Before proceeding, a disclaimer
Section 5 of the Apple Beta Software Program Agreement (“Definition of Confidential Information”) states:
You agree that the Pre-Release Software and any information concerning the Pre-Release Software (including its nature and existence, features, functionality, and screen shots), the Seeding Tools, and any other information disclosed by Apple to you in connection with the Beta Program will be considered and referred to in this Agreement as “Confidential Information.” Information that otherwise would be deemed Confidential Information but (a) is generally and legitimately available to the public through no fault or breach of yours, (b) is generally made available to the public by Apple, (c) is independently developed by you without the use of any Confidential Information, (d) was rightfully obtained from a third party who had the right to transfer or disclose it to you without limitation, or (e) any third party software and/or documentation provided to you by Apple and accompanied by licensing terms that do not impose confidentiality obligations on the use or disclosure of such software and/or documentation will not be considered Confidential Information under this Agreement.
Everything I’ll talk about in my Big Sur logbook should not be considered confidential information according to points (a) and (b) specifically. In other words, I will do my best to limit my observations and the subjects discussed here to what Apple has made available to the public during the WWDC 2020 and via the macOS Big Sur Preview page on the company’s website.
Big Sur public beta: download and installation
The first thing to do when you enroll your Mac in the Apple Beta Software Program is to download the Mac OS Public Beta Access Utility, which is essentially a tool that enables Software Update to detect the Big Sur beta releases. When you start installing this tool, it reminds you to perform a backup before installing beta software. It’s a nice touch. It would be even nicer if Time Machine backups worked reliably under Catalina, but that’s a story for another time.
Another tool called Feedback Assistant is also installed. You use it to send feedback directly to Apple as you evaluate the beta software.
Once everything is set up, Software Update informs you that there’s a new Mac OS version available. And Big Sur is big — on my MacBook Pro the installer is 12.30 GB. I’m hopeful that the download won’t take long: my home wireless network is working at full speed, and Apple servers are usually fast. Unfortunately the download is annoyingly slow, and it takes between 3 hours and a half to 4 hours to complete.
The installation process, on the other hand, isn’t much different from a regular new release of Mac OS, and it takes about 38 minutes from start to finish. As the installer itself warns, the Mac will be restarted a few times. I also notice that the MacBook Pro becomes rather hot at a certain point, and fans appears to run at full speed for a little while, but then things return to normal.
The MacBook Pro restarts for the last time, and I’m at the usual login screen. Everything went well.
That menu bar: uh-oh
I already noticed it when Big Sur was previewed during the WWDC 2020, and on the Preview page on Apple’s site, but — at least for now — the menu bar in Big Sur is a bit of a mess.
On Twitter I remarked the most obvious detail: the increased spacing of the various menu bar icons, but the menu bar’s transparency is also an issue.
Let’s start with icon spacing. On bigger displays, like we saw in the WWDC demos, it may not be a problem, but the situation on my retina MacBook Pro’s 13-inch display is jarring:
(If this and the following images of the menu bar look too small on your computer, try right-clicking them and selecting ‘Open Image in New Tab’ or a similar option in your Web browser.)
This is how it looks in the Finder, which has only a few and short menu names (in English, at least). Also consider that I’m only using two third-party menu bar additions here: Dropbox (1) and iStat Menus (2). The rest of the icons (3) are from the system.
Compare and contrast with the menu bar of my 11-inch MacBook Air running High Sierra:
iStat Menus is a very useful tool, and can display much more information on the menu bar than the particular configuration I’m using. But even if you’re not using a utility that takes up much space with icons in your menu bar, you can see how the menu bar can get crowded by third-party additions very quickly. If you’re even a minimally tech-savvy Mac user, your menu bar is probably already crowded. Cloud services like Dropbox, Box, Microsoft OneDrive, etc. put an icon up there. TextExpander puts an icon up there. Any utility that offers quick access to its options puts an icon in the menu bar. Plus there are even utilities that run in the background for which the menu bar icon is the only way to access them.
