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Do any macOS users actually want unification? I do not, but I'm just one data point. Being able to use mobile apps on a computer is a clear win, but that's a p

Do any macOS users actually want unification? I do not, but I'm just one data point. Being able to use mobile apps on a computer is a clear win, but that's a purely additive change—you don't need change the existing OS appearance or functionality to accomplish it. I worry that "unification" will be realized by dumbing down the desktop rather than empowering the mobile device.

ChefboyOG 5y ago
The endgame seems to be that all Apple products are just iPads of different sizes.
vkoskiv 5y ago
> I worry that "unification" will be realized by dumbing down the desktop rather than empowering the mobile device. This appears to be their plan. It has steadily ramped up since Mojave, and Big Sur was the inflection point. I have used OS X exclusively since 2008, and last year I made the choice to no longer upgrade any of my machines beyond Catalina. I'm slowly getting used to the fact that I won't be able to use Macs for my work in the near future, and am making adjustments to my workflow accordingly. I know this is probably the life-long FruitCo® fan in me speaking, but I'm genuinely distraught about this. My absolute favourite software platform in the world is being chipped away at to appeal to the lowest common denominator. Even worse, most people seem to be cheering them on for doing it. Really upsets me.
- quenix 5y ago
  Apart from questionable changes to the user interface, I don’t see how Apple have been “dumbing down” macOS in terms of usability so dramatically. Could you point to some concrete examples?
  - pkulak 5y ago
    Not being able to edit huge portions of the file system, even as root. Apps not having file system access at all until you grant it, and then it’s folder by folder. Those control panel plug-in things just stopped being supported at all, so good bye custom mouse drivers and such.
    - threeseed 5y ago
      What you call dumbing down I call incredibly useful security features. Apps shouldn’t be able to read my entire hard drive unless I give it permission. And the core OS should be immutable. Also not sure what you’re talking about. Custom mouse drivers of course still work.
      - viraptor 5y ago
        It really depends on your usage. It can be a security feature for many contexts, but otherwise: - docker - you need to be able to bind any folder - IDE - you need to be able to edit basically anything - office software beyond "I have some things in 'Documents'" - same - python, ruby, any other interpreter - same - brew, or any other package manager - same etc. This simply doesn't work well for many developer workflows. I tried to use a dedicated app for per-app security control like that (can't remember the name anymore) - but for development it was a disaster. It just makes you click "allow" on a popup 10 times a day until you stop paying attention. Now, macos is not at that level yet, but the direction towards that is the complaint usually.
        evgen 5y ago
        The problem is that your 'developer workflow' sounds like you are assuming a particular level of insecurity that is unwarranted. Learn about the principle of least authority and try to apply it to your workflows. None of the applications you mention need complete access to the filesystem and in every one of those cases the access could be easily limited to a few directories and you would probably never notice.
        viraptor 5y ago
        Yes/no. The security policies as they are implemented today just aren't possible to effectively use by developers. I've got a project in progress which allows you to go into the context of a specific project as a selinux policy and then work on it that way. It's hard, it's a lot of work, and there are endless edge cases. This is not me giving up, it's actually hard to build a system where you both enforce realistic restrictions and don't end up going "yeah, whatever, I've got enough of those permission questions" after a week. Consider: An interpreter needs to run homebrew which installs new app, but the same interpreter running a script for your project should not read anything apart from those project files. Same interpreter needs to update local packages via bundle and git, but a random script you run shouldn't be able to access your ssh key via git commands. This is basically impossible to achieve without large compromises outside of selinux right now.
  - pantulis 5y ago
    I think the lament has some justificiation if you remember Mac OSX as the de-facto developer dream workstation circa 2009. As a consumer platform desktop macOS will be great, for a non-apple developer workload... not so sure.
  - flohofwoe 5y ago
    Some examples I noticed (haven't look at Monterey yet though), most of those changes make sense on a small portrait display with touch interaction (e.g. iPhone), but not on a notebook display in landscape orientation (most of those fall under "questionable changes to the user interface", but I still think it's important to point them out, because IMHO they don't make sense on a notebook-style computer): - scroll bars have been removed (but they can be enabled again), not sure when this happened, Catalina maybe? - Ok/Cancel style dialog boxes are vertically stacked (since Big Sur) - the completely intuitive "Save As..." action has been replaced with "Duplicate" (at least in Apple tools), no idea what's the reasoning behind this is TBH, this wouldn't make sense on iPhones either - more vertical space wasted for window chrome since Big Sur, especially in the Finder - "Natural Scrolling" (can also still be reversed thankfully) - ...and probably a few more subtle changes which I don't care much about
    - vosper 5y ago
      How is any of that “dumbing down”?
      - flohofwoe 5y ago
        Well, apparently those changes are made to appease iOS users so they don't feel lost on Macs. I just can assume that Apple thinks this user group is too dumb to adapt to a different user interface philosophy? Don't know :)
        monkey_monkey 5y ago
        OK, so none of those things are dumbing down, they're just decisions you don't agree with.
        serf 5y ago
        unless we formally define 'dumbing down', I think that's just opinion. Just to take one example, scroll bars were turned optional with default off -- a simpler UX that's in favor of less visible user interactions for the sake of reducing user complexity is usually considered dumbing down. Now, in Apple Land, far behind the Reality Distortion Field, they may refer to the reduction of user interaction options as 'beautification' -- but everyone else usually just calls it 'simplification', which is often (diminutively, perhaps) referred to as 'dumbing down'. (in reply to "scrollbars only disappear without a mouse" , so what? That's still a reduction in user-visible information -- do touch users somehow not need to be told that an active view can be scrolled by anything other than visual gestures and cues? It's a nice pipe-dream, indicative design, but there isn't any design standard that suggests that may be or even could be the case.) tl;dr : when a user loses visible indications, and loses possible interactions, it's not uncommon to phrase the state as being 'dumbed down'.
  - matwood 5y ago
    Even the changes to the UI are following current design trends in general. More space, bigger elements, and removing what can be removed for simplicity. See the upcoming Android 12. For years the industry moved towards more and more information density, and is now moving back. Whether macOS is a good implementation of this trend can be debated.
  - panta 5y ago
    A random example: desktop Spaces has been arbitrarily limited to a single row of max 9 desktops (with Lion I believe). Before you could arrange the desktops in a matrix (up to 16 desktops IIRC). Also the removal of RSS support, X11, emacs.
  - s_dev 5y ago
    Kernel Extensions are gone -- regular users would never care about this sort of thing but you can't use products like Little Snitch properly on Big Sur and onwards. Kexts were also used for making Hackintoshes -- again not something normal Apple users would care for. mac OS is simply becoming less versatile and more locked down.
    - Wowfunhappy 5y ago
      Well, Hackintosh users at least definitely don't care whether Apple is signing third party kexts, because they were never signing Hackintosh kexts anyway. The ability to load kexts in general is still used extensively by Apple and isn't going away any time soon. (Hackintosh's days are numbered anyway due to Apple Silicon.)
    - watersb 5y ago
      ?? Little Snitch works fine for me on macOS BS on my M1 MacBook Pro. Does it fail to work properly on Intel Macs? All of my x86 Macs are far too old to try Big Sur. EDIT: Oh, I see -- first-party Apple apps can stream unlimited data, tracking your activity. Egads... https://sneak.berlin/20210202/macos-11.2-network-privacy/ https://sneak.berlin/20210202/macos-11.2-network-privacy/
    - robertoandred 5y ago
      Kernel extensions going away doesn’t mean their functionality is going away.
    - pjmlp 5y ago
      They not gone, rather replaced by user space solutions, improving overall OS stability.
- pkulak 5y ago
  Same thing happened to me too. I prepared myself for a year or so by replacing everything with an equivalent open-source project. Taught myself Vim so I could use those bindings in editors instead of the standard Apple ones. Then I made the switch, and it was pretty seamless.
