After WWDC 2020: bittersweet Mac

Tech Life

I won’t be going through everything that was announced at the WWDC 2020. There have been so many other sources writing very comprehensive overviews already; and I’m terrible at overviews anyway — I always end up forgetting something. 

I must also confess that when I started watching the WWDC keynote, I was anxiously waiting for the Mac segment and the talk about the transition from Intel architecture to ARM (which Apple calls Apple Silicon, at least for now, in their characteristically generic nomenclature). So I paid very little attention to the Apple Watch news, and enough attention to the iOS/iPadOS part to be at least aware of the main changes.

Oh, and speaking of iOS, I’ve been a bit amused by how a lot of pundits and commentators have talked about Widgets in iOS 14 as being this huge deal. Granted, it’s the first major change in iOS’s Springboard since Folders in iOS 4 ten years ago. And granted, the widgets they showed look cool and their implementation appears to be well executed. But to my eyes the mix of widgets and regular apps gives the Springboard a busier look and feel. On Android, widgets can be positioned on the screen with less constraints and can be kept visually separated from app icons. And despite the behaviour of iOS’s widgets has been considered more akin to Windows Phone’s Live Tiles, Windows Phone still manages to look more elegant because in that operating system there’s virtually no distinction between ‘app icon’ and ‘widget’ — everything that is displayed on the main screen is, well, a tile, with customisable sizes. 

The transition to ARM: unexpected magnanimity

As you know, I was very worried about how Apple would handle the Intel-to-ARM transition. In my pre-WWDC post, I wrote:

The previous transition, from PowerPC to Intel chips, gave users an inordinately long grace period when it comes to software and backward compatibility. […] If you consider that the last minor release of Snow Leopard (10.6.8) was released in June 2011, this means that you could still run a PowerPC app on an Intel Mac as late as five years after the transition was complete, hardware-wise. 

That long grace period was in large part made possible by Apple releasing Rosetta, a dynamic binary translator included in the Intel versions of Mac OS X, allowing people to run PowerPC apps at almost native speeds.

For this next transition, I speculated that Apple wouldn’t bother investing time and resources in developing a similar software tool. I predicted more pragmatism on Apple’s part and said that the company would require developers to rewrite their apps to run under ARM Macs, and if you still needed to run Intel apps, well, you could keep your Intel Mac around until you would be ready to make the jump to ARM. In other words, I predicted that Apple would largely place the burden of transitioning to developers and users, in an Either you follow us or you’ll be left behind fashion.

I was genuinely surprised, and relieved, when I saw the Universal 2 and Rosetta 2 icons appear on the screen. It seems that Apple is willing to stick to the same approach they chose for the PowerPC-to-Intel transition, and that’s a good thing in my book. They said it will take them two years to complete the transition, and that Macs with Apple Silicon will start to appear later this year. I particularly appreciated the way they’ve delivered the message about leaving Intel behind: while internally they probably cannot wait to get rid of Intel chips inside Macs, their public-facing stance is much more nuanced: we’re not dropping Intel support overnight, there are still new Intel Macs in production, and, in Cook’s own words, We plan to continue to support and release new versions of Mac OS for Intel-based Macs for years to come. Again, this feels quite relieving. 

If you’ve been reading me for a while, you know I’ve spent these past years worrying about how much Apple really cares about the Mac, and those periods in the recent past with lack of meaningful updates, the degrading software quality, and the way Apple handled the butterfly keyboard fiasco, didn’t exactly give me hope. But I’ll be honest: after hearing how Apple plans to handle this next Mac transition, and especially after watching John Gruber’s discussion with Craig Federighi and Greg Joswiak, I feel more reassured about the future of the Mac.

