I don’t work at the fruit co but since you asked for speculations. Mine: the fruit co designers are still designing a nice interface to show the overflow, because they obviously think that the Windows tray overflow looked inelegant and are still searching for the ideal UI. But the designers themselves don’t have a lot of menu bar apps so they don’t think it’s a priority.
Windows has always baffled me with the system tray icons it is too cluttered. I grew up with a tricked out Linux desktop so I understand the need to customize. But most of the time you do not need that.
I believe a VPN should stay hidden if it works, no need to have it visible.
> I believe a VPN should stay hidden if it works, no need to have it visible.
Which is fine if you only have one VPN client or one VPN network and you don't need to turn it on/off or change it regularly.
My current day job has one VPN client but five different networks.
At a previous job I had two different clients I would need to switch on and off.
It is very on-brand with Apple though that there is one right way to do things, and everyone else either needs to change the way they do things or go elsewhere.
That’s the company response but I’m definitely not the only long-term Apple user whose go-to response is a sympathetic nod followed by a long rant about Tim Cook and his contempt for software engineering.
TBF, there isn't a computer on earth that will solve that problem perfectly. At some point, "you shouldn't have so many utilities running" is perfectly acceptable advice.
That's the standard apologist response to ANY defect you point out in anything, or any question they don't know the answer to but still want to bloviate about.
It‘s reasonable to assume that menu bar items will be rendered differently as well, to accommodate for Dynamic Island (which changes its width as needed).
Well I mean, recently because they have no idea how to make good UIs, and have not read their own enormously detailed (and excellent) Human Interface Guidelines tomes from 10, 20, and probably 30 years go, and have basically regressed to barbarism.
But before that relatively recent fall-off-a-cliff event (whatever it was that caused it, most of us will never know), it was pretty clear that they didn't want to implicitly endorse the lazy/anti-user/Windows-equivalent-UX antipattern of having apps that intentionally made themselves accessible only from a menu bar icon.
I hate the App Store shite that goes wildly too far the other way, but I don't quite understand wwhy they couldn't figure out a way to enable the menu bar widget API in a way that failed if your app didn't also have a way to open via all the normal ways (double-clicking the icon in /Applications, asking Siri to launch it, etc)
> they didn't want to implicitly endorse the lazy/anti-user/Windows-equivalent-UX antipattern of having apps that intentionally made themselves accessible only from a menu bar icon.
The single biggest complaint I had when I switched it to Mac was lack of this feature. Still miss it. .