Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
POLL: Is Yosemite UGLY or NOT?
- Thread starter MagnusVonMagnum
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
Poll: first impressions of OS X Yosemite (more than ten thousand votes)
This poll of MacRumors readers (registered users) is:
Off-topic from this GUI poll: there's plenty of praise for features and functionality, so I expect the 9to5Mac poll to show less disappointment than is shown in this poll.
This poll of MacRumors readers (registered users) is:
- about the GUI
- not about features.
Off-topic from this GUI poll: there's plenty of praise for features and functionality, so I expect the 9to5Mac poll to show less disappointment than is shown in this poll.
Plain white buttons don't really do it for me. Neither do plain, flat checkboxes and radio buttons. The UI of previous versions seemed richer.
This is interaction but I dislike that you click in the upper-left corner for Spotlight and then have to move to the center of the screen to select your search result. I really don't like making the green "+" Maximize instead of Zoom... Mavericks has a solution for both Zoom & Maximize that was never a distraction. At least an option to reverse the behavior so Zoom is the default would be quite nice. Changes like these piss me off. With Linux you're never locked into such a change. If they're going to make OS X behave like Windows, then why not offer options to change things too?
This is interaction but I dislike that you click in the upper-left corner for Spotlight and then have to move to the center of the screen to select your search result. I really don't like making the green "+" Maximize instead of Zoom... Mavericks has a solution for both Zoom & Maximize that was never a distraction. At least an option to reverse the behavior so Zoom is the default would be quite nice. Changes like these piss me off. With Linux you're never locked into such a change. If they're going to make OS X behave like Windows, then why not offer options to change things too?
Last edited:
If recent Tim Cook interview is any indication, I guess he mutated Steve Jobs' DNA foundation...
Ugly, no but needs work
Its not ugly by any means, but the dark mode has a long way to go, but its only in beta, so ill wait for the final release to pass my judgement
Its not ugly by any means, but the dark mode has a long way to go, but its only in beta, so ill wait for the final release to pass my judgement
People who hate it are definitely some of the louder people on these forums but it looks like most people think it looks awesome, and I would include myself in that category. I absolutely love the new look in Yosemite, even though I still fervently believe that they should have named it OS X Weed.
Yeahbutnobutyeahbutnobutyouvotedforuglierthanallsoyouruglytoobutyeah.
Most voters here think that pre-release Yosemite is 'prettier than all prior versions' of OS X.
If that phrase can be interpreted as 'looks awesome', then (with comparable exaggeration, and help from a thesaurus) someone might say:
- for one eighth of voters here, the appearance of Yosemite is atrocious, awful, execrable, lousy, pathetic, poor, rotten, terrible, vile or wretched.
More than ten percent of voters here think that pre-release Yosemite is uglier than all prior versions of OS X.
If the current percentages here can be multiplied by the the current number of voters in the 9to5Mac area, then 2,284 voters think that Yosemite is worse-looking than some of its predecessors; 1,264 voters think that it's the worst-looking OS X ever.
However – before the statisticians read the riot act – as I said earlier, I treat polls such as this as entertaining. Not conclusive; only me and thirty-nine other people think that pre-release Yosemite is the worst-looking OS X ever. Only one hundred and seventy people think that it looks awesome
I've noticed that a number of several of Apple's more senior engineers that apparently disagree with Jonathan Ive end up getting fired. I have to wonder whether this "improvement" known as Yosemite has anything to do with quality and is instead tied completely to one man's enormous ego.
It's comments like this that make me ashamed to be a member of the same species.
I doubt "enlightened" will be a term used to describe the human race as a whole any time soon.
Yes, it's hard for me to take comments seriously when they associate "love" for something in the same breath as "weed". OS X Weed??? WTF....
I've come to the conclusion I no longer care what the "masses" think about anything. I'm happy to be in the minority. The masses love Windows too. Since when does that mean anything good? The masses have bad taste in movies or else garbage like the "Transformers" Michael Bay movies wouldn't be so damn popular. That was probably why Apple was better off with Steve Jobs running it. He didn't give a crap what the masses liked. He did what he thought was cool. I used to think that was a liability. I'm now seeing with Yosemite that it was probably a good thing because I can't imagine the late Mr. Jobs thinking flat single tone buttons ever being as "cool" as the Aqua ones that he seemed pretty excited about back at the turn of the century. In other words, "flat and boring" shouldn't be the new "cool".
