So I did the thing I always say I'm not going to do on a weeknight, which is install a brand new OS the second it drops. Apple pushed OS X Yosemite out yesterday, free download from the App Store, and I was up until almost midnight waiting on a five-gig download over my apartment's not-great cable connection just so I could poke at it before bed. No regrets exactly. But I've got opinions this morning, running on not enough sleep and a second cup of coffee that isn't helping.
First, the good stuff, quickly, because everyone and their cousin has already written the "here's what's new in Yosemite" post this week and I don't need to be the fourth one you've read. It's flatter. Icons got redone, the whole interface leans translucent now so your dock and menu bar pick up whatever's behind them, and there's a dark mode toggle for the dock and menu bar buried in General preferences that I turned on within about ten minutes because obviously I did. Spotlight moved to the center of the screen and got bigger, more like Alfred if you've ever used that (I have, for years, and I'm curious if this kills my reason for keeping it installed). Handoff is in there too, the thing where you can start an email on your Mac and finish it on your phone, though I haven't gotten it working yet because apparently my 2011 MacBook Air doesn't have the Bluetooth LE hardware for it. Cool feature, wrong laptop.
Here's my actual complaint, the one I came here to write about: my WiFi has been garbage since about 1am.
Not dropped-once-and-fine. Dropped, reconnected, dropped again, sat there with the WiFi icon doing that fanned-out "searching" animation while a page just refuses to load, for basically all of today. I restarted the router twice, which is normally my fix for everything, and it didn't touch it. Forgot the network and rejoined it, no change. Toggled WiFi off and on maybe fifteen times over the course of the afternoon like some kind of digital nervous tic. It's not just me either — I poked around a couple of the Apple support forum threads on my phone (since, ironic, my laptop's WiFi wasn't cooperating) and there's already a pile of people reporting the exact same thing less than 24 hours after this thing shipped. Something about how Yosemite handles DNS or maybe it's the WiFi Assist stuff under the hood, nobody in the thread seems totally sure yet. I'm not going to pretend I've diagnosed it. I just know I lost about two hours today re-loading the same three tabs.
The other thing bugging me, smaller but it's been nagging at me all day: the new system font is Helvetica Neue, and at the smaller sizes it is genuinely hard to read on my non-Retina screen. Menu bar text, some of the Finder sidebar labels, definitely feel thinner and blurrier than they did under Mavericks. I know Retina displays are supposed to make this a non-issue, and if you've got a newer machine you're probably reading this confused about what I'm even complaining about. But not everybody replaced their laptop this year, and on my aging Air the light-weight type just looks a little washed out. It's not a dealbreaker. It's just the kind of thing where I notice it every single time I glance at the screen, which after a full day adds up to a low hum of irritation I didn't ask for.
iCloud Drive is the other new thing that greeted me on first boot, this big prompt asking if I wanted to turn it on, with fine print warning that older iOS devices and Macs running anything before Yosemite won't be able to see synced folders properly anymore. I hit "not now" because I've still got an iPad running iOS 7 that I use constantly for reading in bed, and I'm not ready to lock it out of my own files over a system prompt I hadn't fully thought through yet. Might flip it on once I've upgraded that too. Might not. iCloud and I have a complicated history already, and I'm not eager to add a new chapter at 11pm with a laptop that can barely hold a WiFi connection.
Anyway. If you're thinking about updating tonight, maybe wait a couple days, let the forums figure out the WiFi thing first. Or don't, and then come complain to me about it, I'll be right here nursing the same headache.