Why is Big Sur so ugly?

[fisherking]

And that is where you are again, totally wrong. Apple, like any company selling a product, is answerable to those who purchase (or do not) purchase that product. If everyone just went with your idea of not raising complaints about anything, Apple would wrongfully believe everyone just loves their new paradigms, when in fact they're generally much maligned. Your "fact" is actually a blatant lie which you are attempting to use, as you have done all through this thread, to silence opposition.

I don't see any people taking "endless screenshots of minute details" or "pointing arrows at half-point size flaws", this thread is actually full of giant glaring flaws, omissions, and defects in the UI.

ha, yes. apple always bases it next move on what the public wants.

we wish we lived in that universe. meanwhile, remember, we're discussing (mostly) opinions here, not facts. opinions about the GUI. yes,there are also some small issues, that (hopefully) will be resolved over the coming updates (as has happened in the pre-release beta cycle). but none of it keeps you from working, and lots of people are happy with the new look, or content enough, or... a bit of everything. so, am not, in fact, totally wrong. not at all...

 

[zakarhino]

My biggest issue with it is that they prioritized aesthetics over functionality. "We gave everything a bit more room" or something to that effect was uttered by Craig during the keynote... that was the moment I realized it would be a clusterf***. Giving everything more room and rounding everything means more wasted pixels and less content on the screen.

 

[Kyanar]

ha, yes. apple always bases it next move on what the public wants.

we wish we lived in that universe. meanwhile, remember, we're discussing (mostly) opinions here, not facts. opinions about the GUI. yes,there are also some small issues, that (hopefully) will be resolved over the coming updates (as has happened in the pre-release beta cycle). but none of it keeps you from working, and lots of people are happy with the new look, or content enough, or... a bit of everything. so, am not, in fact, totally wrong. not at all...

Actually, yes, it does base its next move on what it believes the public wants. Which is why people like you trying to stifle criticism are so annoying, because in your ideal world, everyone just takes what Apple does and says "please sir, may I have some more".

This thread has opinions like all discussions, which you seem to think people should just stop having if it disagrees with Apple, but it also raises quite a lot of issues. Quite a few of them are not "small issues", in fact being giant glaring issues. Dialog boxes, for example, should not randomly slice off half the text. I have a menu bar item that I don't know what it is because its invisible, but still taking up space. Support for an entire network filesystem is broken for crying out loud!

So yes, you are totally wrong. Not about your opinions, but that people should just shut up about it and quit "whining" as you put it.

 

[zakarhino]

I am sorry, but work under-the-hood is just long-term maintenance of the product, which is necessary to move forward, but it has nothing to do with new features. I do appreciate that, but still I miss new features. All I get is few hundreds of new emojis every release.

Or... let me put it other way around, I miss features that used to be there e.g. CUDA, that was deliberately killed by both Apple and NVIDIA because they don't like each other (how professional is that?), Aperture that was killed by Apple and replaced by dumbed down Photos that "just works", i.e. you cannot check size on disk of your albums, you cannot keep certain albums on separate (offline) storage, it occasionally sucks all your CPU to do face detection and you cannot control it.

I think with your admiration to Apple (NOTE: I used to be admirer too), you simply fail to recognize that with each new release of macOS you get more and more stripped down and locked down OS that has one goal - drive the sales of new expensive Macs. Apple used to embrace open-source technologies, support open standards such as OpenCL or OpenGL. Nowadays they replace all of them with proprietary technologies.

With all the money they have they are not even trying to revolutionize the PC market, compete with Chromebooks, Windows nor Linux. All they are interested are the maximum profits from selling their computers at highest possible price. $699 is the cheapest computer you can get from Apple. Their laptops start at $999. And everything is soldered, there's no upgradability. Because apparently "magic" is all Mac consumers need these days and that "magic" solder will make you buy new machine sooner than later. And anyone that thinks or feels otherwise can move to Windows or Linux.


Apple would be certainly happy seeing this.

Amen. It's a relief to witness some sense on this forum when so many people seemingly eat up the marketing for lunch and fail to criticize some of the anti consumer choices Apple has been making over the years.

 

[zakarhino]

All of that pales in comparison to the sheer brokenness of the UI
View attachment 1670032

Yes, that's the whole dialog. Clipped text and all.

Look how much space is being wasted on just decoration and border radius, I can't believe people actually like this.

