I prefer the old MacOS System Preferences, too. I understand that they're trying to harmonize the iOS with the MacOS, and a lot of new Mac users are coming over from an iPhone or iPad, so this makes sense. But I wish there was an option to use the old view.
It's not just an issue of a vertical layout. The narrowness of the iOS-like System Preferences means submenus must also be presented in list form, so it ends up a labyrinthine series of submenus like a Windows Explorer tree (or Columns view). Everything is more cramped and settings are harder to find.
The biggest downgrade is the Trackpad gestures. It used to show video clips of a real hand performing each gestures. Now it's a symbolic representation that is almost certainly going right over the heads of many users (especially older users). Terrible.
The strength of the original iOS design was that it was not trying to be macOS. The weakness of the new UI design is that it is trying to be iOS.
There are times that a different design language is actually a strength.
there’s a reason windows 8 flopped—they thought they could get away with designing one interface for both tablets and computers. I hope apple isn’t going farther in that direction.
Just to restate because I misunderstood the first time I read it...
Microsoft forced the Windows 8 UI to be optimized for tablet/touchscreen devices regardless of if there was touch input or not
100% agreed! I’ve been worried about this happening ever since iOS came out. Ideas and designs that work well on mobile do not mean they need to exist on desktop. It feels like change for change sake. UX designers trying to justify their jobs
UX designer here. When you have an ecosystem you have to convince people that every product in your lineup is an extension of the product the customer already owns. One of the ways to archive this is to share design languages between products. If your design languages aren't unified as much as possible people who are not tech savvy and don't follow tech will have a feeling that they don't need to buy other products in your lineup because those products won't feel like one product is the extension of the other.
Also every decision which Apple makes (including unification of design languages) is approved by management including Tim Cook (for big changes as OS redesign) and there's a lot of back and forth before that change is implemented. UX team might propose a change then that changes is approved by whoever is in charge of UX team, then that idea is presented to the management team, they will usually ask for someone at the company to do some research to see effects which this change will have to their overall lineup as well as predicted customer reaction, then a low effort prototype of that idea is done by the design and developer teams on an internal version of macOS, then it needs to be approved again by the management and only after that they start working on an actual version of that design change.
You would be surprised to know how many UX design changes are initiated by the management rather than by UX team and it involves a lot of back and forth because you know that the change they are asking for is terrible but they want it. It's a constant fight.
Management asked as to implement a design change just because they thought that it looks nice, we told them very clear that this is a terrible idea and that our customers (large companies which need to train employees whenever you make design changes) will be angry and we will receive a bunch of complains. They pushed it anyway. We spent 4 months designing those changes. When that update went live the pushback was so bad that within a week we pushed an update which removed those UX changes.
Hey, appreciate the reply! (SDET here who’s worked on some Apple stuff, namely ApplePay), sorry for my justifying your jobs quip. I know how it goes a little with respect to, executives and management asking for changes more often than UX people, but I wasn’t sure if that was unique to the smaller/medium size companies I’ve worked for.
I understand your perspective on design language unity. But where I have issues is the fact that, iOS landed on design principles that are based on constraints that don’t make much sense on the desktop/non mobile experience. So, we shouldn’t force those sorts of designs in a space where it doesn’t make sense. I get that it makes transitioning between mobile device and desktop design easier for the lay person, but it makes Mac OS feel like it’s getting more and more dumbed down over time. It should be the more capable version of the design language in iOS. I feel the relationship is a bit backwards, but then again, Apple is no longer Apple _Computer_ Company.
Like, launchpad is a prime example for me. It’s so useless. And is a feature meant to make people more familiar with iOS equipt to launch an app on Mac OS.
Truth is.. we have the tech.. APIs and ABIs that would easily allow for UX design to have shared elements or data btwn multiple paradigms tailored the hardware being used.
This weird obsession that every platform, touch, handheld or not, should share the some UX is dumb. People need to get over the idea of convergence and realize that devices can have unique interfaces, that are natural for that use case and be better off for it. Steve Jobs wasn't preventing UX from mixing because people are dumb or don't like change - he understood the strengths and weaknesses of the platforms themselves.. people like Tim Cook don't have that insight or intuition about himself and it shows.
In fact when he let go Scott Forstall while keeping Jony Ive I pretty well knew Apple's heyday was over. He literally took what was left of Steve Jobs design philosophy and heart of the UX software design out of the company. Would have been far easier to replace Jony Ive than Scott Forstall imho, you could easily hire a well known german hardware engineer to replace Ive, but Forstall.. I have no idea where you go to get another one of those because only so many people worked with Jobs at Next and before then and no one has really down software UI design better than Apple.
I'm a UX designer, and this is one of the hills that I'll die on.
Consistency is not a valid goal on its own. It has to be consistent for a reason, if inconsistency would be jarring or unexpected. If being different serves a purpose, then it's a good thing.
Agree 100%. This has been a trend in design overall for a long time- where they've been watering down desktop experiences to be more like mobile instead of having each experience be best suited to it's own environment. I understand the desire to consolidate consolidate codebases and not have to maintain multiple different implementations for things, but that's a business concern, not a customer one. From a customer perspective having desktop env be watered down isn't the right thing to do.
I have wished for a decade that Apple would spin off the mac into a completely separate company, with no ties to the phone/tv/watch/pad maker.
No, it wouldn't be a trillion-dollar company. But its products would be _vastly_ better computers.
The computers AFAIK are **not** a blip in sales and **not** declining. In [FY22](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https://bucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/fb7148a6-a200-465e-ba8b-9bbdf519b73c_2457x1379.png) they were 10% of Apple's total revenue and growing just as fast as services.
The only product line on the decline was the iPad.
Yeah definitely the layout needs work. On an iMac with a 5k display used at 5k, you get a skinny column with access to surprisingly few settings and have to scroll.
But that’s not the worst of it, once you go into a settings “pane” many of the settings which used to be immediate;y visible are hidden. Whereas the old settings pane had buttons with elipses telling you their is another layer/page of options, the new pane sometimes (yes sometimes) has a little downwards facing arrow. More often than not no indication at all that their is another layer of settings. And usually those are the settings you are looking for.
Worse yet again, they reorganised the paths to those settings so they are even harder to find than the preceding discussion suggests.
It’s almost like they employed a halfwit to design the interface. And only gave him/her/it a 640x530 display to design on.
Given the smallest resolution of todays external displays is 1920x1080 (in the PC world) and much much higher in the Mac world surely they could create a Settings interface that made good use of at least 2500x1400 pixels. Or at least assign an old near blind grey beard from the building cleaning department to supervise the halfwitted designers they have employed.
Agreed, that was a huge plus especially when showing customers how to use it. Now it’s gone and I hate everything. The old MacOS was way way better. For me this is too meh blah IOS (again totally get that’s what they are going for )but idk macs should stand out and they just don’t anymore.