Mac OS Big Sur

The snag is Mac OS’s new look. I’m not a fan. But you knew that. I’ve already mentioned this on Twitter: if you want to have a good review/recap of iOS 14 and Mac OS, watch this video by Quinn Nelson. When you get to the part where he criticises Mac OS Big Sur’s user interface, pay attention to his commentary, as we’re pretty much on the same page. He makes some funny remarks like, System Preferences look like Apple paid a guy on Dribbble $30 to make it in 2 days. Or, This looks like something that Xiaomi would call MiMac. Or, Looks like Apple tried to knock off their own OS.

I get that the major force driving this visual change is to make Mac OS look and feel more similar to iOS and especially iPadOS. Apple is decidedly marching towards a homogeneousness across its major platforms that soon will embrace both software and hardware. But in everything I’ve seen of the user interface of Mac OS Big Sur so far, I’ve noticed how Apple seems to prioritise looks over function. In his video, Quinn Nelson also makes a more serious remark about the UI: It just seems too simple and yet too cluttered; which was exactly my very first impression as soon as I saw the demos.

In the WWDC keynote, there’s this bit from the short video with Alan Dye (Apple’s VP of Human Interface) where he says:

We’ve reduced visual complexity to keep the focus on users’ content. Buttons and controls appear when you need them, and they recede when you don’t.

And that’s one of the main things that bother me about Big Sur’s UI. I’m not a VP of Human Interface, but I’d say that a desktop operating system you interact with using complex and precise input methods and devices, can in fact afford a certain visual complexity without getting in the user’s way. Which is what I (and I suspect many other people) have always loved about Mac OS. An operating system characterised by a user-friendly, easy-to-use, but not-dumbed-down interface. I’d hate to see a progressive oversimplification of the Mac’s UI that could potentially introduce the same discoverability issues that are still present in iPadOS.

I’ve always considered the look of an operating system to be a by-product of how it works, rather than a goal to achieve, if you know what I mean. If something is well-designed in the sense that it works well, provides little to no friction during use, and makes you work better, it’s very rare that it also ends up being something ugly or inelegant from a visual standpoint. How it works shapes how it looks. If you put the look before the how-it-works, you may end up with a gorgeous-looking interface that doesn’t work as well as it looks.

The renewed insistence on transparency and the alarming amount of reduced contrast present in many places of the UI makes the experience look as if it was designed by twenty-somethings with perfect vision for twenty-somethings with perfect vision. The Accessibility preference pane looks more and more like a place that is not devoted to people with physical impairments, but to people who are not on Apple’s design team or who are not within the trendiest segment of the intended target audience.

It’s just the first beta, though. I hope things will improve as betas progress. I hadn’t felt this kind of visual-change shock since the introduction of Mac OS X 10.10 Yosemite, with all that UI flattening, bold colours, and poorly-chosen Helvetica Neue as system font.

Quietly optimistic

I usually avoid posting my impressions right after a big Apple event, especially one as filled with new stuff as this WWDC 2020. This time I’ve purposefully forced myself to wait, and take in other people’s impressions and observations first. My first reaction to Mac OS’s new look was of shocked incredulity, some of my comments were bitter and destructive, and while it’s still hard to look at Big Sur without wincing, rage-quitting a platform after using it for 31 years isn’t really a thoughtful alternative. I’ve decided, now more than ever, for a wait-and-see approach. I’m still not upgrading my current Macs, but I’m considering getting another Mac that is modern enough to run Catalina and the Big Sur betas, and use it as a disposable test machine. I prefer sharing any detailed criticism about Big Sur’s UI after I’ve used it myself on a Mac, in real-life, real-production conditions.

The hardware part of this transition is admittedly what’s keeping me interested and downright excited at the moment. I’m very curious to see how having powerful and power-efficient processors will affect hardware design in future Macs. While I bet that Apple can’t wait to get back at designing thinner and thinner laptops, it would be interesting to see whether they release even slimmer desktop machines as well. I just hope ports won’t also keep disappearing as devices get thinner. Anyway, it’s clear that Apple has plans for the Mac, and while I may not fully agree with the direction they want to push it or how they want to transform it, it’s still better than not having the Mac around at all. 

I think.

The Author

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