The Reshaped Mac Experience | Hacker News Reader

The Reshaped Mac Experience

morrick.me

88 pointsyannovitch80 comments

The author makes the assertion that if we are all celebrating Apple's latest hardware, it is because the focus on their user interface has faded into the background and they have lost their way.

But reading through the piece the only tangible evidence he provides is more spacing between elements that he is pulling up on 5 year old hardware?

Screen density and pixels have improved dramatically in that time frame, we have larger screens, more resolution, and retina display, it's like switching from Analog to HD. Not every new interface will work equally well on old hardware, but that doesn't mean that the interface has deteriorated.

Making something infinitely backwards compatible will ultimately destroy the user experience, as you can't take advantage of the present and the improvements it offers.

The OS is getting a bit iOS-ified - that I agree with, but it isn't forced upon you to the level Windows does, so it is easily avoided.

I would prefer to have a seen a more detailed breakout of the real degradation in user experience, otherwise it's just a complete opinion piece with no real facts or proof points to offer.

I use macos to read mail. They have been chipping away at mail bit by bit.

I have always used it in what's now called "classic layout" - message list above, current message below, sidebar with accounts/mailboxes.

In the message list, I could choose what columns were shown, how wide they were and in what order.

I could just click on the top of a column to sort one way, click again to sort another.

This would let me find all the mail today or last week in order. or group by subject. Or find everything with an attachment. or back to sorting by date with today at the bottom.

What I was waiting for was smarter mail rules. maybe nested rules. Maybe smarter ways to interact (without resorting to applescript)

But they dumbed it down and there's a dropdown to pick what to sort (drop twice if the order they chose was not what you expected). You cannot choose your columns. You cannot choose the order. rules have not gotten smarter and with a name like "classic layout", I figure it is one update away from gone.

I spend hours a day in my Mail app and I actually like the default layout as is.

But my coworker likes the classic layout, and another coworker likes the default layout but with expanded preview text to more lines. I wouldn’t go as far to say one preference is worse than the other.

I have a copy of Sparrow I've been dragging from computer to computer for I don't know how many years now. [sheds single tear]

I switched to Thunderbird because of this and because of the serious data loss bug in Apple Mail in Catalina [0]. Thunderbird is kind of terrible but at least it's dependably terrible.

[0] https://mjtsai.com/blog/2019/10/11/mail-data-loss-in-macos-1...

The last time I tried to use the built in mail app (about a year ago?) I was met with some pretty serious bugs that made it unusable. Not to mention those smart filters didn't work.

It sucks that Apple has let it get so bad, but I personally wouldn't consider Mail part of the OS. It's just a built in App like garage band or something.

Yep, but fortunately they brought back the good old table view in Mail on Big Sur.

> Screen density and pixels have improved dramatically in that time frame, we have larger screens, more resolution, and retina display

I'm typing this on a new 13" MacBook Air, and the screen is pretty small! don't know if BigSur is optimized for a 27" iMac display, but on a small laptop, I certainly feel like the decreased UI density feels like a hindrance.

One of my minor bugbears with macOS since Yosemite has been changing the green button from zoom to full screen.

I just don't use full screen mode much. On my 25" displays the only application that gets kept full screen is my IDE. I don't need a dedicated button that slowly animates the window to fullscreen if I accidentally click it.

Speculating here, but given that most people using a mac are looking at a 13" screen, it seems like this change was made to benefit them. And that's fair enough, but why can't there be a toggle in the system preferences to change it?

macOS has some preferences like this, but they all seem to be things grandfathered in from the old days. Future updates that change things like the green button or Mission Control don't get any preferences to tweak behaviour and it's so frustrating.

This continually drives me nuts, especially watching people from windows use macs. They want to get normal maximize behavior to not have to manually size a window, and instead get thrown into fullscreen. This causes an immediate wtf moment, asking me how to undo it, and then living with a tiny little window. sigh

Tell them to double click the title bar of the window. This will maximize it for most windows, similar behavior to what they should be familiar with in Windows on that front at least. Sometimes this results in a "smart" maximization, like if it's a PDF in Preview it'll take all the vertical space it can get, but won't widen if it's in a single page view beyond what's needed. You can also hover over the edges (left/right, or top/bottom) until you get the double arrow cursor and double click to extend in horizontally or vertically, again just like Windows offers there.

