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