Riccardo Mori

The case for MacBooks without webcam

August 31, 2022

It’s a bit sad that, in all his decades-long career at Apple, Phil Schiller will probably be most remembered for his two infamous on-stage remarks, Can’t innovate anymore, my ass! (uttered during the presentation of the 2013 Mac Pro), and Courage (during the presentation of the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus, explaining the decision to remove the headphone jack — “the courage to move on, do something new, that betters all of us”).

Both remarks have, with time, basically become memes and — like the evergreen Think Different — are often used as retorts to criticise some decision or stance taken by Apple.

Well, here’s my idea to file under the Courage category; an idea that would solve both the questionable notch design of MacBooks’ displays and the not-so-great quality of the webcams they come equipped with. Just, remove the webcam altogether.

If you’re thinking I’m the only crazy one to have had this idea, I’m not. In fact, several people made this suggestion on Twitter and via private emails after reading my recent article on the terrible design detail that is the notch in MacBooks.

The idea came to me a bit earlier this year, when I was trying to remotely help an acquaintance set up their phone as webcam for Zoom calls because their laptop’s built-in webcam had failed and wasn’t recognised anymore by the computer. When Craig Federighi introduced the Continuity Camera feature at the WWDC 22, that lets you seamlessly use your iPhone as a webcam for your Mac, I started thinking that maybe this idea wasn’t as crazy as it sounded at the beginning, even to me.

It’s still a bold proposal, so of course it needs to be more detailed than, Just get rid of the webcam on all MacBooks, remove the notch in the process, and be merry.

Like other people suggested, I would restrict the webcam removal to the MacBook Pro models, while more entry-level machines like the MacBook Air would keep their webcams. The reasoning here is that the target audience of an all-purpose Mac like the Air is more likely to need a webcam on a frequent basis, and for them a laptop with an integrated webcam is the best solution. Pro users (at least those I’ve talked with) tend to use the webcam more sparingly, and they also tend to have good, updated iPhone models; so, when they need to be on the occasional video call on their MacBook Pros, they wouldn’t have any problem taking advantage of the Continuity Camera feature.

Webcams in laptops are an ongoing technical challenge. The only sensible placement is at the top centre of the laptop’s lid, and today more than ever, laptop lids are thin. Too thin to accommodate high-quality photographic equipment. And so, compared to the very high-quality camera hardware in smartphones, when it comes to laptops we’re mostly stuck with sub-par webcams whose video quality can only be improved (a bit) via software. For a FaceTime or Zoom call, they’re probably enough, though sometimes a combination of poor webcam quality and not-optimal lighting conditions can give you an unflattering look when you’re broadcasting yourself.

When I think about a future iteration of webcam-less MacBook Pros, I don’t really see any major downsides. Yes, having to pull out your iPhone and secure it to the MacBook Pro’s lid makes things a bit less immediate, especially when the video call is not planned, and you’re the one being called, but if the Handoff/Continuity mechanics work well enough, you would get the video call on your iPhone then seamlessly continue on your MacBook Pro when you place the iPhone on top of it moments later.

An objection to consider is, But Rick, what about MacBook Pro users who don’t have an iPhone and use an Android phone? My snarky response would be, Why, do you know any? While my more serious response would be that there are software solutions — like Camo — that let you use any phone as a webcam for your Mac or PC.

I think the only people to find webcam-less MacBook Pros cumbersome to use are those who need the power of a MacBook Pro and simultaneously have to use a webcam on a very frequent basis. Here I guess that, knowing beforehand that MacBook Pros come without webcams, they would organise and plan a workaround before purchase. If Apple really removed the webcam in future MacBook Pros, this wouldn’t historically be the first time Apple removes something that ends up annoying a segment of their user base, until people work around it and life goes on. I won’t even mention the removal of the floppy drive in the first iMac back in 1998; more recently, I’m thinking of the removal of the headphone jack in iPhones, or leaving behind certain ports in MacBooks that are still relevant on a practical level, like USB‑A or Ethernet.

The only case that would work against a webcam removal in Apple laptops is that if Apple is planning to bring FaceID to Macs, then the necessary camera array for FaceID must be present. Unless they find a way to implement it even when using an iPhone with the Mac via Continuity Camera.

From a design standpoint, removing the notch and the webcam would be a win both in the looks and functionality departments. MacBook Pros’ displays would have cleaner lines again; bezels could be made even thinner (you bezels-obsessed folks are already gasping in excitement, I know) and displays a bit larger without making the laptop physically bigger. I bet most MacBook Pro users would accept this kind of trade-off. Overall, I consider the idea of removing the webcam from MacBook Pros less crazy than slapping a notch in the top centre of the display. But let me know what you think, as usual via Twitter or by shooting me an email.

