macOS Big Sur’s Big Secret

I've been using the Mac OS big sewer beta excuse me partner big sir beta on my Mac Pro since Monday and the more that I use it the more something feels off it's not the icons or the menu bar or the battery percentage page and System Preferences that's going viral on Twitter I mean what is that no those things are a little frustrating chore but they're not really going to substantive ly change Mac OS what feels off is this my mouse and it's why I'm declaring with confidence that touchscreen Macs are coming soon and I've got the evidence to back it up now wait a minute I know you're typing down in the comment section did you happen to forget the WW 2018 keynote when Craig federighi said this and the fact that the Mac and Iowa shares so much technology has led people almost every year to keep asking us the question are you merging iOS and Mac OS so I'd like to take a moment to briefly address this question No of course not shoot I forgot he said that yeah I guess we'll just end this video no I didn't forget he said that but things have changed since 2018 let's listen to the second half of his statement read along the Mac because it's expanding we love Mac OS because it's explicitly created to the unique characteristics of Mac hardware like the ergonomics of the keyboard and a trackpad yeah that's a good point the flexibility in displays and storage and because of the power it expect first off we need to get a small little snag in my theory out of the way the fact that Apple said touchscreen Macs were never gonna happen now look most people will take this back to 2010 when Steve Jobs said the following touch surfaces don't want to be vertical it gives great demo but after a short period of time you start to fatigue and after an extended period of time your arm wants to fall off it doesn't work it's ergonomically terrible many will dismiss this comment and say look at all of the windows touchscreen laptops on the market that clearly have demand Jobs was wrong about that just like he was wrong when he said creating a stylist or adding a multitasking manager to the iPad would be quote blowing it under Tim Cook Apple has added both of these things to the iPad and they are great jobs was wrong but I think Jobs was right about a touchscreen Mac somewhat lifting your arm up and down to touch a screen can be in jobs as own words ergonomically terrible but unlike jobs I don't think that vertical touchscreens are categorically terrible they're simply bad when lifting your arm up and down over and over again is the only or the primary way to interact with the device I'll give you an example of a terrible experience and hey what do you know Apple makes it it's the iPad was smart Keyboard folio with this case the only way interact with the iPad in its vertically propped up position is by lifting your arm and poking at the screen which after 10 to 20 minutes gets really tiring now in an era where the iPad was mostly a media consumption device and very few people did actual work on them it probably wasn't that big of a deal but the iPad has evolved and Apple has proved Steve Jobs correct they did it this year when they began offering cursor input on the iPad via the magic keyboard it is a better experience and it proves that dual input user interfaces can be quite excellent because even with a trackpad I often still find myself touching things on display but now it's by choice and not by necessity more recently Phil Schiller stated in 2016 when Apple added the touch bar to the MacBook Pro that they had tried touchscreen max and quote absolutely came away with the belief that it isn't the right thing to do and quote surely mr. Schiller had some good reasoning right well not really he said they couldn't do a touchscreen on a notebook because Apple focuses on the whole platform and it would mess up desktop Mac's because the proposition of a touchscreen on a desktop is in his words absurd sidebar it's not the Microsoft Surface studio with its zero gravity hinge is fantastic and I know a lot of artists that would kill to have something like that that ran Mac OS but that's not really what Schiller said that pissed me off what pissed me off was that he said that they didn't want to make a touchscreen laptop because it would split their lineup by feature set and sorry but that's bullcrap because at least with a non touchscreen iMac you could still use a keyboard and a mouse to do nearly everything you could with a touchscreen MacBook display the touch bar which is the alternative that Schiller offered literally locks out features from desktop users because it's not even available and it does split their lineup and it's one of the reasons that the touch bar in my opinion has largely failed because it's not consistent across all Macs Schiller then goes on to say that they'd also have to totally redesign the menu bar four fingers in a way that would ruin the experience for those using cursor devices like a mouse he said that you can't optimize for both that it's the lowest common denominator thinking and used to believe this was true with Mac OS Catalina Apple announced catalyst a tool that would allow developers to write apps that could run on both the iPad and the Mac and in principle this was a good idea if you make apps easier to port more apps will be ported the problem well these were all touch only apps that needed to be optimized for a non touch interface now some apps like PDF viewer did a really excellent job and you would have no idea that this was a catalyst app it looks and feels just like a Mac app other apps like Twitter did an ok job where it mostly feels like a webview app rather than a Mac app but it doesn't feel bad per se that said several iOS elements make their way through like switches which apples human interface guidelines explicitly say should not be used on a Mac analyst app when checkboxes could be and then we have apps like habit minder which sorry is just terrible and that's what I feel a lot of Kabbalist apps are like they just look like an iPad app they got thrown onto the Mac without any modification buttons are spaced way too far apart for cursor users using elements like date pickers are a joke with a mouse and a keyboard and more these apps in Schiller's words use lowest common denominator thinking but even though many apps felt like an awkward iPad app that just got slapped on to a Mac users expressed that it was better than no app at all and that's pretty sad then we've got big sewer there are a large number of odd modifications made to the fundamental