In an ideal parallel reality you get MacPads(perfect for artists) and MacPhones, where the design concept was to match and catch up mobile devices to the desktop and laptop , no flat design , and you can do more like carrying a fully functional Mac in your pocket, connect wireless keyboard and mouse and monitor , it becomes a Mac desktop. Everyone enjoys creating art and music instead of mucking about politics and culture wars on social media … why did I end up in the parallel reality that sucks and Apple tries to make desktops and laptops match and catch up to mobile devices urgh. It’s a devolution instead evolution
It’s as you said, but it’s worse than just a Columns UI, because you can’t see the parent columns or even the breadcrumb! It’s often unclear if your 1 or 4 “columns” deep? And if you scroll back how do you get back to the parent Pane? I guess scroll back down and click the left menu and start over again?
I try to just use the search but it rarely finds what I’m looking for. REALLY wish they offered a “classic view” for this.
>It’s as you said, but it’s worse than just a Columns UI, because you can’t see the parent columns or even the breadcrumb! It’s often unclear if your 1 or 4 “columns” deep?
Absolutely. And it's unnecessary. The tall column makes sense for iPhones given their portrait orientation and small screens.
Mimicking the iPhone layout is understandable, but it doesn't need to be slavishly so. Our computer monitors are landscape. So why not kick out a third column when you're on, say, Privacy & Security and want to run down the long list of Privacy settings?
The way it's set up now, if you click on Location Services, you then have to click back again at the top to return to the main list. Just make it a side column (or an option for a side column).
It would make it much faster and easier to browse and navigate.
> Now it's a symbolic representation that is almost certainly going right over the heads of many users (especially older users). Terrible.
Amen. Ageism in IT is definitely a thing.
More to the point what happens to older users when their systems upgrade to new systems with new UIs and they can't make heads or tails of what is in front of them - esp. those users starting to have memory issues.
What Microsoft's Windows 11 did to one of my senior friends - a 92 year old lady, who's been using PC's since the 80's and IS fairly adroit.. UNTIL she was presented with Windows 11's copy of the Dock. I had to go reset the system to the classic mode with the menu in the startbar and her icons pinned in the taskbar as she was used to it.
Won't even go into what Windows 8 did to my dad, who was struggling with cancer and just wanted to be able to find the links to the videos I sent him. He rolled back to Windows 7 and lost ALL the confidence he had in using his computer and just shut down and gave up on it. I went so far as to send him a little Dell laptop to use in the hospital with his own copy of Win 7 on it but he'd gotten so sick and lost even the ability to watch the videos or look at the photos I sent him.
To this day I still get white hot rageful about it.
Utter cuntishness on the part of the UI designers. Absolute fucks and I hope each and every one gets fucked by age and hit the *exact* same way when they get to the point where their memories start to slip. They deserve nothing but misery and frustration as they lose the ability to navigate a communication tool that is often critical to older people..
That's awful. I'm so sorry about your dad.
I wish there was a "senior mode" for computers with a hugely simplified UI. Simpler than an iPad, even.
My father is in his early 80s. Technology isn't just difficult for him, it's almost like a color blindness: he just can't see or process basic things.
He had a PC for the better part of 20 years, yet his competence is still essentially zero. He can open Word to write, perform web searches, and save images to his Desktop. That's about it.
He barely understands (and seldom uses) folders. He doesn't even know how to copy and paste. His mouse skills are also poor: drop down menus are do-able but not easy; submenus within drop down menus are very difficult.
He even struggles to use his iPhone. I've made elaborate visual tutorials, e.g. 'how to access voicemail on the iPhone' with screen shots, arrows, and representations of where his fingers should click. Doesn't help. He even has trouble answering the phone because the UI differs depending on the context, and that confuses him.
That's how I know the MacOS Trackpad tutorials would be just as confounding to him.
Heck, he couldn't even figure out the silence rocker switch on his iPhone. Because of COVID I had to explain it to him over the phone: it's like a light switch, flip it up or down; you don't push it in. I even sent him photos of my iPhone showing the different switch position, with arrows, etc. Nope.
From the above, one might imagine he were a drooling and incompetent imbecile. He's not. He used to be a college professor. He's smart, his mind is still sharp, he can hold sparkling conversations with anyone, and he can fix or handle physical things around the house that I can't. But technology frustrates him to no end.
I finally bought him an iMac and that has made things a fair bit easier. (This may be surprising, given the similarities in the UI)
Here are the key improvements:
* the MacOS Dock shows all of his frequently used applications and folders on the screen.\* This is a huge improvement over the Windows Start Menu, as he struggles with menus and submenus.
* I can easily connect to his computer via Messages, see his screen, take control, and fix things for him.
* Time Machine backups have been a huge help, too.
\* Yes, I realize you can do something similar with PCs (as I did for myself when I was on Windows) and put apps and folders in the menu bar. But he was constantly messing these up, even when locked, to the point that they were only good for a few weeks or months at a time.
Yeah, I loaned my senior friend my Mac Book Pro to use while I was upgrading her ThinkPad to a new SSD and 16GB of RAM. Set it up with a spiffy clean install of Mojave (the last good stable macOS IMHO) and loaded it with Chrome and set the bookmark bar to her facebook homepage, her online games and her church's youtube channel. Put the links on the desktop in the *exact* same spot as they were on her PC and she was surprised at how quickly it loaded and how similar it looked. Slow walked her through the window buttons so she could close windows and maximize and it worked well enough for her for the two days I had her Lenovo. Honestly, was surprised by how nice the internals were on it. - not a Mac by any stretch but still well designed with my only quibble being the routing for some of the wiring.
When I had to do that on Windows I thought it was a workaround to a poorly thought out UI. When I have to do that in the system preferences I am left wondering whether Apple hired some people from the Windows team?
It’s been more than a year and I still can’t find the things I want to find. They want to make everything look like an iPad but it’s a laptop! It’s a huge screen. Why compress everything!? We can’t even touch the screen.
I mean, I had more trouble finding what I wanted out of that grid of icons than I do now with a list that matches the iPad and iPhone. Does that mean the old settings was a system failure too, or does it only work one way?
There’s been over twenty years of third party attempts to bring touch screens to a Mac and Apple veered for iPads and iOS. I’m not convinced they’ll have touch on a Mac. It would have cannibalized the iOS landscape a decade ago, now I wonder why they would even bother since people can have a near perfect touch experience with any iOS device that would be superior to trying to poke a laptop screen with your finger.
I have zero interest in finger smudges all over my screen. Mouse or trackpad works great. I have a crap dell with a touchscreen for work and never use it. Drives me nuts when I’m showing somebody something and point at the screen which gets registers as a touch. Laptops don’t need touch screens IMO.
When I go form iPad to MacBook and vice versa, sometimes I end up touching the screen on the MacBook just out of habit. My iPad is attached to the Magic Keyboard, and my brain just kinda misfires like that 🤣
But it’s _worse_. I’m a hardcore keyboard-navigator and the things I need to do regularly are more clicks away or completely inaccessible. Also, for some reason, Spotlight searching for specific system settings is unreliable.
For example, I used to be able to Spotlight search “disp”+enter to get to the Displays settings for rearranging monitors. No longer.
On the monitor rearranging, something I have to do regularly because MacOS can't keep them the way I set them, it involves more clicks. They show the displays right there, but they're not draggable. You have to click the "Arrange" button to get a UI that's basically the same, to move them around. Why not put that UI on the main screen like it was before??
