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Comment by delusional | Hacker News Reader

> feels like a toy for kids.

I wish unserious complaining like this wasn't mixed with actual technical criticism of software.

It is very serious. I love the way Catalina and Mojave looks; dark mode or light mode, it just screams "professional" at the top of it's lungs.

Big Sur is, somehow, the exact opposite. Corners are rounded off as if they could hurt someone, and margins are padded more than a cell in solitary confinement. Space is wasted everywhere. It's Fischer-Price design philosophy and I'm hardly the only one to point it out.

In a side-by-side, so much screen real estate gets wasted that it's genuinely disgusting: https://www.andrewdenty.com/blog/assets/img/macos-new-ui/fin...

Agree on all points. Tahoe ruined macOS for me. Not only does it waste screen real estate, but it’s not performant at all and my M4 pro is no slouch.

Just feels like I’m using an iPad now.

Here’s a fun exercise. Look at how huge the window borders are to achieve that insane corner radius. The cursor changes to the resize arrow at the corner before it even touches the window, the bottom arrow is a good 4-5px away from the window lol.

Touch and mouse interfaces simply are different. After over a decade of pretending otherwise there are now sufficiently many counter-examples.

> Space is wasted everywhere.

Sure, that's a reasonable technical criticism. Wasted screen space is, in my opinion, an issue in modern interface design trends. Good design uses space in a thoughtful manner. The designers of macOS clearly don't agree with us, but we can have a reasonable technical discussion about that. We can consult the data. We can consult the users.

> It's Fischer-Price design philosophy

You're mixing the two again. Fisher-Price was not consulted in the design of modern macOS interfaces, and complaining about not liking the design language cheapens all your actual points. No real discussion can be had around this taste garbage. You're rage baiting.

It objectively does feel like a toy with those rounded corners though. How do you know Fischer-Price wasn't consulted?

It doesn't seem like a toy to me. Therefore, it is not objective but is just your subjective opinion. Which is fine, but don't overstate your opinions as being objective when they aren't.

I think that "serious" is not the right word here. But rather, saying "it's like a toy" is not constructive. When someone says "it looks like a toy" that tells me nothing about what they don't like about it. Saying "I don't like the rounded corners and wasted space" is something concrete you can have a discussion about, so it's better to use that kind of phrasing.

Toy design isn't objectively bad. Windows XP has many colorful, misshapen buttons and they're amazing for the vision-impaired, same goes for Apple's Aqua UI. Fischer-Price design language is arguably why the iPhone is so popular, when you deploy it with intent the results can be spectacular.

What is the intent of dumbing-down the Mac design language? iOS superfans already have devices to use, the Mac has to compete in the professional segment of the market, not the casual one. The only motivation I can see is to enforce solidarity with VisionOS, which by most accounts seems to be a professional flop too. An ecosystem shouldn't aim for superficial similarity across devices, each experience should enforce their unique strengths/weaknesses in the UI and then network their state to each-other in the background. Apple used to know this.

It's also weird because Microsoft has some excuse for wasting screen real estate - Windows is used on touchscreen devices and has to at least adapt to them. But Apple stubbornly refuses to put touchscreens on laptops, at which point what excuse do you have to not build good information density?

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