23 ms·

It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

• jsheard 9mo ago
  I hate to be that guy, but there's some irony in putting a full screen animated snow effect over an article about unnecessary, distracting clutter.
  • jakzurr 9mo ago
    lol, I really liked this article. But yeah, maybe it helps that I have the scripting turned off.
  • deleted 9mo ago
    [deleted]
  • master_crab 9mo ago
    True, but you can turn it off with the snowflake icon at the top.
    • alejoar 9mo ago
      Which also changes the background color to yellow for some reason. And then the "night mode" is.. what is that, a lantern? Jeez.
    • jsheard 9mo ago
      Ah, so you can. I tried that but the particles don't disappear immediately so I thought it was just toggling the colour scheme.
      • master_crab 9mo ago
        Yeah I thought the same thing too. Takes a few moments. A UX suggestion for the author. If a user wants it off, it doesn’t need to be graceful, just quick.
        • hn_acc1 9mo ago
          Yeah, I wasted 60 seconds of my life on that stupidity. Makes me much less inclined to read another article by the same author.
    • deleted 9mo ago
      [deleted]
    • moogly 9mo ago
      True, but the site owner clearly despises their prospective readers. I found it more prudent to close the tab and flag the submission.
      • throwaway270925 9mo ago
        Flagging a submission just because they added a little whimsy for the holidays to their personal website which you dont like? What a sad, sorry, hate-filled way to go through life.
        • moogly 9mo ago
          "Hate"? For flagging a UX-hostile submission. Who is overreacting here?
    • serial_dev 9mo ago
      Wow, it turns off the snowflakes, but the ones already falling will stay there and keep falling. I thought it only changed the background color to yellow, so assumed it doesn't actually turn off the snowflakes, wanted to come here and comment how ridiculous that is on an article talking about bad icons, then I saw in the comments that it turns off the snow effect... eventually (like a 10s delay). It's hilarious that it's a great article about clutter, and yet, the post is on a theme that is so badly cluttered it would have been funny... if I could have read the article...
  • deleted 9mo ago
    [deleted]
  • MattRix 9mo ago
    I thought the article was great, but nearing the end I noticed my phone was incredibly hot and realized it must be the snow effect.
  • Diggsey 9mo ago
    It's also `position: fixed` which breaks all scroll optimizations and makes scrolling feel terrible.
  • izacus 9mo ago
    If you hate to be that guy, why did you decide to be that guy?
    • d-lisp 9mo ago
      So that the role is occupied already
    • Avshalom 9mo ago
      Nobody loves to be that guy more than the guy that hates to be that guy.
      • esafak 9mo ago
        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wfg1c8dyZYM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wfg1c8dyZYM
  • diffeomorphism 9mo ago
    Nah, the irony is that you think that this was not done on purpose. E.g. look at the hamburger menu on the top right.
• tardibear 9mo ago
  I like the article content but it's ironic that I needed to switch to Safari reader-mode to be able to comfortably read it.
• alykhalid 9mo ago
  Reminder, you can turn off the animated snow effect with the snowflake icon at the top
  • deleted 9mo ago
    [deleted]
  • anymouse123456 9mo ago
    Sure, if you don't mind having your eyeballs seared by the brightest orange on record.
    • loloquwowndueo 9mo ago
      At least he didn’t use the trick to make the background HDR bright.
  • Semiapies 9mo ago
    It's not a "reminder" for people who've never been to the site before. Especially not when the icon isn't even visible on some devices, like my phone in portrait.
  • afandian 9mo ago
    No you can't, it just turns the background yellow. EDIT: the snow stops _but after a few seconds_. I toggled it to find out if it would turn off the snow, and the immediate feedback was that it doesn't. That's really _really_ bad UX.
    • aylmao 9mo ago
      It's a fun little winter feature. People need to give it a break. fwiw I went through the whole article with the snow effect on and found it just fine too.
      • afandian 9mo ago
        I get the site has a frivolous feel, which I do like. And there's no problem with snow if you can turn it off. But it _seems_ like you can't turn the snow off, at which point it does become annoying. And it's actually making a serious point about something I care about, so I actually wanted to read the article (which I did through the snow).
• throwaway_ab 9mo ago
  It's hard to justify snowflake animations on your website...
  • jgalt212 9mo ago
    Scrooge
  • vegabook 9mo ago
    or changing my mouse pointer
  • archerx 9mo ago
    Yes can people stop doing this, it was cute 20 years ago now it’s just annoying and obnoxious.
    • ChrisMarshallNY 9mo ago
      That reminds me of this classic: https://www.angelfire.com/super/badwebs/ https://www.angelfire.com/super/badwebs/
    • noduerme 9mo ago
      FWIW, while I'm complaining about this site I'm actually adding a nice easy-on-the eyes particle system in the background of a point-and-click online game. You don't put it in front of the content or behind text people are supposed to read. This is such a common failure mode with coders who do their own design. Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should.
  • deleted 9mo ago
    [deleted]
  • pixelesque 9mo ago
    It's very annoying, but you can turn it off (snowflake icon, although then you get a yellow background), and IMO the article content is worth reading.
    • 9mo ago
• master_crab 9mo ago
  Is there a reason Apple can’t focus on system improvements instead of constantly tweaking with their UI so thoroughly every couple years? I don’t disagree the OS UI needs to be revamped periodically, but it seems they do it too often.
  • seb1204 9mo ago
    KPI and corp revenue I guess. There was a time I heard that Apple had an only fix bugs release.
  • realusername 9mo ago
    Fixing bugs isn't going to give you a promotion.
  • matwood 9mo ago
    It's a damned if you don't, damned if you do. Apple could release a new system with zero UI updates and tons of internal improvements and people would call it 'old' and 'dated' and 'lack of innovation'. It's a bit like adding new emojis in an OS release. There's been reports that new emojis are one of the drivers for getting people to upgrade. No one cares about a zero day security flaw, but that new kiss emoji everyone wants.
    • afandian 9mo ago
      It's been 16 years since Snow Leopard. I think we're ready for another one.
      • matwood 9mo ago
        I agree, but I'm pointing out why UI changes happen. Apple could certainly do UI changes as part of a cleanup release though. Basically start with getting back to consistency pointed out in the article. But, having worked with users I've seen first hand out tons of internal improvements are ignored while one small UI change makes 'everything seem new'.
        • 9mo ago
• safety1st 9mo ago
  It's pretty wild how the best screenshot of a usable menu is from, like, Office 2000. What the hell have we been doing for the past 25 years?
  • Nextgrid 9mo ago
    Technology moved from being a tool to an ad delivery vehicle. Tools' success metric is how much they make your task easier/faster. Ad delivery machines' success metric is how much of your time they waste. Shitty UI making you spend more time in front of the screen is considered a good thing according to those "designers"' performance metrics.
    • deleted 9mo ago
      [deleted]
  • meindnoch 9mo ago
    Computers became a necessity. You have no choice but to own a computer, so there's no evolutionary pressure to prevent their enshittification.
  • bonesss 9mo ago
    Web technologies took off, web giants emerged, and the desktop monopoly maintaining rough standardization and being forced into steady ease of use improvements was hobbled. Microsoft’s desktop dominance was challenged by Google Docs and Facebook apps in parallel, Microsoft had to jump to web tech late, and the last few decades have been them reconciling their stack to the fact they missed the web and mobile despite pioneering key user-facing tech for both. Then they entered catchup-mode for client and search tech, only to later realize maybe they don’t care because the cloud catchup efforts blossoming into MS-consultant orthodoxy for every-darned-thing made their cloud offerings the most profitable bit… Ads and desktop stagnation pulled Windows into a weird OSX-at-home territory everyone kinda hates. And then LLMania took off, entrenching MS cloud and AI strategies into all of it, all the time. Pushing so hard that they’re gonna spend billions distancing their semi-Enterprise office brand from the term‘Microslop’. TLDR: the rush to the web/mobile moved the focus off thick clients and desktop affordances, the money is elsewhere, a universal GUI toolkit isn’t obvious for anyone, and SaaS feels better online
• noduerme 9mo ago
  Sorry, even though I agree with your piece, the incredible irony of writing about bad design decisions while having fucking snow flying past the text I'm trying to read is just too much... [edit] I just discovered the snow icon, which does turn off the snow but turns the background into bright yellow. Oh and the other icon which turns your cursor into a ...spotlight? On an otherwise black page? Do I have that right? Which one of those things was a design decision that enhanced usability, or readability, or... anything at all? These choices can best be described as sophomoric. You can disagree with menu icons, but they at least in theory serve a purpose. What purpose is served by any of the gizmos on this site?
  • ghrl 9mo ago
    I find the snowflakes equally irritating, but believe there is a huge distinction. This is an individual's blog page, their own corner of the internet, where they can share their opinion and present them in any way they'd like, whereas Apple is designing an Operating System for premium devices used by millions of people that depend on its usability.
    • noduerme 9mo ago
      They can do whatever they like with their blog, and that's great! But why would I give any weight to the design arguments of someone who designed that thing? It's like if someone comes up to you in a clown costume and starts giving you fashion advice.
  • flumpcakes 9mo ago
    > What purpose is served by any of the gizmos on this site? It's a personal website, it's fun. Comparing someones personal website - where the 'fun' things can be turned off - to a $tn company with hundreds of millions of users who rely on the usability their products is not a great basis for disagreeing with a pretty great write-up with many salient points.
  • whstl 9mo ago
    Making HN readers angry is its own reward. I wonder if JWZ still has the red carpet for HN users. Let’s test: https://www.jwz.org/blog/2026/01/dali-clock-in-the-wild/ https://www.jwz.org/blog/2026/01/dali-clock-in-the-wild/ EDIT: Yep, still works!
• Klaster_1 9mo ago
  Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46196688 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46196688
• robin_reala 9mo ago
  I was somewhat buying the article until I got to the monstrosity that is the “Special mention”, at which point I flipped to completely agreeing. That really is atrocious.
• jraph 9mo ago
  I suppose I wouldn't mind much either way, apart from the misaligned text maybe now that you brought my attention to it. I agree that colors could help. Don't hesitate to give KDE/Qt a try, it apparently happens to get all these things right according to this article from a quick glance: everything is correctly aligned, even when in the same menu some items both have an icon and a checkbox, and some don't have anything; icons are mostly meaningful, some icons are colored (most are monochrome though, there's a move to this), and not all items have icons. I guess it's the kind of things that are hard to get right for a hobby OS like macOS that lacks professional UX designers. :-)
• mosura 9mo ago
  It is incredible just how widely held the view is that Win2k (or XP in classic mode) was close to peak desktop UI. (Contenders also being Tiger to Snow Leopard and Windows 7). A key problem is that big US corps have always had a product design mentality that can produce monstrosities like your average cable TV remote and think it is in any way a good solution. That was clearly already an influence on things like XP.
  • whateverboat 9mo ago
    Win XP was excellent, as was Win 7 I thought. However, since then KDE has in my opinion, gone even further and become even better. So, the peak is not gone, it has just moved to KDe.
  • wpm 9mo ago
    Classic Mac OS' Platinum is also a contender for pre-2000 peaks. I actually never grew up with a Mac, my first one ran Tiger when I was in high school. But over the years I have collected rare or interesting Macs of yore, from before my time and come to adore Platinum and the classic Finder.
• robinhood 9mo ago
  I never disliked an OS as much as I dislike what Apple is doing with MacOS (and iOS by extension). I've been with MacOS for 20 years, but I've switched at home to Linux full time 2 years ago and I don't regret it. At work I'm forced to be on MacOS. It's concerning how Apple doesn't care anymore about user needs, usability, design and consistency. Where it was the best OS in the past for me, it's not anymore. Other OSes are better suited for where I'm at in my life.
  • paulcole 9mo ago
    I thought that was supposed to be Apple’s thing. “We decide how to make it and you decide to buy it or not.” It makes it seem like they’re designing for you until they’re not.
    • delecti 9mo ago
      Importantly, that philosophy relies on the result having merit, and working cohesively on its own terms, even if it's not your preference. Like, if I go to a restaurant that refuses me sugar for my tea, it better be darn good tea.
      • paulcole 9mo ago
        > Like, if I go to a restaurant that refuses me sugar for my tea, it better be darn good tea. But if you demand sugar in your tea it doesn't matter how good the tea is, right? You are not going to like that restaurant. > Importantly, that philosophy relies on the result having merit, and working cohesively on its own terms, even if it's not your preference I am too dumb to understand what this means.
        • delecti 9mo ago
          I might prefer my tea with sugar, given the choice, but I'll still be satisfied if the tea is very good (this metaphor assumes I don't demand sugar, but merely prefer sugar). I might prefer that Apple products work differently, but if they work well, I'll tolerate that they don't work exactly how I want. In either case, I'm willing to adapt my preferences a bit to an expertly made product. > I thought that was supposed to be Apple’s thing. “We decide how to make it and you decide to buy it or not.” This was Apple; your customization options were limited, but things were well designed and cohesive. If you were willing to adapt to their design paradigms, you'd benefit from their expertise, and also have to put in less effort tweaking. Plus you could pick up any random new Apple product and be up to speed immediately. But to extend the metaphor, if the tea sucks, I'll stop going to that restaurant. If Apple makes their UIs both immutable and bad, I'll use something else.
• mrcino 9mo ago
  Low quality, inconsistent software is a result of a lack of standards, QA, internal communication and rigged corporate processes that are serving the private interests of managers trying to satisfy the board, not the users. This is a symptom of no strong leadership that's capable of enforcing standards, Apple downslide as a whole firm where departments and people are fighting each other for resources.
