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Comment by perardi | Hacker News Reader

I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: I don’t think macOS/Mac OS has added much in the way of UI enhancements for desktop usage since 10.6.

And by desktop usage, I mean, literally, using a computer on a desk with a mouse and keyboard.

They have absolutely made some nice enhancements when using a laptop with a trackpad. And obviously there’s many under-the-hood improvements. But in terms of old-school I-have-a-mouse grey-beard users like me? Meh.

This, of course, makes sense as a priority, given they sell so so many laptops.

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It is a little disappointing seeing the utilities folder populated with the same dusty apps they were 20 years ago. I don't want them to go away—I want new stuff. Give me features and more tooling without feeling like something is being taken away in the process.

I found it weird they removed the network utility app. Doesn't seem like a complicated app to keep up to date.

Sure, you can still use the terminal commands but it was nice to use a gui.

https://www.macrumors.com/2020/06/23/network-utility-depreca...

It works if you copy the Catalina version of Network Utility over to Big Sur.

They added a lot of features in 10.7/8 that I really like. Autosave is the biggest one for me—particularly alongside the integrated revision history—and notification center is super convenient. Remember when everything had to use Growl?

I would agree with you if we were talking about 10.9, though.

Growl was excellent. Nearly every decent app used it (besides there weren’t restriction on only App Store apps being able to leverage it) and it allowed the user far more customixability in terms of look and feel and persistence, etc.

> Remember when everything had to use Growl?

And yet Steam and Microsoft Teams still roll their own notifications, for some reason.

Steam rolls their own everything. Controllers don't work right for apps launched from steam unless you enable the overlay, if you launch outside of Steam they work perfectly. They even seem to roll their own window management as on Linux if you mark a chat as "always on top", then focus another steam window that is partially under it it and click on the overlapped area it handles the click with the window that isn't focused. They also had huge issues with mapping clicks on hidpi setups but I think those are mostly fixed now.

There's been a bunch of quality of life improvements over the years. Dark mode, file renaming by clicking the window title, Mission Control is more feature rich than Exposé, Desktop Stacks, native notifications come to mind. There's been a lot of practical security improvements too, with the permissions system and FileVault full disk encryption. By nearly all accounts APFS is a much better file system than HFS.

There's a lot to be said for Snow Leopard's simplicity and refined design, and plenty to complain about in Big Sur. But there have certainly been some improvements over the past 10 years. Even for grey beards, I'd say.

Maybe it was just me, but there was a lot of talk and excitement that the desktop metaphor and WIMP had kind of plateaued and something new might happen. There were a lot of interesting things tried, but the new UIs for smartphones were the only things that caught on. The desktop kind of stopped changing.

Magic Mouse 2 is where the real improvement is. It's a joy to use, even though it's sharp edges really suck for prolonged use. Hopefully they fix that in the next iteration, also it's a bit too heavy.

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