- spijdar 5y ago
  Question is, what alternatives do you plan to use that are better for you? Many of the same sorts of interface and "unification" changes seem to be coming to Windows, and Linux is sort of in another world as far as usability goes. Great for some people, but if you don't already prefer it, are the changes to MacOS bad enough to accept the similarly-changing Windows or the many caveats Linux desktop?
  - vkoskiv 5y ago
    That is the part that upsets me the most - there are no viable alternatives. Linux I can get by with, but it's a huge compromise on all fronts except the terminal experience. Windows is obviously out of the question completely.
    - komuher 5y ago
      New windows is more like Windows + Linux in one device so dunno if it'll be out of question for most folks who see how apple is killing macos :)
      - spijdar 5y ago
        People who think Apple is killing MacOS generally do because they think Apple is sacrificing the utility of the desktop in favor of sharing code/UI with their mobile platforms. I don't think these people will be fond of the sweeping changes made in Win11's UI that are dedicated to touch interfaces/tablets, and to the big new feature of running Android apps "natively" on Windows, along with an Android app store. The ability to run Linux software is also mostly irrelevant, as MacOS/Darwin has largely been able to run those same programs natively since the beginning. It's never needed a POSIX compatibility layer -- it was built to support that functionality from day 1. e.g. Apple didn't need to build a compatibility shim to tunnel Wayland/X11 applications because Quartz was designed from the start to support that use case.
        GekkePrutser 5y ago
        The changes in Windows 11 are much more mellow than those in Windows 8, which were ridiculously geared towards tablets and totally ignored the existence of desktops, which happened to be 99% of the Windows userbase :/ Windows 11 is a much better compromise of usability on both, and I like the idea of panes, it is sorta kinda heading towards a tiling window system which really appeals to me. And the android thing and Amazon's involvement. Yeah a lot written about this and I don't agree with it either. But you don't have to use it.
- nbzso 5y ago
  I was in shock, when realised that everything that I love about Mac Desktop since beginning of OSX era will be showed away in the name of vertical integration. Now I am ok. Catalina is the last Apple OS that I will run on my computers. Figma is in the browser. Blender is working under Linux perfectly. Windows is horrible, but if used properly for specific tasks it will perform. The big problem was to move away from Logic, but where there's a will, there's a way. I am deeply thankful for all those years of Desktop Bliss, but Apple nowadays is marketing and shareholders driven company and this is the opposite of Jobs philosophy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4VBqTViEx4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4VBqTViEx4
  - arvinsim 5y ago
    > The big problem was to move away from Logic, but where there's a will, there's a way. I moved to Ableton years ago because I wanted a cross-platform DAW.
  - physicsguy 5y ago
    My workflow these days is to use WSL2 for everything. It even handles CUDA now
  - JKCalhoun 5y ago
    > this is the opposite of Jobs philosophy I would caution you about pigeon-holing "Jobs' philosophy". I have observed that his philosophy often suited the circumstances he found himself in at various points in his fascinating career. ;-)
  - danaris 5y ago
    > this is the opposite of Jobs philosophy. Frankly, I think that the design changes Apple has been making are very much in line with how Jobs would have done things. Would he have made it exactly the same? No, certainly not; he was a different person who was very opinionated, so there would be differences—but the direction of the changes would, I think, be very similar. However, I think it's also pretty irrelevant, given that Jobs himself explicitly said "Don't try to do things the way I would do them. Just do the right things." (Paraphrased from memory.)
- deleted 5y ago
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- alwillis 5y ago
  I disagree that macOS is being “dumbed down”. Unfortunately, the days of easy access to system volumes, kernel extensions had to end because the internet isn’t a friendly place and we just can’t have nice things. I spend more time on the command line now than I did 10 years ago on macOS and I don’t see that changing any time soon. It’s been a three release arc, starting with Catalina, to Big Sur and now Monterey, that started off pretty rocky and seemingly coming to fruition with this release. I’m using the public beta of Monterey as my daily driver and the transition couldn’t have gone any smoother, especially given it’s still months away from being released. So much better than Catalina which was ridiculously bad two years ago. I also don’t agree this is the lowest common denominator; since iPadOS, iOS and macOS all have the same core operating system, it only makes sense there should be a baseline of functionality and that users are able to use the appropriate platform for a given task. But that doesn’t mean unfettered access to everything on the Mac; given the world we live in, that’s a a recipe for disaster, which is why we can’t have nice things.
etaioinshrdlu 5y ago
I'm not concerned with dumbing down the desktop -- not a whole lot has changed in 15 years really. Big Sur really changed precisely nothing about how I use the computer. Certainly it's still highly functional and mostly gets out of the way. I'd be more concerned with locking down like iOS -- but that too, Apple has been measured and slow. Although, I'm pretty disturbed by the locked-down trend. Kernel extensions are pretty much dead. It does feel like a matter of time until it becomes as locked-down as iOS.
Closi 5y ago
I would love unification if it could be sensibly achieved (ie if a best of both scenario is possible). My 12.9 inch iPad is great for casual reading, browsing, casual games, drawing etc My 13 inch Mac is great for serious work - programming, PowerPoint, excel, and anything slightly more complex that requires productivity. Inside both of these devices is the same M1 processor, the same amount of ram, approximately the same screen size and I can add a keyboard to my iPad - so why should I carry two devices? (I know I don’t have to carry both devices and I could just pick one, but some things are just better on the other side of the fence. My dream laptop is an iPad that can dual boot iOS and Mac OSX, but if a unified OS can be achieved without compromises that’s even better!)
- crooked-v 5y ago
  Arbitrary window tiling (think basically the same pane-dragging UI that, say, VS Code has) and the ability to mark specific apps as 'keep alive indefinitely in the background' would go a long way towards making iPads useful as all-around computers without even needing other major changes.
- deergomoo 5y ago
  I've wished for the same thing—I spent 95% of my working time at a desk docked to a monitor, but that 5% when I need to be elsewhere is still critical. I would generally prefer a desktop computer when I'm at my desk, so it would be great if I could use the iPad Pro I already own to achieve that last 5% instead of needing a laptop that almost never moves (that said, I mind a lot less since I ditched the hot, noisy 16" MacBook Pro for a MacBook Air M1). Unfortunately, because my work is software development (specifically web development), I can't do any of it without also involving a "traditional" computer to do most of the heavy lifting. A lot of people will think it's stupid to want a way to spin up local servers on an iPad—a system which has never even claimed to entertain such capabilities—but the hardware is more than sufficient. It's a shame to not be able to use it to its potential.
- 2muchcoffeeman 5y ago
  I agree with this. There have been numerous products and fantasies of a phone that could dock to use as a laptop. And now for the first time we have a single platform for all devices. If they are sensible about it, unification would be fantastic.
pram 5y ago
I appreciate feature parity with iOS at least, it felt like macOS was being left behind for years. A lot of the stuff added from Mountain Lion to Yosemite was rotting away. The App Store, for instance, felt like terrible abandonware for years. Same with Messages. On Big Sur I can pretty much do everything I used my phone for now, which is what I personally wanted.
hughrr 5y ago
There is runtime unification but the user interfaces are still well separated based on the target device and screen size. I suspect the end game is one app package that runs on phone, tablet and desktop with specialist UI for each platform. So far they are doing extremely well. I can hop between all devices mostly transparently. And the desktop has not been dumbed down; all interfaces have been improved on their target devices. I have got to the point my iPad is my go to machine now.
atdt 5y ago
There are billions of people who are adept at using cell phones but have never owned a personal computer. Some of them can afford Apple products, but may not have thought they needed or wanted a different form factor before this year. Apple is betting that they will want a device that can act as a seamless extension of the computer they already have (their cell phone). Apple is doing this by gradually purging all things that aren't first-class on mobile, be they user interface affordances or the x86 instruction set.
