It's probably just me, but I feel that many apps on Apple follows the same pattern. For example checkout and compare the scroll bar experience on ChatGPT website (Chrome) between a Mac-book and a Windows laptop.
All of that money spent on hyper expensive laptops, and people still end up with terribly ugly websites!
But I can tell you how/why (I think) it happened.
They dropped them in iOS when the iPhone rolled out. It made sense given the small display area where even a 10 to 12 pixel column makes a difference.
And then, sadly, there came the slow roll to make both MacOS and iOS look the same and so they started auto-hiding on the Mac as well.
It's the form-before-function that I loathe ever since Jony started making round mice or USB connectors impossible to find.
- designers who come from an advertising/visual design/motion design/packaging/print (although those are a dying breed)/etc background.
Those people care more about how things look in a video commercial or on a giant billboard, and they care about visual aesthetics and making something that catches your eye because it looks really good.
- designers who come from an interaction/HCI/usability/accessibility/etc background
Those people care about things more from a systems point of view, how features will behave across a variety of contexts/modalities, how users come to understand them over time, etc. They had more of a voice in the 80s/90s (Don Norman, Bruce Tognazzini, etc are in that category) but have been increasingly in the minority ever since.
(Designers who come from an industrial design background are a bit of a wildcard - some will put superficial fit & finish above all else, while others really get how good ergonomics, tactility, etc can translate to software).
Honestly, there's value in both. Users will judge a book by its cover, and you want interfaces to look attractive and be compelling - designers from the latter group will be content with designing interfaces that just look like black and white wireframes.
But at the same time, you don't want pure aesthetics to run completely orthogonal to core usability. So it's a balance, and software interfaces are usually worse off when that balance is out of whack.
Anyways, I'll let you guess what category of designers are overrepresented in Apple's ranks. Hint: their current head of interface design comes from a magazine design background.
You can turn them back on everywhere in Settings -> Appearance -> Show scroll bars always.
- Turned on "Always show Scrollbar" in MacOS setting
- Turned on "visible" in VSCode for vertical scrollbars
Check the explorer window -> scrollbar doesn't show up unless your mouse somehow touches the area.
But this is probably a VSCode thing though.
It takes courage.
Even when I used a mouse on a Mac desktop it still never bothered me. Looks cleaner, feels sleeker and doesn’t impact functionality.
Yeah but I agree that everyone has their own flavors. I personally prefer the Windows 2000 ones...I'm old. Never liked the flat ones, looks soulless.
(flatness is a universal cancer, though, even compared to the ugliness of the old Win)