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I've been running it since the RC and am currently in the process of uninstalling it. The new UI is so incredibly ugly I honestly cannot understand how they tho
by smcleod 1y ago
I've been running it since the RC and am currently in the process of uninstalling it. The new UI is so incredibly ugly I honestly cannot understand how they thought it was acceptable to even released as a beta let alone an RC and now release.
There's SO much padding and wasted screen real estate, disjointed looking floating inner panels, window corners that are so rounded you see gaps in full screen apps, inconsistencies everywhere and - well, I could go on.
Basically the vibe I get from it is that they think their users are dumb - they won't care about things like this and that they want everything to look like a preschoolers tablet.
- PlanksVariable 1y agoThat was my experience with liquid glass on mobile. I’d heard it was bad, thought it couldn’t possible be that bad then tried it and was flabbergasted. Really unfortunate.
- msk-lywenn 1y agoDid you notice any impact on battery life?
- rick_dalton 1y agoI was on RC too, for a few days, and also uninstalled. I'm glad I did, the fresh Sequoia install feels much nicher. Even with reduce transparency on, the design was too ugly and the drab gray icon jails for non-squircle icons were downright offensive. First macOS version I'm gonna skip and I've been a day one updater since mountain lion, very sad.
- cmckn 1y agolol are you an ATP listener? I don’t think the icon situation is enough to keep me off the release, but agree that the design is just kind of a mess and not my taste.
- rick_dalton 1y agoHaha I'm subscribed but haven't listened to that episode, I took the squircle jail term from the arstechnica tahoe review.
- bombcar 1y agoATP was enough to convince me to tell people at work not to upgrade right away. Last time I did this was ... the version that removed 32bit compatibility, I think?
- 00deadbeef 1y agoEverything I've seen of it looks a disaster. I'll wait for macOS 27.
- lysace 1y agoWaiting an extra year to jump on new macOS releases has been the norm for sane people for quite some time now. It sucks if you buy a new mac which isn't supported by older macOS releases though, so maybe don't do that for a year or so. I guess you sometimes just have to put your new Apple device in storage for a year until there's functional software.
- stevage 1y agoFor me I simply don't upgrade ever until I'm forced to, usually by an app that I want to use. As someone without an iPhone and who doesn't really use included desktop apps, there are simply never any improvements in the OS for me, only regressions.
- reaperducer 1y agoWaiting an extra year to jump on new macOS releases has been the norm for sane people for quite some time now. /Looking forward to macOS Fresno.
- 00deadbeef 1y agoI usually wait 6 months, but this time I plan to skip the release altogether
- vunderba 1y agoI have a Mac M1 that's been on MacOS 14 Sonoma for a couple years at this point - I've not seen anything even remotely interesting in later releases that could incentivize me to roll the dice and upgrade.
- apparent 1y agoMy Mac is also on Sonoma. I'm sure there are some incremental features that I would appreciate, but I'm always worried about what's going to break or be worse with the next OS update. I'll update my phone because iOS jumps are bigger in terms of functionality. But 14 years in, OSX just doesn't have a lot of new bells and whistles that I care about. The last time I updated, I was only excited about getting Sidecar functionality so I could dual-screen onto my iPad. When a minor feature like this is the most memorable, that's saying something. I think the only thing that would get me to update would be notable AI improvements. But seeing what I've seen of AI on iOS, I'm in no rush.
- rvrb 1y agoIt was the straw that broke the camel’s back for me. After trying out the preview for a month, the writing was on the wall, and I began the process of switching to a Thinkpad with Linux. I am now fully off macOS for the first time in 20 years of being an Apple die hard. I could use a lot of emotionally loaded words to describe how I feel about this release, but the long and short of it is that I am no longer the target audience for Apple.
- caycep 1y agoJust run linux with utm!
- stock_toaster 1y agoSimilar story here. Loong time Apple fan, but as they say.. "trust arrives walking, but leaves on a horse". I'm real mad! I installed tahoe in a virtualbuddy VM to see how it was before running on my main system... and.... I will be definitely be keeping Sequoia for a while (at least a year, probably). If the situation does not improve in the meantime, I will probably switch to a framework laptop running cosmic desktop or something like that.
- leptons 1y agoSimilar story here, but going from Windows to Linux. It seems like Linux is gaining some market share with the OS disasters from both Apple and Microsoft.
- Lio 1y agoYep I feel the same. To know if you're the target user or not I guess you go to Apple's marketing material. Do you see anyone that looks like you, doing anything that looks like what you do? I don't and I can't remember the last time I did. It seems to be a lifestyle brand now for people I have little in common with. At least with Linux there's the possibility that you can make it your own even if it's not that way right now.
