A first look at macOS Big Sur as it launches in public beta with a new Control Center, a redesigned Notification Center with widgets, more
Jason Snell / Six Colors : Tweets: @dimillian and @gregorymcfadden Tweets: Thomas Ricouard / @dimillian : Big Sur is such a leap in term of UX. I was back on Catalina for doing some stuff and it really feel “ancient”. And it's not just because Big Sur is newer, it's just because anything before Big Sur feel very gray and dated. Gregory McFadden / @gregorymcfadden : NOO! They changed the new delightful screenshot sound in the latest Big Sur beta!
Context & Ripple Effects
Big Sur's public beta lands about six weeks after Apple first showed the redesign at WWDC, making this Jason Snell's first sustained hands-on with the new Control Center and widget-bearing Notification Center rather than a staged demo. The cadence is familiar: Mojave and then Catalina each went through the same public-beta rite before shipping, so this is the third straight summer the Mac's next interface has been exposed to ordinary users months early.
What is different this time is the scale of the visual break. The coverage frames Big Sur as the most thorough Mac redesign in the recent run — more rounded corners, iOS-derived system controls — and early adopters like Thomas Ricouard are already reporting that going back to Catalina makes the prior interface feel "ancient."
First-order effects
- Developers and opted-in testers get roughly a full quarter to shake out the new Control Center and Notification Center before the fall release, shifting bug discovery from launch week into the beta period.
Second-order effects
- Third-party Mac apps now have to rework their interfaces to match Big Sur's rounder, more translucent chrome or risk looking stale against the system — the same dynamic that made Catalina-era designs feel dated once Big Sur arrived.
Third-order effects
- If the annual public beta keeps functioning as a mass feedback loop, user reaction during the beta window becomes a formal input to shipped design — a pattern visible again years later when Apple dialed Liquid Glass back in an iOS 26 beta after social-media criticism.
The trend: Apple's summer public beta has hardened into a fixed stage of every macOS release, turning interface redesigns into publicly negotiated rollouts rather than day-one surprises.