HACKER Q&A
📣 smusamashah

Why everyone is copying the Mac's GUI?


I tried Windows 11 and the Taskbar was unusable for me. I never group icons because it hides window titles. Rounded corners, centered Taskbar and other UI "enhancements" make it looks like a cheap replica of a Mac OS. Microsoft has been doing it for sometime. But it's not just Microsoft, Google has been doing the same with Android with every new release. Samsung led the way probably.

Apples OS surely looks beautiful. TouchPad is pleasant to use and the file explorer has a useful multi column view. But that's about it for me. Being a Windows user since 98 nothing else made sense to me and I don't want to be on a Mac again.

So for those who have used both a lot, are Apple's OSes more intuitive or usable when compared to other established interfaces? Why everyone is copying Apple anyway?

  👤 smoldesu Accepted Answer ✓
Apple is copying well-designed UIs, and even they're getting a lot wrong. The current MacOS design language is insanely wasteful, and as I started to explore other toolkits I also started to realize that a lot of their interactive primitives are also pretty junk: their checkboxes and radial buttons are tiny and unresponsive, most window controls are pointlessly small and inconsistent, and their Big-Sur styled padding makes no sense on a device intended to be used at hi-res. Speak for yourself, but Apple's most profound design statements are in the rearview. Cocoa is bordering on junk these days, and I might even prefer the LAF of GTK3 to modern MacOS. Quite a disappointing fall from grace.
👤 rbanffy
For one thing, Apple's UI is simple and non-intrusive. These days, I rarely minimize windows, preferring, both on Mac and Gnome, to move them out of the way to a new workspace. File management is also something that's not as important anymore - apps don't work that much with files and the distinction of what's local and what's not is blurry with iCloud.

I find Windows a bit confusing. There's a start menu, but there are also icons on the bottom of the screen that show some, but not all, applications available. Configuring stuff is a nightmare - vendor applets and system applets compete for functionality.

Both Windows and the Mac make a stupid blunder in splitting app and system updates. I don't want to search (or be prompted) for updates from two different places. I don't care whether my text editor is or is not part of the system - it's part of MY system. On the Mac, it is a regression - a couple releases back, there was a unified mechanism for updating software. Now, iWork is on the App Store and, for some reason, Safari updates with the OS.