For the record, Apple didn’t do anything wrong. It simply named macOS after Sonoma which I’m sure is a lovely place. One month after the keynote, however, and I’m thinking macOS Death Valley may be a better fit.
It’s completely out of Apple’s control, but things that make macOS Sonoma features great are getting nuked before the OS ever makes it out of the gate.
Take widgets on the desktop, for instance. macOS Sonoma finally liberates widgets from exile in Notification Center. Widgets are no longer constrained to a narrow column.
Now they can live on the desktop where they’re free to stretch their wings and fly – or at least appear as XL-sized widgets like on the iPad.
Optionally, widgets can lose their color and take on a tint based on your wallpaper when the desktop is not in focus.
There’s also a new option in macOS Sonoma that lets you click anywhere on the desktop to move all of your windows aside. I’m still a Hot Corners kind of person, but I think it’s clever, especially if you’re used to clicking an exposed part of a window to show it. Now the desktop can be one of those windows.
Widgets are no longer limited to which Mac apps you have installed either. Starting in macOS Sonoma, widgets from apps installed on your iPhone will be available on your Mac.
Apple demoed this feature using the world’s greatest Reddit client in history. Then the geniuses at Reddit hoped its luxury-priced API would be its secret shortcut to an overvalued IPO, and now Apollo is dead.
Craig Federighi should offer Christian Selig a remote job doing whatever Christian wants at Apple. A dog rescue donation button in the Wallet app has my vote.
macOS 14 is chock full of great new features though. Another is called Add to Dock. This feature lets you turn any website in Safari into a web app on the Mac. It’s great for creating a more app-like experience for services that disallow their iPhone app to run on Apple silicon Macs.
Add to Dock is also handy for creating desktop versions of web apps that used to offer desktop apps … for their web apps.
My go-to example when writing about Add to Dock last month was TweetDeck. I’ve relied on TweetDeck for Mac for years as a way to manage multiple Twitter accounts from a single window.
TweetDeck was also the only way to access streaming Twitter in the dark-but-not-as-dark-as-now days without a standard Mac app. Manually refreshing the timeline for something you follow in real time is hard.
But macOS Death Valley strikes again. Fine, the real culprits are millionaires and billionaires who run their businesses like they’re broke. Still, TweetDeck as we know it is being axed before macOS Sonoma officially ships.
Of course, the reality is that neither of these two occurrences have anything to do with macOS Sonoma’s great new features.
They’re both just the result of web company executives making decisions that they believe are best for their respective businesses. It’s merely a sad set of circumstances that these macOS Sonoma features will have a little less utility for some of us as a result.
But if you do believe in the curse of macOS Death Valley, perhaps you should keep a close eye on Lucid Motors. Craig Federighi did demo checking his EV charge as part of Sonoma…
FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links. More.
Comments