So just some notes about the niceties, and "wish it was the old way" of the difference between the machines.
- This is a big one I just noticed - I have 3 displays, and my two side displays always had this shadowing pattern - like a burn-in, organic in shape, about 0.5 to 1.5 cm wide along the display's bottom edge.
That's gone. Which makes me wonder if it was a bug in the Sapphire Pulse RX580, or the cables it was connected with.
- The machine is dead quiet. Now the loudest thing in the room is the air filter. At idle I can't tell if it's awake or asleep. Which is a problem because...
- There's no indication on the machine if it's awake or asleep. What idiot decided the status light wouldn't indicate sleep / wake status?
I have the machine set up with a wattage meter next to it, so I can tell what's going on by the power draw.
- Power - I think it's reasonably similar to my old machine. Writing this with a number of apps open in the background, but the machine more or less idle, it's consuming about 180watts. The screen savers, even flurry, take it over 200. Sleeping, it uses 17-18w.
- I'm still dealing with DisplayPort issues that seem to stem from my main display being slower to initialise than my side displays (so boot and recovery are happening sideways on my left portrait display), and waking the computer up but being disconnected if I switch to DisplayPort from HDMI if I've been gaming on Xbox while the Mac is asleep. My old Mac didn't like this display on DisplayPort either. Thankfully someone at Apple support is working with Engineering on trying to figure the cause.
- The USB ports are a lot looser fitting than the old machine's. I've noticed that on a couple of other Macs as well. It doesn't inspire confidence to connect a heavy gauge 5m usb cable to it, if the bend strain of it is always putting pressure on the port. So, I'm running USB over a Thunderbolt 3 to USB adapter. It seems to work well, *except* on a powered hub my mouse stays lit up when the machine is shut down (it goes dark wen the machine's asleep) - so something is happening differently to the way the old machine handled shutdown signalling to the USB bus.
- What I had hoped to use the USB ports for was to connect little USB LEDs, thinking they'd go dark when the machine was asleep from the ports powering down, as a substitute for the power light not providing sleep status. No such luck, unfortunately.
- Ventura Vs. High Sierra - eh, I can live with it.
- I still think the visual style is overly fussy - too much whitespace prioritised over content, and the palletised menu with left gutters changing based on tick presence is a poor design.
- System Settings is a catastrophe.
- Substituting "Settings" for "Preferences" - Preferences is about *me* and what *I* want. Settings is about the computer, and what it wants. It just feels like dumbing down to simpler, less elegant and thoughtful words. Ironic really, because the Australian language preference now gives you a British (holy crap the text correction just auto-corrected "British" to "Irish" *lol*) spin, so Trash is now Bin, but Settings sits there, like someone asking if I want "Candy", or "Cookies", or "Aluminum".
- Colours seem a little over-saturated and lurid. I switched my displays to AdobeRGB as their colour profile, and it's a little less "using the paint directly from the tube".
- Some of my old apps have round dock icons, and at least one lets you choose a round icon. #FightThePower.
- The dock being separated from the edge of the screen when used on the side looks stupid - the running app indicator lights are too close to the highlight hairline at the dock's bezel edge, which is visually noisy.
- Having all my document storage externalised on another Mac (which sleeps when idle), shared via smb and set to mount on login really seems to be working. It bodes well for moving storage to a Synology at a later date.
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