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Comment by pornel | Hacker News Reader

Design of macOS since BigSur took such a nosedive.

Buttons are flat text that doesn't look clickable, with the best case of having a very faint border, sometimes only on hover. There are multiple ad-hoc checkbox replacements. There's a jarring cacophony of old macOS and new iPadOS UI elements — old UI elements with small fonts, small padding, and teeensy disclosure indicators share the screen with big fat round blobs lazily transplanted from a touch screen OS. Some elements react to hover, some don't. Some can only be discovered by hovering mouse in a specific location. Menus have varying heights, and varying padding.

Such unpolished inconsistent details used to be a tell-tale of non-native UI toolkits, or skins for other OSes faking a Mac OS X look. Now macOS looks like a hasty unfinished reskin of iPadOS ;(

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Agreed. And the poor Settings app. They butchered its soul. I’m sad every time I have to interact with it.

I much prefer it, fwiw. Since MacOS apps have their settings in-app, I rarely use Settings.app and so I could never remember where to find things in the 2D grid of the old app. Now things are much more discoverable, since it’s a 1D layout that I scroll linearly. Even more so because there’s somewhat of a correspondence with iOS, whose Settings.app I use all the time (since iOS apps don’t have settings in-app). I say this as someone who has used macOS for almost 20 years.

I agree. The new settings app is one of few places where new design/reorganisation is actually better and people are annoyed just because of broken habits. Whats really bad though is how individual settings in the app are gradualy disappearing.

I never even try to find things in the 2D grid of the old System Preferences app. I just use Spotlight, or any number of Spotlight replacements that support searching for prefPanes. I say this as someone who has used macOS for almost but less than 20 years: perhaps my first introduction to OS X was Tiger so I'm more accustomed to Spotlight?

I'd say it goes back even further; the Yosemite UI wasn't really good either. The buttons ended up looking so boring with all gradients stripped out.

To me, it seems like the spirit of Jony Ive is still around. Seriously, you should email Craig Federighi about this with (any links to) criticisms or images showing comparisons. Sometimes Apple takes action only when people high up are alerted.

There's an accessibility setting to show button borders in toolbars. I turned it on the day I got my current Mac and now keep forgetting that it's not the default.

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