The M1 at its introduction was a little too good at its price point. The cynic in me says it will get hamstrung in software by piling on a lot of useless ‘ML’-crap in the OS that makes it perceivably slower. I’ve had my M1 laptop for two years and it still feels like it just came out of the box. I’m holding off on Ventura for as long as I can. The page showing the new features for MacOS is a laughable piece of marketing, trying desperately to find added value or frame things as such.
People have been hating on the new System Settings app (a messy redesign that violates Apple's own design guidelines) and how almost every other enhancement is really minor.
However, I've really enjoyed Ventura, because of the following (non-exhaustive list):
* As a Mac admin: enterprise managed updates actually work compared to Monterey!
* As a Mac developer: SwiftUI graphics rendering is significantly faster, closing in on AppKit levels of performance with no changes required!
As a regular user:
* A battery life leak that I noticed with Monterey 12.6.1 was fixed and my battery life became much better
* The Weather app is absolutely amazing
* Live Text is even better than before
One issue that's been irking me is that I've had a lot more accidental Siri triggers while talking to other people, and even while watching movies and videos through the speakers. I'm going to re-do the Hey Siri set up to see if it fixes the issue.
The settings page doesn't work for one thing. Not badly designed (which I believe it is), but it just plain is a buggy mess.
I've also had to manually fix permissions problems on directories that in the UI do not show as granted, but are actually enabled and allowing file reads/writes (the UI is just showing that permissions haven't been granted when they have, which is incredibly dangerous).
I don't mind the new organization of System Settings.app, but the search field is extremely slow and doesn't always return a sensible top result. I was skeptical of it at first, but I think it was probably the right direction, assuming they continue improve it.
It reduced battery life and consumes more resources for me on m2. I do roughly the same thing every day, so I'm used to when I need to plug in and can plan accordingly. Ventura has higher resource usage, and I need to plug up 70-90 minutes earlier, though sometimes up to 120 mins earlier.
