I really wish MS had stuck with the Windows 8/Phone direction - bright square blocks that didn't waste space, which felt like it was a full refutation of the transparent everything of Vista that was still there to some extent in 7.
Looking at macOS 26, it's hard not to compare it visually to Vista given the transparency emphasis. Hopefully in a few years an Alan Dye-free Apple will move in a different direction.
The external power supply bricks aren't much better. I've had a few 27" LG 4k monitors, and the ones with a brick seem to fail more frequently (in the monitor, brick was fine).
I don't think I need a new $4000 refrigerator with an ad-spewing tablet and barcode scanner.
I do think a $100 device with a barcode scanner and a tiny LCD screen that attaches magnetically to the fridge and has 3 buttons: "Buy More", "Empty", "Expired", where you scan an item then hit the appropriate button it syncs to a backend service that helps build shared grocery lists would be a winner.
Mostly that VLC has had noticeable issues with displaying some kinds of subtitles made with Advanced SubStation (especially ones taking up much of the frame, or that pan/zoom), which MPV-based players handle better.
Note that, while I haven't had time to investigate them myself yet, IINA is known to have problems with color spaces (and also uses libmpv, which is quite limited at the moment and does not support mpv's new gpu-next renderer). Nowadays mpv has first-party builds for macOS, which work very well in my opinion, so I'd recommend using those directly.
It says in passing As the Metal backend is only supported on Apple Silicon devices, GPU and CPU share the same memory in the part talking about the differences between the Direct3D and Metal render pipelines.
Not sure why though, because Metal 3 is still supported on a bunch of Intel Macs...
If anyone has read the Iain M. Banks novel Excession, this feels somewhat similar to the funnier parts of it where a bunch of AI's embedded in spacegoing vessels have chat discussions back and forth, with a fair bit of shade thrown.
Looking at macOS 26, it's hard not to compare it visually to Vista given the transparency emphasis. Hopefully in a few years an Alan Dye-free Apple will move in a different direction.
reply