New ones don’t seem to be available any more, you probably need to go refurbished. Last year some third-party sellers still had new units available. Replacing the battery is always an option.
It doesn’t look like Apple will be going back to something smaller than the 17e. Unless you count the upcoming foldable, which while shorter than the mini, however is also wider, thicker and heavier.
Yes. The list of reasons is long, but at the end of the day the Haskell on the JVM crowd moved on to other things, and the people who just wanted Java++ moved to Katlin. And that was most of the audience.
Also a liquid glass hater, but for what it's worth, 27 is supposed to make it a little bit better. I would prefer to go back to what I had before I had to upgrade into this horrible UI, but this is better than nothing.
I've been running the 27 beta and it fixes so much of the ugliness I hated in Tahoe. Lots of places had toolbars restored, solid areas that indicate where the window can be grabbed. The shitty icon spam in menus is back to sanity. And window corner radii are consistent and less bulbous.
macOS 17 is decisively faster on my MacBook Air M1 16 GB than macOS 26/27 is on my MacBook Pro M2 Max 32 GB. And I don’t mean just the animations themselves but lag/sluggishness/responsiveness in general.
You can already turn off most glass effects in 26 via "System Settings => Accessibility => Display => Reduce Transparency".
I had that turned off years ago (for reasons I don't remember), and was wondering what all the fuzz was about when 26 came out because I didn't see much of a difference ;)
IMHO the actual important visual changes in the 27 beta is that rolls back the bizarre oversized corner radius in Finder windows, and they also got rid of the 'every menu item must have an icon' idea.
Also on the beta. Agreed. Definite visual and UX improvement over 26, fixing the most egregious issues with 26 implementation of Liquid Glass, but maybe not quite as good as 25 overall.
As long as the UI improves and I can ignore all the AI stuff they're starting to push through, that's fine with me, though like many longtime macOS users, I'm not holding my breath for a bug-free experience.
A couple of weeks ago, I had a Baltimore Oriole (a cool-looking bird, not a baseball player) in my yard. They aren't rare, per se, but they are uncommon.
Took my iPhone out to snap a picture, and pressed the camera button. I hadn't used it, since upgrading to 26.
It takes the picture. It's there. I can see it, but it won't let me save it. Instead, it wants to tell me about the cool new voice-activated AI retouch feature. There was no way to save.
I probably could have figured it out, but I was so furious, I just nuked the picture.
For those of us older than just 10 years of using macOS, the older Apple OSes have instilled within us the desire to never install the X.0 release and wait until at least the X.1 release. The bug-free experience is a myth
I found if you turn off transparency effects and turn on high contrast in the accessibility settings, it's actually a pretty nice looking UI. Still has some dumb quirks like inconsistent corner radiuses and text appearing under UI elements (because they're assumed to be transparent, but aren't). But all software is trash in 2026 so be thankful it isn't even worse, I guess.
Been doing that for years now already (performance boost). You can also do high contrast mode per app (if were talking about iOS). Must have for iMessage I think personally as it makes hard to read Green Bubbles a nice dark green that is very pleasant.
I bought a MBP mainly for the hardware, otherwise I'd have stuck with Linux. OS-wise, the jump from Monterey (which I'd last used) to Sequoia was smooth and still feels that way. I prefer not to notice the OS at all, something that I feel would be hard to do on Tahoe due to all that liquid glass and dumb transparency and animations.
Love to see this, now if only they could revert the whole shimmering oil slick disaster that is "glass" on iOS (unlike macOS, even if I "reduce transparency", the oil slick effect still appears in many places, in addition to all the spacing issues).
Fortunately, those can run Linux. I recently installed Arch on an Intel T2. The only issue is that it does not have a TPM module, so the LUKS password needs to be manually entered at boot.
You can use TPM with secure boot to store the password. TPM checks that the firmware is the same and that the OS is signed by trusted (by _you_) keys, and if everything matches it makes the key available for reading by the OS.
Same. It's not the worst thing in the world, at least with Reduce Transparency enabled in the Accessibility settings, but I still don't feel any inclination to upgrade. My personal Mac Studio is macOS 15 and my work MacBook is on macOS 26, and I don't think there's a single thing that I find to be better on the work laptop than on my personal machine.
I might update to macOS 26 in September to be ready to update to macOS 27. Being two versions behind doesn't seem reasonable and I'd rather be on the "Tahoe but less shitty" version than Tahoe itself.
It's difficult to keep track over time, however. Brands will build up a reputation as being the one that's actually good for a particular product, and then for one reason or another reduce in quality while relying on their brand history. And it can take a long time for that word of mouth reputation to die off. The effect is bolstered by people who own older generations of the product citing longevity.
An example that comes to mind is Speed Queen for laundry machines. People in the know now look for *used* Speed Queen machines, but casual searches will still turn up the old reputation.
> An example that comes to mind is Speed Queen for laundry machines.
I should have figured when I noticed my local appliance store starting selling them. That was my plan for when the Samsung garbage that came with my house breaks. What's the quality machine now?
I'm not aware of one. And I suspect that Speed Queen is still better than the usual suspects. But they've shifted to some plastic parts, more electronics, that sort of thing.
