Then they just use the Apple features that they know of. There’s also a Tips app on iOS. There’s a Apple Support twitter account. https://twitter.com/applesupport. Some people may not even how to right click a mouse, or press and hold, but those features are there for those who know. I not up to date with all the features of Firefox releases, and it’s not a big deal.
IMO Focus is a really good feature, along with custom home screens. I don’t see how withholding this feature until e.g. Focus Filters is ready, would be better. If Focus was withheld until iOS 16, and then released all at once with Focus Filters, then someone would find something to complain about: too much change at once, buggy, API not ready etc. Apple builds on features regularly, and it seems fine for now.
My use case for Tab Groups: I’m researching electric vehicles at the moment. So this is a new area for me, and there’s no shortage of stuff to cover. When I am in the mood for EV stuff, I open a Safari window to the EV tab group, and read, open ∞ more tabs etc. But I have other things to do in my browser; when I’m doing those other things, I stay out of the EV safari window. If I come across an EV-related link, I can “open link in tab group:EV”, so I can forget about it, until I’m back in a EV-browsing mode: sometimes on iPad/iPhone. I only have 2 tab groups: EV, and recipes. I usually make notes in a separate app, e.g. Drafts.app, so don’t make Safari bookmarks of most pages. And sometimes the EV tab group is empty, which is OK. As it is, there are some bugs in Tab Groups, but I’m glad Apple is still building on it.
I’m afraid I use none of them, though I shall explore the full-screen menu bar. I find myself unexcited by new bells and whistles, which seem to simply complicate things and move the Mac experience even further away from its roots.
As for Tab Groups, I have always had folders of bookmarks that I can open all at once, but Safari is unusable for me. The loss of support for proper extensions and the ineffective apps for ad-blocking is a big thing for me. Fortunately Firefox and Vivaldi have kept this ability.
I think this is an excellent point worth discussing that IMHO usually gets far too little air time.
What is the cost of all these added features? How much clutter and inefficiency do they thrust upon users, especially those who have no interest in using them? How many bugs are introduced? How much does it affect other previously perhaps perfectly functioning aspects of the OS or its apps?
There will always be some people who find a certain new feature awesome. And I’m sure that’s perfectly genuine, not debating that. But the nature of the internet and forums such as even this one is that very few people who really like something can still make things appear as if the new feature were heavily used and beloved by a much larger faction, perhaps even the majority. But in reality it could still easily be the case that a new feature gets adopted by perhaps 5% of the users, while of the other 95% perhaps half is negatively affected by clutter or bugs etc. I rarely encounter that being discussed.
At times it almost appears as if a new feature that works and gets used by at least somebody is always worth it, especially when it can be marketed as new and fancy and flashy and yada. And then I’m reminded that that is probably how Office over the years became the nasty behemoth that it got to be.
Personally, I’d like to see more emphasis on less is more. And indeed that has to be a very thin line to walk—I know from my own experience that even though I usually favor simple, I at times absolutely expect customizability.
At least, allow us to choose not to install them when an OS is upgraded, or make them removable to save both space and CPU time. Back in the days of OS 7 - 9 I would prune down the system folder of unwanted extensions and control panels until it was sleek and fast, and fit nicely on a hard disk that was 40MB-640MB. Open Transport? - OUT! OpenDoc? - OUT! Languages I don’t speak? - OUT! And so on.
That one feature is, for me, what would make Tab Groups useful. I did in fact kinda sorta notice it when I tried to delete a tab group that I had created experimentally. (I found myself closing individual tabs in the group but the group itself still existed, and it took me a long time to discover that it was in the Sidebar—a place I instinctively avoid whenever possible because it looks exactly like old Windows Explorer. )
But when you put it this way, and thinking about those who said they use them to sequester particular interests…I’m reframing Tab Groups a bit: it’s like having another instance of Safari running in MacOS that is customized for a particular use.
That’s better than separate windows, because when you close them, they’re gone.
That’s better than opening a group of bookmarks in new tabs, because that’s static.
It looks like a separate browser that behaves like one; or perhaps a Space (another feature I keep meaning to become acquainted with!).
That seems more useful to me, but it’s going to take some more interpretation and thought if Apple wants it to catch on.
