This depends on who your audience is, and I'm shocked by this community not seeing it.
The new settings are far more intuitive for non-experience users who are more comfortable with an iPad than a traditional computer. That's where the market is. The enthusiast demographic who actually understands what the settings mean and how the machine works is minuscule.
Having simple controls that don't accomplish tasks is not a valid example of simple controls to accomplish tasks, and I'm shocked at anyone here not seeing it.
If this theory of the users needs were true, then everyone would and should just use Chromebooks.
The reason Windows exists and must be used by so many even when they don't want to, why a Chromebook or an iPad doesn't cut it, is Windows is where all the actual unimaginably varied productivity and special purpose software is. Not because of the middle of the road generic office and web apps. It's because of those PLUS the infinite other. It takes both to be useful not just the big mass in the middle of the bell curve.
No matter how much bigger the numbers are for the common case, things need to cover all cases in order to be useful. Trying to reduce Windows down to a Chromebook or an iPad is silly when the Windows95 paradigm was already the simplification.
Windows without the functionality of Windows is nothing. An iPad is far better at that than a simplified Widows can ever be. Even if somehow MS managed to make an excellent iPad, then what? iPads already exist and someone else is famous for them. Meanwhile, the thing they ripped out was their very value proposition itself. The differentiator that gives them a reason to exist at all.
All that supposedly unwanted complicated stuff was litterally the primary value and differentiator of the product itself.
Right but the iPad UX is also terrible. All I can really do is remove and recreate. There’s no way to actually fix anything. This isn’t necessary. Advanced options could be exposed in iOS too. It’s just bad design everywhere.
I understand your point from a purely aesthetic standpoint.
However the second that a commonly needed setting is required you're going a layer "deeper" (it's not because before it was at the first level) and that aesthetic is broken. I doubt the iPad first crowd is going to really intuit that.
I'm also amazed at software developers complaining about Microsoft's development process for the Settings app. They've been incrementally developing it for years -- which is a good thing -- and yet there so many complaints here that it didn't materialize fully formed on day one. It's like when talking about Microsoft everyone forgets how software development is actually done.
How is Microsoft still doing fundamental rewrites of core features?
Perhaps Stack Ranking and/or promotions being based on Visibly Changing Something.
And yet we're still having debates and active development on how to have graphical sessions on Linux.
iptables was released in 1998. That's 26 years ago. And yet those Linux devs are still working on nftables and firewalld.
If those Linux devs still haven't figured out how to do graphical sessions or firewall by now they never will.
FFS how to boot/init Linux is still under active development and some rapid changes over the past several years. If they can't even figure out how to boot how can you take those devs seriously?
Or maybe you redesign your stuff for the realities of today instead of just assuming what a few people did in the 80s was the be-all end-all of software and UI design.
Microsoft will not remove the control panel until you can do everything with the Settings app (or something else not yet invented). Despite this "deprecation" it's really not going anywhere.
My use of the settings app has slowly increased over time as more and more settings are available there. I have to be doing something pretty specific to open the control panel now.
Maybe it's more profitable to keep your users inexperienced. Easier to sell them cruft that way.
I don't think this demographic of tablet users who can't ever possibly accept another UI style actually exists. Poking at an unknown object to figure out how it works is not some ancient lost art. It's one of the most basic things that all humans do. We do this as infants.
Gods, imagine how frightened and confused DOS users were by Windows.
And I remember that the mouse was something that confused users.
And the joke about using the CD drawer to put the coffee there? I see it.
Yet, all those users (school managers and a lot of old ladies) get it anyway.
So not only does it interrupt and block me from opening the browser's File menu, but now I have a bunch of inaccurate "Favorite" tickets.
Android and the like will just link you directly to the settings and most peoples computer now a days is a phone, not a laptop.
What they are presenting us is far more like the 90's Macromedia Flash style UI bloatware that hardware peripheral manufacturers also keep trying to foist onto us.
Also, ability to filter or sort a list wouldn't confuse iPad audience all that much, would it?
The fact you are trying to copy someone shouldn't prevent you from making it better in some basic ways.