- Controls are awkwardly placed. By placing the labels on the left edge and their respective toggles on the right edge, your focus must now move all the way from the left edge to the right edge. I find that extremely disorienting, especially because the divider lines are extremely faint.
- Awkward navigation hierarchy. Very few Mac apps ask you to select something from a sidebar, click something in the detail pane, and then have the entire content pane be replaced with a new content pane, with a back chevron button. Apps that do that are usually browser. It's an interaction paradigm that I find awkward.
- Some of the panels just look bad. The wallpaper panel for example attempts to save space by having wallpapers in the same category be laid out horizontally. It then tries to >jam all the categories vertically. Now it's much harder to find wallpapers from a category, and going between categories is similarly just as hard because it now necessitates a lot of scrolling. The trackpad gesture "videos" are remarkably sterile.
- Infinitely expanding vertical lists. The Wi-Fi settings page for example lists all of the available networks. There are however more settings below the list. Since macOS hides scrollbars by default, it's now incredibly hard to find them. More "you won't know you can interact with it until your mouse cursor is over it" design decisions. The text field to change the computer name looks nothing like a text field; it looks like a regular label. It's only when you mouse over that the background color changes, suggesting that it's editable. That's bad design. "Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works."
- Perhaps, the most egregious problem I see, is that this will encourage further lazy and thoughtless additions of settings. I understand the OS has grown more complex over the years, and putting more controls under System Preferences can be hard. But that's exactly what Apple used to be good at: work around constraints and design something that works well. The old System Preferences app, for all its flaws, had setting panels that clearly demonstrated craft and thoughtfulness. This new System Settings design, thanks to its pervasive use of scrolling lists, will encourage people at Apple to just throw in more settings in the lists with little thought, since SwiftUI makes it so easy to. I bet by macOS 15 we'll see the lists for the panels grow even longer, and settings will be just as hard to find, if not more so, as they are in System Preferences today.
I hate it because it is clear evidence that Apple has lost its touch when it comes to desktop user interfaces. System Settings reeks of a cost-saving measure to me: the SwiftUI rewrite benefits them by allowing them to think less carefully about new toggles, and the iOS/macOS design unification benefits them by allowing them to think even less carefully about what a desktop user interface should look like and behave in general.