Riccardo Mori

Safari 15 on Mac OS, a user interface mess

June 18, 2021

Software

Introduction: no WWDC-related observations?

Maybe you’ve wondered why I haven’t written my usual post-WWDC article sharing my observations about the keynote. Well, once again my main job absorbed most of my time and energies. But also, frankly, there hasn’t been anything extraordinarily good worth scrambling to write down.

Don’t get me wrong, plenty of nice things have been introduced at WWDC 2021 across all Apple platforms, but overall it felt like going to a nice restaurant serving you decent food. Did you eat well? You’d say yes. Did you eat so well it’s worth leaving a lengthy review online? Not really.

I will write something about WWDC, if I find an interesting-enough angle that’s worth writing about three or four weeks after the event.

The Mac — Saving the last for last

What’s really worth mentioning, though, is how Apple has screwed up the whole dessert.

The dessert is the Mac, of course, and in calling it a dessert I’m trying to give a respectable, polite label to something that was left for last. Deal with it, I’m still a Mac user first, the Mac platform is still the one I care most, so I’m giving it precedence over everything else.

There has been a wave of pieces written in recent times by pundits who now say that those who believed Apple did not really care about the Mac were wrong. Look, the new Apple Silicon chips! Look, new hardware updates! Even redesigned Macs! Whoa, crazy stuff indeed.

Why was Mac OS left for last at the WWDC keynote? Because essentially, everything new that’s coming in Monterey are features originally devised for iOS and iPadOS devices, and then adapted for Mac OS. And Universal Control I’d call an ecosystem feature. Nothing, to my recollection, was conceived specifically to take advantage of the Mac as a powerful, versatile machine and platform. Nothing was designed specifically with the Mac in mind. Nothing was designed as a Mac-first feature.

The utter user-interface butchery happening to Safari on the Mac is once again the work of people who put iOS first. People who by now think in iOS terms. People who view the venerable Mac OS user interface as an older person whose traits must be experimented upon, plastic surgery after plastic surgery, until this person looks younger. Unfortunately the effect is more like this person ends up looking… weird.

These people look at the Mac’s UI and (that’s the impression, at least) don’t really understand it. Its foundations come from a past that almost seems inscrutable to them. Usability cues and features are all wrinkles to them. iOS and iPadOS don’t have these strange wrinkles, they muse. We must hide them. We’ll make this spectacular facelift and we’ll hide them, one by one. Mac OS will look as young (and foolish, cough) as iOS!

Safari’s facelift

The new Safari. Image © Apple, Inc. and taken from the Mac OS Monterey Preview webpage.

For years, Safari’s interface has been a good balance between minimalism and functionality. The app chrome was shaved away, iteration after iteration, and it seemed it had reached its minimum but still viable footprint.

On my 11-inch MacBook Air (running Mac OS 10.13 High Sierra and Safari 13.1.2), the total vertical space taken by Safari’s Title bar/Toolbar, Favourites bar and Tab bar is 86 pixels, 64 if you hide the Favourites bar. The 11-inch MacBook Air’s display is only 768 pixels tall, but even in these ‘cramped’ conditions there’s still enough space left to a website for clarity and meaningful navigation. Especially if you hide the Favourites bar and use Safari in full-screen mode.

On my 13-inch retina MacBook Pro running Mac OS Big Sur 11.5 beta and Safari 14.1.2, the total vertical space taken by Safari’s Title bar/Toolbar, Favourites bar and Tab bar is 110 pixels, 82 if you hide the Favourites bar.

In both instances, the vertical space taken by the Tab bar is 28 pixel. Twenty-eight.

The point I’m making with all this pixel peeping is that these are negligible measurements. Getting rid of the Tab bar with the excuse that you’re saving space is the stinkiest bullshit I’ve ever smelt in a while. 28 pixels for any of the current Mac displays is nothing.

In The reshaped Mac experience I wrote:

Going through Big Sur’s user interface with a fine-tooth comb reveals arbitrary design decisions that prioritise looks over function, and therefore reflect an un-learning of tried-and-true user interface and usability mechanics that used to make for a seamless, thoughtful, enjoyable Mac experience.

What Apple has done to Safari 15 is no different. Ever since WWDC 2020 this damned quote by Alan Dye (Apple’s VP of Human Interface) has stayed with me, and most of what’s happening on Mac OS and to Mac OS always comes back to it:

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.

I’ll reiterate this until I’m out of breath: it’s not the right approach. Or at least, it could make sense if applied thoughtfully in certain parts of the interface. What’s going on in Safari 15 is that buttons and controls have actually been swept under a rug with an (···) icon, and they don’t appear when you need them — you have to look for them. And it makes no sense whatsoever that one would want to go looking for the Reload button in a tiny menu with a More… icon.