Why though? I've yet to come across an auto formatter that formats things the way I personally like. But that's fine. I do whatever the hell I want until I'm ready to open a PR, then bang it through the auto formatter. And you know what? I can also go the other direction and run a home-brew auto formatter to reshape things the way I personally want on my local machine.
I'm not sure why, but apparently my experience is unwelcome enough to be downvoted. Drive by changes are really annoying, IMO, and as the GP shows, the formatting tool outcome differs. So there are many "valid" versions of the same program logic. You have therefore not do what these formatters pretend to do, namely take this variable out of the equation. Rather, the wrong auto format can look much worse than the original.
I'm not sure why people felt formatters were necessary. but now they're part of the zeitgeist and there is no going back.
I'd go so far as to argue that person to person differences are helpful to a reader. When I am dealing with a long term code base it's easy to develop a feel for who is responsible for different constructs without needing to rely on the git history. This gives me immediate information on what to expect.
> That's why I like Go, every piece of code looks the same, there's one default enforced linter and this discussion (or discussion if discussion should be allowed or prohibited) doesn't even cross anyones mind
I remember people saying this exact same thing about Python ~20 years ago.
The thing is that some people start to adopt certain "mannerisms" from their LLM of choice. It's not funny in and by itself, but it tends to be unnecessarily pompous words/expressions as well. Relevant: https://www.vice.com/en/article/youre-not-imagining-it-peopl...
I've seen this too and I get it. However, we should not assume that certain phrases are AI tells. And that was my point. There are all kinds of things I see described here as "AI slop" that are things I just do, and have done, for decades.
I've renovated houses (and I have a bad habit of buying 100 year old hacked up chaos-boxes - my current house was moved from one hill in San Francisco to another 80 years ago, so it's a puzzle box), so yes, I've been using "load-bearing" as a shorthand for decades, reduced to be less jargon-y by adopting "structurally essential" for increasingly international team composition, where English is a second or third language.
However, I've been hearing "load-bearing" at least two orders of magnitude more often over the last few months, particularly after uncorking Claude Code for the team.
I don't think it's a dead give-away of AI usage, and I don't think AI usage is a problem. I just think we can introduce phrases into common use by having them be used by common tools. So let's train the models on obscure/archaic terms and see what happens. Heck, we can just prompt it...
It turns out that LLMs are really good at writing bash too. even perl! maybe we should rethink some of these lost bits because we no longer need to worry about the arcane parts.
Define "really good?" I don't think I've ever had them produce a script that I didn't need to correct in some way. They can write it, that's true, but we still need to be able to read it.
Fair. I'm comparing it to the output I see generated in more mainstream, day to day, languages. I'm not going to bother to get into an argument on if the frontier models can generate amazing code in general.
What I've found is I can get get the frontier models to generate bash scripts, perl one liners, etc that do exactly what I need at roughly the same quality as any other code it generates.
100% They're super useful and I often use them to generate bash scripts of, but that's exactly how I know how important it is to check their work!
I'm a shell scripter at heart, the arcane stuff has always been a delight for me, so I've driven them to do some pretty complex stuff where previously I would have "copped out" and used python. I'd say the general adage of them being at the level of a very talent junior holds true.
I agree with you, instead of working on creating a bash script if we just sit as a senior developer ,check and correct what is needed is the way forward, it kind a remind me Pair programming when one do the scripting and other corrects it
Bash scripts requires "set -eu" at minimum, when written by LLM or human.
It's the only language terrible enough to make the default behavior ignore undefined variables, commands, and execution errors, and happily continue executing whatever was produced by me smashing my hands on the keyboard, until the end of the file, while returning an exit code of 0, claiming complete success.
> Bash scripts requires "set -eu" at minimum, when written by LLM or human.
No. It does not.
Just write good scripts and catch errors and handle them. That's the same more less with every language.
And bash can be written in a way that it is sane and readable and maintainable. Just because you have seen a lot of junk in the language does not make the language bad per se. Sure there are a lot of languages "features" which are more then questionable but I want to rise again the point that it has its place and can be used in a good way.
I agree completely, if you use a linter like shellcheck [1]. If you're just winging it, then no.
I first learned about shellcehck when I worked with someone that claimed they could write flawless bash scripts, then blamed me when their script broke because there was a space in a folder name. I ran his scripts through, resulting in him immediately adopting it, while he enjoyed eating crow.
Yes :) I'm using shellcheck since at least 2012/2014. And I loved the bash haters handbook <3 in all seriousness, bash will shine then when you have no heavy tooling available and we still have these systems around as at least at some point in time in their life time. With most stuff in life: you should take care and pay attention
Then, I think we fully align. Yes, shell scripts aren't going anywhere, and are pretty great. I usually write several per week. I just make sure to enable eu, and also have error traps, with little error messages, because I hate heisencode more than anything.
But, you'll never convince me that "ignore errors by default" is sane. ;)
I have seen them write massively more complex bash scripts than any normal person would ever attempt, but the failure rate is absurdly high compared to when they write sane typed languages.
I have some absolutely amazing bash scripts that I would never have contemplated making myself in bash. And they'd only have been somewhat better in python. Claude for the win!
Why haven't I upgraded? Because there's no mini and all they make are phablets now.
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