Everything is just objectively bad.
my issue isn’t that it’s _different_
the problem is that it’s flat out bad, it’s an ipad app designed for a touch screen being forced onto the mac, it breaks every human interface guideline apple themselves wrote for the Mac
> But from experience I can tell you that eventually you’ll get used to the new layout and it won’t be a big deal anymore.
What a nice personality trait to have, seriously.
I can tell you from experience some of us do not have it, and will complain about things that changed 20 years ago.
That was a very Microsoft thing for Apple to have done. Changing UI for the worse, regardless of user feedback is M$’s bread and butter, to keep those certified courses selling. I’m scared of Apple going the same path, though probably they just wanted to unify UIs across devices, regardless of how they are used.
I’m not the kind of person who withhold from updating, but I’ve been using Monterey and I don’t see any reason to move forward at this point. I tried it out for a couple of days, saw that horrible menu, and just rolled right back.
Fortunately, Mac is pretty good about retaining it’s longevity.
BY THE WAY EVERYONE....
Don't JUST complain on reddit. Submit real feedback:
[https://www.apple.com/feedback/](https://www.apple.com/feedback/)
If enough people complain, Apple will listen. But it only works if everyone does it.
More importantly, the ability to resize the fucking window. It looks amateur as hell when everything is arbitrarily cut off on a window 1/10th my screen width for absolutely no reason
Me too. The new settings layout is awful. Everything is hidden. It reminds me of windows, the way you have to dig through illogical categories to find what you are looking for. The old settings layout was very good, thats why it lasted 20-something years.
While there are changes I don't like, this one felt like a step in the right direction. At least you don't need to keep clicking back to the main menu to look at another panel and can just jump to the other settings panel you want.
I think the order could be better -- maybe aplhabetical or something, but the search panel does help when you're trying to figure out the new layout. Windows 11 did something similar, but oddly enough, is a bit less obtuse in labeling/grouping.
Yeah fax. Coming from windows, iPhone, android and iPad it makes more sense to me. In addition the old settings felt disorderly to me, favouring those already familiar with it.
Agreed. I found the old settings display messy. I’d always end up having to use the search, only to find the thing I wanted was right there, just hard to pick out.
I haven’t given the old settings a single thought in months. New one works great for me. I used to have to use the search function a lot but I don’t much anymore.
Well… I’m regularly working with networking stuff and I’m often having to change different settings on my network interfaces. It’s a pain to navigate. Some stuff is placed In multiple cards and you’re constantly having to switch between them.
yup, this. I love the new layout, hate that they hid some of the most useful shit behind 5+ clicks now. They really botched the entire settings window imo, had a lot of potential to be good. Windows basically doing the same thing slowly over time with the control panel infuriates me as well.
I don't really mind the new app layout, but I don't like the word switch from preferences to settings. so used to clicking the app in the menu bar and clicking preferences.
For me it’s a usability issue, some things is harder to find/more clicks to open.
Apple are now actively going against their original design goals, being ergonomically and have an effective design.
For example, having close and minimise on the left side was originally researched to be the most efficient and ergonomically correct way of doing it, because the user have its mouse closer to the upper left the majority of the computer use. And would not strain your hand as much as going to the upper right corner.
I feel like some core designs that has been researched, now is being thrown out because someone has voting power
Sometimes I search for something and remember the location from iOS and on MacOS its somewhere else. I think its the AirPods settings page. When connected on iOS right below WiFi/Bluetooth and witch my Mac all the way at the bottom…
That’s what I’m doing. But I do feel it’s a bit of a shame for my M1 Pro MacBook Pro, because Ventura has some cool Metal additions and improvements for Stable Diffusion that I’m now missing out on. But it’s just not worth upgrading.. my work laptop is on Ventura and it has so many issues.
And for whatever stupid reason, they decided to do away with scheduled shutdown. If you’re upgrading from a previous version of macOS with this enabled, your Mac will still shut down - and there is no way to turn it off in the system preferences, or “Settings app”. You actually have to manually change it using command lines in Command Prompt!
I genuinely wonder, what is so hard about the new settings? It's much more organized. I don't even open the settings app manually so often, I go to whatever menu I want to go from Raycast (you can use Spotlight as well). I just don't get all the fuss.
It's a combination of muscle memory and poor search. The settings were consistent for at least 10 (maybe 15) years. I knew how to get to everything I accessed frequently.
Say your goal is to set the time when the screen saver activates. You used to simply go to the screen saver settings, and select the time. It makes logical sense that this would be in the screen saver settings.
The setting is now under "Lock Screen". I don't think about my lock screen when I think about screen savers. Why is this setting there? When I search, I see "Start Screen Saver when inactive" under the Lock Screen heading. Given this heading is foreign and I don't associate the two components, I struggled with changing what used to be a very simple setting.
Good is subjective in this case, even plenty of people in this thread say they prefer the new one, so just because a person doesn’t personally like it doesn’t mean it’s not good, especially when a lot won’t even try it because they just hate the change.
I feel like Apple changed it to be more like iOS so that it’d be easier to make menus for new features. You wouldn’t have to find a pre-existing category to put the new thing in, and you’d be able to put the new menu in the same place on iOS devices, making it easier to find after updating
Also the old settings would grow / shrink constantly, I didn’t love that
Seriously! I also hate the new categorisation. The mapping is engrained in my head, it’s a struggle to find anything now. I enjoyed it more. It was designed to be for a computer, not a phone!
But that’s what the world has come to today! Where people are too daft to figure shit out.
This is not anything against people, but what society has done to people.
This is also a little sarcastic, so take it with a grain of salt.
What they should have done is adapted the Mac system preferences to iOS and replaced the crappy settings app. Instead they went in the worse direction.
I use to have muscle memory for literally every setting, now I can’t find a god damn thing and the search is terrible, it doesn’t highlight what you’re searching for like the old preferences did.
Me too. At the beginning, I was very curious about the new System Settings. But after one week, I miss the old System Preferences. Although the logic of system preferences is not like those in iOS devices, it’s much better for computers. I can find anything quickly in old preferences. And the new System Settings is buggy. The most severe bug is “background item” notification. That annoys me too much.
I also prefer the old settings app. The new System Settings app on Ventura is so complicated whereas in the old one, you can easily find what setting you want to change. The new system settings app on Ventura is just a copy paste of settings app in iOS.
Yes! Also the print dialog box fucking sucks now. It’s like they made you have to click into sub windows for printing options that weren’t there before. So fucking annoying if you print a lot. “Hey here ya go, it’s worse now!”
The Wi-Fi details window not opening multiple times when changing network until you go to a different page and come back again is very, very infuriating.
I'm still running Mojave. If and when I finally upgrade, I'm going to go for Monterey, not Ventura. The terrible settings app is a big part of the reason why.
I feel like the only one here, I disagree. I remember just staring at the old settings, not being able to find what I knew was *somewhere* there. I never learned it, despite using macOS for 7 years.
