Third macOS Golden Gate Public Beta Now Available

I’m going to install golden gate on my gold Macbook! Gold

But you’ll wait until it’s Golden Master, right?

For the love of all things sacred please fix the incorrect perspective on the hard drive icon.

My guess would be the particular person who drew that one has poor judgement. And the higher ups who set direction didn’t notice because it is not on the desktop by default anymore. And it’s not as noticeable if icon size is set smaller

Louie Mantia was on Gruber's pod many episodes ago, probably last year, at this stage; Gruber was talking about how when he was in a private meeting with some other tech journalists with Apple's then chief design officer (now at Facebook) and when he asked him a question about the drop shadows on Apple Watch face hands the man didn't have the knowledge to answer, which surprised Gruber (I'm sure he probably said he'd get back to him on that detail, or whatever). Gruber said he then knew the guy wasn't intimately involved with all of the details like Apple software leaders of old were. The man came from the advertising world. Also, Louie or one of his colleges at one meeting used a word the leaders weren't familiar with (a software UI term) and the leader shouted at him for being too technical (when it was the right word to use to describe this detail; the leader lacked the required software UI knowledge to understand the issue).

You can see this kind of thing when Apple redesigned their UI and you couldn't easily tell the focus window. It's not enough to be a designer to design good software, to do so you need to be a good software designer with a good aptitude and understanding of operating system software design, and in the case of app icons, a deep knowledge in that particular area.

Apple's new software design lead comes from the software design world. So some of that might be at play here re this odd icon—people making design decisions without the needed knowledge or understanding. Hopefully for the sake software design many such things are reversed in the coming two years or so. I personally think this Snow Leopard-style release focused equally on polish, speed and performance, efficiency, battery life, and fixing bugs should be the standard OS release protocol—not a once every ten or fifteen years if you're lucky affair. There's no good reason from a user standpoint why each release shouldn't be better in all of these ways. The user benefits too much to not want this being a major focus each release.

Further, and maybe this is a personal thing that others may not agree with, but to further push the software in this direction with focusing on quality across the board, I believe Apple would do well to move to biennial OS software releases, with a full two years to build, polish and refine prior to release. Let's make these systems so good bugs are hard to find, and app devs have a good amount of them so apps are also much better quality on new OS versions.

I saw in a reddit thread today that in Golden Gate beta, Apple Intelligence can no longer be turned off.

So, if true, I guess Apple Intelligence will be mandatory in all new Mac hardware released going forward (ofc, you can only downgrade to a version of MacOS that is the one that a device first shipped with).

I feel kind of uneasy about that. The Apple Intelligence back end is Google ... I think.

You can turn it off (its now just Siri) and no the backend isn't Google. Apple is using Gemeni models but that doesnt mean anything gets sent to Google, its still running on Apples servers as well as apple prompts, agents, etc.

I saw in a reddit thread today that in Golden Gate beta, Apple Intelligence can no longer be turned off.

So, if true, I guess Apple Intelligence will be mandatory in all new Mac hardware released going forward (ofc, you can only downgrade to a version of MacOS that is the one that a device first shipped with).

I feel kind of uneasy about that. The Apple Intelligence back end is Google ... I think.

Will definitely try when I get home. My MacBook Neo has been so sluggish.

Came back to report that my Neo seems normal now after this update. 🥳