• duggan 9mo ago
  I thought I was going to disagree with this; on the surface I think the icons are something of an improvement, but the rest of the post is persuasive. This is a bad sign for design at Apple. It suggests a fundamental lack of attention to detail that would have been harder to imagine a few years ago. What's driving it?
  • Xmd5a 9mo ago
    > Burger menu > User agreement "User disagrees with the content of this site." I recommend playing with the top-right buttons, it made me chuckle audibly.
    • wpm 9mo ago
      Download your personal data, there's a lot of fun messages in there.
  • layer8 9mo ago
    Leadership doesn’t understand and/or care anymore.
• dankobgd 9mo ago
  Funny thing is that i didn't see that "icon" that disables snow effect.
  • nirava 9mo ago
    that part looks to be a parody of bad ui. the burger icon, the dark mode switch, the snow thing all are purposely built to subvert common expectation.
• stavros 9mo ago
  All the icons look easily center-justified to me!
• bayindirh 9mo ago
  I'll voice the unpopular opinion: As someone who can parse images faster than text, I tend to find what I'm looking for faster in macOS Tahoe. Still, my primary OS is Linux, but for laptops I prefer macOS, and it's still in acceptable shape. However, I'll agree that Tahoe has far more papercuts than its predecessors. It needs a "Snow Tahoe" version.
• aylmao 9mo ago
  This isn't the only aspect of Tahoe that seems amateurishly designed by someone following "wrong rules", the wrong rule here being "for consistency, let's assign an icon to every action. Another wrong rules I've seen blindly followed is making everything an edge-to-edge canvas, so that the sidebar floats on top. Having a full-window canvas with floating sidebars can make sense for applications where content is expansive and inherently spatial (like say, Figma) or applications where the sidebar is an actual floating element that can be moved around (like Photoshop once was). It doesn't make sense in Finder, or Reminders, where the content is ultimately just a list. Forcing the sidebar "to float on top of the content" yields no benefit because the content wont ever scroll under it, and because it can't be moved anyway, but it does lead to wasted space, that ugly "double border", etc.
  • x0x0 9mo ago
    but being too lazy to even globally coordinate the icons is some deep rot.
    • pornel 9mo ago
      They've got the SF Symbols font, and probably assumed that's enough. Everyone has the same set of icons available, technically. It seems that Apple has nobody left who has all three at the same time: taste, attention to detail, and authority to demand fixes. Having lots of people who have max two out of these three gives you designs of Microsoft and Glass Apple.
      • wpm 9mo ago
        I despise SF Symbols. Cheap, lame, boring, flat little hieroglyphics do not make good icons. They're just cheap.
        • stefanfisk 9mo ago
          If rather have a boring but consistent and usable UI than something jazzy but inconsistent and broken. Every app should not be its own little universe as if it was a videogame.
• xnx 9mo ago
  28 days ago. 334 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46196688 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46196688
  • echoangle 9mo ago
    Thanks, I was thinking I was having a deja vu because I was sure I had read something like this recently.
• josalhor 9mo ago
  Interesting. The article starts with this: > Sequoia → Tahoe It’s bad And I look at the image... And I like it? I agree with the author that it could be better, but most of the icons (new, open recent, close, save, duplicate, print, share etc), do make it easier, faster and more pleasant for my brain to parse the menu vs no icons. Again, I don't disagree that you could do it better, I just disagree with the premise that the 1992 manual is "the authority". Display density has increased dramatically; people use their computers more and have been accustomed to those interfaces, which makes the relationship of the people with the interfaces different. Quoting a 1992 guideline on interfaces in 2026 feels like quoting the greeks on philosophy while ignoring our understandings of the world since then.
  • afandian 9mo ago
    I wouldn't take too much into a book about optimising database storage written for 90s-era hard disks and CPUs. But a file menu is still a file menu, and save is still save. In fact it's remarkable how little that has changed since 1983.
  • vehemenz 9mo ago
    The author addresses this. Humans are the same in 2026 as 1992. Besides, that interface designers or even the average computer user understands more than in 1992 is highly implausible on its face.
    • paulcole 9mo ago
      Why is it highly implausible on its face other than the fact it makes arguing against him harder?
      • jollyllama 9mo ago
        Why would UX be getting worse across the board if there is greater understanding now?
        • paulcole 9mo ago
• thenaturalist 9mo ago
  If there is ever a leaked insider story of how whatever Tahoe is supposed to be got cooked up and released that would be my read of the year.
  • aylmao 9mo ago
    I don't work or have ever worked at Apple, so I don't know the full details, but I heard the new design wasn't introduced until very late in the development process, and at a point in time where teams are supposed to focus on polish, not redesigns or introducing new features. So not only did teams have to rush incroporating this new design, they also didn't get time to think things through and polish. It sounds like they didn't have time to push-back either, and so there was no feedback/iteration loop where they could work out with whomever is in charge of wider system design what works and what doesn't on what apps.
• 1f60c 9mo ago
  At this point I'm just hoping Cook (who bears ultimate responsibility) or Ternus will see the error of his ways, but I'm not holding my breath. I doubt they understand what's wrong with this or that they even know about the HIG.
• g947o 9mo ago
  Those who want to complain about the snowflake animations, wait till you try out the dark mode
• flumpcakes 9mo ago
  It seems like Apple's hardware design is universally loved with much acclaim, why is their software getting progressively worse? It's not Microsoft-add-all-the-bloatware-and-adverts-we-can worse, but it's 20-year-old-operating-systems-were-better-designed worse. We're getting to a point where I think Linux windowing systems like KDE are better designed. And it seems that all they had to do was not change much over the span of a few decades. Or am I out of touch? It feels like I could use a computer better back when XP was the mainstay.
  • teddy-smith 9mo ago
    It's just enshittification. Going to continue to get worse as time goes on. Even the hardware will go at some point I'm betting.
    • Maxion 9mo ago
      It's just entropy. It takes a special kind of person to be able to fight it in a big org. Jobs, Musk et. al. are assholes but they do manage to push their vision through. Probably because they are assholes.
      • ex-aws-dude 9mo ago
        It seems like apple is missing a design dictator
      • esafak 9mo ago
        Jobs and Musk are CEOs; of course they can push their visions!
    • einsteinx2 9mo ago
      > It's just enshittification. That’s not what enshittification means. Somehow its usage has quickly devolved from a very specific pattern companies used to squeeze “value” out of their customers over time into just “something getting worse in any way” or even just “something I don’t like now but I did before” which is not at all the point.
• TheAceOfHearts 9mo ago
  Looking at the old Microsoft menu gave me a pang of nostalgia for what we lost. It was so clear and readable. The icons were clearly colored and so easy to understand. I think the key issue with macOS is that they don't seem to have someone who is looking at the whole ecosystem holistically to make sure that there's consistency and integration across experiences. You probably have development silos for different applications and they don't really integrate with each other. There should really be a role like Integration Emperor that exists outside of the traditional corporate hierarchy who can go to different teams to push for increased consistency.
  • meindnoch 9mo ago
    >I think the key issue with macOS is that they don't seem to have someone who is looking at the whole ecosystem holistically to make sure that there's consistency and integration across experiences. That person died in 2011.
    • wahnfrieden 9mo ago
      Rose tinted glasses. Have a look through Jobs era UI again.
      • halapro 9mo ago
        Oh yes Mountain Lion was very very bad. UI was simple, maybe too simple, but it made sense. The only complaint from that era was the thin scroll bars and the flipped scroll direction, both of which are forgotten about and accepted nowadays.
        • egypturnash 9mo ago
          As someone whose primary interaction with her computer is via her drawing tablet stylus I still loathe the thin scroll bars; I've turned them off in prefs but I still regularly encounter apps and websites that force them and they have to be really special to overcome that.
        • 9mo ago
• ineedasername 9mo ago
  Something on this website made my iPhone (16 pro) immediately begin warming up, become hot to the touch, and invoke screen-dimming throttling. I verified by exiting it and reentering, during which the pattern abated and then recurred. The snow? Something else?
  • meindnoch 9mo ago
    You can turn the snow off in the toolbar.
• ajross 9mo ago
  The irony here isn't so much that it's the minutiae of the menu design that's wrong, it's the top-bar menus as a whole are a dead paradigm. Nothing uses them anymore. Leave the mac for a moment and go to your windows device. Pull up Chrome. No menu. The file browser, nope. Not in the terminal either. VSCode still has one![1] But the office suite doesn't anymore[2]. And obviously, the proximate cause of that is that most interaction these days is with phones where horizontal text menus are a non-starter. No one uses menus. So why so get so upset over the mac implementation of a dead paradigm? Because ironically the Macintosh bakes a "menu" into the screen space for you, and has since 1984. Giving up menus on a mac requires that you give up one of the things that make a mac a mac. And that's hard, for marketers even more so than designers. So it persists and festers. But in the rest of the world, we walked away and never looked back. The icons aren't the problem here. [1] "Big" apps for experts still get value out of putting their actions into tightly packed text. Photoshop too, etc... But these are increasingly the exception and not the rule, and even there the next generation of big tools (c.f. Cursor) don't have them. [2] Even worse there, because the tab bar it does have actually looks like a menu but isn't.
  • filchermcurr 9mo ago
    I use menus all the time... I much prefer text to inscrutable icons.
  • vehemenz 9mo ago
    The top menu is not necessarily for common functions. Nor is it true that no one uses it. Chrome’s unique buried menu breaks user expectations. Casual users have trouble finding it.
    • ajross 9mo ago
      Do you have a cite for that? It's a hamburger menu, which is by far a more common menu paradigm in the modern world. Do you imagine some kind of "casual user" who... doesn't have a phone? I repeat: the menu bar is a dying abstraction, preserved in a consistent form only on the Macintosh (even iOS has no equivalent), because it's presence is unavoidable. Users of modern apps don't see it used consistently, so it's absolutely not surprising that Apple's designers aren't doing it either.
• moi2388 9mo ago
  Isn’t this post a bit ironic given all the random snow on the page?!
• deleted 9mo ago
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• hnarn 9mo ago
  This is the second time in just a few weeks I see a post from some UX person complaining about how some major tech company doesn't "understand" design while themselves having a design that is absolutely abysmal. What made this person think that having gigantic snowflakes flying down a page serving only text and images would be a good idea? _edit_: I'd also like to point out that I know it can be disabled, the question(s) I then have are 1) why is it enabled by default 2) black text on yellow background is yet another obvious mistake
  • the_other 9mo ago
    It’s not obvious to me how black on yellow is a mistake. It’s quite readable, the contrast is broad enough for clarity but not so broad the background overwhelms the foreground. Yellow’s a recommended “light” background for visually impaired people so the choice has precedance (although I confess that many other examples of it I’ve seen use a softer pastel yellow which is more comfortable).
    • fainpul 9mo ago
      The huge area of intense yellow (or any highly saturated color actually) is very jarring. The eyes get tired quickly. It's really a weird choice coming from a person who is apparently into visual communication. Btw, I'm using a desktop PC with a large browser window. Maybe on a small mobile screen the problem is less apparent.
      • the_other 9mo ago
        Sure, but "white" has a pretty similar effect, especially on modern high lumen screens. "Dark mode" is popular for a reason. Personally, anecdotally, I find the black-on-yellow easier to work with than most sites' black-on-white. I just tested it with my screen at two or three brightness levels, and it was more comfortable than similar content against white. I'm over-sensitive to glare because my eyes lack pigment. I _think_ this makes me more susceptible to contrast issues (it certainly feels like it, but I am only n=1 and I've not done careful study). I'm open to being challenged on this but you'll have to come with broad audience data to contradict a lot of lived experience. It's fair that you might not like the black-on-yellow; you might feel it's a poor branding choice; but I still contest that it's not "wrong" for any technical, perceptual reason.
• Zealotux 9mo ago
  Tahoe and Liquid Glass™ solidified for me the idea that Apple completely dropped the ball when it comes to design. Clearly they needed an a-hole in charge, Jobs would've crucified a few people. It's painful to see the decay, update after update, into a more confusing, cluttered, and tacky experience.
  • rco8786 9mo ago
    Steve Jobs died 14 years ago. If we're attributing this to those in charge, Jony Ive's departure is much more correlated.
    • nicoburns 9mo ago
      Apple's UI design started going downhill with the iOS 7 "flat design" release which was very shortly after Steve's death, and seemed to correspond to Ive being given a little too much free rein in the leadership vacuum that followed. Jobs had his own flaws, but he was definitely a huge part of why Apple's UI design (and product design in general) has historically been as good as it has.
      • postalcoder 9mo ago
        I agree. Jobs being around for the birth of the GUI probably played a big role in that. Pushing past text-based terminals to graphical interfaces meant having to spend every moment thinking about purposeful interaction and design.
        • Y_Y 9mo ago
          Maybe we could use Vison Pro to recreate a visit to Xerox Parc in 1979 to inspire the current designers to use UI patterns that gave been working well for fifty years.
      • qn9n 9mo ago
        Pretty sure iOS 7 was regarded as awful on launch and then a little while later people decided it was amazing and lovely to look at once the kinks were ironed out. People just don't like new things that change what they are used to.