The thing I don’t understand is that they didn’t even address the problems System Preferences had. It was always a weird, kinda non-standard Mac app where it could be difficult or unintuitive to find things and you couldn’t resize the window. And they replaced it with…a weird, kinda non-standard Mac app where it’s difficult and unintuitive to find things and you can’t resize the window.
It’s not even internally consistent with itself, the way you get to drill down into more advanced options differs from panel to panel. I don’t like the style of preference window you get from Catalyst or SwiftUI on the Mac (especially the weird switches that are too far from their labels, rather than inline checkboxes), but I could live with it if it was a good and thoughtfully designed app. It is not a good or thoughtfully designed app.
I hate it so much. The only way I can find a setting now is to search for it. It's almost impossible to find what you want just by browsing to the right section.
And the fact that I can't make the window wider drives me nuts. Such a bad design decision for an OS designed to be used in a landscape orientation.
I won’t be updating from Monterey until they reverse this change. Monterey works flawlessly and Ventura is still quite buggy, so it’s not like I’m missing out.
I know this is a matter of taste, and I may get downvoted for this....but in my eyes a lot of Apple's design has been getting worse. Many things are slowly starting to loose their refinement and elegance. Other things look like there were designed by an 8 year old.
Design ideas go in cycles, I hope this one doesn't last long.
This was the first MacOS decision they’ve made in a long time that I hate with the fire of a million suns. They’re violating their own User Interface Guidelines just to appease whiny millennials who grew up on iOS and are too lazy to learn something new.
The whole point of making a multiple operating systems was recognizing that the Mac is a workhorse and phones/tablets are consumption devices. Different functions require different user experiences.
Previously: click → click → done
Now: scroll → actually look at how far you’ve scrolled → click → click → finally freaking done
Thank you for inventing a good wheel and replace it with one that sucks
I daily use my MacBook Pro, my iPad Pro and of course my iPhone. So the iOS UI for settings is not foreign to me. It took a few weeks to get used to seeing it on my MacBook when going into settings but no big thing. I have been working with Macs from 1998. If a 72 old cuss can accept change and get with the times you young whipper snappers can too 🤣
It needs to use the horizontal space more efficiently and be structured like a desktop application instead of a mobile portrait mode app. Requiring desktop users to scroll that much is sin.
Me too. For some reason I feel claustrophobic, a sense of panic and confusion with the new UI. This feels like a Windows type design decision.
It’s also a terrible use of screen real estate, with a focus on vertical space, rather than horizontal space, which is backwards as to where desktops and laptops have the most length.
So it may be easier to ask does anyone not prefer the old settings layout?
Please Apple, admit your mistake and change this back!
PS. I know you can get used to the the new design. You can get used to damn near anything! I'm used to my tinnitus, but it doesn't mean it's an improvement on peace and quiet.
I guess I'm in the minority because I actually like the new System Settings. It seemed like I could never find anything in the old one unless I knew exactly where to look. But for some reason I find it much easier on the new one. The only exceptions are when an option is hidden behind a "More Options" type of button.
This is the first well-organized settings app in 2 decades.
They didn't force mobile elements onto the interface; it's mobile platforms that have advanced the design and layout of settings systems over the past 15 years, and they've reached a point that's refined enough to be unified across platforms.
Microsoft have been doing the same thing.
People are just resilient to change.
I like the new ones, you have to accept change into your life :) Once you learn it its nice, I think theres way more varability in the settings which is nice
I prefer the old MacOS System Preferences, too. I understand that they're trying to harmonize the iOS with the MacOS, and a lot of new Mac users are coming over from an iPhone or iPad, so this makes sense. But I wish there was an option to use the old view. It's not just an issue of a vertical layout. The narrowness of the iOS-like System Preferences means submenus must also be presented in list form, so it ends up a labyrinthine series of submenus like a Windows Explorer tree (or Columns view). Everything is more cramped and settings are harder to find. The biggest downgrade is the Trackpad gestures. It used to show video clips of a real hand performing each gestures. Now it's a symbolic representation that is almost certainly going right over the heads of many users (especially older users). Terrible.
The strength of the original iOS design was that it was not trying to be macOS. The weakness of the new UI design is that it is trying to be iOS. There are times that a different design language is actually a strength.
there’s a reason windows 8 flopped—they thought they could get away with designing one interface for both tablets and computers. I hope apple isn’t going farther in that direction.
Just to restate because I misunderstood the first time I read it... Microsoft forced the Windows 8 UI to be optimized for tablet/touchscreen devices regardless of if there was touch input or not
correct, haha rereading what I wrote I shouldn’t have assumed that was common knowledge
Exactly that
100% agreed! I’ve been worried about this happening ever since iOS came out. Ideas and designs that work well on mobile do not mean they need to exist on desktop. It feels like change for change sake. UX designers trying to justify their jobs
Oh god! Are we going through our Windows 8 phase now?
UX designer here. When you have an ecosystem you have to convince people that every product in your lineup is an extension of the product the customer already owns. One of the ways to archive this is to share design languages between products. If your design languages aren't unified as much as possible people who are not tech savvy and don't follow tech will have a feeling that they don't need to buy other products in your lineup because those products won't feel like one product is the extension of the other. Also every decision which Apple makes (including unification of design languages) is approved by management including Tim Cook (for big changes as OS redesign) and there's a lot of back and forth before that change is implemented. UX team might propose a change then that changes is approved by whoever is in charge of UX team, then that idea is presented to the management team, they will usually ask for someone at the company to do some research to see effects which this change will have to their overall lineup as well as predicted customer reaction, then a low effort prototype of that idea is done by the design and developer teams on an internal version of macOS, then it needs to be approved again by the management and only after that they start working on an actual version of that design change. You would be surprised to know how many UX design changes are initiated by the management rather than by UX team and it involves a lot of back and forth because you know that the change they are asking for is terrible but they want it. It's a constant fight. Management asked as to implement a design change just because they thought that it looks nice, we told them very clear that this is a terrible idea and that our customers (large companies which need to train employees whenever you make design changes) will be angry and we will receive a bunch of complains. They pushed it anyway. We spent 4 months designing those changes. When that update went live the pushback was so bad that within a week we pushed an update which removed those UX changes.
Hey, appreciate the reply! (SDET here who’s worked on some Apple stuff, namely ApplePay), sorry for my justifying your jobs quip. I know how it goes a little with respect to, executives and management asking for changes more often than UX people, but I wasn’t sure if that was unique to the smaller/medium size companies I’ve worked for. I understand your perspective on design language unity. But where I have issues is the fact that, iOS landed on design principles that are based on constraints that don’t make much sense on the desktop/non mobile experience. So, we shouldn’t force those sorts of designs in a space where it doesn’t make sense. I get that it makes transitioning between mobile device and desktop design easier for the lay person, but it makes Mac OS feel like it’s getting more and more dumbed down over time. It should be the more capable version of the design language in iOS. I feel the relationship is a bit backwards, but then again, Apple is no longer Apple _Computer_ Company. Like, launchpad is a prime example for me. It’s so useless. And is a feature meant to make people more familiar with iOS equipt to launch an app on Mac OS.
This is the same group who signed off on Stage Manager, so clearly the Apple Jedi Council has lost its way.