And what’s more arbitrary than the new Tab bar design? Two things any user, no matter their tech-savviness, has needed in a browser:

A wide Address bar to see exactly where they are, which webpage it’s loaded, the whole URL.
A proper Tab bar, with as much horizontal space as possible, to be able to open a lot of tabs and read at least a small part of their titles.

(And no, I don’t think that only nerds open dozens of browser tabs at a time. I’ve seen it firsthand in so many occasions and contexts that it can’t be just anecdotal data.)

And what have they done in Safari 15? They merged these two browser bars, of course, thus delivering the worst of both worlds:

On the one hand, the Address bar keeps shifting position and changing width (meaning it gets shorter) as you create more tabs. Please, turn on your common sense, and consider how ridiculous this is.
On the other hand, now that tabs have to coexist with the Address bar on the same line, they have less space. Meaning that on a relatively small 13-inch display, it’s probably enough to open just six tabs before things get cramped and tab text gets truncated to meaninglessness.

In other words, what a browser needs is horizontal breathing room, instead we have Apple doing things backwards, sacrificing horizontal space to give us what, 28 more vertical pixels? It seems as if the people in the design team are all working exclusively on 32-inch Apple XDR Pro Displays.

Many people are also commenting negatively about the new feature where Safari’s app chrome changes colour by taking the accent colour of the currently loaded website. Michael Tsai says: Having the page background color bleed into the tab area makes it harder to read, and it feels weird for the current page’s color to affect the way other tabs look. It also works inconsistently, even on the same pages on Apple’s site. At least there’s a preference to turn it off. And I agree with him, but this is a minor offence compared with the rest of Safari’s UI butchery.

By the way, in case you thought it was an original feature, go have a look at Vivaldi browser. While you’re there, take a look at how Vivaldi tackles the ‘too many tabs’ problem. Spoiler: by adding a second Tab bar. And I say, why not. There’s enough vertical space on current computers. And those users who usually deal with a lot of tabs prioritise having easy access to them and tab legibility, not having 20 more vertical pixels available.

While we’re on the subject of browser tab management, Apple’s proposed solution — creating groups of tabs — is rarely efficient and overall unconvincing. A little experiment: how many browser tabs do you have currently open? Let’s be conservative. Let’s say nine. How many are so tightly related among one another that you can meaningfully group them together? I bet none to very few. Unless you maybe start using such generic labels that you always need to check inside each group to see which sites you have there.

I have currently 18 tabs open in Brave on my main Mac. Each points to a website that is not related to any other and can’t be put under the same label or category. In everyday browser use, tabs are a messy affair that is kind of messy by design and users are generally fine with it. We need open tabs, we need to see what’s open at all times, and we need to be able to quickly jump to the tab we need in the here and now. In this scenario, pinning tabs is much more useful than grouping them and hiding them away. Your most visited sites have a persistent place in the Tab bar. Their tabs are reduced to show only the favicons because you know them well and there’s no ambiguity. And that’s really it. This way of browsing is not a problem in search of a solution, Apple. You have so many more UI issues to fix, instead you add some more by ‘revolutionising’ Safari. Stop — hiding — UI — elements — arbitrarily!

I dearly hope the new UI in Safari can be neutralised by some toggles in the browser preferences. But I also hope this thoughtless UI won’t give strange ideas to the designers of Brave, Firefox, and other browsers. I’m really liking Vivaldi at the moment, by the way. Its user interface can become quite complex, but the developers and designers have been open enough to give the user a great deal of flexibility, so that you can truly customise Vivaldi to your needs.

I’m also really liking another browser I’ve been beta testing for quite a while, about which I’ll hopefully talk in more detail soon.

Safari 15 on Mac OS, a user interface mess was first published by Riccardo Mori on Morrick.me on 18 June 2021.

No thanks to the App Store

June 5, 2021

by Riccardo Mori

Software

After months of blogging drought, Marco Arment publishes another great article, Developer relations. I kept nodding all the way through, and this passage inspired me to chime in based on personal experience as a power user / informed customer:

Apple further extends the value argument, and defends their justification for forced commissions, by claiming responsibility for and ownership of the customer relationship between all iOS users and each app they choose to use.

This argument only makes sense — and even then, only somewhat — when apps are installed by a customer browsing the App Store, finding an app they hadn’t previously heard of, and choosing to install it based on App Store influence alone.

But in the common case — and for most app installations, the much more common case — of searching for a specific app by name or following a link or ad based on its developer’s own marketing or reputation, Apple has served no meaningful role in the customer acquisition and “deserves” nothing more from the transaction than what a CDN and commodity credit-card processor would charge.

The idea that the App Store is responsible for most customers of any reasonably well-known app is a fantasy.

I’ve purchased or downloaded apps from the App Store since the beginning, and I can confirm everything Arment says.