• core2quad 9mo ago
  Funnily enough, I find icons an improvement overall - even if those are inconsistent, it feels like it gives me more points to anchor my eyes on when skimming through an unknown menu and gives me any context. Starting to use Mac ~3 years ago, I often encountered giant blocks of text in right-click menus and while pleasing aesthetically, those were a chore to actually parse. For someone who daily drives macOS for, I assume, multiple years more than me, it probably comes down to memorisation, and how it looks becomes more important (with Tahoe breaking habits), but I find the inconsistencies and icons something that actually helps me find my ground. Granted, the execution leaves a lot to be improved, I won't argue against it. Tahoe in some places feels downright amateurish. Despite that, I'll still take what Tahoe added over no icons at all... I feel like color icons + using them more sparingly would certainly be better though. I guess a justification for Tahoe icons on my end is - those help me navigate the UI despite all their shortcomings (and ugliness they bring in many places).
  • teddy-smith 9mo ago
    I don't even look at them, they're just visual clutter to me.
    • richrichardsson 9mo ago
      ^ This. I couldn't quite formulate the exact reason why I disliked the Tahoe menus compared to previous versions, but this article nailed it.
  • layer8 9mo ago
    It’s best when only some of the items in a menu (like maybe a third of them) have icons, preferably the most important commands. This gives the menus a visual structure and can also help in better recognizing groups of related items. The classic Windows menu from the article is a good example: https://tonsky.me/blog/tahoe-icons/word@2x.webp?t=1767611340 https://tonsky.me/blog/tahoe-icons/word@2x.webp?t=1767611340
    • core2quad 9mo ago
• jacobp100 9mo ago
  I hope with Alan Dye now out of Apple they will revisit a lot of what just happened. There’s been a lot of places where things have just become worse
• newsclues 9mo ago
  Tahoe needs a serious rethink and fixing the problems it created. Apple (software) has lost its way and needs to return to whatever made them great and different.
• quietsegfault 9mo ago
  I like seeing the icons. It helps me pick the right thing without reading. Seems easier for me.
  • loloquwowndueo 9mo ago
    You can’t read?
    • quietsegfault 9mo ago
      This violates Hacker News guidelines. HN explicitly asks users to be respectful and avoid personal attacks or insults. Responding with “You can’t read?” is a direct insult, adds no substantive discussion, and detracts from the conversation. Try harder.
  • jaffa2 9mo ago
    The irony is that the examples with 'all the icons' require more reading, since it's now impossible to distinguish the 'important' items, and in a lot of cases the icons are the same or wrong, requiring reading to determine what the icon means.
• finnlab 9mo ago
  I’ve always respected macOS for being the 'stable' choice for not-as-techy people. But recent versions feel like a mess. Running Tahoe on my 2019 Mac Pro (Yes the cheese grater one) has been surprisingly frustrating. Simple things are broken: Ableton couldn't even trigger a microphone permission prompt, forcing me to meddle with a SQLite database, which is definitely not meant for end users to touch, just to get it working. Logitech’s software is also stuck in a loop denying it has Bluetooth access (Which it has). And with the added graphical glitches (Apple likes to call them liquid glass) and weird window artifacts (For some reason, all my windows had a black, rectangular border one day), it’s honestly less reliable than my macOS-style Linux rice from 2015. But I'm still stuck with MacOS since I NEED Adobe Lightroom for my work and there is still now way to run that with GPU acceleration on Linux. But if there was, there would be no device running Windows/MacOS left in my household I've also recently come upon this talk by an ex-apple UI/UX engineer: https://youtu.be/1fZTOjd_bOQ https://youtu.be/1fZTOjd_bOQ I think what he's talking about is precisely what got lost at apple. Edit: In case someone stumbles upon this after experiencing the same problem with ableton, here is the command I executed: sqlite3 ~/Library/Application\ Support/com.apple.TCC/TCC.db "INSERT OR REPLACE INTO access VALUES('kTCCServiceMicrophone','com.ableton.live',0,2,4,1,NULL,NULL,0,'UNUSED',NULL,0,1725000000,NULL,NULL,'default',0);" Disclaimer: I have absolutely no Idea what it does, as it was generated by Gemini. I do not have anything super important on this computer so I just executed it, but please don't touch obscure system files if you have data to lose.
  • gnarlouse 9mo ago
    Yeah I'm hopeful that they spend the next software update atoning for their UI sins. I remember being really excited for Liquid Glass, because it felt like a return to the good old days of Skeuomorphism, at least in some spirit. In reality, it was a botched delivery, I suspect for two reasons: 1. Trying to unify all of their design (in one year no less) against one style -- developed primarily on Apple Watch & the now defunct Vision Pro -- was a colossal undertaking. 2. There's so much goddamn software packed into each OS that you're going to inevitably be stuck with bloated menus. Imagine Apple releasing OS 27 this year and saying "we're stripping you down to the bare bones. It's going to feel like Snow Leopard, but we're going to give you customization menus to alter that experience." I would lose my mind with joy. I'd be so excited to be able to operate my fucking phone again.
• postalcoder 9mo ago
  This is an excellent article. Apple has been rudderless on the interaction design front for over a decade now. The windowing mess is evidence of it. We now have the cmd+tab (app switcher), Spaces, Mission Control, (full screen) split screen, Stage Manager, and now tiled window control. None of those interaction metaphors have been expanded upon since their initial launch. I'm a "mac guy". I understood why Apple initially eschewed windows style alt-tab, given the emphasis on app-centricism. But now, they've created a thousand different ways to switch windows without giving us a proper window switcher. There are apps that bring alt-tab to Mac, but they are all bad because Apple doesn't give developers access to the low-level APIs to create performant and fully featured window management. Before, Apple had an endless well of great ideas to tap. That's how we got the term "Sherlocked". However, now that they've locked down macOS so much, they've suffocated themselves of new ideas.
  • walthamstow 9mo ago
    I have to say I've never found anything wrong with the alt-tab app I use on macOS. I wonder if you're referring the permissions it has to ask for? https://github.com/lwouis/alt-tab-macos https://github.com/lwouis/alt-tab-macos
    • postalcoder 9mo ago
      Alt tab is okay but it has performance issues (sometimes window switching is instant, sometimes there's a slight but perceptible delay). The devs have acknowledged it and said that it cannot be fixed. Other pet peeves include the smallest window thumbnails are enormous and enabling mouse hover to switch windows causes me to switch to the wrong window, and thumbnails are often stale.
      • soared 9mo ago
        You can change the window size in settings
        • postalcoder 9mo ago
• lerp-io 9mo ago
  no cuz its easier to read that context menu with icons
• yakkers 9mo ago
  Have to say, it’s quite wild to me that one of the design blunders of macOS Tahoe could be a pages long blog post. I’d actually forgotten about the menu icons in Tahoe (I tried Tahoe during the beta period and lasted less than a day) and at first thought this would just be a pretty short piece on Tahoe’s new application icons. Going back to the article though: another amusing detail is that the one menu where having icons is actually helpful (the Move & Resize menu) actually had those icons before Tahoe.
• mrichman 9mo ago
  For someone critical of UI, he has an awful lot of animated bullshit on that site.
  • diffeomorphism 9mo ago
    Which is very much on purpose to make fun of exactly that. Try some of the other settings in the top right, e.g. the literal hamburger menu.
    • WaltPurvis 9mo ago
      In what way does it make fun of it? It's simply an example of it. And with no apparent way to turn it off. (Edit: There is a non-apparent way to turn it off. I still think having irritating visual effects doesn't constitute making fun of irritating visual effects.)
    • hn_acc1 9mo ago
      Tried that. Does nothing regarding snowflakes that make article next to unreadable.
• gingersnap 9mo ago
  A few days ago there was a post on year of the Linux desktop due to Windows getting worse. The sense is that MacOS isn't degrading as fast, but it still also is looking its lead to linux in usability.
• quietsegfault 9mo ago
  Most of the people I work with use Macs and never talk about the UI being good or bad. And boy, do we talk about insignificant crap that pisses us off. They just don’t care about menu icon alignment or whether the design follows 1992 guidelines. This thread feels like classic HN bikeshedding. The article itself is nearly 5,000 words about menu icons. Menu icons! Yes, the inconsistencies exist. Yes, they could be better. But the level of outrage here doesn’t match reality. People are acting like Apple has completely lost their way over… inconsistent icon styling in dropdown menus that most users don’t even notice.
  • thomas_ma 9mo ago
    Apple’s “way” for many years included a maniacal focus on nailing the details.
  • FarmerPotato 9mo ago
    One of the core values distilled by Steve Jobs for all Apple employees is “Obsess over the user experience.” (2011) It’s been inherent in The Macintosh Way from the beginning.
• meyum33 9mo ago
  Over the years it feels like Federighi’s pleasantness and enthusiasm in those fun videos just don’t translate into the work he oversees. The software mostly work fine but they don’t make me feel “aha” or “this is how it should be done” anymore.
• JaggerJo 9mo ago
  Good that Alan Dye is no longer at apple. Liquid Glass on macOS is a mass. The icons, the floating side menus, the inconsistent corners, the new tabs in Safari.. On iOS it's totally fine, but on macOS it's a disaster. I've only updated one machine so far and will keep all others on Sequoia until this mess is resolved.
  • iamcalledrob 9mo ago
    You can get away with sloppy, cluttered and inconsistent UI on mobile when everything runs serially, full-screen. But bring that to desktop, where your UI is windowed and appears alongside (or overlapping) other windows, and you end up with chaos. The floating sidebars are a prime example of this. Why should I have to expend mental energy to differentiate what's an actual window -vs- what's just a novelty round-rect with a shadow (oh, and and window controls for the parent round-rect, which is a window)?
  • reddalo 9mo ago
    >will keep all others on Sequoia until this mess is resolved Good for you, unless Apple changes its mind my MBPro from 2019 will be stuck on Tahoe forever.
    • JaggerJo 9mo ago
      Hah, really? If you enter recovery mode and install an OS via network it installs the OS the device originally shipped with, right? On an Intel-based Mac: - If you used Option-Command-R to start up from Internet Recovery, you might get the latest macOS that is compatible with your Mac. - If you used Shift-Option-Command-R to start up from Internet Recovery, you might get the macOS that came with your Mac, or the closest version still available. https://support.apple.com/en-us/102655 https://support.apple.com/en-us/102655
      • reddalo 9mo ago
        Ah yes, of course I can install an older version. I meant that it won't get new updates to future (and hopefully better) versions :(
• sgt 9mo ago
  Can someone at Apple who's also on HN please forward this to Craig Federighi? Seems this is a bit of regression or someone asleep at the wheel. I'm overall happy with the stability of Tahoe but some of the design is getting a bit sloppy.
• josefresco 9mo ago
  What an indictment of not only Apple designers, but the entire "science of UX" It's clear now there is no science, it's just designers making... things. Very similar to other design fields where there is no "logic" just trends & vibes. Several generations of potentially brilliant engineers and designers have wasted their careers building advertising empires with shiny buttons.
  • pacifika 9mo ago
    Isn’t this in robust support of science in UX?
    • josefresco 9mo ago
      I dunno, is it "science" if the top designers in the industry can completely ignore it? Engineers can't ignore physics (for long).
      • graypegg 9mo ago
        I mean, if there was only 1 engineering firm that made the iBridge, which represented nearly a quarter of all bridges out there, they might last a bit longer. They really made the bridge experience truly inspiring with the all-new glass I-beams!
  • latexr 9mo ago
    Misapplication of the science isn’t proof the science doesn’t exist. Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines used to be fantastic. One of the reasons they’re sucking so bad right now is they’re ignoring their own previously working rules. That’s what happens when you put in charge arrogant industrial and print designers who think UX and UI are inferior forms of design.
• SkyPuncher 9mo ago
  I tend to disagree with the author on this. Reading actual words takes time (and, for me, mental energy). I have to look at each character, say the word in my head, then visualize what action that word means. Where as icons have a lot more built in meaning (but lack specificity). I tend to use them as a _local_ fuzzy filter (unless it's a common, well known icon like share) then read the words to understand exactly what they mean. In other words, I'm not using icons to find a single action. I'm using icons to quickly understand the available options to me. Meaning, they're only there to help me compare and contrast options within the same visual context. It's fine for the same action to have different icons in different places. When I'm looking at the "File" menu, I'm not really concerned what the action looks like on the toolbar (let alone a different app).
  • sovnade 9mo ago
    But that's the author's point, no? Icons are great when used as visual shortcuts, but the way they're implemented makes absolutely no sense to the point of being detracting. They're inconsistent from menu to menu, even in the same application, and don't even necessarily represent the action they're assigned to.
    • SkyPuncher 9mo ago
      > They're inconsistent from menu to menu, even in the same application, and don't even necessarily represent the action they're assigned to. My point is that none of that matters. They just need to represent something within the context they're being used.
  • afandian 9mo ago
    That's different from how menu icons apart have been used clasically. In e.g. Microsoft Office the save icon was present in the File menu along the text, and also the toolbar, stand-alone. And it was clear enough that you would trust the stand-alone save icon to perform the action you expected. Icons were also selectively chosen for common actions. If icons are considered non-deterministic and non-canonical, then they can't [confidently] be used stand-alone. Also, I'll meet your data point of 1 with mine. I have an iPhone and find it far easier to pick an app from the list of names than pick an icon. I frequently mix them up (and I only use a dozen routinely)
• Pengtuzi 9mo ago
  My iPhone got really hot reading this. It’s either from Steve Jobs turning in his grave, or the snow CSS eating all my CPU cycles.
• vim-guru 9mo ago
  Very much agree! Apple has been dropping the ball lately
• rumori 9mo ago
  It looks like they made a decision to include icons for every menu item and the developers for each app had to come up with an icon association for all menu items. I’m sure they realized along the way that this was a bad idea, maybe it was too late.
