3 ms·

Whew. Those screenshots: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/09/macos-26-tahoe-the-ars-technica-review/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/09/macos-26-tahoe-

by sho_hn 1y ago

Whew. Those screenshots: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/09/macos-26-tahoe-the-ars-technica-review/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/09/macos-26-tahoe-the-a... As a KDE Plasma dev, I always counted on us getting better, but I didn't expect the competition to get so much worse. We'd be flamed to high and heaven for shipping broken notification popups and rendering glitches like that in a prod release. What happened internally to cause this, I wonder?

shantara 1y ago
The rumor mill speculates that Apple needed to ship something big and flashy to distract people from calling them out on their failure to deliver on the AI features promised (and previewed!) more than a year ago.
- anakaine 1y ago
  They probably should have just eaten the AI non delivery instead of now having two major failures.
- touristtam 1y ago
  I've heard another take that is interesting and a clear departure from that never ending moaning: Like the ultra slim new iPhone that could be a step to validate the technical challenges to a foldable device, this change in UI is to prepare the user base for a complete change in the form factor, be it a glass slab or a greater focus on wearable (ala glasses).
justahuman74 1y ago
My guess is organizational inertia around dependency chains
vachina 1y ago
Wow those looks broken. I switched to Mac precisely thinking Apple knew best. Whatever happened to don’t change it if it ain’t broken?
itopaloglu83 1y ago
There’s no way this was developed by Apple. I keep thinking that they outsourced the macOS development to some amateurs online and took a year off traveling the world. Looking at the screenshots and review videos, I cannot believe how ugly and out of proportion it is. Normally, there would be a consistent design and some people like it while others don’t. But this is simply ugly.
- travisgriggs 1y ago
  My guess is that it’s all product managers and “designers” now, a whole religion of procedures and terminology, and unfortunately very little engineering of the kinds that some of the early Ux pioneers applied.
heavyset_go 1y ago
At this point, I have Plasma configured as a better macOS shell. Not a clone, those always look bad, but layouts close enough that my macOS muscle memory can't tell the difference.
pndy 1y ago
After years with Xfce and GNOME, I recently switched to distro that by default prefers KDE, and I'm overall satisfied - Qogir theme, little customization and I'm as good as I was with Win7. Plasma 6.4.5 feels way more stable than line 5 that would crash during stupidest things. As for what happen at Cupertino: it seems that they replaced people who knew theory and practice, principles of interface design with designers who were told to make a product that looks "fresh" and will diverge attention from Apple's AI failure. Because why this Liquid Glass now if not as "rattling keys" effect? It's not a technological breakthrough - we've seen translucent plastic/glass/acrylic elements and fancy animations in operating systems before. Hell, even Plasma had that glass stuff in initial line 4 of release. And OSX had Aqua interface, window animations long before Microsoft wasted years for Longhorn finally releasing it as Vista with Aero. Not mention Compiz on Linux around same time. My partner is already baffled with lack of polish and consistency across the system in this release. In some places it's just a transitional animation added on top of flat style for "wow" effect because hardware nowadays doesn't tax much for that. Tahoe feels like it tries to follow GNOME/Adwaita big interface elements that should stay exclusively on mobile devices, and it does this quite late and also really bad.
deprave 1y ago
That’s the important question. Someone else on the thread suggested it was to divert attention from one failure (AI) and now they have two. I wonder how Steve Jobs would react to this mess. Maybe he’d say he would not have been in such a mess in the first place. :)
sbuk 1y ago
People in glass houses...
toyg 1y ago
Have you seen Windows 11? It's like they copied random ideas out of KDE 4 and bolted them on top of Windows, badly. My theory is that big companies like to compress salaries. To compress salaries, you hire young and fire old, which means losing historical knowledge. The other theory is that people who grew up with Kde-look.org are now running the asylum, without ever going through the sort of formal training that the previous generations of UI designers had to experience.

by sho_hn 1y ago

shantara 1y ago

The rumor mill speculates that Apple needed to ship something big and flashy to distract people from calling them out on their failure to deliver on the AI features promised (and previewed!) more than a year ago.

anakaine 1y ago
They probably should have just eaten the AI non delivery instead of now having two major failures.
touristtam 1y ago
I've heard another take that is interesting and a clear departure from that never ending moaning: Like the ultra slim new iPhone that could be a step to validate the technical challenges to a foldable device, this change in UI is to prepare the user base for a complete change in the form factor, be it a glass slab or a greater focus on wearable (ala glasses).

justahuman74 1y ago

My guess is organizational inertia around dependency chains

vachina 1y ago

Wow those looks broken. I switched to Mac precisely thinking Apple knew best. Whatever happened to don’t change it if it ain’t broken?

itopaloglu83 1y ago

There’s no way this was developed by Apple. I keep thinking that they outsourced the macOS development to some amateurs online and took a year off traveling the world. Looking at the screenshots and review videos, I cannot believe how ugly and out of proportion it is. Normally, there would be a consistent design and some people like it while others don’t. But this is simply ugly.

travisgriggs 1y ago
My guess is that it’s all product managers and “designers” now, a whole religion of procedures and terminology, and unfortunately very little engineering of the kinds that some of the early Ux pioneers applied.

heavyset_go 1y ago

At this point, I have Plasma configured as a better macOS shell. Not a clone, those always look bad, but layouts close enough that my macOS muscle memory can't tell the difference.

pndy 1y ago

After years with Xfce and GNOME, I recently switched to distro that by default prefers KDE, and I'm overall satisfied - Qogir theme, little customization and I'm as good as I was with Win7. Plasma 6.4.5 feels way more stable than line 5 that would crash during stupidest things. As for what happen at Cupertino: it seems that they replaced people who knew theory and practice, principles of interface design with designers who were told to make a product that looks "fresh" and will diverge attention from Apple's AI failure. Because why this Liquid Glass now if not as "rattling keys" effect? It's not a technological breakthrough - we've seen translucent plastic/glass/acrylic elements and fancy animations in operating systems before. Hell, even Plasma had that glass stuff in initial line 4 of release. And OSX had Aqua interface, window animations long before Microsoft wasted years for Longhorn finally releasing it as Vista with Aero. Not mention Compiz on Linux around same time. My partner is already baffled with lack of polish and consistency across the system in this release. In some places it's just a transitional animation added on top of flat style for "wow" effect because hardware nowadays doesn't tax much for that. Tahoe feels like it tries to follow GNOME/Adwaita big interface elements that should stay exclusively on mobile devices, and it does this quite late and also really bad.

deprave 1y ago

That’s the important question. Someone else on the thread suggested it was to divert attention from one failure (AI) and now they have two. I wonder how Steve Jobs would react to this mess. Maybe he’d say he would not have been in such a mess in the first place. :)

sbuk 1y ago

People in glass houses...

toyg 1y ago

Have you seen Windows 11? It's like they copied random ideas out of KDE 4 and bolted them on top of Windows, badly. My theory is that big companies like to compress salaries. To compress salaries, you hire young and fire old, which means losing historical knowledge. The other theory is that people who grew up with Kde-look.org are now running the asylum, without ever going through the sort of formal training that the previous generations of UI designers had to experience.