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Last Year on My Mac: Look Back in Disbelief

511 points by vitosartori 9mo ago

CodeWriter23 9mo ago
The Bozo Explosion is in full force at Apple now. They should bring Forstall back. Engineers need to be be humiliated for making stupid decisions.
- Etheryte 9mo ago
  I get where you're coming from, but the word humiliation is not constructive in a professional setting. Reasonable decisions can easily look stupid without context and hindsight is always 20/20. Being responsible for your actions should be the norm, but ridicule is not the right way to get there.
  - CodeWriter23 9mo ago
    The Jobs I and Jobs II eras at Apple prove it is constructive.
deafpolygon 9mo ago
Old man yells at cloud.
thenaturalist 9mo ago
Tahoe is such a criminal worsening of UI quality, it really is worrisome that Apple is proudly releasing it. If this kind of software trend continues in 2026, it might be the first time I take a serious look at Linux distros on Mac.
- renegade-otter 9mo ago
  Installed Mint on my GAMING Windows system, uninstalled Steam on Windows. All is well. While at it, nuked my old MacBook Pro and Air with Mint too - not like they are getting updates anyway. It can be done, it should be done. These commercial operating systems have enshitified to a critical point and are beyond repair.
  - roxolotl 9mo ago
    The thing that’s weird about this though is it isn’t enshitification. I don’t want to defend the worsening of software quality/ux/ui for monetary gain but at least it’s somewhat rational. This is not a change that emphasizes profit driven changes over user driven ones. Maybe I’m missing some profit motive but it just seems like an awful design choice. Edit: Not to disagree though. I too have a Linux gaming pc and are helping friends do the same.
    - trinix912 9mo ago
      Maybe not enshittification in the sense that every other UIImageView has an ad in it, but definitely a huge regression from the UI it had before. Sadly it's only a matter of time until everyone copies it because it's cool and it's what Apple does so they must be right!
- trinix912 9mo ago
  I'm holding off upgrading my laptop (2013 MBP running Catalina) until they get their UI stuff together. I'd just gotten used to Sequoia on my desktop but this is unbearable. Not a single update since 2019 has improved the UI more than it regressed it in my opinion. Too much whitespace, too little contrast, too big controls, and now too little readability. It's almost like their entire UI department is under threat of being fired unless they invent a radical UI update every other year. Even Vista was a readability zen compared to this and they aren't listening to feedback at all.
sylens 9mo ago
Perhaps the thing I hate most about Tahoe is the embedded rounded rectangle around the menu inside of the larger rounded rectangle window. They're trying to go for this look of a menu floating above the rest of the window it belongs to, but it just looks sloppy to me in dark mode.
- Lord-Jobo 9mo ago
  Looks sloppy in any mode. The amount of wasted space has gone from “well a little bit of rounding/padding is alright to achieve a unified unique look” to “holy shit this is just Fischer price laugh and learn garbage”. 1/2 pixel strips everywhere, around tons of elements. Huge rounded corners. Slow showy animations. This isn’t a UI for adults, this is a UI for a fake computer sequence in a cheap Netflix movie.
  - xp84 9mo ago
    Even Jony Ive, who I thought was a bad UI designer when that job was unwisely given to him, thinks Alan Dye has no taste. That’s saying something.
- rick_dalton 9mo ago
  Personally I couldn’t get past the horrible gray squircle jails for icons that don’t adhere to their boring new standard. They didn’t even update the pixelmator icon for quite a while, which they themselves acquired. Shows you how much effort went in to this.
xqcgrek2 9mo ago
Tahoe has to be the worst software Apple has released in three decades. It's unbelievable it got through. If Macs and macOS were not a tiny portion of their revenue I would short the stock.
- uxp100 9mo ago
  iOS 26 is also very bad. Many Christmas conversations between boomers baffled by their phones, and as I younger (than boomer) person I am not as baffled but there are a number of things that take more button presses than they did in previous versions for no apparent reason. And it’s real ugly imo.
  - treetalker 9mo ago
    Viewing all tabs in Safari is the thorn in my side.
    - uxp100 9mo ago
      Yes, that’s the main one I was thinking of, though there are spots in the photos app too iirc.
    - spencercwood 9mo ago
      You can swipe up (or maybe down if you put it on top) on the address bar and it will take you to the all tabs view.
    - DrProtic 9mo ago
      I got so frustrated with that, luckily there’s an option is setting to bring the button back to be visible and not in a menu.
  - xp84 9mo ago
    They’ve achieved sufficient lock-in that they can enshittify everything as much as they want with no consequences. Switching has too high an ecosystem cost, plus in the US it’s a special case that a lot of people think if you don’t use all Apple products you are probably poor.
jwlake 9mo ago
its very odd that apparently everyone working in Apple software dev either refuses to dogfood this stuff or just uses iPads for everything.
- hamdingers 9mo ago
  So many of the rough edges disappear when "Reduce Transparency" is enabled I've theorized that setting must be pretty popular around Apple's offices.
  - normie3000 9mo ago
    My browser has a half-inch white bar at the bottom constantly, presumably because of this setting.
    - hamdingers 9mo ago
      Cannot reproduce on 26.2 with either Safari or Chrome with the setting on. That would infuriate me.
      - normie3000 9mo ago
        When first scrolling, the bottom page controls disappear. But they leave their container blocking the page content.
  - xp84 9mo ago
    Using that option suddenly nerfed all my themes in Edge, forcing the window title bars to all be gray instead of the bold colors I use to differentiate the different profiles I use for work. I wish there was a “Reduce bullshit” toggle on MacOS and iOS, and also that it would skip all the increasingly stupid animations. No, reduce motion sucks because it just uses an equally-slow crossfade. Just STFU and let me move to the next task and stop animating everything. Good for you, you have a good GPU, I don’t care.
- mc32 9mo ago
  Ironically that would be a new kind of dogfooding.
ghusto 9mo ago
Adding insult to injury, my fans are constantly going now because I have to pay for this disastrous upgrade with tons more resources.
- xp84 9mo ago
  Well, the M1 is still good enough to last years longer under the sane demands of nearly any type of work. That’s bad for the stock price. How else are they going to keep people on the same upgrade cycle as the Intel days if they don’t tax those GPUs with all these pointless animations?
avidphantasm 9mo ago
Since macOS went to a yearly cadence, I usually upgrade during Christmas break, this allows for a couple of point releases to work out the kinks. I won’t be upgrading this year. I hope macOS 27 fixes this abomination. Otherwise, this 30+ year Mac user will be moving on…
- Y-bar 9mo ago
  You would do well to avoid 26. I upgraded to be a Guinea Pig for a few colleagues and I regret it. Things like apps and scripts work in the technical sense, but it is worse because the myriad of graphical and interactive issues.
egypturnash 9mo ago
I just hope that my current Mac keeps being usable long enough that Liquid Glass has been fixed or replaced entirely by the time I'm forced to upgrade to whatever's shipping on my next computer.
- stefanfisk 9mo ago
  My kid dumped a glass of water all over my MBP M1 a few days ago. Deciding between an inferior M4 with Sequoia or a fancy new M5 with Tahoe has been rough :/
  - HelloUsername 9mo ago
    > dumped a glass of water all over my MBP I believe that's how the designers at Apple came up with Liquid Glass
  - dghost-dev 9mo ago
    Liquid Glass is not that bad lol.
    - stefanfisk 9mo ago
      Neither is an M4 Pro.
  - coldpie 9mo ago
    If it helps, I've been using XFCE since 2007 and it's remained functionally identical for all of those almost 20 years. It just works, it improves a tiny bit with each major upgrade, and they don't rearrange everything every couple years for the sake of justifying a salary. Maybe it's a good opportunity to consider whether you actually have to keep running on Apple's treadmill.
    - baq 9mo ago
      I’d love an XFCE (or even gnome tbh) environment on a properly built laptop, unfortunately only Apple is able to build something that works in all areas that matter: sleeps when lid closed, wakes when lid opens, touchpad and display don’t suck.
petesergeant 9mo ago
Updated iOS overnight and what the fuck man. Also Settings search is so totally broken I can’t even
baggy_trough 9mo ago
I do enjoy the liquid glass controls in some places. The glass effect is really beautiful. What I hate about it is the way the overall UI constantly gets in the way of my content.
- treetalker 9mo ago
  I expect and demand a level of, for want of a better term, UI crispness. It is equally aggravating to err on either side: Windows 3.1 clunk to the left, Tahoe's operationally useless (indeed, operationally detrimental) visual fireworks to the right. Apple needs to hit a sweet spot of crisp, but the priority must be fast, logical interaction that lets me operate at the speed of thought. With Tahoe, Apple tried to gild the lily.
efficax 9mo ago
liquid glass is a total disaster. what the hell is going on in the ux teams at apple? this is like their windows vista era. i hate it so much
- ChrisMarshallNY 9mo ago
  I'm almost positive that it's because they want to make as many apps as possible VisionOS-friendly. I suspect that they were rather shaken at how poorly AVP was received.
  - emchammer 9mo ago
    I don’t want to wear one of those things on my face. I want a high-quality computer and phone. Apple executives are out to lunch.
    - MagicMoonlight 9mo ago
      [flagged]
      - bigyabai 9mo ago
        Bring him inside, we're just about to start another round of Ultraman Quiz King on the family Pippin.
      - efficax 9mo ago
        the market agrees for the most part. VR goggle interfaces just aren't taking the world by storm. When it came out I thought: I'll wait for the iteration that comes 2 years later (the AVP 3 or whatever) since by then they'll have worked out the kinks and it will be a solid computing platform. It's 2 months shy of 2 years since general availability of the AVP and it's essentially identical to the initial release with just a minor chip upgrade. It's a dead product line
        fauigerzigerk 9mo ago
sho_hn 9mo ago
MacOS aesthetically peaked with Leopard in '09, but speaking frankly the OS has felt abandoned to me since around 10.2, with so many basic interaction issues with window management and the dock just never getting fixed properly and a long list of half-assed bandaids and abandoned experiments over the years. There is no true passion in MacOS, and the marketing has come face to face with reality in 2025. It's the neglected step-child of a company distracted by other things. There's been some impressive engineering done by lower-level folks under the hood of it all, though.
drnick1 9mo ago
The answer is KDE and GNOME, at least on the machines that support some form of Linux.
- tensor 9mo ago
  That is not the answer. Many of us run software that is not available on Linux.
dijksterhuis 9mo ago
> Maybe this is because I’m getting older, but that gives me the benefit of having experienced Apple’s older interfaces, with their exceptional quality and functionality. i really missed snow leopard for about 10 years all the way up to when i moved on from my macbook circa 5 years ago.
- hallole 9mo ago
  Snow Leopard, Mountain Lion were so peak. The first step into minimalism was beautiful, too, I'll admit, but it's culminated in this Liquid Glass garbage, so it was ultimately a misstep.
- stefanfisk 9mo ago
  I feel so old saying this, but back in the days both Apple and third party developers would follow the HIG closely enough that something felt off right away when an app wasn't behaving 100% native. Running something like a Java app was jarring to say the least even if they were supposedly using a "cross platform" UI library. But then Gruber said that the HIG was dead and the decline gained more and more momentum...
  - Groxx 9mo ago
    Very much yes. When "affordance" was one of the primary goals, rather than "breathing room". Information density took a nose-dive and we lost all visual separation and gained... what? Less battery life?
