I count four different corner radius sizes currently on my screen, which is maddening.

Apple has a thing against people with OCD. Or taste.

The thing is horribly wasteful of screen real estate, and as someone who’s been writing a Mac blog for over two decades, I am so happy I started using Fedora two years ago—GNOME has its flaws, but it looks nicer than Tahoe.

I have been running the beta from the beginning and they have improved quite a bit, but I am actually shocked they didn't delay Mac OS 26, because the design is so rough around the edges. Some of the larger aesthetic changes, such as the menu bar and the dock look good, but there is so much more that looks objectively awful.

1. the way window UI elements float in bubbles on the top over a white background is horrible. It looks amateurish.

2. Icons look low detail and blurry. At first I thought they were using low resolution placeholder icons, but no, the layered diffused glass effect just kind of translates to blurriness on many app icons.

3. The side bar, such as on Finder, just kind of floats there. That is fine and looks kind of neat on the Maps app as you can see some of the maps behind it, but on the Finder it is just a white bubble over top of a white background, which... is a choice.

4. The app launcher is gone, and replaced by Spotlight, which is worse.

I could go on. The point is it is bad and Apple should be embarrassed. I say that as someone who likes Apple products alot.

It was the straw that broke the camel’s back for me. After trying out the preview for a month, the writing was on the wall, and I began the process of switching to a Thinkpad with Linux. I am now fully off macOS for the first time in 20 years of being an Apple die hard. I could use a lot of emotionally loaded words to describe how I feel about this release, but the long and short of it is that I am no longer the target audience for Apple.

It’s ugly as hell and plain stupid.

I couldn’t watch the WWDC and when I saw the screenshots I thought it was a joke. Giant buttons with weird padding and extreme transparency effects.

This is going to sound harsh but it looks like when “working” from home, Apple engineers outsourced their work to amateurs online.

I simply cannot believe that Apple is shipping an OS this out of touch with elegance.

Steve Jobs said in his inauguration speech that he slept on the floor to take typography classes and later obsessed over having great typefaces on Macs. Steve would’ve burn the place down instead of shipping a crap like this.

I try not to indulge in negativity and scorn, but I agree with these sentiments. This is resoundly a regression. Text overlapping on text, searchboxes that are broken and now just function as text boxes, increased latency throughout the operating system.

It's so bad that it's kind of fascinating. Unfortunately, even "Reduce Transparency" doesn't fix the LG update.

Yeah similar situation here. I've been running it since basically the day after WWDC, and I've just had this sinking feeling that its so bad, they wouldn't be able to fix it before release. Or, they don't even view it as something that needs fixing.

I'll begrudgingly get a couple more years out of this personal M2 Air, but my engineering team is prepping to do upgrades on some older M1 Pros we've had since launch, and after seeing Tahoe, the CTO and I formed a plan to give devs the option of getting either an M4 Pro or a Framework. We haven't launched yet, but I think a solid number of our engineers are going to opt for the Framework, hopefully as high as half.

Ugh I upgraded excitedly and can't stand the UI - there is no upside to any of it. Also for some reason things are also beachballing and VSCode keeps crashing - new M4 MBP. All the system log errors are present exactly as they were and my USB-C dock with Ethernet port still doesn't work.

I was on RC too, for a few days, and also uninstalled. I'm glad I did, the fresh Sequoia install feels much nicher. Even with reduce transparency on, the design was too ugly and the drab gray icon jails for non-squircle icons were downright offensive. First macOS version I'm gonna skip and I've been a day one updater since mountain lion, very sad.

I float around the VC world in SF. Several of the women that work for VCs in decent positions don't know how to maximize a window on the MacBooks.

> SO much padding

No idea on macOS, but turn on Reduce Transparency on iOS and there’s tons of padding most of the time, but then sometimes zero padding. And I mean zero. The edges of buttons and text are at the edge of the underlying background. It’s…embarrassing.

