After going in depth with iOS 14 earlier this week, today we focus on macOS Big Sur. The biggest takeaway from my hands-on time with the follow up to macOS Catalina is that Apple’s latest OS is clearly being designed with the future in mind.
Although it’s unmistakably Mac, Big Sur is a departure from previous versions of macOS in terms of aesthetics. Everything, from the dock, to the menu bar, to window chrome, icons, and even sounds have been updated.
A good overview of the many, many changes in Big Sur.
Interesting sidenote: with both Windows and macOS now heavily catering towards touch use, this leaves Linux – and most of the smaller platforms, like the Amiga or Haiku – as one of the last remaining places with graphical user interfaces designed 100% towards mouse input.
Big buttons, lots spacing, lots of wasted space – it’s coming to your Mac.
Oh, I don’t know. I always thought that the Gnome house style was “Big buttons, lots spacing, lots of wasted space” and at least some sort of ideal of touch interfaces. Even if it doesn’t actually work that way.
I now use Dash-to-panel on GNOME 3 and I changed the alt-tab behavior with that I’m happy with GNOME 3.
While I welcome the visual changes to MacOS, I’m more interested in what’s going on under the hood. e.g. What’s new in Darwin 20? There’s not a lot in this video that can’t be found from Apple.com.
If you watch the video in-depth, you’ll see most controls – buttons, checkboxes, etc. – are still very clearly mouse-size and not suitable for touch. Thom’s assessment is rather hyperbolic (nothing new there).
I continue to be impressed by the sheer number of features and apps Apple delivers with macOS with a high level of polish. Admittedly, a lot of the new/newly enhanced ones such as Apple Arcade and Messages aren’t really that enticing to me personally, but when you take into account GarageBand, Photos (which can now edit and apply filters to videos), iMovie, Automator, Dictionary, and the extensive customization options for that are hidden away in System Preferences – it’s clear that Apple still knows its audience – a combination of folks who want a “just works” computer, and professional software developers and creative professionals who demand the ability to tweak everything. It’s obviously not as customizable as Linux, but I find that macOS finds the right balance for me of providing choice and limiting it – and in rare cases where they don’t have their shit together so much (AHEM window tiling) there are cheap third-party options (BetterSnapTool) to fill the gap. Watching this new features video reaffirmed for me that macOS, despite the cosmetic changes, will continue to make users such as myself feel warm, fuzzy and at home.