In the latest version of the paid edition of the Power On newsletter, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reports that Apple is considering an overhaul of the operating system. The company is focusing on one for iOS 18, which will be released this summer at WWDC. Gurman also reports that a macOS overhaul is also in the works.
However, the facelift of iOS 18 is Apple’s priority (as usual), and that of macOS will not be ready for WWDC. It is more likely to be introduced in the next couple of years. Since the macOS redesign has just begun, no details are provided on what the redesign will entail. Apple last redesigned macOS with Big Sur in 2020, which would be more than five years old when this new design overhaul is expected to arrive.
Apple’s approach isn’t surprising: it’s what the company has been doing for the past few years. iOS takes the lead, then Apple takes many of the ideas developed there and implements them into macOS. So once iOS 18 is released, we’ll have an idea of what might be coming to macOS. Gurman specifically claimed that Apple was not looking to bring the visionOS design language to iOS, but he did not mention whether the headset’s circular design elements would be available on macOS. Vision Pro and Mac are very closely aligned because of the ability to share the screen via a virtual screen. It is therefore possible that Apple is seeking to unify the two interfaces.
Let’s hope, however, that Apple takes advantage of this opportunity to put the iOS version of macOS into perspective. Sometimes rollovers don’t work as well as they could – the system settings overhaul introduced in macOS Ventura is one example. While using iOS-inspired elements can work in macOS, Apple needs to remember that people use the Mac in a very different way than the iPhone, and the UI needs to reflect that.