I made the mistake of updating my phone, and immediately regretted it. We tried Liquid Glass already, it was called mid-aughts Windows. It sucked then, and it sucks now.

Everything I've seen of it looks a disaster. I'll wait for macOS 27.

It would be one thing if they excessively rounded and padded the windows, but they shipped with a bunch of different padding and border radii. So far I’ve counted 4 different borders, and I’m sure there’s more.

Steve Jobs would never have allowed this to be released.

The Finder looks like shit. The sidebar is like badly retrofited from another program, perhaps from some crappy Gnome theme.

The Control Center (or however they call the drop down window with quick controls for volume, wifi, brigthness, etc) has floating isolated icons like crap.

Bring back Scott Forstall. Give him a big bonus. Let him fix this shit.

Otherwise, the code changes and actual features are probably fine.

Can you post screenshots of what you mean?

I see grossly rounded corners in some apps, but I don't see the other stuff like gaps in window corners for full screen apps. I may have some config bit flipped that has disabled those.

Yeah, the new corner radius is ugly but by and large, it's not much different than before, from what I see so far.

How hard is it to downgrade?

Did you notice any impact on battery life?

> Basically the vibe I get from it is that they think their users are dumb

Your point would have been much more convincing had you refrained from this sort of pejorative assigning of motives. It wasn't necessary.

I've been running the betas to the final release and there are a number of basic affordances and system improvements that are definitely worthwhile. I will not be going back.

Having said that, while I know they had good intentions with this whole design, and probably really thought they were pursing a winner, what a massive, massive miss. This is such an aesthetic disaster that I'm just in awe. I feel like they had a huge push to do some seemingly substantial change, particularly on the mobile side, given the stumbles in the AI space, so they changed a lot of things maybe without quite enough thought.

Ugly as hell. More dead space. On the mobile side they released an update to iOS just today from the RC a few days ago that removes some of the particularly stupid animations (the app tray did some dumb thing where it expanded and shrank, and that and a few similar things are gone).

Training/preparing users for upcoming AR glasses interfaces?

I've been running the RC and I have had no issues. Some of the design choices (sidebars particularly) are strange, but it's generally fine.

I recommend not overcomplicating your life and just staying on the latest macOS.

So the Gnome 3 gang were ahead of their time?

I really like the Apps change. Instead of opening up the icons full screen, it opens in a spotlight search window.

What I find weird: you can have light icons with color, dark icons with color, but not clear (and/or tinted) icons with color.

It’s a strange omission.

I weirdly like the clear apps on iOS. Less visually stimulating.

No more *poof* animation when you drag a control out of the toolbar during customization.

Border radius on everything on Apple devices has been progressively increasing, eventually I expect everything to be circular. No rectangles allowed.

The only thing that really bothers me with the macOS 26 design update is the complete lack of contrast. Everything is white-on-white with super subtle shadows. You can't see what tab is selected in Safari, you can't see what is a button, etc. And it doesn't even look good - it just looks like something is broken, like a texture failed to load.

Just thinking out loud.

Maybe some people took remote working really seriously and just delegated their work to amateurs online while they traveled the world.

Just saying. There’s no other explanation to how bad this is.

If there is an alternative to the m-series that lets me keep the battery life I'd jump ship. The m-series chips are just so good though

I feel like every macOS update has been worse than the last, since like 2015-2018 or so. Still, their only real competition is Windows 11, which isn’t well received either.

It's ironic that Apple makes screen size incredibly expensive for every millimeter - and then designs UI which proceeds to waste that pricey real-estate as well as user time by burying options (or worse, simply removing many advanced user options "because they don't fit").

Wow. I know I’m not the first to say it, but it really does give me Windows Vista vibes. No bueno.

Imagine if Steve saw this...

https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/tahoe...

Windows Aero is back

I'll give it a try, I installed the iOS and iPadOS betas and I actually like some of the changes.

