Those are the first system preferences on macOS that are usable to me, and I'm not even a big iOS fan. The chaotic version before felt like Windows to me.

Say what you will about the new version, but the old version of System Preferences was certainly not "chaotic". I found it very pleasant to look at and navigate.

This new thing violates much of Apple's own HIG, and despite running Ventura for half a year, I still find myself hunting for things that should be easy to find. Quick: where do you go to turn the volume menubar control on or off?

I type "volume" in the search field and pick the right option?

Now do it with a cup of coffee in one hand and a mouse in the other.

Maybe they should make special operating systems just for people who constantly hold something in their one hand while clicking around with the other.

I agree. In the old SP I usually used spotlight to find what I wanted as quickly as possible. Now, I usually still do. The practical difference is negligible. I have no trouble finding the settings I want to modify, and a rarely have a need to modify any.

My response is similar for the other complaints I see here. I can ignore new features I don't like. I've got integration with my phone and watch that took zero effort. No need to waste time on drivers, etc. If I want to run Photoshop I can.

(I've used Macs since the original Mac Plus with one one-year Windows interlude. For servers I use Linux, which is obviously appropriate for that use.)

The latest system preferences are an improvement to me. It was a mess before and it’s still a mess but the app layout makes it easier to browse, and at least it’s consistent with iOS.

Why does a desktop OS need to be consistent with a 5" touchscreen phone?

To improve the user experience of the many Apple customers deciding to buy an old fashioned Mac.

The very argument that was presented when iOS first came out, as well as whenever touchscreens on MacBooks come up, is that the UX is fundamentally different.

So why would it suddenly be a good idea to import this from iOS?

Perhaps the people against touchscreen on MacOS finally retired or gave up the fight, so Apple is slowly preparing what Microsoft did years ago with Windows 8.

What Microsoft did, and still hasn’t finished. System preferences still contain massive amount of details contained in Windows 7 (and older!) style windows.

At least Apple managed to move all their settings from one paradigm to the next in one year. I’m looking forward to the improvements they make to the app in the future.

They didn't finish it because they went hard, all in one go, and suffered consumer backlash as a result. From this Apple learned that you have to boil the frog slowly.

Right? It’s a middle finger to mac users with an external screen. It was too hard to make it scale horizontally, or even prefetch the settings in the background and not have a lag between clicks. Not the end of the world, but backwards

For the majority of the world, their primary computing device is their touchscreen phone.

This obsession with “unifying” disparate things under One True API / UI / Language is all over software. It’s probably the same mentality behind what what Microsoft was doing with Windows 8 and Metro. Unnecessary abstraction is the bad Software Engineer’s bread and butter. We’ve all worked with That Guy who kept arguing “We could call X and Y the same way if we just had a unifying abstraction Z. It would simplify everything!” Z becomes the worst of both X and Y and the customer is less satisfied just wants to keep X and Y separate. But the developer is more comfortable now, and that’s what matters.

Everything seems to get sacrificed at the altar of Developer Comfort. Performance gets thrown under the bus so we can write everything in JavaScript. Platform-specific features get abandoned or neutered in a cross-platform framework so we only have to target one API. We ship gigs of Docker containers so we don’t have to get our software to work on all the customers’ computers.

This is just another example. Wouldn’t it be great if iOS apps and Mac applications converged on the same thing? Only a developer would want this.

Because it's confusing to have two ways of doing things when one way works just fine.

Why would you ever want added cognitive complexity?

If things need to be different then sure. But if they can be unified in a way that works great for both then please do!

Honestly, with their tight integration, I don't even think of watchOS and iOS and macOS as being so separate. They're all just a kind of "appleOS" that gets applied to different form factors. So UX unification is ideal wherever it makes sense.

I’d love to chat with you in private regarding your work with Ok Cupid. How can I reach you?

It forces you to search to do anything useful, since the grouping is all over the place, and the search feature is really poor.

> and at least it’s consistent with iOS

What a huge win for Mac users.

Grouping has always been all over the place. If anything the new grouping is more intuitive.

And search works better than it used to as well. To me it's been entirely improvements.

I am however, not using IOS.

> and at least it’s consistent with iOS.