- spideymans 5y ago
  > There are billions of people who are adept at using cell phones but have never owned a personal computer Further, a big chunk of this not-so-young generation of kids whose primary interactions with computers has been through iOS, iPadOS or ChromeOS (remember, ChromeOS is dominant in education, while iOS dominates teen personal devices). These kids will soon be entering college, and a lot of them will be buying Macs.
tonyedgecombe 5y ago
The only part I don't like so far are Catalyst apps, these are apps that have been ported from the iPad. Music is a bit of a dog on the Mac and TV isn't great either. Hopefully Catalyst will disappear once SwiftUI matures. The article dose say: The good news is, for all the recent fears among Mac users that Apple might be attempting to collapse Mac, iPhone, and iPad into a single amorphous product, macOS Monterey still feels unreservedly like a Mac.
- deergomoo 5y ago
  > Music is a bit of a dog on the Mac Music isn't even Catalyst, it's the old iTunes codebase with the non-music features ripped out and a fresh coat of paint. It's possibly the worst app I use day-to-day on the Mac. It's crashy, buggy (I regularly have AirPlay playback just stop after 10 seconds for no reason), and because the entire Apple Music feature set is just embedded web views, it's also incredibly slow and janky.
  - jtvjan 5y ago
    I guess Catalyst will now be the name for "OSX apps that look like iOS apps blown up to a big screen".
- matwood 5y ago
  I don't think Catalyst was mentioned at WWDC much if at all. Also no new Catalyst apps were announced. I think it's already on its way out.
matthewmacleod 5y ago
I worry that "unification" will be realized by dumbing down the desktop This seems to be a commonly espoused view about what’s happening to the Mac, but I don’t really see why. The UI has changed a bit, in some ways making it visually closer to iOS. But that’s basically it - core functionality is mostly the same. It’s not “dumber” or “smarter” - it’s just “a bit different”. Took maybe a day to get used to.
simonh 5y ago
So far unification just seems to be about additive capabilities coming to both platforms. Auto-recognising text in images, tab groups in Safari, shortcuts. Would you rather these came to iOS only like so much has before? I am concerned they might at some point start taking things away. For now we still have Automator, but maybe not for ever. I’ll start complaining when valuable MacOS features actually start to be pulled, not before. People freaked out when Microsoft brought out the Metro style UI in Windows 8, saying Apple was going to do the same thing on the Mac, well 9 years later nope, still no sign of anything even close to that drastic. The Mac is still very clearly optimised for mouse and keyboard, and the convergence is just about shared technology.
- planb 5y ago
  > For now we still have Automator, but maybe not for ever. Shortcuts is buggy as hell in the beta, but it looks like it will be better than Automator when it's done - even for advanced tasks. What's most important is that third party apps actually support it, and that's way easier with Shortcuts.
  - simonh 5y ago
    Looks like it can even run bash, Python and Perl scripts so maybe we're not going to need Automator anyway.
  - 9dev 5y ago
    Shortcuts on iOS is a godsend, so I'm very optimistic about this.
allenleein 5y ago
Same on the newest iOS 15 beta: https://imgur.com/gallery/Utw251K https://imgur.com/gallery/Utw251K Quite hard to navigate the features.
arrrg 5y ago
The reality is that Mac OS only has a chance to survive in a good enough shape if any feature that comes to iOS can also easily come to Mac OS. Practically all of those features are stuff that are on its face a positive additions (OCR for photos, Shortcuts). In the past it wasn’t at all obvious that iOS features would always also benefit Mac OS and often there was a time delay. Mac OS was neglected. During that past few years Apple seems to have created the infrastructure to bring all things to all platforms in a way that’s realistically doable for them and I think that is exactly the right decision. The billion dollar monster iOS will always suck oxygen out of the room for Mac OS, so better for the Mac OS to optimally benefit from that billion dollar monster. In terms of the UI paradigm Mac OS certainly does some weird shit and that’s always sad (though if we are honest with ourselves not exactly a new development – Mac OS always had some weird quirks and corners) but I don’t think that’s down to iOS or unification or anything like that. For Apple platform unification seems to mean bringing features to all platforms, not unifying the UI (and that’s the right call). That doesn’t mean that the UI team for Mac OS can’t make wrong decisions. (One example: Mac OS notifications heavily rely on hover states, to an extent that leads to a poor user experience. This is an interaction model iOS doesn’t even have, so we can’t and shouldn’t blame that on iOS. This is all the fault of the Mac OS team and design direction and not a result of unification.)
- aikinai 5y ago
  This is a very insightful comment and I wish more people recognized the practical realities here instead of just complaining about change in MacOS.
rorykoehler 5y ago
I don't want it. I don't want a touch screen on my laptop either. I didn't want the touchbar. It's all just gimmicks to me.
bengale 5y ago
Not really, but I'm fine with more alignment. Having the designs closer together is fine, being able to run iOS apps can be handy, shortcuts moving over is great news. As long as I don't start loosing access to the terminal, or the ability to load apps from any source then I'm pretty happy.
tokamak-teapot 5y ago
What I believe Apple are heading towards: iOS on Macs, but with window management, external monitor support, etc. so that it’s hardly a different user experience from MacOS, but with the security of iOS. The ‘big’ apps will still work as they do on MacOS (not as cut down iOS versions). There will still be a shell - though it might work in a VM / container. What I want on my desktop: exactly that.
- GekkePrutser 5y ago
  What's the point of a shell though if it's restricted to a container? I use the shell mainly to poke around inside the OS to change things Apple doesn't make fancy on/off switches for :)
  - tokamak-teapot 5y ago
    I don’t know if that’s the kind of mechanism they would use, as I don’t know if it actually helps with security compared to the sandboxing already applied to apps.
GekkePrutser 5y ago
I also don't. I only use Macs, not iOS as that's too limited for me. I also use many desktop OSes mixed together (also Windows, Linux, FreeBSD) so many of Apple's cloud services are irrelevant to me as I can't use them on the other platforms. I just need the Mac to be a good desktop computer. I already stopped using Safari for this reason also, as its sync only works on Apple platforms. However I do think I'm an outlyer. Most people go all-in on an ecosystem. This will never work for me. I used to use iOS too until Android caught up and really started being good for power users. I already stopped using Macs privately because they became too locked-down. I always loved macOS (since 2004) for being a powerful POSIX system with a consistent UI and third party app support. But it's becoming too much like an "iPad Plus" now. Something like that has no place in my life, sadly.
- vnorilo 5y ago
  Are you me? I've found digital life is much better if you don't make the platform part of your identity. It's comforting when there's something familiar like bash or POSIX or your favourite open source software available out of the box. But it's better not to assume that when something's missing the platform is devoid of value, and to keep your vendor lock in as low as possible. I've used macs because the frequency of terrible hardware is low (with huge caveat for og touchbar mbp) and work often requires targeting iOS. The unix bits help me get productive and the integration is good. However I'm also perfectly ok with Windows. I quite like their text rendering and found powershell quite good. MSVC is very good if you want a heavy C++ IDE. Also have had no problems using any common Linux distro - once driver stuff is figured out. All the platforms have both ideological and technical problems, but I don't feel the need to rehash them here. What is most important to me is owning root and the trend away from that is disturbing. I'm ok with various sandbox and security technologies, as long as I have the master key when I really need it.
  - GekkePrutser 5y ago
    Exactly! Security is important and sandboxing is a good way to achieve some of that. However a lot of vendors combine that with taking away our control as the user. Having security shouldn't have to mean giving up the keys to our digital kingdom. Apple takes the easy way too much. Sure you can disable things like SIP but then you lose the security aspect completely as well. It shouldn't have to be all or nothing. And we can see already where this leads to with iOS. Emulators? Nope, not permitted. Browsers with their own engine? Nope. No, the Mac isn't there yet but it's sure heading there.
gorgoiler 5y ago
