Apple was the company that dropped the headphone jack from their phone, shipped a laptop with only USB-C ports etc... they don't shy away from making big controversial decisions if they feel like it's good for them.
If Apple was going to do this to MacOS, they'd have already done it. They wouldn't be spending years tip toeing towards it like people seem to think.
Instead, they've rolled back some really unpopular changes like the crappy keyboard in their laptop, they just shipped a new Mac Pro that is clearly designed for professionals. This chip transition will result in Apple's laptops having better battery life, specs and heating than any other laptops available on the market. It won't even be close.
Additionally, they're actively trying to bring a huge swath of developers who currently only develop for their mobile devices into developing for the Mac. If they were trying to turn Macs into something for college students to watch Netflix on they wouldn't be doing any of this.
It's insane to me that people can see a UI refresh as a sign of doom while ignoring that Apple has actually been investing in the platform quite a bit more than they were a few years ago.
"We love our developers and pride ourselves on individual expression and transparent feedback."
-- Corporation 101
Imagine: you're in charge of Apple's new keyboard. You spend a bunch of time and money making the thing as thin as possible, because that's the overall design trajectory.
Of course, you test this thing internally, and it's okay. It takes a little while to get used to, but isn't awful to type on, and a few months of stress testing seem to indicate that this thing will work in the real world with an acceptable defect rate.
Besides, your management chain loves this thing, because It's Thinner(tm).
And then, you ship it, and discover that this thing breaks way more often in the real world.
But, because Apple, you're a company that never publicly admits to doing anything wrong (because lawsuits), which takes customer feedback with an overly-critical eye (philistines must be using it wrong), and which is more likely to spend it's entire capitalization on cat treats than it is to interrupt an ongoing hardware design cycle.
It's not just management -- it's the company culture.
On the one hand, this enables them to do bold things and endure incredible criticism before being proven right. The iPod, no optical disks, bundled GPUs, AirPods, etc.
On the other hand, this enables them to do bold things and endure incredible criticism before being shown horribly, horribly wrong. The snowflake keyboard, the touchbar, the iPhone antenna, etc.
I also suspect this is why Apple's hardware design is just so overall excellent. They identify perfection, and relentlessly pursue it. Sometimes Apple gets it wrong, and it shows, but when they get it right, they get it really right.
When the iPad first came out: "OMG, you can't print! How insane." Probably forgetting other things.
Apple does a ton of things wrong and arguably forces some changes before a lot of the world is ready for them. But they've never prioritized supporting legacy and, in fact, arguably have had a pretty consistent strategy of eliminating legacy at least one or two beats early relative to other companies. Certainly I've found some changes too aggressive. OTOH, there are usually ways to adapt that I've found no more than mildly annoying at first.
I very much don't recall anyone complaining about printer support. The primary jab at launch was "it's just a big iPhone". Which was in fact true—it just turned out that "a big iPhone" was pretty damn good, especially when actual iPhones had 3.5" screens.
I'd say most of these sorts of complaints are basically legitimate. When the iPhone came out, it didn't have copy and paste, and that was in fact extremely annoying!
The thing for me with the original iPad was coming to the realization that it was a (very nice) luxury device that was mostly useful for me (at the time) when traveling. And, when I gave one to my dad, it was a revelation relative to computers that he never could really use.
I had mine replaced twice, but the third revision (which according to Apple is an improved version) has been reliable (except for the key labels wearing off) though I still greatly prefer the 2012 design.
My biggest issue now is the trackpad and its incredibly broken palm rejection that causes the cursor to jump all over the screen. This isn't a settings issue (settings do not help at all) and it was never a problem on older Apple laptops or on the iPad, which has a huge touchscreen with flawless palm rejection. Unfortunately (for me and for Apple), wearing an Apple watch seems to make the broken palm rejection and random cursor jumping even worse.
The keyboards had a higher fault rate and many other issues and Apple has corrected its mistake, albeit 1-2 years too late from a consumer perspective. That's all there is to the story and the only semi-relevant competition to MBPs was STILL just ThinkPads and XPS, even with the main input device being significantly worse than previous iterations.
