The general trend of macOS releases over the past few years is that it has been moving closer and closer to the look and feel of iOS. The icons have become iOS icons, and their shape has become the iOS shape, and you can now use your iPhone as the Mac’s webcam, etc. etc. This occasionally comes at the expense of other functionality (ask me how I feel about the new Settings menu), but it is the direction that Apple has clearly been heading in since (arguably) Big Sur. Every so often, other splashy features are announced (Stage Manager, Universal Control, Quick Notes) that I write a lot about and then never end up using ever again.
So, good news for Continuity fans: that’s basically what’s going on with Sonoma. Ventura looked a heck of a lot like iOS, and Sonoma looks even more like iOS. I turned my office’s Mac Studio on after installing the developer beta and thought, for a second, that I might be hallucinating my iPhone’s lockscreen. It’s remarkably reminiscent.
It’s crazy how Microsoft always seems to be doing things about 10 years before everyone else catches on, for better or worse. I’m not a fan of the iOS look, and it looks whacky and childish to me when ported to the Mac – especially since macOS has also become almost Windows-like by having so many application frameworks, some from iOS, some from macOS, and some a weird combination of the two.
It’s making macOS far messier and more inconsistent than it used to be, leaving the Linux desktop as the last bastion of people who value a dekstop-first, consistent interface. If you told me this 10-15 years ago, I’d have called you crazy, but we’re now living in a world where a GTK or QT desktop is far more consistent and focused on the desktop than Windows and macOS, which both feel lost in the woods at the moment.
GNOME 3 is doing it for a decade now too. KDE is the remaining big traditional desktop environment. And we can say the same for a lot of smaller ones too.
“ but we’re now living in a world where a GTK or QT desktop is far more consistent and focused on the desktop than Windows and macOS,”
Mixing QT *and* GTK is far more consistent
Is this some kind of joke? Gnome 3 tossed a perfectly functional desktop for a faux-tablet interface, libadwaita doesn’t obey themes or dark mode, and then there is the whole Qt versus Gtk thing with each having its own human interface guidelines.
Yeah, I wouldn’t go as far as Thom did. Both KDE and Gnome have tabletized their interfaces to a certain degree. I think Windows is right now the most desktop oriented. I haven’t used a modern version of Mac in a while. Though, I am considering moving back to Mac as a stable base to run Virtual machines. I need something to replace my Nuc’s and the quality I got from the non intels was pretty aweful with unreplaceable components failing with in a year. Mac mini seems like a good choice, with some offloading of some Vm’s to the cloud.
It has to be a joke. And even sticking with Mate Desktop, it’s getting harder and harder to keep that consistency especially because of the intentional breakage. 🙁
It’s all fun and games until it’s mandatory to pay Apple their 30% vig on all money you make on their platform, just like iOS.
Ding ding ding. That’s exactly where it’s going,.
There is a little obstacle to this: Adobe. Adobe isn’t going to give Apple 30% of it’s revenue, they’d much rather not support the first version MacOS that does this (thus making old Macs more valuable and new Macs undesirable).
I have never seen an uglier version of MacOS in my life. The high point of OSX was when leopard came out. Jobs said that as a design goal “It should almost feel lickable” and it was gorgeous.
I also really liked the Platinum look of os8 and os9, but it was very inconsistent and even apple programs like itunes and sherlock looked out of place.
Apple is moving towards unifying the Mac, iPhone, and iPad user experience.
That is going to piss off some of the old timers, who are used to a specific desktop experience. But since they are now the minority, Apple is going where the vast majority of their revenue is coming from: the “i” side of things. Such is life.
Haven’t been in the MacOS world long enough to notice. Maybe because I am still diehard Android-centric has hidden that from me. I generally try to keep my desktop and mobile experiences separate. _Some_ integration is good, but not in totality. I don’t even have Windows configured to use Phone Link any more.
Almost every app I use on macOS is just an Electron wrapped website on desktop. This idea that there will or even should be a consistent UI framework is just whacky. App designers don’t want that. Developers don’t want that. Users think they want that, until everything is drowning in sameness. Just look at the boring stagnant browser landscape, and the popularity of something like Arc. People don’t want everything to be the same. Variety is the spice of life.