The notch is wrong: feedback and follow-up

July 31, 2022

by Riccardo Mori

Tech Life

Two weeks ago I published a piece that was essentially about something I needed to get out of my system, because I was starting to feel like I was the weird one for maintaining a strong negative stance on the subject. I’m talking about the so-called notch, a questionable design element that Apple, after featuring it on iPhones for many iterations, deemed worthy of applying to Mac laptops as well.

Unlike many people, whose reaction to the notch was just a shrug — both when it debuted on the iPhone X in 2017 and on the 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pros in 2021 — I was extremely put off by it. Especially when it appeared on Macs.

Back in October 2021, when reacting to the first notch appearance on the then-freshly introduced MacBook Pros, I wrote:

[B]ack to the notch: it was completely avoidable. You can justify it however you want, but it has the same fundamental characteristic as its iPhone counterpart — it’s just plain ugly. It is indeed a design compromise on the iPhone because on such a portable device on the one hand there’s the need to maximise screen real estate, and on the other there’s the simple fact that you have to provide a sophisticated front-facing camera with the necessary technology to enable FaceID. So you design a display with a screen that reaches the top where possible, i.e. the area surrounding the notch. You provide as many pixels as possible given the circumstances.

And yes, putting that notch on the MacBook Pros might have originated from the same impulse — maximising screen real estate. But while on the iPhone this was a need, on the Mac it’s just a want. Again, with displays as big and pixel-dense as those in the new 14 and 16-inch MacBook Pro models there’s no need to maximise screen real estate. You don’t need to carve a space up top where to shoehorn the menu bar, as if it were an annoying, restricting UI element, and splitting it up in the process. To me, this makes no sense from a design-is-how-it-works standpoint. It looks like an urge to make a design statement for design statement’s sake — as if Apple products needed some signature design quirk to be recognisable.

Ever since the notch’s introduction as a design element on Macs, every time I engaged in some discussion about it, other people made me feel as if I was the silly one for reacting so strongly about it. Why are you making such a big fuss about it? and What’s the big deal? were among the most typical responses I’d receive.

The feedback I got tells a different story

At the time of writing I’ve received a total of 61 email messages about my article The notch is wrong. Of these, 55 are from people who essentially wrote to thank me for writing that piece and almost every one of them added something along the lines of “I thought I was going crazy and was the only one who hated the notch that much”. I admit that this kind of feedback made me feel much better and even a bit vindicated.

Of the remaining 6 messages, 3 were kind of neutral about the notch (for example, J.A. wrote “I do get your criticism, I’m not a fan of the notch either, but I’ve got accustomed to it and when using my MacBook Pro it doesn’t really bother me.”), and 3 were instead quite supportive of the notch.

This is just anecdotal data, of course, but it’s interesting to see that these 61 emails came from all over the world (it’s a guess based on people’s names — I’ve recognised English, French, Italian, German, Dutch, Polish, Korean, Indian and Japanese names) and from people of varying degrees of tech-savvy. In other words this sample, however small, didn’t feel like originating from the same ‘bubble’, so to speak.

Two important points I should have articulated better in my previous article

When I consider the remaining 6 emails, those with the neutral-to-positive stance towards the notch, in at least 4 of them my correspondents wrote something like, “Your piece sort of makes me feel judged by deciding to purchase a MacBook with a notch, almost as if I were told that I have bad taste when it comes to design”.

And the second thing common to many emails was something like “Yeah I don’t think the notch is ultimately that big of a deal; believe me, you stop noticing it after a few days, it really is unobtrusive”.

Responding to these remarks, I want two things to be especially clear in my harsh criticism of the notch:

I’m definitely not passing judgement on those people who have purchased or thought about purchasing ‘notched’ MacBooks. The 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pros are exceptional machines, and the M2 MacBook Air is a capable all-purpose laptop. Save for the notch and a few other small details, I generally love the design of these Macs, and I’m really happy if they’re the solution that best fits your needs. What can you do about the notch? Nothing, really; it’s something Apple forces down your throat whether you like or not. It’s not you, customer, who has bad taste in design here — it’s Apple.
My criticism of the notch is purely design-oriented. The point I’m trying to make is that we shouldn’t think of the notch as good or bad design depending on if and how much we ‘notice’ it. But that the notch is bad design whether we notice it or not, whether it bothers us little or very very much.

Could it merely be an æsthetic concern?

F.W. writes me:

Don’t you think that your dislike for the notch is merely a matter of looks rather than functionality? If functionality isn’t really impacted, shouldn’t we conclude that the notch isn’t that deeply flawed as your critique would imply?

