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.