- noisy_boy 1y ago> Do you see anyone that looks like you, doing anything that looks like what you do? I don't and I can't remember the last time I did. You mean you are not an ethnically interesting person with a head full of colored hair wearing ethically sourced pre-aged linen sipping responsibly grown coffee with a serene smile facetiming even more interesting people without any worry about any real problems in the world?!
- diffrinse 1y agoSo the Gnome 3 gang were ahead of their time?
- betaby 1y agoIndeed, gives old Gnome vibe.
- etempleton 1y agoI have been running the beta from the beginning and they have improved quite a bit, but I am actually shocked they didn't delay Mac OS 26, because the design is so rough around the edges. Some of the larger aesthetic changes, such as the menu bar and the dock look good, but there is so much more that looks objectively awful. 1. the way window UI elements float in bubbles on the top over a white background is horrible. It looks amateurish. 2. Icons look low detail and blurry. At first I thought they were using low resolution placeholder icons, but no, the layered diffused glass effect just kind of translates to blurriness on many app icons. 3. The side bar, such as on Finder, just kind of floats there. That is fine and looks kind of neat on the Maps app as you can see some of the maps behind it, but on the Finder it is just a white bubble over top of a white background, which... is a choice. 4. The app launcher is gone, and replaced by Spotlight, which is worse. I could go on. The point is it is bad and Apple should be embarrassed. I say that as someone who likes Apple products alot.
- dsego 1y agoLooking at the Slack icon right now, and it just looks blurry and low resolution, same for Calendar and some others, it's awful.
- etempleton 1y agoThe maps icon is the most egregious. It makes my head hurt.
- crossroadsguy 1y agoSo people do use Apple maps and that too on a mac.
- FabHK 1y ago> 4. The app launcher is gone, and replaced by Spotlight, which is worse. Do you mean the Launchpad? (I've never used it; but always use Spotlight to launch apps.)
- 1y ago
- runjake 1y agoCan you post screenshots of what you mean? I see grossly rounded corners in some apps, but I don't see the other stuff like gaps in window corners for full screen apps. I may have some config bit flipped that has disabled those. Yeah, the new corner radius is ugly but by and large, it's not much different than before, from what I see so far.
- goalieca 1y agoTry running console with tmux. The window menu just floats there instead of being snugly fit against the bottom from end to end.
- mickle00 1y agohttps://imgur.com/a/jLPM9oV https://imgur.com/a/jLPM9oV this is what I'm seeing with Safari, WhatsApp and Chrome all maximized but with various radius on each corner.
- datenyan 1y agoGood lord, that's awful. I'm definitely firmly in Camp Apple for the most part, but this just looks actually atrocious.
- leptons 1y agoIf this were April 1st, it might make sense. But this is a major OS release by a brand that's famous for its design aesthetic. What the actual fuck Apple? Does nobody test anything anymore? How did this get out of the lab? Who exactly is steering this ship? Tim Cook's days at the helm might be winding down.
- richrichardsson 1y ago> Does nobody test anything anymore? Honestly feels like QA and release qualification are non-existent in so many organisations these days. This can't possibly be the case though, right? Right?
- coldtea 1y ago
- lynndotpy 1y agoI try not to indulge in negativity and scorn, but I agree with these sentiments. This is resoundly a regression. Text overlapping on text, searchboxes that are broken and now just function as text boxes, increased latency throughout the operating system. It's so bad that it's kind of fascinating. Unfortunately, even "Reduce Transparency" doesn't fix the LG update.
- wilg 1y agoI've been running the RC and I have had no issues. Some of the design choices (sidebars particularly) are strange, but it's generally fine. I recommend not overcomplicating your life and just staying on the latest macOS.
- kcplate 1y agoIt took a day of getting used to it, but I have had no issues either. Some of the commentary on this thread seems overly critical to me, but you tend to see that on any Apple thread on HN. There’s stuff I like, some stuff I don’t, but in the end I’ll adapt. I think sime people just hate change. I am convinced that some folks complaining here will be complaining when MacOS 28 comes out and changes some OS 26 feature they have grown to like.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- bradgessler 1y agoIt would be one thing if they excessively rounded and padded the windows, but they shipped with a bunch of different padding and border radii. So far I’ve counted 4 different borders, and I’m sure there’s more.
- rcarmo 1y agoYeah, 4 different corner radius sizes is where I’m at too. Won’t be surprised if there are more.
- bradgessler 1y agoI just counted 5 different radii in Apple’s apps alone. I also discovered they space the window control buttons in all sorts of different spots to, so it’s even more insane than just multiple radii.