It’s a good question. While I think a great part of my aversion to the notch is indubitably tied to its visual ugliness, I don’t agree that the notch doesn’t really impact functionality. If Apple itself tells developers they need to take the notch into account when designing their apps, then Apple itself is recognising that the notch could potentially be an issue, functionality-wise. I keep quoting this tweet from Linda Dong (Apple Design Evangelist) because I think it’s very telling of the kind of approach Apple’s having here:

Either way it’s still a great idea to keep menu bar titles short and consolidate menus when you can for usability’s sake! Hunting through a million menus is never fun even on pro software.

She’s suggesting to keep menu bar titles short and consolidate menus because otherwise this happens:

In one of the feedback emails I received, one of my readers attached this screenshot taken from Marques Brownlee’s review of the M2 MacBook Air, where you can see Pixelmator Pro in use (a damn good app, by the way). The annotations are mine.

What she’s suggesting is actually not a good idea for usability’s sake. It’s just a suggestion to avoid making Apple look bad for having arbitrarily introduced a hardware detail that actively interferes with one of the most important UI elements in the whole operating system — the menu bar.

Apple introduces the notch, and then developers have to do unnecessary extra work on their apps to mitigate the potential interference of this element.

Keep menu bar titles short — this doesn’t take into account at all any other language that isn’t English, Chinese or Japanese. Just take the Finder menu bar titles. In English, they are Finder, File, Edit, View, Go, Window, Help. All short words, most are 4‑character long; the longest is 6‑character long. In German, the Finder menu bar titles become: Finder, Ablage, Bearbeiten, Darstellung, Gehe zu, Fenster, Hilfe. In Spanish we have Finder, Archivo, Edición, Visualización, Ir, Ventana, Ayuda. Not all languages can afford short words. But even if we just stick to English, menu titles should be as clear and descriptive as possible. They shouldn’t be kept artificially short to accommodate a questionable design compromise.
Consolidate menus — “Hunting through a million menus is never fun even on pro software”, Dong says. You know what’s not fun either? Scrolling unnecessarily long menus because you had to consolidate into one menu a series of commands that were previously spread across three menus and it made sense that they were spread this way. Changing places to commands because you need to consolidate menus and reduce the number of menu bar titles because there’s the real possibility that they will collide with the notch, is the polar opposite of doing good usability. Same if you think you could maybe transform a list of menu commands into a popover or drop-down menu hidden behind an icon on a toolbar.

Some wrote me that they still haven’t encountered applications with menus that get displaced and pushed to the right of the menu bar by the presence of the notch. I don’t have recent Adobe Creative apps (the last suite I used is the CS3), so I can’t check, but historically apps like Photoshop and InDesign have had plenty of menu bar titles. Not long ago I also tried out Affinity Photo and Affinity Publisher, and I remember that the menu bar was pretty crowded. Between menu titles and all the menu extra I usually keep on my 13-inch MacBook Pro, I’m pretty sure that if my MacBook Pro had a notch, there would have been disruption up there in the menu bar.

The screen real estate gains purportedly allowed by the notch

This is perhaps the strongest argument I’ve heard from people who don’t mind (or actually welcome) the notch. And while they’re not technically wrong, I still think that what the notch gives you, display-wise, is in most cases simply not enough to justify such kind of design compromise.

If we compare a 13.3‑inch M1 MacBook Air with a 13.6‑inch M2 MacBook Air, their screen resolution is horizontally identical (2560 pixels), while vertically the M2 Air is 64 pixels taller than the M1 Air (1664 vs 1600). Those 64 pixels are essentially the height of the menu bar (split by the notch in the middle). And that is the total of ‘new’, really additional space you have on an M2 Air compared with the M1 model. Yes, the M2 Air has a physically bigger display than the M1 Air, but since the resolution is essentially the same, you won’t see more stuff on the M2 Air’s display. For the most part, you’ll see the same stuff as on the M1 Air, but slightly enlarged. Again, the only real space you gain is 64 pixels vertically.

And while the M2 MacBook Air has physical dimensions that are impressively close to the M1 MacBook Air, the latter is still a tiny bit shorter in height. Just today I picked up both computers in an electronics store, and their overall mass feels essentially the same. The M2 Air weighs 50 grams less than the M1 Air, but when holding both Macs, I couldn’t really tell the difference. One is not dramatically lighter or more compact than the other. But the thinner bezels of the M2 Air really do the trick. The display is bigger than the M1 Air by 0.3 inch diagonally, but feels bigger too. It’s a well-engineered deception (in the sense that, yes, it’s physically bigger, but the only added screen real estate are those 64 vertical pixels).