  - PaulDavisThe1st 9mo ago
    > back in the days both Apple and third party developers would follow the HIG closely enough that something felt off right away when an app wasn't behaving 100% native. That's only true for desktop productivity apps and widgets. Apple and 3rd party "creativity" apps never followed the HIG religiously, if at all.
dc_giant 9mo ago
Design got worse since Maverick for professional users.
- thomassmith65 9mo ago
  It has been worsening since Snow Leopard. That is cliched but true.
layer8 9mo ago
There are claims that Liquid Glass was in development for three years. If that is accurate, the results are even more appalling.
- api 9mo ago
  All the non-technical people I know loved it. It's pretty. It's neat. It looks cool. Apple is a consumer products company. My personal feeling on it is just "meh." My productivity with my laptop hasn't changed. I'm not a huge fan but it's not a deal breaker. I still find it better than Windows 11 for the most part, and Linux has other issues as a daily driver for me. IMHO Apple needs a "tick" release where they only polish and fix bugs and usability issues with an almost total feature freeze. I've heard they may be doing that.
  - omnimus 9mo ago
    Looking at popularity of similar design on iOS it would be surprising “non-technical” users like it. People HATE new iOS. Low contrast, not clear layering and focus, things being moved around for unknown reasons. Also who uses MacOs beaides developers? Majority are creative prosumers in arts/design and they are even more annoyed by messed up designs. What you are left with are lawyers, writers, students? I guess they might like it.
    - rr808 9mo ago
      > Also who uses MacOs beaides developers? Students - all of them.
      - omnimus 9mo ago
        I said that in the next sentence. Than again this is really true only in US. In rest of the world (including europe) Macs are seen as luxury environment.
        stefanfisk 9mo ago
wintermutestwin 9mo ago
While the UI designers are rearranging deck chairs, the UX is totally failing to love up to the promise of an ecosystem. Cross system cut n paste is a neat trick, but I just want timers and alarms to actually work as expected. I shouldn’t be surprised given that the mac save as dialog box has a name field that is still hard coded to 32 characters visible. Whenever I bitch about it I get pushback that filenames shouldn’t be longer than that! Um hello - tell me you have never worked in the real world outside your iphone bubble without telling me.
cglan 9mo ago
I think for the first time I’ve been considering moving off iOS because of liquid glass. The bugs on apple products have hit a breaking point for me. Mac is still unequivocally the best laptop around imho, but it’s less clear cut for phones. My iPhone 15 pro is borderline unusable. Every day is a new issue. I’m very much over it. You used to be able to count on the basics working smoothly, but stuff like the camera and messaging are frequently broken for me
- SkyeCA 9mo ago
  I've recently been using an Android phone a family member gave me after they upgraded and to my shock it's...fantastic? It's not at all like I remember Android from back in the early Android days.
  - loloquwowndueo 9mo ago
    Dunno man, I’ve used Android recently and it’s still as bafflingly confusing and crappy as I remember it being. Definitely an “to each their own” kind of situation.
    - rr808 9mo ago
      I think that is what you get used to. I've been using Android for over a decade and my wife's iPhone is super confusing to me.
      - loloquwowndueo 9mo ago
        That’s a good observation, I think you’re right.
      - bigyabai 9mo ago
        Yep, my parents are both Android users and have to ask "where is the home button" when someone passes them an iPhone.
        9mo ago
jjice 9mo ago
I don't mind how Liquid Glass looks at all. It's just insane how buggy the system has become. Even Messages will bug out, like deleting my first word if I type too fast after opening a conversation or auto scrolling and not letting me scroll down until I exit and re-enter. Unacceptable for the premium you pay for Apple software. Unacceptable for any software one is paying for. I hope they get their shit together and start fixing before they continue adding new stuff. 26.2 doesn't inspire me that they're on that trajectory. The thing that amazes me most is that everyone on the teams responsible is probably using their Apple devices and running into these same bugs!
- eoskx 9mo ago
  I've had similar observations with different behaviors in Safari and Finder. One would think the quality of Apple's software would be increasing with the usage of Swift over Objective-C, but the opposite seems to be true.
  - walthamstow 9mo ago
    Spotlight is also slow and buggy now, on an M3 Pro no less. I loathe the feeling of being faster than my computer and having to wait for it to catch up, something that I haven't felt since the M1 came out.
    - deleted 9mo ago
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    - runjake 9mo ago
      This was my last straw that caused me to disable Spotlight: Typing something into Spotlight, having it pull up the right result and highlight it, and me hitting the Enter key, and the search results suddenly updating after and highlighting some new result and then opening that instead. It’s not just Liquid Glass. It’s bugs like these where I realized Apple software was truly rotten to the core. Whomever is running the show (Craig) can’t do their job. I’m now noticing the same bug in the latest versions of Windows 11 when I hit the start button and run a search. This was a solved computer science problem.
estetlinus 9mo ago
I am trying hard to have strong feelings about it, but I just can’t bother. The only thing constant is change. What I do know for a fact, is that for each error I have on my MacBook, I’ll have ~10 ungoogable errors on any other OS. I rage-sold my last Windows due to losing my Java installation (or just confusing which terminal I installed it in). Please, crop all thumbnails in the corners, as long as you come pre-installed with just one working terminal.
- bigyabai 9mo ago
  > I’ll have ~10 ungoogable errors on any other OS. If you ever attempt to compile software, the shoe instantly hits the other foot. WSL is a godsend, and Apple's "native" terminal environment becomes a confusing liability. Catering to different audiences, I suppose.
deleted 9mo ago
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baq 9mo ago
Not upgrading to Tahoe for as long as $DAYJOB allows. ‘Defer update‘ dialog can be conveniently moved away to the second display almost out of sight.
mvkel 9mo ago
One of the most egregious issues with macOS 26 is the accessibility/usability regression. Apple prided itself on making their operating system accessible. Good ux is inherently accessible. There are so many parts of the os that flagrantly ignore well-established accessibility standards, some of which Apple themselves advocated for
- xp84 9mo ago
  It’s what you get when you install a hack print designer who knows nothing about UI as the head of software design and leave him there for a decade. Even Jony Ive, who also had no business designing software, didn’t respect Dye. Thank goodness Meta has done Apple the biggest favor of the century by poaching him.
  - hu3 9mo ago
    I hope I'm wrong but I don't see quality control improving with Dye's leave. The man had a bad taste for design but bug prevalence is endemic and changing head of design won't fix that.
    - franktankbank 9mo ago
      How is it possible that the head of a divisions particular UX taste pervades the product?
    - mvkel 9mo ago
      I largely agree. The product decision deficit at Apple is cultural, not due to any one person missing. Stephen Lemay, Dye's replacement, has been at Apple since 1999, yet was passed over for the design lead position multiple times. There's a reason.
  - deleted 9mo ago
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- DonHopkins 9mo ago
  [flagged]
fauigerzigerk 9mo ago
It seems obvious to me that liquid glass is no designer's idea of a good UI. It's a business move to force developers to support the upcoming iGlasses where transparency is actually necessary. Perhaps Apple is willing to accept that most macOS users will enable "reduce transparency" so long as devs implement support for transparency. But there is another explanation making the rounds, possibly a conspiracy theory. Some people claim that Apple is doing this to make cross-platform technologies look obsolete and hard to implement. If there's any truth to this, it's a terrible idea that could easily backfire. People could get used to there not being a consistent platform look and feel. Like on Windows, "native" could lose its meaning. Whatever Apple promotes as "native" could become just another style among many.
- xp84 9mo ago
  I think people are already used to inconsistency. Whatever Apple thinks, and honestly even in spite of what any users think, only the very largest companies have the appetite to mess around making bespoke SwiftUI things, so that they have to build their app twice. So, actual “native” stuff is mainly the realm of passionate indie developers and everyone else will always use cross-platform tools.
bratwurst3000 9mo ago
i switched this year from windows to mac because windows is unbearable.... but apple seems to want to get rid of desktop user also
- xp84 9mo ago
  It’s clear how much Apple now hates the MacOS as we have known it… I think the concept of a computer which can run code outside a sandbox and without tollbooths that extract rents for Apple is abhorrent to them. I think the vague plan is to iOSify it more and more until there is no real difference, including the lockdown and mandatory App Store requirement.
soulofmischief 9mo ago
M2 MBP here. Definitely skipping Tahoe. Sequoia is already just terrible, not only is the UX clunky and hostile, but Apple seems to have flat out broken its Bluetooth and networking stacks in multiple ways, and in general the system is extremely unstable. Best hardware around, but at this point I might even take W11 over this locked down mess. At least Asahi support is decent these days. And I'm tired of paying for things that should be stock, such as proper window and mouse management, or reasonable fan control so that the keyboard doesn't burn my fingers under moderate workloads.
rayiner 9mo ago
> That was little more than a decade ago, in 2014. Not that I want to turn the clock back, but it would be really helpful if I could read clearly what’s on my display once again. I want to turn the clock back. It’s not a reflexive opposition to anything new. I thought OS X clearly got better from 10.0 to 10.4. But in the last vie versions it’s been a regression.
- E39M5S62 9mo ago
  I booted a G4 Mac the other day, running 10.4.something. I was thrown back in time to a period where OS X was clearly their flagship software stack. Everything was coherent and cohesive - and shockingly - fast. I'd daily 10.4 again if it could operate on the modern internet comfortably!
  - vdupras 9mo ago
    Nevertheless, I also remember that in the 10.4 days, OS X had the reputation of being sluggish compared to Linux or even Windows (I guess it was Windows 7 at the time?). And it kinda was. Bouncing ball when launching an app. How high the bar was back then.
    - E39M5S62 9mo ago
      I was running it on a Dual 1.25ghz G4 with 2GB of RAM- a fairly high-spec machine for the 10.4 era.
rick_dalton 9mo ago
I’ve deferred my next Mac upgrade to when my current M1 air on Sequoia stops being supported. If they mess it up further I may just move off the platform. Such a shame because the hardware is great.
renaudg 9mo ago
Liquid Glass appears to be the culmination of the Alan Dye era at Apple, where UI terms like "radio buttons" were derided as "programmer talk". https://daringfireball.net/2025/12/bad_dye_job https://daringfireball.net/2025/12/bad_dye_job Thankfully he has now left. Things could hopefully pick up again usability-wise within 2-3 years.
- mort96 9mo ago
  The worrying thing is that his departure seems in no way like a consequence of his terrible job. He wasn't squeezed out by upper management, he left because Meta made him a better offer. I'm sure Apple's software quality will go up now that he's gone and his replacement is allegedly liked by Apple's competent UX people who disliked Dye; but Cook clearly doesn't recognise the problems, lest he'd have planned to get rid of Dye by now.
  - swiftcoder 9mo ago