 

[fisherking]

Actually, yes, it does base its next move on what it believes the public wants. Which is why people like you trying to stifle criticism are so annoying, because in your ideal world, everyone just takes what Apple does and says "please sir, may I have some more".

This thread has opinions like all discussions, which you seem to think people should just stop having if it disagrees with Apple, but it also raises quite a lot of issues. Quite a few of them are not "small issues", in fact being giant glaring issues. Dialog boxes, for example, should not randomly slice off half the text. I have a menu bar item that I don't know what it is because its invisible, but still taking up space. Support for an entire network filesystem is broken for crying out loud!

So yes, you are totally wrong. Not about your opinions, but that people should just shut up about it and quit "whining" as you put it.

discussion is great, whining & ranting is pointless. and i stand by that. and if you believe that apple's moves are dictated by the public, that's fine... i prefer to live in the real world.

i have lots of issues with apple, with my mac. but i don't whine about it. anyway, we disagree, and that's ok. now i will go back to working on my mac, and enjoying the experience on big sur....

 

[zakarhino]

Big Sur and most of the latest macOS/iOS/tvOS releases are what happens when the people that build products don't actually use them themselves enough to figure out what works and what doesn't.

 

[ErikGrim]

It's how people who just were learning Photoshop in the early 2000's designed icons. It's super dated.

I mean, that's absolutely just not true. And the main function of an icon is to be easily recognisable in a lineup of other icons by shape (and secondarily colour).

 

[ErikGrim]

I can go one further. I remember when Flat UI design meant this:

View attachment 1670015

Or this:

View attachment 1670017

Or this:

View attachment 1670018

See why it makes no sense to call this regression of UI design 'modern?'

You really have to disengage your brain from thinking that low res pixel design from the 80s are in any way comparable to modern flat design.

 

[ErikGrim]

Here's the list of the things I hate with the new design


1. The window title is not symmetrical (see the gap on the right side).

View attachment 1669912

What is adding the key command on the right, because it's certainly not there by default?

 

[nickdalzell1]

You really have to disengage your brain from thinking that low res pixel design from the 80s are in any way comparable to modern flat design.

Doesn't change the fact it's as boring today as it was then. We have screens capable of rendering so much more and capable of so much more depth than we're seeing today. A regression is still a regression. In the 80s, it was due to hardware limitations. What's the excuse today? Our eyes see a 3-D world all around us. Skeuo for me was fun and made me want MORE. Flat just feels like work. I just want to send a text and make the screen go immediately dark. It's not fun anymore. I tend to frequent Google Assistant or Siri more to avoid even looking at it.

Of course, then you have apps that are bringing skeuo back, such as the latest Kindle app having a 3-D page turn animation. It's kinda a mixed bag. I really like how LG did the Stylo 5's UI. It's flat, similar to the LG G3, but it's not a Fisher-Price rainbow skittles interface. It's like a modern take on TouchWiz Nature UX, even down to the naturey sounds it has sprinkled about the interface. Unlike my Galaxy A01, which only allowed me to customize the ringtone, I was able to even get the LG to accept all the sounds from the Galaxy SII, including all notification, alarm, and various other tones, completing the set. I also prefer how it removed a ton of Android Pie's most annoying features, such as the clock positioning and limit of notifications. So, yes, there are SOME rare folks out there making decent flat UI designs, but it's not ever going to be nearly as neat to me as the previous skeuo.

 

[ErikGrim]

No. 3D representations of the real world on a 2D screen for the purposes of UX is visual noise.

 

[nickdalzell1]

I suppose you view AR as visual noise as well? I always thought skeuo was fun to interact with myself. Better looking too. Plus, could have paved way for a holographic UI, but we had to up and regress with no going back. It's like flat is never going away and that's just a boring future. We're stuck at stagnation and homogenization.

There were far nicer flat UIs in sci fi films/tv shows than we get here. LCARS, the UI on transparent LCDs seen in Oblivion, or the UI of various consoles in Stargate: Atlantis and Universe, and so on. Far more interesting than reality, which just imitates LeapPad devices too much. Like it's meant for kids.

Every app looks the same, there's zero differentiation anymore. It'd be nice to see some variety, some folks doing skeuo and some doing flat, and having actual choice, instead of OEMs dicating direction we'd have actual people using devices doing that. I guess I just miss never knowing what came next. I'd enjoy that radio app with tuning 'knobs' then open a notepad with a great paper texture, then a calendar with faux leather and it worked like the real thing, I was always wondering what fun was next, which app did the look even more fun. My eyes never felt strained, and it connected my real world with my digital one, instead of trying too hard to distance real from the digital. I especially loved TouchWiz, with the nature UX fitting perfectly in with my love of walking in the woods and hiking. Oh well, life goes on, I suppose.

