Apple love to preach "the UI gets out of the way of your content" with each new redesign, but how true is that in practice? Let's compare the total height of the Safari UI with a toolbar, favourites bar and tab bar visible, across the three latest Mac OS design languages – Yosemite, Big Sur and now Tahoe. I've added a red line for emphasis.
It sure looks to me like the UI is eating more into my content with each redesign.
This shit really pisses me off. But a lot of the things they're doing with their new GUI piss me off.
Download the Feedback Assistant app and file complaints with well-thought arguments for why this hurts functionality / usability. Any changes that might be made to improve it have to come now, before they're locking changes to ship this fall.
I’ve been using the iOS beta. I can’t speak to the Mac beta. For iOS, the execution needs work, but I think I actually agree with the sentiment that content should own the entire screen and the controls should float over the content. However, there are some serious readability concerns that they need to sort out. But think of Instagram from 5 years ago compared to TikTok. TikTok really demonstrated how the content should take over the screen, and now every major social media app has a TikTok style vertical feed that fills your entire screen. I don’t use TikTok, but I enjoy apps that let content take up the screen. Apple does things that are genuinely really frustrating like refusing to redesign the Magic Mouse or putting the power button on the bottom of the Mac Mini. But in this case, I think maybe we should let Apple Cook - pun intended - but push back on obvious flaws like readability.
Oh, it's a cool theme, to be sure. But they overshot and need a lot of feedback to correct the mistakes. Let them know the places where this doesn't work so they can improve it. The same was true several years ago when they last overhauled the UI (a lot of errors got fixed that summer), only this is far more ambitious and they need as much feedback as they can get.
Beta 1 definitely doesn’t represent the final UI product. If you compare it to the WWDC Liquid Glass video, they’ve got tweaking to do. However with that said, LG is so much better in person and in use than pictures and video portray.