Mac Just Works, But This is Dumb
For many years we’ve been told by the Apple community that “Mac Just Works”, or the same for Apple mobile devices. No operating system, desktop or mobile, is perfect of course. But some bits of imperfection seem sillier, worse than others - like these things about Macs that I’ve written about:
The image above shows what System Settings on my iMac looms like. For me, this is another thing on the Mac that does not work well. The user interface (UI) is the same as on an iPad. Maybe it’s the same on iPhones too; I don’t know because it’s been quite a few years since I used one. This UI feels fine/good to me on an iPad. It feels goofy and awkward on an iMac. I love this New vs Old image via reddit:
I could swear that the plan when iOS first came out as the operating system for the iPhone, and was later modified to run on iPads (which later got their own OS) was to bring the power and (some of) the features of MacOS to Apple’s mobile devices. That’s been part of the massive success of Apple’s mobile devices. In this case though, bringing the Mobile UI for an essential app and applying it to the big screen feels much more like a “dumbing down the Mac” sort of exercise.
I want to mention that I am not an anti Mac or anti Apple person. I’ve used several generations of the iMac and I think they’re fantastic PCs. I still have an iPad that I use for a few things as well. I am just not a fan of bringing this mobile UI to the Mac desktop, or of the constant stripping away of ports, or the way that Spaces pretty much *never* work as they are supposed to.