macOS Big Sur

A new look for your Mac

lan Dye, who joined Apple in 2006 from a background in branding and fashion, has taken over human interface design He and his team have tweaked macOS with two perhaps conflicting aims: to improve consistency across all of Apple’s OSes and to ensure your Mac feels like a Mac. App icons now sit within a squircle and share symbols with iOS and iPadOS, but depart from the flat look introduced in iOS 7 with “highly crafted” shading. Aiming for “reduced visual complexity to keep the focus on users’ content”, buttons and tools recede to grey when inactive but make more use of colour, while text has been respaced. Even sounds are remastered.