Another interesting comparison is between the older 2019 16-inch MacBook Pro and the 2021 M1 Pro/M1 Max 16-inch MacBook Pro that features the notch. Resolution-wise, the newer MacBook Pro clearly wins (3456×2234 vs 3072×1920), so here there is a substantial increase in screen real estate compared with the 2019 Intel 16-inch MacBook Pro, but the M‑class 16-inch MacBook Pro is actually thicker, taller, and heavier than the 2019 Intel model, while having essentially the same width (35.57 cm vs 35.79 cm of the Intel model). So yes, here you indeed have a bigger screen in a Mac that is more or less the same size of the previous Intel model, but you don’t end up with a more compact form factor.

The ‘winner’ here is probably the 2021 14-inch MacBook Pro, but it’s also the hardest laptop to draw a fair comparison with. We could compare display size, resolution, and the machine’s physical dimensions with the short-lived 2019 15-inch MacBook Pro, but that comparison has already been won by the 2019 16-inch MacBook Pro itself, having a bigger display, better resolution, and surprisingly similar physical dimensions.

Maybe we could pit the 2021 14-inch MacBook Pro against the 2020 M1 or 2022 M2 13-inch MacBook Pro. And here, the former clearly wins on all aspects: bigger display, better resolution, only roughly 1 cm taller and wider. 200 grams heavier, but given the appreciable performance leap, you can forgive that. The only big difference here is price. If you have a relatively tight budget, there is no compactness or bigger screen advantage for you, you’ll have to choose a smaller, more affordable MacBook. If you don’t mind the notch, the M2 Air may work for you. If the notch annoys you, you want the M2 chip, and don’t mind the Touch Bar, then it’s the base 13-inch MacBook Pro. Otherwise, the best option still remains the M1 Air, in my opinion.

The point of all this long-winded excursion about screen sizes, resolutions and Mac laptop’s physical dimensions is that — except the 14-inch M‑class MacBook Pro — the ‘notched’ display design doesn’t really give that substantial an advantage over a ‘non-notched’ display with a thicker top bezel. Especially in the M2 Air vs M1 Air comparison.

Again, the focus here remains on a purely design-oriented speculation. Pragmatically, lots of customers will chose the ‘notched’ MacBooks because they offer many other tangible advantages: faster chips, more memory, qualitatively better display panel technology, more ports, etc. When you consider these specs and your needs, you clearly give them precedence over design considerations about a funny notch. Here I openly recognise I’m in a stark minority, since I’m not willing to give in, and I won’t purchase a Mac laptop that has a notch, no matter what. It bothers and upsets me too much on a conceptual level for me to ignore it. That’s me, and I’m perfectly aware of my principled stubbornness here.

But I’m very glad for all the feedback I’ve received so far. My sincere thanks to everyone who took the time to write me an email on the subject. At least I don’t feel alone or misunderstood in my strong aversion to the notch. I’m still hopeful that this design compromise will only last a few years and will be discarded in the next major MacBook redesign.

The notch is wrong

July 17, 2022

by Riccardo Mori

Tech Life

From John Gruber’s review of the M2 MacBook Air:

There’s a notch. This looks weird at first, I know. But, as someone who’s been using a notched 14-inch MacBook Pro for months, trust me, you stop thinking about it after a few days. It’s a little bit weird when you use an app that has so many menus that one or more of them fall on the far side of the notch, but I don’t regularly use any apps with that many menus. I’ve got 26 apps running on this MacBook Air right now, and not one of them has too many menus to fit on the left of the notch¹.

In that footnote at the end of the paragraph, Gruber adds:

BBEdit and Safari come the closest among my currently-running apps. Safari, because I have both its optional Develop and Debug menus enabled. One app I occasionally use that does have menus that span the notch gap is Safari Technology Preview — because the name of the app itself in the menu bar takes up so much space.

The way he talks about the notch is pretty much the way everyone who has purchased or tested a notched MacBook talks about it, and the way everyone who has ever owned an iPhone with a notch talks about it. It boils down to, Yes, there’s a notch, but you get accustomed to it very quickly and it’s not a big deal.

I am sick and tired of being gaslighted about this. See, the notch is a design detail / design decision that positively angers me, but every time I vent my frustration about it, a lot of tech people out there react as if I were the crazy person, the now proverbial “old man yelling at cloud”, to cite a popular meme.

What also angers me is this casual normalisation of the notch’s presence, like it’s just a little quirk of good old Apple. Heck, in several places across the Web I’ve even read that the notch is what now makes Apple’s devices distinctive. Do you realise how bonkers that sounds? When has an Apple product, especially phones and computers, not been distinctive? Have you ever watched a film or TV series where blatant product placement was not allowed, so they had to use computers and devices with their logos covered or removed? You can recognise a MacBook, an iMac, an iPhone, a mile away. If anything, the notch is what today makes Apple devices distinctively jarring from a design standpoint.