Not so much the UI, but certainly for the features. Location based do-not-disturb. Wifi QR code sharing. Bug free airplay. Sharetangle integration with social media. iCloud files experience. One-stop config for mail / calendar / notes. All of these are gradually unifying. iOS always seems to have more useful OS features. The more of these that appear on my laptop, the better.
whywhywhywhy 5y ago
You're going to get it if you like it or not. It's hard to imagine a future 10 years from now where MacBooks are not running an iPad OS ancestor rather than a MacOS ancestor. Just gotta roleplay being a senior member of Apple where you know just how much money comes from iOS and just how many users there are of iOS vs their computers. iOS/iPadOS is the norm, MacOS is the weird odd one out.
- spideymans 5y ago
  Apple has put a ton of effort into making pointer + keyboard interaction on iPadOS a first class citizen, and most of the iPad’s marketing material nowadays shows it with a keyboard and trackpad attached. While l I don’t think iPadOS will replace macOS, I do believe that an iPadOS based notebook is inevitable.
sandbags 5y ago
I don't even want mobile apps on my desktop. I can't think of any mobile native app I've wanted on macOS in this fashion. Apps designed to take advantage of a finger, or pen, on a screen are unlikely to ever be a great experience on my Mac. And the side effects on macOS are doubly unwelcome.
- solarkraft 5y ago
  I can think of many. Unfortunately all of them were pulled from the store by their developers.
jillesvangurp 5y ago
I use macs but don't use iphones/ipads and instead prefer Android. In general, I don't really use a lot of the services and apps that come with macs. I don't use iCloud. I don't use iMail. I don't use Safari. I don't use Facetime. I don't use keynote, pages, iMovie, Garageband, etc. So, like with most OS X / Mac OS releases of the last half decade, there's actually very little (if anything) I can point at that actually genuinely is an improvement for me. The base OS has mostly gotten worse actually. It's gotten a lot more anal about requiring signed binaries and micromanaging permissions. Dropping 32 bit means my steam library is now full of stuff that no longer works. OpenGL support is a deprecated afterthought meaning that a lot of OSS stuff either won't work or barely works. I recently updated my macbook pro but aside from some minor icon rearranging in the menu bar, I can't really tell the difference with last year's edition. Most of this review is about applications that Apple bundles with the OS that compete with third party stuff that I use and prefer. Couldn't care less about any of that. But I appreciate that it's nice for people buying into the whole Apple everything experience. The reason I use macs is mainly because it's nice hardware with a unix like OS. Most of the tools I use are open source. I user Firefox for browsing, homebrew, docker, Intellij, VS Code, Darktable for photos, etc. I could easily switch to Linux or Windows and use the same tools. But macs are convenient. For now. It seems MS is much more on top of making Windows developer friendly than Apple is currently. It wouldn't be hard to do for Apple but for some reason they are not interested in that anymore.
- ithkuil 5y ago
  I also use Mac as a glorified unix OS with an WiFi that works, printing that works, laptop sleep and awake that works, and UI that works across external monitors with various DPI settings seamlessly. I know many of the aforementioned issues have been fixed (to some extent) for linux. I'd be willing to give the Linux desktop another try but: 1. I really love my LG 5k external monitor. It's still hard to find hardware for linux that can drive it (especially laptops) 2. I got used to how fonts are rendered on macos 3. Keyboard shortcuts systematically different (CMD/meta vs Ctrl) make it harder to occasionally switch between the two systems. I know it sounds silly. But it's hard to remap those modifiers in a way that keeps everything else working the same.
yepthatsreality 5y ago
It’s funny because when Windows 8/10 touted unification, the response from Apple talking heads was they would always need two distinct OSes…and here we are.
- TrispusAttucks 5y ago
  Indeed. Your response reminded me of the Ubuntu Convergence [1] goal that was abandoned in 2016 but had similar critics. [1] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Convergence https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Convergence
- robertoandred 5y ago
  You’re confusing distinct UIs with distinct feature sets.
  - yepthatsreality 5y ago
    Sure however you spin it.
chadlavi 5y ago
I want macOS on an iPad, yes.
- gjsman-1000 5y ago
  How about an iPad mini?
grishka 5y ago
Designers seem to be collectively forgetting two simple things: 1. The UI is a tool, not an art piece. It's something people use to get their job done. They don't admire its beauty and "cleanliness". Every time you move things around to "make it more aesthetically pleasing" or "refresh it", you're messing with people's muscle memory. People hate when their muscle memory is messed with. 2. The UI should be designed to make most of the input devices with which it will be used most of the time. This means huge paddings, large fonts, and borderless buttons have no place in a desktop OS. Apple's initial idea about iOS being for touchscreens only, and macOS being for mice and keyboards only, was great. Now they're diluting macOS by allowing iOS apps to run on it, and by borrowing iOS UI patterns that were clearly designed for touchscreens. Except I couldn't care less about Safari. There are better browsers out there anyway. And all the stuff that requires Apple servers is also irrelevant to me.
- Dah00n 5y ago
  >Every time you move things around to "make it more aesthetically pleasing" or "refresh it", you're messing with people's muscle memory. People hate when their muscle memory is messed with. While I agree with you, no one does this as much/often as Apple and somehow people still praise it.
  - grishka 5y ago
    As a long-time Android user, I can assure you Google does this way too often. They just can't leave the notification shade alone, they always redesign something in a subtle and annoying way in there. This year they ran out of ideas, but the marketing department demanded a big release, so they invented this "material you" crap.
beervirus 5y ago
I didn’t want it in windows 8, and I don’t want it here.
pwinnski 5y ago
Unification as goal seems foolish, but I'm not entirely sure that's what Apple is doing. So far they're mostly unifying things that make sense, and avoiding things that don't. The Safari changes may change my mind once I actually use them, though. I think the bigger issue from Apple is that they seem to feel the need to change something visible and obvious about MacOS with every release, and while not all of those changes are in service of unification with iOS, many of those changes seem unnecessary at best, and counter-productive at worst. The "unification" label is more a product of observers than Apple themselves. They have repeatedly stated explicitly that they have no intention of merging the two OSes, and I believe them on that. So far.
snowwrestler 5y ago
IMO the “desktop” metaphor for GUI computing was incredibly dumb the day it was introduced, and so it sort of cracks me up when people worry about it being dumbed down. It’s always dumb! That’s why it works for so many people. As long as MacOS supports powerful keyboard shortcuts, trackpad gestures, and the Unixy Terminal, I feel confident it will remain productive for me. I don’t really care about running mobile apps on desktop, but I also don’t really care about changes to window toolbars and aesthetics either. I learned MacOS once; I’m confident I can learn the 10% that is different from release to release.
- anthk 5y ago
  Plan9/9front has a "desktop" too. And it's regarded as Unix 2.0. Acme is an editor/terminal on steroids.
druidsbane 5y ago
I don't want unification so much as the ability to run full macOS off of my phone when docked to a display. It is a simple request on the face of it and Apple is about the experience and hiding complexity, so even if it is hard to implement, once the hardware is capable (and it has been for a while) this is arguably a very nice feature to have for many.
blacktriangle 5y ago
I absolutely do not and this unification trend has pushed me to finally spin up a separate BSD desktop and keep OS X around solely for iOS development. I was so optimistic when the iPad launched with iOS. It made sense that a tablet running a very limited OS would make the perfect user-facing device that could potentially free up OSX to evolve in a more developer/power user direction, since you could now offload the general purpose users to iOS. Instead the opposite has happened and macOS has evovled closer to iOS, thus causing me to lose all hope in the future of the macOS platform. C'est la vie.
runawaybottle 5y ago
Unification is important for developers to dog food. The average “consumer” (us versus them) will be integrated into this design system. They will expect UI behavior across the apple ecosystem to be homogeneous. If we as developers do not take part in this and dog food the universal OS, we will be blind to all the problems users are facing, and be unable to innovate in this marketplace. If you want to sell to users, use what they use.
- runawaybottle 5y ago
  For the dick face that down voted me, explain why.

