Riccardo Mori

What about the M1 Macs?

December 28, 2020

Whenever I end up updating my blog less frequently, or seem to avoid talking about the tech subject du jour, I’m sure to find some message or email asking me or teasing me about exactly that. According to recent feedback, people were surprised by my silence regarding the new M1 Macs with the first Apple Silicon chip.

There’s nothing sinister about my silence. As I’ve said repeatedly over Twitter, I’ve simply been very busy with my daily job in the past three months or so, and I haven’t had the time to sit down and write about this subject. I started to read and watch reviews from people who actually had review units of the new M1 MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, and Mac mini, and therefore had something concrete to say. And in so doing, I realised that, at the end of the day, there’s not much to add to what has already been said — the blessing and the curse when you finally have time to talk about a subject that isn’t really du jour anymore.

Pretty much all reviewers have reported the amazing mixture of stunning sheer performance and greatly-improved power efficiency, making the new MacBooks largely silent, never getting hot under pressure, and with absurdly long battery life. Performance has also been notable software-wise, as many Intel apps translated by Rosetta 2 apparently run faster on an Apple Silicon Mac than on Intel Macs. These facts alone have filled me with enough excitement to consider purchasing an M1 Mac sooner rather than later.

More interestingly, I think it’s also time to look back at what I expected, mused, and feared about the current Mac transition a year or two ago, when everyone was engaged in speculation roughly before the release of Mac OS Catalina. Searching previous entries on this subject in my blog, some key words appear to be dread, apprehension, anxiety, then a mix of quiet optimism and worry.

In my numerous observations back in 2018, 2019, and earlier this year, the apprehension regarding the Intel-to-ARM transition was never really about the hardware. I anticipated (like many other pundits) that the new ARM-based Macs would display an incredible combination of sheer performance and power efficiency. What made me nervous was primarily how Apple would manage the transition; the time they would grant users and developers to adapt; how quickly they would burn bridges with their Intel past, so to speak; if and how much they would provide backward compatibility software-wise, and so forth.

But the WWDC 2020 made me quietly optimistic, and the November ‘M1’ event reinforced that optimism. Apple still seems to care about the Mac, after all, and seems to be handling the architecture transition just as smoothly as the PowerPC-to-Intel one.

I still have some concerns, though. Two, mainly.

One — Many commentators, talking about Apple Silicon, appear to be relieved by the fact that Apple has finally been able to get rid of Intel CPUs and that Apple isn’t constrained anymore by Intel’s chip development roadmap. Finally Apple has complete control over their hardware. Like what’s been happening for years on the iPhone and iPad’s fronts, Apple is able at last to design everything at the hardware level, inside and out. And I agree with this sentiment, to some extent. Apple’s innovation in SoC design is undeniable, and these first entry-level M1 Macs are just the beginning of what Apple can do.

But the flipside of total hardware control is, well, that Apple is even more free to shape the Mac platform to their taste, needs, and whims. Which means that if they want to release Macs that are user-inaccessible black boxes inside, they can. And many people won’t even protest because oooh, these Macs are powerful, they last hours and hours on a single charge, and they’re very secure! I know that in late 2020 wanting a personal computer with user-upgradable and user-replaceable parts sounds quaint and very old-school. But if an internal SSD fails, or if I want bigger internal storage down the road, it ought to be possible for me to replace the SSD or to swap it with a bigger one, instead of having to bring the Mac to have its entire motherboard changed by Apple at a cost that, out of warranty, would certainly be prohibitive.

Two — Hardware/software integration. It should be a no-brainer at this point. With Apple Silicon Macs and Apple designing and coding their own operating system, we should be in integration heaven, back to the good old PowerPC days and even better. And yet, when I look at the advances of Apple’s hardware division and the products of Apple’s software division, the results seem to come from two different companies. In After WWDC 2020: bittersweet Mac, I wrote:

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.