And thanks to this peculiar way of thinking we also have several layers of UI inconsistencies in Windows, for example. Someone thought "let's unify everything" but, assuming this is a good idea at all, you really need a lot of work, planning, effort, and most of all imagination to make sure the final result is actually an improvement for the users of both mobile and desktop systems rather than being a mediocre one-size-fits-all solution.

Except the iOS settings app is also a disaster

Apple ecosystem is no longer software - only apps. It’s hard to do(code) normal things on the OS because of all of the fancy “security”

What code is prevented by security? Other than limits to kexts, your code isn’t beholden to most of the system security changes unless you make a sandboxed app.

Your code is certainly “beholden” to most of the system security changes, and your app is effectively sandboxes regardless of your wishes.

Source: Self after working on anti-theft software for macOS, for a few years now.

Your app is not beholden to sandboxing unless you specifically are using sandboxing as part of your application configuration. It would also only apply to app bundles.

I can make a command line tool or a standalone Qt application right now without having sandboxing pop up at all.

Even for access that the OS protects the user from, as an app developer I rarely need to think about it. When I try and access a limited area it asks the user for me.

Source: self after working on lots of varied code bases from web dev to 3D libraries and standalone applications for over a decade.

I have to deal with refusal to install apps from "untrusted developers" constantly, I can't even believe you wrote that.

For starters, the UI experience is terrible. You get a dialog telling you you can't install an app; close the dialog then you have to know to go to a certain Settings tab under Privacy & Security, and there will (hopefully) be some text that allows you to enable the app. This is a UI disaster. Maybe they do it so that non-technical users will give up in frustration.

Once MacOS decided that my official Oracle JRE was "untrusted", and I would get the bullshit dialog every time I started a Java process (note: I develop apps using the JVM). I had to google to learn some arcane CLI magic to disable the untrusted bits on my JRE files.

More recently, I couldn't get CIV 6 to run. Instead of telling you what to do, you get a "app is corrupted" dialog (maybe this was the fault of Steam). This required multiple enabling via the magic permissions tab. I mean, are Steam and Firaxis not "trusted developers".

All this pales in comparison to the pain when using my MOTU audio interface. Getting it to work was an enormous pain in the ass thanks to Apple security. And then MacOS would randomly decide to break things every 6-12 months, and getting it to work again requires discovering an arcane NVRAM reset procedure using magic key presses during reboot.

All of that is irrelevant to both my response and the person I was replying to where we were talking about coding specifically.

* * *

It just means the app is not signed+notarized.

They don’t necessarily need to be from the App Store, but they do need to be notarized.

If they’re not, the warning can be bypassed.

Seems overblown to me, been a macos user for over a decade and the ios-ification o f the mac hasn't been a big deal for me. My greybeard workflows still work the same (everything in iterm, using vim, tmux, all the "standard stuff"), sometimes updating xcode is a pain but w/e. Homebrew still chugging along. Parallels is fantastic. Performance of the M1 Max on my new mac studio is just heavenly. The changes to macos have been nowhere near as egregious as what MS is butchering windows with.

The latest update added "Stage Manager" or whatever, tried it out for an hour...didn't really like it and turned it off, it never gets in my way trying to force itself on my like Windows does with all of its anti-features.

People complain about system preferences but I use spotlight to find settings when I need them, which works great - and once a setting is set I rarely change it. I don't think I've touched the preferences "app" since I initially setup my mac studio. The moaning and groaning about how bad it is just seems so.....pointless to me.

> I don't think I've touched the preferences "app" since I initially setup my mac studio. The moaning and groaning about how bad it is just seems so.....pointless to me.

Have you considered that other people have usage requirements different from yours?

Of course there's not much reason to complain about System Settings if you never use it, but that's missing the point.

His usage requirements is using it only once when he sets up his computer, which is probably a good thing for a preferences app. It works well for him, why shouldn't be able to say so? So we can keep this thread strictly about complaining?

You could copy paste your comment to everyone here, "have you considered that other people use it differently".

> It works well for him, why shouldn't be able to say so?

That's not all the commenter said. "The moaning and groaning about how bad it is just seems so.....pointless to me."

If System Settings is fine for the commenter, that's great for the commenter. (Although "I virtually never use it" isn't exactly a great response to "It's virtually unusable" or a great defense of System Settings.) However, the commenter is criticizing other people for complaining about it, and that's not justified.