ChefboyOG 5y ago

The endgame seems to be that all Apple products are just iPads of different sizes.

vkoskiv 5y ago

> I worry that "unification" will be realized by dumbing down the desktop rather than empowering the mobile device. This appears to be their plan. It has steadily ramped up since Mojave, and Big Sur was the inflection point. I have used OS X exclusively since 2008, and last year I made the choice to no longer upgrade any of my machines beyond Catalina. I'm slowly getting used to the fact that I won't be able to use Macs for my work in the near future, and am making adjustments to my workflow accordingly. I know this is probably the life-long FruitCo® fan in me speaking, but I'm genuinely distraught about this. My absolute favourite software platform in the world is being chipped away at to appeal to the lowest common denominator. Even worse, most people seem to be cheering them on for doing it. Really upsets me.

quenix 5y ago
Apart from questionable changes to the user interface, I don’t see how Apple have been “dumbing down” macOS in terms of usability so dramatically. Could you point to some concrete examples?
- pkulak 5y ago
  Not being able to edit huge portions of the file system, even as root. Apps not having file system access at all until you grant it, and then it’s folder by folder. Those control panel plug-in things just stopped being supported at all, so good bye custom mouse drivers and such.
  - threeseed 5y ago
    What you call dumbing down I call incredibly useful security features. Apps shouldn’t be able to read my entire hard drive unless I give it permission. And the core OS should be immutable. Also not sure what you’re talking about. Custom mouse drivers of course still work.
    - viraptor 5y ago
      It really depends on your usage. It can be a security feature for many contexts, but otherwise: - docker - you need to be able to bind any folder - IDE - you need to be able to edit basically anything - office software beyond "I have some things in 'Documents'" - same - python, ruby, any other interpreter - same - brew, or any other package manager - same etc. This simply doesn't work well for many developer workflows. I tried to use a dedicated app for per-app security control like that (can't remember the name anymore) - but for development it was a disaster. It just makes you click "allow" on a popup 10 times a day until you stop paying attention. Now, macos is not at that level yet, but the direction towards that is the complaint usually.
      - evgen 5y ago
        The problem is that your 'developer workflow' sounds like you are assuming a particular level of insecurity that is unwarranted. Learn about the principle of least authority and try to apply it to your workflows. None of the applications you mention need complete access to the filesystem and in every one of those cases the access could be easily limited to a few directories and you would probably never notice.
        viraptor 5y ago
        Yes/no. The security policies as they are implemented today just aren't possible to effectively use by developers. I've got a project in progress which allows you to go into the context of a specific project as a selinux policy and then work on it that way. It's hard, it's a lot of work, and there are endless edge cases. This is not me giving up, it's actually hard to build a system where you both enforce realistic restrictions and don't end up going "yeah, whatever, I've got enough of those permission questions" after a week. Consider: An interpreter needs to run homebrew which installs new app, but the same interpreter running a script for your project should not read anything apart from those project files. Same interpreter needs to update local packages via bundle and git, but a random script you run shouldn't be able to access your ssh key via git commands. This is basically impossible to achieve without large compromises outside of selinux right now.
- pantulis 5y ago
  I think the lament has some justificiation if you remember Mac OSX as the de-facto developer dream workstation circa 2009. As a consumer platform desktop macOS will be great, for a non-apple developer workload... not so sure.
- flohofwoe 5y ago
  Some examples I noticed (haven't look at Monterey yet though), most of those changes make sense on a small portrait display with touch interaction (e.g. iPhone), but not on a notebook display in landscape orientation (most of those fall under "questionable changes to the user interface", but I still think it's important to point them out, because IMHO they don't make sense on a notebook-style computer): - scroll bars have been removed (but they can be enabled again), not sure when this happened, Catalina maybe? - Ok/Cancel style dialog boxes are vertically stacked (since Big Sur) - the completely intuitive "Save As..." action has been replaced with "Duplicate" (at least in Apple tools), no idea what's the reasoning behind this is TBH, this wouldn't make sense on iPhones either - more vertical space wasted for window chrome since Big Sur, especially in the Finder - "Natural Scrolling" (can also still be reversed thankfully) - ...and probably a few more subtle changes which I don't care much about
  - vosper 5y ago
    How is any of that “dumbing down”?
    - flohofwoe 5y ago
      Well, apparently those changes are made to appease iOS users so they don't feel lost on Macs. I just can assume that Apple thinks this user group is too dumb to adapt to a different user interface philosophy? Don't know :)
      - monkey_monkey 5y ago
        OK, so none of those things are dumbing down, they're just decisions you don't agree with.
        serf 5y ago
        unless we formally define 'dumbing down', I think that's just opinion. Just to take one example, scroll bars were turned optional with default off -- a simpler UX that's in favor of less visible user interactions for the sake of reducing user complexity is usually considered dumbing down. Now, in Apple Land, far behind the Reality Distortion Field, they may refer to the reduction of user interaction options as 'beautification' -- but everyone else usually just calls it 'simplification', which is often (diminutively, perhaps) referred to as 'dumbing down'. (in reply to "scrollbars only disappear without a mouse" , so what? That's still a reduction in user-visible information -- do touch users somehow not need to be told that an active view can be scrolled by anything other than visual gestures and cues? It's a nice pipe-dream, indicative design, but there isn't any design standard that suggests that may be or even could be the case.) tl;dr : when a user loses visible indications, and loses possible interactions, it's not uncommon to phrase the state as being 'dumbed down'.
- matwood 5y ago
  Even the changes to the UI are following current design trends in general. More space, bigger elements, and removing what can be removed for simplicity. See the upcoming Android 12. For years the industry moved towards more and more information density, and is now moving back. Whether macOS is a good implementation of this trend can be debated.
- panta 5y ago
  A random example: desktop Spaces has been arbitrarily limited to a single row of max 9 desktops (with Lion I believe). Before you could arrange the desktops in a matrix (up to 16 desktops IIRC). Also the removal of RSS support, X11, emacs.
- s_dev 5y ago
  Kernel Extensions are gone -- regular users would never care about this sort of thing but you can't use products like Little Snitch properly on Big Sur and onwards. Kexts were also used for making Hackintoshes -- again not something normal Apple users would care for. mac OS is simply becoming less versatile and more locked down.
  - Wowfunhappy 5y ago
    Well, Hackintosh users at least definitely don't care whether Apple is signing third party kexts, because they were never signing Hackintosh kexts anyway. The ability to load kexts in general is still used extensively by Apple and isn't going away any time soon. (Hackintosh's days are numbered anyway due to Apple Silicon.)
  - watersb 5y ago
    ?? Little Snitch works fine for me on macOS BS on my M1 MacBook Pro. Does it fail to work properly on Intel Macs? All of my x86 Macs are far too old to try Big Sur. EDIT: Oh, I see -- first-party Apple apps can stream unlimited data, tracking your activity. Egads... https://sneak.berlin/20210202/macos-11.2-network-privacy/ https://sneak.berlin/20210202/macos-11.2-network-privacy/
  - robertoandred 5y ago
    Kernel extensions going away doesn’t mean their functionality is going away.
  - pjmlp 5y ago
    They not gone, rather replaced by user space solutions, improving overall OS stability.
pkulak 5y ago
Same thing happened to me too. I prepared myself for a year or so by replacing everything with an equivalent open-source project. Taught myself Vim so I could use those bindings in editors instead of the standard Apple ones. Then I made the switch, and it was pretty seamless.
spijdar 5y ago
Question is, what alternatives do you plan to use that are better for you? Many of the same sorts of interface and "unification" changes seem to be coming to Windows, and Linux is sort of in another world as far as usability goes. Great for some people, but if you don't already prefer it, are the changes to MacOS bad enough to accept the similarly-changing Windows or the many caveats Linux desktop?
- vkoskiv 5y ago
  That is the part that upsets me the most - there are no viable alternatives. Linux I can get by with, but it's a huge compromise on all fronts except the terminal experience. Windows is obviously out of the question completely.
  - komuher 5y ago
    New windows is more like Windows + Linux in one device so dunno if it'll be out of question for most folks who see how apple is killing macos :)
    - spijdar 5y ago
      People who think Apple is killing MacOS generally do because they think Apple is sacrificing the utility of the desktop in favor of sharing code/UI with their mobile platforms. I don't think these people will be fond of the sweeping changes made in Win11's UI that are dedicated to touch interfaces/tablets, and to the big new feature of running Android apps "natively" on Windows, along with an Android app store. The ability to run Linux software is also mostly irrelevant, as MacOS/Darwin has largely been able to run those same programs natively since the beginning. It's never needed a POSIX compatibility layer -- it was built to support that functionality from day 1. e.g. Apple didn't need to build a compatibility shim to tunnel Wayland/X11 applications because Quartz was designed from the start to support that use case.
      - GekkePrutser 5y ago
        The changes in Windows 11 are much more mellow than those in Windows 8, which were ridiculously geared towards tablets and totally ignored the existence of desktops, which happened to be 99% of the Windows userbase :/ Windows 11 is a much better compromise of usability on both, and I like the idea of panes, it is sorta kinda heading towards a tiling window system which really appeals to me. And the android thing and Amazon's involvement. Yeah a lot written about this and I don't agree with it either. But you don't have to use it.
nbzso 5y ago
I was in shock, when realised that everything that I love about Mac Desktop since beginning of OSX era will be showed away in the name of vertical integration. Now I am ok. Catalina is the last Apple OS that I will run on my computers. Figma is in the browser. Blender is working under Linux perfectly. Windows is horrible, but if used properly for specific tasks it will perform. The big problem was to move away from Logic, but where there's a will, there's a way. I am deeply thankful for all those years of Desktop Bliss, but Apple nowadays is marketing and shareholders driven company and this is the opposite of Jobs philosophy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4VBqTViEx4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4VBqTViEx4
- arvinsim 5y ago
  > The big problem was to move away from Logic, but where there's a will, there's a way. I moved to Ableton years ago because I wanted a cross-platform DAW.
- physicsguy 5y ago
  My workflow these days is to use WSL2 for everything. It even handles CUDA now
- JKCalhoun 5y ago
  > this is the opposite of Jobs philosophy I would caution you about pigeon-holing "Jobs' philosophy". I have observed that his philosophy often suited the circumstances he found himself in at various points in his fascinating career. ;-)
- danaris 5y ago
  > this is the opposite of Jobs philosophy. Frankly, I think that the design changes Apple has been making are very much in line with how Jobs would have done things. Would he have made it exactly the same? No, certainly not; he was a different person who was very opinionated, so there would be differences—but the direction of the changes would, I think, be very similar. However, I think it's also pretty irrelevant, given that Jobs himself explicitly said "Don't try to do things the way I would do them. Just do the right things." (Paraphrased from memory.)
deleted 5y ago
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alwillis 5y ago
I disagree that macOS is being “dumbed down”. Unfortunately, the days of easy access to system volumes, kernel extensions had to end because the internet isn’t a friendly place and we just can’t have nice things. I spend more time on the command line now than I did 10 years ago on macOS and I don’t see that changing any time soon. It’s been a three release arc, starting with Catalina, to Big Sur and now Monterey, that started off pretty rocky and seemingly coming to fruition with this release. I’m using the public beta of Monterey as my daily driver and the transition couldn’t have gone any smoother, especially given it’s still months away from being released. So much better than Catalina which was ridiculously bad two years ago. I also don’t agree this is the lowest common denominator; since iPadOS, iOS and macOS all have the same core operating system, it only makes sense there should be a baseline of functionality and that users are able to use the appropriate platform for a given task. But that doesn’t mean unfettered access to everything on the Mac; given the world we live in, that’s a a recipe for disaster, which is why we can’t have nice things.