    It’s honestly hard to tell from outside - execs at that level are very rarely fired. They tend to be asked politely to find something new to do with their time
    - mort96 9mo ago
      They also tend to not be featured very prominently on a huge product launch event while in the process of "finding something new to do with their time". If he's actually being squeezed out, that process must've started after the public launch of iOS 26. EDIT: though I guess you could also read it as, iOS 26 had come too far to stop it, so they let Dye be the visible face of it so that he'd be the fall guy and the next guy would get the credits for fixing it... I don't know, I guess we don't really have enough info to speculate one way or the other
      - acdha 9mo ago
        I’d also believe that he was able to ride his past reputation and his sponsor’s memory enough to get the commitment to ship Liquid Glass, but that gamble blew up once most reviews revolve around how they’ll probably make it less bad in an update. Apple values keeping users on current releases and this is the first one where so many experienced users and fans have been advising people to hold back. I think Dye knows he had enough capital to bull the release through but not to recover from making the story about the release about his shortcomings.
rich_sasha 9mo ago
I'll have to upgrade my M1 MBP some time and no way am I putting up with this nonsense - back to Linux laptop for me. What recommendations do people have for good metal-body linux-friendly "ultra books" (or whatever they're called these days)?
- evantbyrne 9mo ago
  It would be newsworthy if Linux laptops could compete with MacBooks on performance and quality. Maybe reconsider Windows if you feel the need to switch?
  - rich_sasha 9mo ago
    Well, Mac hardware is good, but in what universe is anything working better on Windows than Linux?? Same hardware available, less bloatware.
    - evantbyrne 9mo ago
      I would expect Windows to have better battery life than Linux, just because Linux is so much worse than MacOS on power consumption, but I also haven't run Windows on a laptop in over a decade so I really don't know.
- syabro 9mo ago
  Try installing asahi on mbp? I tried on my mbp m2 pro, works great
embedding-shape 9mo ago
> After three months of strong feedback during beta-testing, I was disappointed when Tahoe was released on 15 September to see how little had been addressed Now it was a while ago I left the Apple ecosystem as it became clear they didn't actually care about UX anymore, but did "strong feedback during beta-testing" ever actually result in any results? I remember doing something similar back in 2012-2013 sometime, and friends having similar feelings across the years, that it makes me think that Apple never really did any changes based on feedback receiving during the beta testing. Has anyone here ever written something in via the traditional feedback forms/venues and actually had something changed before the final release? I even asked around my circle of acquaintances and even the ones 110% into the Apple ecosystem seem to never have noticed anything changed based on their feedback.
- qubitcoder 9mo ago
  I’ve submitted multiple bug reports over the years using the Feedback app. And, to my surprise, not only did I receive a detailed response within a month or so, the issues were resolved.
foxygen 9mo ago
My MacOS has this insane bug where the cursor sometimes won't change to a pointer/loading/any other state on my second monitor. This is really bad, but even worse for me who writes websites for a living, and need to check that my CSS cursor pointer class actually worked. I can't count how many minutes I've lost refreshing my browser and double-checking my code. Now I just keep my browser on my primary monitor. I've found many other people with this bug on the internet, and it has been happening for YEARS. I honestly can't understand how a premium product aimed at developers can have something like this for YEARS without a fix. I'm moving away from MacOS, and might ditch my iPhone too as I won't have all the nice integration with MacOS anymore. Fuck you, Apple.
- dgreensp 9mo ago
  I ran into this, and there was a bizarre fix—I think having Adobe apps open in the background caused it, or something.
  - foxygen 9mo ago
    I saw some responses like this. I have zero Adobe apps in my Mac.
- n8cpdx 9mo ago
  Do you have a trackpad? If you re-enter focus by right clicking (very easy to do with gestures), focus stops working until you leave and re enter by left clicking. Unfortunately not a new issue.
  - deleted 9mo ago
    [deleted]
  - foxygen 9mo ago
    I don't use a trackpad. I leave my Macbook closed with 2 external monitors and an external mouse/keyboard.
frou_dh 9mo ago
What's obvious to me is that the PRIMARY motivation for Liquid-Glass-ifying MacOS was not to improve MacOS, but simply to make it look consistent with the new version of iOS/iPadOS. So for Apple to start with a level of disrespect for the existing product where the question of whether each change is actually an improvement is effectively off-topic, it's no wonder they made a dog's dinner of Tahoe.
talentedcoin 9mo ago
These articles always make me laugh. Everyone complains and then everyone lines up and buys Macs again. macOS has been on the decline for literally years now. If you really want things to change put your money where your mouth is and switch!
- 7e 9mo ago
  Switch to what? Windows is horrible and Linux is just as bad (but in different ways).
  - nutjob2 9mo ago
    Although its not for everyone, I run a Hackintosh and stick to 10.15 or lower.
  - analogpixel 9mo ago
    I think a lot of people on HN don't realize that some people require software outside of a terminal and a web browser. Can I run Ableton on linux? can I run all the audio plugins that only ship windows/mac versions? is there a decent graphics editor? (gimp is not it.) If all I did was play in the terminal and a web browser, I'd have switched to Linux by now.
    - tambourine_man 9mo ago
      Exactly. There’s nothing that comes close to the Adobe suite. Maybe someday an investment similar to what was made in Proton will happen to Wine in general.
    - bigyabai 9mo ago
      > Can I run Ableton on linux Yes? The .msi installer for Live has worked in Wine for more than a decade.
      - trinix912 9mo ago
        Until you need a specific plugin that doesn’t, or some hardware equipment with custom drivers (very common in the AV world).
analogpixel 9mo ago
If you notice your OS/Window Manager, then they have failed in what they were designed to do. I don't own a computer for the OS, I own it to run the Applications that I find useful.
JaggerJo 9mo ago
+1 I only updated my MacBook Air and really don’t like it. Will keep all other macs on Sequoia until macOS 27 hopefully fixes most of the issues.
pmdr 9mo ago
For me, earlier versions of macOS/OS X and Windows Vista/7 were the right mix of eye candy and usability. Apple's just showing off with this liquid glass thing. Yeah, it's cool that they attempted it, but it should've remained entirely opt-in. Apple being Apple, there's no opt-in -- once they like it, it's the default.
- brokencode 9mo ago
  For a major revamp, you should either do it or not do it. Making it opt-in or even opt-out means every app then has to try to support both different UIs, which is a longterm maintenance cost. Not only for Apple, but the entire ecosystem. I personally sort of like the liquid glass, but it's also kind of a mess in a lot of edge cases. I feel like it was an interesting idea that didn't really pan out fully and should have been scrapped. It's just too controversial for pure eye-candy.
e40 9mo ago
I 100% agree with OPs take, though I don't really mind it as much as he does. I do hope the changes will be rolled back in 27, or at least controls given to us that allow us to roll back changes.
kruuuder 9mo ago
Funny to see the last screenshot of OS X from 2014 in the article. I would love to use a system with such a high contrast and information density. But I also remember very well how many users were upset with the most recent design changes at that time: The all caps section titles in the sidebar, and the gray icons that were previously colored.
- lapcat 9mo ago
  Yes, IMO Tiger was actually peak Mac UI. As soon as Apple released iPhone, the Mac took a back seat.
  - cosmic_cheese 9mo ago
    Tiger with 10.5/10.6-style 2D grid virtual desktops and Mavericks traffic light buttons, or alternatively Mavericks with aqua scrollbars and 10.5/10.6-style 2D grid virtual desktops is very close to my ideal desktop environment.
    - docmars 9mo ago
      Wow I completely forgot that Spaces were also vertically oriented. I miss that.
      - cosmic_cheese 9mo ago
        It was really nice. With the current linear design I organize desktops by theme (e.g. one for dev, one for research, etc) and with the 10.5/10.6 design I'd use vertical desktops for subcategories — so following the same example, on a single screen setup I might have desktops arranged something like: │ Rails Docs/Search │ Backend Dev │ Music │ ├───────────────────────┼────────────────┼────────────┤ │ UIKit Docs/Search │ iOS Dev │ Chat │ ├───────────────────────┼────────────────┼────────────┤ │ MDN/Web Dev Search │ Web Dev │ Email/News │ With this, I quickly develop muscle/spatial memory for where each category "lives" and can navigate there in a flash. It also substantially reduces the need for individual programs like browsers to bear organizational load, so for example suddenly "just" single-tier vertical tabs become sufficient, making browser workspaces and tree style tabs much less necessary.
karmakaze 9mo ago
The day that I need to update to macOS 26 for continued security patches is the last day I'll choose to run macOS. I'm pretty much all on Linux for non-work stuff anyway with an old Windows 'gaming' PC that only runs a 10 year old game.
- DetectDefect 9mo ago
  > update to macOS 26 for continued security patches Are you certain that is not already the case? Or do we still truly believe Apple has the capacity, resources and motivation to care about two version of their operating system at one time?
virgil_disgr4ce 9mo ago
Just as a datapoint: Not only do I actually like Liquid Glass, I don't have any errors or bugs on my MBP or my iPhone EXCEPT for the audio scratching sometimes on macos. Which alone is flatly unacceptable.
- vor_ 9mo ago
  If you're experiencing crackling under high system load, try connecting external speakers or headphones. It's weird, but it seems to mitigate or even eliminate the issue.
  - virgil_disgr4ce 9mo ago
    Thanks for the tip, however all of the crackling I've heard was exclusively WITH speakers plugged in (via the 3.5mm jack). Though I've noticed lately I'm not hearing any crackling any more. I don't think I updated anything so it might be spurious.
QuiEgo 9mo ago
The really really frustrating thing is that even in this lesser state, all of the alternatives are still a worse experience than an Apple Silicon macbook. It’s sad to be in a time where enshitifcation is the word of the day and things are getting worse as time goes on. There’s nothing on the horizon of tech that excites me anymore. I used to feel joy and excitement for the future of tech. Now I feel profound sadness at this reality.
LucidLynx 9mo ago
Not gonna lie, this year has been exceptionnaly disappointing for every product and every OS (more generally: software) from Apple. The battery life first: I lost 6 to 8h of battery life EVERY DAY because of iOS 26. The battery life of my macbook is worst too, even after all the updates and a fresh install of macOS 26.2. The interface is very ugly, and not easy to use at all. I am oftenly loston both systems (iOS 26 and macOS 26) because of all those glass interfaces on top of each other. The performance did not improved either, and the gaming ecosystem that I was very optimistic is becoming a mess. Again. To finish, an exceptional high number of annoying bugs that are not solved yet, despite my feedbacks since the first Beta versions. It seems nobody care. It’s infuriating that I can’t downgrade the OS on both devices. Especially on my mac. This pushed me to re-try a Linux distro on my old laptop, and re-try Android on an old Google Pixel phone. Both are great for my needs, and the phone has way more battery life than the iPhone (despite the phone has already 5yo). I did not expected at all that 2025 would be the year of Apple pushing me out of it ecosystem... Very nice job guys.
zingar 9mo ago
Without arguing with the main point I do want to say that although I didn’t ask for increased control size from 18 to 26, my hands are really appreciating it.
wutwutwat 9mo ago
