No, it's not. But a) for some reason, most vocal people are the one doesn't like any change at all (how many times we see posts and coments glorifying Windows 2000 ui as a pinnacle of UI design?) and b) this site become a copy of slashdot from the start of the century, just with reversed roles of Apple and Micro$$oft - it's just fashionable to dump at anything Apple related.
Not that Big Sur doesn't have it design problems (at least from the screenshots from the first beta onward, I didn't tried it yet). And to be honest, even without Jony Ive, my impression is that designers still more care how the product will look on screenshots than in real use. But it's hardly just an unusable piece of shit that majority of comments here implies.
That's untrue..? Windows 10 gets the most flack out of any operating system for its UI direction.
Truth is, design will always be a personal choice - some lean towards pragmatism over aesthetic and others lean the other way. Some people will like it, some people won't.
People are noticing Apple is choosing to go down Microsoft's and Google's direction in UI design with flat, big wasted lettering space, and contrasty icons. It's fair to complain about that as Windows users have for years.
Anyone who has rolled out a new version of an application or even a completely new app replacing an old one knows that in general people are reluctant to change. And the more reluctant they are, the more vocal they are about it.
I liked Win 7 the most although XP wasn't bad, but I hate flat design with a lot of white space. I am using a computer, not a phone so I can click on small icons with a mouse.
I assumed Big Sur was designed that way because Apple would finally merge iPads with Airs and get MacOs with a touch screen, which would have made the tradeof make sense. Alas, not so.
Lots of wasted space everywhere, for no good reason. And degraded usability in so many places.
Look at the Mail app for example, you could previously view “inboxes” at the top of the app (useful because you could then resize the app to take up far lesser horizontal space); and now you can’t – just because, … no reason really?
> White space or negative space is important for usability
Sure, I don’t deny it. However, just adding a ton of space doesn’t make a design good. Especially when you actively harm functionality while doing that.
From my limited experience doing design, I’ve realized that good contrast and active visual demarcations go a long way towards that goal (both things which the new UI is sorely missing).
Notice the breadcrumbs that you could use to conveniently use as favorite inboxes. Those are gone now, which means that you have to keep the left sidebar always exposed (thus taking up significantly more horizontal space). This was what I think is really good design, thoughtful and non-intrusive.
Not everyone is working on large screens. Adding a ton of padding to all UI elements doesn’t improve usability in the slightest, regardless of what you might say.
I've noticed even apart from this there are many people who have a strong emotional reaction against space, using almost moral language to describe their problems with it. It's as if the space is truly being wasted, squandered... that the space isn't being valued for the work it can do, but instead left open for aesthetics in a bourgeois obliviousness to the needs of the proletariat.
GNOME 3 has done a fine job of tweaking their UI for touch usability, and more recently for small screens - it's already quite usable on tablet hardware.
Does many third party programs seem faster than before to you?
Firefox seems noticeably faster to me. By "noticeably" I mean that when I started doing normal browsing after upgrading, not looking for or expecting any performance improvement, I found myself thinking "how did clicking that link display the new page so fast?".
Excel also seems a little snappier. I've got a spreadsheet that has a few worksheets, and one in particular seemed slow to switch to. It's responding quite a bit faster now.
Same. I like that it feels familiar when moving between my iPhone, iPad and macOS. It has some quirks, like all the UIs before it, but there isn't anything I'm going to rage over.
Change is always hard though. Some people will like it and some will hate it.
It's very jarring to say the least. My first impression playing with Big Sur under parallels was that everything on screen seemed to take up too much space. The corner radius change in particular is enough to really bug me. Though I did get used to it pretty quickly. I'm going to wait a while before upgrading a machine I regularly use.
This is always true, every time, 100%. The UIs that people here are wishing hadn't changed were absolutely hated when they were announced.
In a few months we'll be able to have a more measured discussion about the good and the bad, but this reaction now is par for the course. Every UI change I've ever gone through has sounded exactly like this on internet forums when it happened.
Nah I work with a lot of Mac users and I’ve not heard any complaints yet. This is just the internet effect I think, people like to complain about things.
