Major inconsistencies in macOS Ventura

They're not duplicates. It's just the way Apple is displaying your apps.

/System/Applications and its Utilities subfolder are the apps installed by the OS. This way, they're completely protected against any attempt to modify them by being in the read-only system volume.

The root Applications folder is part of the user volume where the apps you install go. But the OS (somewhat confusingly) displays your apps and the OS installed apps as a concatenated list. The idea being that the Applications folder appears as it always has to the user, despite the fact all of the installed apps aren't really in the same folder.

The size difference is the same thing. The smaller total is only for the OS installed apps in the System folder. The larger one is those, and your third party apps totaled together.

One way this is a bit more clear is if you use Carbon Copy Cloner to backup your system to another drive. When complete, there is an Applications folder on the backup drive.

But, the only apps in the backup are yours. It skips copying over the OS installed apps. It does the same with the Utilities subfolder. Only the apps you installed in that location are part of the backup.

I've wasted thousands of dollars and over a year of lost time trying to get my MBP16 M1 to work as it should.

Well, what you did waste all of that money and time trying to "fix" something that was never broken. It's just the way Apple decided to separate and display what's on the drive.

Heck, on my Intel 2018 mini, the OS no longer even shows the Applications folder in my user account. It did in Monterey and earlier, but not anymore.

svdrifter wrote:

Having dealt with over a year's worth of problems with Monterey on my MBP16 M1 Pro, I [somewhat reluctantly] decided to give Ventura a try at solving the issues. So far, this seems to have been a big mistake.

I hate to say, "I told you so", but have you ever seen anyone say, "I upgrade my Mac to [..insert random place in California here...] and it fixed all kinds of problems!"?

One issue is that, during the upgrade from Monterey to Ventura, my applications appear now to be all out of wack. I now have two primary "Applications" folders (three, counting the User's application folder). These two are "/Applications" (as before) and now "/System/Applications" (which I have never seen before). (A third one, of course, is in the User folder: "/Users/[myusername]/Applications".) What's even crazier is that, at any given time, I can view different contents within each.

This is normal and unchanged since well before Monterey.

See uploaded screenshots. Note that the typical "/Applications" folder comprises 92.3GB of space, while the new "/System/Applications" folder only comprises 932.7MB, which appears to only contain Apple's core proprietary applications.

Never look at file sizes. Since Apple adopted the APFS file system, the size of any individual file or folder may be completely meaningless. In most cases, it is accurate, but definitely not in that particular location.

Note that the original "/Applications" folder contains a duplicate set of Apple's core proprietary applications, in addition to all of my previous personal secondary apps (non-core apps).

No, it doesn't. You are using the Finder to look at these folders. Just like I said above, in most cases, the Finder is accurate, but definitely not in that particular location. The Finder with synthesize different locations on disk and show them to you as if there are one, distinct location. To be fair, the Finder has always done this for certain locations, namely the "Trash" folder. Apple simply expanded that behaviour to the Applications folder. And as above, this is unchanged since macOS 10.15 "Catalina".

I have not been able to find any reference to the movement of apps to a new location in the release of Ventura, including from Apple's telephone support staff (although that's fairly typical).

Even though this happened in 2019, it is not documented anywhere and I doubt anyone in Apple's telephone support staff would know anything about it anyway. Apple simply does not document any system behaviour at this level.

I've wasted thousands of dollars and over a year of lost time trying to get my MBP16 M1 to work as it should. I hate to give up now, but this is incredibly frustrating! Thank heavens I have two MBP15 (Intel) backups, still running reliably under High Sierra. But some of my newer software won't run on that OS.

Can anyone shed light on this?

So far, everything you've said is completely normal. If you made the jump from High Sierra to Monterey, then that would have been a jarring experience. You are supposed to upgrade every year, so you don't notice those changes as much.

It would be best to describe exactly what problems you were having in Monterey and we can suggest ways to resolve them or perhaps suggest better ways to accomplish the same things. So far, everything you have described is 100% normal and expected.

Generally speaking, it is a bad idea to go digging around in the internals of an Apple operating system. I've seen people do that and watched them literally lose touch with reality. I'm not exaggerating. I would be happy to explain these changes and the logic behind them. In many cases, the reasons are not technical, but driven by human and market behaviours that are out of Apple's control.

You're welcome. 🙂

Just to expand a bit. I'm also currently hanging on to an external installation of Mojave so I can run the CS6 Master Collection on it. And that's mainly so I can use Encore to author DVDs and 1080 Blu-ray disks (it can't do 4K or higher).

But I've found I don't really even need that anymore. I closed our in-home business just over a year ago, so have no need to produce such disks. For myself, I can create 4K MP4 videos in the free DaVinci Resolve and stick the completed video on a flash drive. From there, plug the drive into our 4K capable Blu-ray player and go. A final necessity to let go of CS6 since it will be impossible to run it on any Apple Silicon Mac.

CCC doesn't really clone a drive. Well, it does still have a function to allow a full clone, but the vendor strongly recommends against doing that. He notes the changes to macOS makes it so there's no way to ensure all system files are copied correctly, or at all. What you backup is your data. If you're doing a full restore, you erase the main drive and install the OS. When it gets to the point where it asks if you have data to restore, you say yes and point it to your backup. It all works nearly perfectly. All except for any third party apps you had included in the Privacy settings (such as for Full Disk Access) all need to be added again.

I've replaced everything I used to use in the Adobe suite with other apps. Most free, some perpetual license. All except for Photoshop. I use the $10 per month single title CC subscription for that. Like you, I've used PS for so long I hardly have to think where the controls are. And like you, I tried Affinity Photo and other possible PS replacements to eliminate that last piece of subscription software. But I just plain didn't like any of them. That, and I have several third party plug-ins I use a lot that only run correctly in PS.

CS6 is 64 bit, but not entirely. It has a lot of 32 bit support files. That's why it won't run beyond Mojave.