windows vista called, it wants its Aero back... just format and install Sequoia, that's what I did
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synapsomorphy 9mo ago
I'm a Linux and Windows user thinking of getting a Macbook, mostly for the hardware. All these recent proclamations of disappointment in Tahoe seem insanely overblown to me. The problem that this post leads with is that thumbnails' corners are too rounded, which "misrepresents" the original? Seriously? Maybe it's worse now compared to the golden years, I don't know, never owned a Mac. And it's fair to criticize it from that perspective. But I am completely at a loss for how any of these issues could be bad enough to make you switch platforms. Windows and Linux are not exactly usability all-stars! I had to write my own app for decent speech-to-text on Linux which is built in at a system level on Macs. This feels to me like just the age-old tale of people wanting to (love | hate) brands, when really, things are nuanced. I switched from Android to iOS recently and the experience did not change much. iOS is absolutely not "borderline unusable" like I've seen many claim. If anything it's maybe a 10% nicer experience overall. Lack of nuance in people's takes makes for less signal in the noise and makes it annoying to figure out the actual pros and cons of different platforms.
- bigyabai 9mo ago
  Okay, now go use it and report back. The grass isn't always greener.
- LucidLynx 9mo ago
  It is not only for the corners. Do some searches and you will find a ton of bugs, bad performances and bad battery life for laptops, random crashes, ... The issue is not only on the lack of good design ideas, but also on the quality of what Apple provides since a few years now.
  - synapsomorphy 9mo ago
    Maybe the quality is reduced, sure. But if you "do some searches" you can find all of those things for any major software release. Seems to me like people in Apple's walls are forgetting that the outside world is not some Garden of Eden. But yeah, I'd have to use it to say for sure.
    - 9mo ago
walterbell 9mo ago
2023 Vision Pro (iPad-on-Skull) sold less than 500K devices, with v2 cancelled. In 2025, the design failed upward to 4000 x 500K users, https://archive.is/gxaYw https://archive.is/gxaYw > [Apple] is working to simplify the way users navigate and control their devices.. The design is loosely based on the Vision Pro’s software.. will mark the most significant upgrade to the Mac since the Big Sur operating system in 2020.. For the iPhone, it will be the biggest revamp since iOS 7 in 2013... 2 billion devices in use around the world.. when Apple revamped its Photos app last year, legions of users complained. With the entire operating systems changing, the stakes are much higher. Since 2023 launch, Meta Ray-Ban sold ~4M camera glasses priced below $500.
diebillionaires 9mo ago
Couldn't agree more. I haven't and won't update to Tahoe, and am now using linux more frequently as I begin to move away from Mac OS, and eventually Apple products.
eviks 9mo ago
> with their exceptional quality and functionality. This was never true, for example, taking this simple criterion of readability: > would be really helpful if I could read clearly what’s on my display Look at the device's names at the left-most screenshot - you can't clearly read them even though there is plenty of space wasted on the margins and the "…" I mean, sure, liquid glass made everything worse, but it doesn't mean all the other decades-old UI sins disappear in the exceptionally fuzzy rearview window
anarticle 9mo ago
I think if macOS is a tool it should change less. Looks too much like vista to me.
nout 9mo ago
This is a good time for trying Linux. If you are coming from Mac, then a distro with GNOME interface (Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu...) will feel like at home after a couple tweaks. I recommend "Dash to Dock" to get the MacOS dock experience and "Search Light" to get the spotlight search.
- LoganDark 9mo ago
  I love GNOME Wayland; it has some of the best support for trackpad gestures of any Linux desktop experience I've ever tried. On the other paw though, client-side decorations are not the way to go on Linux, and I'm still incredibly frustrated that they insist on not even supporting server-side decorations at all. Client-side decorations are for apps that are designed specifically for a certain desktop experience; server-side decorations are for compatibility with the many millions of apps that already exist!! (And for anything cross-platform / cross-DE.) Apple gets away with it because macOS is largely monolithic, and doesn't really have swappable desktop experiences. GNOME does not get away with it because they're just one competitor in a large landscape of Linux and they should want to be compatible with Linux applications in general, not only GNOME applications.
  - hagbard_c 9mo ago
    My biggest beef with client-side decorations is that they're not optional. For those of us using tiling window managers those decorations are totally superfluous and only take up space, especially since the Gnome folks seem to have decided that every UI element needs to have lebensraum by adding huge areas of white space around them. I want my windows densely populated and I want lots of them on my screen because I'm using a COMPUTER - not a PHONE - with a LARGE SCREEN and a pointing device. I do not need to be able to fat-finger those buttons, I have an accurate pointing device with which I control a pointy cursor with which I can accurately hit single pixels if needed. Now I need to LD_PRELOAD some library to get rid of those stupid unneeded decorations, I need to find the current iteration of the compact Adwaita theme (for as long as that is still possible...) and I otherwise need to FIGHT the software as if I were running some proprietary blob of malware from the Fruit Factory or from Redmond. Blegh, so much wasted time and effort.
- 9mo ago
t1234s 9mo ago
Using Liquid Glass on both a retina and non-retina display it looks like Apple is trying to depreciate non-retina displays just like they have done in the past with floppy disk, cd rom, and having useful ports. Tahoe on a non-retina display looks slightly but noticeably shittier than the previous version.
docmars 9mo ago
Can Apple get it over with and revert this overhaul? It's such a disaster. Sequoia's UI and icons were nearly perfect and still looked modern. There was no need for this change whatsoever.
jessegrosjean 9mo ago
I dislike Liquid Glass. At the same time I make Mac apps and I've got to adopt liquid glass to keep my apps looking alive/updated. How to do this without making my apps UI worse? I would love to see some "how to fix Liquid Glass" type articles. List out the problems, list out potential solutions. Anyone run across articles like this? Please share relevant links.
- trinix912 9mo ago
  For iOS, I guess if you just update the bottom navbar (if you're using it) and use the fancy new glass back buttons that should be enough to keep them looking updated without breaking the UI in major ways. For macOS maybe keep original toolbars (instead of the new floating-inside-a-floating-box ones) or make a custom UIView that emulates what's currently on Sequoia. Same for sidebars. Those two alone would IMO make it better than the built in apps on Tahoe. And a design classic, an inner rounded rectangle should have a smaller corner radius (less rounding) than the outer one AND the inner rectangle should maintain significant margin between itself and the outer rectangle's borders. This is why the new Finder sidebar looks so tacky, they got the first part (corner radiuses) right but since the two elements are so close to each other there's still a visual clash between them. How to avoid it? Use a flat sidebar with a border only on the right.
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anentropic 9mo ago
all else aside... > two windows in the same app, both created using SwiftUI, can’t even share a common radius, as shown below this actually looks correct to me, the smaller 'subordinate' dialog has smaller radius, like nesting dolls
anal_reactor 9mo ago
The cycle of most products: Step 1: company caters to a niche Step 2: niche loves product, recommends to wider audience Step 3: wider audience adopts product Step 4: company switches to targeting the wider audience Step 5: niche doesn't like product anymore, switches to a competitor Windows is in step 5 - previously undisputed king of desktop, now an ad-infested boomer legacy system. MacOS is in step 4 - previously pricy but good solution for devs and creatives, now PITA for devs and "I would switch if it weren't for Adobe suite" for creatives, but normies think it looks pretty. Linux is in step 1 - Valve has been consistently investing in making it a viable gaming system. If you told me 10 years ago that Linux actually runs games other than TuxCart, I'd have laughed, but nowadays "does it run on Linux" is a serious question for every new release. It just needs some time to mature, and once gamers switch, other desktop users will slowly follow.
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spike021 9mo ago
honestly the issue i hate the most is how bad the keyboard has gotten over the past 3-5 years/major iOS releases. on top of the bug people mention a lot where types are miss-pressed, there's a problem i get where if iOS considers a word misspelled it'll refuse to let me use the space key or otherwise move away from the word or close the keyboard. it's almost like a UI thread lockout. it's extremely frustrating.
DrProtic 9mo ago
I was about to upgrade my MacBook but instead booted up Linux on my dust collecting desktop, all because liquid glass. They managed to break so many things, they even managed to mess up the volume slider. Instead of showing up across the screen now it’s tucked away to the top right. What the hell.
- vor_ 9mo ago
  That's one of the changes I like. Instead of getting a huge volume indicator in the center of a video you're watching, it's a small slider that's off to the corner where I'd prefer it to remain.
jama211 9mo ago
There are a lot of valid criticisms here especially regarding accessibility but after seeing the first item be complaining about “wasted space” because of rounded corners on a finder preview it made me find it very hard to take seriously, too much old man yells at cloud energy to be honest.
- ricardobeat 9mo ago
  These are real concerns for UI design; excessive padding, limits on information density, inconsistent spacing, clashing elements. Does an engineer complaining about a car with hexagonal wheels have “old man yells at cloud” energy? Yeah the car still runs, and might even look cool, but it’s a stupid choice by any professional standards.
  - jama211 9mo ago
    I knew at least one armchair UI expert would come out of the woodwork because I dared to have an opinion that was only agreeing with the 99% of what OP said instead of 100%, but the _level_ of obtuseness in your comment still managed to surprise me.
steve-atx-7600 9mo ago
Hurts to even look at this post. Today I pulled up a podcast episode in apple podcasts for Mac and could hardly see the app buttons that got obscured by the window turning black to "match" the episode artwork. When I found the buttons, I could literally not read their labels because they were now black on black. This is just asinine at this point. The design change should have been aborted before it became such a mess that it distracts from fixing all of Apples other problems.
joduplessis 9mo ago
As others have noted here, LiquidGlass by itself isn’t a bad idea. However, the execution is horrible. Massively inconsistent border radii, a Finder window that reminds me of the Engineers’ ship from Prometheus, laggy performance, illegible fonts due to overlays, and the list goes on. Tahoe is so badly designed that using Windows 11 feels like a breath of fresh air. Curious if any Apple folk are on HN that could add some insight as to how it happened.
felixding 9mo ago
If only Apple could bring Scott Forstall back. Oh one can dream...
brailsafe 9mo ago
I can say that I haven't held off quite this long in the past for an OS update on mac, I wonder how long I'll stick it out. I did buy the M4 Pro 16" 48gb last year, and am incredibly happy with it hardware-wise, so it'll stay on Sequoia as long as I can get away with.
amai 9mo ago
When will Apple finally vectorize its GUI so I can customize font and font size of the GUI? They didn't have that in 2014 and in 2026 they still don't have that. My Amiga had that in 1993! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_User_Interface https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_User_Interface

