Ars Technica’s Review of MacOS 10.14 Mojave ⇥ arstechnica.com

Andrew Cunningham continues John Siracusa’s tradition of publishing the best reviews of MacOS updates. This year’s is well worth reading because, in addition to obvious visual changes in MacOS Mojave, there are plenty of non-obvious but more consequential updates below the surface:

Mac OS X began life as a 32-bit operating system, but a slow, steady transition to 64-bit hardware and software has been happening for over 15 years. Today’s Macs — and any Mac running Mojave or any version of the operating system going all the way back to Mountain Lion — have been all-64-bit, barring a handful of first-party apps and background services and a steadily shrinking list of third-party apps. Still, 32-bit apps run just as well as they did when Snow Leopard shipped on 32-bit Intel Macs back in 2006.

That doesn’t change in Mojave, but this is the last version of macOS that will run those 32-bit apps at all.

There are also plenty of updates to the security and privacy features introduced in MacOS over the past few years:

[…] In High Sierra, Gatekeeper controls access to Location Services, Contacts, Calendars, Reminders, and Photos — any app that wants access to any of that data needs to ask for it and be granted permission first, and the app should fail over gracefully (i.e. not crash) when that permission is denied.

In Mojave, that access control extends to several other areas: access to Mail, Messages, Safari browsing data, HTTP cookies, call history, iTunes device backups, and Time Machine backups all require permission now. And like in iOS, macOS apps now need to ask permission to use any webcam or microphone attached to the system (Apple says this includes the built-in hardware plus any device that uses macOS’ default drivers, which covered both my Logitech C920 webcam and Scarlett Solo USB audio interface).

These changes have not been easy in certain specialized cases; but, for average users — and bugs aside — ought to be worthwhile protection.

I’ve been using MacOS Mojave about 50% of the time since July, and full-time for over a week. Generally speaking, it’s an excellent update: the new Desktop Stacks feature is brilliant and everything Stacks should have been in the first place; the enhanced iPad-inspired Dock is terrific; and the entire system feels rock solid and even a little faster. I’m not necessarily saying you should upgrade right away, but I, personally, did not have the same feeling of trepidation as the past couple of MacOS updates.

Update: One thing I forgot to mention is in regards to the new autofilling two-factor authentication code behaviour, similar to that which is in iOS 12. Here’s how Cunningham describes it:

When you receive two-factor authentication codes via SMS (and when you’ve got your iPhone configured to forward SMS messages to your Mac), Mojave will offer to insert those codes for you in Safari or any other app updated to target Mojave.

Unfortunately, Apple’s own two-factor authentication codes do not autofill because they are not sent over SMS.