• odyssey7 9mo ago
  Introduce UX problems today —> enables a big win when you remove them next version.
  • drooopy 9mo ago
    "Introducing macOS 27 'Snowy Tahoe' with 0 New Features!"
• Jeremy1026 9mo ago
  Including the statement "Adding unpleasant, distracting, illegible, messy, cluttered" on a page with unpleasant, distracting, illegible, messy, and cluttered snowfall is certainly a choice.
• gkanai 9mo ago
  Good Riddance to Alan Dye. Tim Cook- if you do one thing before you retire- promote the right person to fix both MacOS and iOS. They're both in need of a lot of work to fix.
• layer8 9mo ago
  > In menus, the ellipsis character means that the user must provide more information before a command will operate. More specifically, to the user it means they’ll still have the opportunity to back out of the operation; that it won’t take effect immediately upon clicking the menu item. It allows the user to “explore” the command without committing to its execution yet. For that reason, IMO the ellipses in “Attach Files…” and “Add Link…” are appropriate. What I’m seeing more often in practice is that menu items that should have an ellipsis don’t. They make you wonder what the immediate effect of the command would possibly be.
  • abanana 9mo ago
    Indeed, the ellipsis means some kind of dialog box will open. Regarding the wording "the user must provide more information", that's what that dialog box is for, while also providing a "cancel" option so that as you say, the user can back out. Surely "Attach Files..." brings up a file requestor, so it's exactly the correct use. I can't see why the blogger thinks otherwise. It's just a small nitpick though. The article generally seems to do a good job of highlighting some frankly shocking (and worrying amateurish) problems in these menus.
• swiftcoder 9mo ago
  I love that I'm reading this on a site that has decided to obscure the content with falling snow for the holidays
• rado 9mo ago
  Great points and my favourite: The menu now draws a blank frame first, then populates it with items. Sometimes taking up to half a second. Nobody noticed this?
• nmeofthestate 9mo ago
  Windows 11 Explorer adds an accent colour to otherwise monochrome icons, which does help distinguish them. I still don't consciously use the icons when picking a menu item though. Explorer also "promotes" copy/paste commands to the top of the context menu as just icons with no text label, which can be confusing - your instinct is to just to look for a "Copy" or "Paste" item in the menu, but no - for some commands you must learn the icon and the fact that it doesn't appear in the menu proper. Also the context menu populates slowly with dynamic items depending on the right-clicked file which causes items to dodge out of the way of your cursor, but I don't want to get too deep into a wider discussion of the awfulness of Windows 11 Explorer...
  • FarmerPotato 9mo ago
    Oh MacOS Sequoia the menu items will dodge away as you navigate a right-click menu.
• chrishannah 9mo ago
  Tahoe feels like at some level a manager had said "the rule is every menu item needs an icon" and just left individual engineers to figure out what to use.
  • danw1979 9mo ago
    I bet it’s simpler than that: I reckon the management don’t give a shit, and the engineers just got away with whatever they (incorrectly) thought was right because nobody whatsoever was critiquing their work.
  • JamesSwift 9mo ago
    A lot of these actually feel like unifying on a swift UI component library that has a "menu item" component which has a non-nullable icon as a parameter.
• mintflow 9mo ago
  Apple still get quite good revenue and best in class engineers, how does this allowed to happen?
  • layer8 9mo ago
    Because it doesn’t noticeably affect revenue (yet?), and because presumably it’s not the “best-in-class” engineers who are making these decisions, but misguided designers and managers, or engineers who don’t know any better.
• Taek 9mo ago
  Wow, this article is a tour de force in menu and icon design, I learned a lot. For anyone who wants to understand the design world better, or wants a glimpse into the brain of a design-minded person, this is a great article. Incredibly accessible, incredibly insightful, and just overall a gem.
• gmac 9mo ago
  Wow: horrifying. I've been delaying the upgrade, and looks like I'm going to keep right on delaying it.
  • p2detar 9mo ago
    I've decided to completely skip it. I'm not gonna upgrade to Tahoe, unless it's something very vital. This is a UI abomination to me.
• dzonga 9mo ago
  do posts like this ever reach the higher up at Apple say Tim Cook ? or they're buried at the lower levels so the next level boss can't look bad. maybe apple or ex-apple people can comment ?
  • FarmerPotato 9mo ago
    No, they don’t. Issues just get closed.
• weinzierl 9mo ago
  The story goes that the looped square icon(⌘) was introduced because Steve Jobs hated to see apples in every menu line. Not only because of the clutter but he thought it diluted the brand.
• publicdebates 9mo ago
  I used to be a die hard UI perfectionist. I thought there were perfect UIs, and that you could go more or less away from or toward perfection with choices. But lately, over the past 5 or 10 years, it seems to me that perfection in UI is just as arbitrary and mutable as people's tastes and preferences. It's hard to admit it to myself, but I think my love for the early Mac OS and Windows 9x UIs was mere puppy love at first sight, and now is simply nostalgia. To me, it seems very related to the idea of how to fall in love with a person. There seems to be nothing you can measure it against. You simply either do or do not feel a connection with the person, an inexplicable infatuation. And if you do, then that love cools and settles into something more subtle but just as real over decades, until you're holding hands on your deathbeds. Yet I can't for the life of me figure out how it begins, or what its metrics are, or where its catylists come from. I suppose this is what Randall Monroe wondered all those years ago when he came up with his blog's subtitle. If only I could ask him, perhaps I would have the answers to everything.
  • Coeur 9mo ago
    I fell in love with early macos as well, but it was the enormous amount of care they put into it that got me. Maybe it was actually the same thing for you, not puppy love.
  • oneeyedpigeon 9mo ago
    Individual style choices (e.g. whether to use a shadow or not) are always going to be opinionated. Even if one choice is objectively better, it's not going to be so 100% of the time, in every context, to all users. Consistency is always better. App A and App B should use the same save icon, without any caveats, regardless of what it actually is. If you offer me a consistent experience, I'll take it whether it's Windows 95 or Tahoe.
  • bambax 9mo ago
    > But lately, over the past 5 or 10 years, it seems to me that perfection in UI is just as arbitrary and mutable as people's tastes and preferences. No. Perfection exists, but it's not how something works or looks. Perfection is stability. A bad solution that you know inside and out is preferable to a "better" solution that you have to spend time to think about every time you use it.
• tuzemec 9mo ago
  I'm still on Sonoma (14). And it pisses me off that there's no easy way to upgrade to Sequoia (15). I really don't want to touch Tahoe at all.
  • richrichardsson 9mo ago
    I found it extremely easy to find the "macos sequoia installer" to download from Apple's servers. Literally those search terms will do it; download -> install. Admittedly it would be "easier" if Apple gave you the choice of which version to upgrade to in macOS, but that's generally not how software is provided.
  • latexr 9mo ago
    > And it pisses me off that there's no easy way to upgrade to Sequoia (15). Open the Mac App Store and search for Sequoia. https://apps.apple.com/app/macos-sequoia/id6596773750 https://apps.apple.com/app/macos-sequoia/id6596773750
    • sxv 9mo ago
      This doesn't work for me. I see it in the App Store but it says not available for my system and redirects me to the Tahoe update. edit: worked after second attempt (via macappstores://apps.apple.com/app/macos-sequoia/id6596773750?mt=12 )
• oneeyedpigeon 9mo ago
  > These are OS basics, these are foundational. Every app has them, and they are always in the same place. They shouldn’t look different! This is the key point for me. I think I go further than the OP, though; I would almost force apps to use the stock menu items. Declare that your app has to save stuff, and the OS can take care of supplying a 'File -> Save' menu item, a Save toolbar icon, and a Save keyboard shortcut. I guess the more 'liberal' way of doing this would be to make it so easy to do the above that you would really have to go very far out of your way to purposefully deliver a worse experience. But you're free to do that if you're so inclined.
• DemocracyFTW2 9mo ago
  I've found the 'same' (abstract) gripe in related fields: for example, PostgreSQL allows users to extend the language with custom operators that must be composed from multiple punctuation marks; the intended use is so you can write succinct formula-like operations like `case when my_container <@ my_elements then ...` or `set participants = applicants <&&> employees` and so on. The problem with these of course is that it's often very hard to guess what some kind of !!`#+*@ semantics a given grawlix is intended to have; both `case when is_subset_of( my_elements, my_container ) then ...` and `set participants = union_of( applicants, employees )` are much clearer. Another example are customized extensions of MarkDown syntax. To my mind constructs like `[link title](like_address)` already stretch things and the only justification for having brackets plus parentheses to stand in for link syntax is their ubiquity. One of the downsides of this terse syntax is its resilience to extensibility. For example, when you start with an exclamation mark as in `` now all of a sudden your code is understood as an `<img>` tag, not an `<a>` tag. What if you need extra attributes? There have been multiple suggestions how to extend `` to include desired image dimensions, none have become standard. You probably should fall back to inserting HTML, which I am fine with. Lastly, when designing a user interface, I have found that having to choose icons is a significant burden, and often one without satisfactory solution. One of my solutions in the past was to fall back to Apollo-era text-only buttons; sure, the texts would have to be localized, but then the entire application is subject to localization anyway. A plus is that each button with a short text instead of a picture already provided the mnemonic, the identifier for that action, something an icon does not do for you.
• Tepix 9mo ago
  Excellent article. What really got my respect was the fact that his videos listed at https://tonsky.me/talks/ https://tonsky.me/talks/ are not hosted on YouTube.
• guerrilla 9mo ago
  I'm not even going to finish the article. I never want to see these kinds of icons again. You win. Good news is, I'm not seeing a lot of these in GNOME and Gtk+ apps, so I'm already okay. There's only a couple in Firefox. Actually, good luck even locating the menus in GNOME. They keep moving and becoming fewer and fewer with every generation.
• foltik 9mo ago
  The average person can get used to arbitrarily terrible UX. See 87% of the workforce that uses sluggish corporate-bloatware-filled windows laptops every day. It’s only those who have experienced and gotten used to something drastically better that will be sensitive to all the shortcomings. Apple software used to be that elevated experience for the average person. Given the lack of basic consistency though, it’s evident that there are no leaders at Apple that care about UX enough to thoroughly design and test the whole software experience anymore. Just a bunch of random teams doing whatever. I wonder why every large company seems to fall off in the same way?
• DrScientist 9mo ago
  Also why-o-why is the close menu item directly next to the save item? Imagine wanting to save and accidentally click close.... > Or two-letter As that only slightly differ in the font size: In that one case having a large A for bigger and smaller A for smaller makes sense.
• oneeyedpigeon 9mo ago
  Given the headline, the article took longer to deal with the alignment issue that I was expecting! However, I noticed that some of the screenshots were less affected than I remembered, so I checked my own OS. It turns out that Apple has, sort of, addressed the mismatched alignment problem in its own apps. Oh, but Google hasn't, so Chrome's icons are still all over the place. Apparently, that's not for the OS to sort out, but every single individual app. Oh, while some of the menus in Preview are fixed (File, Edit), others aren't (View, Tools). So it's not just down to each app to manage its own icon alignment, but each menu!
• titzer 9mo ago
  As it happens I updated to Tahoe a couple days back. This entire UI refresh strikes me as completely unnecessary. I didn't even notice the menu icons. Thanks for that. Just another thing to be annoyed about. But really, the glaringly obvious ones are already in your face. 1. There is no setting to get rid of the ridiculously over-rounded corners. 2. The dock, which I put on the left, now has about 10 extra pixels between it and the edge of the screen. 10 pixels that now will never, ever, be usable again. 3. All the icons have been forced into a rounded corner box. As it turns out, the human brain is really good at recognizing silhouettes. This just made that part of my brain useless. It retroactively restyled applications' icons that I've used for over a decade. I'm sure I'll find others, but it's clear that Apple does not care about users. This all about power. They didn't even include settings to turn any of this off...just "take it like we wanna give it to you, plebes". Infuriating. And none of these things matter. Literally none of them are core to how an operating system works, just how it looks. I just don't understand UX people, and at this point I'm starting to hate them.
• sirwhinesalot 9mo ago
  It's hard to justify Liquid Glass in general. The wastefulness of flat design (in terms of space) married with the visual excess of skeuomorphism, but without even providing any affordances (does the sidebar being raised give you any new information on how to use a sidebar? No). If you're a designer at a top 10 S&P 500 company making 6 figures, you owe it to yourself to have some love for your craft. If a PM tells you to shove a UI style meant for an unsuccessful VR device onto desktop and mobile platforms, say no. Get your colleagues to say no. Make that PM read everything the Nielsen Norman group has ever written. Read it too.
  • reddalo 9mo ago
    I agree, Liquid (Gl)ass is hideous. I'll stick to macOS Sequoia for the time being.
    • codyb 9mo ago
      MacOS 26 highlights were... and this was _Apple's_ opening modal... "Icons that look like shit!" and "Notification summaries that may not be correct!" In general I feel as if Apple's software feels buggier and less solid lately across my iPhone and my computers. Won't be upgrading the personal computer for as long as possible
      • euroderf 9mo ago
        > Apple's software feels buggier and less solid lately across my iPhone and my computers. Agreed. Rendering is very flaky. Input events are dropped. Blinky. Laggy. Two of the Seven Dwarves of Liquid Glass.
        • shermantanktop 9mo ago
          Buggy, Flaky, Dropsy, Blinky, Laggy... that's five. How about Wobbly and Gloopy to round out the seven?