Look at those poll results for features mentioned above. Like 80% are impressed or blown away by Yosemite. Blown away? By WHAT? It doesn't do anything that amazing. Continuity? It's neat, but "blown away?" WTF are people smoking? Weed I guess. It makes everything seem cool, amazing and blows you away. OMG, that is like the BEST bologna sandwich I've EVER HAD!!!!! DUDE!!!!!!!!!!
It's comments like this that make me ashamed to be a member of the same species.
I doubt "enlightened" will be a term used to describe the human race as a whole any time soon.
Glad you can't notice an obvious intentionally juvenile jokes when you see one.
Have a nice day.
Very wise attitude. Took you that long to realise this?
... but here is where you logic crumbles. Even if you happen to be the minority, it does not automatically mean that you are right. And if you can't see anything impressive about Yosemite's design or features, then it does not mean that its not there.
Honestly, when I read the juvenile statement I didn't realise that it was intended as a joke. (In this topic there are, I suspect, some posts that are simply juvenile (in a bad way) it becomes difficult to recognise a joke when one is made.)
Well, I'm waiting to hear what is "blowing away" people in Yosemite. I mean there's a difference between "somewhat impressed" or whatever and "blown away" IMO. I see a few new features, but nothing spectacular.
Frankly, I'd still settle just to get a separate dock on the 2nd monitor or even a "migrating" dock for people that use the SIDE mounted dock. That's RIDICULOUS that they didn't take that into account in the first place. Does Apple think people with side docks don't matter? It's not like people (including myself) didn't give them feedback to point it out in case they truly had their heads up their own arses. My theory is ALL feedback goes straight to the bit-bucket. Apple doesn't care if OS X doesn't work right. It would take them 5 minutes to fix the token issues for the machine going to sleep when using NFS. They don't care or they would have fixed it. I ONCE got a reply about iTunes crashing with the PPC version and it must have been a different person/department because a real person contacted me and told me they were on it and it was fixed the next release within a couple of weeks. I thought I hit the lottery.
only me and thirty-nine other people here think that pre-release Yosemite is the worst-looking OS X ever
In the words of someone at Apple, concerning reported problems with the UI (and something more specific): "You are not alone ". More than that I'll not quote, suffice to say: it's no laughing matter.
Yosemite aside for a moment, The Muppets are funny
I've monitored stats on Yosemite for a while. The disgruntlement rate (as in I hate Yosemite) seems to be about 20% across the boards.
Decades ago, in the late '80s the Open Software Foundation was founded. After doing research on how to do GUI's, they came up with guidelines. For example, a control was supposed to look like some type of actual control. Unix vendors agreed with it, Microsoft agreed with it, and Apple agreed with it. Hence you have 3-D effects on buttons, title bars, etc. It segregates control from content and it's intuitive. A control actually looks like a control.
Enter Jonathan Ive and the "Flat look" a few decades later. On an iPhone a control may or may not look like a control. It may be essentially little more, at least on an iPhone, what's the the equivalent of a hyperlink - God help you if the content being viewed is using text and colors similar if not identical to that of this new "state of the art" control. With Yosemite you have inconsistent symbols with no indication that they're controls, or controls on flat white buttons that really aren't clear to anyone unless they're familiar with the previous products (like Safari) that used them. To users unfamiliar with Safari or any of the typical Apple applications and utilities included with the OS, this will seem confusing, and it will not encourage sales. Apple will lose a fair amount of (I'd guess 10%) their existing base while simultaneously failing to attract new customers.
Jonathan Ive is probably brilliant at designing static objects, like the cases that encompass the computer system. How often do you here anyone say the Mac's are "butt ugly?" Rarely, if ever. However, in my opinion, he has no clue about designing operating system UI's that require interaction - no clue at all. It's sort of like a hospital that had a brilliant plastic surgeon that could reshape a face disfigured in an accident into one where there's no trace the accident occurred and deciding he's so good at that then surely he can handle all the cardiac care surgery. A plastic surgeon is not a cardiac surgeon, and a hardware designer is not a UI designer. They're two different things, and Apple an Jonathan Ive don't seem to know the difference.
A 20% "disgruntlement" rate is waaaaaaay too high if Apple expects to maintain its already meager worldwide percentage of computer users.
Decades ago, in the late '80s the Open Software Foundation was founded. After doing research on how to do GUI's, they came up with guidelines. For example, a control was supposed to look like some type of actual control. Unix vendors agreed with it, Microsoft agreed with it, and Apple agreed with it. Hence you have 3-D effects on buttons, title bars, etc. It segregates control from content and it's intuitive. A control actually looks like a control.
