macOS Monterey Review — The M1 Pro / Max Update!

Live Text, FaceTime for lockdowns, Quick Notes, Focus mode, Shortcuts, M1 Pro and Max Acceleration, and yeah, Safari redemption. I'm Rene Ritchie. Thanks to Curiosity Stream with Nebula for sponsoring, and John Gruber of Daring Fireball, the talk show and dithering fame, for joining me for macOS Monterey, the review. Let's do this.

[Rene] So, do you wanna go through some of the big features sort of in the order Apple did, or do you wanna jump right into Safari.
[John] Were there any changes other than Safari? I don't remember Rene.
Live Text.
[John] Oh!
Live Text for me on the iPhone has been transformational and I'm pretty sure you saw that example of the kid in school-
[John] Yep.
[Rene] Holding his phone up and just copying it. I don't use it to that extent on the Mac, but it is unlocked generations of text layer PDFs for me.
I think Live Text is the best feature of the year. And if it was the only feature that they had this year, if they were like, "You know what, this is gonna be a slow year, but we've got Live Texts." We'd be like, "Yeah, good year." It's amazing. And the other thing about it is it works so perfectly every time for me. And I use it more often-
[Rene] Yes.
Than I expect.
I know they've brought it to Intel Macs now too-
Yeah.
They're not doing it in real time because they don't have a neural engine, but they're gonna do it, you know, whenever you need it to be done. But just the idea that because the silicon is the same now, it's like that slide they had where it suddenly grew and showed all the iOS features that you were getting on the Mac.
Right. Did you notice this at WWDC back when they first unveiled the Live Text, they purposefully showed some photos where the text was blurry in the background like bokeh, bokeh,
[John] Yeah.
They didn't wanna say, "Look at this, this text isn't even in focus and we can get the phone number out of it." Easily the feature of the year.
Some people have said that this was sort of like the pandemic release that, you know, a lot of the features were designed to make everybody's at-home lives easier. And it starts with like FaceTime, because now you can blur out the ugly background you know, if you're in your home office, if you have to. And you can even share invitations to people who don't use Apple devices. There's no FaceTime for windows or Android, they get a web interface, but you can include those in calendars and makes it really easy.
We're all on these voice calls now all the time. And they all stink in various ways.
[Rene] Yes.
We've made them better in a few ways, right? FaceTime now supports spacial audio.
Yeah.
And it's amazing. It is really immersive.
Yeah.
You cannot look at the feature set for this year's OSs and not think, "Okay, this was the year Apple got serious about remote meeting collaboration," right? It's probably the biggest win for most users this year. In my opinion.
Even though messages didn't get as much as FaceTime this year.
Are you surprised by the fact that messages for the Mac still doesn't have apps? And you know me, and I do send you a sticker once in a while.
[Rene] Yes, yes. You have like a ration of emoji and then like a smaller ration of stickers.
And it is weird where if I'm texting you from my Mac and I wanna send you a sticker, and I know you appreciate a good sticker, like a good-
I do. I do. Baby Yo&da with a Tim Horton's cup sticker, like if you can combine things like that, perfect.
But it so weird at this point, knowing the backstory of the catalyst conversion and that there are on a shared code base, they're literally on a shared hardware platform now, right? That we've moved to Apple silicon. And you still have to switch to your iPhone or iPad to send a sticker, it's kind of weird.
They didn't catch fire and they're not bad enough that they're gonna delete them, but they're not big enough that they're gonna really promote them anymore. The one thing that I'm not sure about is like all this shared stuff. I know that their argument is that people send you stuff every day. They send you news articles, and they send you photos, they send you music, and you lose track of all of it. But now I go to like my photos app and I see like all the dumb memes my friends have sent me and is it really or screenshots? I would almost prefer it, if I could go to the person and see what they sent me. I know that's very personal, everyone's gonna have different preference, but I just find having the app as the front page for that is, it just puts a lot of junk in my drawer.
Yeah. I have to say that that sounded good when they pitched it to me. So therefore I see why they green-lighted it. Maybe it is very personal, but in practice now that I'm living with it, it is not that useful, in my opinion.
Have you used the Focus modes much? I've used the bear functionality of Focus mode. And I like it that it says like, "You know, John has notifications off," things like that, but I haven't made 31 different focus modes with 81 different home screen layouts or anything like that yet.
Honestly, this is one where I've mentioned it to a few friends over the last few weeks, and it's gotten the most, "Whoa Grubs, you're way off base," 'cause most of the people I talked to love it and they're really into it.
[Rene] Yes.
And they're setting up these great. And my angle on it is-
But you're talking to Merlin.
I know, but my angle is I hate it. I liked the binary nature of I'm in normal mode, or I'm in Do Not Disturb mode.