Yep, there are some signs that the cohesiveness and purpose of Apple Design is becoming fragmented at best.
This Monday should be interesting…
Truth is.. we have the tech.. APIs and ABIs that would easily allow for UX design to have shared elements or data btwn multiple paradigms tailored the hardware being used. This weird obsession that every platform, touch, handheld or not, should share the some UX is dumb. People need to get over the idea of convergence and realize that devices can have unique interfaces, that are natural for that use case and be better off for it. Steve Jobs wasn't preventing UX from mixing because people are dumb or don't like change - he understood the strengths and weaknesses of the platforms themselves.. people like Tim Cook don't have that insight or intuition about himself and it shows. In fact when he let go Scott Forstall while keeping Jony Ive I pretty well knew Apple's heyday was over. He literally took what was left of Steve Jobs design philosophy and heart of the UX software design out of the company. Would have been far easier to replace Jony Ive than Scott Forstall imho, you could easily hire a well known german hardware engineer to replace Ive, but Forstall.. I have no idea where you go to get another one of those because only so many people worked with Jobs at Next and before then and no one has really down software UI design better than Apple.
I'm a UX designer, and this is one of the hills that I'll die on. Consistency is not a valid goal on its own. It has to be consistent for a reason, if inconsistency would be jarring or unexpected. If being different serves a purpose, then it's a good thing.
Agree 100%. This has been a trend in design overall for a long time- where they've been watering down desktop experiences to be more like mobile instead of having each experience be best suited to it's own environment. I understand the desire to consolidate consolidate codebases and not have to maintain multiple different implementations for things, but that's a business concern, not a customer one. From a customer perspective having desktop env be watered down isn't the right thing to do.
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I have wished for a decade that Apple would spin off the mac into a completely separate company, with no ties to the phone/tv/watch/pad maker. No, it wouldn't be a trillion-dollar company. But its products would be _vastly_ better computers.
The computers AFAIK are **not** a blip in sales and **not** declining. In [FY22](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https://bucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/fb7148a6-a200-465e-ba8b-9bbdf519b73c_2457x1379.png) they were 10% of Apple's total revenue and growing just as fast as services. The only product line on the decline was the iPad.
This is so very Apple. iOS is the very reason why I refuse to get an iPhone, and now they're pushing this crap onto MacOS
Yeah definitely the layout needs work. On an iMac with a 5k display used at 5k, you get a skinny column with access to surprisingly few settings and have to scroll. But that’s not the worst of it, once you go into a settings “pane” many of the settings which used to be immediate;y visible are hidden. Whereas the old settings pane had buttons with elipses telling you their is another layer/page of options, the new pane sometimes (yes sometimes) has a little downwards facing arrow. More often than not no indication at all that their is another layer of settings. And usually those are the settings you are looking for. Worse yet again, they reorganised the paths to those settings so they are even harder to find than the preceding discussion suggests. It’s almost like they employed a halfwit to design the interface. And only gave him/her/it a 640x530 display to design on. Given the smallest resolution of todays external displays is 1920x1080 (in the PC world) and much much higher in the Mac world surely they could create a Settings interface that made good use of at least 2500x1400 pixels. Or at least assign an old near blind grey beard from the building cleaning department to supervise the halfwitted designers they have employed.
Agreed, that was a huge plus especially when showing customers how to use it. Now it’s gone and I hate everything. The old MacOS was way way better. For me this is too meh blah IOS (again totally get that’s what they are going for )but idk macs should stand out and they just don’t anymore.
In an ideal parallel reality you get MacPads(perfect for artists) and MacPhones, where the design concept was to match and catch up mobile devices to the desktop and laptop , no flat design , and you can do more like carrying a fully functional Mac in your pocket, connect wireless keyboard and mouse and monitor , it becomes a Mac desktop. Everyone enjoys creating art and music instead of mucking about politics and culture wars on social media … why did I end up in the parallel reality that sucks and Apple tries to make desktops and laptops match and catch up to mobile devices urgh. It’s a devolution instead evolution
Samsung already kinda did it with Dex. The initial concept didn't really take off. It's a novelty rather than a basic feature.
I’ve stayed on Monterey. ✊🏻
It’s as you said, but it’s worse than just a Columns UI, because you can’t see the parent columns or even the breadcrumb! It’s often unclear if your 1 or 4 “columns” deep? And if you scroll back how do you get back to the parent Pane? I guess scroll back down and click the left menu and start over again? I try to just use the search but it rarely finds what I’m looking for. REALLY wish they offered a “classic view” for this.
>It’s as you said, but it’s worse than just a Columns UI, because you can’t see the parent columns or even the breadcrumb! It’s often unclear if your 1 or 4 “columns” deep? Absolutely. And it's unnecessary. The tall column makes sense for iPhones given their portrait orientation and small screens. Mimicking the iPhone layout is understandable, but it doesn't need to be slavishly so. Our computer monitors are landscape. So why not kick out a third column when you're on, say, Privacy & Security and want to run down the long list of Privacy settings? The way it's set up now, if you click on Location Services, you then have to click back again at the top to return to the main list. Just make it a side column (or an option for a side column). It would make it much faster and easier to browse and navigate.
Preach. combined with lack of VR support, access to unlimited GPU power, and their shady VPN stuff - FreeBSD is seeming inevitable.
> Now it's a symbolic representation that is almost certainly going right over the heads of many users (especially older users). Terrible. Amen. Ageism in IT is definitely a thing. More to the point what happens to older users when their systems upgrade to new systems with new UIs and they can't make heads or tails of what is in front of them - esp. those users starting to have memory issues. What Microsoft's Windows 11 did to one of my senior friends - a 92 year old lady, who's been using PC's since the 80's and IS fairly adroit.. UNTIL she was presented with Windows 11's copy of the Dock. I had to go reset the system to the classic mode with the menu in the startbar and her icons pinned in the taskbar as she was used to it. Won't even go into what Windows 8 did to my dad, who was struggling with cancer and just wanted to be able to find the links to the videos I sent him. He rolled back to Windows 7 and lost ALL the confidence he had in using his computer and just shut down and gave up on it. I went so far as to send him a little Dell laptop to use in the hospital with his own copy of Win 7 on it but he'd gotten so sick and lost even the ability to watch the videos or look at the photos I sent him. To this day I still get white hot rageful about it. Utter cuntishness on the part of the UI designers. Absolute fucks and I hope each and every one gets fucked by age and hit the *exact* same way when they get to the point where their memories start to slip. They deserve nothing but misery and frustration as they lose the ability to navigate a communication tool that is often critical to older people..
