I just want it to work without headaches. I don’t want workarounds and “turn off all of the extra nonsense” sliders. Call me an old or a Karen. But this is one reason why I picked Mac for 12+ years, and I am increasingly switching my workload to Linux. It’s not a fashion accessory for me.
I am willing to learn the new features. But half-assed widgets that get in the way, menu bar quirkiness, losing finder menu settings, and more are increasingly common.
The changes to the settings menu was the worst for me. Instead of making the settings menu in iOS better they…. made the MacOS settings look like iOS. IE: awful and extremely user unfriendly.
I have been using ios for 16 years and it’s still hard to find things. I really wish they hadn’t copied it. Horribly designed menu
For me, the worst issue is the low-contrast these days between the window chrome (toolbar etc) and the main window content, plus the reduction in shadiowing. This came in - when? Two or three major releases ago?
Every day, with overlapping windows, I try to select the top of a window, only to find that I have selected a window above and behind, Drives me nuts.
There is an ‘increase contrast’ option accessibility. but that might as well be called ‘make everything deliberately butt ugly’.
I didn’t really realise how bad it is until I was using my wife’s old Mac, and was amazed how easy it was to manage windows.
MAYBE you could make an argument if my Mac screen was in vertical portrait layout all the time, you could begin to argue in favor of the thought process behind the current design.
But without that, with a landscape-oriented Mac display, the argument just isn’t there, so the thought process doesn’t make sense.
This is all before you even brain storm actual UI design ideas—the base-argument is invalid.
As a counterpoint to this, as a new Mac user I feel the settings redesign is a night and day improvement. The new settings menu isn’t perfect, but visually I much prefer a two column layout where everything is in a vertical list than a large pile of icons. People also complain about similarity to iOS, but then again, it’s nice that my knowledge of where certain settings are on my phone translates directly over to my laptop. And when that fails, the search works great too, unless Apple named the specific setting something weird, which they do have a tendency towards.
Image: screenshot of system settings icon, with red badge
Finish setting up Apple Pay
subscribe to iCloud+
software update available: MacOS Sonoma (doesn’t matter that your current OS is still supported)
sign up for Apple One
you aren’t protecting your traffic using Private Relay
I remember when macOS rolled out spotlight and spaces and said “Redmond, start your photo copiers”, but I’ve Cook it’s been “people still use Windows and they get treated like cattle”
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I do actually agree with the headaches in Linux. I am not a fanboy of any OS. It is a pain in the butt to get working the way I want. However, it’s usually when installing an unfamiliar set of software, at the end of the day I get it figured out and then it usually works in perpetuity.
These changes in the Mac environment break and change things that are out of my control. I have bugs that go back several major revisions that keep popping up again.
At least from a disk usage standpoint, I’m finding Sonoma is using less storage than its predecessors. This is a big deal for me, since I’ve been close to the limit on my boot drive.
They need to stop making so many releases… I haven’t liked the last ones.
Fully agree. Starting to feel like Windows. I’m used to Windows’ bullshit and have a lot of ways around it, but in exchange I can fully customized my OS.
I’d prefer Mac not act the same though. I use it for programming and work; I don’t want to fuck with it.
Thank goodness I am not alone. Not only is everything bloated now, but the UX has become terrible. Home is a mess and it’s very difficult to achieve what you want, not to mention “new” Siri fails about 40% of the time. And I just found out yesterday about Shortcuts. Cool idea, but I am completely intimidated by the UI, and I have been using Macs for over 16 years. Everything has become difficult and unintuitive, which is the opposite of what used to make Apple great. It sounds like I’m describing enshitification and I hope I’m not.