Yeah I feel like I want fullsreen almost never. Even on a 13" laptop, almost all of my workflows involve having at least two applications open and at least occasionally having both of them visible at the same time

You can have two apps in full screen mode side by side

I personally really enjoy full screen mode when using my laptop undocked

Full screen and split screen have become my default modes of using almost everything on macOS. It's a pleasant, generally better focused, way of interacting. I just wish it were richer like the tiling WMs I used on Linux. Maybe not as useful on a laptop (due to screen size and my aging eyes), but when attached to a high res monitor it would be nice to be able to split the screen into quarters, at least, instead of halves.

This is also what I generally want and we're not alone. There are a few active projects to facilitate this. Personally I like <ahref=https://freemacsoft.net/tiles/">Tiles</a>

ummm, how? When I hit the green button for full screen, it takes over the screen like a Spaces screen. How are you able to have side by side full screen of 2 apps. That seems like you are breaking the definition of the word full. If 2 apps are "full" screen side by side, you either have "half" screen views or 2 monitors.

Press and hold the "full screen" button and you'll get the option to go full screen with 2 apps.

this was unknown to me. thanks for sharing

Of course! Holding Option and clicking on it gives you the older "Zoom" functionality too!

Open Mission Control and drag a window into an already full screen application. You can also drag two windows in a new full screen space, or drag a full screen space into another to merge them.

Which is often not the case for a writer, a video editor, an electronic musician, and many other jobs...

It bugged me too. If you hold down option, you get the old behavior.

Just in case you weren't already aware, you can hold Option when you click on the green + and it'll Zoom instead of going full screen. I'm the same way as you in that I don't really use full screen too much but I can understand that most people prefer their browser and email and stuff in full screen so that being the default makes sense to me.

I agree with the annoyance at the change.

I would recommend BetterTouchTool (https://folivora.ai/) to get back the ability to maximize windows with a click. Also you can drag windows to the right or left of the screen, and it resizes to half the screen. Wonderful to put two applications side by side.

You can still double click on the app’s menu bar to have it expand to fill the screen

Double-click a blank part of an apps’ title bar, yes. Or hold down the option key and click the green button, for apps that don’t support this due to a custom layout. Still not every app scales as you might want it to, but it’s the old behaviour restored, just behind an option key…

I agree. I don't disagree with the fact that the OS and UI team seem a little less focused on the polish of the entire experience but the leaps in hardware are just too great to be able to keep up appropriately in the UI.

They really just need to get back to ironing out the every day things. Case in point - not being able to reply to a Message directly from the notification is a huge regression. Fix stuff like that first.

> the leaps in hardware are just too great to be able to keep up appropriately in the UI

Why would this be the case? Apple's a massive, well-resourced company and it seems like they should be able to walk and chew gum at the same time.

Microsoft and Windows Control Panel migration to System Settings argue its pretty difficult indeed, even for the most well-resourced companies.

The failure of company A to manage a roll-out does not predict the failure of company B. It just goes to show how badly company A manages their resources.

Or, alternatively, that companies with large codebases face similar issues of complexity and legacy interactions that aren't easy to just throw people/resources at, they just take the time they take in order to get it accomplished and persistence is preferred over alacrity.

This is just an opinion but I'm a big fan of Apple and have been using their machines for a long time. There are just some new conventions that have been introduced alongside hardware that add complexity that I don't think is possible to get right the first time around outside of some pretty minimum functionality. Any time an process needs to be re-thought or redefined, you're basically starting from scratch even if the end results look similar. In the example I gave, Notification Center was something that had to be ported over from iPadOS/iOS (and I'm glad it did as I find it very useful and much more consistent of an experience) but it then needed to be retro-fit to handle applications that weren't originally intended for it. It also needs to deal with notifications in a way that make them consistent so that new users pick up the basics of how it works easily. To me, that's a hard task. I just wish there was a bit more consideration taken towards keeping existing functionality in place, even if it contradicts new paradigms, but that's really a design choice that I just have to disagree with because the alternative is probably better for most people using the machines. If it's not, the analytics will bear that out and they'll change it to the one that I prefer.

There are many things in macOS that have not been looked at properly. That has nothing to do with hardware. It's plain sloppyness.