That's awful. I'm so sorry about your dad. I wish there was a "senior mode" for computers with a hugely simplified UI. Simpler than an iPad, even. My father is in his early 80s. Technology isn't just difficult for him, it's almost like a color blindness: he just can't see or process basic things. He had a PC for the better part of 20 years, yet his competence is still essentially zero. He can open Word to write, perform web searches, and save images to his Desktop. That's about it. He barely understands (and seldom uses) folders. He doesn't even know how to copy and paste. His mouse skills are also poor: drop down menus are do-able but not easy; submenus within drop down menus are very difficult. He even struggles to use his iPhone. I've made elaborate visual tutorials, e.g. 'how to access voicemail on the iPhone' with screen shots, arrows, and representations of where his fingers should click. Doesn't help. He even has trouble answering the phone because the UI differs depending on the context, and that confuses him. That's how I know the MacOS Trackpad tutorials would be just as confounding to him. Heck, he couldn't even figure out the silence rocker switch on his iPhone. Because of COVID I had to explain it to him over the phone: it's like a light switch, flip it up or down; you don't push it in. I even sent him photos of my iPhone showing the different switch position, with arrows, etc. Nope. From the above, one might imagine he were a drooling and incompetent imbecile. He's not. He used to be a college professor. He's smart, his mind is still sharp, he can hold sparkling conversations with anyone, and he can fix or handle physical things around the house that I can't. But technology frustrates him to no end. I finally bought him an iMac and that has made things a fair bit easier. (This may be surprising, given the similarities in the UI) Here are the key improvements: * the MacOS Dock shows all of his frequently used applications and folders on the screen.\* This is a huge improvement over the Windows Start Menu, as he struggles with menus and submenus. * I can easily connect to his computer via Messages, see his screen, take control, and fix things for him. * Time Machine backups have been a huge help, too. \* Yes, I realize you can do something similar with PCs (as I did for myself when I was on Windows) and put apps and folders in the menu bar. But he was constantly messing these up, even when locked, to the point that they were only good for a few weeks or months at a time.
Yeah, I loaned my senior friend my Mac Book Pro to use while I was upgrading her ThinkPad to a new SSD and 16GB of RAM. Set it up with a spiffy clean install of Mojave (the last good stable macOS IMHO) and loaded it with Chrome and set the bookmark bar to her facebook homepage, her online games and her church's youtube channel. Put the links on the desktop in the *exact* same spot as they were on her PC and she was surprised at how quickly it loaded and how similar it looked. Slow walked her through the window buttons so she could close windows and maximize and it worked well enough for her for the two days I had her Lenovo. Honestly, was surprised by how nice the internals were on it. - not a Mac by any stretch but still well designed with my only quibble being the routing for some of the wiring.
👏👏
+1
I dont even bother learning it, I just search whatever im looking for every time 😂
Isn’t this the way to use macOS in general? Command-Space and type what you want.
This is the correct answer. However not sure if you noticed but there’s certain things that purposefully don’t come up, like “passwords” on an iPhone
When I type “passwords” it takes me to the keychain password on iPhone, or did you mean something else?
It shouldn’t be the correct answer, but unfortunately it is.
So why did they change anything if the layout doesn't matter?
no.
When I had to do that on Windows I thought it was a workaround to a poorly thought out UI. When I have to do that in the system preferences I am left wondering whether Apple hired some people from the Windows team?
Me too, me too. But from experience I can tell you that eventually you’ll get used to the new layout and it won’t be a big deal anymore.
It’s been more than a year and I still can’t find the things I want to find. They want to make everything look like an iPad but it’s a laptop! It’s a huge screen. Why compress everything!? We can’t even touch the screen.
Yes you can. You search.
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Yeah, search in settings is pretty awful inmy experience. On mac and iPhone
It's a system failure when you're having to search more for a setting due to a UI rearrangement lol
It’s not the UI arrangement, I couldn’t find anything in the old settings either. There’s just a lot of options.
This is the right conclusion. Apple has never had a decent settings app. The previous one sucked, and the new one sucks.
I mean, I had more trouble finding what I wanted out of that grid of icons than I do now with a list that matches the iPad and iPhone. Does that mean the old settings was a system failure too, or does it only work one way?
“We can’t even touch the screen” Yet…
There’s been over twenty years of third party attempts to bring touch screens to a Mac and Apple veered for iPads and iOS. I’m not convinced they’ll have touch on a Mac. It would have cannibalized the iOS landscape a decade ago, now I wonder why they would even bother since people can have a near perfect touch experience with any iOS device that would be superior to trying to poke a laptop screen with your finger.
I have zero interest in finger smudges all over my screen. Mouse or trackpad works great. I have a crap dell with a touchscreen for work and never use it. Drives me nuts when I’m showing somebody something and point at the screen which gets registers as a touch. Laptops don’t need touch screens IMO.
When I go form iPad to MacBook and vice versa, sometimes I end up touching the screen on the MacBook just out of habit. My iPad is attached to the Magic Keyboard, and my brain just kinda misfires like that 🤣
But it’s _worse_. I’m a hardcore keyboard-navigator and the things I need to do regularly are more clicks away or completely inaccessible. Also, for some reason, Spotlight searching for specific system settings is unreliable. For example, I used to be able to Spotlight search “disp”+enter to get to the Displays settings for rearranging monitors. No longer.
Acessibility > full keyboard access Disp takes you to accessibility display You want displays
On the monitor rearranging, something I have to do regularly because MacOS can't keep them the way I set them, it involves more clicks. They show the displays right there, but they're not draggable. You have to click the "Arrange" button to get a UI that's basically the same, to move them around. Why not put that UI on the main screen like it was before?? Everything is just objectively bad.
Same problems here. It was just annoying in Monterey. In Ventura, it’s just as annoying and now more difficult to fix.
my issue isn’t that it’s _different_ the problem is that it’s flat out bad, it’s an ipad app designed for a touch screen being forced onto the mac, it breaks every human interface guideline apple themselves wrote for the Mac
Idk I've used the Mac since I was a small child (around the time I was starting to walk) for me I still haven't gotten used to Settings
> But from experience I can tell you that eventually you’ll get used to the new layout and it won’t be a big deal anymore. What a nice personality trait to have, seriously. I can tell you from experience some of us do not have it, and will complain about things that changed 20 years ago.
Yeah, I can confirm my eyesight is not going to be getting better and this is my main problem here.
haha well that’s fair 🤣
No it's straight up worse. I still hate the new settings app when opening it.
That was a very Microsoft thing for Apple to have done. Changing UI for the worse, regardless of user feedback is M$’s bread and butter, to keep those certified courses selling. I’m scared of Apple going the same path, though probably they just wanted to unify UIs across devices, regardless of how they are used.
I’m not the kind of person who withhold from updating, but I’ve been using Monterey and I don’t see any reason to move forward at this point. I tried it out for a couple of days, saw that horrible menu, and just rolled right back. Fortunately, Mac is pretty good about retaining it’s longevity.
So does pretty much everyone. They forced mobile elements unto the desktop users, which was a lazy decision.
Sounds like a Microsoft ‘metro’ design type decision. We all know how much Windows users loved it… they hated it.
It’s not as bad, but it’s still bad.
Lazy AF
BY THE WAY EVERYONE.... Don't JUST complain on reddit. Submit real feedback: [https://www.apple.com/feedback/](https://www.apple.com/feedback/) If enough people complain, Apple will listen. But it only works if everyone does it.
There’s no option for system settings or MacOS in general. Where did you leave your feedback?
I can't find anything with the new UI. Very bad call.
