The Anatomy of a macOS App

That first os screenshot made my heart sink; a reminder of how far we've fallen.

How I wish our operating systems still looked like this. Utilitarian, useful. No rounded corners and bubbly icons, reducing the useful space more and more each year.

The incredible quality of Mac hardware is the only thing keeping me from jumping to a thinkpad / omarchy setup.

Count the pixels! Percentagewise, the window decorations and menu bar in that screenshot take up a lot more space than the modern equivalent does at 5K. If you're comparing it to to the current 14" Macbook Pro, it's closer, but Macbook Pro still wins - and still continues to hold its own even if the classic Mac is producing a 1280x1024 display. And this even though the Macbook Pro is the space-constraised pocket version! (Also note: you haven't even investigated the scaled display options yet)

Disclaimer: I have a desktop Mac, and I'm assuming the pixel counts are the same for the laptops.

(The window corners weren't always round, but there was a bit of rounding to the screen corners there from day 1: https://infinitemac.org/ - this really struck me when I first saw it, coming from the Atari ST.)

I've been on a 13" MBA for years as my daily, and I'm convinced that the usable screen real estate in macOS 26 is a significant downgrade. The window bezels feel like they're 1cm thick, as if they're meant to be finger-accurate rather than mouse-accurate. Probably telegraphing what's to come