But I do not understand how the color-tinted UI/icons ever got shipped. They just look... bad...

So far the only thing bothering me so far is the way the tabs look (in Finder and Safari). And I did turn on the menu bar background.

I absolutely hate it. I guess we’ll probably get used to it but until then… gah ugliest MacOS ever?

I do dislike how toy-like the user interface looks, but I really hate how illegible notifications are on iPadOS. I had to turn on the reduce transparency setting so I could read the notification text against my lock screen wallpaper.

You're just old, kids love this shit

The worst thing is Safari removing all tabs button.

Quick way is to pinch out with two fingers but that is impossible one-handed.

Another is to swipe up (or left/right) on address bar but that often triggers app switching because he indicator is 3mm lower

Without knowing your specific workloads, I'd imagine an M2 Pro Mac mini (which is supported by Asahi) is still plenty fast.

If you don't need the battery life of a MacBook and you're happy getting a desktop device, there's plenty of machines running new AMD chips that are just as fast as an M series mac, if not faster. And they'll run Linux with no compromises. Check out Bee-Link (https://www.bee-link.com/) for some mac-inspired hardware.

> Seeing that Apple's returning to it's "design roots"

There's a very important and relevant design quote from Steve Jobs that keeps popping up in my head:

https://mastodon.world/@lensco/115184866965741757

> I always considered the butterfly keyboard[1] the point at which Apple's design system jumped the shark as it focused on it's own aesthetics vs. building quality and reliable products.

This statement describes pretty much every mouse Apple ever made, from the circular ones to the horrendous magic mouse with charging port underneath.

> Funny enough, it's the only time period since 1999 that I was apple free for a while.

Same here. After the butterfly keyboard era, I spent about 5 years with Windows 10/11 and powershell, then WSL. There's still a lot of annoyance in the Windows space (NTFS is slow due to all the filesystem filters), but Linux package managers are much better than homebrew and WSL does make Windows a pretty reasonable developer system. I'm back on the MacOS now but I wouldn't hate a nice Windows machine.

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

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

My guess is organizational inertia around dependency chains

Oh boy, I opened the settings app to change the wallpaper, the scrollbar gets cut off by the right bottom rounded corner. The wallpapers can be scrolled horizontally and they show up under the side rail (blurred), looks like a glitch, and I still can't resize this window to see more of the wallpapers. They may have fixed the custom color bug though.

It really does look like ass on the laptop. Maybe it works on mobile, idk, but terrible on laptop. Also not a good sign since apple is not known for rolling back releases.

Yeah I shouldn't be surprised this was allowed to launch today, but yet I am.

I ran the whole beta on all my devices. Every new beta I'd ask myself "Surely they fixed 'x' by now, right?" and we advanced, beta after beta, with the same bugs and performance regressions all the way up to launch.

The icons still need to redraw in the settings app and app library. It's overall sluggish. The drop shadows are huge in the finder and other apps top bar. If you turn on always show scrollbars they get cut off at a weird angle due to the excessive corner radius.

My iPhone 16 PM runs hot all the time, even on release now, vs. iOS 18.

I don't mind the transparency or glass effects. I actually like it in some areas. But man does it need some serious polish and bug fixing, and a lot of time and effort spent on consistency.

This should never have went live in this state. I consider .0 just another beta, really. Actual release will probably be .2 or .3

At last Apple implemented a decent clipboard history. KDE has this thing for a decade now, I guess...

KDE also can encode entries as QR codes, so you can make URLs transferable to your phone or whatnot.

-- Sent from my MacBook Air.

Windows has this with Win+V for those wondering.

Including passwords from password managers?

Does that mean that add-on clipboard managers like Maccy are obsolete now?

Wow, didn't realise there was more than one tab

There were already a zillion and one apps (Maccy, ClipMenu, Jumpcut, Flycut, Alfred, ...) that provided this.

