1W from 160 yards!?

 

[foliovision]

Nope. If you're looking at actual content, which is where most people's eyes are focused most of the time, the difference in overall appearance is trivial; and the boxes around the toolbar icons (which I actually like) simply help focus the eye. Plus changing the toolbar's icons and text from gray-on-gray to black-on-gray is so much nicer.

I work with a lot of applications and windows, some of which are very window heavy. I don't appreciate going backwards from Snow Leopard/Mountain Lion/El Capitan levels of contrast with modern gradients to either light grey on middle grey to black and white boxes.

And yes, I do think it looks like System 7 which I really did use. It's black and white menu boxes. Yes, there's higher PPI but it's still back to black and white 2-tone. It's a kick in the face to the millions of us with slightly fading vision. Particularly as Apple was able to build usable interfaces all the way through Monterey, albeit the last real winner in terms of contrast ratios being El Capitan.

Apple has welched enough on Apple Care, broken iOS/OS updates, forced updates, deliberate incompatibility, right to repair – the love affair is over and I'm looking for the exit, as Apple is not to be trusted. Not with our hardware budget, not with our software investment (Aperture/FCP Studio, just two examples which hit me hard) and not with our privacy (Patriot Act in its different iterations).

Aside: Whatever he says to BusinessInsider, ultimately Tim plays ball with the Feds. One because he has to and because ultimately money matters more to an operations guy than privacy, Steve was different, he never cared about money except as an instrument of change. Steve would dare the Feds to drag him off to prison, he was no more vulnerable to state intimidation than Jesus of Nazareth (or more recently Julian Assange).

 

[theorist9]

I work with a lot of applications and windows, some of which are very window heavy. I don't appreciate going backwards from Snow Leopard/Mountain Lion/El Capitan levels of contrast with modern gradients to either light grey on middle grey to black and white boxes.

And yes, I do think it looks like System 7 which I really did use. It's black and white menu boxes. Yes, there's higher PPI but it's still back to black and white 2-tone. It's a kick in the face to the millions of us with slightly fading vision. Particularly as Apple was able to build usable interfaces all the way through Monterey, albeit the last real winner in terms of contrast ratios being El Capitan.

Apple has welched enough on Apple Care, broken iOS/OS updates, forced updates, deliberate incompatibility, right to repair – the love affair is over and I'm looking for the exit, as Apple is not to be trusted. Not with our hardware budget, not with our software investment (Aperture/FCP Studio, just two examples which hit me hard) and not with our privacy (Patriot Act in its different iterations).

Aside: Whatever he says to BusinessInsider, ultimately Tim plays ball with the Feds. One because he has to and because ultimately money matters more to an operations guy than privacy, Steve was different, he never cared about money except as an instrument of change. Steve would dare the Feds to drag him off to prison, he was no more vulnerable to state intimidation than Jesus of Nazareth (or more recently Julian Assange).

Certainly there are a lot of practices by Apple that increase their bottom line while making them less consumer-friendly. At the same time, Apple still has a lot of residual goodwill with me for the outstanding product support they've given me in the past.

But decreasing contrast (as opposed to, say, making their desktop SSD's effectively non-upgradeable) doesn't make them more money. So isn't that simply a bad design decision, rather than a profit-driven tradeoff? [Unless they decided the overwhelming majority of their market are younger users, and that they would find the low-contrast look more attractive....]

Having said all that, you wrote "I'm looking for the exit, as Apple is not to be trusted". Is there any other PC manufacturer that can be?

 

[foliovision]

Having said all that, you wrote "I'm looking for the exit, as Apple is not to be trusted". Is there any other PC manufacturer that can be?

It's not about the hardware. There's lots of good hardware out there, both current and vintage. It's about software. And yes, with Linux, one wins one's freedom for the price of learning the command line. I'm very attached to the work of the great third-party developers on macOS (ManyTricks, Gus Mueller, Michael Tsai, Ergonis, Peter N. Lewis, to name just a few). But Apple has done nothing for me on the software side since Snow Leopard except add support for AMD Radeon cards.