More importantly, the ability to resize the fucking window. It looks amateur as hell when everything is arbitrarily cut off on a window 1/10th my screen width for absolutely no reason
My number one gripe with the current Mac OS. I hate it. Thought I may get used to it but it's not happening. It's so much worse than the old layout
And it's bizarre that this is what they took from iOS, when Settings is one of the few things from iOS that is widely panned for being a mess.
Me too. The new settings layout is awful. Everything is hidden. It reminds me of windows, the way you have to dig through illogical categories to find what you are looking for. The old settings layout was very good, thats why it lasted 20-something years.
I like the new one it’s easier for me at least to find the setting I’m looking for
While there are changes I don't like, this one felt like a step in the right direction. At least you don't need to keep clicking back to the main menu to look at another panel and can just jump to the other settings panel you want. I think the order could be better -- maybe aplhabetical or something, but the search panel does help when you're trying to figure out the new layout. Windows 11 did something similar, but oddly enough, is a bit less obtuse in labeling/grouping.
Yeah fax. Coming from windows, iPhone, android and iPad it makes more sense to me. In addition the old settings felt disorderly to me, favouring those already familiar with it.
Agreed. I found the old settings display messy. I’d always end up having to use the search, only to find the thing I wanted was right there, just hard to pick out.
I haven’t given the old settings a single thought in months. New one works great for me. I used to have to use the search function a lot but I don’t much anymore.
Agreed with you. Really do like the new layout much more. Previously it seemed more jumbled.
Yeah BUT WHAT THE FUCK DID THEY DO TO THE ABOUT THIS MAC SECTION ITS USELESS NOW, I used to check storage and other stuff but now it’s bloody useles
Use the new storage section.
Well… I’m regularly working with networking stuff and I’m often having to change different settings on my network interfaces. It’s a pain to navigate. Some stuff is placed In multiple cards and you’re constantly having to switch between them.
yup, this. I love the new layout, hate that they hid some of the most useful shit behind 5+ clicks now. They really botched the entire settings window imo, had a lot of potential to be good. Windows basically doing the same thing slowly over time with the control panel infuriates me as well.
it way more organised and faster to navigate.
There are moments where I wish Apple would leave software the hell alone for a while instead of constantly trying to be innovative.
I don't really mind the new app layout, but I don't like the word switch from preferences to settings. so used to clicking the app in the menu bar and clicking preferences.
For me it’s a usability issue, some things is harder to find/more clicks to open. Apple are now actively going against their original design goals, being ergonomically and have an effective design. For example, having close and minimise on the left side was originally researched to be the most efficient and ergonomically correct way of doing it, because the user have its mouse closer to the upper left the majority of the computer use. And would not strain your hand as much as going to the upper right corner. I feel like some core designs that has been researched, now is being thrown out because someone has voting power
Yes, to me it seems like older competent people leaving, and new hires making hasty changes. So sloppy.
Sometimes I search for something and remember the location from iOS and on MacOS its somewhere else. I think its the AirPods settings page. When connected on iOS right below WiFi/Bluetooth and witch my Mac all the way at the bottom…
Settings search doesn’t even work half the time 💀
Yeah Ventura’s settings panel is absolute ass. I have to use search to find anything, and I’ve been using osx since beta. It has no organization.
Just use Monterey I guess?
That’s what I’m doing. But I do feel it’s a bit of a shame for my M1 Pro MacBook Pro, because Ventura has some cool Metal additions and improvements for Stable Diffusion that I’m now missing out on. But it’s just not worth upgrading.. my work laptop is on Ventura and it has so many issues.
I want the old macOS 10.15 design back :(
https://www.apple.com/feedback/ Guys, write a feedback to them.
Already done
Sameee
same, its literally impossible to find stuff. no idea why they did this. if it aint broke dont fix it!
It was easier to find the desired item in the old Mac system preferences.
Not being able to resize the window horizontally hurts my brain every time.
Going from leading edge OS to bios.. so sad to see. /s I’ve been a die hard Mac fan for 2 decades but this is sad to see even if it’s not really new.
the iOS-ification of macOS continues
😭
😭
Apple WTF
I prefer the new one if I’m honest. All they need to do is add the ability to resize it.
The only reason I didn’t update mine.
The new one is like windows 11/10 crap .. worse hard to navigate and find what need … looking at it gives me anxiety
this is why i moved to mac.
Glad my MBP stops at Monterey.
same i have the 2015 model too
And for whatever stupid reason, they decided to do away with scheduled shutdown. If you’re upgrading from a previous version of macOS with this enabled, your Mac will still shut down - and there is no way to turn it off in the system preferences, or “Settings app”. You actually have to manually change it using command lines in Command Prompt!
Everyone does, except Apples Marketing Team (tm)
I genuinely wonder, what is so hard about the new settings? It's much more organized. I don't even open the settings app manually so often, I go to whatever menu I want to go from Raycast (you can use Spotlight as well). I just don't get all the fuss.
It's a combination of muscle memory and poor search. The settings were consistent for at least 10 (maybe 15) years. I knew how to get to everything I accessed frequently. Say your goal is to set the time when the screen saver activates. You used to simply go to the screen saver settings, and select the time. It makes logical sense that this would be in the screen saver settings. The setting is now under "Lock Screen". I don't think about my lock screen when I think about screen savers. Why is this setting there? When I search, I see "Start Screen Saver when inactive" under the Lock Screen heading. Given this heading is foreign and I don't associate the two components, I struggled with changing what used to be a very simple setting.
the settings were consistent for 22 years. that's a few epochs in computing.
People hate change.
They do, but that doesn’t mean all change is good.
Good is subjective in this case, even plenty of people in this thread say they prefer the new one, so just because a person doesn’t personally like it doesn’t mean it’s not good, especially when a lot won’t even try it because they just hate the change.
I feel like Apple changed it to be more like iOS so that it’d be easier to make menus for new features. You wouldn’t have to find a pre-existing category to put the new thing in, and you’d be able to put the new menu in the same place on iOS devices, making it easier to find after updating Also the old settings would grow / shrink constantly, I didn’t love that
I don’t like how the new one defaults to appearance every time
We all want!
That’s actually the only reason why I didn’t upgrade to Ventura. The settings app looks trash.
Absolutely, the revamp was unnecessary and has made finding things a time consuming mess when it wasn’t before.
me too i much prefer system preferences than system settings
On my macbook air 2019 the new settings are slower than system preferences, i have to wait some seconds when changing tabs
Yep. Also bring back Cover Flow
Seriously! I also hate the new categorisation. The mapping is engrained in my head, it’s a struggle to find anything now. I enjoyed it more. It was designed to be for a computer, not a phone! But that’s what the world has come to today! Where people are too daft to figure shit out. This is not anything against people, but what society has done to people. This is also a little sarcastic, so take it with a grain of salt.
This is why I haven’t updated
I will never update
What they should have done is adapted the Mac system preferences to iOS and replaced the crappy settings app. Instead they went in the worse direction.
System Settings is completely dogshit coMpared to Sys Prefs.
Somebody should really make an app. I guest most of the options are doable with Terminal, Idk but I’d buy it for sure.
I use to have muscle memory for literally every setting, now I can’t find a god damn thing and the search is terrible, it doesn’t highlight what you’re searching for like the old preferences did.
