Apple seems to have forgotten the value of consistency: they keep changing their user interfaces. For example, on the iPhone one could swipe up from the bottom (the VERY bottom — don’t miss) to get to a secret screen presenting the “control panel”. How nice. But now one must swipe from the upper right corner. Of course, there’s no way to learn this except by a rule that was long since abandoned: RTFM (Read the ... Manual). Well, we abandoned it forty years ago. It seems that Apple has revived that rule.
Here’s another example: In Mac OS 12.3, you could set the delay time before the screen saver kicked in. You did so with the “Screen Saver” option in the System Preferences:
Clicking on this icon brought you to this window:
All you had to do was select how long a delay you wanted before the Screen Saver kicked in.
You could also have the Mac go to sleep, but that required use of the “Energy Saver”:
Clicking on this icon brought you to this window:
Simple. Easy. Piece o’ cake.
Now let’s see progress at work. Here’s the System Settings for the new, more powerful OS Sequoia 15.4:
Gee, they’ve changed the settings icons… but look, there’s the Energy Saver (the fourth icon from the top, green)! Let’s click on that:
Uh…gee… where’s the setting for making the Mac go to sleep? We can somehow prevent it from going to sleep, but we can’t make it go to sleep. What gives? OK, let’s look for something else.
No, “Desktop & Dock” doesn’t help. But look! There’s “Screen Saver”! Problem solved! Right?
Wrong! This let’s us choose WHICH screen saver animation we get, but it doesn’t allow us to say how long it goes before turning on… Oh, wait! There’s an OPTIONS button! That’ll do it! Right?
Wrong again! This only permits us to set the parameters of the animation. We get to control all sorts of petty stuff, but we can’t set the basic control for when it turns on.
Well, I’m getting desperate here, so I might as well try “Lock Screen” — as if locking the screen is related to turning on and off the screen saver…
Golly gee whillikers! They hid the screen saver control here! And clocks?!?! And switching users?!?!?!
What a bunch of loonies...