More and more Mac applications are being written in clunky cross-platform frameworks like Electron as developers are so tired of Apple moving the cheese (constantly changing frameworks, switching API's, changing permissions). For developers, working with macOS is a never-ending headache.

they decided the overwhelming majority of their market are younger users, and that they would find the low-contrast look more attractive

That's exactly what Apple decided. They would make macOS either much harder to use or extremely ugly for a huge part of their user base. If Apple gives us the finger, again and again, we should take the hint.

As I leave Apple, I'll be taking four people in my immediate circle (three of them much younger, who will not become lifelong customers for Apple) and encourage many more in wider circles and publish articles about how to do it to a much wider audience.

The MBA calculations about what my vote is worth (1) vs their entire marketshare is a bit short-sighted. It's not just me, there's lots of us and we will make a long term difference. Of course US-trained MBA's think in two and three year cycles (in the best case)…

 

[daweathaman]

macOS 14.4 has possibly made this issue more prevalent for people, including myself, as well: https://github.com/waydabber/BetterDisplay/discussions/2622#discussioncomment-8816298

Kernel panics introduced because of a monitor connection...

I've been having the same issue since 14.4, too. I just had a kernel panic pop up after I logged back in my M2 Pro Mac mini (see below). It typically happens if I lock the screen and not sign out of my user account, but lately it's been happening more whether I sign out or not.

panic(cpu 3 caller 0xfffffe001eeedc7c): "AppleT602XDPTXPort(lpdptx-phy0)::deactivateTimeoutOccurred(0x100000521): deactivate() incomplete 10 seconds after displayRelease()! (check DCPEXT)\n" @AppleT8112DPTXPort.cpp:574
Debugger message: panic

 

[organisum]

Looking at going to ProTools from Logic and moving to Windows. Then also switching my IT business from Mac-centric to Windows. A lot more money there.

 

[RedWeasel]

Looking at going to ProTools from Logic and moving to Windows.

Maybe also consider Cubase or Nuendo, which has like the audio features of PT and the MIDI features of Logic (and more).

Depends a bit on what you are doing of course.

 

[Harry Haller]

Looking at going to ProTools from Logic and moving to Windows. Then also switching my IT business from Mac-centric to Windows. A lot more money there.

I'm using Studio One and dipping my toe into Ableton Live and sticking with my Mac for Music for now. Moving to Windows for Blender and Unreal Engine to have Access to Nvidia GPUs. I was shocked when the Apple Silicon Mac Pro 76 core GPU showed up on the Blender performance page with a score equivalent to an RTX3080 and the CPU with i9 13900K compute. WTF? That's 1/5 the performance of a 4090 and the 5090 will be out in a few months.

The rumor that the Mac Studio and Mac Pro might not be updated until 2025 might make me rethink my commitment to Macs even for music. Hopefully there's some good news at WWDC.

 

[chrisone]

I've been having the same issue since 14.4, too. I just had a kernel panic pop up after I logged back in my M2 Pro Mac mini (see below). It typically happens if I lock the screen and not sign out of my user account, but lately it's been happening more whether I sign out or not.

Exactly the same, and indeed it seems to happen after 14.4

 

[Ish]

As mentioned before I 'upgraded' to Sonoma quite late and one on the niggles I have is that the favourites bar is more spread out and some of the shortcuts that were immediately visible have now fallen off the page into the list. It also means that nothing is quite where it was and after so many years of it being stable, muscle memory takes over and I'm clicking on things that aren't where they used to be.

 

[foliovision]

The rumor that the Mac Studio and Mac Pro might not be updated until 2025 might make me rethink my commitment to Macs even for music. Hopefully there's some good news at WWDC.

I'm no fan of the new Apple, with yearly OS updates which mostly move the cheese and kneecap third-party developers. That said, the new M1 (M2, M3, M4 by extension) computers are so incredibly powerful, particularly for music. There's not a performance reason on earth that a composer could ever require more than an M2 Ultra.

Video editors could make an argument, but since Resolve runs so well on Apple Silicon, it would be a big spend indeed which could get better performance out of a PC. The potential is there and with some other software it would make sense to build an FX station with Windows and nVidia cards.