The Reshaped Mac Experience (opens in new tab)

But reading through the piece the only tangible evidence he provides is more spacing between elements that he is pulling up on 5 year old hardware?

Screen density and pixels have improved dramatically in that time frame, we have larger screens, more resolution, and retina display, it's like switching from Analog to HD. Not every new interface will work equally well on old hardware, but that doesn't mean that the interface has deteriorated.

Making something infinitely backwards compatible will ultimately destroy the user experience, as you can't take advantage of the present and the improvements it offers.

The OS is getting a bit iOS-ified - that I agree with, but it isn't forced upon you to the level Windows does, so it is easily avoided.

I would prefer to have a seen a more detailed breakout of the real degradation in user experience, otherwise it's just a complete opinion piece with no real facts or proof points to offer.

But yes, it's a pity when mobile designers bring their extreme space stinginess to the desktop. Hamburger menus here, hieroglyphs there, why have buttons with labels when you can have useless empty space? Ugh.

It was immensely helpful to be able to sit down in front of something and interact with thoughtful pervasively reused metaphors & mechanisms all seemingly integrated individually with the global goals of the software always front and center. It was a great mental counterweight to what I find to be much more common today, which is disparate components seemingly made by different teams, each with their own non-overlapping set of human interface guidelines, all crammed together on screen in ways that seem to indicate the organization structure of the company that created it rather than the needs and enjoyment of the user who's going to work with it. Egregious examples of this that are top of mind are JIRA and Salesforce, but they're hardly alone in this regard.

Using those old systems w/ their extremely dated UI aesthetics, but still being extremely enjoyable & productive to use was a constant reminder that the UX being well integrated and consistent is at least as valuable to the experience as it looking slick.

That said, I think this matters a lot less in an "appified" world where your tasks as a user are already incredibly discrete and faceted for you. The scope of interaction is narrow and focused and so there's not nearly as much need or incentive to have a "globally" consistent narrative that stitches together with everything else, because you're mostly having transient task-specific interactions. For example there's not as much need for hailing a ride in the Lyft app to compose well with picking a show to watch on the Hulu app. Everything is a discrete purpose built experience, and to some extent I actually think this is appropriate for the use and medium of apps. The challenge seems to be that software which isn't like that, and is something you actually sit in front of an work with at length as a central hub or part of a much larger workflow, is being put together in the same way as discrete little purpose built apps instead of as a coherent broader interaction framework.

"... the common reaction was that I was just being ‘nostalgic’; that surely my MacBook Pro was the better choice because it is orders of magnitude faster, with a ‘more modern’ OS, and that the sum of those parts was a better Mac experience. That I should ‘be rational’ and accept that."

I think it's clear from the comments on HN and the increasing frequency of articles like these that not everyone is thrilled with the iOS-ification of the Mac desktop.

They're behind Microsoft Windows for window management. They're waaay behind Linux for a functional, modern terminal environment without homebrewing half of your OS into place. They're behind in the gaming scene, pushing away studios by insisting on a proprietary graphics API.

Just getting a 3rd party mouse or keyboard to work with the system can sometimes be an exercise in futuility. Why won't a mac accept input from a keyboard in BIOS mode on the login screen? Granted, this is as much an issue with the 3rd parties as it is Mac, but it certainly doesn't make me want to work with Macs more.

There are very few specifics. Also, the spacing and size of icons in finder and on the menu bar can be adjusted to suit. Not to mention general display scaling. So the author might end up happy with those aspects of Big Sur after all.

Generally, the op is unhappy that things aren’t the way they used to be and probably will keep changing. True, but purely a matter of personal opinion.

I like the finder window changes, especially the title moving to the left. Seems to be more visible somehow and makes more sense to me (I mostly use list and column views, and the title is the folder name and generally sits above the space where the files are listed below. And things seem to collapse better when the window is thinner.

Just look at the screenshot they post to illustrate their point. Its almost as if they have deliberately configured their system to make a point.

The resolution is obscenely large (sorry, don't know the tech term).

They have all their finder windows configured to use large icons. Seriously ?!? Only pure beginners do that.

Their longwinded rant is likely more to do with their lack of Mac experience than the actual OSX UI.

I use OS X a lot. There's nothing seriously wrong with the experience. Its better than what Windows or Linux UI's have to offer (especially Linux UIs which all look like a poor attempt at copying OS X UI).

Only after the article is more than half done, do they mention padding as a specific complaint, and that's it, the only issue in the entire article is padding.

Another article which exists to make the author feel superior? At least if you're gonna rant, make it worth the reader's time with a bunch of specific examples for us to tweak...

All in preparation for a MacBook Touch?

"It’s thanks to well-designed user interfaces that we enjoy driving a classic car, or shooting with a 50-year-old film camera, or listening to vinyl records on a 40-year-old record-player and hi-fi stereo."