5 ms·

> What is happening here is Apple is unifying their product lines. Who asked for this? What do the end users have to gain from this? So far, I've seen the macO

> What is happening here is Apple is unifying their product lines. Who asked for this? What do the end users have to gain from this? So far, I've seen the macOS design steadily regress for no good reason whatsoever. The new settings app in particular is a disaster. Not only is it a UI that scrolls, a big no-no in desktop UI design, it also severely lacks affordances, and the hierarchy of the settings themselves feels rather arbitrary. What I've seen of macOS Tahoe goes even further with this touchscreenification. I've never used an iPhone as my main phone and never owned an iPad so I don't feel qualified to speak about them. I've also never seen a Vision Pro in person, but I treat it as a cool tech demo that solves no real practical problems. So far, VR has been mostly used for gaming, but Apple doesn't seem very interested in that use case.

dham 1y ago
It's obvious iOS will become the desktop OS in the next 5 years or so. I've been worried since Lion that MacOS will become iOS, but with the recent changes on iPad it's clear the opposite will happen. That's why I'm getting out now. MacOS has been going downhill anyway. It still has no great way to manage windows or workspaces. It doesn't have tiling built in or even a clipboard manager. The only way to make the OS usable is turn on accessibility reduce motion, but that still doesn't allow multiple workspaces to be usable.
- grishka 1y ago
  > It's obvious iOS will become the desktop OS in the next 5 years or so Again, who asked for this?
  - zapzupnz 1y ago
    Not only who asked for it, but who believes it? This tired line has been the same drum for well over a decade with no proper evidence to support it other than “tHeY lOoK tEh sAmE”.
    - grishka 1y ago
      All desktop OSes are getting rid of desktop design patterns in favor of touch ones for some stupid reason. At least for Windows it can be explained by the fact that Microsoft is very desperate about putting touchscreens into everything that runs Windows. But for macOS there is no such explanation because there are no touchscreen Macs.
      - zapzupnz 1y ago
        And yet macOS Tahoe reverses a lot of "getting rid of desktop design patterns", such as Launch Pad (which emulates the iPadOS home screen) being replaced by a more generic list of apps using the same interface as Spotlight. Again, I think what people see as "getting rid of desktop design patterns" in macOS is mostly aesthetic. Mac apps remain Mac apps, they retain all the aspects of their interfaces that make them Mac apps. More evidence in the way iPadOS 26 adopts certain aspects of the macOS interface, but does them in an iPadOS-oriented way that you wouldn't really say the two OS are converging, more that they're doing really weird impressions of each other — but underneath the grease paint, the same actors as always remain, each with their strengths. (In saying that, System Settings is an abomination)
        grishka 1y ago
        > Again, I think what people see as "getting rid of desktop design patterns" in macOS is mostly aesthetic. Have you seen the settings in the new Xcode? This iPad-ass crap keeps infesting various apps. Overall, the current Apple seems to be very scared to lay things out in two dimensions. Every new UI they build and almost every old UI they redesign is just a sad vertical stack of stuff. The combined title bars and toolbars that were introduced in Big Sur are not an aesthetic change. It's a very visible downgrade. Tahoe further downgrades that by removing the bottom border of that top bar. > such as Launch Pad (which emulates the iPadOS home screen) being replaced by a more generic list of apps using the same interface as Spotlight That is a welcome change. But that's about the only one. They also made the alerts denser, reverting part of the Big Sur redesign, but, again, because they are so afraid of horizontal layout, the icon is just awkwardly above the text instead of to the left.
- adastra22 1y ago
  > It's obvious iOS will become the desktop OS in the next 5 years or so. It is obvious that Apple is moving in that direction. I have never met a single person who actually wants this, however.
Fluorescence 1y ago
> UI that scrolls, a big no-no in desktop UI design Is it? I like a UI without a minimum screen size. I am livid when I can't use a fixed-size-settings dialogue because a driver/monitor is misbehaving so I'm at min resolution. The sort of issue where you have to find another machine so you can "count tabs" for keyboard navigation to get at things off-screen. Many other cases: e.g. I like to use VMs or RDP in small windows. I also like to resize a settings window into something tiny or tiling it when doing something I need to do toggle something back and forth. I agree it's bad if it's a long list of barely related things you have to scan each time to find what you want. The "categorised scroller" type dialogue vscode uses for settings in in theory the best of both worlds... but I keep finding myself accidentally scrolling beyond my intended category causing myself much confusion.
- grishka 1y ago
  The right way is to design your dialogs such that they fit into the minimum screen resolution that the OS runs at. Some of the Windows ones are optimized for 640x480 because that's what the basic VGA driver runs at. If I remember correctly, macOS requires either 800x600 or 1024x768.
  - int_19h 1y ago
    640x480 was the minimum resolution in Win95 days. It was upped to 800x600 in WinXP, I think? And more recently, to 720p in Win11.

