Apple love to preach "the UI gets out of the way of your content" with each new redesign, but how true is that in practice? Let's compare the total height of the Safari UI with a toolbar, favourites bar and tab bar visible, across the three latest Mac OS design languages – Yosemite, Big Sur and now Tahoe. I've added a red line for emphasis.
It sure looks to me like the UI is eating more into my content with each redesign.
After booting into Tahoe for the first time and spending a bit of time opening up apps, I had a feeling that my 16" MacBook Pro just got smaller, because things are bigger and less of my stuff can fit on the screen. What good is a larger screen if the UI keeps eating up all that space?
On the Mac we have the mouse pointer. It's a precision pointing device. Things don't need to be sized to work with touch. We can deal with higher UI and information density – we got by for decades.
@tuomas_h @jeffwatkins they have a new 18” MacBook Pro coming that they expect you to upgrade to.
It also has a transparent glass keyboard with the letters moulded into each cap in crystal quartz, to ensure that the letter printing doesn’t get in the way of the laptop’s design.
THANK YOU! You are 100% correct.
@tuomas_h @rhysmorgan @stroughtonsmith also: why would this be a good thing anyway? I don’t get the fascination with touchscreen laptops. We have a mouse pointer and trackpad which means I don’t have to move my arms to select things and interact. Reaching out is inaccurate and tiring and smudges the screen.
There are ways to do direct + indirect control well (we did that with Solu). Apple just never figured it out (Touch Bar as example).
And at the same time they manage to show less information and actions while taking up more space
@tuomas_h there are several false beliefs at work:
- blurred content under the UI chrome counts as “content”
This is somewhat true for photos (the only use case being designed for apparently) and totally false for text.
- a Mac is essentially an iPad with a keyboard
The macOS 26 UI is now derived from the iPad. The biggest problem for the iPad with its full screen paradigm and “big iPhone” UI has always been “what do we do with all the leftover space”? Answer: add a sidebar and whitespace.
@tuomas_h @marcoarment I think people with brains like mine must be in charge of UI lately, because I while I can absolutely see what you mean about less content fitting on the screen at the same time, the extra space and lower density actually let me take in more of the content. In high-density UIs I feel like my eyes can't rest on any one thing and it takes a lot more effort to read. It's like a light that's too bright, except it's information? Extra whitespace feels calming and comfortable to me.
I wonder how complicated it would be to implement a setting for density choice, like we have in some UIs (email comes to mind), where we can choose like “cozy” for high-density or “relaxed" for lower-density.
@LauraLangdon @marcoarment I think that’s a great point and there probably isn’t one universally right. I come from the camp that thinks UIs should be compact and not try to blend in with the content, kind of acting as a “frame” for what I’m trying to focus on.
And I totally agree there should be something like the “sidebar icon size” setting that we have now but for the whole UI. We probably wouldn’t be having this discussion if that existed.
@tuomas_h Still ahead of Chrome. (below)
Fun fact: in designing Edge for Windows 10 I took screenshots of every single browser and made sure that the UI exactly met or beat the tightest of them.
I was so stubborn about it I refused to use the proposed system button size because it made the ui too tall and horsey. The controls team gave me shit about it, but then ultimately changed the sizing of all controls to match and that's how I saved hundreds of millions of Windows users an extra 4 pixels.
@tuomas_h @chartier I bet they’re prepping touchability on the Mac and want it to be less of a touchability nightmare than on windows. Lay the groundwork in the UI first, then roll out the hardware.
Everyone I know has been trying to scroll on their MacBooks by touching the screen for at least a decade. Apple knows the demand is there.
That's because the lead designer is getting older and hasn't accepted yet they needed glasses.
@tuomas_h I'm not saying it's going to happen today or tomorrow, but there's no other obvious explanation, to me, to justify this amount of padding.
As you said, we'll have to see it to believe it.
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