[sneak]

I wish I could run Mojave or Catalina on my brand new 16". It came with Monterey, which is ugly. Whoever thought light grey text on dark grey background was a good or reasonable UI choice should be fired.

It's the Windows XP Home of operating systems.

[smoldesu]

The biggest thing preventing me from upgrading to Big Sur+ is how ugly the UI is. Gone are the elegant, sleek windows of old, replaced by bubbly flat sheets and weird, incongruous menu systems. It feels like Apple was taking the piss out of the GNOME desktop and then forgot to press the "we're just joking" button before they shipped it.

[sneak]

It's possible that the key product people that were responsible for making macOS useful for those other than the iPhone/YouTube generation have mostly moved on from product leadership inside of Apple, whether due to changing priorities, retirement, being sidelined inside of what I am internally mentally referring to as Apple 3.0, or just getting fed up with the tacky panhandler-esque push toward services revenue at all costs, et c.

The GNOME comment is spot on. Unfortunately while the screen and cpu/gpu/apu is amazing in the new M1P/M rMBP16, it is also one of the ugliest laptops Apple has ever shipped. (The best thing they did to the overall design of the iPhone recently, hardware specs aside, was to go back to making the rounded bubble 10/11 be like the 6 in the 12/13, which, despite being an improvement, is a reversion to the past. I also can't tell the difference in the design of the 12 and 13.)

This seriously does not bode well for people who deeply appreciate simple beauty in their daily-use tools.

I was spoiled over the last decade or so of my laptop being of extremely high performance/quality AND ALSO completely unnecessarily fucking gorgeous. Now it's an ugly grey brick. I hope those days aren't over forever.