I actually want my tab collection to be static. If I rarely need to go and change the set of pages I want to open at one click I can do that in bookmark edit mode. Otherwise, I don’t want the collection to change just because I happen to close a tab or something. Sounds then like I’d actually be best served by sticking with a bookmark groups rather than the new Tab Groups.
I like the analogy of Tab Groups essentially giving you a second instance of Safari.
There was some new Safari feature a couple of iOS major releases ago that changed the interface. I did what I had been doing, and the effect was different, and I needed to fumble around and figure out how to undo what I had inadvertently done and then how to do what I used to be able to do. (I wish I could remember more detail.) Experiences like this make me reluctant to transition to a new release.
Along the same lines, there was a new release of Numbers a while back that would not work with the existing version of Numbers on another device. (I believe the new version was part of an iOS install, but I’m not sure. If so, then the version made incompatible was on macOS.) Since I depend on interoperability, I wish Apple to note such pitfalls in the release highlights. It appears that Apple expects that everyone will install the newest version as soon as it is available and buy new hardware if it’s required (or even desired due to slowed performance).
And, of course, Apple assumes everyone has super-high speed internet to install poly-GB downloads. And it’s available all the time.
On the topic of this thread, I don’t use any of the features. Some sound interesting but not so much that I want to take the time to learn more, and most don’t sound interesting—to me, of course.
I was thinking of that as I read down the list of comments. I try to keep up with Mac stuff, but I don’t use either a smartphone or a table and I am still on Big Sur, so I’m using none of the new features. The recent spate of changes in Word have made it a horror story for professional writers; vital features have been moved around (you can’t spellcheck in writing mode, but you can’t change font or color in Review mode, and change tracking can put three columns of stuff across the screen in tiny type).
I’m with you on that. I make my living writing about science and technology, and having companies fiddling with my tools is a nuisance because relearning processes wastes too much of my time. On the other hand, I want to be able to make some changes; like making type more readable to help my aging eyes. I’ve seen a few new computer things that impressed me, like appls that identify plants and birds, and have been fiddling with re-recording old audio with audacity. But nothing I saw on the poll made me interested enough to investigate what it was.
I agree. I think the question was what makes Tab Groups different from a bookmark group, so having something you can count on when you click it would serve you better.
I used some of these features because I happened to run across them in the everyday use of my devices, but many I didn’t use because I just didn’t know they existed. These days, I don’t really follow the Apple world like I used.
I would love to respond to the survey, but it seems to require a Google account, which is not the account I use with TidBITS. I use Focus, Safari Tab Groups, Hide My Email, iCloud Private Relay, Universal Control, Shortcuts, and Memories. Some of the features in the list I haven’t tried at all, but might use them if motivated to do so.
Maybe I’m not surprised. After the notifications/focus screwup I actively avoid looking for features.
As an aside on the notifications: first I suddenly started getting interrupted all of the time (weirdly on phone calls when the phone would mute the person talking to show a notification I didn’t want to receive, podcasts too) to trying to tweak it now I miss phone calls and message notifications. It’s all quite effed now and it would be nice to know how to clean slate the notifications settings. And don’t start me on the elderly in-laws, they don’t have a clue what’s going on.
Oh, and TextSniper on the Mac is so much more useful than live text, which just gets in the way.
The survey doesn’t require any account—it merely says that if you sign into Google, you can save your progress. Given how little time it will take, there’s no reason to sign in.
To your point on less being more … I’m not sure how best to apply that principle. The loss of affordances pointing to controls I might need/want to use continues to annoy me. Apple seems to understand its devices differently. ;-) I’ll never understand why we lack an on-screen indication that the phone has been “silenced.” The most basic function seems to be on/off and an indication of state. Not so for the iPhone. Is this a rant or the sign of something more … These things have been around for a while and people seem to have adapted.
Personally, I’ve been drifting away from Apple. The new features aren’t especially appealing/useful for me. The OS starts to seem stale and not well tended to: do I look in services or the share sheet for what I need? And how is it that a bookmark command falls in iOS the share sheet and someplace else on my desktop? Likewise, I’m of the camp that Apple would leave commands in the same place from upgrade to upgrade. Why should I hunt for something I need NOW?