If we look at the notch from a design is how it looks perspective, it is an egregiously hideous detail, both on iPhones and MacBooks. It’s this black strip that looks like someone redacted a part of the display. It’s this dead zone that looks like someone cut off a bit from the display. It’s also a detail that deforms the natural, rectangular shape of any display, of any screen.

If we look at the notch from a design is how it works perspective, it’s a bad design compromise. On iPhones (and on Android phones that copied its design) it has almost completely neutralised the usefulness of the status bar. On Macs, it has split the menu bar in two, creating an unnecessary interference with menus and menu bar icons (or menu extras, as they’re called). And for what? For thinner bezels and a little increase in screen real estate at the top left and top right? (Today’s tech obsession with thinner and thinner bezels deserves a study of its own, by the way). When you go fullscreen, having a MacBook with a traditional display and having a MacBook with a notched display makes no difference, because the usable application space remains essentially the same. You don’t ‘gain’ space.

As I’ve previously written,

If you stop and think about it, it’s utterly ludicrous that a developer should alter their app design to accommodate an element which was arbitrarily put in place by Apple and that is so intrusive it can’t possibly help developers make their app better, UI-wise or usability-wise.

[…]

If my 13-inch retina MacBook Pro had a notch, it would already be problematic and I would be forced to resort to third-party solutions like Bartender to hide most of the menu extras. Don’t get me wrong, Bartender is a great tool, but I want to see those menu extras all the time, because some of them indicate a state, and don’t simply function as a clickable element to access application options.

Again, the notch is an unnecessary hindrance, because even in the best case scenario, it makes you reconsider the way you interact with menu bar elements.

I keep hearing the same song, that the design of the M‑series MacBook Pros and now MacBook Air is the best design we’ve seen from Apple in ages. But I’m not 100% sure about that. (Between you and me, the true peak of MacBook design are the 2015 MacBook Pros). There are certainly praiseworthy details in the industrial design. The hinge’s design, a (finally!) better keyboard, the almost complete disappearance of the Touch Bar from the product line, the overall thermal design on the inside, and the sheer elegance these computers exude when you look at them closed — they look like aluminium slabs carved from a single block of material.

But trackpads are still too big. And that notch is like a gash on the chassis of an otherwise pristine Ferrari. Apple has a decades-long industrial design pedigree. For years their hardware design dictated what was beautiful, functional, cool, and fun in the computer industry. Now I have to read bullshit like The notch is what makes an Apple device distinctive, and I’m the crazy one because I get angry about it? The notch is a design stain in Apple’s reputation. It’s a disgrace that should be repeatedly pointed at and laughed until Apple decides to change course. Exactly like the keyboard with the butterfly mechanism. Too bad that people are opportunistic: they got angry at Apple for that flawed keyboard design because it actually prevented them from using the computer properly. The notch… eh, it can be ignored because wow, look at the fantastic performance of these M‑class MacBooks! Who cares about that black spot? It can be hidden and everyone’s happy!

Even Gruber, in his review of the M2 MacBook Air doesn’t even mention the notch in the section about “What could be better on the Air?” If I had a review unit of that machine, I would lead this part of the review with, The first thing that could be improved on this MacBook Air is the display, starting with the removal of that thing at the top.

The notch should be constantly criticised even if it doesn’t bother you, because it’s bad design; because it’s wrong design. Because there’s nothing essentially advantageous about it. Or beautiful, or functional, or cool, or fun. That part of the MacBook’s display should be treated like a sore spot, where you point and say, There’s room for improvement here.

[Update, 19 July 2022 — Nick Heer points out, both on Twitter and in his piece about the 14-inch MacBook Pro he recently purchased, that the notch allows Apple to put a 14-inch display in a machine that is physically smaller than the 13-inch MacBook Air (the pre-retina model), and that for him this is an acceptable-enough compromise to not make him hate the notch as much as I do. What can I say: while it’s true that the 14-inch MacBook Pro is smaller than the old 13-inch Air, the measurements indicate that the difference is negligible (1.24 cm in width, 0.58 cm in depth), and the presence of the notch to me is more an indicator of Apple’s failure to fit a bigger screen in a smaller lid — the notch itself is a testament to the fact that this couldn’t have been done without sacrificing something. This was not a clean design operation. Again, most Mac users will probably consider this an acceptable sacrifice. I’m not one of them.]

And in case you were wondering, I’m putting my money where my mouth is. I’m still using an iPhone 8, my next iPhone will very probably be a third-generation SE (which has the exact same notchless design as the 8), and I won’t purchase any of the flagship iPhones until the notch disappears from their displays.