Let’s start with iOS. Since 2008, I’ve accumulated about 250 apps for iPhone, iPad, iPod touch. It’s not an incredibly high number, and it includes apps that are now no longer available on the Store. Of course, the first years of the App Store were the most active for me as a customer: lots of new and interesting applications, lots of exploring. Those were exciting times indeed. As I tweeted recently, the sum of the apps I’ve purchased over the past four years doesn’t even reach the number of apps I purchased in 2010 alone. Then over the years things started to settle, and I started getting more and more selective. The bulk of the apps I still use today on all my iOS devices are apps I purchased around the 2009–2015 era.

But how did I find all those apps, anyway? Here’s a (surely incomplete) list:

Personal recommendations from friends
Recommendations on social networks
Recommendations on personal tech blogs I follow via RSS
News from app developers I was already following
Marketing efforts by the app developers themselves
Reviews from websites and portals that have been app-review-oriented from the beginning. Sites like Beautiful Pixels, and the now sadly defunct AppStorm Network in particular.

A unique resource worth mentioning is AppShopper, which has been both a website and an iOS app itself. Sadly it doesn’t work anymore, but when it did, I remember thinking that is how Apple’s App Store app should have worked. The app was efficient and well-designed, and it favoured discoverability by doing what Apple’s been trying to do since the major redesign of the App Store app a few iOS versions ago. At least 45% of the apps I have on my iOS devices were discovered thanks to AppShopper alone.

On the other hand, if I had to approximate a number to tell you how many apps I have discovered simply by accessing the App Store app and — without actively searching anything in particular — just finding an interesting app out of sheer exploration, then I’d say no more than ten apps in total. In the whole history of the App Store.

What’s remarkable is actually how many ‘misses’ I’ve got thanks to the App Store, especially in the case of Mac software. By ‘misses’ I mean when you realise you’d like to have an app for a specific task, you don’t find any recommendations via the usual channels, you resort to exploring the App Store in the hope you’ll find something useful, and you end up downloading one or more apps to try out and see if there’s a viable candidate. Apps that in most cases turn out to be underwhelming at best, or don’t really do what you wanted the way you wanted, or are just terribly-put-together pieces of software.

Search has always been one of the App Store’s weak spots. As someone still using several vintage iOS devices, it would be nice to be able to search for apps that are still on the App Store but have lower system requirements. Instead I have to resort to launching a browser and perform a search like this:

site:itunes.apple.com/us "requires iOS 5"

Given the sheer quantity and varying quality of apps it offers, a place like the App Store — both on iOS and Mac OS — should have some kind of Advanced Search facility, a way of filtering or otherwise fine-tuning your searches. Instead it’s still a mess, and even when you know the name of the app you’re seeking or the name of its developer, often it doesn’t appear among the first search results. To be fair, the situation has improved over the years, but the way sponsored apps and ads are given precedence still messes up search results a bit.

It’s a pity that app review portals like AppStorm have disappeared today. Its format was great: there was a staff made of curators who really cared, offering well-written reviews that were not too long, not too brief, with a final rating from 0 to 10. There were app round-ups, so you could have an idea of, say, which were the seven most notable productivity apps of the month. There were news and opinion pieces.

Even with the recent restructuring and redesign of both the Mac and iOS App Stores, even with the undoubtedly useful Today section, I’ve had a hard time finding new apps ‘blind’, just relying on the search & discover features of the App Stores themselves. Marco Arment is entirely right — the App Store has been little more than a conduit for purchasing and installing apps. In my personal experience, after 13 years purchasing apps, the App Store itself has had next to zero influence over my decision whether to buy an app or not. In the sheer majority of cases, I already knew what I was looking for, and I already knew it was going to be a good-quality app.

Apple Silicon Macs: wait

June 3, 2021

by Riccardo Mori

Tech Life

There has been one common theme in the readers’ emails I’ve been receiving for the past two months or so: people asking for buying advice regarding Apple Silicon Macs. While I intend to respond privately to each and every message, because everyone comes from a different, specific situation, I’ll write here my general take on the matter, one week before the WWDC.

If you want the TL;DR version, there you have it in the title of this piece. The longer answer is a reflection on the current state of things both from a hardware and software standpoint.

Hardware

Since the Intel-to-Apple Silicon transition started, Apple has introduced one new chip, the M1 SoC, and as one would expect from Apple’s history designing their own chips for iPhones and iPads, the M1 delivers an impressive CPU/GPU performance and power efficiency. I just wrote “as one would expect”, but in truth the M1’s performance vastly surpassed everyone’s expectations.

Currently there are four Apple Silicon Mac models powered by the M1: the 13-inch MacBook Pro, 13-inch MacBook Air, Mac mini and the 24-inch iMac. With the exception of the MacBook Air and entry-level iMac (both lacking 1 GPU core), these Macs all perform in the same excellent way. The models lacking 1 GPU core perform slightly worse but I guess that a regular user won’t really notice the difference.