etaioinshrdlu 5y ago

I'm not concerned with dumbing down the desktop -- not a whole lot has changed in 15 years really. Big Sur really changed precisely nothing about how I use the computer. Certainly it's still highly functional and mostly gets out of the way. I'd be more concerned with locking down like iOS -- but that too, Apple has been measured and slow. Although, I'm pretty disturbed by the locked-down trend. Kernel extensions are pretty much dead. It does feel like a matter of time until it becomes as locked-down as iOS.

Closi 5y ago

I would love unification if it could be sensibly achieved (ie if a best of both scenario is possible). My 12.9 inch iPad is great for casual reading, browsing, casual games, drawing etc My 13 inch Mac is great for serious work - programming, PowerPoint, excel, and anything slightly more complex that requires productivity. Inside both of these devices is the same M1 processor, the same amount of ram, approximately the same screen size and I can add a keyboard to my iPad - so why should I carry two devices? (I know I don’t have to carry both devices and I could just pick one, but some things are just better on the other side of the fence. My dream laptop is an iPad that can dual boot iOS and Mac OSX, but if a unified OS can be achieved without compromises that’s even better!)

crooked-v 5y ago
Arbitrary window tiling (think basically the same pane-dragging UI that, say, VS Code has) and the ability to mark specific apps as 'keep alive indefinitely in the background' would go a long way towards making iPads useful as all-around computers without even needing other major changes.
deergomoo 5y ago
I've wished for the same thing—I spent 95% of my working time at a desk docked to a monitor, but that 5% when I need to be elsewhere is still critical. I would generally prefer a desktop computer when I'm at my desk, so it would be great if I could use the iPad Pro I already own to achieve that last 5% instead of needing a laptop that almost never moves (that said, I mind a lot less since I ditched the hot, noisy 16" MacBook Pro for a MacBook Air M1). Unfortunately, because my work is software development (specifically web development), I can't do any of it without also involving a "traditional" computer to do most of the heavy lifting. A lot of people will think it's stupid to want a way to spin up local servers on an iPad—a system which has never even claimed to entertain such capabilities—but the hardware is more than sufficient. It's a shame to not be able to use it to its potential.
2muchcoffeeman 5y ago
I agree with this. There have been numerous products and fantasies of a phone that could dock to use as a laptop. And now for the first time we have a single platform for all devices. If they are sensible about it, unification would be fantastic.

pram 5y ago

I appreciate feature parity with iOS at least, it felt like macOS was being left behind for years. A lot of the stuff added from Mountain Lion to Yosemite was rotting away. The App Store, for instance, felt like terrible abandonware for years. Same with Messages. On Big Sur I can pretty much do everything I used my phone for now, which is what I personally wanted.

hughrr 5y ago

There is runtime unification but the user interfaces are still well separated based on the target device and screen size. I suspect the end game is one app package that runs on phone, tablet and desktop with specialist UI for each platform. So far they are doing extremely well. I can hop between all devices mostly transparently. And the desktop has not been dumbed down; all interfaces have been improved on their target devices. I have got to the point my iPad is my go to machine now.

atdt 5y ago

There are billions of people who are adept at using cell phones but have never owned a personal computer. Some of them can afford Apple products, but may not have thought they needed or wanted a different form factor before this year. Apple is betting that they will want a device that can act as a seamless extension of the computer they already have (their cell phone). Apple is doing this by gradually purging all things that aren't first-class on mobile, be they user interface affordances or the x86 instruction set.