On the Mac front things are a bit more problematic. Now that the notch is contaminating the MacBook design, I’m in the same position as I was back in 2018: at the time I didn’t want to get a new MacBook as an upgrade because of the butterfly keyboard fiasco, so I opted for a desktop Mac (iMac 21.5‑inch 4K). Now I refuse to purchase a MacBook with a notch because I simply do not want to reward such an absurd design decision with my money. So I’m once again looking at desktop Macs. An M2 Mac mini paired with a good monitor is definitely going to be a great replacement for my 2017 iMac. And in case I also need an Apple Silicon laptop, an M1 MacBook Air is probably going to be just fine for my needs. Still, it’s a bit of a frustrating situation for someone like me who simply cannot ignore the notch, no matter how loudly you tell me that it’s not a big deal.

Especially you there… yes you, who for years kept telling me how much you hated the design of the iMac G3’s round mouse.

Don’t normalise the notch. Don’t let Apple designers think it’s a good idea. This is not the ‘good’ Think Different of 25 years ago.

“The notch is wrong” was first published by Riccardo Mori on Morrick.me on 17 July 2022.

Sleep Aid app review

July 11, 2022

by Riccardo Mori

Software

A few weeks back, I was contacted by Sam Rowlands of Ohanaware, a long-time indie Mac developer (remember Funtastic Photos? I used to have a blast using this editing app back when my main Mac was the 12-inch PowerBook G4). Sam informed me about the imminent release of Ohanaware’s latest application, Sleep Aid, and asked me if I wanted to review it. Of course, was my response. I was then provided with a NFR licence and a link to download the app.

This is not a sponsored review, nor was I given editorial input or anything of the sort. If anything, I was encouraged to be as honest as possible in my observations. I think this is enough of a disclaimer, so let’s proceed with the review.

First and foremost, I have to apologise for the delay. The app’s official launch was June 23. I had hoped to be a bit more prompt with my review, but I’ve been exceptionally busy with my day job these last months. I also didn’t want to rush my impressions or miss anything essential.

What does Sleep Aid do? As the name suggests, the app is meant to monitor your Mac’s sleep and help figure out any sleep-related issues. Specifically — and I quote Ohanaware’s blog:

When the Mac was pretending to be asleep.
When the Mac suffered Unusual Insomnia, Excessive Insomnia and Long Insomnia.
When the Mac awakes directly after being sent to sleep.
When the Mac was woken by Notifications, Bluetooth, Siri and others.
When Sleep Settings, Sleep Aid or the Mac OS was changed.

In theory, this is the kind of very geeky, very specific app that could potentially be abstruse to operate or understand. Quite the contrary. What’s admirable about Ohanaware’s work here is that they’ve created a very Mac-like and user-friendly interface to display and interact with what would otherwise be boring or complex stuff.

You recognise the experience and expertise of a long-time Mac developer from that attention to detail Apple used to teach everyone and then forgot after Steve Jobs’s passing. An important detail in Sleep Aid is the onboarding. Ohanaware knows that the app could be a bit hard to interpret for a regular user, so when you first run Sleep Aid, you’re presented with a series of (skippable) Welcome screens that give you an overview of the app.

These six screens are brief, well-designed, and manage to tell you everything you need to know to use Sleep Aid. I can’t overstate how good an idea this is. Too many apps today just throw their user interface in your face, explain little about how to navigate it, often present controls and UI elements users have to decipher/test themselves in a trial-and-error fashion, and most crucially lack a meaningful in-app Help system. On this front, Sleep Aid makes for an excellent first impression. I mean, just look at its in-app Help homepage:

Here’s Sleep Aid’s main interface (in Dark Mode):

I’ve chosen to feature an image provided with the press kit because it shows a variety of sleep/wake situations that I simply couldn’t reproduce in my testing (I tested Sleep Aid on two Macs, one that is specifically set to not go to sleep, and a laptop that has no real sleep problems, so both their outputs didn’t make for a representative, encompassing UI example).

Sleep Aid’s interface isn’t really that different from a calendar or agenda app. But instead of recording your appointments and events, it keeps track of your Mac’s sleep/wake cycles, every hour of every day, and retains the last two weeks of sleep history, so that you can have a broader picture of what’s happening with your Mac’s sleep. In case of issues and anomalous periods of insomnia, by having the possibility to check over such an extended interval, you could take note of possible patterns and unwanted events that trigger insomnia on a regular basis.

Of course, you can select a specific chunk of activity and see detailed information about it. Here, I have selected the activity for the morning of Saturday 9 July on my iMac:

Note that, as I was hinting before, my iMac is specifically set to avoid sleep when the display is turned off (I had to do this because too often my Razer BlackWidow Elite keyboard was unresponsive after waking up the iMac), that’s why you’re seeing all those red blocks in my calendar. If there were an application or process preventing my iMac from sleeping, Sleep Aid would show it under the Potential software causes section.