After spending five months using beta after beta after official releases of Big Sur on a 13-inch retina MacBook Pro, Big Sur’s interface feels exactly like that — easy on the eyes, but punctuated by arbitrary design decisions that make it clunkier, less usable and less friendly in different areas. It shows that the system has been rethought with the how-it-looks before the how-it-works. The Mac today feels powerful like never before. Mac OS feels at its most dumbed-down.

So, what about the M1 Macs? They’re unbelievably good machines, and everything that is genuinely good about them and future Apple Silicon-based Macs — sheer performance, astounding power-efficiency, and great backward compatibility with Intel software thanks to Rosetta 2 — will also allow Apple to get away with a lot of things with regard to platform control, design decisions, software quality, and so forth. Who cares that a pill tastes bitter, if it makes you feel good, right?

The narcissism network

December 27, 2020

by Riccardo Mori

Briefly

Every now and then I get a message from one of my contacts asking me if I’m ever ‘fully’ returning to Instagram. You see, my Instagram account, while still active, is in a sort of passive mode. Back when Facebook acquired Instagram (2012), I decided to stop uploading photos, not wanting to put anything creative on something that was now owned by Facebook, the tech company I despise the most. My first reaction at the time was to just shut down my account, but what about the network of contacts and acquaintances I had built there when Instagram was good and fun? So I decided to still hang around and check their photos, and sometimes like and leave comments. There are also a few people I know I can only contact through Instagram, so that’s the way we exchange messages.

Back to the question I was mentioning at the beginning — the answer is probably When Instagram will be removed from Facebook and returned to its former glory, i.e., it’s pretty unlikely, unless someone in power really decides to break down tech giants like Facebook.

But apart from my personal preferences and my hate for Facebook, it is undeniable how profoundly and for the worse Facebook has changed Instagram over the years. Of course, people who have become ‘important’ thanks to Instagram will not agree, but everything Facebook has brought to Instagram has contributed to transform a fun network for casual photo sharing into a machine for self promotion and ego-boosting.

When I open Instagram today, what I see is a destroyed timeline that is so riddled with advertisements, promoted accounts, suggested accounts and similar extraneous content, that I actually struggle to scroll and find photos from people I actually follow. What is important to me — this content, submitted by friends and acquaintances and people I’m interested in — is presented by the app as if it were an afterthought.

But it’s not just a matter of a distorted shape or form of the product, it’s also a matter of how the content itself, even from people I like and follow, has shifted. Very few people still use Instagram in the way that it was back in 2010, and those who do are all early adopters. Now Instagram is an opportunity for self promotion, both in the sense of Here’s something I made (a product, a design idea, a typeface, etc.), and in the sense of a narcissistic cult of personality, and that’s where you’ll find accounts made entirely of selfies and announcements of upcoming live videos. I appreciate the former type of self promotion; the latter, er, insta-grows old.

The ‘Instagram story’ format, while open to many different purposes, is again very often used for self promotion, self-affirmation, and navel-gazing. And don’t get me started on Instagram Reels. I don’t know about you, but in my case all Reels suggested by the algorithm involve young women who are either dancing, working out, showing off their new clothes, or engaging in suggesting activities. (I really can’t explain this. It’s certainly not based on my Instagram browsing activity, which is generally very limited and always focused on people I follow — a completely different demographic.)

There are days when I think Flickr should double down on social photo sharing for its mobile experience and try to recapture the fun and immediacy of both Instagram and Flickr’s heyday, but I understand this is easier said than done. I’m also wondering if Instagram’s transformation at the hands of Facebook has perhaps poisoned the well for good, so that it’s now more difficult to create a social network where people just share stuff for the fun of it, without thinking about other purposes, without egocentrism and the “what’s in it for me?” mentality.

Finally upgrading my iPad

December 12, 2020

by Riccardo Mori

Tech Life

Rather unexpectedly, my wife got me an eighth-generation iPad as birthday gift. The Space grey, 128 GB, Wi-Fi model. She told me she couldn’t stand my growing frustration as I kept using my old third-generation iPad I bought in 2012. And she knew that, for my needs and personal preferences, an eighth-generation iPad (“iPad 8” from now on) would have been more than enough.

