Comment by epistasis

The more you people keep harping on this ultra robust backup strategy, the fewer everyday average people are actually even going to attempt a backup.

And restore tested.

The removable storage will presumably not be encrypted the way the soldered storage is

[dead]

I'm not aware of any control over what gets backed up.

I'm assuming that all of my local work would be lost. But I'd still have the sixteen million duplicate photos.

iCloud's priorities are not a great fit for preserving my source code repos. Fortunately those aren't very big.

But when my son's Mac dies, his huge Logic Pro projects are toast. And he is a few thousand miles away now.

Kind of, but without a sub you only get a trivial amount of storage.

There is no iCloud Backup for Macs, only iOS devices.

There is iCloud Drive sync, but that only syncs your Documents and Desktop folders, but any other files are not synced.

All the data is encrypted and the key is held inside the secure enclave within the CPU. If the CPU fails then the data is unrecoverable.

That's a big ask. Probably only work the few hundred it'd take to do that, then get the data off it, if you had some super important documents // crypto wallet.

Key is held on a separate chip unfortunately

encrypted by both a boot password and a secure enclave held key

Similar experience. In active use in my house:

    2012 MacBook Pro
    2015 MacBook Pro
    2019 MacBook Air
    2020 M1 MacBook Pro

The longevity is incredible.

The last few models of Intel Mac Pro that I used were mostly good at getting really hot.

Dropbox would fire up to do massive walks of the filesystem tree and the fans would take off. I think the thermal interface material on the GPU got cooked at some point. It would be a relatively easy fix, for me a couple of hours, but I chose to fix it with an M1 MacBook Air.

Just use. There were two models that had issues with the gpu desoldering, 2012 and 2015 iirc? I was lucky enough to have them. I put the mobos in the oven (180deg for seven minutes?) and that would fix it. For about a month… and then 2 weeks.. and then… I actually have a 2018 that I borrowed from a friend after my 2013 Air ssd gave up, it is still working I think, but its twice as slow, at least as my Air was. Its so weird. The Air stayed ‘snappy’ even after my friends Pro’s would become too sluggish. Maybe because I never update ;)

They fare differently in dusty environments, for one. Airs being sealed do well.

the 2012 was a really solid generation (the 2010 as well. i still have both, not running osx anymore of course)

Another 2012 Air user here.

The battery doesn't hold a charge anymore, but as long as it's plugged in, it keeps chugging along.

> The old airs were legendary.

You gotta be kidding me. The old M1 Air had the "bendgate" where several people, me included, saw their screen die overnight for no reason. Tens and tens of pages of people complaining about it only to be with "you're holding it wrong" answers. Insanity.

I think Apple fixed that mess with the gen after that one.

Yeah the formfactor, the noise, the heat… even the performance seems better except for what, benchmarks..?

Reduce != disable.

On the Windows side, Windows 2000 and XP/Vista/7’s Classic mode, though Aero was quite nice. I’m not a fan of the interfaces from 8 onward, and I didn’t like Luna in XP.

On the Mac side, it’s a toss up between the platinum interface of Mac OS 8/9 and Mac OS X Tiger. With that said, I have a work-issued MacBook Pro running Golden Gate as my daily driver, and Liquid Glass is alright. It’s not what I’d prefer if I had a choice, but it’s not a dramatic departure from previous versions of macOS. A Cheetah or Puma Mac OS X user should be able to navigate Golden Gate with ease, mostly.

Windows 2000 / XP in classic mode / XP / Vista / 7. For OSX I'd say High Sierra to Catalina.

I'd say Snow Leopard was peak.

Liquid Glass was not a "small UI change". It disrupted many accessibility aspects of macOS, so much so that Apple toned down quite a few aspects of the design in subsequent updates, even adding a slider to reduce the effect. [1]

The quantity of requests for how to disable Liquid Glass on Apple Discussions is staggering. [2]

[1]https://www.macrumors.com/2026/06/09/macos-golden-gate-liqui...

[2]https://discussions.apple.com/thread/256227663

I think the biggest thing isn't really whatever it is but the act of changing and forcing everyone to change into the new ui that is the disruptive part. It is a combination of window dressing changing but also sometimes functions breaking. It is ironic because software written for developers prides itself generally on maintaining compatibility with say depreciated flags, or if things will be depreciated plenty of notice ahead of time. But that only holds for cli software. GUI software and the OS that all goes out the window. Stuff breaks, workflows break, you have no recourse and in fact they might make it genuinely difficult to go back to an older version. Like this part of it is the shitty part. Never mind how it happens to look. It is the forcing effect.

If you consider the transition from macOS 15 to 26+ 'small', I think you should see an optician.

Like GP, I despise the new design. I'll say the old design was pretty peak design. Windows looked like windows. Buttons like buttons. With accessibility tweaks (for transparency and borders) I could make it very, very usable.

This new thing is a crime against UI. Every icon now sits in a circle, and takes up % more room as a result. Because … it's pretty? It isn't pretty.

I upgraded my laptop thinking I was going to develop an app and that I'd need to be on the latest design. I ended up developing a TUI so I needn't have bothered. Every time I see my partner's laptop, still on Sequoia, I shed a little tear.

NeXTSTep

Small improvements don't get much accolades. And for the most part, the UX is so good that most changes tend to be neutral or for the worse. And when you're really attached to something and there's on an unnecessary change, it feels almost like betrayal!

I, for one, prefer Apple products because they sweat the small stuff more than the other options, and when they have put in effort to make things worse it's kind of infuriating.

I do a bit of desktop Linux work too, and it's OK, but hard to complain when it's all open source volunteer work! Windows is so terrible that I wouldn't even know where to start. What's the point? There's nobody at Microsoft that even gives a damn.

Mac OS 7.6.1 was peak Apple

No, it was Windows 3.11

Small?

They're going to force us soon. When getting a new device I don't think you can install an older version either.

Liquid Glass is more than just the transparency. There are many other changes that cannot be disabled that way. Not to mention the overall lag compared to Sequoia (I skipped Tahoe entirely so I had a direct knife-edge transition). 27 is less bad than 26 but Liquid Glass doesn't make anything better than prior UI and makes several things worse, even if you turn down the transparency.