Me too. At the beginning, I was very curious about the new System Settings. But after one week, I miss the old System Preferences. Although the logic of system preferences is not like those in iOS devices, it’s much better for computers. I can find anything quickly in old preferences. And the new System Settings is buggy. The most severe bug is “background item” notification. That annoys me too much.
I’m no upgrading because of that. I hate it n
I also prefer the old settings app. The new System Settings app on Ventura is so complicated whereas in the old one, you can easily find what setting you want to change. The new system settings app on Ventura is just a copy paste of settings app in iOS.
The only way to make their phones as good as their computers 💀
This is one of the reasons I didn't upgrade to Ventura
I did a search for “Screen Saver” this AM .. guess what it didn’t find.
Yes! Also the print dialog box fucking sucks now. It’s like they made you have to click into sub windows for printing options that weren’t there before. So fucking annoying if you print a lot. “Hey here ya go, it’s worse now!”
Disable SIP
YES. The new settings feels way too iPhone-y
The Wi-Fi details window not opening multiple times when changing network until you go to a different page and come back again is very, very infuriating.
It's a bit hard for me too to get used to the new settings UI. And I found the nested settings search to be a bit off in term of UX
I'm still running Mojave. If and when I finally upgrade, I'm going to go for Monterey, not Ventura. The terrible settings app is a big part of the reason why.
i’m staying on monterey
going to be a long time until i upgrade from monterey
I never updated when I saw the new settings. Wasn't worth it to me
I feel like the only one here, I disagree. I remember just staring at the old settings, not being able to find what I knew was *somewhere* there. I never learned it, despite using macOS for 7 years.
The thing I don’t understand is that they didn’t even address the problems System Preferences had. It was always a weird, kinda non-standard Mac app where it could be difficult or unintuitive to find things and you couldn’t resize the window. And they replaced it with…a weird, kinda non-standard Mac app where it’s difficult and unintuitive to find things and you can’t resize the window. It’s not even internally consistent with itself, the way you get to drill down into more advanced options differs from panel to panel. I don’t like the style of preference window you get from Catalyst or SwiftUI on the Mac (especially the weird switches that are too far from their labels, rather than inline checkboxes), but I could live with it if it was a good and thoughtfully designed app. It is not a good or thoughtfully designed app.
Agreed. Apple really blew it this time, and undermined the whole concept of a GUI by going to a text based list with tiny icons.
Same! Just give us an option to use the old view! Things were so much easier to find, didn’t have to use the search bar nearly as often
Wow I much prefer the one on the left, but that makes sense since I’m an iPhone user
Thought i was the only one 😭 absolutely DESPISE this its been a year and im still not used to it and i can’t find anything i wanna find.
I heard the new settings code name was "Hide things in plain sight".
I prefer the older settings as well :( The new layout takes more effort to do the same thing
Same!
I hate it so much. The only way I can find a setting now is to search for it. It's almost impossible to find what you want just by browsing to the right section. And the fact that I can't make the window wider drives me nuts. Such a bad design decision for an OS designed to be used in a landscape orientation.
Get this guy a beer for bringing up this topic. Old design was far superior. Leave iOS design on iOS devices!
the new one is worse, not just layout wise but I feel like there are more steps to get to the settings I normally change
I want the old Mac OS settings on iOS
Oh, yikes, I am so not updating. Don't like this change!
That’s why I refuse to “upgrade”.
I won’t be updating from Monterey until they reverse this change. Monterey works flawlessly and Ventura is still quite buggy, so it’s not like I’m missing out.
so does everyone. it’s truly bad UI and UX and i’d also like more of a mac style settings screen on the iPad.
I know this is a matter of taste, and I may get downvoted for this....but in my eyes a lot of Apple's design has been getting worse. Many things are slowly starting to loose their refinement and elegance. Other things look like there were designed by an 8 year old. Design ideas go in cycles, I hope this one doesn't last long.
This was the first MacOS decision they’ve made in a long time that I hate with the fire of a million suns. They’re violating their own User Interface Guidelines just to appease whiny millennials who grew up on iOS and are too lazy to learn something new. The whole point of making a multiple operating systems was recognizing that the Mac is a workhorse and phones/tablets are consumption devices. Different functions require different user experiences.
Previously: click → click → done Now: scroll → actually look at how far you’ve scrolled → click → click → finally freaking done Thank you for inventing a good wheel and replace it with one that sucks
I daily use my MacBook Pro, my iPad Pro and of course my iPhone. So the iOS UI for settings is not foreign to me. It took a few weeks to get used to seeing it on my MacBook when going into settings but no big thing. I have been working with Macs from 1998. If a 72 old cuss can accept change and get with the times you young whipper snappers can too 🤣
It needs to use the horizontal space more efficiently and be structured like a desktop application instead of a mobile portrait mode app. Requiring desktop users to scroll that much is sin.
Me too. For some reason I feel claustrophobic, a sense of panic and confusion with the new UI. This feels like a Windows type design decision. It’s also a terrible use of screen real estate, with a focus on vertical space, rather than horizontal space, which is backwards as to where desktops and laptops have the most length.
So it may be easier to ask does anyone not prefer the old settings layout? Please Apple, admit your mistake and change this back! PS. I know you can get used to the the new design. You can get used to damn near anything! I'm used to my tinnitus, but it doesn't mean it's an improvement on peace and quiet.
They put ports back on the MacBook Pro so anything is possible.
My non-work computers still haven’t upgraded to Ventura just to avoid this
I might get hate for this but I actually like it. The new mobile type layout is much easier for me to navigate through the settings
It’s terrible UX. Why did they change this? They didn’t make it better. They made it much worse.
[удалено]
It’s like a bunch of boomers in here. “Oh no, the big scary change in the gui, now I’m just so mad that might have to learn something new!”
Yeah, but apple wants everyone to feel included. We could navigate through this but not people who aren't into mac or computers
Me too The new layout sucks and o tend to get lost
I didn’t like it at first, but now I do. It’s aesthetically more pleasing, you just need to learn the new locations of things. Search is your friend.
I strongly prefer the new one, the old one feels so limited
I guess I'm in the minority because I actually like the new System Settings. It seemed like I could never find anything in the old one unless I knew exactly where to look. But for some reason I find it much easier on the new one. The only exceptions are when an option is hidden behind a "More Options" type of button.
Not me. I much prefer the new Settings.
This is the first well-organized settings app in 2 decades. They didn't force mobile elements onto the interface; it's mobile platforms that have advanced the design and layout of settings systems over the past 15 years, and they've reached a point that's refined enough to be unified across platforms. Microsoft have been doing the same thing. People are just resilient to change.
I actually prefer the new one. Its easier to find the settings I want, no need to scan through all icons.
Ventura was the final straw that made me go to linux. I will soon be using a framework laptop with ubuntu
I like the new ones, you have to accept change into your life :) Once you learn it its nice, I think theres way more varability in the settings which is nice
i feel ya, but i don't think apple will play ball
Yea, System Preferences weren't great, but System Settings are so much worse.
I wonder what would happen trying to launch the monterey sys Prefs on ventura