If you used the 2016 keyboard, you wont say that.
Regarding the 2017 keyboards, I'm not even talking about the fault rate. They had no escape key and the key travel was too small so it was like typing on a touch screen.
No, no it's not really.
It's all about preference and tolerance. I bought my Mum an 'old' Apple USB keyboard (i.e. similar to the pre-2017 laptop keys) when her PC's existing KB broke, as I liked mine very much. Being a life-long touch-typer, she just couldn't get on with it, because the travel was too little for her. She's now very happy with a KB with mechanical (Cherry) key switches.
In contrast, I prefer the older Apple KBs, but can get on perfectly well on my 2017 MacBook Pro's KB; and it's not like a touch-screen at all.
Then maybe I only used broken ones with no perceptible key travel whatsoever.
I agree that when it does work, there is _some_ feedback from keypresses, but seriously, if they can fake the clickability of the touchpad via haptics, why couldn't they do the same for the keyboard? Out of all devices that I develop on, the macbook is the most frustrating, mostly because of the keyboard.
Still, I don't think these issues made the KBs true garbage. Such examples would be nearly any non-MacBook touch pad or often enough display hinges. Far worse than a slightly less convenient keyboard which can always be supplemented with an external bluetooth keyboard as well. Can't really do that with hinges.
And sad about the change in sheets and alerts... I’ll probably get over that.
I figure it must be something with my machine but haven’t really delved too deeply and couldn’t find much when I looked.
Was hoping for a bit more out of Music. It’s decent, and certainly better than what iTunes had become. But sometimes I’m left wanting.
Although having my Pops be able to share a playlist over iMessage with me was a stellar experience in terms of how seamless it was and having it sync from my phone to my computer.
I think the problem is that they're indicating state by toggling between your chosen accent color and black. If your accent color is, say, pink, the difference is pretty obvious, but if your accent color is relatively dark, like blue or purple, it's harder to see. It seems like they could solve this by toggling between the accent color and gray, or "lighting up" a solid roundrect of the accent color around the control when it's on.
I'm excited to try it all out, but also unsure how comfortable I'm gonna find it. The large white expanses seem glaringly over-bright to me, at first glance.
If it is bright in light mode, it might be nice and dark on dark mode. We’ll find out once people start running the preview
But that's off-topic to some extent; I scanned through this page looking for some good news for developers. Topping my list is support for SVG assets. NOPE. WTF? Android has had this how long? Apple's "@2x", "@3X" bitmaps were amateur-hour to begin with, but a decade later? No vector support?
Come on.
And still no user-definable color schemes. Windows (and Unix GUIs, for that matter) had them for decades, while Apple forced its late-'80s inverse scheme on every user that whole time. The hard-coded "dark" theme is a half-baked, belated admission that staring into a glaring light bulb with black text on its surface all day may not be the best way to work.
This would also have been a great time to abandon the single menu bar, but nope; that poor decision continues to plague Mac users. Really, this should have been canned in the transition to OS X, but now there's even less of an excuse.
I'm sure there will be some good changes, but from this list I'm not encouraged. Getting rid of the distinction between toolbar and app content... WHY? The "flat UI" experiment was a failure. Let's continue to take tasteful steps back toward GUIs that communicate in universal visual terms whenever possible.
From the Xcode 12 Beta Release Notes:
> Added support for Scalable Vector Graphic (SVG) image assets. These preserve their vector representation with deployment targets of macOS 10.15 or later, iOS 13 or later, and iPadOS 13 or later. (18389814)
> Android has had this how long? Apple's "@2x", "@3X" bitmaps were amateur-hour to begin with, but a decade later? No vector support?
PDF assets have been supported on all Apple platforms for many years.
The announcements today represent years of work by thousands of engineers and designers. It’s impossible to cover everything in a 2 hour keynote, let alone one geared towards the media/general public. Even the 2 hour “State of the Union” that’s geared towards developers barely scratches the surface, let alone a single webpage.