511 points by vitosartori 9mo ago

The Bozo Explosion is in full force at Apple now. They should bring Forstall back. Engineers need to be be humiliated for making stupid decisions.

Etheryte 9mo ago
I get where you're coming from, but the word humiliation is not constructive in a professional setting. Reasonable decisions can easily look stupid without context and hindsight is always 20/20. Being responsible for your actions should be the norm, but ridicule is not the right way to get there.
- CodeWriter23 9mo ago
  The Jobs I and Jobs II eras at Apple prove it is constructive.

deafpolygon 9mo ago

Old man yells at cloud.

thenaturalist 9mo ago

Tahoe is such a criminal worsening of UI quality, it really is worrisome that Apple is proudly releasing it. If this kind of software trend continues in 2026, it might be the first time I take a serious look at Linux distros on Mac.

renegade-otter 9mo ago
Installed Mint on my GAMING Windows system, uninstalled Steam on Windows. All is well. While at it, nuked my old MacBook Pro and Air with Mint too - not like they are getting updates anyway. It can be done, it should be done. These commercial operating systems have enshitified to a critical point and are beyond repair.
- roxolotl 9mo ago
  The thing that’s weird about this though is it isn’t enshitification. I don’t want to defend the worsening of software quality/ux/ui for monetary gain but at least it’s somewhat rational. This is not a change that emphasizes profit driven changes over user driven ones. Maybe I’m missing some profit motive but it just seems like an awful design choice. Edit: Not to disagree though. I too have a Linux gaming pc and are helping friends do the same.
  - trinix912 9mo ago
    Maybe not enshittification in the sense that every other UIImageView has an ad in it, but definitely a huge regression from the UI it had before. Sadly it's only a matter of time until everyone copies it because it's cool and it's what Apple does so they must be right!
trinix912 9mo ago
I'm holding off upgrading my laptop (2013 MBP running Catalina) until they get their UI stuff together. I'd just gotten used to Sequoia on my desktop but this is unbearable. Not a single update since 2019 has improved the UI more than it regressed it in my opinion. Too much whitespace, too little contrast, too big controls, and now too little readability. It's almost like their entire UI department is under threat of being fired unless they invent a radical UI update every other year. Even Vista was a readability zen compared to this and they aren't listening to feedback at all.

sylens 9mo ago

Perhaps the thing I hate most about Tahoe is the embedded rounded rectangle around the menu inside of the larger rounded rectangle window. They're trying to go for this look of a menu floating above the rest of the window it belongs to, but it just looks sloppy to me in dark mode.

Lord-Jobo 9mo ago
Looks sloppy in any mode. The amount of wasted space has gone from “well a little bit of rounding/padding is alright to achieve a unified unique look” to “holy shit this is just Fischer price laugh and learn garbage”. 1/2 pixel strips everywhere, around tons of elements. Huge rounded corners. Slow showy animations. This isn’t a UI for adults, this is a UI for a fake computer sequence in a cheap Netflix movie.
- xp84 9mo ago
  Even Jony Ive, who I thought was a bad UI designer when that job was unwisely given to him, thinks Alan Dye has no taste. That’s saying something.
rick_dalton 9mo ago
Personally I couldn’t get past the horrible gray squircle jails for icons that don’t adhere to their boring new standard. They didn’t even update the pixelmator icon for quite a while, which they themselves acquired. Shows you how much effort went in to this.

xqcgrek2 9mo ago

Tahoe has to be the worst software Apple has released in three decades. It's unbelievable it got through. If Macs and macOS were not a tiny portion of their revenue I would short the stock.

uxp100 9mo ago
iOS 26 is also very bad. Many Christmas conversations between boomers baffled by their phones, and as I younger (than boomer) person I am not as baffled but there are a number of things that take more button presses than they did in previous versions for no apparent reason. And it’s real ugly imo.
- treetalker 9mo ago
  Viewing all tabs in Safari is the thorn in my side.
  - uxp100 9mo ago
    Yes, that’s the main one I was thinking of, though there are spots in the photos app too iirc.
  - spencercwood 9mo ago
    You can swipe up (or maybe down if you put it on top) on the address bar and it will take you to the all tabs view.
  - DrProtic 9mo ago
    I got so frustrated with that, luckily there’s an option is setting to bring the button back to be visible and not in a menu.
- xp84 9mo ago
  They’ve achieved sufficient lock-in that they can enshittify everything as much as they want with no consequences. Switching has too high an ecosystem cost, plus in the US it’s a special case that a lot of people think if you don’t use all Apple products you are probably poor.

jwlake 9mo ago

its very odd that apparently everyone working in Apple software dev either refuses to dogfood this stuff or just uses iPads for everything.

hamdingers 9mo ago
So many of the rough edges disappear when "Reduce Transparency" is enabled I've theorized that setting must be pretty popular around Apple's offices.
- normie3000 9mo ago
  My browser has a half-inch white bar at the bottom constantly, presumably because of this setting.
  - hamdingers 9mo ago
    Cannot reproduce on 26.2 with either Safari or Chrome with the setting on. That would infuriate me.
    - normie3000 9mo ago
      When first scrolling, the bottom page controls disappear. But they leave their container blocking the page content.
- xp84 9mo ago
  Using that option suddenly nerfed all my themes in Edge, forcing the window title bars to all be gray instead of the bold colors I use to differentiate the different profiles I use for work. I wish there was a “Reduce bullshit” toggle on MacOS and iOS, and also that it would skip all the increasingly stupid animations. No, reduce motion sucks because it just uses an equally-slow crossfade. Just STFU and let me move to the next task and stop animating everything. Good for you, you have a good GPU, I don’t care.
mc32 9mo ago
Ironically that would be a new kind of dogfooding.

ghusto 9mo ago

Adding insult to injury, my fans are constantly going now because I have to pay for this disastrous upgrade with tons more resources.

xp84 9mo ago
Well, the M1 is still good enough to last years longer under the sane demands of nearly any type of work. That’s bad for the stock price. How else are they going to keep people on the same upgrade cycle as the Intel days if they don’t tax those GPUs with all these pointless animations?

avidphantasm 9mo ago

Since macOS went to a yearly cadence, I usually upgrade during Christmas break, this allows for a couple of point releases to work out the kinks. I won’t be upgrading this year. I hope macOS 27 fixes this abomination. Otherwise, this 30+ year Mac user will be moving on…

Y-bar 9mo ago
You would do well to avoid 26. I upgraded to be a Guinea Pig for a few colleagues and I regret it. Things like apps and scripts work in the technical sense, but it is worse because the myriad of graphical and interactive issues.

egypturnash 9mo ago

I just hope that my current Mac keeps being usable long enough that Liquid Glass has been fixed or replaced entirely by the time I'm forced to upgrade to whatever's shipping on my next computer.

stefanfisk 9mo ago
My kid dumped a glass of water all over my MBP M1 a few days ago. Deciding between an inferior M4 with Sequoia or a fancy new M5 with Tahoe has been rough :/
- HelloUsername 9mo ago
  > dumped a glass of water all over my MBP I believe that's how the designers at Apple came up with Liquid Glass
- dghost-dev 9mo ago
  Liquid Glass is not that bad lol.
  - stefanfisk 9mo ago
    Neither is an M4 Pro.
- coldpie 9mo ago
  If it helps, I've been using XFCE since 2007 and it's remained functionally identical for all of those almost 20 years. It just works, it improves a tiny bit with each major upgrade, and they don't rearrange everything every couple years for the sake of justifying a salary. Maybe it's a good opportunity to consider whether you actually have to keep running on Apple's treadmill.
  - baq 9mo ago
    I’d love an XFCE (or even gnome tbh) environment on a properly built laptop, unfortunately only Apple is able to build something that works in all areas that matter: sleeps when lid closed, wakes when lid opens, touchpad and display don’t suck.

petesergeant 9mo ago

Updated iOS overnight and what the fuck man. Also Settings search is so totally broken I can’t even

baggy_trough 9mo ago

I do enjoy the liquid glass controls in some places. The glass effect is really beautiful. What I hate about it is the way the overall UI constantly gets in the way of my content.

treetalker 9mo ago
I expect and demand a level of, for want of a better term, UI crispness. It is equally aggravating to err on either side: Windows 3.1 clunk to the left, Tahoe's operationally useless (indeed, operationally detrimental) visual fireworks to the right. Apple needs to hit a sweet spot of crisp, but the priority must be fast, logical interaction that lets me operate at the speed of thought. With Tahoe, Apple tried to gild the lily.

efficax 9mo ago

liquid glass is a total disaster. what the hell is going on in the ux teams at apple? this is like their windows vista era. i hate it so much

ChrisMarshallNY 9mo ago
I'm almost positive that it's because they want to make as many apps as possible VisionOS-friendly. I suspect that they were rather shaken at how poorly AVP was received.
- emchammer 9mo ago
  I don’t want to wear one of those things on my face. I want a high-quality computer and phone. Apple executives are out to lunch.
  - MagicMoonlight 9mo ago
    [flagged]
    - bigyabai 9mo ago
      Bring him inside, we're just about to start another round of Ultraman Quiz King on the family Pippin.
    - efficax 9mo ago
      the market agrees for the most part. VR goggle interfaces just aren't taking the world by storm. When it came out I thought: I'll wait for the iteration that comes 2 years later (the AVP 3 or whatever) since by then they'll have worked out the kinks and it will be a solid computing platform. It's 2 months shy of 2 years since general availability of the AVP and it's essentially identical to the initial release with just a minor chip upgrade. It's a dead product line
      - fauigerzigerk 9mo ago

sho_hn 9mo ago

MacOS aesthetically peaked with Leopard in '09, but speaking frankly the OS has felt abandoned to me since around 10.2, with so many basic interaction issues with window management and the dock just never getting fixed properly and a long list of half-assed bandaids and abandoned experiments over the years. There is no true passion in MacOS, and the marketing has come face to face with reality in 2025. It's the neglected step-child of a company distracted by other things. There's been some impressive engineering done by lower-level folks under the hood of it all, though.

drnick1 9mo ago

The answer is KDE and GNOME, at least on the machines that support some form of Linux.

tensor 9mo ago
That is not the answer. Many of us run software that is not available on Linux.

dijksterhuis 9mo ago

> Maybe this is because I’m getting older, but that gives me the benefit of having experienced Apple’s older interfaces, with their exceptional quality and functionality. i really missed snow leopard for about 10 years all the way up to when i moved on from my macbook circa 5 years ago.

