The text and menu bar icons adapt as well, turning white for dark backgrounds and black for light backgrounds. The menu bar at the top, previously white, is now translucent, adopting the color of your desktop background. Overall, though, they contribute to a new, distinctly iPhone-y look and feel.Īnother change you may notice is that Big Sur makes greater use of transparent and translucent layers. The old ones were fine the new ones are fine, too. I do not have strong opinions on icon shapes, though I’m sure many people do. Music is now the white eighth notes on a red background, Mail is the white envelope on a blue background, the Safari compass has been placed on a white background, etc. (Windows have rounder corners now as well, as do other elements like menus, checkboxes, dialog boxes, and sliders.) A number of apps also have new icons that look like their iOS 14 icons. The company has made a number of tweaks that will sound small on paper but add up to an aesthetic that’s friendlier, more modern, and much closer to iOS.įor example: the dock icons for Apple’s apps now all have the same rounded-square shape. The whole OS has a new look, which Apple says is its biggest design update to its desktop operating system since the debut of OS X. The desktop of a MacBook running macOS Big Sur. If you’re an iPhone or iPad user, it’ll feel newly familiar. Whenever you take the leap, though, you will notice the difference. We’ve reached out to Apple for comment on these reports.) (The exception is if you’re running a late-2013 or mid-2014 MacBook Pro the update’s been causing some of those models to get stuck on a black screen. There also aren’t any hugely disruptive changes like Catalina’s removal of 32-bit app support. Apple really seems to have ironed out the numerous bugs that popped up during the surprisingly rough beta period, and the final release is quite stable without any major problems. I’ve been using the operating system on a 2019 MacBook Pro 13 for the past several weeks.

In this case, though, I would actually feel okay updating today. Should you update? My advice is usually to wait a few weeks and let early adopters report all the problems, especially with your primary work device. Whether all of those features are as useful on a computer as they are on an iPhone is another question. Big Sur - through a series of minor tweaks and refinements - absolutely achieves the goal of making macOS look and feel more similar to iOS than it ever has before. Many of its “new” features will be familiar to owners of iPhones and iPads it’s playing catch-up to iOS. Like the M1 chip, Big Sur is a step in Apple’s efforts to cohere its user experience across devices. But there’s another release this week that will usher in a big change for Mac users: macOS Big Sur. Apple announced its new M1 chip, which, if the company’s claims about performance gains are to be believed, could redefine our expectations for laptop processors.

Last week might’ve been the most important week of this year for consumer laptops.

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