MacOS Ventura on M2 MacBook Air - Long Term Review

Vemuda Techno - Year after year Apple has been polishing its systems, merging them together. Now the systems look more unified than ever, but that doesn’t mean it’s good.

I have been using the release version of the MacOS Ventura for a full month now, on top of four months of betas, and I do have something to say.

This MacOS update is probably the most controversial release for one reason. There’s one reason that makes this simultaneously a giant leap forward for MacOS, and a hot, smelly mess.

Source: IDG

So, let’s take a closer look at the latest and greatest MacOS Ventura together!

This update brought us two new apps – clock, and weather. Don’t get me wrong, but I can’t care less about the weather app. It works fine, looks great, but the widget we had before basically gave me all the info I needed.

It’s a nice app, but again, in all the time I’ve used Ventura, I have opened it maybe twice. But the clock app is another story. The clock app is a total gamechanger.

Usually, when working, I need to set timers, stopwatch, etc. Previously I could take the phone and get sucked in by social media, for half an hour. Now, I can either open the app and start a timer, or I can ask Siri to do it for me.

By the way, when you set a timer it will appear in the menu bar. Kinda a nice touch, right? All and all, this part of Ventura is not the controversial one.

Continuity camera. I can’t say that I have used it, really. On paper this really looks like a great idea for some people.

If your MacBook’s camera is too bad for you, just use the iPhone as the webcam. This should work, right? Well, yes, but actually no.

The feature itself works, the laptop connects to my phone, and the image looks great. But for me, even despite having frequent video calls, this feature is kinda useless.

First – video calls usually don’t require having the sharpest or the widest image. And the camera in macbooks is perfectly fine for facetime or zoom calls, where your camera view is cramped into a tiny rectangle.

Second – you need to buy a separate phone mount just to attach your iPhone to your mac. I don’t feel like spending money on something I don’t need.

And third – I have concerns about the impact it may have on the hinge. Hinges in macbooks are fragile and can break easily, and strapping seven ounces of weight to it doesn’t seem like a very good idea. If the hinge breaks, the repair would easily cost half of what the laptop is worth.

Safari, on the other hand, is a strange thing. I can’t say I am a frequent Safari user, but the feature list is really small. Shared tab groups? I tried it a few times and it really helped me collaborate with other team members.

We now can work more effectively, reducing the time needed to share information. However, I am not a huge fan of the somewhat updated looks of Safari in MacOS Ventura.

It looks a bit more like we see on iPads and iPhones, and I don’t think this is a good approach.

The browser on a computer cannot be treated the same way as on tablets or phones. We interact with it differently, the screen is different, and the comfortable button layout for the pointer is different.

If Apple continues to walk this path with Safari, it could possibly become the end of Safari for me.

Yet there is one more thing about Safari that kinda saves it – live text translation. When you see a text, you can select it, then right click, and in the menu select “translate.”

The window that appears not only gives a translation, but allows you to listen to the correct pronunciation.

For me, it’s a really useful feature, since I often need to do some research for new videos, and some articles can be not in English.

Some words may be hard to pronounce, and this feature can really help me make more high-quality videos.

Apple changed the design of Siri, but it didn’t get any better in terms of capabilities. I can’t stress enough how useless Siri is.

It can set timers, all right, can create reminders, call people, but that’s basically it. When I need to google something, it mostly happens when I am already in Safari or Chrome, and asking Siri instead of manually typing my request takes more time.

Plus, Siri can only do short search requests. If I ask it about the diameter of the Earth, it will answer just fine.

But I can’t ask her, for example, how to create a correct mesh in Blender, or how to create an L-cut in Premiere pro. That’s why if I use Siri – it does for me the basic tasks, saving me a couple seconds.

In terms of the system's speed and responsiveness – everything is great. On any apple-silicon powered mac everything works great. The animations are fluent most of the time, but we’ll talk about flawed moments in a sec.

The loading time is the same, no hiccups were noticed. Yes, the first betas were somewhat slow and buggy, but the release version is well-polished.

The same goes for bugs – since the official release I haven’t seen any bugs or compatibility issues. Apps work just as good as they did on Monterey, so no complaints here.

In terms of battery life Ventura does perform similarly to Monterey.. Haven’t noticed any difference. But there still is one thing to say about charging – it must be done responsibly.

Macbooks are fragile, and using a cheap charger may damage the battery. If you are having troubles with charging your mac, you should check out UGREEN.

Here I have two great chargers that you may like.

First – this 4-in-1 65W desktop charger. This charger is perfect for minimalist desk setups. One cable goes to the outlet, the charger takes almost no space on the table, and four cables go out. You can connect 2 usb-c cables and 2 usb-a cables for fast charging your gadgets.

An UL94-V0 rated shell along with an efficient heat dissipation structure ensures safe overnight charging.

The Ugreen Power Dispenser system intelligently adjusts the power output to protect your product's battery, so it will last longer.

To protect your charger from overheating, the Thermal Guard system takes 200 temperature readings every second. This charger can easily charge your M2 MacBook Air from 0 to 100 in 1,5 hours.