I disagree. I think it has everything to do with hardware because the software has to work with the hardware. The teams more than likely focus on making sure new hardware works with the OS as a priority and focus on the "nice to haves" for point releases. Rosetta, for example, probably took up a large chunk of time in the latest release and that has to extend to nearly every aspect of the UI to make sure that notifications, power management, and resource management all work properly with both new and existing apps on both ARM and x64 versions.

Frankly, I'd point to where you say so yourself:

> Not every new interface will work equally well on old hardware, but that doesn't mean that the interface has deteriorated.

Apple is well-known for long support periods on mobile, and 5 years is not, in my eyes, an old computer that ought to be replaced. And so if the interface doesn't work as well on the authors supported hardware, then I think we can agree the interface has objectively deteriorated.

> "that he is pulling up on 5 year old hardware?"

is a 5 year old computer old?

Consumer silicon components have an predicted life span of 5-7 years†. This life span gets lower the smaller we go with chip technology.

So, yes, a 5 year old computer is near retirement age.

† https://c3.nasa.gov/dashlink/static/media/other/ObservedFail...

That's a pretty lousy estimated lifetime. If that is truly the case, it feels like planned obsolsense, as the rate of improvement in computing power has drastically slowed.

I figure it's a tradeoff. Speed and cost vs. lifespan.

(Effectively) Irreplacable batteries already limit the lifespan of many consumer devices to 3-4 years, so why limit the capabilities of the hardware to get a few years that won't be usable anyways… is how I imagine those conversations going.

It shouldn't be considered old at all. Using a 5-year old laptop right now, and I don't see much that needs upgrading.

Not even the battery? I have a 2015 macbook pro, and battery health is at 78%. It probably has another year in it, maybe two, if I am lucky.

That's fair. Battery has never been great on this laptop, but certainly the health has significantly gone down. I guess I rarely notice because I don't really leave the house with it.

Personal computing has existed since say 1977.

Viable personal computing since 1981. GUI personal computing for the masses since 1993 or so.

That's 40 years with a conservative estimate. 5 years is 12.5% of the history of personal computing. So kinda yes.

No.

I am still using an AMD Turion era laptop, commenting to this thread from it.

I would say it's exiting middle age.

Well there have been 5 major OS releases on said 5 year old computer.

So in OS-years, yes, the computer is old. ;-)

I'd say that they'd never found their way. The MacOS UI sucks. I abandoned Macs years ago. I assume that it's only gotten worse since then. Of course just my humble opinion.

A few days ago Apple pushed an update to my iPad Pro and now I can scribble handwriting into text fields and have it recognize (along with gestures like scribble-out to delete). There was even a nice little tutorial. Delightful. The original vision of the Newton, finally fulfilled!

But yes, it's a pity when mobile designers bring their extreme space stinginess to the desktop. Hamburger menus here, hieroglyphs there, why have buttons with labels when you can have useless empty space? Ugh.

I acquired an old Mac SE/30, a Quadra 650 w/ a Radius Rocket, and a NeXTstation Turbo specifically because I wanted UX & UI inspiration (and sanity checking) as my company began to transition from the nuts and bolts of our first product to the facets that are user facing. Everything from the workbench GUI, to the CLI, to even the config files & SDK.

It was immensely helpful to be able to sit down in front of something and interact with thoughtful pervasively reused metaphors & mechanisms all seemingly integrated individually with the global goals of the software always front and center. It was a great mental counterweight to what I find to be much more common today, which is disparate components seemingly made by different teams, each with their own non-overlapping set of human interface guidelines, all crammed together on screen in ways that seem to indicate the organization structure of the company that created it rather than the needs and enjoyment of the user who's going to work with it. Egregious examples of this that are top of mind are JIRA and Salesforce, but they're hardly alone in this regard.

Using those old systems w/ their extremely dated UI aesthetics, but still being extremely enjoyable & productive to use was a constant reminder that the UX being well integrated and consistent is at least as valuable to the experience as it looking slick.