At the moment, there’s no real performance differentiator between these machines; it’s not like the PowerPC or Intel days when you had, say, two Macs with the same CPU class but different clock speeds, or a different number of CPU cores. The only thing making a difference between one M1 Mac and another is perhaps if you choose a variant with 16 GB of integrated RAM instead of 8. At the moment, the main differentiator between these M1 Macs is their form factor and I/O connections.

Should you buy one of these Macs now? At this point the transition to Apple Silicon Macs is more or less halfway through, maybe even less than halfway. Apple still has to introduce the second wave of Apple Silicon machines, the prosumer/professional tier. Putting together various rumours, we should expect a 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pros, a more powerful iMac with a bigger display, a new Mac Pro, and there’s even a more powerful Mac mini on the way. There are also rumours of a new, colourful MacBook (I’m not sure if it’s going to be a redesigned MacBook Air, or if Apple is thinking about reintroducing a laptop that is simply called MacBook, without Air or Pro designations).

All these not-yet-announced Macs, supposedly starting to appear over the next months all the way into next spring (I’m speculating), should all be equipped with a more powerful chip than the M1.

So, let’s get back to the question, Should you buy one of the current M1 Macs now? Here’s my reasoning:

Do you currently own an older Intel Mac and you’re getting frustrated by its performance for certain tasks, a pro-level Mac would be overkill for your needs, and you can’t postpone an upgrade anymore? Then get one.
Do you think a colourful 24-inch iMac is just the right desktop Mac you were waiting for, are satisfied with what it offers and you think its price/performance is just right for you? Go for it.

Otherwise, wait. Even if you’re coming from a Mac mini and find the M1 mini appealing for the performance boost over your Intel mini at a relatively low price, wait for the purported M1X Mac mini. It could offer you even more performance and it may still be an affordable machine.

Wait until the transition to Apple Silicon Macs reaches the next stage. Wait until you’re starting to get a clearer picture. To see what the pro machines offer and at what prices. You will literally make a more informed choice.

Software

Apple Silicon Macs have of course a different architecture than Intel Macs, and even if an Intel Mac and an Apple Silicon Mac running Mac OS Big Sur look identical superficially, behind the scenes things behave differently.

You should really keep an eye on Howard Oakley’s blog, and I suggest you take the time to check what he has written so far under the M1 Macs category. In Would you regret an M1 Mac?, he writes:

M1 Macs have a complicated security model, quite different from that enforced by the T2 chip, which is difficult enough at times. Although this allows an M1 Mac to boot from an external disk without changing its security settings (in the way that you have to with a T2), recognition and use of external storage for such purposes is continuing to trip M1 users up, particularly when combined with relatively immature Big Sur installers. In recent versions of macOS 11 this hasn’t improved as much as it needs, and now even the NVRAM seems to have become locked down from the system.

And:

Macs, even those with T2 chips, have always offered the user choices as to how they’re used. Although the most popular is to boot each Mac you use into your account on its internal storage, many prefer to go around with their own bootable system on an external disk. This is ideal for someone who wants the same environment, apps and documents when they’re in the office as when they’re at home.

The good news is that’s now possible using M1 Macs, with some significant cautions in addition to the current limitations over updating bootable Thunderbolt disks.

You probably don’t want to try this with just any M1 Mac, though. Getting your wandering drive to work with a new M1 Mac is quite a fiddle, and not something you’d want to do every time you go into the office. With just two or three different Macs, it appears quite usable within the limitations now imposed by macOS.

These are just excerpts, make sure you read the article in full. Howard then concludes:

Are M1 Macs ready?

Yes, but you should still tread warily if you need:

more than 16 GB memory;

more than two Thunderbolt ports, or to use a dock;

to boot from an external disk;

to boot more than one Mac from the same external disk.

My very condensed take is this. Apple Silicon Macs, due to their different architecture, feature a different security model, a different boot structure, a different recovery system in case things go wrong, and despite we’re by now four minor releases into Big Sur, the situation is still a bit rough around the edges. I know we’re in the middle of a transition, but I wish things were somewhat smoother. And I wish Apple outlined these significant changes more clearly for the end user. New customers entering the ecosystem only now and through an M1 Mac won’t care much, as it’s all new territory for them, but users transitioning from Intel Macs should be made more aware of such changes.

In this regard, if you’re a regular user who uses their Mac for everyday tasks, has a minimal backup strategy mainly consisting of Time Machine backups and the occasional manual backup of the most crucial stuff, doesn’t tinker with their machine, and so forth — then the transition from an Intel Mac to an Apple Silicon Mac should be relatively painless.