      • Hamuko 9mo ago
        I got a new Apple Watch and just getting it set up was a pain. For some reason the passcode input would fail to register key prompts and I had to spam the buttons until something clicked. Then I gave my old Apple Watch to my mom and the setup failed like three times before we managed to get it done. Did make me wonder if anyone at Apple actually tests setting up these devices.
• issafram 9mo ago
  The snow effect made it unbearable for me to finish reading
• reactordev 9mo ago
  Apple design has a designer problem. For far too long they worshiped the Ives of design, distilled it until there was no flavor left, and then lost their Oracle. Ever since, they have produced sub-par UX/UI experiences. They don't follow their own guiding principals, and they let shareholders and executives tell them what they should do. They figured they mastered remote work before anyone else and rested on their laurels while the industry innovated itself beyond. What was once the pinnacle of user experience is now sub-standard. It takes an extra second to unlock my phone now because of the stupid icon animations. The glass effect on the desktop doesn't look good at all. It didn't in 2006 with Vista, it doesn't now. The only thing keeping me on the Mac is the unified memory M series chips and *nix pedigree. Soon, I'll get my hands on one of those fancy AMD AI Max's and go Linux everywhere.
  • wpm 9mo ago
    The issue is that on Linux, unless you are really careful and fastidious in lowering your expectations, there is no desktop environment that comes close to the experience on macOS (despite its now numerous flaws and horrible regressions).
    • reactordev 9mo ago
      I disagree entirely when we have ravynos. MacOS isn’t a great experience, it’s a walled garden.
• Arnt 9mo ago
  Oh god, collecting these screenshots must've magnified the pain so much.
• oliwarner 9mo ago
  It's hard to take a post about UX and accessibility seriously when there's a crappy snow effect precipitously eroding my will to read. Edit: Oh there is an icon to disable it, but still.
• avra 9mo ago
  The snowflakes are a clever engagement hack. They doubled the amount of comments here. I find it funny for the moment, but I hope this will not become the norm for hn posts.
• doodlesdev 9mo ago
  These don't seem to be well thought at all. While reading the article, I've started wondering if they were chosen by an LLM after some developers decided it wasn't worth the trouble of going through every single application and choosing icons for every single menu item. That would explain a lot, in my opinion.
  • layer8 9mo ago
    What likely happened is that design leadership commanded that everything needs to have an icon, and most of the individual developers tasked with updating the menus just pick the next best icon from the provided icon library, because there exists no further guidance or oversight. There’s probably a designated procedure for requesting new icons, but why bother if nobody is checking your work.
• blacktestscreen 9mo ago
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• ValleZ 9mo ago
  It’s hard to justify the UI rant when there is annoying snowflakes animation on top of it.
• soapdog 9mo ago
  That article almost made me cry. I was reading the NewtonOS 2.0 Human Interface Guidelines yesterday and it was so clear, so well-thought. The mess we find ourselves into in macOS Tahoe is impossible to excuse. I have no idea how that got out of the door.
• necovek 9mo ago
  Ever since I first tried a modern Mac (around the time of M1 MacBook Pros with Max coming out: work mandated, or I wouldn't), I could easily see inconsistencies all around the system, and could never get to grips to why people cling to the belief that it has consistent, simple UI. It was as inconsistent as GNOME (which I mainly use), and sometimes more so (though this could be my personal bias, since I've used GNOME since before 2.0 days, so 2003 or so -- though, I'd note that 2.x series was significantly more consistent, especially with Sun-contributed GNOME HIG, than 3.x still is). Not to even mention hardware support, as I had a lot of issues with Realtek external USB network devices randomly disconnecting (and they are in many USB-C hubs, including inside USB-C monitors), with no such issues under Ubuntu. I imagine there is some history around MacOS being similarly much better in the past, but I've never seen anything great about MacOS UI/UX in comparison to GNOME. I do like their performance and battery life, but the "shells" it's stuck in also sucks (until recently, only glossy screens; shallow keyboards with sharp palmrest edges; either heavy or passively cooled; no touchpad buttons...). Putting some of this hardware into a new Thinkpad X1 Carbon case would be amazing, though I'd want to run Linux on it.
• blenderob 9mo ago
  This is genuinely disheartening. As I continued reading the fine article, disappointment began settling in. Does nobody care about doing a good job anymore? When even multi-trillion-dollar companies cannot execute projects with some baseline level of quality and craft, it paints a disappointing picture. Very sad and disappointing. :(
• jedwards1211 9mo ago
  I don’t think it’s a good idea to require an icon for everything, some actions are hard to depict with an icon. But on the other hand, I think 95% of the icons in the first menu in this article are clear and probably help most people navigate faster.
• tanepiper 9mo ago
  I'm still on Sequoia, almost 100% of the reason is how bad OSX26 looks. There's absolutely nothing compelling me to update right now
  • freehorse 9mo ago
    Same. All my colleagues had to update, and I feel dread just looking at their screens. There is something very deeply disturbing in this new design that I cannot even pinpoint. I wait and hope that some point apple will revert certain changes, or at least give more options for disabling some stuff.
• quyleanh 9mo ago
  Sorry, it's because they are busy with marketing liquid glass theme.
• botanrice 9mo ago
  As a fan of pictograms in general and very much a visual learner, I don't mind Tahoe icons or menu icons in general. By default I look to those first and then the text, it works for me. That said, Apple's Liquid Glass is really poor UI. It works okay on my Macbook but feel like it's basically broken a couple features of my second gen iPhone SE, which is kind of untenable imo. Apple also clearly seems to design for larger devices now, which I get but... am I any less of a customer because I use an older device? why should I be de-prioritized? Lastly, speaking of UI/UX - this blog's website was really bad! Ironic that a blog on UI/UX would have bubbles floating down the screen interfering with text readability and no way to turn them off!
  • JamesSwift 9mo ago
    Im also starting to slowly suffer as a fellow iPhone SE enjoyer. Every month another app or website has some UI update that doesnt take the SE screen size into account and is either awkward to use or sometimes impossible because they dont allow scrolling.
    • botanrice 9mo ago
      I am a full-stack dev that does a lot of front-end work and I can't even comprehend not checking every possible screensize when designing my app lol it's so easy to both test and design for all screen sizes now. I don't get why this is a struggle for some site or apps.
• compiotr 9mo ago
  I love this post. Had me laughing quite a bit.
• Surac 9mo ago
  I think all the icon „bloat“ is from the designers that needed to stay relevant. They learned to use pictures instead of text from some professors and wanted to show how much they are worth. The picture for text pattern is valid if you want to replace one or two words in a commercial but not if you have about 200 icons on your page. Also the trend to a flat black and white design makes the icons just to blend together
• simlevesque 9mo ago
  The old guidelines assumes the user is literate. Apple's focus has changed since then. I'm not saying it's working well, but this vision leads to things like this.
• yoz-y 9mo ago
  Ah least partly I believe the inconsistencies are due to the design of SF Symbols. That is, they are named after what they look like, rather than what they represent. E.g.: “square.and.arrow.up” rather than “share”. I do prefer this approach because it makes the symbols generally more useful for everything else than menu/toolbar icons. However as the article makes very obvious, unless a consistent scheme is placed in place, program developers will choose whatever they want to represent common actions.
• vincnetas 9mo ago
  Well at least lots of designers at apple can now claim "I created icons for mac os"
  • reddalo 9mo ago
    ...as if they were Susan Kare.
• skerit 9mo ago
  This is brutal. The examples just kept on coming. Halfway through the article I assumed it must have a bunch of comments under it, but nope. More brutal examples
• exe34 9mo ago
  I love the snow on the web page, it highlights the message really well!
• 1718627440 9mo ago
  > I’m not saying there’s an obvious metaphor for “Open” Apple missed. There isn’t. Citation needed. The open icon is general a file containing an arrow or a file as a metaphor of taking a file out of a folder. I just tested with MS Windows XP, MS Windows 7, MS Windows 10 and Mate/Gnome 2.
• Pxtl 9mo ago
  The inconsistency and monochrome nature is problematic but imho including your icons alongside the text representation wherever practical is good because it educates the user what those icons mean so that when they see the icon without the context of the text representation they will know. Including the hotkeys in the menu is good for similar reasons. Does it help me find and click the menu item? No. But does it help me use that action next time without going through the menu? Yes. Icons are same. Imho the best layout for menu-bars was Windows Phone 7. In WP7, a toolbar of action button icons were shown along the bottom of the screen along with a kebab-button. Clicking the kebab-button would just expand out the bottom-bar into a menu showing the icons in the same order as they were in the toolbar along with a text description. Below the toolbar icons would be all other non-toolbar commands. It made it clear that the toolbar and the menu were the same thing, just the toolbar is an abbreviated form of the menu for the sake of economy of screen real-estate. Putting icons throughout menus is kind of a cruder version of same. I like that.
• davidmurdoch 9mo ago
  I don't mind the icons, but the snow effect on the website makes it much harder to read.
• yosser 9mo ago
  I've just gone through the rather painful and protracted process of reverting from Tahoe to Sequoia.'Reverting' rather than 'downgrading' since Tahoe is in no sense an upgrade. I consider myself quite tolerant of UX quirks, iPhones are still pleasant to use, particularly if you select 'reduce motion' from the accessibility settings. Tahoe though, bugs aside, is just genuinely unpleasant to use and interact with. By far the most offensive thing to me is the pointless rounded rectangle thing. It delivers absolutely no value at all to the user and defies any form of justification. How in any form is this a decision designed to improve things for the user? The other multiple weirdnesses commented on elsewhere while unpleasant are more liveable with, but I honestly never found a single change that improved my interactions with the computer. How on earth can you have spent a whole year on this and why didn't anyone have the authority to pull the plug? I would no longer recommend a new mac to my anyone. A second hand model running a previous operating system makes far more sense.
  • rantingdemon 9mo ago
    Did you follow a guide to revert black?
    • yosser 9mo ago
      Sort of, but be warned it wont automatically revert a time machine backup of your Tahoe files to a Sequoia system, you have to manually copy them. Similarly you have to recovery boot into disk utility to flatten your hard drive before installing Sequoia from (say) a memory stick. It all seems a bit needlessly tricky. Frankly though - for me at least - it's worth the trouble.
• meisel 9mo ago
  What is with the annoying snow going over the text? That is a pretty “arbitrary” graphic element
• anymouse123456 9mo ago
  The icons are another symptom. A brand new Apple iPhone 17 Pro. Constantly lagging and locking up in preparation for another transparent animation that absolutely no one asked for. Feeling like Apple just mugged me and stole $1,000.
• patrick4urcloud 9mo ago
  very nice article of how apple get confuse of a good ui. is it part of global Enshittification or did big tech forgot all past good rules ? i guess , steve jobs would have made an heart attack reading your article :)
• NoMoreNicksLeft 9mo ago
  I think that these icons are a great idea. With the rise of illiteracy, you can no longer count on people being able to read the labels in menus. What better way to ensure that Apple comes out on top in the post-apocalyptic wasteland than the genesis of a new primitive ideographic writing system? 10,000 years from now, when Apple users are grunting and hooting to argue about which icon means "make computer magic remember!", you'll all have been proven wrong.
  • kccqzy 9mo ago
    This article provided a good counterpoint; there is a picture where all text labels in menus have been removed and just the icons are left. It’s worse than having only text labels.
    • NoMoreNicksLeft 9mo ago
      The end of the world would not be complete without the death of humor.
• SamuelAdams 9mo ago
  Ironically adding a snowfall CSS effect to this blog also makes it difficult to read and use.
• facundo_olano 9mo ago
  Is there a recommended modern day, non mac specific, equivalent to those "Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines" linked at the beginning of the article?
• paperpilot 9mo ago
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• paperpilot 9mo ago
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• dionian 9mo ago
  am i the only one who likes liquid glass
• 827a 9mo ago
  Big words coming from the guy rendering dense falling snow over the entire article content.
• deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
• DrewADesign 9mo ago
  Looking at a bunch of developers assume expertise in interface design while shitting all over design as a field used to be a rage bait situation for me, but it’s fruitless. I’ve been both, and I was a developer long before I was a designer. I don’t think you have to be an expert to criticize an interface, and you definitely don’t have to like it, and some number of designers undoubtedly agree. But I encourage you to consider that the osmosis-learned nibbles about design and that Edward Tufte book you enjoyed might not qualify you to judge the competence of the better part of an entire set of professions. Most developers don’t even know what actual problems designers are tasked to solve, let alone evaluate their efficacy. Developers are a lot better at knowing when they know something than realizing when they don’t. NOBODY is good at discussing what they’re used to with what’s objectively good or bad. The “I don’t care what anybody says — this is just objectively bad” attitude is something that arises with literally any interface change in any major product. Developers have a very different usage style than most people and when you get a bunch of people in one place agreeing with each other without any outside voices, that’s an echo chamber at best and a circle jerk at worst. To be clear, I’m not even discussing, let alone defending the design: I’m countering the cocky obnoxious designer hate that pops up in these threads. PS— Edward Tufte has some interesting perspectives on data visualization but the reason he’s so popular with the engineering crowd is because he was an engineer and he makes cut-and-dried rules about things that are easy to understand without any design education, and explains them in a way that appeals to engineers. Reading that book is better than nothing, but it’s gives laypeople about as much understanding of design as a “[language] cookbook” gives laypeople an understanding of programming.
• smeeth 9mo ago
  I suspect this sort of thing starts to happen when UX decision-making gets decentralized. No single god-king would allow six or more different new icons; the lack of uniformity is obviously nonsensical to anybody, but not necessarily to a disorganized collective of anybodies.