It'll be one of the first things I turn off whenever I get around to installing it ~6+ months from now.

It's truly hideous to look at. I really can't believe they went for these massively rounded corners. They're too stubborn to allow you to select an option for right angled corners again. They just tinker as there's no other real UI enhancements.

It’s a trend that’s visible in other designs too, like Material 3 Expressive.

I’m not a fan of Windows but I believe that probably the best modern UI design system for desktops right now is probably the flavor of Fluent used in Windows 11. It still retains somewhat desktop-like information density, doesn’t go overboard on radii, and has a touch of depth. I’d like to see more design languages exploring in its general direction.

It reminds me of the Wii U interface[1]. Except less playful. It really is a disaster.

[1] https://wiki.cemu.info/images/1/1a/Wii_U_Menu.png

totally agree, this is kind of an embarrassing look for supposed workstations

It might be more accurate to say that they are giving non-disabled people an experience akin to that of disabled people. ;)

I've been submitting endless feedback about how Liquid Arse breaks dark mode during the beta. I keep seeing dark text on dark backgrounds all over the place in both Tahoe and iOS 26, for example: https://imgur.com/a/R3DTcSd

I've pretty much given up with submitting feedback though.

> Apple no longer cares about disabled people.

Did you enable the relevant accessibility options that are there for this purpose?

> literally disable millions of users, people who will need to visit the accessibility settings to reduce the transparency.

I'm confused. You're condemning them for not accommodating the disabled, yet admitting they provide an accommodation in the same sentence.

Changing toolbars to text-only is pretty bad. The button hotboxes are tiny

Generally I think the toolbar settings needed more testing, they can be wonky (e.g. in Automator for text+icon it causes the traffic lights to misalign, in Safari toggling the sidebar on and off is janky).

Much the same on Linux with Wayland.

I haven't touched Windows for over a decade, does it still have a decent story for disabilities? They've certainly regressed in other areas ...

You can turn off the transparency in the accessibility settings. Sure products could be 100% accessible out of the box but unless you had some sort of limit on that it would likely make the experience worse for the majority of users. I can’t imagine Helvetica Neue Extra Light was particularly accessible as the system font a decade ago - but there were accessibility settings.

This is what happens when designers are treated as royalty and are told that their new "clothes" are "awesome" all the time.

It's also a symptom of consumption addiction where there is demand/motivation for drastic, superficial changes that don't really offer any value except to those who are consumed by the need for constant change for change's sake.

Apple used to care more about disabled people because of how the Accessibility APIs worked and were required for most apps.

Agreed.

No, it's worse. Basically it's the same experience but with an uglier UI

The search textbox overlaps with text which scrolls underneath.

The search box did not work for a few minutes after updating, but I assume that was a temporary indexing bug.

I'll be honest, I hear this every single time. But I've never delayed upgrading, and I've never regretted it. That's not to say every upgrade has been a strict improvement, but going back to my first Mac at 10.4 (Tiger) I've never wished I had stayed on an older version. We'll see how I feel after going to Tahoe, maybe this will be the one that breaks the trend.

Windows, on the other hand…

I don't wait a full _year_, but I definitly give it many months before upgrading. This one I might wait longer...

It's been so long since Apple has released anything in either iOS or macOS that excited me as a user. I don't seem to be their target customer anymore.

The only reason I even have to "upgrade" to a higher version number is how quickly app developers (including Apple themselves) drop support for older OS's. My iPhone which is stuck on iOS 15 runs just as well as the day I bought it, but every other app I download tells me (in essence) "LOL your phone is too old and our developers are too lazy to keep our software running on it. Upgrade your OS or get lost loser".

That's literally the only thing motivating me to upgrade anymore: The treadmill of software compatibility. Apple doesn't have to innovate--they just need to make sure the ecosystem is broken after ~5-10 years or so.

Spotlight got a major upgrade. It’s notably faster and deeply integrates with Shortcuts (letting you specify input variables, for example) among other things.