hallole 9mo ago
Snow Leopard, Mountain Lion were so peak. The first step into minimalism was beautiful, too, I'll admit, but it's culminated in this Liquid Glass garbage, so it was ultimately a misstep.
stefanfisk 9mo ago
I feel so old saying this, but back in the days both Apple and third party developers would follow the HIG closely enough that something felt off right away when an app wasn't behaving 100% native. Running something like a Java app was jarring to say the least even if they were supposedly using a "cross platform" UI library. But then Gruber said that the HIG was dead and the decline gained more and more momentum...
- Groxx 9mo ago
  Very much yes. When "affordance" was one of the primary goals, rather than "breathing room". Information density took a nose-dive and we lost all visual separation and gained... what? Less battery life?
- PaulDavisThe1st 9mo ago
  > back in the days both Apple and third party developers would follow the HIG closely enough that something felt off right away when an app wasn't behaving 100% native. That's only true for desktop productivity apps and widgets. Apple and 3rd party "creativity" apps never followed the HIG religiously, if at all.

dc_giant 9mo ago

Design got worse since Maverick for professional users.

thomassmith65 9mo ago
It has been worsening since Snow Leopard. That is cliched but true.

layer8 9mo ago

There are claims that Liquid Glass was in development for three years. If that is accurate, the results are even more appalling.

api 9mo ago
All the non-technical people I know loved it. It's pretty. It's neat. It looks cool. Apple is a consumer products company. My personal feeling on it is just "meh." My productivity with my laptop hasn't changed. I'm not a huge fan but it's not a deal breaker. I still find it better than Windows 11 for the most part, and Linux has other issues as a daily driver for me. IMHO Apple needs a "tick" release where they only polish and fix bugs and usability issues with an almost total feature freeze. I've heard they may be doing that.
- omnimus 9mo ago
  Looking at popularity of similar design on iOS it would be surprising “non-technical” users like it. People HATE new iOS. Low contrast, not clear layering and focus, things being moved around for unknown reasons. Also who uses MacOs beaides developers? Majority are creative prosumers in arts/design and they are even more annoyed by messed up designs. What you are left with are lawyers, writers, students? I guess they might like it.
  - rr808 9mo ago
    > Also who uses MacOs beaides developers? Students - all of them.
    - omnimus 9mo ago
      I said that in the next sentence. Than again this is really true only in US. In rest of the world (including europe) Macs are seen as luxury environment.
      - stefanfisk 9mo ago

wintermutestwin 9mo ago

While the UI designers are rearranging deck chairs, the UX is totally failing to love up to the promise of an ecosystem. Cross system cut n paste is a neat trick, but I just want timers and alarms to actually work as expected. I shouldn’t be surprised given that the mac save as dialog box has a name field that is still hard coded to 32 characters visible. Whenever I bitch about it I get pushback that filenames shouldn’t be longer than that! Um hello - tell me you have never worked in the real world outside your iphone bubble without telling me.

cglan 9mo ago

I think for the first time I’ve been considering moving off iOS because of liquid glass. The bugs on apple products have hit a breaking point for me. Mac is still unequivocally the best laptop around imho, but it’s less clear cut for phones. My iPhone 15 pro is borderline unusable. Every day is a new issue. I’m very much over it. You used to be able to count on the basics working smoothly, but stuff like the camera and messaging are frequently broken for me

SkyeCA 9mo ago
I've recently been using an Android phone a family member gave me after they upgraded and to my shock it's...fantastic? It's not at all like I remember Android from back in the early Android days.
- loloquwowndueo 9mo ago
  Dunno man, I’ve used Android recently and it’s still as bafflingly confusing and crappy as I remember it being. Definitely an “to each their own” kind of situation.
  - rr808 9mo ago
    I think that is what you get used to. I've been using Android for over a decade and my wife's iPhone is super confusing to me.
    - loloquwowndueo 9mo ago
      That’s a good observation, I think you’re right.
    - bigyabai 9mo ago
      Yep, my parents are both Android users and have to ask "where is the home button" when someone passes them an iPhone.
      - 9mo ago

jjice 9mo ago

I don't mind how Liquid Glass looks at all. It's just insane how buggy the system has become. Even Messages will bug out, like deleting my first word if I type too fast after opening a conversation or auto scrolling and not letting me scroll down until I exit and re-enter. Unacceptable for the premium you pay for Apple software. Unacceptable for any software one is paying for. I hope they get their shit together and start fixing before they continue adding new stuff. 26.2 doesn't inspire me that they're on that trajectory. The thing that amazes me most is that everyone on the teams responsible is probably using their Apple devices and running into these same bugs!

eoskx 9mo ago
I've had similar observations with different behaviors in Safari and Finder. One would think the quality of Apple's software would be increasing with the usage of Swift over Objective-C, but the opposite seems to be true.
- walthamstow 9mo ago
  Spotlight is also slow and buggy now, on an M3 Pro no less. I loathe the feeling of being faster than my computer and having to wait for it to catch up, something that I haven't felt since the M1 came out.
  - deleted 9mo ago
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  - runjake 9mo ago
    This was my last straw that caused me to disable Spotlight: Typing something into Spotlight, having it pull up the right result and highlight it, and me hitting the Enter key, and the search results suddenly updating after and highlighting some new result and then opening that instead. It’s not just Liquid Glass. It’s bugs like these where I realized Apple software was truly rotten to the core. Whomever is running the show (Craig) can’t do their job. I’m now noticing the same bug in the latest versions of Windows 11 when I hit the start button and run a search. This was a solved computer science problem.

estetlinus 9mo ago

I am trying hard to have strong feelings about it, but I just can’t bother. The only thing constant is change. What I do know for a fact, is that for each error I have on my MacBook, I’ll have ~10 ungoogable errors on any other OS. I rage-sold my last Windows due to losing my Java installation (or just confusing which terminal I installed it in). Please, crop all thumbnails in the corners, as long as you come pre-installed with just one working terminal.

bigyabai 9mo ago
> I’ll have ~10 ungoogable errors on any other OS. If you ever attempt to compile software, the shoe instantly hits the other foot. WSL is a godsend, and Apple's "native" terminal environment becomes a confusing liability. Catering to different audiences, I suppose.

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baq 9mo ago

Not upgrading to Tahoe for as long as $DAYJOB allows. ‘Defer update‘ dialog can be conveniently moved away to the second display almost out of sight.

mvkel 9mo ago

One of the most egregious issues with macOS 26 is the accessibility/usability regression. Apple prided itself on making their operating system accessible. Good ux is inherently accessible. There are so many parts of the os that flagrantly ignore well-established accessibility standards, some of which Apple themselves advocated for

xp84 9mo ago
It’s what you get when you install a hack print designer who knows nothing about UI as the head of software design and leave him there for a decade. Even Jony Ive, who also had no business designing software, didn’t respect Dye. Thank goodness Meta has done Apple the biggest favor of the century by poaching him.
- hu3 9mo ago
  I hope I'm wrong but I don't see quality control improving with Dye's leave. The man had a bad taste for design but bug prevalence is endemic and changing head of design won't fix that.
  - franktankbank 9mo ago
    How is it possible that the head of a divisions particular UX taste pervades the product?
  - mvkel 9mo ago
    I largely agree. The product decision deficit at Apple is cultural, not due to any one person missing. Stephen Lemay, Dye's replacement, has been at Apple since 1999, yet was passed over for the design lead position multiple times. There's a reason.
- deleted 9mo ago
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DonHopkins 9mo ago
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fauigerzigerk 9mo ago

It seems obvious to me that liquid glass is no designer's idea of a good UI. It's a business move to force developers to support the upcoming iGlasses where transparency is actually necessary. Perhaps Apple is willing to accept that most macOS users will enable "reduce transparency" so long as devs implement support for transparency. But there is another explanation making the rounds, possibly a conspiracy theory. Some people claim that Apple is doing this to make cross-platform technologies look obsolete and hard to implement. If there's any truth to this, it's a terrible idea that could easily backfire. People could get used to there not being a consistent platform look and feel. Like on Windows, "native" could lose its meaning. Whatever Apple promotes as "native" could become just another style among many.

xp84 9mo ago
I think people are already used to inconsistency. Whatever Apple thinks, and honestly even in spite of what any users think, only the very largest companies have the appetite to mess around making bespoke SwiftUI things, so that they have to build their app twice. So, actual “native” stuff is mainly the realm of passionate indie developers and everyone else will always use cross-platform tools.

bratwurst3000 9mo ago

i switched this year from windows to mac because windows is unbearable.... but apple seems to want to get rid of desktop user also

xp84 9mo ago
It’s clear how much Apple now hates the MacOS as we have known it… I think the concept of a computer which can run code outside a sandbox and without tollbooths that extract rents for Apple is abhorrent to them. I think the vague plan is to iOSify it more and more until there is no real difference, including the lockdown and mandatory App Store requirement.

soulofmischief 9mo ago

M2 MBP here. Definitely skipping Tahoe. Sequoia is already just terrible, not only is the UX clunky and hostile, but Apple seems to have flat out broken its Bluetooth and networking stacks in multiple ways, and in general the system is extremely unstable. Best hardware around, but at this point I might even take W11 over this locked down mess. At least Asahi support is decent these days. And I'm tired of paying for things that should be stock, such as proper window and mouse management, or reasonable fan control so that the keyboard doesn't burn my fingers under moderate workloads.

rayiner 9mo ago

> That was little more than a decade ago, in 2014. Not that I want to turn the clock back, but it would be really helpful if I could read clearly what’s on my display once again. I want to turn the clock back. It’s not a reflexive opposition to anything new. I thought OS X clearly got better from 10.0 to 10.4. But in the last vie versions it’s been a regression.

