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Comment by cosmotic | Hacker News Reader

I know it's off topic but oh my does big sur look terrible; Those dialog boxes look appalling. Stacked buttons? centered text? 5-word-wide columns?

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Apple's new design philosophy seems to be: if it's good enough for your phone, it's good enough for your laptop.

I generally feel that Big Sur is much more cohesive and consistent in daily use vs Catalina and generally easier on the eyes. There are some UI missteps but I like it.

Neither Big Sur, Catalina, or Mojave, are as good and consistent as anything in the "big cats" series. Apple's UI quality has been steadily declining since Maverick.

It is, but on the other side, the hatred for small displays (like my Macbook 12) is apparent. Every toolbar is just thick and huge, because on 20+" retina no one cares anymore.

It’s not designed for you and me. It’s designed for the growing population whose first and only computer has been an iPhone.

It's looked bad on iPhones since the first iPhone.

It’s designed this way because we can’t have nice things.

It’s been too easy to mess things up by repartitioning the hard drive and installing a different OS.

The M1 is blazing fast; I imagine by the time the pro versions ship with 32 or 64 Gb of RAM and more high performance cores, running Linux in a VM on Apple Silicon Macs should be a solved problem.

In Apple's defence, linux still isn't fit for purpose from an every day user security standpoint. On linux I can't install and run a program without giving it access to my network and write access to all of my data. For the average person, the whole point of a computer is to be able to run software that usually interacts with things (data on disks) and people (over the network).

My mum doesn't want to be able to brick her computer by pressing the wrong sequence of keys / buttons in the control panel. And she doesn't want a malicious program to be able to use her credentials to encrypt and ransom all her company's data. Removing features from my mum's computer makes it a better device for her. And sometimes a better device for me - I trust my iphone to safely run 3rd party software more than I trust my linux desktop.

Apple's philosophy - while very different from what I want in a computer - is absolutely oriented toward a sensible, well thought out vision of computing. I think us hackers do a disservice by dismissing the use case.

I recently gave my grandfather a Linux machine to use–it's done much better than his Windows computer at least. All he needs to do is click the browser in the dock at the bottom.

You're a shitty grandson, why not just configure your DE so that browser launches on startup?

Downvoters, you may want to imagine a world in which the parent has a... wait for it... sense of humor

Thats fine so long as we're happy to relegate all end user software to be run inside the web browser. But I can't help but mourn what we're losing in the process.

I've spent most of my career on the web. But web apps are always (and will probably always be) second class citizens to desktop apps because they're slower, can't integrate as well into the desktop environment, have a one-size-fits-all user interface, they can't really save and load local files and so on.

And sure - web software has been strengthening linux because most native software never targets linux anyway. But surely there are other answers?

Agreed. I recently helped a Windows 10 user who didn’t know how to change her wallpaper even though she’s had her PC for years.

Not everyone wants to or should be a system administrator in order to browse the web or use a spreadsheet.

The vast majority of computer users shouldn’t even attempt some of the things we used to do back in the day…

I don't dismiss the use case, I just bemoan that they are becoming increasingly draconian in enforcing that use case on everyone, even those who would like to gain some of the benefits that Apple does offer, without having to deal with the cruft.

I haven’t used it yet so I can’t comment on the full experience, but from screenshots I’ve seen it’s very mixed. The updated window/toolbar designs look fantastic to me, though the lower contrast between foreground/background windows is a disappointment. The dialog boxes do often look that bad, but some look much more like their pre-11 counterparts. The rounded corner main menus look super weird but I suspect that’s one that will feel normal after some use. Many of the icons look great (and better than their iOS counterparts), some look just awful.

That said, every large visual overhaul in macOS/OS X has been followed by several iterations of refinement, and I don’t doubt this one will too. I expect by 13 or so the design will be more mature. Lately I’ve tended to skip an OS upgrade and this one doesn’t offer me much to compel me to change that, so I’m looking forward to seeing what they refine in 12.

I guess I'm just not sensitive to terrible UI. Seems ok to me, particularly for uncommonly accessed recovery dialogs.

People make a big deal about UI changes between MacOS versions ("Oh god, now there are flat, rounded icons!" or whatever) and I suspect most users don't even notice anything's different at all.

This is the new global standard look for dialog boxes.

I notice. I trip up for months. People build muscle memory and habit. It's not just a style thing, it's a psychology, human nature, and science thing. These are fundamentals of human computer interaction that Apple has lost touch with.

Intentionally. But let's get over it. Long time Mac OS X users like you and me are not "target demographics" for this company anymore. I understand and I am mad about making HIG something of the past plus other changes, but there is a positive in this. For me this is one really, really expensive lesson. Never put your eggs in one basket. Never trust your business computing on one vendor. I have learned and moved on to extreme decentralisation approach with mix of Linux and Windows boxes in the office and Debian KDE personally. Since Mountain Lion I have seen the writing on the wall and luckily have invested in software multi-platform workflow. So now Apple is just another tech news to smile about.:)

Can you give an example where you get tripped up for months? I honestly don't understand. All the tools I use seem to look and behave 100% identical after an upgrade. I don't use much Apple software so maybe that explains this difference in perception..?

I think they only change that ever bothered me was when scroll bars started to disappear and stop looking uniform. That was a long time ago though, maybe before even OS X.

Wholly subjective, but I agree: a few weeks in and I still really don't like it. I particularly dislike the way menus look now. Horizontal margins (there and elsewhere) seem to have been shrunk in a way that to me looks mean and unbalanced.

Reminds me of Gnome 3 in a bad way...

Why do this

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