• __bjoernd 9mo ago
  Oh, that snow backdrop really hits hard while talking about other people's UI failures...
• codr7 9mo ago
  It's lacking taste, as is everything from Apple these days.
• rozab 9mo ago
  Similar discussion on similar blog post from last month: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46196688 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46196688
• saberience 9mo ago
  This times 100000. I've been using Mac OS since 1992 and this version (both IOS and MacOS) has had me pulling my hair out more than every other version, and note, I did use OSX 10.0! The first thing I did with Tahoe was go into the System Preferences to try and turn off as much as possible of the new UI because it's the biggest regression in Mac OS history (at least since I've been using Macs). I used to mock Windows for the Explorer UI and general GUI experience, now I think I prefer using my Windows 10 PC over my Mac. It's just such a fucking mess, so inconsistent, shitty performance (even on brand new macs and phones), is actively harder to grok, much harder to use for my elderly parents, and doesn't even look "cooler" or "better" in any way. It's just worse on every possible metric, and made me start wondering about an Android phone, which has never happened since I bought an original iPhone. I am and have been the ultimate Apple fanboy since 1992, but this release fucking sucks balls. I hope you're listening Apple.
• ddon 9mo ago
  Page about usability has distracting snow all over the page :)
• misterbishop 9mo ago
  Posting about the finer points of UX while your whole page has a geocities snow animation.
• tomaskafka 9mo ago
  And then you have Sylvio Rizzi (of Reeder fame) just one-shotting the whole Liquid Glass tenet by using the prominent glass element to focus on the actual content instead of that hideous sidebar (a liquid glass element I hate the most, not just for a way it makes Xcode 26 sidebar 1 cm wider than Xcode 18 with the same content). I would wear the t-shirt with Reeder screenshot to work if I worked at Apple, and would observe who notices it. https://x.com/tomaskafka/status/2008168483608293873 https://x.com/tomaskafka/status/2008168483608293873
  • dxdm 9mo ago
    I don't understand the point you're trying to make. I clicked on your link to your own post on x.com and found pretty much the same text, plus a screenshot that does not explain anything - potentially because I don't know how to get to a full-screen-sized version of that image, but I actually doubt that would help. If it can't be explained in words here on this site, could you please tell me what I'm looking at/for in the screenhot?
    • davidivadavid 9mo ago
      I'm not intimately familiar with the UI/UX principles behind Liquid Glass so I could be wrong, but the main difference I see here is that in the second screenshot, on the Reeder app on the left, the "floating" section is used for emphasis on the main content area (right hand side), while in the Finder screenshot on the right, it's the navigation menu on the left that is floating, and brings unneeded emphasis to itself. Looking at it for 30s, I still don't understand what Apple was trying to do. What am I supposed to believe happens to the table as it goes under that floating menu? It clearly doesn't seem to continue all the way to the left edge of the window. Why not? If not, why bother with that whole floating menu concept if the underlying content arbitrarily stops at the menu? The most surprising part to me is how people keep calling that nonsense "skeuomorphic" when it doesn't replicate any kind of physical intuition known to mankind. It's just made up physics that looks dumb.
      • tomaskafka 9mo ago
• apricot 9mo ago
  So much effort is spent in the computer industry to un-solve previously solved problems.
• queenkjuul 9mo ago
  I agree with the piece but i have a hard time admitting that a site with fake snow falling in front of the screenshots is dispensing sound design advice
• throwaway290 9mo ago
  I hate liquid glass a lot but it's hard to take seriously this when there are snowflakes falling in front of the text.
• AutumnsGarden 9mo ago
  Article is alright but the website itself induces a LOT of lag. The heavy particle use is very distracting and makes the article hard to read.
• philipallstar 9mo ago
  The funny thing is the most clear example of useful icons, the eight top/left/bottom/right/corners options, could be more helpfully replaced by a single image where you click on it in the place you want the stuff, and remove the text entirely (other than for screen reader support).
• hammeiam 9mo ago
  I'm not going to take design advice from somebody who animates snow falling over the text and images of his blog
• dwoldrich 9mo ago
  Disgusting. I couldn't even read through to the end. Are there some perverse incentives to having the OS upgrades be free? Is that what is causing this? Do they simply have no taste?
• panzi 9mo ago
  On my phone that website had some ash rain animation all over it, making it unreadable without reader mode. WTF.
• pianom4n 9mo ago
  It's hard to take complaints about UI consistency seriously when the cursor is changed for no reason at all (with a barely-different hover state, too).
• canucker2016 9mo ago
  One of the touted advantages when Microsoft introduced the Office product suite was the integration and consistency of the apps. Whether you opened Word, Excel or Powerpoint, when the user wanted to quit the app, they'd use the same command - they didn't need to realize that the Quit command at a certain location in one menu had the same functionality as the Exit menu that was positioned in another location in another menu in another app. Same name, same menu location, same shortcut key. Much easier to train yourself or your employees - learn one app and you'd be familiar with the other apps in the Microsoft Office product line. Other companies that tried to create Office-like suites didn't/couldn't create the consistency amongst the apps since they had to acquire the missing apps from other software makers to complete their own Office-like suite. But this consistency was tempered by common sense. The goal of shortcut keys was to make common actions quickly accessible to users. But for consistency, the same shortcut key should be used across apps. When Mail/Outlook was introduced, users found that CTRL-F was bound to the Find command. Makes sense on first thought. But what's the most common command in an email app - is it "Find" or is it "Forward email". Especially when the prevailing standard for CTRL-F in email apps was CTRL-F. When Bill Gates angrily complains that he's always invoking the Find command by mistake, Program Managers are willing to make exceptions to dogma. It'd be interesting to compare the menus in Apple's iWork suite (Pages / Numbers / Keynote) to see if their menu items /shortcut keys are consistent or unique. Note that this Microsoft Office suite consistency didn't necessarily extend to other Microsoft apps. There's no one managing menu item consistency company-wide at Microsoft, just within Office.
  • FarmerPotato 9mo ago
    Look at where it came from. Excel was a Macintosh app. By 1989, Microsoft had designed one or two Mac applications to blend seamlessly with MacPaint, MacWrite, and MacDraw. (MacProject became MS Project IIRC.) Word on Mac was a native GUI while Word remained DOS based and Word for Windows was still launched from DOS by typing WINWORD.EXE. Apple Human Interface Guidelines were foundational to Win 3.1. At the same time, doing UI on Unix I was always asked to solve problems by “doing it the Apple Way.” My secret was the MITRE Corp UI book which surveyed best practices from all platforms and underlined the reasoning.
• drnick1 9mo ago
  It's time to try GNOME. It's MacOS-like (without really copying any specific aspect of it), incredibly clean and polished. Add a dock with the Dash to Dock extension if you want to make it even more similar.
• DamnInteresting 9mo ago
  I personally enjoy changes of scenery, but my parents struggle to relearn how to use their computer every time there is a major OS update that revamps the UI. It's seldom better, it's just change for change's sake, resulting in a lot of time lost to relearning. Sticking to the old OS is only viable as long as security updates continue. I wish that OS developers would provide the option to retain the bulk of the old UI when a new one comes out, implementing the UI like a swappable "theme." People who prefer consistency could keep most of their old UI, and those who prefer the newer UI can have it.
• junglistguy 9mo ago
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• junglistguy 9mo ago
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• WhyNotHugo 9mo ago
  The world is full of incredibly smart and talented developers… But where are they? Because they’re not leaving their imprint on any of the big tech companies in recent years.
• treymalikcruz 9mo ago
  I am very glad I have maintained my hesitance to update the operating systems on my Apple devices. The Liquid Glass announcement from the jump seemed really just like 1. a transparent (no pun intended) ploy to answer broad anti flat design sentiments from the public, without any expressed functional benefit and 2. a way to normalize this sort of design with an eye on a future of wearables and AR devices, something they seemed fairly invested in with the release of the Vision Pro. All of this is at the cost of immediate visual clarity, as it only adds more visual noise to the interface and removes (or at least inhibits) color as a core visual differentiator. This new system of icons is something I was entirely unaware of until now, since I haven't updated or had to use an updated MacOS device. I've in the past been a defender of MacOS, but it really does feel like the decision making is completely off the rails and has no consideration of the most basic principles of design. Baffling.
• maipen 9mo ago
  I see a lot of people talking about the past, but I think this is just a reminder that no matter how successful they become, there will always be these periods where companies and people lose focus. The exact reason/s for this to happen is hard to figure out. Leadership changes, trends, getting too comfortable, lack of competition, the list goes on... There's always bad reactions to change, but eventually they fade away because the product turns out to be good and just needs some time to get used to it. But this time, this is not the case. Liquid glass sucks and so does the UX that came with it. Apple will eventually fix this mess, they have all the resources in the world to do so.
• BLACKCRAB 9mo ago
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• auxiliarymoose 9mo ago
  Much of the problem stems from inconsistent application of icons. This would have gone better if Apple established (and followed!) clear guidelines for exactly which icon to use for which standard action (e.g. search). That the icons exist is not necessarily a problem, since they can help teach users which buttons in the UI do which actions. (menu bar for discovery, app UI for less mouse travel + contextual options). But that requires consistency, which the current implementation lacks...
• threethirtytwo 9mo ago
  Little UI elements like that are generally inconsequential. I agree they have changed for the worse in a negligible way. The reason for all this change is simple. The first reason is planned obsolescence. The GUI has to change enough such that it looks like there’s constant progress so users think the company is moving forward when in reality GUI design plateaued decades ago. The second reason is designers need to stay employed. So they change inconsequential things and make up reasoning to justify it. Liquid Glass is one of these things. I also want to note that the most useable GUI is not the prettiest GUI. The current MAC GUI looks more modern and better then he one in the OPs guideline example. So gui design isn’t just about usability, it’s about manipulating consumer psychology. As consumers ourselves There’s two traps here that people fall for. The first is aforementioned it’s that it looks better and feels flashier (like Liquid Glass) but isn’t rationally or logically better (in fact it can be worse). Most HNers don’t fall for this trap. The second trap is to think these changes actually matter. Liquid Glass barely changed anything. More icons barely changed anything. This entire blog post is making it out to be a bigger deal than it is when in actual reality the difference is so minor it’s negligible. Every HNer falls for this trap.
  • OsrsNeedsf2P 9mo ago
    > The second reason is designers need to stay employed. So they change inconsequential things and make up reasoning to justify it. Liquid Glass is one of these things. Working at BigTech, this is the answer. ICs need to find their own impact. That's how you get things like Material Design 3 which talked about how "Bold" it made a brand look - "Boldness" is something you can measure with user tests, and designers need something they can point to and call success; even if everyone knows it's stupid.
    • sam1906 9mo ago
      [dead]
    • nomel 9mo ago
      For any bureaucratic system, the system will slowly transition away from the reason it was put into place and towards self preservation.
• next_xibalba 9mo ago
  This article reads like opinions and vibes without a solid grounding in data. For example: "Look how much faster you can find Save or Share in the right variant..." But each variant took me the same amount of time. Or so I think. But that demonstrates the issue: is any of this being measured and analyzed? My opinion is that much of design is just "convincing opinion wins" (where convincing-ness is often not at all based on measurement of some kind), leading to crappy stuff like ultra flat design and Corporate Memphis.
• zaidf 9mo ago
  My hope is that the new generation of designers/UX people question and reject many of the UI/UX patterns made popular in the past 15 years and go back to the 90s for inspiration. Resources like the Apple Design Guidelines from 1992 linked in the OP is excellent! Perhaps my biggest gripe is that many of these terrible UI/UX patterns are built in at such a low level, it is near impossible for developers to override them in the software they build. For example, I really dislike flat UI and particularly flat scrollbars. But it is near impossible to add scrollbars that look like these in any Windows or Mac app I build: https://flowingdata.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/evolution-of-the-scrollbar-1536x1116.png https://flowingdata.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/evolution... Usability has become theatre across Apple products. The sad part is that since Microsoft just seems to copy Apple, over time Windows usability has also degraded severely. I am so frustrated by what Apple, Microsoft and Google have done.
  • gonational 9mo ago
    IMHO, the "new generation" of designers is the problem. Same goes for the "new generation" of developers. Want to make a basic HTML page with a contact form? Better get React + 300 dependencies, require the backend to provide a REST endpoint... fast forward six months... Why has this happened? Everything is too easy. You used to have to have pretty good intelligence to break into UI design and software development. Now, anyone can do it with 30 minutes of "e-learning", and, therefore, the average IQ of a UI designer/or software engineer has decreased, dramatically.
    • zaidf 9mo ago
      Fair enough. But tides do shift. A lot of today’s terrible patterns (like flat design) were born in the late 2000s and early 2010s. The current generation of UI and UX folks—for simplicity, designers in their 20s—who are empowered to make both big and small decisions at Big Tech are largely riding that inherited wave. There’s still time for their taste to evolve as their confidence and seniority grow.
• ctippett 9mo ago
  500+ comments and no one's mentioned the jack of all trades "share" button? I would really love to see the internal metrics around how many users press share because they're actually sharing something versus wanting to use any one of the myriad of other functions it hides. Exhibit A: In Safari I had to "share" this page to use the "Find on Page" feature to search whether anyone had mentioned the share button yet. Bonkers.
  • myguysi 9mo ago
    Yep also ran into this while trying to search the article. It’s maddening when the share action is now also hidden within a context menu.
