macOS Ventura on M2 MacBook Air — LONG TERM REVIEW

year after year Apple has been polishing its systems merging them together now the systems look more unified than ever but that doesn’t mean it’s good I have been using the release version of the Mac OS Ventura for a full month now on top of four months of betas and I do have something to say this Mac OS update is probably the most controversial release for one reason there is one reason that makes this simultaneously giantly forward for Mac OS and a hot smelly mess so let’s take a closer look at the latest and greatest Mac

OS Ventura together this update brought us two new apps clock and weather don’t get me wrong but I can care less about the weather app works fine looks great but the widget we had before basically gave me all the info I needed it’s a nice app but again in all the time I’ve used Ventura I have opened it maybe twice but the clock app is another story The Clock app is a total Game Changer usually one working I need to set timer stopwatch Etc previously I could take the phone someone and get sucked in by

social media for half an hour now I can either open the app and start a timer or I can ask Siri to do it for me by the way

when you set a timer it will appear in the menu bar kind of nice touch right all in all this part of Ventura is not the controversial one continue continuity camera I can’t say that I have used it really on paper this really looks like a great idea for some people if your macbook’s camera is too bad for you just use your iPhone as a webcam this

should work right well yes but actually now the feature itself works the laptop connects to my phone and the image looks great but for me even despite having frequent video calls this feature is kind of useless first video calls usually don’t require having the sharpest or the widest image and the camera in MacBooks is perfectly fine for face timer Zoom calls where your camera view is ramped into a tiny rectangle second you need to buy a separate phone mount just to attach your iPhone to your Mac I don’t feel like spending money on something I

don’t need and third I have concerns about the impact it may have on the Hench hinges and MacBooks are fragile and can break easily and strapping 7 ounces of weight to it doesn’t seem like a very good idea if the hinge breaks the repair would easily cost half of what the laptop is worth Safari on the other hand is a strange thing I can’t say I’m a frequent Safari user but the feature list is really small share it tap groups I tried it a few times and it really helped me collaborate with other team members

we now can work more effectively reducing the time needed to share information however I’m not a huge fan of the somewhat updated looks of safari in Mac OS Ventura it looks a bit more like we see on iPads and iPhones and I don’t think this is a good approach the browser and the computer cannot be treated the same way as on tablets and phones we interact with it differently the screen is different and the comfortable button layout for the pointer is different if Apple continues to walk this path with Safari it could possibly be become

the end of safari for me yet there is one more thing about Safari that kind of saves it live text translation when you see a text you can select it and right click and in the menu select translate the window that appears not only gives a translation but allows you to listen to the correct pronunciation for me it’s a really useful feature since I often need to do some research for new videos and some articles can be not in English some words may be hard to pronounce and this feature can really help me make more

high quality videos Apple changed the design of Siri but it didn’t get any better in terms of capabilities I can’t stress enough how useless Siri is it can set timers all right you can create reminders call people but that’s basically it when I need to Google something it mostly happens when I’m already in Safari or Chrome and asking Siri instead of manually typing my request takes more time plus Siri can only do short search requests if I ask it about the diameter of the earth it will answer just fine but can’t ask her for example

how to create a correct mesh in blender or how to create an L cut in Premiere Pro that’s why if I use Siri it does for me the basic tasks saving me a couple seconds in terms of the system’s speed and responsiveness everything is great and any Apple silicon powered Mac everything works great animations are fluent most of the time but we’ll talk about flawed moments in a sec the load in time is the same no hiccups were noticed yes the first betas were somewhat slow and buggy but the release version is well polished the

same goes for books since the official release I haven’t seen any bugs or compatibility issues apps work just as good as they did in Monterey so no complaints here in terms of battery life Ventura does perform similarly to Monterey haven’t noticed any difference there is still one thing to say about charging it must be done responsibly MacBooks are fragile and using the cheap charger may damage the battery if you are having troubles with charging your Mac you should check out ugreen the sponsor of today’s video here I have two great Chargers that you may like

first this four and one 65 watt desktop charger this charger is perfect for minimalist desk setups one cable goes to the outlet the charger takes almost no space on the table and four cables go out you can connect PC cables and two USB a cables for fast charging your gadgets and ul94 vo rated shell along with an efficient heat dissipation structure ensures safe overnight charging the u-green power dispenser system intelligently adjusts the power output to protect your product’s battery so it will last longer to protect your charger from overheating the thermal guard system takes 200

