That Ventura screenshot looks terrible. Is that real or has it been photoshopped?
But I think I’m general HN tends to hold a very conservative view on UI while the general public does not. The feeling I get is that most users here believe that windows XP was the peak of UI and everything after was worse. Which is not at all what the average person would say.
The general public spends too much time peck-typing or fighting with ads/spam/etc to even begin to feel limited by the UI "improvements". The problem however is that by removing power-user features and dumbing everything down to the lowest common denominator it also prevents those users from ever levelling up.
Only hip designers think coming up with new UI design ideas every year is a good idea.
From almost complete arpanet dominance to utter obscurity.
I only see one visual anchor in the old one, the horizontal rule at the bottom separating Menu Bar. Everything else is just jumbled together.
The new one at least attempts visual anchors with gradient background boxes and by right-justifying all the controls.
I grant you the contrast ratio is worse and Apple should read Contrast Rebellion. And I personally don't care whether they use a checkbox or a switch, as long as its placement is convenient and aesthetic. I use Linux with Gnome 4 on my workstations, which uses switches for settings, and a MacBook laptop with checkboxes, and iPad with switches, and none of that makes any difference to me.
But otherwise I prefer the layout arrangement of the new one. Vertical and horizontal spacing are more orderly, left-justification of text and right-justification of controls improves UI consistency, and grouping within gradient boxes is more aesthetically calmer to my eye. Just my $0.02, to each their own.
I don't disagree with a single point you made about the anesthetics, and still passionately believe the ux is worse now. The new one would look better in a luxury furniture catalog but humans using it would take longer to complete tasks and produce more mistakes.
There's a lot of accessibility options like "increase contrast" and "differentiate without shapes" if you don't like it though.
No. Just no. You make these things readable and accessible by default. You don't bury it in a setting somewhere.
I have 20/20 vision and I felt compelled to turn high contrast and button shapes on because the OS is so goddam unreadable.
On calibrated monitors I haven't had an issue, but I could see it being a problem if the contrast is too high on a display. I've been using macOS since Snow Leopard but I have not tried Ventura yet.
True, but it also makes it harder to see which text corresponds to which switch, by separating them all with different distances. Before, there was no ambiguity about what each box did. Now, you have to scan the left column to find the item you want; and then either scan right to see the switch (which is error prone because there are no lines to follow) or scan the right column from the top and hope you counted correctly. It is more pleasing aesthetically, but less useable.
I guess the way to have both controls and labels to line up without separating them would be to put the labels after the controls. But it is not great to have the explanation of what a button does after the button. And there would still be issues with drop downs with different widths.
But the problem is that the choose-boxes and radio buttons at the top can't be treated the same way, and create an inconsistent layout when combined with the check boxes.
Moving all the text to the left, and all the controls to the right, and boxing each choice together with its text using gradient background boxes, feels overall cleaner, more consistent, and better organized.
This is not a Wes Anderson movie where everything has to be symmetric. You're free to mix controls. To put them in grids. To put them in multiple columns. Just go and look at your System Preferences now.
The new grouping is not a clear cut, like why is the position of the docked grouped with window behaviour? The older makes it trivial to discover that the dock moves unlike the newer one.
My view is that the design is much less refined and have a lot of space to improve. It isn't bad, the potential is there if you consider a touch + mouse ui. So let's wait I guess.
Both seem faulty in that regard. Both cram Dock and Window behavior into the same section, when each should be a separate section similar to the Menu Bar section at the bottom. But that's not a fault of the design language here, and can be fixed without changing it.