Just wanted to share any ideas on what the best final os could be for intel macbook pro's. I have a 16 inch i9 version, which has always been somewhat of a lemon, but the speakers and the display are still too nice (and too expensive) to replace, given its still functional for what i do.
Mode of operation:
- Rebuild the OS quarterly to acknowledge they are no longer supported. This has become very quick over the years, due to the gem of apfs not needing allocated space for partitions, all my data lives on other partitions. I do a clean install every time, and have some bash (!!) scripts that copy out the app support files before rebuild and restore once its back.
- Run in single retina mode, mostly. Since big sur. intel integrated gpus aren't good enough to run macos smoothly, you can use the discrete gpu, or a utility to set the resolution to a 1x option. I suppose the default resolution is okay, but ever since macs i've always taken more screen space.
Options:
- TAHOE: As bad as it is, i enjoy eye candy. Its also in the beginning of its school year, so wont be seriously interesting until next year, it still has time to bake. If all you care about is the patches against the bogey man thats 3 years from now still to go, which is quite good. I love the transparencies but of course they're expensive on all but the gpus of the latest m chips. They can never fix this apart from turning it off btw. The rounded windows and the supermassive bloat designed to take out the m1 superchip are hard to ignore though.
- SEQUIOA: Bloat is already beyond intel.
- SONOMA: Has acceptable performance on intel, just slightly worse than ventura, and brings alot of app compatibility it seems. Still has a year of support. It may be the first os though that formally tuned away from intel, the power management is more aggressive, somehow it runs very cool, but is also more bursty, and choppy, which somehow seems to drain the battery more than ventura.. while running cooler? There could be more stuff going on in the background that's not apparent. Its pretty much the same as ventura though if you aren't measuring, and if you were forced to by software wouldn't be the end of the world.
- VENTURA: Golden child. The last os where everything was just right for intel. Critically, seems to have better power management than monterey. Also critically, beats monterey in app performance. While monterey may have snappier windowing, the content drawn in windows is far more snappier on ventura.. it actually feels better. Also im running 13.7.6!!!! 13.7.7 (and im assuming .8) are tangibly worse. When i rolled back to 13.7.6 it was like formal acceptance.
- MONTEREY: Worth a go. Overall windowing is quite noticable step above ventura, but it wasn't a universal win due to the in app content rendering much faster in ventura. I haven't tested this in a while, but i also suspect classic gaming using opengl is faster on monterey, at least since ventura over the years pretty much gaming was a universal disappointment. Battery life i feel like saying is worse than ventura as well, the lower power mode isn't as interesting. There's something up with availability though, only the 7.4 installer is still available, and i tried to update via ota to 7.6 on a different imac and it refused to boot after restart. Never seen an official apple patch fail until this.
Just lastly, to save on testing, what i like doing is going to geekbench browser and searching for the build and my cpu to see if there are any trends. If there isn't a trend you cant hold your breath and make one, but for particularly good or particularly bad builds for your processor, its immediately apparent. I usually only try the best performing builds.
Mode of operation:
- Rebuild the OS quarterly to acknowledge they are no longer supported. This has become very quick over the years, due to the gem of apfs not needing allocated space for partitions, all my data lives on other partitions. I do a clean install every time, and have some bash (!!) scripts that copy out the app support files before rebuild and restore once its back.
- Run in single retina mode, mostly. Since big sur. intel integrated gpus aren't good enough to run macos smoothly, you can use the discrete gpu, or a utility to set the resolution to a 1x option. I suppose the default resolution is okay, but ever since macs i've always taken more screen space.
Options:
- TAHOE: As bad as it is, i enjoy eye candy. Its also in the beginning of its school year, so wont be seriously interesting until next year, it still has time to bake. If all you care about is the patches against the bogey man thats 3 years from now still to go, which is quite good. I love the transparencies but of course they're expensive on all but the gpus of the latest m chips. They can never fix this apart from turning it off btw. The rounded windows and the supermassive bloat designed to take out the m1 superchip are hard to ignore though.
- SEQUIOA: Bloat is already beyond intel.
- SONOMA: Has acceptable performance on intel, just slightly worse than ventura, and brings alot of app compatibility it seems. Still has a year of support. It may be the first os though that formally tuned away from intel, the power management is more aggressive, somehow it runs very cool, but is also more bursty, and choppy, which somehow seems to drain the battery more than ventura.. while running cooler? There could be more stuff going on in the background that's not apparent. Its pretty much the same as ventura though if you aren't measuring, and if you were forced to by software wouldn't be the end of the world.
- VENTURA: Golden child. The last os where everything was just right for intel. Critically, seems to have better power management than monterey. Also critically, beats monterey in app performance. While monterey may have snappier windowing, the content drawn in windows is far more snappier on ventura.. it actually feels better. Also im running 13.7.6!!!! 13.7.7 (and im assuming .8) are tangibly worse. When i rolled back to 13.7.6 it was like formal acceptance.
- MONTEREY: Worth a go. Overall windowing is quite noticable step above ventura, but it wasn't a universal win due to the in app content rendering much faster in ventura. I haven't tested this in a while, but i also suspect classic gaming using opengl is faster on monterey, at least since ventura over the years pretty much gaming was a universal disappointment. Battery life i feel like saying is worse than ventura as well, the lower power mode isn't as interesting. There's something up with availability though, only the 7.4 installer is still available, and i tried to update via ota to 7.6 on a different imac and it refused to boot after restart. Never seen an official apple patch fail until this.
Just lastly, to save on testing, what i like doing is going to geekbench browser and searching for the build and my cpu to see if there are any trends. If there isn't a trend you cant hold your breath and make one, but for particularly good or particularly bad builds for your processor, its immediately apparent. I usually only try the best performing builds.