temperature readings every second this charger can easily charge your amp to MacBook Air from 0 to 100 in 1.5 hours second charger I have here is this Gan fast charger also at 65 Watts you just hook it to the outlet and have one USB type A and two type c for fast charging of all of your devices tablets phones laptops one device to charge them out the Gan technology makes it safer lighter and more efficient than standard Chargers you may find in the box size wise it’s almost half the size of Apple’s single port 61

charger it even has the foldable plug for easier transportation and traveling I can do that all day this adapter easily charges the M2 MacBook Air to 51 in only 30 minutes all that in one small power efficient and fully protected charger and now udreen has some great Black Friday discounts so hurry up the deals start on 24th of November and end on 28th so check the link in this video description to learn more what I extremely enjoyed about Mac OS Ventura is the object separation in photos for me it is really a game changer when

it comes to creating thumbnails previously I used to open Photoshop and spend precious minutes painstakingly separating myself from the background now I can simply open a photo right click on the subject and select copy subject Apple’s neural engines will pretty accurately cut out the subject all that’s left is just paste it into Photoshop if you know how to make photos the right way this feature can save you hours it’s probably one of the best additions to Mac OS in a long time one more positive thing I found is the updated Spotlight search now it can

search across everything you have on your laptop with photos files messages everything this makes it much easier to find the necessary information plus if you’re looking for files you can preview them directly from the Spotlight by long pressing the spacebar now it is much easier to find what I need and definitely save some time on a daily basis hope Spotlight will keep getting better because there is still a lot of potential things really start getting dark for apple with the stage manager Apple was really hyped in this feature emphasizing how useful and convenient it is

Apple believes that it’s so hard that by default it replaces the keyboard brightness button in the control center but everyone I ask has turned it off immediately after the update to me this is simply a gimmick a feature simply for the sake of it created just to make iPads seem more like a Mac but at Max it adds zero functionality really first do you need to have multiple windows opened on one screen mean why pilot up Windows instead of expanding them to separate desktops second the stage manager takes up just too much space the screens

on Macs are not particularly wide so still in an inch from us is basically a crime getting used to using a stage manager is just a huge pain in the ass for decades we’ve been used to a certain workflow certain interactions with Mac OS and now Apple wants us to relearn everything just so that they could say that the feature isn’t useless I just fundamentally don’t understand how it must be difficult for people at Apple to press command tab that they came up with maybe in some scenarios it can help a little and maybe new

Mac OS users will like that but for us the older gang such changes are not good all the time that I’ve tried to use it I was just questioning the reasons for this feature to exist oh and the animation is choppy even on the 14 and 16 inch MacBook Pros 120 hertz especially when you swap between have heavy apps sometimes it just can freeze and stop responding but new settings that’s a whole nother level completely remade and redesigned settings are breaking all the workflows and settings interactions we used to have for decades and makes me

Google Solutions and answers for where to find something far more often unifying settings across all devices sounds like a good idea at first but the way it is implemented here completely butchers all good intentions first the whole interaction scheme is broken just look at Monterey each settings section had its own icon easily recognizable even without titles now look at the vertical scroll list from Ventura here on the left you can see all the settings menus and when you click on them they will appear on the right just like on iPads but what works for simple

settings of a tablet doesn’t work for laptops and the Order of preferences is now based on iOS Wi-Fi Bluetooth Network notifications I can’t imagine a single Mac User who values Wi-Fi focus and screen time over general settings here they are in Monterey the top left corner hard to miss here with a scrollable list you simply can scroll past them and don’t let me start on icons they are different in Ventura in Monterey each icon was representative visually expressive and you could have figured out which section to open base solely on icons now all icons are

unified devoid of humanity just look what happens when I go to wallpapers we must scroll horizontally now let’s go to sounds to choose an alert sound you now need to select one from a drop down menu and click a separate button to hear the sound you’ve chosen in Monterey you could just use arrow keys or click on H1 and hear the sound instantly battery section let’s open that in Monterey and inventura and Monterey was fairly easy to navigate through menus pick options and do scheduling inventura on the other hand all of that is gone why

did Monterey have this section designed by a human and then tour up by some AI from the Westworld well you got the point right new settings are that controversial thing from the start so you should think twice before installing Ventura if you still have this option so my impressions are mixed Mac OS Ventura is it gets much better in some areas but gets much worse than others to me it will eternally stay a so-so update it will take some time for Apple to fix all the mistakes they made so I’ll keep you posted on that

foreign

%d bloggers like this: