I made the Windows -> Mac transition in 2008 and recently played around with a modern Windows machine. I was pretty stunned to find the Control Panel experience... not unchanged, but still eerily similar to Windows XP.
Windows' Control Panel is a trainwreck of UX compared to OSX System Preferences. Being such a core part of the OS, I really expected to see, well, something new and better. But then I remembered how countless programs embed themselves in the control panel via DLLs, so Microsoft probably can't make major changes to the UX without breaking binary compatibility with ancient software packages.
Yeah, but they're all separate from any other preference pane. Everybody gets the same framework to create completely independent prefpanes, not hijack Apple's existing ones.
There are no hooks, for example, to modify the Displays prefpane; if Apple decides they want to update it, they're free to do so. On the other hand, a lot of graphics card vendors still needlessly add their own little tab to the display adaptor control panel and the desktop's context menu.
I made the Windows -> Mac transition in 2008 and recently played around with a modern Windows machine. I was pretty stunned to find the Control Panel experience... not unchanged, but still eerily similar to Windows XP.
Windows' Control Panel is a trainwreck of UX compared to OSX System Preferences. Being such a core part of the OS, I really expected to see, well, something new and better. But then I remembered how countless programs embed themselves in the control panel via DLLs, so Microsoft probably can't make major changes to the UX without breaking binary compatibility with ancient software packages.