Okay, this will take some explaining. A part of me that I thought had died is legitimately excited for new multitasking features on the Mac. But only because I hope it gets rid of the virtual desktops/Spaces feature, which I never use, and it only ever gets in the way.
PCfags won't know what I'm talking about, but it is such a pain in the arse when you use the 3-finger 'Application Expose' to switch between browser windows, which doesn't even work in Full Screen. Chrome and Brave both use the native Full Screen and I wish that they didn't. It also makes the entire window disappear into its own hidden space when you watch a video in full-screen so that sometimes you can't find it later.
As tempted as I am to load the beta onto my main machine to see if it fixes this annoyance (or at least gives me an option to disable it), I think it's safer just to not get my hopes up. Can anyone else confirm?
Gah, I have... no nice words to say about the Stage Manager feature. In isolation, it looks fine. In the context of the OS, it's just a worse version of the Dock with a bit of Mission Control/Spaces thrown in. Instead of complimenting the functionality of those features, Stage Manager merely duplicates it. It looks like one of those
janky third-party app switchers with a little more polish and a little less customisability. Or it looks like something designed for an iPad... with a touchscreen.
And yet, [edited to clarify:]
the iPad version of this feature is inspiring critics to call iPadOS "
an increasingly convoluted mess" so it can't be much of a success on that platform either. Besides, if it
really is the future of multitasking, then it was a dick move of Apple to limit it to the M1 iPads, especially when it's been
implemented internally a decade and a half ago.
I haven't tried the Ventura beta, nor do I own an iPad, but I probably don't need to, And do you know what
really pissed me off about this? It was Craig giving his
lousy PR statement about how redundant functionality is
good because it allows different people to use the product in different ways. Here's my biggest problem with that (emphasis mine):
"On the Mac, there are so many different ways to work. Some people use spaces, some people are in and out of Mission Control. Some people are command tab people, some people like to create a mess, some people clean up their messes and some people use minimization. I mean, there's no wrong answer here, there are a lot of valid ways to work on the Mac."
He officially recognised the command-tab people! I feel so seen! Except no, because while they were focusing on polishing other features, they forgot that command-tab rudely shoves you to a different space if you use it in
a Full Screen app. And since command-tab
can't be used to switch between windows of the
same app, you'll need Application Expose, and yet Apple
completely disabled it in Full Screen. Chromium-based browsers use the native Full Screen
every damn time you maximise a video, and I watch enough Youtube videos maximised that it's become a major annoyance. (I realise that by saying this, I'm powerlevelling myself as a shut-in who watches too much Youtube, but I can't be the only one who wants to tab out mid-video
without needing to switch Spaces.)
Rationally, Full Screen apps - a feature that has been broken since Lion - shouldn't really annoy me that much. But with the last decade from Apple having been a string of disappointments (
10 years, almost to the day, since they soldered the RAM in "pro" laptops), this is looking more and more like a last straw moment for me with the Mac. It's been a long time coming.
. If you upgrade them both to 256, then the price difference shrinks to a mere $150, which you can rationalise as $50 for the cameras and $100 for the M1 (both of which are 
