![]() ![]() On narrower windows, The Search box is now gone, collapsed until you click the Search icon.Īpple has also altered the geography of the window itself, in a move that was telegraphed with the design of several apps, including Music, Podcasts, Reminders, and Maps, in macOS Catalina. The Back and Forward buttons are perched on the extreme left, even beyond the title of the window. The title, once centered, has been aligned to the left and made bolder, with its icon hidden (until you mouse over). ![]() Toolbar icons are simple glyphs that only gain an outline when you mouse over them. Let’s start with the sheer lightness (or in Dark Mode, darkness) of it all: the gray gradient of the title bar and toolbar is gone, replaced by a light (or very dark) gray space that’s populated with the contents of both the title bar and toolbar, collapsed into a single row of items. The first time you look at a Finder window in Big Sur, you will realize that the Mac you have known for years is gone. If the atom of the Mac interface is the window, then Apple has split the atom in Big Sur. High-contrast windows Windows in Big Sur are a study in contrast. Big Sur’s design has rough edges and will need to be reined in a bit, but it also has a lot of potential. That said, a lot of aspects of the Big Sur felt comfortable to me after a week or two-probably because I also use an iPhone and an iPad, and Big Sur is picking up aspects of the design of those devices. And I expect that some of them will end up getting re-thought by Apple’s designers over the next couple of releases. There are definitely some aggressive, challenging changes in the macOS Big Sur design that will throw long-time Mac users for a loop. When Apple makes major operating-system design changes, they tend to start out a bit extreme and then get beaten into shape over time-until they become boring and are replaced by a new design. Now here’s macOS Big Sur, getting ready to ring in the dawn of the third age of Mac. Did Apple use Catalina as a patsy so that Big Sur wouldn’t be blamed for all the changes required for the transition to Apple silicon? That’s probably a conspiracy theory too far, but I will say this: Good Cop macOS Big Sur fills me with excitement about the future of the Mac in a way Bad Cop Catalina never did. It broke a lot of old software, frustrated a lot of users, and generally had the worst reputation of any macOS update since Mac OS X Lion in 2011. Last year’s macOS Catalina felt like a release designed to settle old scores and clear the field for future advancement. It’s macOS 11.0 Big Sur, which takes the familiar OS X and transforms it by importing a bunch of features from its long-lost relatives, iOS and iPadOS, including support for Apple-designed processors. ![]() Mac OS X, having been rebranded twice and reconstituted to run on Intel processors over its two-decade run, is shucking off its cocoon and emerging as something new. We remember the G3 iMac and the iPod and ultimately the iPhone as the products that brought Apple from the edge of failure to being one of the biggest companies in the world, but it wouldn’t have happened without Mac OS X.īut here we are, at the end. The code it originated with, and many of the software managers and programmers who built it, came to Apple in the same transaction that brought Steve Jobs back to the company. ![]() Mac OS X was no less than a rebirth of the Mac, 16 years after it first appeared on the scene. Note: This story has not been updated since 2020. ![]()
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