Big Sur has some rough edges right now that I hope will get ironed out (fortunately, they're mostly UI issues and not performance/stability), but using it for the past couple months has made me a little more optimistic about the Mac's future. They've brought over a lot of common-sense features and design ideas from iOS, but in a way that embraces the Mac's unique features, rather than feeling like a refresh-for-the-sake-of-a-refresh. My favorite is a much clearer contrast between active and inactive windows.
None of those changes are SwiftUI though. It's a new skin. And very few of those changes are new apps.
In the past few years we've had anything from the new native AppStore that doesn't have a single consistent behaviour [1] to the plethora of half-baked barely functioning app stubs in Swift UI/Catalyst [2]. These are first-party apps by Apple themselves, and they are perfectly fine with the state they are in, and they had no qualms whatsoever when releasing them. That's what "obsessive attention to details"[3] has been on the Mac for the past many years.
The very few examples/exceptions (Big Sur's Messages) are exactly that: very few.
Big Sur has been moving closer to the look and feel of iPadOS so that the new Apple Silicon machines can run iOS-native apps under catalyst without it being too jarring a difference. They greatly increased the amount of code in catalyst to make this possible as well.
At the same time, they have been adding Mac features to iPadOS to make it easier to make a full-featured iPad app closer to a proper featured Mac app. One example there would be mouse/trackpad support. Another would be the multitasking support which, for all of its UX weaknesses on use, makes variable sized, multi window applications available on both platforms.
Messages is an example of the medium-term game Apple is playing here. I anticipate a large number of the built-in apps to be (finally) a single code-base under a single team. They are gaining more capability to do easy, deep customization per OS in each release - but also seeing the systems themselves move closer in terms of UX feature set.
> Big Sur has been moving closer to the look and feel of iPadOS so that the new Apple Silicon machines can run iOS-native apps
Look and feel has little to do with the ability to run apps. The primary reason Apple Silicon will run iOS apps natively because it will be the same processor architecture.
However, a desktop OS being shoehorned into a mobile-like design is a very bad thing for a great amount of extremely obvious reasons.
I can’t believe you’re downvoted for criticising Apple on a thing they objectively pooped the bed on in the past couple of years.
Mac apps released by Apple have been a mishmash of very inconsistent design lately, most people in the Mac enthusiast community even agree with this (think Gruber, Marco, etc.)...
I definitely found it easier to distinguish between active and inactive windows in Big Sur vs High Sierra. Not sure exactly what design elements caused that, as I haven’t used Big Sur since July, but it was noticeable.
Mind, Mavericks is still a lot better than both...
However, looking at the abysmal quality of apps they have been releasing on MacOS in the past few years, I wouldn't hold my breath.