E39M5S62 9mo ago
I booted a G4 Mac the other day, running 10.4.something. I was thrown back in time to a period where OS X was clearly their flagship software stack. Everything was coherent and cohesive - and shockingly - fast. I'd daily 10.4 again if it could operate on the modern internet comfortably!
- vdupras 9mo ago
  Nevertheless, I also remember that in the 10.4 days, OS X had the reputation of being sluggish compared to Linux or even Windows (I guess it was Windows 7 at the time?). And it kinda was. Bouncing ball when launching an app. How high the bar was back then.
  - E39M5S62 9mo ago
    I was running it on a Dual 1.25ghz G4 with 2GB of RAM- a fairly high-spec machine for the 10.4 era.

rick_dalton 9mo ago

I’ve deferred my next Mac upgrade to when my current M1 air on Sequoia stops being supported. If they mess it up further I may just move off the platform. Such a shame because the hardware is great.

renaudg 9mo ago

Liquid Glass appears to be the culmination of the Alan Dye era at Apple, where UI terms like "radio buttons" were derided as "programmer talk". https://daringfireball.net/2025/12/bad_dye_job https://daringfireball.net/2025/12/bad_dye_job Thankfully he has now left. Things could hopefully pick up again usability-wise within 2-3 years.

mort96 9mo ago
The worrying thing is that his departure seems in no way like a consequence of his terrible job. He wasn't squeezed out by upper management, he left because Meta made him a better offer. I'm sure Apple's software quality will go up now that he's gone and his replacement is allegedly liked by Apple's competent UX people who disliked Dye; but Cook clearly doesn't recognise the problems, lest he'd have planned to get rid of Dye by now.
- swiftcoder 9mo ago
  It’s honestly hard to tell from outside - execs at that level are very rarely fired. They tend to be asked politely to find something new to do with their time
  - mort96 9mo ago
    They also tend to not be featured very prominently on a huge product launch event while in the process of "finding something new to do with their time". If he's actually being squeezed out, that process must've started after the public launch of iOS 26. EDIT: though I guess you could also read it as, iOS 26 had come too far to stop it, so they let Dye be the visible face of it so that he'd be the fall guy and the next guy would get the credits for fixing it... I don't know, I guess we don't really have enough info to speculate one way or the other
    - acdha 9mo ago
      I’d also believe that he was able to ride his past reputation and his sponsor’s memory enough to get the commitment to ship Liquid Glass, but that gamble blew up once most reviews revolve around how they’ll probably make it less bad in an update. Apple values keeping users on current releases and this is the first one where so many experienced users and fans have been advising people to hold back. I think Dye knows he had enough capital to bull the release through but not to recover from making the story about the release about his shortcomings.

rich_sasha 9mo ago

I'll have to upgrade my M1 MBP some time and no way am I putting up with this nonsense - back to Linux laptop for me. What recommendations do people have for good metal-body linux-friendly "ultra books" (or whatever they're called these days)?

evantbyrne 9mo ago
It would be newsworthy if Linux laptops could compete with MacBooks on performance and quality. Maybe reconsider Windows if you feel the need to switch?
- rich_sasha 9mo ago
  Well, Mac hardware is good, but in what universe is anything working better on Windows than Linux?? Same hardware available, less bloatware.
  - evantbyrne 9mo ago
    I would expect Windows to have better battery life than Linux, just because Linux is so much worse than MacOS on power consumption, but I also haven't run Windows on a laptop in over a decade so I really don't know.
syabro 9mo ago
Try installing asahi on mbp? I tried on my mbp m2 pro, works great

embedding-shape 9mo ago

> After three months of strong feedback during beta-testing, I was disappointed when Tahoe was released on 15 September to see how little had been addressed Now it was a while ago I left the Apple ecosystem as it became clear they didn't actually care about UX anymore, but did "strong feedback during beta-testing" ever actually result in any results? I remember doing something similar back in 2012-2013 sometime, and friends having similar feelings across the years, that it makes me think that Apple never really did any changes based on feedback receiving during the beta testing. Has anyone here ever written something in via the traditional feedback forms/venues and actually had something changed before the final release? I even asked around my circle of acquaintances and even the ones 110% into the Apple ecosystem seem to never have noticed anything changed based on their feedback.

qubitcoder 9mo ago
I’ve submitted multiple bug reports over the years using the Feedback app. And, to my surprise, not only did I receive a detailed response within a month or so, the issues were resolved.

foxygen 9mo ago

My MacOS has this insane bug where the cursor sometimes won't change to a pointer/loading/any other state on my second monitor. This is really bad, but even worse for me who writes websites for a living, and need to check that my CSS cursor pointer class actually worked. I can't count how many minutes I've lost refreshing my browser and double-checking my code. Now I just keep my browser on my primary monitor. I've found many other people with this bug on the internet, and it has been happening for YEARS. I honestly can't understand how a premium product aimed at developers can have something like this for YEARS without a fix. I'm moving away from MacOS, and might ditch my iPhone too as I won't have all the nice integration with MacOS anymore. Fuck you, Apple.

dgreensp 9mo ago
I ran into this, and there was a bizarre fix—I think having Adobe apps open in the background caused it, or something.
- foxygen 9mo ago
  I saw some responses like this. I have zero Adobe apps in my Mac.
n8cpdx 9mo ago
Do you have a trackpad? If you re-enter focus by right clicking (very easy to do with gestures), focus stops working until you leave and re enter by left clicking. Unfortunately not a new issue.
- deleted 9mo ago
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- foxygen 9mo ago
  I don't use a trackpad. I leave my Macbook closed with 2 external monitors and an external mouse/keyboard.

frou_dh 9mo ago

What's obvious to me is that the PRIMARY motivation for Liquid-Glass-ifying MacOS was not to improve MacOS, but simply to make it look consistent with the new version of iOS/iPadOS. So for Apple to start with a level of disrespect for the existing product where the question of whether each change is actually an improvement is effectively off-topic, it's no wonder they made a dog's dinner of Tahoe.

talentedcoin 9mo ago

These articles always make me laugh. Everyone complains and then everyone lines up and buys Macs again. macOS has been on the decline for literally years now. If you really want things to change put your money where your mouth is and switch!

7e 9mo ago
Switch to what? Windows is horrible and Linux is just as bad (but in different ways).
- nutjob2 9mo ago
  Although its not for everyone, I run a Hackintosh and stick to 10.15 or lower.
- analogpixel 9mo ago
  I think a lot of people on HN don't realize that some people require software outside of a terminal and a web browser. Can I run Ableton on linux? can I run all the audio plugins that only ship windows/mac versions? is there a decent graphics editor? (gimp is not it.) If all I did was play in the terminal and a web browser, I'd have switched to Linux by now.
  - tambourine_man 9mo ago
    Exactly. There’s nothing that comes close to the Adobe suite. Maybe someday an investment similar to what was made in Proton will happen to Wine in general.
  - bigyabai 9mo ago
    > Can I run Ableton on linux Yes? The .msi installer for Live has worked in Wine for more than a decade.
    - trinix912 9mo ago
      Until you need a specific plugin that doesn’t, or some hardware equipment with custom drivers (very common in the AV world).

analogpixel 9mo ago

If you notice your OS/Window Manager, then they have failed in what they were designed to do. I don't own a computer for the OS, I own it to run the Applications that I find useful.

JaggerJo 9mo ago

+1 I only updated my MacBook Air and really don’t like it. Will keep all other macs on Sequoia until macOS 27 hopefully fixes most of the issues.

pmdr 9mo ago

For me, earlier versions of macOS/OS X and Windows Vista/7 were the right mix of eye candy and usability. Apple's just showing off with this liquid glass thing. Yeah, it's cool that they attempted it, but it should've remained entirely opt-in. Apple being Apple, there's no opt-in -- once they like it, it's the default.

brokencode 9mo ago
For a major revamp, you should either do it or not do it. Making it opt-in or even opt-out means every app then has to try to support both different UIs, which is a longterm maintenance cost. Not only for Apple, but the entire ecosystem. I personally sort of like the liquid glass, but it's also kind of a mess in a lot of edge cases. I feel like it was an interesting idea that didn't really pan out fully and should have been scrapped. It's just too controversial for pure eye-candy.

e40 9mo ago

I 100% agree with OPs take, though I don't really mind it as much as he does. I do hope the changes will be rolled back in 27, or at least controls given to us that allow us to roll back changes.

kruuuder 9mo ago

Funny to see the last screenshot of OS X from 2014 in the article. I would love to use a system with such a high contrast and information density. But I also remember very well how many users were upset with the most recent design changes at that time: The all caps section titles in the sidebar, and the gray icons that were previously colored.

lapcat 9mo ago
Yes, IMO Tiger was actually peak Mac UI. As soon as Apple released iPhone, the Mac took a back seat.
- cosmic_cheese 9mo ago
  Tiger with 10.5/10.6-style 2D grid virtual desktops and Mavericks traffic light buttons, or alternatively Mavericks with aqua scrollbars and 10.5/10.6-style 2D grid virtual desktops is very close to my ideal desktop environment.
  - docmars 9mo ago
    Wow I completely forgot that Spaces were also vertically oriented. I miss that.
    - cosmic_cheese 9mo ago
      It was really nice. With the current linear design I organize desktops by theme (e.g. one for dev, one for research, etc) and with the 10.5/10.6 design I'd use vertical desktops for subcategories — so following the same example, on a single screen setup I might have desktops arranged something like: │ Rails Docs/Search │ Backend Dev │ Music │ ├───────────────────────┼────────────────┼────────────┤ │ UIKit Docs/Search │ iOS Dev │ Chat │ ├───────────────────────┼────────────────┼────────────┤ │ MDN/Web Dev Search │ Web Dev │ Email/News │ With this, I quickly develop muscle/spatial memory for where each category "lives" and can navigate there in a flash. It also substantially reduces the need for individual programs like browsers to bear organizational load, so for example suddenly "just" single-tier vertical tabs become sufficient, making browser workspaces and tree style tabs much less necessary.

karmakaze 9mo ago

The day that I need to update to macOS 26 for continued security patches is the last day I'll choose to run macOS. I'm pretty much all on Linux for non-work stuff anyway with an old Windows 'gaming' PC that only runs a 10 year old game.

DetectDefect 9mo ago
> update to macOS 26 for continued security patches Are you certain that is not already the case? Or do we still truly believe Apple has the capacity, resources and motivation to care about two version of their operating system at one time?

virgil_disgr4ce 9mo ago

Just as a datapoint: Not only do I actually like Liquid Glass, I don't have any errors or bugs on my MBP or my iPhone EXCEPT for the audio scratching sometimes on macos. Which alone is flatly unacceptable.

vor_ 9mo ago
If you're experiencing crackling under high system load, try connecting external speakers or headphones. It's weird, but it seems to mitigate or even eliminate the issue.
- virgil_disgr4ce 9mo ago
  Thanks for the tip, however all of the crackling I've heard was exclusively WITH speakers plugged in (via the 3.5mm jack). Though I've noticed lately I'm not hearing any crackling any more. I don't think I updated anything so it might be spurious.

QuiEgo 9mo ago

The really really frustrating thing is that even in this lesser state, all of the alternatives are still a worse experience than an Apple Silicon macbook. It’s sad to be in a time where enshitifcation is the word of the day and things are getting worse as time goes on. There’s nothing on the horizon of tech that excites me anymore. I used to feel joy and excitement for the future of tech. Now I feel profound sadness at this reality.