The fact that so much of the page is devoted to this liquid glass feature pretty much tells you the answer is no. Plus the fact that the "And so much more" section lists 10 different updates in the same space as their poster with a link to a PDF instead of building out a larger webpage speaks volumes.

- Apple Sparse Image Format allows you to create virtualized disk images with a virtualized file format that can be formatted to any kind of file

- Terminal.app now supports 24-bit color and powerline glyphs

- Vehicle Motion Cues to reduce motion-sickness when in a moving vehicle

Native container support is pretty exciting.

The on-device foundation models framework is interesting to me. So far the responses have not been good but the potential is appealing.

TextEdit has a styling toolbar now which I appreciate. The new spotlight has more functionality and seems faster (and less likely to pull up a website instead of the app I'm trying to launch)

I was in Beta since Beta 2, and I saw massive improvement in energy efficiency on my MacBook Air M2 and Pro Max M4

I've been using it for ~6 weeks, and I'm also a bit confused by the hate since it's barely changed. I'm a fan of the improved UX harmonization across form factors. My intuition is that the minor and gradual "Duploization" of macOS in Sequoia and now Tahoe foreshadows touchscreen MacBooks.

For Finder I discovered that changing the Toolbar to Icon Only significantly improved it. Then I set the sidebar icons to small in the Appearance system setting. That helped a lot.

Most of the new UI is designed almost exclusively for icon only toolbars.

> Now fonts are even smaller in System Settings, for example. What are they even thinking?

It's worse on the iPad. They apparently think an iPad is now also a mouse and cursor device because they made touch targets so small, and the fonts in menus shrunk down making them more difficult touch targets as well.

New people in design roles that no longer care about old rules.

Declining institutional taste and no one at the helm who appreciates or enforces old rules when necessary.

That looks so bad :D

https://github.com/apple/container is supported from macOS 26

The changes to Spotlight are fairly power-user focused. There's a lot of enhancements to make it quicker to set up shortcuts within it, and they've added a clipboard manager feature to it.

This summary looks acceptable: https://www.computerworld.com/article/4041433/spotlight-is-m...

Not a direct response to your question but (I guess like you) I often find with these releases that the changes I actually care about aren’t flashy enough to even warrant a mention in the presentations or on the main web page.

There seems to be some expansion of screen time, finally, but I haven’t been able to figure out what it is yet based on the only *os 26 update I’ve done so far is the public beta on a single Apple TV.

I think we'll have to wait for benchmarks to see if this is a leopard or a snow leopard

OpenSCAD and others look like they did even before Sequoia, with a small corner radius and older control spacing.

Well, that's why there is a lot of complaints.

The main selling point of a macbook is not a UI with transparency. It's hardware stuff (like ARM processors, battery life, aluminum frames, etc..) and a decent, stable, unix-ish software environment. No one is using macOS for the visual effects, so it is annoying that Apple is revamping the UI everyone is used to in order to add more visual effects.

Seems nuts to me, but I'll be curious to see how this all pans out.

This settings turns reduce transparency and it turns makes the menu bar gray, which looks horrible on a display on notch.

Is there any way to make it black? Like it appears on full screen applications? (apart from enabling the transparency together with a black wallpaper)

Currently even on dark mode it doesn't have a black background while reduce transparency is toggled on.

We're all disabled now. Thanks, Apple.

Weirdly, I had that enabled pre-Tahoe and have had to turn it off as it was even worse with it on for me.

Everyone’s different I guess :)

Back on Sequoia, but this is great advice, thank you!

Accessibility hasn't changed at all, and it remains trivial to turn off visual effects that present a problem. https://imgur.com/a/Vw55f8V

Two of the latest Intel MacBooks, and the last Intel iMac, so technically, yes, there’s still some Intel support in there. My 2019 iMac is one version too old.

does not support 2018 Mac mini

That's new in the 26 OSes.