[Rene] Yeah.
And that's it. And maybe it's, I'm not trying to be self-effacing, but it's not that I'm a dummy, but that sometimes it's like, I need the reduction in complexity. Where Do Not Disturb, I love it. You know, what is one of the greatest inventions of all time? Everybody has to agree with this, the Light Switch.
Well, but a dimmer switch, you press it. You never know which is off, so you go past it every time.
Right. Don't get me started on dimmer switches, Renee. I mean, seriously, it's gonna be the end of my marriage. You know, I hate 'em. I don't like it. I like lights on, lights off. Do Not Disturb is on, it is off. So I don't blame Apple from making it because I can see from talking to friends that some people really like having
[Rene] Yes. three, four different modes that they're in with different settings. I get it. And you know, not for me-
I've always wanted Apple to take the VIP setting and make it universal, make it not email level, but make it contact level. Because like, if I wanna get like highlighted emails from you, for example, I also wanna see your messages when I might be in Do Not Disturb, or I wanna see your, like just everything on the system. And they never did that. We had like the favorites in the phones, which had certain priority privileges and other things, and this sort of fixes that. So if you do have toxic family members, which is by no means unique, especially over the last two years, you can set it up so that those people think you're in Do Not Disturb. Where the nontoxic family members think you're available for all sorts of different messaging. And I think that is valuable. It just takes a little bit of extra work to set it up.
And again, I guarantee you, there are people watching your videos who love these new features because people are super into it.
Yes.
And I'm enthused for them, I know what it's like to feel heard. You know, like, "Oh my God, this is the one thing I really wanted to nerd out with. And the fact that that syncs across all my devices, I'm happy for you. But then some of the stuff they went in and did do, they did break, right? Like Shortcuts.
Yes.
So there were no Shortcuts for Mac, and clearly, you know, that was holding Shortcuts back as a Apple platform-wide automation technology. And they're like, "Okay, we'll do Shortcuts for Mac." And they sort of blew up the whole thing.
Well, it's interesting because SharePlay got postponed and Universal Control got postponed. So those sort of get some breathing room on, but not Shortcuts, Shortcuts are
And I do feel the difference is that like SharePlay, it's either there, or it's not there. And if it's not ready, you can hold it. Shortcuts is it's already there for iPadOS and iOS. And therefore they kind of need to ship what they have because you know, to their credit, they're all in on the new version. The new version just is not that great yet.
The one thing I thought was really interesting was Quick Notes. Like just the whole idea, the concept of a lightweight note-taking system that is persistent, not just persistent within the Notes app, but now it's persistent in Safari as well. Having it as part of the OS gives it a lot of advantages for me. So I've been using it actually more than I thought I would.
You know, it's interesting because if anything threw me off with it, it was that when it was first demoed to WWDC, I thought it was very pencil-centric. And that pencil was the only way to do these. And that they could have been called Pencil Notes instead of Quick Notes. And so, I got it in my head that you have to be on your iPad, you have to be using your pencil, and that's not true. You can do it from any platform. You know, I think they're committed to it. So I feel like this is it, but it's like you don't really notice how much you need it until you actually are jotting down a thing, right? You're like on a website you know, ordering something and you're like, "Oh, I just need to get this order number stashed away. So I don't forget the order number." Oh, boom, Quick Note.
The way I look at the cross-platform stuff is sort of like how I've always looked at it, where the iPhone is for like very fast data entry and triage on the go. The iPad is sort of like sitting back and looking at a broader view and doing like aggregation and reporting and that kind of stuff. And the Mac is just for mass entry or mass editing of everything, because it's still so much faster. The pencil feels really organic. Everything from the swiping up the Quick Notes, to the writing them, into doing those, it feels like a lightsaber, like a more elegant weapon from a more civilized age. But like the Mac can just chew through so much stuff. So I guess, let's dive into Safari now because this has been so interesting for me. Because typically Apple is so good at nailing it internally and then pretty much ignoring feedback. Where this time it feels like they totally missed it internally, but were really good at listening to the feedback.
The last five months of Safari evolution and then devolution. I mean, I don't know how else to say it. Has been one of the most fascinating things as an Apple observer, ever. And it's exactly what you think, where there effectively were two tribes, maybe three tribes. So you've got the one tribe that was like, "These changes are really cool. We're evolving Safari in a modern way. Why don't we rethink this?" There's another tribe that is like, "These changes don't make any sense if you have more than three tabs in a window, what are you doing? We cannot break people's habits like this." And if there's a third tribe, it was people in the middle who maybe didn't have a strong opinion. But I didn't hear a lot from that tribe. You know, it was mostly people on one side or the other.