Second charger I have here is this Gan fast charger, also at 65W. You just hook it to the outlet and have 1 usb type-a and two type-c for fast charging of all of your devices. Tablets, phones, laptops – one device to charge them all.

The Gan technology makes it safer, lighter, and more efficient than standard chargers you may find in the box.

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Size-wise, it’s almost half the size of Apple’s single-port 61W charger. It even has the foldable plug for easier transportation and traveling. This adapter easily charges the M2 MacBook Air to 51 percent in only 30 minutes. All that – in one small, power-efficient, and fully protected charger.

What I extremely enjoyed about MacOS Ventura is the object separation in photos. For me it is really a game changer when it comes to creating thumbnails.

Previously I used to open photoshop and spend precious minutes painstakingly separating myself from the background. Now I can simply open a photo, right click on the subject, and select “copy subject.”

Apple’s neural engines will pretty accurately cut out the subject. All that’s left is to just paste it into Photoshop.

If you know how to make photos the right way, this feature can save you hours. It's probably one of the best additions to macOS in a long time.

The last positive thing I’ve found is the updated spotlight search. Now it can search across everything you have on your laptop. Photos, files, messages – everything.

This makes it much easier to find the necessary information. Plus, if you are looking for files, you can preview them directly from the spotlight by long pressing the spacebar.

Now it is much easier to find what I need and definitely saves me some time on a daily basis. Hope spotlight will keep getting better, because there still is a lot of potential.

Things really start getting dark for Apple with the stage manager. Apple was really hyping this feature, emphasizing how useful and convenient it is.

Apple believes in it so hard that by default it replaces the keyboard brightness button in the control center.

But everyone I ask has turned it off immediately after the update. To me, this is simply a gimmick, a feature simply for the sake of it, created just to make iPads seem more like a mac. But on macs it adds zero functionality, really.

First – do you need to have multiple windows opened on one screen? Why piling up windows, instead of expanding them to separate desktops.

Second – the stage manager takes up just too much space. The screens on macs are not particularly wide, so stealing an inch from us is basically a crime.

Third – getting used to using “stage manager” is just a huge pain in the ass. For decades we’ve been used to a certain workflow, certain interactions with macOS, and now Apple wants us to relearn everything just so that they could say that the feature isn’t useless.

I just fundamentally don’t understand how it must be difficult for people at Apple to press Command+Tab that they came up with.

Maybe in some scenarios it can help a little, and maybe new macOS users will like that, but for us, the older gang, such changes are not good.

All the time that I’ve tried to use it, I was just questioning the reasons for this feature to exist. It took more time from me than it saved, period.

Oh, and the animation is choppy even on the 14 and 16 inch macbook pros. Especially when you swap between heavy apps. Sometimes it just can freeze and stop responding.

The best thing about stage manager is that it can be disabled. But new settings… that’s a whole nother level.

Completely remade and redesigned settings are breaking all the workflows and settings interactions we used to have for decades, and makes me google solutions and answers for where to find something far more often.

Unifying settings across all devices sounds like a good idea at first… but the way it is implemented here completely butchers all good intentions.

First – the whole interaction scheme is broken. Just look at Monterey. Each settings section had its own icon, easily recognizable even without titles.

Now, look at the vertical scroll list from Ventura. Here, on the left, you can see all the settings menus, and when you click on them, they will appear on the right, just like on iPads. But what works for simple settings of a tablet doesn’t work for laptops.

And the order of preferences is now based on iOS. Wifi, bluetooth, network, notifications. I can’t imagine a single mac user who values wifi, focus, and screen time over general settings.

Here they are in Monterey, the top left corner, hard to miss. Here, with a scrollable list you simply can scroll past them. And don’t let me start on icons. They are… different in Ventura.

In Monterey each icon was representative, visually expressive, and you could've figured out which section to open based solely on icons.

Now, all icons are unified, devoid of humanity. Now, look what happens when I go to wallpapers. Now we must scroll horizontally to choose images, which is basically forbidden on computers. It’s counter-intuitive and not comfortable.

Here’s how it looks in Monterey. Vertical scrolling, all wallpapers are visible – good design, very user-friendly.

Plus, don’t you see anything strange? The settings section is called “wallpapers” but we don’t see “wallpapers’ anywhere.

We see “desktop”. Why? Because it’s called Desktop in Monterey.

So Apple has changed the name of the section, changed the interaction patterns, but forgot the old names.

Now, let’s go to sounds. Here we see a conflict of interaction. To choose an alert sound you now need to select one from a drop-down menu and click a separate button to hear the sound you’ve chosen.

In Monterey you could just use arrow keys or click on each one and hear the sound instantly.

Battery section. Let’s open that in Monterey and in Ventura. In Monterey it was fairly easy to navigate through menus, pick options, and do scheduling.

In Ventura, on the other hand, all of that is gone. Why did Monterey have this section designed by a human, and on Ventura by some AI from the Westworld? Well, you got the gist, right?

New settings are that controversial thing from the start. So, you should think twice before installing Ventura if you still have this option.

MacOS ventura is.. It gets much better in some areas, but gets much worse in others. To me it will eternally stay a so-so update.

It will take some time for Apple to fix all the mistakes they made, so I’ll keep you posted on that.