The latest system preferences are an improvement to me. It was a mess before and it’s still a mess but the app layout makes it easier to browse, and at least it’s consistent with iOS.
> and at least it’s consistent with iOS
What a huge win for Mac users.
And search works better than it used to as well. To me it's been entirely improvements.
So why would it suddenly be a good idea to import this from iOS?
At least Apple managed to move all their settings from one paradigm to the next in one year. I’m looking forward to the improvements they make to the app in the future.
Everything seems to get sacrificed at the altar of Developer Comfort. Performance gets thrown under the bus so we can write everything in JavaScript. Platform-specific features get abandoned or neutered in a cross-platform framework so we only have to target one API. We ship gigs of Docker containers so we don’t have to get our software to work on all the customers’ computers.
This is just another example. Wouldn’t it be great if iOS apps and Mac applications converged on the same thing? Only a developer would want this.
Why would you ever want added cognitive complexity?
If things need to be different then sure. But if they can be unified in a way that works great for both then please do!
Honestly, with their tight integration, I don't even think of watchOS and iOS and macOS as being so separate. They're all just a kind of "appleOS" that gets applied to different form factors. So UX unification is ideal wherever it makes sense.
And thanks to this peculiar way of thinking we also have several layers of UI inconsistencies in Windows, for example. Someone thought "let's unify everything" but, assuming this is a good idea at all, you really need a lot of work, planning, effort, and most of all imagination to make sure the final result is actually an improvement for the users of both mobile and desktop systems rather than being a mediocre one-size-fits-all solution.