That said, I think this matters a lot less in an "appified" world where your tasks as a user are already incredibly discrete and faceted for you. The scope of interaction is narrow and focused and so there's not nearly as much need or incentive to have a "globally" consistent narrative that stitches together with everything else, because you're mostly having transient task-specific interactions. For example there's not as much need for hailing a ride in the Lyft app to compose well with picking a show to watch on the Hulu app. Everything is a discrete purpose built experience, and to some extent I actually think this is appropriate for the use and medium of apps. The challenge seems to be that software which isn't like that, and is something you actually sit in front of an work with at length as a central hub or part of a much larger workflow, is being put together in the same way as discrete little purpose built apps instead of as a coherent broader interaction framework.

Some comments on this thread are a great example of what the authour here is pointing out:

"... the common reaction was that I was just being ‘nostalgic’; that surely my MacBook Pro was the better choice because it is orders of magnitude faster, with a ‘more modern’ OS, and that the sum of those parts was a better Mac experience. That I should ‘be rational’ and accept that."

I think it's clear from the comments on HN and the increasing frequency of articles like these that not everyone is thrilled with the iOS-ification of the Mac desktop.

If I'm honest, the only thing keeping me on Macs is the easy integration of notes, to-do, and Pages across laptops, desktops, and iOS/padOS devices. I've not found the same functionality in another OS without resorting to Google.

They're behind Microsoft Windows for window management. They're waaay behind Linux for a functional, modern terminal environment without homebrewing half of your OS into place. They're behind in the gaming scene, pushing away studios by insisting on a proprietary graphics API.

Just getting a 3rd party mouse or keyboard to work with the system can sometimes be an exercise in futuility. Why won't a mac accept input from a keyboard in BIOS mode on the login screen? Granted, this is as much an issue with the 3rd parties as it is Mac, but it certainly doesn't make me want to work with Macs more.

Seems like a substance-free criticism of the Big Sur UI.

There are very few specifics. Also, the spacing and size of icons in finder and on the menu bar can be adjusted to suit. Not to mention general display scaling. So the author might end up happy with those aspects of Big Sur after all.

Generally, the op is unhappy that things aren’t the way they used to be and probably will keep changing. True, but purely a matter of personal opinion.

I like the finder window changes, especially the title moving to the left. Seems to be more visible somehow and makes more sense to me (I mostly use list and column views, and the title is the folder name and generally sits above the space where the files are listed below. And things seem to collapse better when the window is thinner.

I must say I struggle to show sympathy for this Apple bashing blog post.

Just look at the screenshot they post to illustrate their point. Its almost as if they have deliberately configured their system to make a point.

The resolution is obscenely large (sorry, don't know the tech term).

They have all their finder windows configured to use large icons. Seriously ?!? Only pure beginners do that.

Their longwinded rant is likely more to do with their lack of Mac experience than the actual OSX UI.

I use OS X a lot. There's nothing seriously wrong with the experience. Its better than what Windows or Linux UI's have to offer (especially Linux UIs which all look like a poor attempt at copying OS X UI).

>Just look at the screenshot they post to illustrate their point. Its almost as if they have deliberately configured their system to make a point.

Seriously. I can configure an iMac G4 to 1024x768 and immediately proclaim how space-inefficient OS X Panther is

In my view the positive direction over 20 years has been how chrome has been receding. With full screen and split screen apps, all you see are the apps. The OS lets you swipe between them. So it would appear to me that the focus should rather be on the app ecosystem and the slow, mild poisoning from electron/web apps.

I agree that the glut of electron apps is becoming a problem.

I disagree that Apple redesigning UIs to focus on content instead of chrome has improved usability. I'm thinking of 'style over substance' changes like hiding scrollbars, and making menus and menubars translucent. Those changes hurt usability.

Chrome has not been receding. Whitespace is chrome. But worse than that it's useless chrome that offers no functionality or visual hinting like skeuomorphic chrome did. Hiding functionality that used to be discoverable through menus behind invisible, sometimes baroque gestures is not an improvement for most people. I have family members who, several times a year, will mute their phone or dim their screen after accidentally bringing up control centre. Explaining what they did "wrong" to them after the fact is nearly impossible - "No don't drag from the edge like that, do it like this."

The disproportionate success and percentage of revenue coming from iPhone/iPad seems like a big driver. All eyes are on iOS first, MacOS is a secondary concern.

This article felt vague and snooty to me personally because it was heavy on the negativity and light on the details.

Only after the article is more than half done, do they mention padding as a specific complaint, and that's it, the only issue in the entire article is padding.