spideymans 5y ago
> There are billions of people who are adept at using cell phones but have never owned a personal computer Further, a big chunk of this not-so-young generation of kids whose primary interactions with computers has been through iOS, iPadOS or ChromeOS (remember, ChromeOS is dominant in education, while iOS dominates teen personal devices). These kids will soon be entering college, and a lot of them will be buying Macs.

tonyedgecombe 5y ago

The only part I don't like so far are Catalyst apps, these are apps that have been ported from the iPad. Music is a bit of a dog on the Mac and TV isn't great either. Hopefully Catalyst will disappear once SwiftUI matures. The article dose say: The good news is, for all the recent fears among Mac users that Apple might be attempting to collapse Mac, iPhone, and iPad into a single amorphous product, macOS Monterey still feels unreservedly like a Mac.

deergomoo 5y ago
> Music is a bit of a dog on the Mac Music isn't even Catalyst, it's the old iTunes codebase with the non-music features ripped out and a fresh coat of paint. It's possibly the worst app I use day-to-day on the Mac. It's crashy, buggy (I regularly have AirPlay playback just stop after 10 seconds for no reason), and because the entire Apple Music feature set is just embedded web views, it's also incredibly slow and janky.
- jtvjan 5y ago
  I guess Catalyst will now be the name for "OSX apps that look like iOS apps blown up to a big screen".
matwood 5y ago
I don't think Catalyst was mentioned at WWDC much if at all. Also no new Catalyst apps were announced. I think it's already on its way out.

matthewmacleod 5y ago

I worry that "unification" will be realized by dumbing down the desktop This seems to be a commonly espoused view about what’s happening to the Mac, but I don’t really see why. The UI has changed a bit, in some ways making it visually closer to iOS. But that’s basically it - core functionality is mostly the same. It’s not “dumber” or “smarter” - it’s just “a bit different”. Took maybe a day to get used to.

simonh 5y ago

So far unification just seems to be about additive capabilities coming to both platforms. Auto-recognising text in images, tab groups in Safari, shortcuts. Would you rather these came to iOS only like so much has before? I am concerned they might at some point start taking things away. For now we still have Automator, but maybe not for ever. I’ll start complaining when valuable MacOS features actually start to be pulled, not before. People freaked out when Microsoft brought out the Metro style UI in Windows 8, saying Apple was going to do the same thing on the Mac, well 9 years later nope, still no sign of anything even close to that drastic. The Mac is still very clearly optimised for mouse and keyboard, and the convergence is just about shared technology.

planb 5y ago
> For now we still have Automator, but maybe not for ever. Shortcuts is buggy as hell in the beta, but it looks like it will be better than Automator when it's done - even for advanced tasks. What's most important is that third party apps actually support it, and that's way easier with Shortcuts.
- simonh 5y ago
  Looks like it can even run bash, Python and Perl scripts so maybe we're not going to need Automator anyway.
- 9dev 5y ago
  Shortcuts on iOS is a godsend, so I'm very optimistic about this.

allenleein 5y ago

Same on the newest iOS 15 beta: https://imgur.com/gallery/Utw251K https://imgur.com/gallery/Utw251K Quite hard to navigate the features.

arrrg 5y ago

The reality is that Mac OS only has a chance to survive in a good enough shape if any feature that comes to iOS can also easily come to Mac OS. Practically all of those features are stuff that are on its face a positive additions (OCR for photos, Shortcuts). In the past it wasn’t at all obvious that iOS features would always also benefit Mac OS and often there was a time delay. Mac OS was neglected. During that past few years Apple seems to have created the infrastructure to bring all things to all platforms in a way that’s realistically doable for them and I think that is exactly the right decision. The billion dollar monster iOS will always suck oxygen out of the room for Mac OS, so better for the Mac OS to optimally benefit from that billion dollar monster. In terms of the UI paradigm Mac OS certainly does some weird shit and that’s always sad (though if we are honest with ourselves not exactly a new development – Mac OS always had some weird quirks and corners) but I don’t think that’s down to iOS or unification or anything like that. For Apple platform unification seems to mean bringing features to all platforms, not unifying the UI (and that’s the right call). That doesn’t mean that the UI team for Mac OS can’t make wrong decisions. (One example: Mac OS notifications heavily rely on hover states, to an extent that leads to a poor user experience. This is an interaction model iOS doesn’t even have, so we can’t and shouldn’t blame that on iOS. This is all the fault of the Mac OS team and design direction and not a result of unification.)

aikinai 5y ago
This is a very insightful comment and I wish more people recognized the practical realities here instead of just complaining about change in MacOS.

rorykoehler 5y ago

I don't want it. I don't want a touch screen on my laptop either. I didn't want the touchbar. It's all just gimmicks to me.

bengale 5y ago

Not really, but I'm fine with more alignment. Having the designs closer together is fine, being able to run iOS apps can be handy, shortcuts moving over is great news. As long as I don't start loosing access to the terminal, or the ability to load apps from any source then I'm pretty happy.

tokamak-teapot 5y ago

What I believe Apple are heading towards: iOS on Macs, but with window management, external monitor support, etc. so that it’s hardly a different user experience from MacOS, but with the security of iOS. The ‘big’ apps will still work as they do on MacOS (not as cut down iOS versions). There will still be a shell - though it might work in a VM / container. What I want on my desktop: exactly that.

GekkePrutser 5y ago
What's the point of a shell though if it's restricted to a container? I use the shell mainly to poke around inside the OS to change things Apple doesn't make fancy on/off switches for :)
- tokamak-teapot 5y ago
  I don’t know if that’s the kind of mechanism they would use, as I don’t know if it actually helps with security compared to the sandboxing already applied to apps.

GekkePrutser 5y ago

I also don't. I only use Macs, not iOS as that's too limited for me. I also use many desktop OSes mixed together (also Windows, Linux, FreeBSD) so many of Apple's cloud services are irrelevant to me as I can't use them on the other platforms. I just need the Mac to be a good desktop computer. I already stopped using Safari for this reason also, as its sync only works on Apple platforms. However I do think I'm an outlyer. Most people go all-in on an ecosystem. This will never work for me. I used to use iOS too until Android caught up and really started being good for power users. I already stopped using Macs privately because they became too locked-down. I always loved macOS (since 2004) for being a powerful POSIX system with a consistent UI and third party app support. But it's becoming too much like an "iPad Plus" now. Something like that has no place in my life, sadly.

vnorilo 5y ago
Are you me? I've found digital life is much better if you don't make the platform part of your identity. It's comforting when there's something familiar like bash or POSIX or your favourite open source software available out of the box. But it's better not to assume that when something's missing the platform is devoid of value, and to keep your vendor lock in as low as possible. I've used macs because the frequency of terrible hardware is low (with huge caveat for og touchbar mbp) and work often requires targeting iOS. The unix bits help me get productive and the integration is good. However I'm also perfectly ok with Windows. I quite like their text rendering and found powershell quite good. MSVC is very good if you want a heavy C++ IDE. Also have had no problems using any common Linux distro - once driver stuff is figured out. All the platforms have both ideological and technical problems, but I don't feel the need to rehash them here. What is most important to me is owning root and the trend away from that is disturbing. I'm ok with various sandbox and security technologies, as long as I have the master key when I really need it.
- GekkePrutser 5y ago
  Exactly! Security is important and sandboxing is a good way to achieve some of that. However a lot of vendors combine that with taking away our control as the user. Having security shouldn't have to mean giving up the keys to our digital kingdom. Apple takes the easy way too much. Sure you can disable things like SIP but then you lose the security aspect completely as well. It shouldn't have to be all or nothing. And we can see already where this leads to with iOS. Emulators? Nope, not permitted. Browsers with their own engine? Nope. No, the Mac isn't there yet but it's sure heading there.

gorgoiler 5y ago

Not so much the UI, but certainly for the features. Location based do-not-disturb. Wifi QR code sharing. Bug free airplay. Sharetangle integration with social media. iCloud files experience. One-stop config for mail / calendar / notes. All of these are gradually unifying. iOS always seems to have more useful OS features. The more of these that appear on my laptop, the better.

