The Reshaped Mac Experience

But my coworker likes the classic layout, and another coworker likes the default layout but with expanded preview text to more lines. I wouldn’t go as far to say one preference is worse than the other.

It was immensely helpful to be able to sit down in front of something and interact with thoughtful pervasively reused metaphors & mechanisms all seemingly integrated individually with the global goals of the software always front and center. It was a great mental counterweight to what I find to be much more common today, which is disparate components seemingly made by different teams, each with their own non-overlapping set of human interface guidelines, all crammed together on screen in ways that seem to indicate the organization structure of the company that created it rather than the needs and enjoyment of the user who's going to work with it. Egregious examples of this that are top of mind are JIRA and Salesforce, but they're hardly alone in this regard.

Using those old systems w/ their extremely dated UI aesthetics, but still being extremely enjoyable & productive to use was a constant reminder that the UX being well integrated and consistent is at least as valuable to the experience as it looking slick.

That said, I think this matters a lot less in an "appified" world where your tasks as a user are already incredibly discrete and faceted for you. The scope of interaction is narrow and focused and so there's not nearly as much need or incentive to have a "globally" consistent narrative that stitches together with everything else, because you're mostly having transient task-specific interactions. For example there's not as much need for hailing a ride in the Lyft app to compose well with picking a show to watch on the Hulu app. Everything is a discrete purpose built experience, and to some extent I actually think this is appropriate for the use and medium of apps. The challenge seems to be that software which isn't like that, and is something you actually sit in front of an work with at length as a central hub or part of a much larger workflow, is being put together in the same way as discrete little purpose built apps instead of as a coherent broader interaction framework.

They're behind Microsoft Windows for window management. They're waaay behind Linux for a functional, modern terminal environment without homebrewing half of your OS into place. They're behind in the gaming scene, pushing away studios by insisting on a proprietary graphics API.

Just getting a 3rd party mouse or keyboard to work with the system can sometimes be an exercise in futuility. Why won't a mac accept input from a keyboard in BIOS mode on the login screen? Granted, this is as much an issue with the 3rd parties as it is Mac, but it certainly doesn't make me want to work with Macs more.