Power users, developers, and assorted nerds should get an Apple Silicon Mac if they want, but I would suggest to not get rid of their trusted Intel Mac setup just yet. (I suspect they already know this, I’m just writing it down for completeness). Support for external disks seems to have been fixed in Mac OS 11.4 for M1 Macs, as Howard Oakley explains, but anecdotally I’m still hearing from people with M1 Macs reporting issues with some of their disks, and a friend recently told me via email that while he’s thrilled by the performance of his M1 MacBook Pro, at this moment he would feel uncomfortable if this were his only machine: I always feel that my experience is ‘on rails’ with this Mac, that whenever I want to try something more ‘experimental’ I’m either going to encounter some glitch, bug, or displease the OS in a way or another [winking face emoji].

Again, like we saw at the end of the Hardware section above, unless you’re in bad need of performance and your older Intel Mac is dragging you down, waiting a few more months shouldn’t hurt. At the upcoming WWDC 2021 we’re going to have a preview of the next version of Mac OS, and hopefully Apple has been monitoring all the feedback received about Big Sur, so perhaps later this year you can get an even better Apple Silicon Mac with an even more integrated and functional operating system. (Between you and me, I dearly hope Mac OS 12 is going to be a more ‘technical’ release, aimed at fixing and refining what doesn’t work in Big Sur, otherwise we’ll enter yet another round of ‘new features, new bugs, let the old bugs rot’).

What about me? What am I going to do?

This is what people often ask me when asking for upgrade advice.

I’m going to do exactly what I’m suggesting in this article — wait. I’ve always avoided the Early Adopter Train during a major Apple transition. I’m what you would call a power user, but for what I do I don’t need the latest and more performant machine, so I can play the waiting game without much hassle.

Whenever I decide it’s time to upgrade, I always aim for a slightly more powerful Mac than I need, because I plan to use such Mac as long as possible as opposed to upgrade frequently.

I admit I was curious to try an M1 Mac and was initially thinking about purchasing a base M1 Mac mini to use pretty much as a test machine while at the same time having good hardware in case I needed to perform the occasional resource-intensive task.

Then the 24-inch iMacs were introduced, and for a moment I thought I could go on and just replace my current 2017 21.5‑inch 4K retina iMac. But I’m not a fan of the design compromises Apple has chosen for these iMacs, I still think my current iMac and its assortment of ports are more versatile, and I have the feeling that I will like the new ‘pro’ iMac better anyway.

Then the recent leaks about the design and I/O connections of the purported M1X Mac mini (see my brief thread on Twitter) rekindled my interest in having such a compact and powerful solution in my setup, and at the same time are proving my point; that is better to wait if one can. If I had bought an M1 Mac mini on a whim, I’d certainly have regretted it now.

This stage of Apple’s transition to Apple Silicon Macs is like a very inviting round of starters at a banquet. If you eat too much of them, when the even tastier main courses are brought to the table you’re going to be already full.

Finally, I insist on waiting until more Apple Silicon Macs are introduced (and Apple shows their hand) especially if you’re a budget-conscious customer who can’t afford to upgrade their Mac frequently. You can save the money of an impulse purchase of an M1 Mac now and get a better Mac at a later stage.

The M1 iMacs: Unnecessarily thin

May 23, 2021

by Riccardo Mori

Tech Life

In my piece about Apple’s Spring Loaded event that took place last month, I said this about the design of the new, colourful M1 iMacs:

Apple has created what’s possibly the thinnest all-in-one desktop computer, and I’m sure they’re still patting themselves on the back. But was it necessary to produce a computer that is so thin that its power supply has to be external? I find that rather inelegant. My 21.5‑inch 4K retina iMac is less than 3 cm thicker at its thickest point, and has an internal power supply. I believe that Apple could have easily built a new iMac with this new, flat design, by making it 2.5 cm thicker and putting the power supply inside. It still would have retained a thin and elegant profile, and Apple would have spared us the external brick.

This design choice on Apple’s part keeps rubbing me up the wrong way. If the thinness of these new iMacs excites you to the point that you don’t really mind having to pay that thinness with having an external power brick, perhaps you’ll find my irritation a bit amusing. Or perhaps you’ll see it as a way to find something, anything, to criticise Apple or to be unhappy about.

Actually, these iMacs have features (or lack thereof) that are even more annoying to me, and that external power supply is just the cherry on top (or, well, at the bottom… of the desk… hidden somewhere…).

When I dislike things like this, sometimes I worry that maybe it’s a matter of age. That maybe I’m just that get-off-my-lawn curmudgeon who has seen so many designs and purported innovations in tech over the past 30 years, and therefore can’t really be enthusiastic about these colourful thin slabs. About these design statements that want to be so much more “how it looks” than “how it works” that, in order to do so, sacrifice I/O, sacrifice internal upgrades, and have to have some parts of their main circuitry placed externally because they simply can’t fit inside.