  • mcslambley 9mo ago
    > Exhibit A: In Safari I had to "share" this page to use the "Find on Page" feature to search whether anyone had mentioned the share button yet. Bonkers. You can also long-press on the address bar to see a whole slew of even more hidden functionality
    • ctippett 9mo ago
      It's very hard to reply without making a snarky sarcastic comment at Apple's expense. Thanks for sharing that super intuitive interface trick, it's so obvious now I know it's there. (seriously though, thanks).
  • strbean 9mo ago
    Is this specific to mobile? Feels like this could be a riff on Android's 'Share' functionality, which is actually the user-friendly name for "send an Intent". And that means that any inter-app handling ends up stuffed into a "Share" menu that pretends only social media apps exist. So you do "Share -> Edit with Photoshop" or similar.
    • ctippett 9mo ago
      Sounds like Android's share button is exactly as ambiguous as the one on macOS/iOS... A dumping ground for all the misfit utilities and functions that couldn't find a home anywhere else on the system.
• pmdr 9mo ago
  Apple has been poisoning the design space the last 5-10 years, they're not just doing it to themselves.
• 0xedd 9mo ago
  [dead]
• ashleyn 9mo ago
  I suspect the icons have to do with a non-english or reading disabilities accessibility requirement. I'd argue it's not comparable to the 1992 standards because there's not clutter on the right due to dimming for the hotkey labels. These guidelines were written only slightly through Mac OS's colour era, with an extensive install base of monochrome Macintoshes where you could only depict dimming with hard-to-read dithering. Now that colour is ubiquitous, this gives designers the option to fade or tint UI items to make them look less distracting or to deemphasise them.
  • eschaton 9mo ago
    By 1992, the Mac had supported color for almost twice as long (5 years) as it had been a monochrome-only system (3 years).
• a022311 9mo ago
  It's been a few years since I last used a Mac and the careful design I had known no longer exists. This made me realize the situation even worse than I imagined it to be based on Tahoe's reviews. Even without a designer's detail-aware eyes, I couldn't stop facepalming with what I saw. I'd be embarrassed to ship that and call it an improvement! Apple icons may look cool and consistent when browsing them all together as part of SF Symbols, but all that disappears when used incorrectly.
• ericyd 9mo ago
  Am I the only one confused why an opinion piece criticizing the superfluous and distracting design choices of Tahoe has a continuous and uninterruptable snow animation that makes the entire thing harder to read?
  • mostlysimilar 9mo ago
    There's a button at the top of the page to disable it.
• hmokiguess 9mo ago
  This makes me think there’s a sort of system level thing applied to pairing icons with menu items, so, with SIP disabled, would it be possible to modify this? I’m already running things like Yabai and Hammerspoon for a lot of mods, might as well look into clearing the clutter of icons next.
• nilslindemann 9mo ago
  https://web.archive.org/web/20121225011818/http://www.useit.com/alertbox/ https://web.archive.org/web/20121225011818/http://www.useit.... Old but gold
• user2342 9mo ago
  I fully agree with the article, but the snow effect on the site is more distracting to readability than the shitty menu icons in Tahoe...
  • deleted 9mo ago
    [deleted]
  • w10-1 9mo ago
    The story in the patterns book about architecture: the architect got tired of arguing with the bishops about a church, so they put a hot tub in the corner on the next design. The bishops agreed that the hot tub must go, and the design was approved.
• binthere 9mo ago
  The snow flakes of the website are really bad for UX, just saying.
• aronowb14 9mo ago
  A bit ironic that the website complaining about UI has virtual snow on it making reading hard.
• sylens 9mo ago
  That Windows 9x menu screenshot made me realize how far we’ve fallen. This entire post is a great enumeration of many of the problems I have with Tahoe and Liquid Glass
• rick_dalton 9mo ago
  They should add a button to turn off the icons. The new menu icons aren't the only icon annoyance either, their own app icons look worse across the board with few exceptions.
• ggfdh 9mo ago
  It looks good. I think they could be doing this to help people recognize iOS icons which don’t have any text (a far worse “classic HIG” crime IIRC).
• groundzeros2015 9mo ago
  I don’t think Craig gets enough blame. He’s the one who just loves gadget features and shiny stuff. I don’t think Apple has championed a single Mac feature around making your computer more a powerful system for professional work since he has taken over.
• breppp 9mo ago
  The number of elements and their behaviors should be limited Reading that as an animation of snow completely blocks my ability to read
• RankingMember 9mo ago
  Oh man I hope some of the people putting stuff in the joke-but-real "personal information" box within the burger menu know that clicking the "download" provides the input from everyone. I'm seeing some seemingly real addresses and social security numbers in there. Additional thought: It's always interesting to see a website linked from HN with a method for user input and a means to see what other users have posted. Just a funny juxtaposition between the buttoned-up ego (not in the pejorative sense) of the HN poster vs the screaming id of that same user on a different platform.
• goshx 9mo ago
  Are the annoying little white circles falling part of the critique?
• a2dam 9mo ago
  Hard to justify snow falling in front of the text on a blog post about how a redesign isn’t helpful design.
  • crumpled 9mo ago
    I had to open the dev tools and pause the code in the debugger before I could tolerate reading the whole article.
    • myguysi 9mo ago
      On mobile there’s a snowflake toggle button in the top left corner. I only noticed this after reading the whole article in reader mode and wondering why my iPhone was on fire…
    • wpm 9mo ago
      There's a toggle button at the top of the page
  • borghives 9mo ago
    The irony did not lost on me that an article about superfluous visual elements is overlayed by an unnecessary distraction. But maybe the point is to not be 100% utilitarian but to weave in a "warm" feeling of the season. It did give me that a fuzzy feeling for the first few second. Then I was bored; then annoyed. Which pretty much follow my feeling of using Tahoe: Cool -> Meh -> Uggg!
• a2dam 9mo ago
  The snow falling in front of the text here really drives the point home
• hiccuphippo 9mo ago
  Reminds me of me when I started building gui applications. Hopefully they'll get over it.
• JBiserkov 9mo ago
  It's a blunt instrument, but this is how I would justify the Tahoe icons: .icon { text-align: justify; display: none; }
• mgaunard 9mo ago
  All Apple software just randomly changes UI with every iteration. It's the software equivalent of fast fashion. Just avoid it and stay with true and tried staples instead.
• tgtweak 9mo ago
  Typical growing pains for a 4 trillion dollar company.
• mattcantstop 9mo ago
  Agreed about the icons, but sweet mercy, that was a challenging read with the snowflakes falling in front of the text.
  • mark_mc 9mo ago
    ok right?! i was getting motion sick trying to read it. really ironic given the content of the article.
• arunc 9mo ago
  This talk by Scott Jenson is just fantastic and he explains some nuances and missed opportunities https://youtu.be/1fZTOjd_bOQ?si=Kiyy_W3Zg3jkCWLG https://youtu.be/1fZTOjd_bOQ?si=Kiyy_W3Zg3jkCWLG
• eviks 9mo ago
  > I was reading Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines from 1992 and found this nice illustration: > Fast forward to 2025 The past wasn't as rosy: while the left column is purposefully confusing (the icons don't match the description), the lack of keyboard shortcuts is just bad design "for the sake of emptiness". It degrades, rather than enhances, the "usability of the interface" And re. icons: while this is correct > The main function of an icon is to help you find what you are looking for faster. The following isn't as straight-forward > Perhaps counter-intuitively, adding an icon to everything is exactly the wrong thing to do. To stand out, things need to be different. But if everything has an icon, nothing stands out. Not really, there is plenty of difference - length, the presense of ... ellipsis ..., the presence of a keyboard shortcut, the icon itself. This combo gives visual cues without reading, so improves the ease of finding. Yes, it would be better to have colors here and there, but then you have the following fundamental issue: > Look how much faster you can find Save or Share in the right variant: But "Save" is something I do NOT want to find fast, I never use that menu item! So I'd prefer the slighly worse (but not bad) busy version rather than a highlight of useless menu items and no icons for the menus I'd actually use! Of course, there is an easy way out - user customization to match user needs (maybe you never use shortcuts, fine, remove the "noise" then; maybe you don't care about "Save", fine, remove the icon there), but that was anathema even in 1992. (but otherwise very good criticism of the basic design fails like tiny size, inconsistency, lack of vertical alignment, bad metaphors, etc.)
• gonational 9mo ago
  Another great one from Tonsky: https://tonsky.me/blog/disenchantment/ https://tonsky.me/blog/disenchantment/
• nja 9mo ago
  This makes me think of QGIS. I've recently been learning it for a couple different projects. It's an incredibly powerful and configurable tool, but its learning curve is incredibly steep. A big reason for this is that the UI is almost entirely toolbar+button based -- but the meaning of all of the button icons are completely opaque to a new user. And, making things worse, there's no way to change the UI to show text next to buttons. So every time a user wants to do something, even if following instructions that say "click the add feature button", they have to hunt around for it. QGIS is free software, so it can be somewhat excused vs a billion dollar company. But they could really benefit from some UX expertise...
• w10-1 9mo ago
  This is a stunning catalog of UI hypocrisy, a call to action for fans and haters. But what's interesting is why such hypocrisy persists - in particular, why so bad now? Yes, designers might need to make work for themselves; yes, a new OS has to seem new, to justify upgrades and convince younglings that this isn't the oldsters' ride; but haventt these always been true? What's different is Apple's slide into disorganization, as it spreads work around the globe in exchange for market access, and internal leaders coast in their mutual non-aggression pacts. What remains of the center can issue global orders (adopt the liquid glass aesthetic; put icons on every action) and the periphery can comply - nominally, imperfectly, and inconsistently. Quality issues come to be tolerated like chronic inflammation, and even deployed in passive-aggressive turf battles. "Back in the day" everyone would be pulled into a rock-tumbler room and grind it out. That's neither possible nor wanted today (as game theory effaced the requisite obliviousness). What to do? Many YC companies have bonding time, where scattered teams join up for intense periods to restore alignment. Otherwise, the Apple might be ripe for a round of organizational consolidation. Personally, I think internal competition with some misses and inconsistencies are a good thing long term. Inflammation is not cancer, and there are better ways to tamp it down.
• az_reth 9mo ago
  Every few months, I will get tired of the current look of my status bar in i3 (or sway on my laptop). For the icons I will go to https://www.nerdfonts.com/ https://www.nerdfonts.com/, search for ones that look cool, and copy paste them to the relevant-ish sections. Apparently I'm qualified to be a designer for Apple.
• divan 9mo ago
  Next article should be about snow on web page and readability.
• diimdeep 9mo ago
  I just got old iPhone 4s with iOS 9 from drawer, and hour later managed to downgrade to iOS 6, uhh, shapes and colors on these icons is something and it's got 3d dock at the bottom that looks just like dock from OSX 10.7, what a blast from the past. links for those interested in downgrading: https://github.com/LukeZGD/Legacy-iOS-Kit/wiki/How-to-Use https://github.com/LukeZGD/Legacy-iOS-Kit/wiki/How-to-Use https://github.com/LukeZGD/Legacy-iOS-Kit/wiki/Restore-32-bit-device https://github.com/LukeZGD/Legacy-iOS-Kit/wiki/Restore-32-bi... https://github.com/LukeZGD/EverPwnage https://github.com/LukeZGD/EverPwnage https://sideloadly.io https://sideloadly.io
• haykerman 9mo ago
  This is why it's important for consumer devices to be "hackable". I'm not saying provide 15 different stock themes for the OS. I'm saying open up the OS interfaces/APIs enough for the community to build their own themes. Give some control back to the power users.
  • eviks 9mo ago
    Indeed, hackable is the solution: don't that one icon? Fn + Right click on it and select to hide it, also changing the menu description in the process. But also do provide 15 different themes for the OS and make sharing themes trivial and built-in so that you can upvote a theme you like (or even a specific icon you like), downvote the one you don't, install the most popular theme in few clicks.
• travisgriggs 9mo ago
  I feel like modern design, in so many cases, missed the science for the symptoms. "It shouldn't look cluttered" --> "Apply ever increasing amounts of padding/margin everywhere" "keep it simple" --> "monochrome is the happy place", etc etc
• xeckr 9mo ago
  Man that pre-XP Windows menu really had soul. I miss it.
• tannhaeuser 9mo ago
  What's your suggestion to deal with Apple's current fail? Wait until Tahoe's successor(s) or leave for good? When Jony Ive left, Apple managed to listen to their customers and quickly got rid of the Touch Bar thing, reintroduced a physical Esc key, etc. so there's hope left, isn't there?
  • bigyabai 9mo ago
    > Apple managed to listen to their customers and quickly got rid of the Touch Bar thing, reintroduced a physical Esc key, etc. so Those are all hardware upgrades that Apple profits from. What incentive does Apple have to make the App Store better, or improve the visual clarity in the iOS and macOS interface? Shouldn't we be seeing downward pressure there too, if innovation can be generalized to software? Most users don't have a say in the matter, and Apple has exploited their ambivalence for decades. If you're the sort of person who cares, you're not Apple's target audience.
• charles_f 9mo ago
  Great article, once you find how to deactivate the snowflakes. This is only an opinion, but it feels like UX in general is moving towards making things cute rather than usable. Liquid glass is a case in point. This is useful to a point, in the same sense that one might beauty, but when this is all you care about, it becomes a problem.
• kensai 9mo ago
  However something should be clear here: the author mentions the UI guidelines from 1992. These are not current. And definitely not some kind of permanent law.
• cush 9mo ago
  This is so well written
• gambiting 9mo ago
  You know what's the other thing that's hard to justify - the incredibly distracting falling snow background.
