[grishka]

Two things.

- The UIs of the 90s were made with mice and keyboards in mind. The designers' minds weren't yet compromised by the existence of touchscreens, both on phones and Windows laptops.

- IT companies were building tools to empower users and actually competed with each other fiercely. It was important to make sure your UI doesn't suck, because otherwise someone else will. This competition required the companies to put users' needs before their own.

And tangential to that: "developer experience" wasn't a thing. Writing software was an engineering job done by people knowing what they're doing. The bar was set pretty high. Compare that to now, when it's almost encouraged to be a junior developer and pile libraries into your project without ever looking under to hood to assess the compromises you're making. And the way the code looks and builds is considered more important by many than the end result that ships.

[KptMarchewa]

How is mac UI "compromised by the existence of touchscreens", when there's not a single MacOS device with a touchscreen?

>IT companies were building tools to empower users and actually competed with each other fiercely.

Glorifying 90s feature factories? That's a new one.

[spectre3d]

>there's not a single MacOS device with a touchscreen

The Touch Bar is a touchscreen. It’s on the current 13-inch M1 MacBook Pro and many previous-gen Macs.

Biggest problem is that I can’t use it without looking at it.

https://robservatory.com/the-fundamental-problem-with-the-to...

[grishka]

Have you seen how unnecessarily huge some controls are in the latest macOS redesign?

[KptMarchewa]

I'm using Monterey daily, so which ones? The top bar/toolbar is smaller than any windows bar, dock size is fully customizable, menus are normal size I'd say.

Rest of space is used by applications, not wasted by system. Coincindetally, none of them are really native. Firefox, jetbrains IDEs, Iterm (well, this one is, but might as well not be since it's just a terminal), Spotify, Slack.

[grishka]

No, don't compare modern OSes to each other, they're all infected with the same disease so this comparison is expected to be bogus. Compare the native controls of macOS Monterey to those of Mavericks (10.9), for example. Or Windows 7.

[KptMarchewa]

Windows 7 to Monterey: https://static.kinguin.net/cdn-cgi/image/w=1140,q=80,f=auto/...

The bottom bar is way larger on Windows than on Monterey. There is nothing like the empty top bar on a Monterey as on the control panel window here. Point to mac here.

If you click on "About this mac" you get the same kind of logo that you get in this Windows photo, so they are about equal there.

There's no obnoxious widgets on Mac, at least by default. I don't remember if they were default on 7 (I think they were on Vista, but that's a different animal). I guess half a point to mac?