HARK, A FIX: Cory Birdsong pointed me to “System Settings… > Accessibility > Display > Reduce Transparency”, which fixes this, over on Mastodon. No, seriously, what the hell? The Notch I’m actually okay with, but removing the distinction between the active area of the menu bar and the inert rest of the desktop seems… ill-advised. The Finder’s menu bar has no visually distinct background.I mean, the visual presentation of the OS looks like something I would create, and brother, that is not a compliment. Really, the overall UI feels like a movie’s toy representation of an operating system, not an actual operating system. The twisty arrows in the Finder to open and close folders don’t have enough visual weight.(Because I definitely need more demands on my time.) Maybe some day I’ll ask Daniel to teach me Swift to I can build my own. I’ve looked at alternatives, but none of them seem like they’re meant as straight up replacements, so I’ve yet to commit to one. Like a stick-shift driver uselessly stomping the floorboards and blindly grasping air while driving an automatic car, I still flip the mouse pointer toward the right edge of the screen, where I kept my DragThing dock, before remembering it’s gone. It had stopped being updated before the 64-bit revolution, never mind the shift to Apple silicon, so this was expected, but wow do I miss it. Some things I find mildly-to-moderately annoying: I’ll probably forget about it soon enough. It isn’t a problem or anything, it’s just a thing that I notice. Probably it’s that the corners of the case are not nearly as rounded as the 2013 model, and I think the thickness ratio of display to body is closer to 1:1 than before. The thing that surprises me is the new machine looks boxier, somehow. I chose the 14” model over the 16”, so it is a wee bit smaller than my old 15” workhorse. Many thanks to the many people in my Mastodon herd who nudged me in that direction. If I’m wrong about that, I can always plug in an external SSD. (Thus quadrupling the active memory and nearly trebling the storage capacity of its predecessor.) I went with that balance, or perhaps imbalance, because I intend to have this machine last me another ten years, and in that time, RAM is more likely to be in demand than SSD. So on Monday, I dropped by the Apple Store and picked up a custom-built early 2023 MacBook Pro: M2 Max with 38 GPU cores, 64GB RAM, and 2TB SSD. The grizzled old veteran on the verge of retirement and the fresh new recruit that just transferred in to replace them. Which I kind of need if I’m going to be writing English text, never mind reloading pages and opening new browser tabs. Oh and also, the top row of letter keys was becoming unresponsive, in particular the E-R-T sequence. If a program, setup, or piece of hardware works for me, I stick by it like it’s the last raft off a sinking island.Īnd so it has been for my early 2013 MacBook Pro, which has served me incredibly well across all those years and many continents, but was sliding into the software update chasm: some applications, and for that matter its operating system, could no longer be run on its hardware. I’ve heard it said there are two kinds of tech power users: the ones who constantly update to stay on the bleeding edge, and the ones who update only when absolutely forced to do so.
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