- llm_nerd 1y ago> Basically the vibe I get from it is that they think their users are dumb Your point would have been much more convincing had you refrained from this sort of pejorative assigning of motives. It wasn't necessary. I've been running the betas to the final release and there are a number of basic affordances and system improvements that are definitely worthwhile. I will not be going back. Having said that, while I know they had good intentions with this whole design, and probably really thought they were pursing a winner, what a massive, massive miss. This is such an aesthetic disaster that I'm just in awe. I feel like they had a huge push to do some seemingly substantial change, particularly on the mobile side, given the stumbles in the AI space, so they changed a lot of things maybe without quite enough thought. Ugly as hell. More dead space. On the mobile side they released an update to iOS just today from the RC a few days ago that removes some of the particularly stupid animations (the app tray did some dumb thing where it expanded and shrank, and that and a few similar things are gone).
- rcarmo 1y agoI count four different corner radius sizes currently on my screen, which is maddening. Apple has a thing against people with OCD. Or taste. The thing is horribly wasteful of screen real estate, and as someone who’s been writing a Mac blog for over two decades, I am so happy I started using Fedora two years ago—GNOME has its flaws, but it looks nicer than Tahoe.
- iqandjoke 1y agoIt is only Apple can do. It needs courage and innovation. We, as user should not be beta tester.
- behnamoh 1y ago> It is only Apple can do. I've come to doubt this. Literally anything Apple does gets copied (sometimes even better than Apple's version).
- hajile 1y agoDoesn't MS still have screens rendered like Windows 3.1 or Win95 in some corners of the OS?
- coldtea 1y agoThe Finder looks like shit. The sidebar is like badly retrofited from another program, perhaps from some crappy Gnome theme. The Control Center (or however they call the drop down window with quick controls for volume, wifi, brigthness, etc) has floating isolated icons like crap. Bring back Scott Forstall. Give him a big bonus. Let him fix this shit. Otherwise, the code changes and actual features are probably fine.
- laborcontract 1y agoI’m glad to see another member of Club Forstall here. My biggest wish for Apple is to bring back Forstall. Letting him go was their biggest mistake.
- leakycap 1y ago... but he was "difficult" to work with! (sigh) I still have a few devices running iOS 5.x and power them up every now and then just to appreciate how incredible the interface was. Even on modest hardware, stuff felt interactive and was beautiful.
- sgarland 1y agoI made the mistake of updating my phone, and immediately regretted it. We tried Liquid Glass already, it was called mid-aughts Windows. It sucked then, and it sucks now.
- ibfreeekout 1y agoI'm glad I'm not the only one getting Vista vibes with this look.
- andsoitis 1y agoand vista was MORE beautiful than this vomit
- trinix912 1y agoQuite an insult to Windows Vista and Windows 7, where Microsoft actually took care to make things consistent and text readable. Here they didn't even put shadows behind all labels!
- 827a 1y agoYeah similar situation here. I've been running it since basically the day after WWDC, and I've just had this sinking feeling that its so bad, they wouldn't be able to fix it before release. Or, they don't even view it as something that needs fixing. I'll begrudgingly get a couple more years out of this personal M2 Air, but my engineering team is prepping to do upgrades on some older M1 Pros we've had since launch, and after seeing Tahoe, the CTO and I formed a plan to give devs the option of getting either an M4 Pro or a Framework. We haven't launched yet, but I think a solid number of our engineers are going to opt for the Framework, hopefully as high as half.
- blinkingled 1y agoUgh I upgraded excitedly and can't stand the UI - there is no upside to any of it. Also for some reason things are also beachballing and VSCode keeps crashing - new M4 MBP. All the system log errors are present exactly as they were and my USB-C dock with Ethernet port still doesn't work.
- divan 1y agoTraining/preparing users for upcoming AR glasses interfaces?
- amarshall 1y ago> SO much padding No idea on macOS, but turn on Reduce Transparency on iOS and there’s tons of padding most of the time, but then sometimes zero padding. And I mean zero. The edges of buttons and text are at the edge of the underlying background. It’s…embarrassing.
- rafram 1y agoI noticed that in iOS Safari. Reduce Transparency brings back the bottom toolbar containing the search/URL field and buttons, but there’s zero padding between the buttons and the edge. Makes it fairly obvious that nobody tested it.
- amarshall 1y agoEnabling Reduce Transparency is a sure-fire way to find a dozen bugs within a few hours. It is always quite apparent no one who is empowered tests it at Apple. At least the padding issue is the one Feedback report I sent that got the “more than 10 similar issues” label so it may actual get fixed.