Another article which exists to make the author feel superior? At least if you're gonna rant, make it worth the reader's time with a bunch of specific examples for us to tweak...

The analogy to playing chess is very thoughtful. Apple's software team has been thinking reactively since the advent of iOS. It's too bad.

Sounds like an awful lot of Apple elitism and not a lot of solution-brainstorming. I though people were aware that this was the Apple experience: You use their software, and when something breaks/doesn't work like you want it to, you forfeit your right to complain. Maybe OP would prefer a Linux machine and just doesn't know it...

I'm not too fond of the extra spacing and padding on Big Sur either. It reduces information density.

All in preparation for a MacBook Touch?

Or making room for a device that runs either OS and making the transition less jarring. Though I suppose a MacBook touch (M1x) would already be able to run iOS apps, theoretically, and it would just help the apps themselves, rather than the OS, fit in.

>Though I suppose a MacBook touch (M1x) would already be able to run iOS apps, theoretically

Nothing theoretical at all, the M1 Macs already run iPhone and iPad apps. [0]

[0] https://www.apple.com/mac/m1/ (bottom of the page)

So an iPad Pro running Big Sur? Combined with the Magic Keyboard, interesting... although I'd say an M1 Mac with a touch display is more likely. We'll see.

Yeah, bought a M1 Mac Mini to tide me over until I can see more directly where Apple is going with iOS/MacOS and touch devices.

I really want a new iPad (still using an original iPad Pro 9.7") and a new MacBook (using a Pro 2016 for now) but I'd prefer a device that could replace both.

>So an iPad Pro running Big Sur?

No chance, this transition is only going one way. iPadOS is coming to the Macbooks not the other way around. MacOS is the old world iOS/iPadOS is the new world for Apple.

Pains me to say it as a huge MacOS advocate but the writing is unfortunately on the wall.

>All in preparation for a MacBook Touch?

I doubt it, the spacing isn't enough to accommodate touch and they have constantly said they don't want to go down that road. They just need to look at the mess Microsoft created to see it isn't a good idea.

I think it's far more likely that they wanted the same design language across platforms.

Love the metaphor:

"It’s thanks to well-designed user interfaces that we enjoy driving a classic car, or shooting with a 50-year-old film camera, or listening to vinyl records on a 40-year-old record-player and hi-fi stereo."

As a Mac cultist and latest iPad Pro owner, it’s pretty obvious the desktop’s time is running out. Most UI innovation is now being poured into how to make iOS a pro-friendly experience. The keyboard/track pad combo was a huge step up, can’t wait to see where it goes from here.

I for one welcome the decline of the desktop. Why, you ask?

Because 35 years ago the desktop was a machine built by nerds, for nerds. iOS has never been that, will never be that. If the desktop Mac goes back to being a machine used primarily by nerds, I'm okay with that.

Developing for the Mac was easy then, your customers were you. You knew that they wanted because it was what you wanted. The same can be said of the engineers working the OS: they had tech-leads, not "marketing". They knew what we wanted because it was what they wanted.

We all got the machine and upgrades we wanted. I would love for it to return to that.

I'm not entirely sure how you expect Apple's "pros" to do their job on an iPad. The majority of Apple's pro market consists of developers and engineers, none of whom will be able to effectively do their job on a CPU that can hardly compile to it's own instruction set. If you do photo retouching or watch Netflix as a "job", then maybe an iPad is usable as a daily driver.

+1 on that, I’m using iPad Pro as my only device for design & code for the last 9 months, and I couldn’t be happier. I moved to it after using over the years different MacBooks Pro and Mini’s. Yet, it’s not for everyone and many will find limitations that are impossible to live with.

I am looking forward to the next version of iPad OS to see what else they will improve. :)

What kind of coding are you doing on the iPad?

Front-end (HTML/CSS/JS) and back-end (Go). Everything using Blink Shell + AWS EC2 instance. Blink is single most used app by me on an iPad (37 hours last week) with Safari (36 hours last week).

And yes, I like to work directly in the cloud that I use to deploy my sites. :)

Whats your development environment & workflow like? I've been considering making the switch.

I wrote a small piece a month ago, maybe this will help you in some way: https://dev.to/monkin/using-ipad-pro-for-work-2dbe it’s mostly accurate, but I made a switch from Linode to AWS this month.

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