I bought a Mac Mini in 2012, nice machine, quad i7, put 16gb ram in it. It came loaded with Mountain Lion and I loved it. I had been a Windows user since 1995 (but as an artist and photographer had used Macs in school) and was clinging to XP but like many, when I saw what they were doing with Windows 8 I bolted, I thought for good. I installed Mavericks when it came out, even better in my opinion, basically seemed to fix and refine a few things that needed refining (though honestly I can hardly tell the difference between them). I also own an ipad 3, ipod touch 3g and my wife gets an iphone 5c through her work. I put ios7 on my ipad and although it didn’t impress much I was ok with it. Same on my wife’s iphone (now she’s on v8, they make her update her phone). The flat vs. 3d thing sort of makes less of a difference on a small touch device, at least for me.
So I was excited but thankfully cautious about upgrading to Yosemite. I read the reviews about how ugly it was and I have to say I agreed just from the screenshots but I thought I’d give it a try anyway so I put it on an external USB 3.0 SSD to give it a test drive. I can now say the ugliness is not fully appreciated via screenshots alone. I will admit it worked fine on my machine, no slow down, I use ethernet not wifi so I couldn’t test that but really, it felt no slower than Mavericks.
But it is ugly. It’s more than that, it’s plasticky, even unfriendly. Everything works ok but the “space” of the OS is just plain depressing. Gone is the warm, quiet space of the previous version. I thought of a glacier as I was using it...minimal, formal, impressive, but ultimately cold and inhospitable. The brightness and lack of contrast, the blue folders, the icons, the fonts...what are they thinking? Technology has the potential to alienate the user and unfortunately, Yosemite does this, at least to me. It’s like what OS X would look like if it were designed by soulless androids. It tries to be friendly using the cheap tricks of saturated color and empty smiles (Finder icon) but fails miserably under sensitive observation. It’s autonomous, it only impresses itself.
Maybe some users only care about function and can overlook aesthetics but for many (most?) of us, we cannot and the “ugly gap” between Windows and OS X has narrowed such that the seemingly unthinkable is now true: it’s a real horserace between the two for my next computer. And for what? The new features are not earth shattering. They’re out of significant ways to innovate this OS and coasting on the current “fashion” in UI design (largely popularized by them!). Apple, please, please reconsider this direction. Part of the pleasure of using a Mac was the soul, the warmth under that cold, sleek exterior. Why this obsessive need to make the “inside” look and feel like the outside? They need to look at the very best in automobile design...the outside of a car can express it’s machine nature but when you’re driving it you want to feel like every decision was made for human comfort, physical and psychological.