LucidLynx 9mo ago

Not gonna lie, this year has been exceptionnaly disappointing for every product and every OS (more generally: software) from Apple. The battery life first: I lost 6 to 8h of battery life EVERY DAY because of iOS 26. The battery life of my macbook is worst too, even after all the updates and a fresh install of macOS 26.2. The interface is very ugly, and not easy to use at all. I am oftenly loston both systems (iOS 26 and macOS 26) because of all those glass interfaces on top of each other. The performance did not improved either, and the gaming ecosystem that I was very optimistic is becoming a mess. Again. To finish, an exceptional high number of annoying bugs that are not solved yet, despite my feedbacks since the first Beta versions. It seems nobody care. It’s infuriating that I can’t downgrade the OS on both devices. Especially on my mac. This pushed me to re-try a Linux distro on my old laptop, and re-try Android on an old Google Pixel phone. Both are great for my needs, and the phone has way more battery life than the iPhone (despite the phone has already 5yo). I did not expected at all that 2025 would be the year of Apple pushing me out of it ecosystem... Very nice job guys.

zingar 9mo ago

Without arguing with the main point I do want to say that although I didn’t ask for increased control size from 18 to 26, my hands are really appreciating it.

wutwutwat 9mo ago

windows vista called, it wants its Aero back... just format and install Sequoia, that's what I did

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synapsomorphy 9mo ago

I'm a Linux and Windows user thinking of getting a Macbook, mostly for the hardware. All these recent proclamations of disappointment in Tahoe seem insanely overblown to me. The problem that this post leads with is that thumbnails' corners are too rounded, which "misrepresents" the original? Seriously? Maybe it's worse now compared to the golden years, I don't know, never owned a Mac. And it's fair to criticize it from that perspective. But I am completely at a loss for how any of these issues could be bad enough to make you switch platforms. Windows and Linux are not exactly usability all-stars! I had to write my own app for decent speech-to-text on Linux which is built in at a system level on Macs. This feels to me like just the age-old tale of people wanting to (love | hate) brands, when really, things are nuanced. I switched from Android to iOS recently and the experience did not change much. iOS is absolutely not "borderline unusable" like I've seen many claim. If anything it's maybe a 10% nicer experience overall. Lack of nuance in people's takes makes for less signal in the noise and makes it annoying to figure out the actual pros and cons of different platforms.

bigyabai 9mo ago
Okay, now go use it and report back. The grass isn't always greener.
LucidLynx 9mo ago
It is not only for the corners. Do some searches and you will find a ton of bugs, bad performances and bad battery life for laptops, random crashes, ... The issue is not only on the lack of good design ideas, but also on the quality of what Apple provides since a few years now.
- synapsomorphy 9mo ago
  Maybe the quality is reduced, sure. But if you "do some searches" you can find all of those things for any major software release. Seems to me like people in Apple's walls are forgetting that the outside world is not some Garden of Eden. But yeah, I'd have to use it to say for sure.
  - 9mo ago

walterbell 9mo ago

2023 Vision Pro (iPad-on-Skull) sold less than 500K devices, with v2 cancelled. In 2025, the design failed upward to 4000 x 500K users, https://archive.is/gxaYw https://archive.is/gxaYw > [Apple] is working to simplify the way users navigate and control their devices.. The design is loosely based on the Vision Pro’s software.. will mark the most significant upgrade to the Mac since the Big Sur operating system in 2020.. For the iPhone, it will be the biggest revamp since iOS 7 in 2013... 2 billion devices in use around the world.. when Apple revamped its Photos app last year, legions of users complained. With the entire operating systems changing, the stakes are much higher. Since 2023 launch, Meta Ray-Ban sold ~4M camera glasses priced below $500.

diebillionaires 9mo ago

Couldn't agree more. I haven't and won't update to Tahoe, and am now using linux more frequently as I begin to move away from Mac OS, and eventually Apple products.

eviks 9mo ago

> with their exceptional quality and functionality. This was never true, for example, taking this simple criterion of readability: > would be really helpful if I could read clearly what’s on my display Look at the device's names at the left-most screenshot - you can't clearly read them even though there is plenty of space wasted on the margins and the "…" I mean, sure, liquid glass made everything worse, but it doesn't mean all the other decades-old UI sins disappear in the exceptionally fuzzy rearview window

anarticle 9mo ago

I think if macOS is a tool it should change less. Looks too much like vista to me.

nout 9mo ago

This is a good time for trying Linux. If you are coming from Mac, then a distro with GNOME interface (Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu...) will feel like at home after a couple tweaks. I recommend "Dash to Dock" to get the MacOS dock experience and "Search Light" to get the spotlight search.

LoganDark 9mo ago
I love GNOME Wayland; it has some of the best support for trackpad gestures of any Linux desktop experience I've ever tried. On the other paw though, client-side decorations are not the way to go on Linux, and I'm still incredibly frustrated that they insist on not even supporting server-side decorations at all. Client-side decorations are for apps that are designed specifically for a certain desktop experience; server-side decorations are for compatibility with the many millions of apps that already exist!! (And for anything cross-platform / cross-DE.) Apple gets away with it because macOS is largely monolithic, and doesn't really have swappable desktop experiences. GNOME does not get away with it because they're just one competitor in a large landscape of Linux and they should want to be compatible with Linux applications in general, not only GNOME applications.
- hagbard_c 9mo ago
  My biggest beef with client-side decorations is that they're not optional. For those of us using tiling window managers those decorations are totally superfluous and only take up space, especially since the Gnome folks seem to have decided that every UI element needs to have lebensraum by adding huge areas of white space around them. I want my windows densely populated and I want lots of them on my screen because I'm using a COMPUTER - not a PHONE - with a LARGE SCREEN and a pointing device. I do not need to be able to fat-finger those buttons, I have an accurate pointing device with which I control a pointy cursor with which I can accurately hit single pixels if needed. Now I need to LD_PRELOAD some library to get rid of those stupid unneeded decorations, I need to find the current iteration of the compact Adwaita theme (for as long as that is still possible...) and I otherwise need to FIGHT the software as if I were running some proprietary blob of malware from the Fruit Factory or from Redmond. Blegh, so much wasted time and effort.
9mo ago

t1234s 9mo ago

Using Liquid Glass on both a retina and non-retina display it looks like Apple is trying to depreciate non-retina displays just like they have done in the past with floppy disk, cd rom, and having useful ports. Tahoe on a non-retina display looks slightly but noticeably shittier than the previous version.

docmars 9mo ago

Can Apple get it over with and revert this overhaul? It's such a disaster. Sequoia's UI and icons were nearly perfect and still looked modern. There was no need for this change whatsoever.

jessegrosjean 9mo ago

I dislike Liquid Glass. At the same time I make Mac apps and I've got to adopt liquid glass to keep my apps looking alive/updated. How to do this without making my apps UI worse? I would love to see some "how to fix Liquid Glass" type articles. List out the problems, list out potential solutions. Anyone run across articles like this? Please share relevant links.

trinix912 9mo ago
For iOS, I guess if you just update the bottom navbar (if you're using it) and use the fancy new glass back buttons that should be enough to keep them looking updated without breaking the UI in major ways. For macOS maybe keep original toolbars (instead of the new floating-inside-a-floating-box ones) or make a custom UIView that emulates what's currently on Sequoia. Same for sidebars. Those two alone would IMO make it better than the built in apps on Tahoe. And a design classic, an inner rounded rectangle should have a smaller corner radius (less rounding) than the outer one AND the inner rectangle should maintain significant margin between itself and the outer rectangle's borders. This is why the new Finder sidebar looks so tacky, they got the first part (corner radiuses) right but since the two elements are so close to each other there's still a visual clash between them. How to avoid it? Use a flat sidebar with a border only on the right.

deleted 9mo ago

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anentropic 9mo ago

all else aside... > two windows in the same app, both created using SwiftUI, can’t even share a common radius, as shown below this actually looks correct to me, the smaller 'subordinate' dialog has smaller radius, like nesting dolls

anal_reactor 9mo ago

The cycle of most products: Step 1: company caters to a niche Step 2: niche loves product, recommends to wider audience Step 3: wider audience adopts product Step 4: company switches to targeting the wider audience Step 5: niche doesn't like product anymore, switches to a competitor Windows is in step 5 - previously undisputed king of desktop, now an ad-infested boomer legacy system. MacOS is in step 4 - previously pricy but good solution for devs and creatives, now PITA for devs and "I would switch if it weren't for Adobe suite" for creatives, but normies think it looks pretty. Linux is in step 1 - Valve has been consistently investing in making it a viable gaming system. If you told me 10 years ago that Linux actually runs games other than TuxCart, I'd have laughed, but nowadays "does it run on Linux" is a serious question for every new release. It just needs some time to mature, and once gamers switch, other desktop users will slowly follow.

deleted 9mo ago

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spike021 9mo ago

honestly the issue i hate the most is how bad the keyboard has gotten over the past 3-5 years/major iOS releases. on top of the bug people mention a lot where types are miss-pressed, there's a problem i get where if iOS considers a word misspelled it'll refuse to let me use the space key or otherwise move away from the word or close the keyboard. it's almost like a UI thread lockout. it's extremely frustrating.

DrProtic 9mo ago

I was about to upgrade my MacBook but instead booted up Linux on my dust collecting desktop, all because liquid glass. They managed to break so many things, they even managed to mess up the volume slider. Instead of showing up across the screen now it’s tucked away to the top right. What the hell.

vor_ 9mo ago
That's one of the changes I like. Instead of getting a huge volume indicator in the center of a video you're watching, it's a small slider that's off to the corner where I'd prefer it to remain.

jama211 9mo ago

There are a lot of valid criticisms here especially regarding accessibility but after seeing the first item be complaining about “wasted space” because of rounded corners on a finder preview it made me find it very hard to take seriously, too much old man yells at cloud energy to be honest.

ricardobeat 9mo ago
These are real concerns for UI design; excessive padding, limits on information density, inconsistent spacing, clashing elements. Does an engineer complaining about a car with hexagonal wheels have “old man yells at cloud” energy? Yeah the car still runs, and might even look cool, but it’s a stupid choice by any professional standards.
- jama211 9mo ago
  I knew at least one armchair UI expert would come out of the woodwork because I dared to have an opinion that was only agreeing with the 99% of what OP said instead of 100%, but the _level_ of obtuseness in your comment still managed to surprise me.

steve-atx-7600 9mo ago

Hurts to even look at this post. Today I pulled up a podcast episode in apple podcasts for Mac and could hardly see the app buttons that got obscured by the window turning black to "match" the episode artwork. When I found the buttons, I could literally not read their labels because they were now black on black. This is just asinine at this point. The design change should have been aborted before it became such a mess that it distracts from fixing all of Apples other problems.

joduplessis 9mo ago

As others have noted here, LiquidGlass by itself isn’t a bad idea. However, the execution is horrible. Massively inconsistent border radii, a Finder window that reminds me of the Engineers’ ship from Prometheus, laggy performance, illegible fonts due to overlays, and the list goes on. Tahoe is so badly designed that using Windows 11 feels like a breath of fresh air. Curious if any Apple folk are on HN that could add some insight as to how it happened.

felixding 9mo ago

If only Apple could bring Scott Forstall back. Oh one can dream...

brailsafe 9mo ago

I can say that I haven't held off quite this long in the past for an OS update on mac, I wonder how long I'll stick it out. I did buy the M4 Pro 16" 48gb last year, and am incredibly happy with it hardware-wise, so it'll stay on Sequoia as long as I can get away with.

amai 9mo ago

When will Apple finally vectorize its GUI so I can customize font and font size of the GUI? They didn't have that in 2014 and in 2026 they still don't have that. My Amiga had that in 1993! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_User_Interface https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_User_Interface