 

[zakarhino]

Doesn't change the fact it's as boring today as it was then. We have screens capable of rendering so much more and capable of so much more depth than we're seeing today. A regression is still a regression. In the 80s, it was due to hardware limitations. What's the excuse today? Our eyes see a 3-D world all around us. Skeuo for me was fun and made me want MORE. Flat just feels like work. I just want to send a text and make the screen go immediately dark. It's not fun anymore. I tend to frequent Google Assistant or Siri more to avoid even looking at it.

Of course, then you have apps that are bringing skeuo back, such as the latest Kindle app having a 3-D page turn animation. It's kinda a mixed bag. I really like how LG did the Stylo 5's UI. It's flat, similar to the LG G3, but it's not a Fisher-Price rainbow skittles interface. It's like a modern take on TouchWiz Nature UX, even down to the naturey sounds it has sprinkled about the interface. Unlike my Galaxy A01, which only allowed me to customize the ringtone, I was able to even get the LG to accept all the sounds from the Galaxy SII, including all notification, alarm, and various other tones, completing the set. I also prefer how it removed a ton of Android Pie's most annoying features, such as the clock positioning and limit of notifications. So, yes, there are SOME rare folks out there making decent flat UI designs, but it's not ever going to be nearly as neat to me as the previous skeuo.

Not to mention one of the most important aspects of design that skeuo can do extremely well if executed correctly: it can teach you how an operating system/software works, what to click on, what to interact with, etc. Part of my indifference towards the "revolutionary" M1 chip is that the OS running on top of it is terrible and doesn't take advantage of that processing power at all.

The GUI was invented decades ago. The files/folders/siloed apps paradigm was invented well before that. All that's changed since then (for the most part) is someone's applied a fresh new coat of paint that as far as I'm concerned actually makes the OS less usable and slower.

 

[zakarhino]

You really have to disengage your brain from thinking that low res pixel design from the 80s are in any way comparable to modern flat design.

They are comparable, they function in almost the exact same way, one is just higher res and looks more "modern" than the other! Design encompasses usability and the underlying interaction paradigm, i.e, what the software does for you. In that sense, they are fundamentally identical in my opinion.

 

[nickdalzell1]

Exactly. Even without the fake textures or leather/game felt, you knew what was a button and what was not. You knew where the app ended and so on. You knew exactly how to work any app. The settings icon was ONE icon, a gear. Not a hamburger menu, ellipsis and a gear (why make three icons to mean settings when only one actually works?!)

A perfect set of examples were the phone dialer, and the music player. You knew exactly how to work them. Now, it's all blended in one layer and you have to guess what is what. I was really surprised how awful iOS 7 ran on my iPhone 4, because without all that fluff, it was very unusably slow. Where had my resources gone?

 

[Traverse]

Okay, so I never used the beta of Big Sur and could only form opinion based on screenshots. After using the system for a few days I think I've gotten used to it and even like it more than the Yosemite-era of macOS - though Mavericks was still my favorite from a design and usability standpoint.

Overall I find the new U.I. feels "lighter" and overall system responsiveness is better. Plus, I like the iOS style of widgets and notification grouping, though I which notification and widgets still had their own separate sections. It's definitely more approachable to the iOS-centric crowd.

I really only have the following feedback to Apple, which I've submitted through their feedback portal (unless it was a purely option item):

• I don't care for the shading/bevel on many of the icons, but I'll adjust I find I'm using magnification on the dock now to help identify icons which all share a similar shape. Not bad, just different.
• Overall font/legibility is reduced in some areas. I feel like they dialed back the font size in sidebars, menus, and some U.I. chrome and I find it a bit hard to see on a 27" iMac. I wish we had a system option to dial these up a bit.
• I wish we had an option less drastic than "Increase Contrast" to add button shapes. I don't like the idea that a single glyph acts as a button in a white toolbar. This is more preference that use-ability though.
• I wish there were options not to hide away so much of the U.I. On iOS it makes sense due to screen size, but on a large 27" iMac I'm annoyed that I don't at least have the option to show more content. A few examples:
  • Music: You have to hover the mouse to see the song time played/reamining.
  • Reminder and Calendar notification alerts are no longer single-click actionable. For example, reminder alerts used to have a "Complete" and "Later" button. Now I have to hover the mouse over them, click "Options" when it appears, and select this action. The alert is the same size, so what was the point?

