The general reaction I'm hearing about the UI changes is "barf". I'm not a Mac user though. Is it that bad?
Not that Big Sur doesn't have it design problems (at least from the screenshots from the first beta onward, I didn't tried it yet). And to be honest, even without Jony Ive, my impression is that designers still more care how the product will look on screenshots than in real use. But it's hardly just an unusable piece of shit that majority of comments here implies.
Truth is, design will always be a personal choice - some lean towards pragmatism over aesthetic and others lean the other way. Some people will like it, some people won't.
People are noticing Apple is choosing to go down Microsoft's and Google's direction in UI design with flat, big wasted lettering space, and contrasty icons. It's fair to complain about that as Windows users have for years.
I assumed Big Sur was designed that way because Apple would finally merge iPads with Airs and get MacOs with a touch screen, which would have made the tradeof make sense. Alas, not so.
Look at the Mail app for example, you could previously view “inboxes” at the top of the app (useful because you could then resize the app to take up far lesser horizontal space); and now you can’t – just because, … no reason really?
Sure, I don’t deny it. However, just adding a ton of space doesn’t make a design good. Especially when you actively harm functionality while doing that.
From my limited experience doing design, I’ve realized that good contrast and active visual demarcations go a long way towards that goal (both things which the new UI is sorely missing).
See the old Mail UI: https://support.apple.com/library/content/dam/edam/applecare...
Notice the breadcrumbs that you could use to conveniently use as favorite inboxes. Those are gone now, which means that you have to keep the left sidebar always exposed (thus taking up significantly more horizontal space). This was what I think is really good design, thoughtful and non-intrusive.
Not everyone is working on large screens. Adding a ton of padding to all UI elements doesn’t improve usability in the slightest, regardless of what you might say.
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Now, my opinion might change come Monday morning when I actually do some real work. But at first blush I'm enjoying the new feel.
Firefox seems noticeably faster to me. By "noticeably" I mean that when I started doing normal browsing after upgrading, not looking for or expecting any performance improvement, I found myself thinking "how did clicking that link display the new page so fast?".
Excel also seems a little snappier. I've got a spreadsheet that has a few worksheets, and one in particular seemed slow to switch to. It's responding quite a bit faster now.
Change is always hard though. Some people will like it and some will hate it.
In a few months we'll be able to have a more measured discussion about the good and the bad, but this reaction now is par for the course. Every UI change I've ever gone through has sounded exactly like this on internet forums when it happened.