There are third-party utilities, such as Bartender, that help keep the menu bar clean and organised, but menu bar icons mainly serve two purposes: one, they’re shortcuts to the corresponding applications; two, they are status indicators. Their position is strategic, and users can check if something is happening at a glance. What’s the CPU temperature? How much battery charge is left? Is Bluetooth on? Is the Mac connected to a wireless network and does it have connection? Is Dropbox updating? And so forth. A utility that hides menu bar icons (even with Bartender’s useful feature that shows menu bar icons in the menu bar when they update) takes away a lot of their immediacy. They’re supposed to be glanceable and easy to reach, otherwise we could just sweep all of them away under a rug — or a Control Centre.
With such excessive menu bar icon spacing, Big Sur exacerbates the problem and makes menu bar icons more cumbersome and more in-the-way, even in a default setup. True, you can remove or hide some of these (Siri can be removed, and you could also hide Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Volume and Battery, since you can access them in the new Control Centre), but really, this kind of workaround would be understandable on a phone, where screen estate is more limited; and again, you just end up adding unnecessary friction and reducing immediacy.
Some have suggested that the increased spacing is because this interface is being already optimised for possible future touchscreen Macs, and it may be the case, but unless the majority of future Macs are touch-enabled (also: consider all past Mac models that can run Big Sur), a touch-friendly menu bar UI should be considered the exception, not the rule. That’s why I think Apple should give the user the option to adjust the spacing, much in the same way users can adjust the grid spacing of icons on the Desktop and in Finder windows.
Menu bar transparency
I may be old-school, but if I were an operating system UI designer, one of my core principles would be, You don’t mess with the menu bar. I believe that there are essential places in a user interface that must remain as clear and utilitarian as possible. The menu bar in Mac OS is one of these. It should be always clearly visible. It’s a functional anchor. It’s your safe place. It shouldn’t be fancy, mutable, confusing.
In Big Sur, the menu bar by default isn’t solid white, but has a noticeable degree of transparency: it takes the colour of the desktop wallpaper behind it, in an attempt to blend in with the rest of the desktop environment. Some may consider this sleek, but it’s just gimmicky and usability-hostile.
What happens when the desktop wallpaper has darker colours? Well, menu items and menu bar icons become white, of course. The problem is that the wallpaper doesn’t have to be too dark. This is with the background picture “Mojave (day)”:
The contrast is awful, and so is giving that subtle shadow to the menu bar elements. For now, the only solution is to select Reduce transparency in System Preferences → Accessibility. This brings the menu bar back to a useful state, solid white with black elements. And I hope this is just a bug, but with certain desktop wallpapers, when you select Reduce transparency, the black menu bar elements retain that subtle shadow and have this embossed, glossy look that I don’t find particularly pleasing or useful (personal preference) — text and icons look smudged:
Also, this shifting between black and white menu items and icons may become annoying if you have your desktop wallpaper set to change at specified intervals. Light wallpaper! Black menu bar elements. Dark wallpaper! White menu bar elements. Neither light nor dark wallpaper! Whatever Big Sur decides.
Reduce transparency should be more fine-grained, too. When you select it in the Accessibility preference pane, it makes the menu bar look ‘good’ again, but it also makes the Dock background milky, and this, at least to my eyes, makes the app icons in the Dock more difficult, not easier to parse. Perhaps the simplest solution would be to bring back this option, which was first introduced in Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard under System Preferences → Desktop & Screen Saver:
In Big Sur, it could be added to the options available in System Preferences → Dock & Menu Bar.
Wrapping it up on a positive note
When it comes to user interface details I know I can be pedantic. I largely focused on the menu bar because it’s such an essential part of the UI that you can’t ignore when something feels wrong. But my first general impression of Big Sur beta on this 2015 13-inch MacBook Pro is overall positive: the system feels a bit snappier than Catalina, and 24 hours after installing it I haven’t encountered any particular issue, save for an unexpected quit of the Maps app when I first launched it.
All the sleep-related issues this MacBook Pro showed after installing Catalina have disappeared. Now the computer sleeps reliably when I put it to sleep, even by simply closing the lid — as it should. As for battery life, it’s too soon to say, because so far I haven’t stressed the Mac very much, but the feeling is that Big Sur seems better than Catalina at energy saving. It feels less wasteful. Which is a good thing, because I’m always wary of beta software and battery management.
So far, this beta of Big Sur — apart from some rough edges related to the user interface — doesn’t really feel like beta software. Whew.