Enter Jonathan Ive and the "Flat look" a few decades later. On an iPhone a control may or may not look like a control. It may be essentially little more, at least on an iPhone, what's the the equivalent of a hyperlink - God help you if the content being viewed is using text and colors similar if not identical to that of this new "state of the art" control. With Yosemite you have inconsistent symbols with no indication that they're controls, or controls on flat white buttons that really aren't clear to anyone unless they're familiar with the previous products (like Safari) that used them. To users unfamiliar with Safari or any of the typical Apple applications and utilities included with the OS, this will seem confusing, and it will not encourage sales. Apple will lose a fair amount of (I'd guess 10%) their existing base while simultaneously failing to attract new customers.
Jonathan Ive is probably brilliant at designing static objects, like the cases that encompass the computer system. How often do you here anyone say the Mac's are "butt ugly?" Rarely, if ever. However, in my opinion, he has no clue about designing operating system UI's that require interaction - no clue at all. It's sort of like a hospital that had a brilliant plastic surgeon that could reshape a face disfigured in an accident into one where there's no trace the accident occurred and deciding he's so good at that then surely he can handle all the cardiac care surgery. A plastic surgeon is not a cardiac surgeon, and a hardware designer is not a UI designer. They're two different things, and Apple an Jonathan Ive don't seem to know the difference.
A 20% "disgruntlement" rate is waaaaaaay too high if Apple expects to maintain its already meager worldwide percentage of computer users.
Your post is nothing more than one persons guess, and nothing more. You are basing the 10% and 20% from where actually ? From those that don't like it from a few members on a forum out of god only knows how many millions will have this OS in the near future. We get from some time to time these types of posts of gloom, and doom for Apple all the time. Some day you will learn this. Your rant will go by way of the black hole as others have.
Last edited:
Nice post. I used OSF Motif, now that was mind blowing. I can't agree more that a control should look like a control.
To add insult to injury, seems the new trend here is not only making controls mute, but making them cryptic. For example, in the Safari title bar, horizontal lines are the Reader, and in Systems Preferences, Show All is a square with dots in it. Now that's intuitive... doh.
Personally, I don't really care to play guessing games with the machine, functions should be obvious.
Will Apple will continue to be successful, sure. Most consumers don't really know or care, the decision is purely visceral.
Last edited:
My observations are similar to his, but I would tend to say it pushes higher, probably a dissatisfaction rate of 30%. Discussions about it's appearance are by no means limited to MacRumors and by no means rare.
If Apple makes a careless decision that alienates its users it's likely going to lose some business.
For example, we used to use the Notes.app on all our company iPhones. We basically had a server setup that could broadcast formatted Notes with assignments and people could sync them via iTunes.
Enter iOS 7 with the glaring white Notes.app that looks more like an old Windows 1.0 clipboard than anything else. Enter also the inability to use iTunes to sync and instead force users onto iCloud or switch to imap as the only means to sync notes. We have security concerns so iCloud was out. We could probably work around that if needed but people were also having a degree of difficulty seeing the "improved" Notes.app.
What you're seeing is an example of how Apple lost business. iPhones and iPads are now out for us. We won't even consider them in house any longer. This is real and it happens. When a company makes radical and unrequested changes to a product, they should naturally expect to lose a percentage of customers.
iPhones aren't computers and the two shouldn't be confused. The user interface is much more important on a computer than an iPhone because nearly 100% of an iPhones screen is content, but that isn't the case with a computer.
If this "improved" design is offending people, as time passes they're going to lose customers. Period.
Doom? I did not read that into FrtzPeter's post.
Rant? I think not. There was not one word shouted, not one exclamation mark.
ABC5S, I suspect that you're over-reacting to opinion.
More than likely. Some loss of business will be certain. (I do not imagine that the percentage of loss will be comparable to the percentage of users who are dissatisfied.)
Business … and more. The Yosemite experience has severely dented my approach to testing for Apple, and I think that it will take years for that dent to be properly worked out.
And more … media and public perceptions of changes in attitude towards a company that once had a cult-like following, and that following was almost entirely positive. If Apple makes some 'cult members' feel as if they're being pissed on, those members are not likely to hang around for long. Some might rebel.
+1
Before Yosemite was even created I remember thinking how out-dated Mavericks even looked.
Everything prior to Yosemite had a "2002ish" design and build to it. And that metal gimmick, blehhhh.
Everything prior to Yosemite had a "2002ish" design and build to it. And that metal gimmick, blehhhh.