Can I also just clarify that the people I heard most from in terms of liking it was ecstatic. Very subjective and various ecstatic. And the arguments against it were almost purely objective and functional. And I'm not saying that as an overall criticism, because you know, personal tastes have a lot to play in this. But for the last couple of months, I have not been able to consistently tell a tab from an address bar. And I keep clicking into a tab thinking I can type into it. And that just should not happen.
A lot of people who like them, especially on the Mac in particular have sent me screenshots. It's unbelievable how many people have done this. They've sent me screenshots of my website-
[Rene] Yeah.
In Safari. And they're like, "Okay, I get your arguments, but you have to admit, your website looks really cool in Safari." And I'm like, "Well, it sort of, but it's like, that's not the point, the point isn't to look cool. The point is to be cool."
That's not my menu, but it looks like it's part of my site and it's not. I have this thing that I modestly call Richie's Law, where whenever somebody says, "Steve Jobs would never," you can always go back a very short period of time and find several examples of him doing exactly that. And that you can't say that he would absolutely not tolerate things that he cared about. Like if you damaged an app or a function that he cared about, he would be in the room throwing it against a wall. But like, you can also tell which apps he didn't ever use. So I'm not gonna say it's like one of those things. But I do think that the executive, some of them were really famous for being on the betas. And I do imagine there was a point where, whether it was Tim Cook or somebody else who called and said, "Where are my tabs?" And somebody started to give him an answer. And he's like, "Why aren't you on that plane?" You know, why aren't you on the plane fixing my tabs? And then it was very clear that this was gonna get handled before-
But in the end it worked out right? Which is kind of, you know, the system works.
And I do think, especially on the brand new, new announced Mac pros with M1 Pro and M1 Max, especially. They've done a really good job. Like the big advantage they have, is that they control the silicon, the hardware, and the software. And they've been building these Mac books for like going on three years. And what's fascinating to me about it is you can go back to like the Mac Pro controversies in 2019, they were building this stuff back then they knew all of this was coming. You know, the 2019 16 inch MacBook Pro, they were building these MacBook Pros. While all of that, with like the butterfly key, all of that was happening. And I think when they landed on these products, again, especially on the new MacBook Pros, they are so fast. Like the best thing I like, the one thing I enjoy the most about Monterey, is that even on Intel, but especially on M1, M1 Max, M1 Pro, it's not just how fast apps launch or how fast websites render, how fast video renders, but I'm living a beach ball free life. I don't get slowdowns. I used to have to wait over and over again when I would skim a timeline, or I'd launch mail and go to VIP's and it would literally take a minute to load. Everything is like iPad level instant. And that, I think is that beautiful dream that Steve Jobs had when he slapped that iPad down on the table and said, "Why can't the Mac do that?" And we've gotten to a point now with M1, all the new processors and Monterey where the Mac absolutely can do that now.
They have definitely been approaching this for a long time. And I do think that now that we see, and again, the transition isn't over yet, we still don't know the full-size iMac story. We certainly don't know the Mac Pro story, which is, you know, arguably the most interesting technical question. But for most Mac users, they now have an Apple silicon Mac to buy, right? Because most Mac users are buying MacBooks. And the entire MacBook line has been transitioned.
Yeah, I think that's my overall take here, and because the new Macs are shipping with Monterey, I'm gonna be going all in on production on, I usually wait, like I wait six months to a year before upgrading a production machine just because you never know, especially with plugins and with all the little apps and everything, how long it's gonna take. But the gains are so good. Like the environment is so good. It is so much better to work on, that I'm immediately switching over to Monterrey. And I think part of that is, a lot of the credit that goes to Monterey because I've been using it all through the beta cycle. And aside from, you know, Safari, everything has been working great. Like I've had zero problems. That's the first time I've had the confidence to just make that switch immediately.
Yeah. I would say long story short, overall, Monterey feels to me like one of those, "Hey, if it ain't broke, don't fix it," OS releases. Where they're like, "You know, this platform is in great shape. Let's not mess with stuff that doesn't need to be messed with and keep it going."
But I also think that they had to rewrite so much, like everything from the big stuff, like APFS and like, over the years, they basically rebuilt the entire understructure of macOS, and each of those was painful. And we experienced that pain as macOS users for five years under Intel. Like Discovery D was probably the biggest example of that. You know, like rewriting foundation blocks one after the other, but it got us to a point where when they had to make that transition, all that pain was spent. That was all budgeted out. We spent that over five years and it was a really good transition. And then we just hit the ground running with Big Sur and now straight into Monterey.
So, you know, I think overall it is a very, I would say to anybody who's already on Big Sur, you should probably upgrade. I mean, do you wanna upgrade on day one? I mean, maybe wait 'til day two and see if anything bad happens on day one.

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