But I’m glad that someone like Marques Brownlee shares my perplexities about the 24-inch M1 iMacs. In his video review on YouTube, he’s not afraid of speaking his mind about some aspects of the iMac’s design that don’t convince him.

[The iMac] is trying to be a piece of tech that can fit into any room, and people would rather have something that looks friendlier than a metal box. Fine. Now, the chin on the other hand… This is probably where we’re going to start to disagree.

I get that it’s iconic to the iMac to have this chin, even though they got rid of the actual icon, the logo. But I just think it would have looked so much better without the chin. So, most of the computer is down there in the bottom. If you look at Apple’s videos, you can see their basic setup, which is the M1, and the logic board, and all that — most of the computer down in that chin. Then it’s just mostly cooling and speakers throughout the rest.

So, by shoving the computer down there, it let them make this whole computer razor-thin — 11 and a half millimetres thin for the whole thing! It’s thinner than a MacBook Pro, it’s thinner than an Apple Watch! This entire computer is actually thinner than the depth of a headphone jack, so they had to put the headphone jack on the side of the computer, otherwise it wouldn’t fit at all. It’s stunningly razor-thin, and it’s kind of amazing that the entire computer fits inside this sleek case — thinner than pretty much every other 24-inch monitor.

And that’s all amazing, and it clearly took a lot of work to make it this thin. But after I get it out the box and decide where I want to put it and lock it in place, I don’t care… I don’t care how thin it is. So I’m confident that nearly 100% of the people buying this machine would have been totally cool with it being, like, 20 millimetres thick, and being able to fit a lot of that computer stuff behind the display so that it doesn’t have a chin. And it would have looked way better and it still would have been impressively thin, so then that would have also given them more room for more impressive speakers. […]

They also probably could have fit the power adapter inside the computer like with all the rest of their desktops, but they really leaned into the external power brick situation with the iMac here…

Dave Lee, another competent reviewer with a good eye for design, doesn’t like the chin either, but more interestingly in his video review he mentions another aspect that’s worth pointing out. He appreciates the design of the magnetic power connector that attaches on the back of the iMac, but he also notes that the iMac is really light, 4.5 kg, and the bottom of the iMac’s stand is slick plastic, it lacks any grippy material. This, he says, is nice for sliding the computer around a little bit, in case you want to tilt the screen and show something to someone, or move the screen away from the sun, for example. But, because it’s a light machine, and there’s no grip on the bottom of the stand, if that power cable on the back is yanked, he thinks there’s a very real possibility that the iMac goes right over the edge of your table or desk.

Since Dave moves the iMac a lot in his video, you really notice just how lightweight this machine is, and just how easily it can be moved around — maybe even too easily. Even if you think the ‘yank the power cable and the iMac may fall’ scenario above is unlikely, think about other situations, like having your headphones plugged in, the headphones cable gets tangled or trapped around something (your chair’s armrest, perhaps), and you end up yanking the iMac, maybe even damaging the headphone port and surrounding chassis, given the position and the thinness of the computer. Do you think this is another extreme scenario? Maybe it is. But I have firsthand experience and other people’s accounts of this exact scenario happening with laptop computers (especially the ‘falling on the floor’ part).

Desktop computers with external power supplies

When John Gruber’s review of the new M1 iMac appeared on my feed, I went and read it right away because I was very curious to learn his take on it. Historically, all his product reviews have been thoughtful, detailed, and have often pointed out things I hadn’t considered, or made me see them in a different perspective, which is the kind of intellectual input I really love.

But this review was underwhelming and, as I commented on Twitter, with unusual fanboyish tones I’ve never really detected in his past product reviews.

His argument defending Apple’s choice to make the iMac so thin as to have an external power supply is unconvincing:

Is it a cheat to make the power supply external? Sure, maybe. But great designers know how to cheat right. The external power supply could have been internal, glommed onto the back behind the hinge somehow. There’s no doubt in my mind that this actual design — with the external power supply enabling the iMac itself to be as thin as possible and universally flat across the entire back — is a superior idea. The power supply will, in most people’s setups, be hidden out of sight. Why not hide something that’s even just slightly ungainly? All sorts of ungainly stuff, everywhere in life, is hidden out of sight. That’s a design cheat.

This reads like a brief from Apple’s marketing department given to a sales rep.

The external power supply could have been internal, all right; the iMac would have been a bit thicker, but still thin enough to be a striking design. It would have worked. It would have produced an equally elegant iMac with all its ports in the main unit. It probably wouldn’t have been a show-off design like this, but really, I don’t see any other reason behind the iMac’s thinness other than, We made it this thin because we can.

Is there any usefulness behind this absolute thinness? No. While I never liked thinness for thinness’ sake in computers, I could understand the argument in favour of having a thin laptop because it also means having a lightweight machine you can easily carry with you anywhere. In machines like the MacBook Air and the 12-inch retina MacBook, thinness can be considered a feature. In a desktop computer? It’s merely wow factor. It’s just looks. Is it good design? I don’t think so. Gruber talks about ‘design cheat’. It’s actually a compromise.