- uptown 1y agoHow hard is it to downgrade?
- jdkee 1y agoSteve Jobs would never have allowed this to be released.
- eloisant 1y agoPeople need to stop idolizing Steve Jobs like Apple only produced consistent UI when he was there. Apple have never respected its own guidelines, for example in the early days of MacOSX there were "brushed metal" apps that were supposed to be (according to the guidelines) for small non-resizable windows. Still, there most popular app, iTunes, broke that by being brushed metal despite being a big, resizable window.
- agos 1y agoiTunes also had a modal settings window, in defiance of another rule
- itopaloglu83 1y agoIt’s ugly as hell and plain stupid. I couldn’t watch the WWDC and when I saw the screenshots I thought it was a joke. Giant buttons with weird padding and extreme transparency effects. This is going to sound harsh but it looks like when “working” from home, Apple engineers outsourced their work to amateurs online. I simply cannot believe that Apple is shipping an OS this out of touch with elegance. Steve Jobs said in his inauguration speech that he slept on the floor to take typography classes and later obsessed over having great typefaces on Macs. Steve would’ve burn the place down instead of shipping a crap like this.
- throwawaylaptop 1y agoI float around the VC world in SF. Several of the women that work for VCs in decent positions don't know how to maximize a window on the MacBooks.
- throwawaylaptop 1y agoYou can downvote all you want but I've seen it and confirmed it by asking why they don't double click the menu bar. They didn't know it was a thing.
- arthurcolle 1y agoIt's very unstable, indexing doesn't work anymore
- quotemstr 1y ago> There's SO much padding and wasted screen real estate, disjointed looking floating inner panels, window corners that are so rounded you see gaps in full screen apps, inconsistencies everywhere and - well, I could go on. Remember in the beforetimes when we decoupled themes from OS updates? Wouldn't it be nice if once again we discovered this lost technology that let different users have different UIs?
- ranger_danger 1y agohttps://stopthemingmy.app/ https://stopthemingmy.app/
- dangus 1y agoMy progression: 1. Apple photos redesign from last year sucks and I’m already frustrated with iCloud abstraction and lack of cross platform friendliness 2. Switch to an alternate cloud photos provider 3. Find out about Liquid Glass, looks like shit, impulse sell my MacBook Pro in favor of a Framework 4. Surprise surprise, it’s actually the year of the Linux desktop. My gaming situation is way better on Linux and it does everything my Mac did. The only compromise is my need to carry a big extra battery around.
- crossroadsguy 1y ago> they think their users are dumb Aren’t they/we? :-) *majority of Well, hasn’t this been the single biggest reason for their sustained stellar returns year after year where often (or maybe most of the time) the biggest change their devices (like iPhones) used to see was the version number change e.g. iPhone 13 -> 14. For the rest of their users — they make a noise (which is not even feeble in comparison), bicker around, lament the fact that the other alternative is Google (Windows and the Wild Linux West), and they stay. Rinse, repeat.
- kkylin 1y agoThere are also under-the-hood changes that I found truly upsetting: among other things, all the Emacs versions I've tried (stock GNU Emacs or Mac Port, downloaded binary blobs and compiled on my machine) are either immediately unusable or become so slow after a day that they are almost unusable. Tracing things on Instruments suggests a culprit (the culprit?) is NSAutofillHeuristicController. This is not a new feature, but I'm guessing with them pushing Apple Intelligence it was rewritten. AFAIK no obvious way to disable this "feature". (Turning off Apple Intelligence doesn't seem to do it.) I'm contemplating rolling back to Sequoia.
- josteink 1y ago> among other things, all the Emacs versions I've tried (stock GNU Emacs or Mac Port, downloaded binary blobs and compiled on my machine) are either immediately unusable or become so slow after a day that they are almost unusable. So basically my #1 work tool will no longer work. That’s a hard deal-breaker right there. As a longer-term means of escape, what’s the best way to run a «full» Linux desktop on a otherwise managed Mac?
- skydhash 1y agoParallel or Vmware (the former is paid and the latter is tortuous to download). Then you can go with debian (for minimal installation) or fedora (for ready to work desktop installation). Works quite great.
- nitros 1y agoThe following should fix that: defaults write org.gnu.Emacs NSAutoFillHeuristicControllerEnabled "NO"
- kkylin 1y agoThanks! I'll give that a shot
- rick_dalton 1y agoThe developer of ghostty had this exact same issue with his terminal. Ironically apple's iCloud password autofill extension on firefox also practically halves my firefox performance. Seems like they haven't figured out autofill yet. https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/commit/b58a761aba75fadf1e3dd2ea23df9e38c4284c92 https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/commit/b58a761aba75fa...