design principles of Mac OS 11 that hint at a very touchable future most obviously and perhaps my least good argument is the fact that all of the default app icons have moved to an iOS like Square about the same size as a fingertip and they've ditched their uniquely designed size and shape now maybe this is just for consistency across iOS and Mac OS but then wouldn't they make them look the same launchpad which is a feature that never really made sense in my opinion on non-touchscreen macs anyways has recently gotten a new icon and renewed attention the all-new control center is basically a direct copy from iOS and certain elements like the sliders feel super weird with a cursor they work like you'd expect but they're too long and thus require an odd amount of mouse travel the distance and padding between icons is frankly a bit bothersome for a precise input device like a mouse or a trackpad it seems like a regression items that were previously closely packed together are now not like audio output devices and Wi-Fi networks many of which are buried in sub menus so as to provide a larger button to press not ideal when you're using a mouse the menu bar itself is slightly larger than it used to be with more space in between each individual menu item but even crazier there is a hidden accessibility setting to make the menu bar a little bit larger which was one of Schiller's primary arguments for not being able to add touch screen support to the Mac at least on my display I mean it leaves more than enough room for a finger Safari has been redesigned with a bigger tab row and an even bigger address bar row yet another odd option when desktop class UI elements can be and have historically always been smaller to make room for more content but the biggest argument for touchscreen Mac is hidden behind a very quick statement that Apple nonchalantly made during the keynote on Monday as you saw Mac's built with apple silicon will be able to run iPhone and iPad apps directly starting day one users can download these apps right from the Mac App Store and most apps will just work with no changes from the developer the implications of this are huge but it goes even a step further than that because during the State of the Union address after the keynote Apple announced that all iOS apps both iPhone and iPad would be available for Apple silicon Macs in the Mac App Store by default and the developers if they didn't want their apps available for our Mac's would have to actively opt out on the offset this might sound like a good idea if your desktop and your laptop and your mobile operating devices all run the same instruction set and code base well why wouldn't you allow for cross compatibility to bolster these new fangled our Mac's with the largest software catalog possible but here's the thing I don't peg Apple as a company that would fill their App Store with a bunch of broken crappy apps that would significantly diminish the experience for these new armed Mac users and without a touchscreen that's what it will be for a lot of apps crappy most games which remember will be made available by default on day one require multi-touch and the last time I checked well a mouse cursor could really only replicate one finger technically the iOS simulator does allow you to perform multi-touch actions by using the mouse cursor and a combination of hotkeys but come on you really think that that's what Apple's gonna do for consumers this is Apple a company that is obsessed with image and visual polish to a fault and that's why I was a bit confused by the announcement at all because think about it without a touchscreen the experience of using iPad and iPhone apps on a Mac will be pretty terrible even worse than the really really bad catalyst apps that Apple has been fervently trying to prove can be good look no further than the fantastic new messages and maps app in Mac OS big sewer that are both built on catalyst but even with a touchscreen the experience of using multi-touch apps is not going to be as good as the device that they were natively intended for then again a lot of apps on the iPad seem a bit ill suited for a cursor and the experience is often less than stellar but many people including myself and apparently Apple because they made the thing believe that less than perfect cursor implementation is better than no cursor implementation at all the good thing is is when the cursor implementation does suck you'll still have a touch screen in my dream world Apple would offer a MacBook like the Microsoft Surface laptop a crazy powerful computer that runs a desktop class operating system but also one that can detach into its own tablet form factor and run iPad OS so like Windows 10 but not crap I don't think that's ever going to happen though because Apple historically has always wanted to sell its users more Hardware not less and it would also go against them explicitly stating that the two operating systems were not converging then again it's not like Apple hasn't never lied to us before my worry is that our really good tablet OS and a really good desktop OS will both turn into two separate happy hybrid os's that try to do too much and yet don't do enough for now all we know is that iOS apps are coming to our max and input options are good I really think the Mac should have a touchscreen if Apple plans to run these apps unmodified as they've stated luckily visual changes in Big Sur strongly imply that a touchscreen Mac is in the works and as dumb is slapping a touchscreen on a laptop or a desktop computer is it's something that people including myself have been wanting Apple to do for years Windows laptops have been doing it Windows desktops have been doing it and it's great it's not perfect but it's better than nothing so what do you think let me know in the comments down below if you think the touchscreen Macs are coming and if so what models will arrive with touch first if you enjoyed this video please give it a like if you didn't that other button seems to work okay - thank you so much for watching and as always stay snazzy

Channel: Snazzy Labs

Views: 1,066,105

Keywords: snazzy labs, quinn nelson, snazzyq, Mac, macOS, macOS Big Sur, touchscreen Mac, touchscreen, MacBook Air, arm Mac, Mac arm, Apple silicon, apple silicon explained, arm vs intel, x86 vs intel, intel vs amd, apple cpu, apple soc, wwdc, keynote, apple benchmark, iPhone, iOS, Mac OS X, macOS 11, big sir, catalina, silicon, multitouch

Id: NXG5REBi2fo

Length: 13min 11sec (791 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 01 2020