And she was right. Granted, the new iPad Air is cool, and is for now the only iPad featuring two things I really like: the new, more angular design and reduced bezels of the iPad Pro, and the presence of a TouchID sensor. But really, I’m just happy to have a more modern iPad; I’m not overly concerned with looks and specs.

Of course, coming from an 8‑year-old iPad 3, the performance boost and also the experience boost are remarkably noticeable. Upgrading my iPad was never one of my top priorities because I don’t use it for work, I barely do creative things on it, and it certainly is not my primary device. While I’m a tech-savvy person and you could even call me a ‘power user’, when it comes to the iPad I use it just like most regular folks — mainly as a consumption device. I read the news and RSS feeds, write the occasional email, browse the Web, listen to music, watch videos, do some photo editing, take notes, and plonk around on GarageBand.

For a long time, my trusty iPad 3 was powerful enough to let me do all that, and since upgrading my main Mac and iPhone became a more urgent matter, also upgrading the iPad felt like an unnecessary expense.

However, the overall performance and responsiveness of my iPad 3 have been worsening over time, more and more noticeably, and the user experience so marred by lags, freezes, and unpredictable (though fortunately sporadic) self-reboots, that for certain tasks I actually enjoyed my first-generation iPad more. Yes, as I’ve previously stated when reviewing the iPad 1, despite it being a less powerful machine than the iPad 3 when you compare their tech specs, it still feels quick and responsive under your fingers. iOS 5.1.1 on the iPad 1 feels much more ‘tuned’ and optimised than iOS 9.3.5 on the iPad 3.

When the iPad 3 was new, I remember some pundits criticising it for essentially being a slow dog that used to get too hot when in use. But it wasn’t my experience. The iPad 3 originally came with iOS 5.1, and while iOS 5 and iOS 6 were certainly the two releases where that iPad really shone, I didn’t really notice any slowdowns under iOS 7 and iOS 8 either. But iOS 9, that was a mistake. Sure, it extended the iPad 3’s useful life, but the cost was a performance hit that became more severe as time went by. iOS 9 came out in 2015; maybe Apple didn’t think there would be people using this 2012 iPad for so long, so they didn’t bother optimising it too much (the same can be said for iOS 9 on the iPhone 4S — which I downgraded to iOS 8.4.1 the day after acquiring the phone a couple of years ago).

Anyway, even with all that said, this ‘slow dog’ has remained useful for many years, its performance truly degrading only over the past year or so (To which point, you may ask — well, to the point that simply scrolling down a moderately complex webpage would make the iPad hang).

What keeps amazing me about this old device, however, is its battery life. After eight years and a half, it still lasts a couple of days on a single charge, with light-medium usage.

But what about the iPad 8? To be honest, I still haven’t had the time to put the new iPad through its paces, since I’ve been swamped with work these past weeks. But I wanted to start with a clean slate, so I didn’t perform a restore from a backup. I just configured it as a new device, and started downloading the apps I’ve been using the most on the iPad 3. And as I said above, the jump in performance is extreme when you’re accustomed to an iPad whose CPU is seven generations older.

The iPad 8 came with iPadOS 14 preinstalled, of course, and I was afraid of feeling a bit lost with regard to gestures and features. Thankfully, the basic, surface-level gesture language is essentially the same as it was on the iPad 3 with iOS 9. But I still maintain that — unless someone tells you, or you gather information by perusing the iPad Guide on Apple’s site or by searching on the Web — many deeper gestures and features remain essentially undiscoverable. I remember staring at the iPad 8’s screen, trying to recall multitasking-related gestures, and I drew a blank. Trying to trigger things by tentatively swiping here and there only brought frustration and frankly made me feel a bit of a newbie. While typing and editing text, I also tried to recall those fancy gestures for Cut, Copy and Paste. Do you remember them, without looking them up in the Guide? I didn’t. Here’s a refresher:

Cut: Pinch closed with three fingers two times.
Copy: Pinch closed with three fingers.
Paste: Pinch open with three fingers.

