Those of us who are long enough in UI design know what is a result of attention to detail and professional GUI. We have all used Os X not only for UNIX like core (Darwin) but for consistent UX and UI libraries. In some point in time Apple was influencing our work in really meaningful way by setting the standard (remember Apple Human Interface Guidelines pre Yosemite). For me personally Soundtrack Pro is most polished professional interface ever made. So in this context UI “innovation” trough emoji and implementation of white space for touch interaction (without touch interaction) is funny but not usable. Performance aside ( which is big accomplishment ) I miss the old approach with balance of contrast and natural flow and will stay on Catalina as long as I can. If Apple changes their stance on telemetry, bypassing things and fixes UI/UX design I have no problem to join again. What is lacking in Linux desktop is consistent approach to UI, but for some of us may be is time to revaluate and relearn things. My personal time investment is in Emacs, with time I have more and more respect for those ideas of freedom and consistency. The selling point for me with Apple was professional interface and high UI standards, sadly they are gone. But hey everyone of us is different and this is good, right?

Oh hey another emacs user!

You can turn off all the telemetry in macOS and they ask you if you want it on when you setup the computer.

Agree to disagree on Big Sur, I love the new look. Keep in mind they’re calling it macOS 11, so there are probably bigger and less superficial changes down the road.

> You can turn off all the telemetry in macOS and they ask you if you want it on when you setup the computer.

That's false. You can turn off OS analytics but there is tons of telemetry built into almost every Apple app, separate from that, that you cannot disable. It tells you about it on first app launch. Open Maps, for example, and it will tell you about the unique, rotating identifier it uses to track your searches. Opting out of OS analytics does not disable telemetry for the other Apple services now deeply integrated in the OS. Even disabling these features doesn't prevent the mac from talking to the services, such as in the case of Siri.

Additionally gatekeeper OCSP checks on app launches serve as telemetry in practice, and this has no preference or setting to disable it.

They’re working on the OCSP issue and I would say it’s more of a disclosure bug than telemetry, which implies intent. You’re right about Maps but you’re saying it’s “almost every app,” do you know of others? Because I’m pretty sure it’s not “almost every app,” and moreover in Maps it’s required to deliver the functionality, so I’m also not sure I would call it telemetry.

Stocks. Weather. News. Maps (has a unique ID across multiple interactions to serve as explicit telemetry). App Store (sends device serial). TV (sends device serial). iMessage (sends device serial).

Telemetry doesn't imply intent. Many things serve great as telemetry that aren't intended to be such. There's no way to limit the way the raw data collected can be mined later, offline.

Do you have resources on the data collection these apps do? I'm interested in digging deeper.

https://github.com/kholia/OSX-KVM if you need an easy way to fire up a fresh install.