In any case, when you’re in this view, by pressing the Suggestions button in the right sidebar you’re directed to Sleep Aid’s Help and offered an explanation of the possible causes preventing your Mac from sleeping, and relevant solutions you can try to see whether things improve.

Two important sections of Sleep Aid are invoked by pressing the Sleep Check and Sleep Settings buttons above the calendar view.

Sleep Check shows Settings and Applications that prevent idle sleep. As you can see, on my voluntarily insomniac Mac, I get a warning that the “Mac is set to stay awake when the display is off” — and the great thing about this is that if I had set this up accidentally, the app can help correct the issue by providing a Fix button on the right.

Sleep Settings both incorporates settings you normally access via the Energy Saver preference pane, and also offers additional features that are specific to Sleep Aid, and these are very useful: you can, in fact, disable Wi-Fi and Bluetooth during sleep, and pause Apple Music during sleep. This removes the risk of Bluetooth devices accidentally waking up your Mac (Sleep Aid will, of course, re-enable all wireless connections on wake). If any setting that’s already in place will prevent the Mac from going to sleep, the Sleep Settings panel will tell you about it. Again, my iMac is set to not sleep when the display is off, and I get the warning here as well:

On laptops, you also get additional useful information regarding battery discharge when you select a specific monitored interval. Battery discharge is always a useful additional indicator, both of battery performance as a whole, and of possible anomalous behaviour triggered perhaps by some rogue background process. My 11-inch MacBook Air’s battery looks normal during a regular period of ‘screen off’:

Of course, not all periods of insomnia have to be anomalous. Here, this red block of insomniac activity may be concerning at first blush, but clicking on it reveals that the reason for the insomnia was the AppleFileServer process. In other words, the MacBook Air had File Sharing active, and I had mounted a couple of MacBook Air’s folders on my iMac’s Desktop. With such a connection between the two Macs, the MacBook Air was not allowed to sleep. After unmounting the folders and closing the connection, things went back to normal.

Conclusion

Thankfully, none of the Macs I currently use suffer from strange sleep issues. (My Power Mac G4 Cube does, and I wish there were some vintage Sleep Aid equivalent to diagnose that!) But even if you, like me, have well-behaved Macs with reliable sleep/wake cycles, this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t buy this app. Sometimes (especially in recent times), a minor Mac OS update could be enough to disrupt a good sleep cycle, maybe because of a bug or a change in the OS that makes an otherwise innocuous background system process behave erratically.

Sleep Aid is a tool that does something powerful behind the scenes while presenting a clear, straightforward user interface. There is no other sleep analysis tool like this for the Mac. It’s disarmingly simple to use: you open the app and leave it running. It doesn’t install anything anywhere, no Login Items, daemons, extensions, nothing of the sort. And the app itself is extremely lightweight as a process, so leaving it open won’t impact your Mac’s performance at all.

Another thing I love about Sleep Aid is that, unlike an awful lot of new Mac apps released nowadays, it has very generous system requirements: it supports Mac OS versions as old as Mac OS 10.13.6 and is of course compatible with both Intel and Apple silicon Macs.

You can download it from its dedicated product page on Ohanaware’s website. A 14-day free trial is available, and it’s enough to evaluate the app. There is no subscription (another plus, in my book): a licence costs $25 ($15 as a Launch promotion price until August 12, 2022) and it gives you one year’s worth of updates and support. Licences are renewed manually, which means that if you don’t renew your licence, you can continue using the last version of the app you’re entitled to.

I think Sleep Aid is well worth its price, and in all honesty I would have purchased it even if I hadn’t been generously given a free licence for testing and reviewing purposes. Talented Mac developers capable of delivering ingenious apps that are also very Mac-like and thoughtfully designed from a UI standpoint, are an endangered species, and in my view they deserve all the support we can give.

Note: The good folks at Ohanaware have provided readers of this blog an extra $5 off Sleep Aid’s launch promotion price: just enter the coupon code MORRICK when purchasing your licence to apply the discount.

A few passing notes on Stage Manager, then I’m done with the subject

June 22, 2022

by Riccardo Mori

Software

1.

This post on the always-excellent Michael Tsai’s blog is an encompassing must-read to grasp the whole debate about Stage Manager and its bafflingly restrictive system requirements.

2.

I’m insisting on this Stage Manager brouhaha, not because I particularly care about this feature — I still believe it’s an unnecessarily convoluted multitasking UI for a tablet — but because it’s just maddening that the previous iteration of a product is just cut off from it. I understand that in the past Apple has done the same — putting out a major OS release with certain features not being able to run on older hardware — but it usually was the case of much older hardware, not the immediately previous iteration. (Going from memory here; I may be wrong). I find this to be consumer-hostile. And I often have the impression that people at Apple are so insulated that they end up handling these things with a bit of tone-deafness.

