MACOS BIG SUR VS CATALINA MAC OS X
MACOS BIG SUR VS CATALINA MAC

In Big Sur there are a number of small tweaks coming to apps – often these are the same changes as you will see in iOS 14 and iPad OS 14. Now that we’ve run through the major design changes coming in Big Sur, on to the big changes coming to the apps that ship with macOS.

MACOS BIG SUR VS CATALINA MAC

Many will be pleased to hear the return of the familiar Mac chime that we used to hear when Macs stared up (most Macs sold since 2016 have been silent in their start up). Apple says that it is updating the system sounds – and probably the first thing you will notice is that the chime when you start up your Mac starts up. One final ‘design’ change we will mention isn’t actually the way the Big Sur interface looks but rather how it sounds.

Notification Centre can get pretty cluttered in Catalina, so the changes coming in Big Sur will be welcome. In Big Sur everything will appear at once – but notification will be grouped by app and you’ll be able to choose the Widget design that suits you. In Catalina when you bring up Notification Centre there are two tabs, Today and Notifications: Today being where your Widgets for Calendar, Weather, Calculator and so on sit and Notifications being the home of all the Notifications you receive from your apps, such as important emails or other messages. Here the new design means that you will see Notifications and Widgets together in the same view. We hope to have the opportunity to add tools like Timer, Calculator, Home and Dark Mode here like you can on in iOS.Īnother element that appears on the right side of the screen, Notification Centre, is also getting a revamp in Big Sur. The best thing about this feature – which people have been calling out for ever since it arrived on in iOS a few centuries ago – is that you will be able to customise controls and add tools for the things you do most often. Click on this to bring up a handy bunch of controls for things like display brightness, sound, Do Not Disturb, AirPlay and AirDrop and Music controls. The other big change is over on the top right, where, alongside the little cluster of icons for things like Wi-Fi, battery, Spotlight search and the date and time you’ll see a new icon for the Control Centre. In fact many will be identical to those icons on the iPad and iPhone. In Big Sur (above) the app icons in the Dock will be more uniform – you’ll see from Apple’s example below that the new icon are all square – just like they are on the iPhone and iPad. Right now in Catalina (below) the Dock is a jumble of mismatched icons, some circular, some square and some neither. As you can see from this first image, there are a number of changes to the design and some entirely new elements, such as the Control Centre in the top right (more on that later). We’ll start by running thought some of the major design changes from Catalina to Big Sur. Is this redesigned macOS really the biggest overhaul in two decades? Probably, although due to its parallels with iOS you probably will have a sense that it’s more familiar than ever.

MACOS BIG SUR VS CATALINA MAC OS X

We feel a sense of Déjà vu – it is after all only six years since Yosemite bought its own iOS-flavoured overhaul to the Mac, which at the time we said changed the look of Mac OS X more radically than any other upgrade since the switch from OS 9 to OS X (which arrived back in 2001). Apple’s describing the move from macOS 10.16 Catalina to macOS 11 Big Sur as “The biggest design upgrade since the introduction of Mac OS X”.

Macos big sur vs catalina