Overall it sicks somewhere between Yosemite and Mavericks. If Apple can address the usability items above by offering a few well-executed options I think it will be right up there with OS X Mavericks.

 

[CasualFanboy]

All of that pales in comparison to the sheer brokenness of the UI
View attachment 1670032

Yes, that's the whole dialog. Clipped text and all.

That looks like absolute sh!+.

 

[Kyanar]

What is adding the key command on the right, because it's certainly not there by default?

That's not Terminal, that's iTerm

 

[Jack Neill]

I was getting tired of the iOS 7/Yosemite/El Capitan/Sierra/High Sierra/Mojave/Catalina UI.

I like Big Sur. It looks fresh.

 

[colourfastt]

Not to mention one of the most important aspects of design that skeuo can do extremely well if executed correctly: it can teach you how an operating system/software works, what to click on, what to interact with, etc. Part of my indifference towards the "revolutionary" M1 chip is that the OS running on top of it is terrible and doesn't take advantage of that processing power at all.

The GUI was invented decades ago. The files/folders/siloed apps paradigm was invented well before that. All that's changed since then (for the most part) is someone's applied a fresh new coat of paint that as far as I'm concerned actually makes the OS less usable and slower.

I think the worst part of the "modern" OS is the lack of differentiation and contrast, such as folder icons (see attached), which are almost impossible to tell apart at a glance unlike the ones used for iCloud which are great and easily discernible, and the icons on the Finder sidebar (again, see attached), which back when I started using OS X (Leopard) were colour.

 

[nickdalzell1]

"Modern MacOS" can't tell whether to be Tiger or what it's supposed to be. The 2-D dock reminds me of the early days of OS X, including Jaguar, and Tiger.

I do like Big Sur over Catalina (especially fixing two things broken entirely in Catalina) but I can only have hopes whatever comes next brings in more skeuomorphism, and isn't hindered by any other beta testers sending feedback saying "ahhh! it's too skeuomorphic! bring flat back!"

Then next version it's back to the same boring iOS 7-inspired look. The Music icon itself ripped right from iOS 7 so I'm not getting my hopes up this time.

I don't use the OS X widgets anyway, I always preferred to use separate apps to do the same job, which was why Dashboard never appealed to me, as all those neat looking widgets were confined to that UI, separate from the desktop, while my 'widgets' such as Opus Domini Lite and Classic Weather, can hover right among my browser and other apps. But the style of the widgets feels too retro for its own good, like early 1970s "modern":

Too 'retro future' am I right? Rounded corners and all. Maybe the next texture will be shaggy carpet?

 

[colourfastt]

"Modern MacOS" can't tell whether to be Tiger or what it's supposed to be. The 2-D dock reminds me of the early days of OS X, including Jaguar, and Tiger.

I do like Big Sur over Catalina (especially fixing two things broken entirely in Catalina) but I can only have hopes whatever comes next brings in more skeuomorphism, and isn't hindered by any other beta testers sending feedback saying "ahhh! it's too skeuomorphic! bring flat back!"

Then next version it's back to the same boring iOS 7-inspired look. The Music icon itself ripped right from iOS 7 so I'm not getting my hopes up this time.

I don't use the OS X widgets anyway, I always preferred to use separate apps to do the same job, which was why Dashboard never appealed to me, as all those neat looking widgets were confined to that UI, separate from the desktop, while my 'widgets' such as Opus Domini Lite and Classic Weather, can hover right among my browser and other apps. But the style of the widgets feels too retro for its own good, like early 1970s "modern":

View attachment 1670742

Too 'retro future' am I right? Rounded corners and all. Maybe the next texture will be shaggy carpet?

Let's not forget the avocado and burnt orange coloured appliances. (I was born in '63, so I lived through that!, as well as the "modern" look shown in your pic.)

 

[nickdalzell1]

I lived through the remnants of it since I was born in '79 and my parents still hadn't updated their decor until the late 80s when we got a new house.

The way things back then tried to imagine the future is called 'retro-futurism' and I think we're going through a software reversion of it today. Can't figure out what decade it's trying to fit into, completely out of ideas.

 

[mif]

I like it. Eye candy reminds me of 10.0 Cheetah.