whywhywhywhy 5y ago

You're going to get it if you like it or not. It's hard to imagine a future 10 years from now where MacBooks are not running an iPad OS ancestor rather than a MacOS ancestor. Just gotta roleplay being a senior member of Apple where you know just how much money comes from iOS and just how many users there are of iOS vs their computers. iOS/iPadOS is the norm, MacOS is the weird odd one out.

spideymans 5y ago
Apple has put a ton of effort into making pointer + keyboard interaction on iPadOS a first class citizen, and most of the iPad’s marketing material nowadays shows it with a keyboard and trackpad attached. While l I don’t think iPadOS will replace macOS, I do believe that an iPadOS based notebook is inevitable.

sandbags 5y ago

I don't even want mobile apps on my desktop. I can't think of any mobile native app I've wanted on macOS in this fashion. Apps designed to take advantage of a finger, or pen, on a screen are unlikely to ever be a great experience on my Mac. And the side effects on macOS are doubly unwelcome.

solarkraft 5y ago
I can think of many. Unfortunately all of them were pulled from the store by their developers.

jillesvangurp 5y ago

I use macs but don't use iphones/ipads and instead prefer Android. In general, I don't really use a lot of the services and apps that come with macs. I don't use iCloud. I don't use iMail. I don't use Safari. I don't use Facetime. I don't use keynote, pages, iMovie, Garageband, etc. So, like with most OS X / Mac OS releases of the last half decade, there's actually very little (if anything) I can point at that actually genuinely is an improvement for me. The base OS has mostly gotten worse actually. It's gotten a lot more anal about requiring signed binaries and micromanaging permissions. Dropping 32 bit means my steam library is now full of stuff that no longer works. OpenGL support is a deprecated afterthought meaning that a lot of OSS stuff either won't work or barely works. I recently updated my macbook pro but aside from some minor icon rearranging in the menu bar, I can't really tell the difference with last year's edition. Most of this review is about applications that Apple bundles with the OS that compete with third party stuff that I use and prefer. Couldn't care less about any of that. But I appreciate that it's nice for people buying into the whole Apple everything experience. The reason I use macs is mainly because it's nice hardware with a unix like OS. Most of the tools I use are open source. I user Firefox for browsing, homebrew, docker, Intellij, VS Code, Darktable for photos, etc. I could easily switch to Linux or Windows and use the same tools. But macs are convenient. For now. It seems MS is much more on top of making Windows developer friendly than Apple is currently. It wouldn't be hard to do for Apple but for some reason they are not interested in that anymore.

ithkuil 5y ago
I also use Mac as a glorified unix OS with an WiFi that works, printing that works, laptop sleep and awake that works, and UI that works across external monitors with various DPI settings seamlessly. I know many of the aforementioned issues have been fixed (to some extent) for linux. I'd be willing to give the Linux desktop another try but: 1. I really love my LG 5k external monitor. It's still hard to find hardware for linux that can drive it (especially laptops) 2. I got used to how fonts are rendered on macos 3. Keyboard shortcuts systematically different (CMD/meta vs Ctrl) make it harder to occasionally switch between the two systems. I know it sounds silly. But it's hard to remap those modifiers in a way that keeps everything else working the same.

yepthatsreality 5y ago

It’s funny because when Windows 8/10 touted unification, the response from Apple talking heads was they would always need two distinct OSes…and here we are.

TrispusAttucks 5y ago
Indeed. Your response reminded me of the Ubuntu Convergence [1] goal that was abandoned in 2016 but had similar critics. [1] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Convergence https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Convergence
robertoandred 5y ago
You’re confusing distinct UIs with distinct feature sets.
- yepthatsreality 5y ago
  Sure however you spin it.

chadlavi 5y ago

I want macOS on an iPad, yes.

gjsman-1000 5y ago
How about an iPad mini?

grishka 5y ago

Designers seem to be collectively forgetting two simple things: 1. The UI is a tool, not an art piece. It's something people use to get their job done. They don't admire its beauty and "cleanliness". Every time you move things around to "make it more aesthetically pleasing" or "refresh it", you're messing with people's muscle memory. People hate when their muscle memory is messed with. 2. The UI should be designed to make most of the input devices with which it will be used most of the time. This means huge paddings, large fonts, and borderless buttons have no place in a desktop OS. Apple's initial idea about iOS being for touchscreens only, and macOS being for mice and keyboards only, was great. Now they're diluting macOS by allowing iOS apps to run on it, and by borrowing iOS UI patterns that were clearly designed for touchscreens. Except I couldn't care less about Safari. There are better browsers out there anyway. And all the stuff that requires Apple servers is also irrelevant to me.

Dah00n 5y ago
>Every time you move things around to "make it more aesthetically pleasing" or "refresh it", you're messing with people's muscle memory. People hate when their muscle memory is messed with. While I agree with you, no one does this as much/often as Apple and somehow people still praise it.
- grishka 5y ago
  As a long-time Android user, I can assure you Google does this way too often. They just can't leave the notification shade alone, they always redesign something in a subtle and annoying way in there. This year they ran out of ideas, but the marketing department demanded a big release, so they invented this "material you" crap.

beervirus 5y ago

I didn’t want it in windows 8, and I don’t want it here.

pwinnski 5y ago

Unification as goal seems foolish, but I'm not entirely sure that's what Apple is doing. So far they're mostly unifying things that make sense, and avoiding things that don't. The Safari changes may change my mind once I actually use them, though. I think the bigger issue from Apple is that they seem to feel the need to change something visible and obvious about MacOS with every release, and while not all of those changes are in service of unification with iOS, many of those changes seem unnecessary at best, and counter-productive at worst. The "unification" label is more a product of observers than Apple themselves. They have repeatedly stated explicitly that they have no intention of merging the two OSes, and I believe them on that. So far.

snowwrestler 5y ago

IMO the “desktop” metaphor for GUI computing was incredibly dumb the day it was introduced, and so it sort of cracks me up when people worry about it being dumbed down. It’s always dumb! That’s why it works for so many people. As long as MacOS supports powerful keyboard shortcuts, trackpad gestures, and the Unixy Terminal, I feel confident it will remain productive for me. I don’t really care about running mobile apps on desktop, but I also don’t really care about changes to window toolbars and aesthetics either. I learned MacOS once; I’m confident I can learn the 10% that is different from release to release.

anthk 5y ago
Plan9/9front has a "desktop" too. And it's regarded as Unix 2.0. Acme is an editor/terminal on steroids.

druidsbane 5y ago

I don't want unification so much as the ability to run full macOS off of my phone when docked to a display. It is a simple request on the face of it and Apple is about the experience and hiding complexity, so even if it is hard to implement, once the hardware is capable (and it has been for a while) this is arguably a very nice feature to have for many.

blacktriangle 5y ago

I absolutely do not and this unification trend has pushed me to finally spin up a separate BSD desktop and keep OS X around solely for iOS development. I was so optimistic when the iPad launched with iOS. It made sense that a tablet running a very limited OS would make the perfect user-facing device that could potentially free up OSX to evolve in a more developer/power user direction, since you could now offload the general purpose users to iOS. Instead the opposite has happened and macOS has evovled closer to iOS, thus causing me to lose all hope in the future of the macOS platform. C'est la vie.

runawaybottle 5y ago

Unification is important for developers to dog food. The average “consumer” (us versus them) will be integrated into this design system. They will expect UI behavior across the apple ecosystem to be homogeneous. If we as developers do not take part in this and dog food the universal OS, we will be blind to all the problems users are facing, and be unable to innovate in this marketplace. If you want to sell to users, use what they use.

runawaybottle 5y ago
For the dick face that down voted me, explain why.