He undermines his own point. He says he has no problem with System Preferences, and then essentially says he never uses it, explaining why he would have no problem with it.

Except that spotlight doesn't find all system settings. And I've already ran into a bug where the system settings dialog loses sync with the configuration requiring the app to restart. And also had settings pane just turn blank.

* People complain about system preferences but I use spotlight to find settings when I need them*

This is exactly how I do it, and I also do it this way in Ubuntu. And in both OSes, I hide docks/apps.

Ubuntu has spotlight?

I'm sure you already know it doesn't contain spotlight itself, which belongs to Apple.

There exist equivalents that have exactly that same functionality as described above. I don't know what GNOME uses, but KDE's krunner searches system settings, user files and applications, bookmarks, browser tabs, solves arithmetic and unit conversions, does spell checking, searches the web, searches active windows, applications and workspaces, etc.. It's configurable with many plugins available. I expect GNOME's system works similarly.

I'm specifically speaking of Ubuntu's version of Gnome, I guess. Press the Super key and a search box appears, a la MacOS's Spotlight. This is how I open apps. There are likely nuances about what is searchable, but in practice it feels the same to me.

> Homebrew still chugging along.

For seven years longer and with 20K more ports than Homebrew, and without leaving a mess on your system or munging permissions, so is MacPorts.

Does Homebrew still have those issues on newer Macs with the /opt/homebrew prefix? I don’t use either at the moment but last time I looked at Homebrew it looked like they had changed the way it installed, at least on Apple silicon Macs.

The default install location for Apple Silicon and Intel is different, for some reason. I got weird problems when many bottles were still Intel-only, but now everything is good. So unless you hate /opt/homebrew, it’s great!

I'm using Nix now on my macOS installs, so I might not be totally correct the current situation. But yeah, I believe most of those sorts of issues have gone away with the new prefix.

There's still some weird annoyances for me, though. For example, it's still intended for single-user mode only. The best solution I came up with was to create a separate user for Homebrew and then basically alias `brew` to `sudo -H -u homebrew brew`.

And generally, if you attempt to use a non-standard prefix, such as in your home directory, packages will have to be built from source. I understand why, but it sucks because this means when you need x86-only packages via Rosetta, you're stuck with the old `/usr/bin` prefix, unless you want to and can build from source.

Also, in general, maintaining multiple prefixes/architectures is annoying too. I wish the default command allowed me to just pass `--arch amd64/arm64` or something when installing packages

I love comments like these. Pure macOS Stockholm Syndrome. “Sometimes some things are a pain but it’s pointless to groan about it.” I mean you do you, but don’t blame other people for finding some of these issues more than they can stand.

Been using Macs exclusively, since the iPhone came out. At some point I noticed a "do not disturb" icon displayed on the top UI bar, something that somehow got turned on after upgrading to Ventura. It took over half an hour of googling and trying random shit before I was able to turn it off. Yes, Settings is a UI disaster, even ignoring that...

Goofy shit like this randomly happens, particularly after OS upgrades. I remember some crazy hell where I couldn't finish the OS install on a new Mac, because Apple decided that Apple IDs must be email addresses, and my ancient ID was not. Required a call to customer support.

And the "untrusted developer" shit always bites me in the ass every couple months or so... It is particularly painful when using pro audio interfaces, which will just suddenly stop working every now and then. It requires a magic key-press during a reboot to clear some kind of special RAM.

It’s fine if search is a way to use System Preferences. The problem I have is that since they turned it into a “big list” search is essentially the only way I can use it. They destroyed the spatiality of the app that had created grooves in my brain over the last 20 years. Now it is very disorienting to use because I can’t efficiently browse for things.

As time goes in from 10.5 System preferences UI kept on degrading to the point that I didn't know what icon to click and frequently just made the search bar for everything. Having the search bar more prominent and making the UI standard for all of the other products probably is a good idea.

> An example is the latest System Preferences. It's virtually unusable.

Most people are familiar with the iOS model already. It's rare to find Mac users who aren't.

It's a bad model, because the iPhone Settings app itself is bad.

The order is seemingly random. You can't reorder, pin favorites, or hide unwanted settings. Many things are buried deep in hierarchies.

Not to mention that iPhone Settings is based on a small, non-resizable window and a touch interface, neither of which are true of the Mac.

Familiar crap is still crap.