I like it a lot. It looks fresh (the side-by-side comparison makes the old flat Aqua instantly look dated), clear, coloured (thank god Apple remembers color has its uses, cough Windows 10) and timeless.
I also very much like the rounded corners everywhere. Setapp has that and I realised how pretty that is. I like that the design languages are converging.
I just hope we retain as much customisation and automation as we have been used to.
My first thought was imagining DevonThink with the new skin…2024?
Doesn’t DT use standard controls? If so, the app should work out of the box.
John Gruber playing with Big Sur dialog boxes. I agree with him that the Cancel boxes currently look a little off, like they’re not active. But overall a nice crisp look, I think.
I’m sure they’ll find ways to work around the design engineering to give us what they think we want.
Am I the only one in finding all those controls conspicuously bigger? As if… they were friendlier for touch.
It would seem that managing a consistent set of controls across three platforms (macOS / iPadOS / iOS) would be more resource and process-intensive for Apple than not. Change management, developer coordination, etc., would possibly be more complex. That might be counter-intuitive, but consistency is often more costly and complex than not.
Personally I don’t mind if macOS controls are not “consistent” with iPadOS, but I also like where Big Sur is going so I would hope these underlying changes are part of a well-managed design trend within Apple. No reason to think it is not.
You never know. If Apple doesn’t offer it right away it always could later and have all the pieces in place. Apple has said ‘no’ over and over to a touch-based macOS but a notebook that ran both macOS and iOS might open up macOS to allow limited touch controls as long at the touchscreen were there. Steve Jobs, Craig Federighi and other higher-ups at Apple have been pretty adamant for years about not making macOS a full touch-OS, from the very beginning of iOS all the way up to present-day.
“We really feel that the ergonomics of using a Mac are that your hands are rested on a surface, and that lifting your arm up to poke a screen is a pretty fatiguing thing to do,” he said.
Federighi added that he doesn’t think the touchscreen laptops out there today—which he referred to as “experiments”—have been compelling. “I don’t think we’ve looked at any of the other guys to date and said, how fast can we get there?”
I supposed the merged design language is good to get iPhone users to try Macs, since they are in the far majority. But it does nothing for Mac users. I’ve installed the beta on an external drive and played around with it for a while. It does seem faster, which is unusual for a beta, but otherwise doesn’t seem to offer anything substantial for Mac users. The fact that it appears to be a really clean first beta tells me that really little changed under the hood.
I don’t think of a moderately rationalized macOS UI was ever intended as a selling point for one OS user to try the other. It’s a refresh with new features, using elements that were found to have worked on a platform with far more users, while pushing both UIs forward.
Startup chime is back!!! 
Noticed that on the keynote.
Things will be as they should be.
(I’ve already enabled it on my iMac Pro.)
You could re-enable the chime in Catalina.
sudo nvram StartupMute=%00
Yes, the article noted that. But this is about it being reinstated in the OS.
apple fan service 
With the break from Intel and the whole OS X timeline I think they needed to also break the UI design, and given that the iOS ecosystem is a much larger installed base, moving the Mac UI more towards that “feel” probably made the most sense.
Unify the underlying code base, unify the overlying (visual) UI – with touch remaining the wildcard for debate.
I’m personally ambivalent about the tweaks: I can’t remember being passionate one way or another about e.g., the skeuomorphism of earlier OS X UIs either. But what I do care about is how it all hangs together.
If the price we need to pay for some progress on FTFF is a UI push towards iOS, then, well, I’m more than OK with the changes.
Well they’ve succeeded.
Something I missed before, maybe it’s just with the presenter for Safari but when did toolbar icons become “buttons”?
I was the opposite, I hated the leather calendar, etc. and would patch the apps to get rid of it. At one point I was almost ready to pull a new Windows machine out of inventory.
Almost 
Overall, I like the design of macOS 11. However, I’m going to miss Mac OS X’s icons. I’m not real wild about all apps having an iOS -like square icon.
I really like and appreciate the app icon diversity in Mac OS X.
That battery icon… I think it’s the only part of the OS that unacceptably ugly.
Messages and Facetime Icon should remove the the green shadow and make it gray imho.
The rest looks really nice, I think. Hyped for this release.