Intuitive, right? Right? Yeah, didn’t think so.

But anyway, I could make this article very long by listing all the little things that, together, create a bad mix of undiscoverability and friction, but that would just be a waste of everyone’s time, mine included. Because those people who already know my criticisms regarding the increasing complexity of iPadOS, and agree with me, will still agree with me. Those who don’t will just tell me that once I’ve got accustomed to the new layers of complexity in iPadOS, all those gestures that still lie undiscovered will become second nature.

And to this second group of people I’ll say that maybe they’re right, but before getting accustomed to such gestures I still have to discover them. Now, I am a techie who keeps himself reasonably up-to-date with this stuff, so I know there are gestures and features on my iPad 8 I need to look for and learn — and I’m going to do just that, because I know where to look. A regular person, not so much. And retorting that a regular person probably doesn’t need to learn more sophisticated gestures because they’re likely to use the iPad in an unsophisticated manner is such a bullshit excuse, if you pardon my French.

iPadOS still needs work to increase discoverability, usability, and reduce friction in many basic-to-intermediate workflows. It’s still an operating system that cannot properly handle its increasing complexity. When you stay on the surface and keep using the iPad as a consumption device, iPadOS is a breeze and is really enjoyable. Once you start digging deeper, once you want to multitask and carry out more complex tasks for longer sessions… that’s when the struggle begins, as you keep wondering why the path to complete certain tasks has to be so convoluted when on the Mac is literally one click and one keyboard shortcut away.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m enjoying my new iPad more than it seems at first glance. I can finally browse the Web and read RSS feeds without hiccups or freezes or the iPad spontaneously rebooting because it didn’t like the Javascript pill a website forced down its throat. I can finally edit photos on the fly, and so on. Whatever app I’m using, everything feels instantaneous. Battery life is outrageously good (I mean, I was given the iPad on 3 November as a very early birthday gift, and since then I only recharged it twice!). And while being only 162 grams lighter than my old iPad 3, it feels much lighter when I handle it. The essence of the iPad experience I felt when getting to know my iPad 3 back in 2012 is still mostly intact. And I’ve decided I’m happy with that.

Mac OS Big Sur logbook (10) - Out of Beta: assorted notes

November 21, 2020

by Riccardo Mori

Software

As you can see by the lack of updates on this blog — almost one month, goodness gracious — my day job has kept me incredibly busy. In this day and age, tech commentary generally tries to keep up with the speed of tech news, and it’s frustrating when you finally have the time to collect some thoughts on a certain subject, and you’re more than a week late.

Also, when I started this logbook, the format idea was to post short, frequent entries as I kept exploring each Big Sur beta version, and try to document differences and any progression or regression of what I’m most interested in when it comes to operating systems — the user interface. I ended up being busy a lot of the time, and only managed to get to 10 entries so far, but I hope I’ve been in part successful in showing what has been going on with Big Sur over the past months.

Little change

And here comes the first point I want to make (or probably reiterate): in general, from a visual and UI standpoint, the Big Sur we have today, officially released nine days ago at the time of writing, hasn’t changed much from what was previewed last June at the WWDC. And that’s… not good, in my opinion. Every time I’ve made this point in the past weeks, the kind of response I’ve received was something like, This is a major visual redesign for Mac OS. It’s likely that Apple has started with a lot of drastic choices that will be smoothened out over the next major, not minor, Mac OS releases.

It’s a sensible response, and very possibly describes what will happen, but it’s extremely unsatisfying for a user interface enthusiast like me. Because it feels like the work on the user interface isn’t getting the priority it deserves. And let me tell you: looking at the current visual state of Big Sur, the work on the UI ought to be Priority Number One on Apple’s list.

And random changes leading to friction

You can browse past entries in this Big Sur logbook for a more detailed look at certain UI changes. The overall feeling is that in an attempt to make Mac OS look more like iOS/iPadOS, Apple has introduced new elements and interactions that on the one hand feel alien to experienced Mac users, and on the other disrupt decades of Human Interface Guidelines with arbitrary and purely-æsthetic changes.