- userbinator 1y agoThere's SO much padding and wasted screen real estate That seems to be a growing trend ever since "UX designers" started taking over (early 2010s?), to the point that I wonder if they're trying to see how far they can take it.
- eboynyc32 1y agoEh. I like it. Seems more modern. Who cares as long as it’s not windows.
- sto11z 1y agoI tried 3 betas of ios and then sold my iPhone and bought a Pixel, that's how disappointed I was from what I saw.
- pfortuny 1y agoEither Tim Cook does not use a Mac computer or he does not notice/care. I am not saying he should helicopter-parent all the design process but the "finished" product? So: that is Apple's CEO for you.
- tobyhinloopen 1y agoHe gets older so everything must get bigger
- rxyz 1y agoWouldnt be surprised if he spends more time on an iPad than Mac these days
- codr7 1y agoThese days? You think that flunk is smart enough to figure out a keyboard?
- whywhywhywhy 1y agoWhy would he when he's a numbers and supply chain guy not a product and vision guy.
- monkeyelite 1y agoIt’s Craig, not Tim.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- BatteryMountain 1y agoHonestly, Windows 7's Aero effects are better looking. Best thing after that is KDE (with light customizations). Everything else has regressed.
- esskay 1y agoThe whole "Liquid Glass" UI is by far their worst ever take on a design language. It feels like stepping backwards to web 2.0 but with even bigger accessibility issues. It doesn't look or feel modern, its ugly, inconsistent and just all around crap. God knows what they were thinking with this. Also who on earth green lit these low resolution looking blurry icons everywhere?!
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- karel-3d 1y agoI don't mind it on iOS I need to say, I was expecting to hate it and it's... okay. I like that I can make all icons just black. It's really atrocious on macOS though. The new Finder looks so stupid. Preview now has artificially rounded corners in PDFs! What are we even doing here.
- andrepd 1y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmWOtf4Ziso https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmWOtf4Ziso Look how far we've fallen.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- figassis 1y agoThis is quite a departure from the company the pioneered UX obsession and attention to the smallest detail. What's happening here?
- Lutzb 1y agoSteve Jobs is no longer there to reign in the designers.
- codr7 1y agoNot just designers, it's like the entire company has grown up depending on Jobs to course correct.
- Vegenoid 1y agoI think we are seeing one of the downsides of vertical integration: the team running part of the stack can shit the bed without consequences because they're carried by the whole. Apple's software design and quality has been going downhill for a while - but their hardware is fantastic and keeps getting better. I've been putting up with the software because the hardware is worth it, and I guess that's going to be put to the test. For all the griping, it matters little in the face of money. People won't be replaced until sales suffer.
- shelled 1y agoI just installed it (had to; if I am using the Mac, I'd rather be on the latest OS for security and compatibility reasons), and it is just disgusting. It is more disgusting than the iOS 26 monstrosity. I mean, how do you even provide constructive feedback to such a pathetic design choice? Not that this company ever deals in feedback (unless it's a strong feedback directly to its wallet). I do believe they are just exhibiting sheer incompetence and intellectual bankruptcy as a corporation. Is it beginning of an end? I don't know. Do giga corps even die anymore?
- josteink 1y ago> The new UI is so incredibly ugly I honestly cannot understand how they thought it was acceptable to even released as a beta let alone an RC and now release. I just tried it and maybe I've just been primed by the internet, but by god, I did not like it. The side-bar design is terrible and lots of application (Maps, Music, etc) always look like they have a window overlapping the current application. So even with a single window open, my desktop already looks messy. For people like me, with a slight OCD about certain details (don't talk to me about notification-bubbles), this is absolutely infuriating. I'll disable auto-updates on all iDevices and Macs, and just keep on security-updates for previous gen OS as long as I can. Eww.
- coldpie 1y ago> The new UI is so incredibly ugly I honestly cannot understand how they thought it was acceptable to even released as a beta let alone an RC and now release. I feel like if you replaced all of the paper in a company's printers with transparency sheets you'd be fired because that's obviously a stupid idea that would never work. But then I guess that's why I'm not a software UI designer.
- jesterson 1y agoI am lucky to read this after before deciding to update. Unforunately did update to the new ios and it's incredibly ugly. Wish there would have been an easy way to roll back on iphone
- earthnail 1y agoYeah, agree the UI is not great, but after using it for a week I feel it's actually... fine. Probably because I use a lot of third-party apps who don't use the new design.