• mrexcess 9mo ago
  Some really excellent points, here. I think reading the old HIG documents should be mandatory in UI design, and departure from it should require serious justification. One small nitpick: the ellipsis reuse in item #8 - that’s actually valid and would have been back in the 1990s as well. A menu item that is followed by an ellipsis indicates that selecting that menu option will open a dialog box. Inconsistently applied, but that’s always been the meaning.
• yayitswei 9mo ago
  Love Tonsky's articles. My favorite is about centering things: https://tonsky.me/blog/centering/ https://tonsky.me/blog/centering/ He has a knack for putting words to the vague frustrations I feel but can't quite articulate. How does he find so many perfect examples that nail exactly what's wrong?
• zythyx 9mo ago
  Are they really trying to tell me how bad the icons on a Mac are while presenting the website with a constant snow animation, which when turned off turns into a horrible bright yellow colour, and the dark mode toggle is a joke turning the website into a pitch black nothing where your mouse becomes a torch...
• dbgrman 9mo ago
  I miss the time of Exposé and Mission Control, 3 finger drag, touch-to-tap, force click, even natural scrolling, Macbook Air, Magnetic magsafe. Then something changed. Touch bar was a miss. LaunchPad was a miss. I don't see a use of "Stage manager". iPad has gone to shit. Widgets came back, on mac... for no reason. In Tahoe, the new spotlight search is one of the better features of Tahoe but i am fine with Alfred. But by and large, there are more annoyances in Tahoe than improvements. For the iPhone and liquid glass, I am convinced that it was done to force people to upgrade to a new device. There *has* to be a reason to upgrade, and when hardware and software feature plateau, then we even the planned obsolescence era.
• reaperducer 9mo ago
  The irony is that Tahoe ships with a new screen saver that celebrates the simplicity and elegance of the original Mac's user interface design.
• DiggyJohnson 9mo ago
  I think the first graphic is a bit misleading because it omits the shortcuts in the more legible left hand side. I love menus that reveal shortcuts. I agree with the main thrust of the article though.
• travisvn 9mo ago
  Does anyone have a good method for avoiding accidentally accepting an "upgrade" notification from Sequoia to Tahoe? With the potential to set off the installation flow with the wrong click (when its being shown over-and-over again), it makes me anxious and feel like I'm not even in control of my own computer anymore. For the time being, I've installed a management profile to defer updates, disabled the Settings options for automatic updates, and used "Quiet You!" to try and keep the notifications at bay. But the maximum deferral time for profiles is 90 days, so if anyone knows of a better solution or work-around, please let me know
  • dblitt 9mo ago
    Make sure to keep a backup of your Sequoia install
• tonymet 9mo ago
  The 90s marketplace was very different. Most of Apple’s customers were English speaking with a high reading level. Even in the US market, that is no longer the case. I agree the icons look cluttered, but they are likely addressing the fact that most users may not comprehend the meaning of those actions.
• jojobas 9mo ago
  It's hard to justify caring about one company's cosmetic design decisions.
• ksec 9mo ago
  This is nice. People are finally noticing. New Design, New Features, New Programming Language, New Products or even New Sector. It is like Apple without Steve Jobs again the first time around. None of them were done because it is better for the customers, but do so because it is better for paid promotion, justify their existing department budget or increasing it, and simply for profits. In many ways Apple is still best of the pack, but they are no longer the same.
• wpm 9mo ago
  To all the people whining about the Snow, click the buttons at the top of the page, come on now. To all the people also whining about the snow, as if it invalidates the opinions written in the article, again, PLEASE click the buttons at the top of the page. The author is clearly going for a fun, whimsical, playful vibe that works perfectly fine on a personal blog. Expecting something different from a workstation operating system made by one of the Fortune 10, especially one who heavily markets their design "prowess", is perfectly reasonable.
• chupchap 9mo ago
  I have a different theory for the current enshitification we see. When OS updates became free Apple and Microsoft stopped caring about what customers want and what will sell. This allowed them to do whatever they wanted without repercussions. OS updates automatically and the new UI is forced on you along with the terrible UX taped on top. Every app and API was geared to the latest OS version alone for developer simplicity and this added to the pressure on the end customer. I don't know how this loop ends, but this sucks.
• hn_acc1 9mo ago
  Someone managed to read that article? With the constantly falling snowflakes? Dang, his UI choices seem worse than any he might be criticizing..
  • arunc 9mo ago
    It was intentionally done as a parody, I reckon.
  • whalesalad 9mo ago
    it's a seasonal theme that can be turned off with one click
• HeavyStorm 9mo ago
  I love this article. It sums up everything I think it's wrong in our line of work. Things have become very... Amateurish. Think of the way these apps got to where they are-who decided to put all those icons? Probably someone who hasn't a good understanding of usability but maybe - like someone with not enough domain knowledge - looked at other apps and thought that the icons look pretty, while having a small amount of understanding of their purpose. Why is that happening? I have theories... Hypothesis. Maybe too many managerial types are calling the shots. Maybe we needed more workers than we where able to educate and the average skill dropped (a lot). Maybe companies realized that poor quality doesn't matter, because either customers don't have other choices or the choices that there are are as bad.
• petiepooo 9mo ago
  It's hard to take this rant seriously when the author chose to clutter his rant with snowflakes. If he's looking for more readers he's lucky I run uMatrix and chose to disable javascript instead of just closing the tab and moving on.
• King-Aaron 9mo ago
  It's hard to justify a blog post about unnecessary and distracting visual elements when the you're peering at the article through a freaking blizzard on the screen lol.
• arthurofbabylon 9mo ago
  The surface area of the Apple suite is now enormous. We now have an incredible array of devices, physical environments, and purposes. It's really quite staggering: just look at the spans between a) checking the UV index on Apple Watch and writing code in Xcode on Mac, b) tracking an outdoor run and navigating with Car Play and watching a movie on Apple TV, and c) messaging and maneuvering spreadsheets and designing/building. Huge expanse across each spectrum. Apple's effort to maintain some semblance of consistency across this incredible array is laudable. (Which is not the same as letting the grievances highlighted in this article slide; I agree with the author 100%.) We all want consistency (probably to a degree greater than Apple is capable of delivering) simply so that we can use the metaphors we're familiar with. I imagine Apple has dozens of design teams, each of which cannot talk to more than a sliver of the others, with probably not a single person aware of exactly how many design teams exist at once. There was probably a period in Apple's history – and probably not that long ago – when a single employee could assess the iconography across the entire suite. Those days are over. My question: beyond preventing the obvious and severe transgressions (Liquid Glass), what systemic solutions are available on a scale like Apple's to maintain high-quality and strong consistency? (I appreciate that Apple does generally one design refresh per year, in contrast to the continuous zero-utility tinkering observable in Google's products, for example.)
  • bigyabai 9mo ago
    > We all want consistency (probably to a degree greater than Apple is capable of delivering) This thinking is the fatal poison of the tech industry. The further you repeat it, the faster the industry dies. Watch: "We all want privacy, probably to a greater degree than Facebook is capable of providing." "We all want browser competition, probably to a greater degree than Microsoft is willing to provide." "We all want advertisement options, probably to a greater degree than Google can tolerate." See what's happening here? You're not making a concession, you're flat-out accepting their failure. Apple can provide consistency, they're a trillion-dollar business that has every incentive to compete on their own merits. Instead they carve out arbitrary and harmful rules for each platform and then steelman it when any authority of any kind suggests that they're wrong. This isn't a "perfect being the enemy of good" situation, it's degraded into "good being the enemy of intolerable defaults" instead.
• abalone 9mo ago
  I just think it's funny he has an obnoxious snow animation all over his screed against arbitrary graphic elements.
• 7e 9mo ago
  It's hard to take anything this author says seriously when it's snowing all over their text.
• ancorevard 9mo ago
  This one better hurt the Apple employees who still cares: "On the upside: it’s not that hard anymore to design better than Apple!"
• econ 9mo ago
  OT (but funny) when looking for a good icon for translation I couldn't find anything obvious so I went with 译 I've since considered if their icon set isn't simply 3000 years ahead? They adopted our numeric system because it was simply better. Are our icons simply better than theirs? We could color it too. Can use manila yellow to make 存 (save) look like a folder.
• sbinnee 9mo ago
  Now I am more afraid than ever to upgrade to Tahoe.
• mismos 9mo ago
  Looking at the article, I thought, maybe this is Apple's experience of Windows bringing touch to the desktop. Yet, it broke my 2 years of muscle memory on the iPad, I am still considering selling and switching.
• thoughtpeddler 9mo ago
  Some people (like myself) derive enormous contextual object-recognition and GUI navigation assistance from iconography of any kind (such as emojis that prepend any sort of list item). But others find the same exact thing wildly distracting. We're all wired differently. Hence: why not just make menu bar icons an OS-level setting?
• PythonPeak 9mo ago
  [dead]
• provdr 9mo ago
  This is a good article. However I guess the real pain is that there's still nowhere to go. Switching to Windows or Linux means giving up the efficiency of M-series chips, losing key apps, and losing the consistent menu-bar. It feels like an abyss.
• scoch 9mo ago
  Sorry to be a bit of a killjoy, but I find the snowflake animation on the page annoying. Nothing serious, of course— I read the article in its entirety ;) But ironically, in the case of this article about icon design, the icon for the warm/cool color theme toggle button in the site header is a snowflake (and it doesn’t change when switching to warm colors). I initially thought this button was meant to disable the snowflake animation :D
• nottorp 9mo ago
  It’s hard to justify the snow effect on that web page too…
• manojneo 9mo ago
  yes
• deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
• lylo 9mo ago
  I've yet to upgrade from Sequoia and having read this _excellent_ article, I'm going to hold off as long as Apple let me. I really hope the recent changes at Apple mean this will get completely overhauled and they'll return to their roots as design leaders. It will be such a shame if this mess is allowed to continue
• abujazar 9mo ago
  Agreed 100 %, but the snow kept me from reading the whole article. Would've thought the snow icon turned it off, but instead it changed the background color… Liquid Glass is bad, but not _that_ bad.
• tanujnotes 9mo ago
  Why are Close and Save so next to each other?
• wartywhoa23 9mo ago
  As a Mac newcomer from Ubuntu, I find it baffling to see this much controversy around minor UI semi-issues while everyone seems to be fully content with the way macOS litters the filesystem, external included, with dot files.
• tekknik 9mo ago
  There seems to be a large issue with Tahoe styling, it seems fine to me. This article seems like someone has nothing else to focus on. If you don’t like the styling, switch OS?
• Drummergao 9mo ago
  This article made me increasingly angry as I read, and by the end, I could only chuckle in frustration. I never expected to see every textbook design flaw perfectly exemplified in Apple’s latest operating systems. In my view, the three major systems Apple launched last year—iOS 26, iPadOS 26, and macOS Tahoe—all feel like they’ve placed a sheet of liquid glass over what is essentially a system-level interaction and design hell. My most immediate impression of iOS 26 is that its initial version felt exceptionally crude. While iOS 7 and iOS 11 also felt unpolished due to their extensive redesigns, in actual use, iOS 26’s roughness feels unprecedented (I have an iPod running iOS 7.0.4 and an iPhone X on iOS 11). Beyond the endless bugs, the system’s UI and rounded corners are chaotic and inconsistent. That said, the stability improved considerably by version 26.2, which is commendable. Back in 2013, Jony Ive’s bold push for flat design defined the iOS 7–9 era. The ultra-thin fonts created a light, visually pleasing aesthetic, but poor readability became a major point of criticism. Apple gradually increased font weight in response, which somewhat compromised the elegance but genuinely improved legibility. Now, with iOS 26, the combination of ultra-bold SF fonts and the liquid glass effect, along with the weakening or outright removal of separators between options, has successfully made readability an unreliable puzzle once again. iPadOS 26 claims to unlock productivity with freely adjustable windows—on the surface, at least. Now the iPad gives you three choices: either use Stage Manager and multi-window mode to boost productivity, or stick to simple mode without split-screen. But once you remove the keyboard and mouse, the split-screen and Slide Over interactions designed specifically for touch suddenly disappear. What used to be straightforward dragging and switching now requires additional adjustments due to the “free” window sizing (Slide Over has returned, but it’s more cumbersome than before). In split-screen mode, the increased rounded corners between windows sacrifice a significant amount of full-screen display area. Also, while adding macOS-style traffic-light buttons and the menu bar seems nice, the interface elements—smaller than a pinky finger—seem to whisper: “Touch experience isn’t important here; keyboard and mouse are.” If productivity plus portability is the goal, why not just buy a MacBook Air? As an ordinary user, in everyday scenarios, what affects us most isn’t window size, but how intuitive and convenient the operations are. To this day, I still don’t understand why Apple didn’t keep the simple and elegant old split-screen logic as an optional mode. macOS Tahoe takes the principle of “neglecting what should be refined, over-polishing what shouldn’t” to a whole new level. As the symbol of productivity, the Mac’s system has been made shockingly chaotic—a messy UI battlefield, not to mention the still inconsistent rounded corners across windows… At the 1983 International Design Conference in Aspen, Steve Jobs once said, “Our design goal is to make products intuitively obvious.” For years, Apple indeed set precedents and profoundly influenced design language across the industry. But this latest iteration of the “Apple style”? I can’t bring myself to agree. I don’t hope to see a future dominated by this kind of visual-first design language. If anything, I’m inclined to think that this time, Apple has simply walked onto its own narrow bridge.