In turn, what always baffles me is how some Apple fans and/or pundits just side with Apple on these things. I realise that technology is constantly moving forward, but sometimes tech companies should stop and think more about their customers’ pace and the time (and money) they need to adapt, to upgrade, to change habits, to adopt new features or different workflows. I’m not necessarily advocating the constant hand-holding of customers. I’m aware that any tech company must always be moving in order to keep their products relevant and alluring, but sending customers who purchased an A12Z iPad Pro in 2020 the message that their quite premium device is already not good enough is kind of preposterous.

Josh Centers at TidBITS writes:

In the bluntest terms: Apple could have engineered Stage Manager to work on non-M1 iPads; it just didn’t want to degrade the overall experience to make that happen. This isn’t necessarily nefarious plotting on Apple’s part but rather the standard way Apple makes business decisions. From Apple’s perspective, it’s a total win. Stage Manager:

Provides a rich multitasking experience that makes people want iPads

Encourages users with non-M1 iPads to upgrade

Justifies the purchase of customers who already own M1 iPads

See, I don’t even think Apple “didn’t want to degrade the overall experience to make that happen”. I think Apple didn’t want to waste resources to engineer a separate, optimised implementation of Stage Manager for non-M1 iPads — while being well-aware that most people don’t upgrade their iPads every 1–2 years. Optimising means you work hard to provide an equally seamless experience on a technically less powerful device.

And those hardcore Apple fans who keep backing Apple even when the company makes unpopular decisions display the same kind of tone-deafness. After reading my numerous tweets where I vented my frustration about Stage Manager being restricted to M1 iPads, someone wrote me an email message basically telling me, If you want Stage Manager, just get an M1 iPad, man.

My reply? Hey, just send me 1,200 Euros via PayPal and I’ll get an M1 iPad, man.

These people just think we all have the money tree (Ficus Pecunia) growing in a corner of our living-room.

3.

When Dashboard was introduced in Mac OS X 10.4.3 in 2005, it featured certain effects and animations that not all Macs were able to perform. To enjoy the full experience, your Mac had to be equipped with a powerful-enough graphics card supporting CoreImage. Still, Dashboard was made available for all Macs, and those models with lesser graphics cards simply didn’t show those effects and animations. There was no true loss of functionality, just an absence of further eye candy.

I think Stage Manager could use a similar approach in order to be made available on slightly older iPads. At least on iPad Pros with an A12X and A12Z Bionic chips and 6 GB of RAM, which are inarguably still very powerful devices. Deliver the core experience, strip down the eye candy.

But, as Josh Centers points out in the afore-quoted bit, [This is] the standard way Apple makes business decisions. Business decisions, not technical decisions. Technically, I don’t think a ‘Stage Manager Lite’ isn’t feasible. Technically, an M1 iPad is indeed more powerful than an iPad with an A‑series chip. It’s just that Apple wants M1 iPads to be also perceived as more powerful and desirable. It’s all about creating artificial differences. A maxed out 2020 iPad Pro with an A12Z Bionic chip and a 2021 iPad Pro with an M1 chip are basically indistinguishable in normal use. Only stress tests and the resulting benchmarks reveal differences. When last year the M1 iPad Pro was introduced, many people asked, What’s the point of this machine? when there’s probably just Final Cut Pro and maybe another app out there that would make the purchase of an M1 iPad Pro at least a bit worthwhile.

Apple can make M1 iPads perceivably superior by developing M1-only features. Makes strategic sense. Still a dick move, though, if you ask me (and the people in my Inbox who bought an iPad Pro in 2020).

4.

File under: “Can’t innovate anymore, my ass!” but the joke’s on you, Apple.

This is dedicated to those who messaged me with snarky comments saying (with a straight face, I suppose) that Apple’s innovation can’t be stopped or hampered!

Thanks to @teknisktsett, I was made aware of Tech Reflect, a great blog by a former Apple employee, who has been sharing a few memories, personal stories, and bits of Apple history (at the time of writing, some of them have already been removed, a clear sign that Apple noticed the blog and wasn’t pleased about them — sigh). In a post that has now been taken down (but here’s an archived version), The author of Tech Reflect talks about how in 2006 they created the ancestor of what is now Stage Manager, but the project was scrapped at a later date.

As you can see in the picture, apart from the obvious changes in appearance, the functional changes between that 2006 project and the 2022 version of Stage Manager appear to be rather minimal. So very innovative of Apple to regurgitate a 16-year-old concept. How lazy and unimaginative this company has become software-wise is absolutely depressing.