dham 1y ago

It's obvious iOS will become the desktop OS in the next 5 years or so. I've been worried since Lion that MacOS will become iOS, but with the recent changes on iPad it's clear the opposite will happen. That's why I'm getting out now. MacOS has been going downhill anyway. It still has no great way to manage windows or workspaces. It doesn't have tiling built in or even a clipboard manager. The only way to make the OS usable is turn on accessibility reduce motion, but that still doesn't allow multiple workspaces to be usable.

grishka 1y ago
> It's obvious iOS will become the desktop OS in the next 5 years or so Again, who asked for this?
- zapzupnz 1y ago
  Not only who asked for it, but who believes it? This tired line has been the same drum for well over a decade with no proper evidence to support it other than “tHeY lOoK tEh sAmE”.
  - grishka 1y ago
    All desktop OSes are getting rid of desktop design patterns in favor of touch ones for some stupid reason. At least for Windows it can be explained by the fact that Microsoft is very desperate about putting touchscreens into everything that runs Windows. But for macOS there is no such explanation because there are no touchscreen Macs.
    - zapzupnz 1y ago
      And yet macOS Tahoe reverses a lot of "getting rid of desktop design patterns", such as Launch Pad (which emulates the iPadOS home screen) being replaced by a more generic list of apps using the same interface as Spotlight. Again, I think what people see as "getting rid of desktop design patterns" in macOS is mostly aesthetic. Mac apps remain Mac apps, they retain all the aspects of their interfaces that make them Mac apps. More evidence in the way iPadOS 26 adopts certain aspects of the macOS interface, but does them in an iPadOS-oriented way that you wouldn't really say the two OS are converging, more that they're doing really weird impressions of each other — but underneath the grease paint, the same actors as always remain, each with their strengths. (In saying that, System Settings is an abomination)
      - grishka 1y ago
        > Again, I think what people see as "getting rid of desktop design patterns" in macOS is mostly aesthetic. Have you seen the settings in the new Xcode? This iPad-ass crap keeps infesting various apps. Overall, the current Apple seems to be very scared to lay things out in two dimensions. Every new UI they build and almost every old UI they redesign is just a sad vertical stack of stuff. The combined title bars and toolbars that were introduced in Big Sur are not an aesthetic change. It's a very visible downgrade. Tahoe further downgrades that by removing the bottom border of that top bar. > such as Launch Pad (which emulates the iPadOS home screen) being replaced by a more generic list of apps using the same interface as Spotlight That is a welcome change. But that's about the only one. They also made the alerts denser, reverting part of the Big Sur redesign, but, again, because they are so afraid of horizontal layout, the icon is just awkwardly above the text instead of to the left.
adastra22 1y ago
> It's obvious iOS will become the desktop OS in the next 5 years or so. It is obvious that Apple is moving in that direction. I have never met a single person who actually wants this, however.

Fluorescence 1y ago

> UI that scrolls, a big no-no in desktop UI design Is it? I like a UI without a minimum screen size. I am livid when I can't use a fixed-size-settings dialogue because a driver/monitor is misbehaving so I'm at min resolution. The sort of issue where you have to find another machine so you can "count tabs" for keyboard navigation to get at things off-screen. Many other cases: e.g. I like to use VMs or RDP in small windows. I also like to resize a settings window into something tiny or tiling it when doing something I need to do toggle something back and forth. I agree it's bad if it's a long list of barely related things you have to scan each time to find what you want. The "categorised scroller" type dialogue vscode uses for settings in in theory the best of both worlds... but I keep finding myself accidentally scrolling beyond my intended category causing myself much confusion.

grishka 1y ago
The right way is to design your dialogs such that they fit into the minimum screen resolution that the OS runs at. Some of the Windows ones are optimized for 640x480 because that's what the basic VGA driver runs at. If I remember correctly, macOS requires either 800x600 or 1024x768.
- int_19h 1y ago
  640x480 was the minimum resolution in Win95 days. It was upped to 800x600 in WinXP, I think? And more recently, to 720p in Win11.