You have app icons that are now losing their uniqueness by going through the Big Levelling Machine and coming out all squares with rounded corners. This sameness in shape that originated in iOS had a reason: in a touch interface, apps are like buttons you press with your finger. This metaphor, on a regular computer with a more precise mouse+keyboard input method, weakens at the functional level, and can also become actively impractical when you have a crowded Dock and you start hunting for the app you want to launch because now all icons have the same shape and they’re harder to make out.

You have dialog boxes and alerts that have been imported as-is from iOS whose design on Mac OS — even within the new Big Sur æsthetic — looks weird and ultimately feels just like what it is, a simple copy-and-paste from another OS that was designed for a completely different category of devices.

You have other ‘imported’ solutions that, while bringing that sense of familiarity and homogeneousness across OSes Craig Federighi seems to care so much about, also introduce friction for no real reason. Take the Control Centre, for example. It’s one of my favourite features on iOS. Its essence is to be a control panel you quickly access to quickly perform certain routine operations, and over time it has become a bit more customisable so that you can have shortcuts to even more actions.

But almost everything about the Control Centre in Big Sur makes it somehow a slower solution and involves more clicks to perform the same operations you can perform in a much faster way on older Mac OS versions. And this added friction is not only limited to Control Centre. Managing notifications has become more fiddly and frustrating, again because of some arbitrary design decision. I fully agree with Marco Arment here. He tweets:

The important actions are now invisible, hidden behind a hover state that requires an extra click (“Options”).

Why?

I know the cost — it’s slower to use and less discoverable.

What are the benefits that make that cost worthwhile?

Whose job is it at Apple to fight for usability over visual appeal when a conflict arises between these factors?

Firstly, that hover state doesn’t even appear consistently. Especially the little ‘×’ in the upper left corner of a notification pane that has the important role of letting you dismiss the notification. Sometimes it appears as soon as you hover your mouse, other times it takes repeated attempts until it finally graces us with its presence. On top of that, it’s an awfully tiny target to hit. I often miss it, and I’m using Big Sur on a 13-inch retina display… Imagine using a 27-inch retina iMac, or the 32-inch Retina 6K Pro Display XDR.

Usability versus visual appeal

Secondly, Arment — in his typically lucid and succinct way to put things — completely nails the crux of the matter when it comes to Big Sur’s UI design: usability versus visual appeal. It’s the recurring theme whenever I encounter some user interface change or user interaction hiccup, and usability seems to always lose the fight.

Think about how less immediate a lot of little things have become. Replying to a message from the notification you’ve received, for example (see this tweet by Wojtek Pietrusiewicz). Or take the Bluetooth indicator in the menu bar. Previously, the icon had a few very recognisable states, such as:

Greyed out icon: Bluetooth is off.
Black icon: Bluetooth is on, and there are no devices connected.
Grey icon with three horizontal black dots across it: Bluetooth is on, and there is at least one device connected.
Black icon with a little battery icon at its side: at least one connected Bluetooth device has a low battery.

When you only connect one device to the Mac via Bluetooth, seeing the grey icon with the dots gives you a visual confirmation that the connection has been established. You don’t even need to check by clicking the icon and pulling down the menu.

In Big Sur, when one or more devices are connected, the Bluetooth icon simply stays black. The only thing this tells you is that the Mac has Bluetooth on. But even if you only connect one device, you have to invoke the menu to be certain that it’s paired and connected. This is a minuscule detail, I agree, but it’s a step back for no apparent reason all the same. An intelligent improvement would be what my friend Donovan Bond suggested: A visual indication of how many devices are currently connected would be great.

