MacOS updates make less sense

I’ve been a Mac user for over a decade now and here comes a little rant.

The transition from Windows started mainly as a job requirement – back then Macbook was the only laptop within reach with 2x pixel density. As a frontend-developer it was important for me to see things as the designers would see them. Also there was quite some vane and conformity – in an average frontend/web conference I would often see people with Macbooks (and they had glowing logos!) and less people with other laptops.

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During all this time I’ve never had an iPhone as my primary smartphone, so was kind avoiding most of the Apple ecosystem – Photos, iMessage, Siri etc. Not really as a protest, but I’ve always felt Android is more compelling, open to the developers and generally it had new features much faster.

In this context most of the MacOS updates usually felt like coming with a bit of a lie.
Those updates are now presented annually as a major OS version, with lots of marketing material and design effort around it. However every time I look inside the release notes I feel stumbled.

Let me elaborate – Safari and Mail updates does not seem to me as an OS update. Most of the time these updates are less visible to me if at all. In rare cases Mail updates result in breaking smaller stuff – like my HTML signature is gone because they changed files location.
The rest of the Apple programs updates usually make very little difference for the people outside ecosystem, like me.
And the more in future, the less relevant it is, and more locked-in this ecosystem seems to me.

From what I remember there were a few major updates – like moving from 32bit system and the introduction of Siri.

Okay, don’t get me wrong – I understand that this design refresh comes with a huge engineering effort under the hood. But for the usual annual update that involves new icons and few features here and there I feel there is a lot of energy wasted.