When I started this logbook back in August, as I was exploring Big Sur Beta 5 and finding parts of the user interface redesign that didn’t convince me, I started making up in my mind a possible way for things to develop from then on. I thought: These are just quick & dirty UI ideas and implementations; I expect things to visibly change from beta to beta, especially as the time to finally release Big Sur approaches, perhaps sometime in October.
But things have progressed differently. So far, two aspects of Big Sur have made an impression on me:
- Its stability. Granted, I haven’t proverbially “thrown anything at it” so far, but for the past three months I’ve been using my 13-inch MacBook Pro with Big Sur pretty much normally. Which means doing all the tasks I typically do on my main Macs on a daily basis. Sure, there has been the occasional unexpected quitting from this or that app, but not really more frequently than what might happen with a regular Mac running a regular Mac OS release. I already said this more than once in this logbook, but in all this time using Big Sur on the MacBook Pro, I’ve never felt I was using beta software.
- How little the user interface has changed since Apple previewed Big Sur back in June. As I was saying before, I expected the first betas to be a rough design sketch, bound to be drastically improved upon (not simply refined) from beta release to beta release. Instead, all visual changes at the UI level so far have been surprisingly restrained. You may think, Well, that’s a good sign. It means that Apple really believes in this redesign. In a sense, it’s true. Apple believes to be doing good work with Big Sur’s user interface. They have a plan and they’re demonstrating they’re willing to stick with it. That doesn’t mean it’s a great plan, though.
No matter how hard Apple tries to spin it, when I’m using Big Sur, I’m not feeling that the reasoning behind all these UI changes was Let’s take the great Mac OS user interface we’ve been perfecting for years and make it better. What I feel, instead, is that behind this user interface redesign there was one simple major directive that came from above: Make it look more like iOS.
I’m just speculating here, of course, but if whenever you encounter a visual change in Big Sur that doesn’t strike you as particularly logic — or doesn’t strike you as particularly improving on what was there before (or how things worked before) — you ask yourself Why did they do this?, try answering the question with Because it had to look more like iOS. You’ll be surprised by how frequently this works.
We’re approaching the end of October, and Big Sur is still in beta, and there are still a lot of visual details that have remained alarmingly unchanged or have been altered so very little; and unless there’s a big change coming in one of the next betas, I have to assume that Apple is fine with such details. And I mean, terrible icons, terrible visual contrast still present in several places, terrible redesign of all dialog boxes, operations that used to need just one click have now become more awkward (requiring more clicks), changes that are simply æsthetic in nature instead of functional (the merging of title and toolbar in Finder windows and application windows, for example), and so forth.
I have to assume that Apple is fine with such details. Which is a bit alarming, but not entirely unexpected. It’s the same company that insisted for years that the butterfly mechanism was better than the scissor mechanism for their laptop keyboards.
Anyway, let’s have a look at some of the UI refinements I’ve spotted in Beta 10. They’re all rather subtle, but entirely welcomed.
Menu bar spacing
One of the first visual changes I complained about as soon as I installed Beta 5 back in August was the excessive space between menu names and menu items on the main menu bar. I’m happy to report that finally in Beta 10 the space between menu bar items has been reduced. Not by much, just a few pixels, but the cumulative effect is noticeable and appreciated:
Menu extras in Beta 5 (above) and Beta 10 (below).
The Dropbox icon is in a different place, as sometimes happens after a restart, but these are the same 15 menu items. As you can see, the space we’ve gained is noticeable. Another pleasant detail you can observe is how the transparency of the menu bar has been decreased over the course of five betas.
Note, however, that only the space between menu extras has been reduced, not between menu names:
Menu names in Beta 5 (above) and Beta 10 (below).
Finder windows
Essentially unchanged except for the icon size slider. Now it has lost all colour and has gone from being too noticeable to being almost too subtle:
I don’t understand why not make the design of this slider consistent with, say, the sliders in this part of the Dock & Menu Bar preference pane:
Transparency
The Dock’s transparency has been slightly, progressively reduced from beta to beta:
Emphasis on ‘slightly’.
The transparency of menu listings has also been reduced over time: Beta 10 here is slightly less transparent than even Beta 8. And the selected menu name in the menu bar is more prominent (the background behind the text is darker). Here’s a progression from Beta 5 to Beta 10:
Miscellaneous fixes/changes
• The Preferences window in Mail has been fixed. Now Rules isn’t left out:
Up to Beta 9 included.
In Beta 10.
• In System Preferences → Desktop & Screen Saver, there is an updated graphic to show Dynamic Desktops. I like it.
Dynamic Desktop option in Beta 5.
Dynamic Desktop option in Beta 10.
• In Safari → Preferences → Privacy, the option for “allowing websites to check if Apple Pay is set up” is back:
This is how it was in Mac OS 10.13 High Sierra.
It would disappear later and in the Big Sur betas so far.
Now it’s back in Beta 10, with an updated wording that includes Apple Card.
• I don’t know if these have appeared in the most recent Big Sur beta or if they were introduced before, but I’ve noticed that there are new background images you can choose from when customising Safari’s Start Page.
These are the most significant changes I’ve noticed, UI-wise, in Big Sur Beta 10. There may be others buried in the system. I have good visual memory, but I’m not exactly keeping track of every interface detail across several built-in apps. But I’m sure I would have noticed if something had been changed in some major way.
At this point I’m guessing Big Sur will be publicly released sometime in November, and all the visual changes I’ve seen so far have been minimal. Refinements, little touches, nothing more. Some of these little touches were long overdue, and I’m glad transparency is being reduced in a few key places. I feel there’s still much more to fix, but I guess that it’s ‘good enough’ for Apple, and hopefully some of the things mentioned above, which I still think need fixing, will be addressed in future minor releases.
However, apart from certain gripes, if I had to judge the overall experience — not just the interface, but system stability and responsiveness — I’d say that Big Sur at this beta stage feels much better than Catalina in its released state.
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