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Comment by skavi | Hacker News Reader

Why is there so much padding around each tab? I guess it makes for clear click targets. Honestly was a fan of the old initial design, though I do lean towards compromising for more screen space.

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Your eyes deceive you. Prior MacOS versions have more overall padding (50pt) but it's put entirely within the tab itself. The new tabs have some margin between each tab and a much smaller padding within tabs, for overall what looks to be ~40pt.

The new design sacrifices the 'X' hover-over on the left side of each tab, presumably in favor of an 'X' that overlaps the tab title.

This happens every time a significant redesign moves visual edges around in a way that has better visual separation. It’s almost always more space efficient, but with better affordance for poor eyesight and/or poor pointer coordination.

An assumption, but it seems to me and many others that they’ve been slowly moving to make macOS more touch interface friendly.

I’m typically anti-touch screen on laptops as it drives the price up for a feature I personally almost never use, but there’s so many use cases particularly for a large portion of Apple’s user base working with digital media.

Aside: A Lenovo Yoga -like MacBook would be cool, although I do like the Touch Bar for quickly moving around in media I’m listening to in the background (but I don’t think that’s enough to justify it).

I have a theory that they’re not actually intending to make it more touch friendly but rather they are trying to unify the interfaces between MacOS and iPadOS for when iPadOS supersedes MacOS. Slowly boiling the frog, so you don’t notice when they move iPadOS to the desktop.

It’s almost this but less extreme. They’re trying to unify the interfaces because they want to return to offering one app platform that isn’t sharply split.

iOS started as an OS X variant with special consideration for touch, but forked Cocoa. The unification that’s happening now isn’t about bringing iOS to Macs, it’s about merging Cocoa-next back into upstream.

I could see that. The reason I think it could be more extreme is the AppStore. I don’t have stats to back this up, but I would assume they make far more money from the iOS/iPadOs AppStore than Mac AppStore. It never truly caught on with the Mac, likely due to the long history of loading your own apps. Apple would love nothing more than to break this cycle.

Management types seem to love poking at things.

I’m not entirely joking - most of the Surface and iPad users I see at work are management/project-management.

This is basically the side-effect of the rollback, and it really sucks. Now, they have to keep this wasteful design, and less tabs will _nicely_ fit into the bar. I don't think the initial design was great, but I like it more over this!

Maybe Apple designers tend to test on 32-inch Pro Display XDRs.

> Why is there so much padding around each tab?

Because it was designed by iOS people.

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