What hasn’t changed with macOS Big Sur

Now, there are a lot of videos out there showing what is new with macOS Big Sur, and there are a lot of changes, but I thought I would start out my series on Big Sur by showing you what is not new. When you update to macOS Big Sur, it will look a little bit different, but your Mac is still going to work basically the same way. Let’s see what I mean. Let’s go to my Mac.

So I am looking at macOS Big Sur here. As you can see, there is a big change to it. We have nicely rounded corners here. I open up a new window; when I click on the Finder here, you will see I have a new window. The windows look different, but in all actuality, it is still macOS. So what do I mean by that? Well, I’m going to close this.

We’ll start out in the upper left-hand corner. We still have our Apple menu, and this is where we find our System Preferences. If I want to shut down my Mac, I still go down to Shut Down here or restart it. The active application is up in the upper left-hand corner, right now I’m in the Finder, but if I go and open up Safari here, you’re going to see that it says Safari. So we still have our active application in the menu bar. Also, let’s close this, when I am in the Finder, if I want to go to my different folders, I can go over to Go here and then select from any one of these folders here to open it up. So if I want to go to my Applications folder, I click on Applications, and now we’re looking at my Applications folder.

When we’re looking at our folders, we have our favorite folders here on the left side, in the sidebar, just like we did in previous macOS versions. I have my different locations here. And then, with my apps or documents, I can view them in icon view, which is what I’m viewing them in now. Or when I go up to the top, I can switch to a different view. To close a window. We go over to the upper left-hand corner and click on the red dot. So let’s go ahead and click on it, and it closes the window. So really nothing new there.

In the upper right-hand corner, we still have our menu extras. But in addition to that, we do have our Control Panel. This is new to macOS Big Sur. I’ll have a separate video on this. We still have access to our notifications or today view in previous versions of macOS; we had an icon up here in the upper right-hand corner. Well, we no longer have that icon. Now, all we need to do is just click in here, and we can see our notifications and today’s view.

What about the Dock? The Dock is still located at the bottom by default. We have our favorite applications here on the left. And then we also have our favorite documents over here on the right. And then in the middle of these, we have our recent applications, just like in macOS Catalina. To get to the Finder, we click on the Finder icon, just like we did in previous macOS versions. To get to the trash, we click on the trash. Our desktop hasn’t changed. You can see, I have two hard drives here, connected to my Mac. I double click on any one of them to open it up.

Even though things may look slightly different with macOS Big Sur, the actual fundamentals of how you use the Mac have not changed. You’re still going to go up to the Apple menu to access your System Preferences, to shut down your Mac, to restart your Mac. You have your menu bar. Your active application is going to show in the upper left-hand corner. On the right side of your menu, have your menu extras. You can still access your notification center, your today view. We still have our Dock in the bottom with our favorite applications on the Dock’s left side, our favorite documents on the right side of the Dock, and then our recent applications in the middle. When we open up a Finder window, we still have our sidebar. It may look a little bit different, but we still have our sidebar, which shows our favorite folders. We can also see our different locations. We can display our apps or folders as icons or in list view. Our desktop still stores all of our desktop files.

So you may read that there are many changes with macOS Big Sur, and there are a lot of underneath changes, but that doesn’t mean that it’s going to change how you use the Mac dramatically. It may look a little bit different, but for the most part, your Mac is still going to work just like your old Mac. If you’ve upgraded from an older macOS.

So that’s a look at what hasn’t changed with macOS Big Sur.