I partly blame the rigid 12 month release cycle, and a stubborn focus on development efficiency that - for reasons best known to them - means they insist on managing a small number of engineers with the goal of consolidating the platforms to the bare minimum.
Take something as simple as the new playback bar in Music, as an example.
Any sane user would agree that this is a regression from what we've had previously.
- It's positioned at the bottom of the window (whereas, generally, controls for other apps are at the top).
- You have to
hover over the strip just to access the track playhead and time (rather than just the play head)
- When you do, the rest of the strip is obscured by frosted glass - for absolutely no reason whatsoever.
- Like most of Liquid Glass, visibility of the strip boundary is worse because it blends into the content behind it.
I'm not going into the whole
Is it objective/subjective debate, which frankly is exhausting. But what are the official arguments for design choices such as this?
- Liquid Glass
"elevates the content users care about most"
- It increases consistency across platforms,
"all while maintaining the distinct qualities that make each unique"
(Source: Apple Developer)
Let's break that down:
Apple doesn't want to manage different platforms. Their end game is likely one OS that is scaled to all their devices in a very distant future. The issue is that we are no where near there yet.
This stubbornness isn't new to Tahoe. When Lion was released, Apple made a considerable number of bone-headed decisions to try and replicate iOS features in macOS - notably, the document containers within apps (because Steve Jobs wanted to move away from Finder's file management), and the introduction of Launchpad, which only received one update.
They say that each platform has distinct qualities that make them unique; but if that where the case, then why does Tahoe skew to choices that make no sense for a platform that has a minimum 13" screen and that's primarily controlled by mouse/trackpad for a cursor and keyboard?
What possible explanation is there for not seeing the track playhead above, other than the reluctance to simply write unique code for the Mac? If the Mac really is getting touch functionality, why isn't there a compromise of elements optimised for cursor or touch as needed? This is beyond a particular taste for an aesthetic or user error: it's clearly and obviously poor design.
The real problem here isn't that Macs are likely to get touch controls or that the software continues to have silly bugs that have gone for months, even years without being fixed: it's that Apple is dead set on trying to distill their OSs to as few development resources as possible, and in the process are using the excuse of 'increased consistency' as a reasoning behind the design.