Gruber:

Why use an external power supply with a non-portable desktop computer? I think that’s the wrong question. The right question is: Why should MacBooks and iOS devices be the only devices that look as thin as possible? Apple has, in fact, done this before, but only sporadically. The 20th Anniversary Mac (1997), G4 Cube (2000), and the first few generations of Mac Mini (2005–2009) all had external power supplies. These M1 iMacs, I suspect, won’t be the last.

Well, in the case of the Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh, this machine featured a unique sound system by Bose, with integrated stereo speakers in the main unit, and a subwoofer built in an external Bass unit. The power supply necessary to power both the Mac and the subwoofer would certainly have been too bulky to be put in the main unit. Since the Mac came with an external subwoofer, it simply made perfect sense to put the power supply there.

The Power Mac G4 Cube came with a big and heavy power brick. You can see its size compared to the Cube’s in this image (taken from eBay):

This power supply wasn’t external just because this way Apple could make the Cube as compact as it was. If this power supply had been an internal component, the Cube wouldn’t have been just taller — its whole design would probably have been different and, essentially, much more similar to any other tower-shaped Power Mac G4 of the time. This power supply is very powerful, capable of powering both the Cube and an attached Studio or Cinema Display with the ADC connector. A power supply like this gets hot and needs proper ventilation. By making it external and in a perforated chassis, Apple could make a smaller and silent desktop setup (remember, the Cube was passively cooled like the iMac G3; it didn’t have an internal fan) where neither the Cube nor the power brick needed active cooling. This is a much better example of that ‘design cheat’ Gruber talks about.

In the case of the Mac mini, the reason for having an external power supply is right there in the Mac’s name. The point was to keep the Mac as small as possible because that was (and is) the defining feature of the Mac mini. Apple then managed to put the power supply inside the mini, because in later Mac mini units the internal components were smaller or removed (like the optical drive).

So, let’s recap:

In the case of The Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh, the benefit of an external power supply was to allow the Mac to have a unique and powerful sound system. It wasn’t just a matter of having a good-looking machine.
In the case of the Power Mac G4 Cube, the benefit of an external power supply was to have a compact and silent desktop machine that was still capable of directly powering ADC displays with just a cable, so that the user didn’t have to deal with two power bricks, one for the Cube and one for the display.
In the case of the first generations of Mac minis, the benefit of an external power supply was to have a small desktop computer. It wasn’t a purely æsthetic reason. The Mac mini was not designed to look cool, but to be usefully compact. Its compactness and small size is its defining feature and what makes it still a versatile machine today (Macminicolo will surely agree).
In the case of the new M1 24-inch iMacs, the benefit of an external power supply is… what? That so you can have the thinnest desktop machine ever? Okay. And that’s useful, how? Thin and light, some will argue. Sure, a light desktop computer is great when you need to take it with you when working out and about— oh, wait. Yeah, yeah, the answer is: the benefit of an external power supply in these M1 iMacs is that so they can look cool. It’s the looks. Just that.

Gruber:

The result of putting the Apple TV-sized power supply out of sight is that the M1 iMac itself looks like it’s just a display. Maybe that’s true of the Intel iMacs too, but the M1 iMac not only looks like it’s just a display, it looks like it’s a very thin display.

I own a 2017 21.5‑inch 4K retina iMac. It doesn’t look thick when I look at its profile. The curved, tapered design makes it look like a thin display indeed. Sure, not razor-thin as the new iMacs, but still, it’s only 5 mm thin at its edge. And it’s a very balanced design overall, both in terms of visuals and weight. It’s not a heavy desktop machine (it weighs 5.6 kg, essentially 1 kilogram more than the M1 iMacs), but it has sufficient heft you don’t feel it may topple if accidentally hit or if it gets yanked by a cable. And it has a very useful array of ports: four USB‑A, two USB‑C Thunderbolt 3, Ethernet, and an SD card slot.

The design of the new M1 iMacs… I don’t know. I even read someone who used the word daring, but what is the dare? Who gets to make the thinnest all-in-one desktop computer? Good, now what? What’s the purpose?

You may say, Sometimes things are just designed to look cool, and that’s okay, I guess. I think it’s a philosophy that works best with objects that aren’t everyday tools, but that’s me.

But even with some past Apple computers where it was clear that the primary purpose of their design was to look different and distinguishable from other PCs (think of the iMac G3 or the first colourful clamshell iBooks, or the Power Mac G3 Blue & White, and the following generations of Power Macs), there was at least one element in that design that made it also practical and smart. A common denominator of all those past Macs I’ve mentioned was their handles. All those machines had smartly integrated handles to lift and move them around. There was more of course, but even this small detail was enough to give their design a certain depth and purpose. These new iMacs are as razor-thin as their design is razor-shallow.