Not that I don't think they should support it (they should), but this is almost certainly due to perfectionism and bias, not amateurishness. Apple has an institutional focus on good iconography, and good iconography almost always has different representations for different sizes. The icons scale within a certain size range, then switch to a representation more appropriate for the size. I would be shocked if this is ever completely eliminated from Apple's DNA.
If you are using a precise mouse or trackpad, a menu bar at the top (or edge) of the screen is much easier to than a menu bar anywhere else on the screen, because it has "infinite" extent. This has been known for decades, and is why macOS places the menu bar at the top of the screen and the dock at the bottom or edge.
However, Apple has made remarkable progress rethinking pointer design on the iPad, as seen in this excellent video, "Build for the iPadOS Pointer":
that statement seems perhaps too harsh to both HN crowd and Apple's core fan base, I spend more time on HN than I care to admit and I can assure you that I do not like XFCE desktop experience at all, my desktop is running Debian 10 with Cinnamon on it, but UX is not something that I'd ever list as one of top 5 features of this setup. Similarly I've been using Apple laptops for about 14 years now and do consider myself a part of "core fan base", for the record I hate the butterfly keyboard, despise touchbar with a passion, and am utterly disgusted by the decision to remove MagSafe chargers.
To quote great Dr Tobias Funke - there are dozens of us.
StumpWM, i3 and dwm are also commonly brought up contenders as peak desktop Linux.
If it doesn't apply to you, it doesn't apply to you.
In my opinion height of desktop experience was Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard - I still miss workspaces, and TotalSpaces2 is a valiant effort but less likely to work with each new update.
Simple minimalism is certainly preferable to whatever macOS can be described as by many, sure. I don’t see a problem with that.
MATE and LXQt are two other comparably simple desktop environments that I like.
I get comments from my bewildered MacOS-using friends when they see that my 400$ Linux machine is faster than anything they've ever tried.
You new-fangled San Berdoo OSXI users get off my lawn.
.... Yeah, that's pretty much true, and for very good reason. Every time an interface changes, it forces people to stop using the system and figure out the new interface. As such, while it is possible to make changes that are beneficial enough to justify the cost, UI changes are very expensive and you'd better have a very good reason to justify breaking everyone's workflow. And by that standard, yes; XFCE is nearly perfect. It's been on the 4.x series since 2003, and going by screenshots I strongly suspect that even a user from XFCE 3.x would find the very latest version to be a drop-in replacement. And it does have decent quality, which combined with its general "get out of the way and let me work" vibe and 20 years of continuity makes it easily one of the best options available.
(You can hold down Option and use the green button as its old "Zoom" function, but I think there should be a system preference to reverse that so it's zoom by default and you hold down Option to go into full screen.)
Optimizing things where the primary focus of attention is what I am looking at mostly is more relevant to me than a shifting design languages. But, I know others will have different views on this and this is based on what people are actually happy with.
I think it's more that (visual) UI Design has the same cyclical property of most other "visual design" like clothing fashion, interior design,... Things look fresh when they're new, after a few years people get bored of the look, and what was once considered modern now looks dated.
Especially for a company like Apple that has built part of its reputation on having the best UI, they can't afford looking behind on the competition. Calling it "change for the sake of change" is partly correct if we were purely talking about products, but it ignores the fact that Apple is as much a marketing company as it is a product company.
Aside from that I think there's also a strong functional argument to be made. iOS and iPad share the same OS, so it makes sense for those to be consistent. As the iPad has matured it's approaching desktop levels of productivity. So now we're in a situation where the iPad is becoming like a Macbook without the keyboard. With so much overlap in functionality, it also makes more sense for those 2 experience to converge rather than diverge. So we're hearing complaints about the "iOSification of the macbook" but they are ignoring the missing link; iOS = iPadOS = macOS
Both have a classic theme.
There are those of us who will have to choose a new DE because Big Sur apparently won't run on our perfectly capable pre-2013 MBPs, and have to choose the least clunky. In that group, Xfce is indeed the bees knees.
I'm more likely to prefer XFCE than Gnome, for example
That being said, I also use and like desktop Apple products so there's that