These past days I’ve received a few snide comments via email, from people who were wondering if I had maybe lost interest in keeping up with this logbook. Absolutely not. The simple truth is that everything was working fine on my 13-inch MacBook Pro and there was nothing really worth mentioning. My daily job also kept me busy. And a couple of days ago I also realised that — while I saw people on Twitter talking about Big Sur Beta 7 — my system was still on Beta 6 and Software Update kept telling me that my Mac was up-to-date. Last night I decided to check again, and what do you know, Software Update informed me that Beta 8 was available, a 3.61 GB download.
As with past betas, right after downloading, and before starting installation, the Mac enters this stage, and it usually reaches very high temperatures; this time the peak was 98°C.
Side note: I had heard that the Early 2015 MacBook Pros had a higher threshold for fan activation compared with the 2013 and 2014 models. I couldn’t believe that with temperatures over 90°C, fans were spinning at only 1800rpm. Anyway, thankfully that didn’t last long and the Mac didn’t melt.
The update went well, and after restarting I began exploring the system looking for changes.
Subtle changes in the UI
Now, bear in mind that some (maybe even all) of the visual changes I mention here may have been introduced in Beta 7. But, as I said above, for some reason Software Update never notified me about Beta 7; so for me these changes have appeared in Beta 8. Apologies in advance if I’m late in pointing them out.
The first welcome change is that now the system menu bar is less transparent than before. I still maintain that this important user interface element should never be made transparent or translucent, for usability reasons; but still, this is a small step in the right direction:
Menu bar transparency in previous betas
Menu bar transparency as of Beta 8 (or Beta 7?)
While we’re on the subject of the menu bar, there’s something else I’ve noticed: how Big Sur handles Dark Mode is bizarre. Now, I still haven’t upgraded my main Macs to Mojave, and I’ve used Catalina for so little time, so maybe this is how Dark Mode has always been implemented — but I highly doubt it.
In short: if you switch to Dark Mode (System Preferences → General → Appearance → Dark), but you keep a light Desktop background, the menu bar will remain light:
Note however how iStat Menus (a third-party app) correctly detects Dark Mode and switches its menu bar elements to white.
To get the ‘full Dark Mode experience’, you also have to choose a dark Desktop background:
And finally, as you may have already guessed, if you choose Light Mode, but you keep a dark Desktop background, the menu bar will remain dark enough that the menu names and other first-party menu bar elements will stay white. Third-party elements, however, stay black because they detect that the Appearance is Light, not Dark:
This is, of course, a silly mess. The crux of the matter is that the behaviour of the menu bar isn’t tied to the system appearance (Light or Dark), but to the shade of the Desktop background. You might say, Well, if you prefer to switch to Dark Mode, you’re also likely to favour a dark background, and that’s mostly true, but still, you may have set your Desktop background to change at specific intervals, and there may be the occasional lighter image that, when triggered, turns your menu bar to light while every other UI element remains dark. It’s distracting, and frankly it also makes little sense. The appearance of the menu bar and Dock should be tied to the system-wide appearance. If I want Dark Mode, these two main UI elements ought to stay dark no matter what happens with the Desktop background.
Finder windows
Looking at Finder windows, I can see a few changes, but I don’t seem to fully understand the intentions behind them. Here’s a Finder window as it appeared in Beta 6 and as it appears now in Beta 8:
A Finder window in Beta 6
A Finder window in Beta 8
1. The Title bar/Toolbar area is now white instead of light grey. This change looks just arbitrary (spoiler: all these changes look arbitrary).
2. The View selector is now a pull-down menu. The only pro brought by this change is that is saves space on the toolbar. It’s really a poor solution prompted by the unnecessary, purely-æsthetic choice of increasing the spacing between items everywhere in the system. As for usability, it’s another faux pas, since now you have to perform an additional click every time you want to switch views in a Finder window. Yes, it’s irritating.
3. The line spacing for the elements in the sidebar has been increased. For better legibility, perhaps? I think it was absolutely fine before. This is a space — especially the Favourites section — that tends to get crowded quickly as users add their most accessed folders, and the increased line spacing makes it look good only when there are just a few items as in the images above. On my main Mac, I have nineteen items there. This means that on the 13-inch MacBook Pro I’d have to keep all windows as tall as the screen to be able to see all such items without scrolling. The increased line spacing is another waste of space.
4. The Path Bar is now white instead of light grey. Another arbitrary change that serves no apparent purpose.
Now that the Title bar of the active window is all white, when you look at a stack of windows, the inactive windows at first glance look more active than the one in the foreground. And look, I know these are stupidly fine details, but shouldn’t it be more logical that objects in the background had more faded colours than the ones in the foreground?
A quick look at Safari
Safari’s chrome appears slightly darker, and when it comes to its Preferences pane, they seem to have slightly improved contrast — the icons for the various sections are darker — and the text, pull-down menus, and buttons appear slightly rearranged. Apart from the improved contrast in the icons at the top, I find that Beta 6 looks better than Beta 8 here. Have a look.
My general impression regarding Big Sur remains unchanged for now. From a performance standpoint, and after almost two months of use, I don’t have complaints. On this 2015 13-inch retina MacBook Pro, the Big Sur betas I’ve tried (Beta 5 to 8) all behaved very well and felt decidedly stable. The MacBook feels very responsive and seems to perform better than under Catalina.
From a user interface standpoint, instead, Big Sur still feels very much a work in progress — in some places perhaps even a work in regress. It’s increasingly hard to understand certain design choices, and it all really feels like a trial-and-error process but in a very random way; like when you really want to rearrange the furniture in your house because you want the rooms to look and feel ‘fresh’, but you haven’t taken into account that if you move the bookcase to the other wall it’s going to bump into the door when you open it; or that if you move the television over there, the sunlight coming through the window will create an annoying glare on the screen and you’ll have to draw the curtains every time you want to watch something; and so on and so forth, you get the idea.
In short, I don’t see a strong, cohesive structure behind Big Sur’s visual design; just the urge to make Mac OS look more like iOS. It’s still an ill-fitting suit, though.