Meh … maybe just a longish rant. But the old joy has definitely gone missing.
Oh, I agree. Apple seems to still allow app makers to default their apps to full-on banners that will appear immediately. Here’s a screen shot of the settings from a trivial app that feeds a digital photoframe:
I don’t want that app, or 50 others on my iPhone, jumping up in my face every time something happens.
Unfortunately, my understanding is you have two choices: be diligent about setting notifications when the app launches for the first time (The app “Ourphoto” wants to send notifications…), or walk through your entire list of apps under the Notifications settings and change their settings (or turn them off entirely) one by one by one.
Picking up on a theme in this thread, I think Apple envisions these things:
Developers will set their notifications defaults responsibly. (They won’t; from a developer-centric point of view they’re working on their own product and not picturing how it will add to the clamor of a hundred yapping apps.)
Making a global “kill switch” to turn all notifications off, or to a sensible default, risks silencing the apps like Phone that are critical to device functioning but are just another app.
I may be wrong about being able to bulk-edit notification settings, but haven’t found such a thing.
One thing missing in this survey is the option to say “I didn’t previously know about this new feature; so I haven’t tried it and don’t know if I would find it useful.” So what you get in response in those cases is just “Never.” You can’t conclude that Apple wasted their time adding that feature. You can’t even conclude that Apple hasn’t advertised that feature well. For all you know, that user may simply be very lazy about investigating new features, or they simply haven’t had time to try them out. I would bet that a lot of users fall into those categories, except for the tiny number of software reviewers who are paid to explore all the new features.
And what should someone say in response to “iCloud Private Relay”? First off, it’s still in Beta; so someone could easily think “That’s a great feature that I will use as soon as it’s out of beta.” So saying “I have Never (yet) used it” is not very telling. You need to first ask, “Do you try Beta software?”
And what about features like “FaceTime links”? How can you evaluate the difference between “Frequently” and “Occasionally”? One person could say “Frequently” meaning that they have need of it every day, while another person might say “Occasionally” meaning that they use it once a month. But their use is driven by their needs, not by how valuable they find the feature. They might both be equally disappointed if Apple were to drop that feature.
I know a person who uses Mail every day but uses Quicken to print out a financial statement once a month. It would be ridiculous to conclude that Mail is more important to him than Quicken.
I would argue that “Never” is a perfectly valid answer there. If users aren’t aware of these features after nearly a year, then the features either a) aren’t being marketed well b) aren’t discoverable enough or c) just not that interesting.
In fact, I deliberately stopped myself from inserting any how-to into the article so as to not skew the results. (I also haven’t commented on which ones I actually use for the same reason, but I’ll show my cards after the results come in if people are interested.)
I think you should say, “If Josh isn’t aware of these features after nearly a year…” Apple could spend a billion dollars advertising these features and most (if not all) my siblings would never hear a word about them. Apple could put pop-ups in various commonly used apps (e.g., Mail) to point people to new features. I can easily imagine the uproar from users denouncing ads from Apple on the Mac, iPad, etc. Most people would be annoyed, tap the close button, and that would be that.
What percentage of Mac users watch the keynotes and take note of the new features soon to arrive, thinking about which ones they might like? Is 0.0001% too high? Probably. What percentage of Mac users read TidBITS? It’s miniscule, for sure.
How is Apple supposed to get through to people like my sister who just reads Mail, sends some Messages, and manages some banking in Safari? It really doesn’t matter how great the new features are, nor how useful to her they might be, if I don’t go out of my way to tell her about them, she won’t know. And even when I do go out of my way, the odds of her actually trying something new is low. And that’s not Apple’s fault and there is little they could ever do about it. And my sister isn’t unusual.
If you surveyed every Mac user in the U.S. and then stripped from the Mac every feature that scored low in your survey, there wouldn’t be much left. TidBITS readers are not a random sample and whether that’s good or bad, I’m not sure.
If Apple creates a feature that I like and no other TidBITS reader likes, that’s just fine with me. According to statista.com, something like 2-3% of the U.S. population uses Twitter. Does that mean it’s a failure? What if only 2-3% of Mac users use a particular feature? Is it a failure?
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