- some options have moved to menus which make no sense at all (e.g. all the toggles for whether a panel's menubar icon appear in the menu bar have moved off the panel for that feature and onto the Control Centre panel. But Control Centre doesn't have any options of its own, so the entire panel is a waste of time and has created a confusing UX where previously there was a sensible one
- loads of useful stuff I do all the time has moved a layer deeper. e.g. there used to be a top-level item called "sharing" for file/internet/printer sharing settings. It's moved one level deeper, below "General". Admittedly, "the average user" who doesn't use sharing features much, let alone wanting to toggle and control them, probably prefers this, but I find it annoying as heck
- following on from that, and also exhibited across the whole settings UI is that UI patterns are now inconsistent across panels; this seems to be because the whole thing is a bunch of web views, presumably all controlled by a different team. So they can create whatever UI they like, with whatever tools make sense. Before, I assume, there was more consistency because panels seemed to reuse the same default controls. I'm talking about use of tabs, or drop-downs, or expanders, or modal overlays... every top level panel has some of these, and they use them all differently: some panels expand a list to reach sub controls, some add a model, some just have piles of controls in lozenges
- it renders much slower. On my m3 and m4 MPBs you can still see lag. It's utterly insane that on these basically cutting edge processors with heaps of RAM, spare CPUs, >10 GPU cores, etc, the system control panel still lags
- they've fallen into the trap of making "features" be represented by horizontal bars with a button or toggle on the right edge. This pattern is found in Google's Material UI as well. It _kinda_ makes sense on a phone, and _almost_ makes sense on a tablet. But on a desktop where most windows could be any width, it introduces a bunch of readability errors. When the window's wide, it's very easy for the eye to lose the horizontal connection between a label and its toggle/button/etc. To get around this, Apple have locked the width of the Settings app... but also seems a bit weird.
- don't get me started on what "liquid glass" has done to the look & feel
These are all pretty bad! I'm not on liquid glass yet, and am not looking forward to it. I'm actually a fan of the "reduce transparency" accessibility option. Hopefully it's sill available.
The weirdest issue I've ran into is on the sound settings page. Sometimes, the first column of the list of audio devices is super narrow, and since you can't drag it bigger, you can only see the first couple characters of each audio device's name, and have to guess which is the one you want.
... but if I open system preferences normally (via spotlight or apple menu) it doesn't happen. It only happens if I use the keyboard shortcut (option + any of the 3 volume keys)! I cannot imagine what kind of spaghetti code could be behind something like this. Clicking to another section and back to the sound section fixes it but... Very weird.
- some options have moved to menus which make no sense at all (e.g. all the toggles for whether a panel's menubar icon appear in the menu bar have moved off the panel for that feature and onto the Control Centre panel. But Control Centre doesn't have any options of its own, so the entire panel is a waste of time and has created a confusing UX where previously there was a sensible one
- loads of useful stuff I do all the time has moved a layer deeper. e.g. there used to be a top-level item called "sharing" for file/internet/printer sharing settings. It's moved one level deeper, below "General". Admittedly, "the average user" who doesn't use sharing features much, let alone wanting to toggle and control them, probably prefers this, but I find it annoying as heck
- following on from that, and also exhibited across the whole settings UI is that UI patterns are now inconsistent across panels; this seems to be because the whole thing is a bunch of web views, presumably all controlled by a different team. So they can create whatever UI they like, with whatever tools make sense. Before, I assume, there was more consistency because panels seemed to reuse the same default controls. I'm talking about use of tabs, or drop-downs, or expanders, or modal overlays... every top level panel has some of these, and they use them all differently: some panels expand a list to reach sub controls, some add a model, some just have piles of controls in lozenges
- it renders much slower. On my m3 and m4 MPBs you can still see lag. It's utterly insane that on these basically cutting edge processors with heaps of RAM, spare CPUs, >10 GPU cores, etc, the system control panel still lags
- they've fallen into the trap of making "features" be represented by horizontal bars with a button or toggle on the right edge. This pattern is found in Google's Material UI as well. It _kinda_ makes sense on a phone, and _almost_ makes sense on a tablet. But on a desktop where most windows could be any width, it introduces a bunch of readability errors. When the window's wide, it's very easy for the eye to lose the horizontal connection between a label and its toggle/button/etc. To get around this, Apple have locked the width of the Settings app... but also seems a bit weird.
- don't get me started on what "liquid glass" has done to the look & feel