Mind you, such annoyances aren’t huge if you examine them one by one. An early impression of Big Sur’s UI I had around the time I started testing the betas (first half of August) was that the visual redesign was ‘kinda nice’ if looked from afar, but frustrating up close the more attention you paid to the various little details. In this sense, it truly reminds me of iOS — an operating system whose interface I’m overall okay with, but which becomes progressively tiring to use the longer the session. It’s like talking to a quick-witted person whose jokes and sarcastic remarks are enjoyable during relatively brief interactions, but get a bit too overwhelming over the course of much longer conversations.

And the problem is that I don’t typically use my Macs in short bursts of activity or for short sessions or to carry out brief and spur-of-the-moment tasks. I have my iPhone and iPad for that. Ever since I started testing Big Sur on my 13-inch retina MacBook Pro I’ve realised I don’t really like to engage in long sessions with it. Especially at first, it started to feel like I was using some kind of third-party iOS-inspired skin installed over Mac OS, and after a while I was sort of thinking of a way to ‘reset it to default Mac OS’, so to speak. Now this feeling has waned a bit, but hasn’t gone away completely.

Cognitive load, my ass

In a now oft-quoted interview for the Independent, Craig Federighi remarks:

We’re living with iPads, we’re living with phones, our own sense of the aesthetic – the sort of openness and airiness of the interface – the fact that these devices have large retina displays now. All of these things led us to the design for the Mac, that felt to us most comfortable, actually in no way related to touch.

I’ve never felt more comfortable moving across our family of devices as a user, which I do hundreds of times a day than I do now, moving between iOS 14, iPadOS 14, and macOS Big Sur. They all just feel of a family – there’s just less cognitive load to the switching process.

I’ve used iOS since it was still called iPhone OS, and of course I’ve used Mac OS for more than 30 years now, and I’ve never felt that ‘cognitive load’ Federighi talks about when switching from one OS to the other. I also never had a problem recognising that the two systems were from the same company. And neither did any of my friends or acquaintances, whether they’re Mac or Windows or Linux users, whether they’re tech-savvy people in general or not. And here we have someone who, I believe, has used Mac OS for as long as I have, and is also the VP of Software Engineering at Apple, talking about this ‘cognitive load’ when switching from one platform to another… And, well, I have a really hard time believing him, you know?

At the same time I’m in full agreement with Michael Tsai when he says:

The cognitive load that Federighi mentions just isn’t something I’ve (consciously) experienced. And one could make the argument that it’s confusing to make systems that work differently look the same. But I take him at his word because it certainly explains decisions like the awful iOS-style alerts. That design provides no benefits for touch; it just makes macOS look more like iOS, which he considers to be a plus.

What I do believe is that it’s the software engineers at Apple who have been progressively experiencing a cognitive load in trying to bring forward different operating systems with different ages, histories, and design such as Mac OS and iOS. It’s been a while, I’m sure, that they were aching to simplify software development across all platforms, and the best way to do that was to unify all of them. And if you look at all of them, which was the outlier until now? Mac OS, of course. Who cares if it was the oldest, more robust, more consistent UI-wise. It was the odd one out, and now that Apple has regained complete control of the platform at the hardware level with Apple Silicon, the software has to play along.

Previous logbook entries

Mac OS Big Sur logbook (9) - More UI refinements

October 27, 2020

by Riccardo Mori

Software

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:

Menubar B5 vs B10
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:

Icon size slider (B8)

Icon size slider (B10)

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:

Sliders in Dock and Menubar pref pane

Transparency

The Dock’s transparency has been slightly, progressively reduced from beta to beta:

The Dock in Beta 5

The Dock in Beta 10
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.

Fixed Preferences window in B10 In Beta 10.

• In System Preferences → Desktop & Screen Saver, there is an updated graphic to show Dynamic Desktops. I like it.

Desktop and Screen Saver (B5) Dynamic Desktop option in Beta 5.

Desktop and Screen Saver (B10) 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:

Preferences - Privacy (High Sierra) This is how it was in Mac OS 10.13 High Sierra.

Preferences - Privacy up to B9 It would disappear later and in the Big Sur betas so far.

Preferences - Privacy - Now 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.

New images in Customise 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.