Buttons and dials are not the problem

May 14, 2021

by Riccardo Mori

Handpicked

Kirk McElhearn, in his DPReview article Opinion: Do we really need all those buttons and dials? :

Today’s cameras are computers with lenses, and like computers, they have a plethora of features, far more than any film camera. As with any computer, we need to be able to adjust these many settings. There are menus that allow us to enable, disable, and tweak the many features available, and buttons and dials give us quick access.

But with many modern cameras now offering a dozen or more control points – some customizable with no obvious markings – there’s a risk of overwhelming certain users. More importantly, the sheer complicatedness of digital cameras can get in the way of taking photos.

[…]

There will always be complicated cameras available for those who want the utmost control. But having a plethora of control points doesn’t necessarily make a camera any better – for some, it makes it worse.

I have too many cameras. Still more film cameras than digital cameras, but recently, thanks to a mixture of very good deals found on eBay, and the generosity of some photographer acquaintances and friends, I’ve also been adding quite a few digital cameras to my collection.

Shooting digital is certainly more practical, more instantaneous, and more affordable today, but one of the things I’ve always preferred about film photography is just how well-designed many film cameras are, whether we’re talking of simpler point-and-shoot cameras, rangefinders, or professional SLRs.

Many film cameras have buttons, dials, and controls that are so well-placed you can easily adjust everything manually and take your shot without even moving your eye away from the viewfinder.

The problem of too many digital cameras is not the sheer amount of buttons and dials — it’s their user interface in general. It’s their menus and settings. It’s the balance between physical controls and virtual controls. It’s the way user interaction is designed.

With all the photography literature and expertise accumulated so far, it should be easier to design a camera’s user interface, instead I often keep seeing unnecessary complexity.

Buttons and dials should be used for all basic functions, everything a photographer needs to quickly adjust in an intuitive way. Setting ISO speeds, changing the white balance, adjusting exposure compensation, focus lock, shooting modes, etc. — all these are functions the user should be able to change without having to look for them in a sprawling menu hierarchy.

Yet I’ve used a lot of digital cameras where the manufacturer chose menus over physical controls to offer a more minimalistic camera design, or perhaps to save costs. The results are cameras that look simpler to use, but ultimately they are not. Users tend to get more confused by several pages of menu options and settings (often even cryptically abbreviated due to space constraints), rather than the amount of buttons and dials.

An annoying design choice with some digital cameras is that you have both a button/dial and a menu option to access the same function or adjust the same parameter. This just increases confusion and clutters the on-screen interface.

An increasing number of digital cameras today feature a touchscreen and their main interface relies a lot on touch input. While I do think that some touch controls can be handy, especially while filming yourself with cameras with fully articulating screens, this is another instance where I greatly prefer having buttons and dials.

There’s a sort of obsession with touch interfaces today, and manufacturers seem to want to put them everywhere in their products; but they’re not a panacea. They may look cool and futuristic, but from a sheer usability standpoint they’re simply terrible. Cameras and cars are the first examples coming to mind. Cameras and cars have one rather important thing in common: in both cases you want the operator to be able to perform the highest number of tasks without averting their gaze, from the viewfinder and from the road ahead respectively.

It’s kind of semantically ironic how touch controls, despite the name, are the ones lacking feedback. So, every time you want to change something, move a virtual switch, activate or deactivate a feature, you need to be looking at the screen first. And the problem with many cameras with touchscreens is that these controls are generally tiny and not really easy to select. Or they’re crammed together and you may end up changing some other parameter by mistake. And in the best case scenario they slow you down noticeably. What do you think it’s more convenient for changing ISO or WB settings, having to tap repeatedly a small target in the corner of a 3‑inch touchscreen, or turning a dial with your left hand while you see updated information in the viewfinder and you still have your right index finger on the shutter button, ready to take the shot?

So yes, I think we need all those buttons and dials — provided they’re laid out thoughtfully, and provided their arrangement is part of a greater interface design that includes the menu layout and navigation, a balance between direct physical controls and what you set up by navigating menus and submenus, and deciding a hierarchy of priority. Buttons and dials should always prioritise frequently-used and frequently-changed controls, and the access to the provided functions should always be as direct as possible. You want to push a button or move a dial, and the associated parameter to change on the fly. You don’t want to push a button or move a dial and have a mini-menu appear, and have to navigate that menu with the arrow pad and press OK to confirm.

When the arrangement of buttons and dials is well designed and their functions clearly marked (or very easily memorised), then you end up with a better overall interface, which is much preferable over cameras that are heavily menu-based and whose few buttons have to necessarily serve multiple purposes. Here you have an interface that slows you down and is harder to memorise.