I mean, there’s some decent design principles behind it. For one, it just takes up space only once rather than for each window individually.
But much more importantly, it makes use of an implication of Fitts’s Law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts’s_law#Implications_for_UI_design
TL;DR: Because you can slam your mouse cursor against the top of the screen, you can’t miss the menu vertically. It’s like an infinitely tall button. This makes it fast for users to move their cursor there.
Having said that, this macOS design is from a time when the mouse and navigation menus were the primary user interaction method, which they’re not anymore. So, yeah, that’s why it was designed like that, but I doubt they’d expend this much effort to design it like that again.
I mean, there’s some decent design principles behind it. For one, it just takes up space only once rather than for each window individually.
But much more importantly, it makes use of an implication of Fitts’s Law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts’s_law#Implications_for_UI_design
TL;DR: Because you can slam your mouse cursor against the top of the screen, you can’t miss the menu vertically. It’s like an infinitely tall button. This makes it fast for users to move their cursor there.
Having said that, this macOS design is from a time when the mouse and navigation menus were the primary user interaction method, which they’re not anymore. So, yeah, that’s why it was designed like that, but I doubt they’d expend this much effort to design it like that again.
I don’t have any issues with mouse precision, so having to navigate that extra distance every time is a pain in the ass.