I'm so bummed that the workarounds to keep a 5k iMac in commission all seem to be really likely to piss off your corporate IT department.

Patching the bootloader in memory seems like a big op-sec no-no.

Last time this came up on Hacker News, someone pointed out that there are new display boards you can buy from China to reuse a 5K's panel as an external display.

I think we're only allowed to run Linux at work on blessed devices. Last I looked, the 5K panel in the iMac was actually presented to the firmware as two smaller displays, which were glued back together in software. Apple does that magic to support its own hardware, but it sounded like Linux doesn't.

Thank you so much. I only need a Mac to compile/debug with Xcode (still can't get USB pass through with quickemu working) but Apple has been killing old versions such that projects wont build and home brew has no bottles and whatnot.

Eh, it has always looked horrible. Non fractional scaling is just too much to ask at this point...but hey look at this tiny toggle element doing this cool liquidy effect wohoo

I still need to use the Scroll Reverser because the scroll direction (aka natural scrolling) can only be turned on or off globally, not per pointing device. I love natural scrolling on the trackpad, but it doesn't make sense on the mouse scroll wheel.

That’s why I miss the old Ars Technica reviews.

The closest I’ve seen is this Apple PDF and I’m not sure it’s what you’re after: https://www.apple.com/os/pdf/All_New_Features_macOS_Tahoe_Se...

Menu extras were never intended to be treated like Windows tray items. For the earlier portion of OS X’s life, there wasn’t even a public API to create them and required a hack and a private API, and the current API is intended for ephemeral menu extras that disappear when their host app isn’t running. In short, the menubar isn’t designed for users to collect menu extras like Pokémon.

I take it as a sign of typical increasing corporate dysfunction. Obvious problems, some even easy and uncontroversial, don't get fixed. Why?

The people who can fix them are not in control. The org must be very top-down. But Steve Jobs had a top down style, so what's the difference? Its: Using and caring about the product.

It's top down direction with the people at the top not using/caring about the product. Presumably they're concerned with other things like efficiency, stocks, clout.

In case you don't know, at least there's a setting to help:

    defaults -currentHost write -globalDomain NSStatusItemSpacing -int 8

And the apps that provide solutions for it, like Bartender, need screen reading permissions which I just can't bring myself to grant.

I think they kinda did? I'm not sure where to look for a link to this info, but I remember watching a YouTube video showing the ability to group and hide menu bar icons in Tahoe so they take up less space (and therefore encroach less toward the notch).

Maybe I'm misremembering the video though.

(edit) The linked page seems to hint at it:

> Personalized controls and menu bar. Your display feels even larger with the transparent menu bar. And you have more ways to customize the controls and layout in the menu bar and Control Center, even those from third parties

I love my Mac and yes, this is easily the most absurd problem. It happens to me all the time and I can’t believe they haven’t fixed it.

Apple…if you’re listening…please fix this.

Notice how on the menu bar, when you click File and then the dropdown appears, you can move the mouse arrow to the right (without clicking) over Edit and now the Edit menu shows up. But the same doesn't work on the status menu icons, if I click on the volume icon and move the mouse, nothing happens, the volume menu stays open, even if hover over the battery indicator. So many little things like this that never worked consistently.

They need to bring back the control strip!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_Strip

Solves this exact issue.

Apparently it's not important.

This is the last ever version with Intel support, right? That's a milestone of sorts.

"ruined"?

It hasn't been able to find anything in years.

It's faster to scroll down in Finder than use the search box to locate anything =)

I mean it’s gotten bad already, but I think people’s hope is that they fixed it that if I type in a file name I work with all the time it’ll be the first result. At least that’s what I’m hoping for.

The Tahoe beach pictures are pretty nice.

https://mrmacintosh.com/download-the-new-macos-tahoe-wallpap... has them at the bottom of the link

Is there alternative backgrounds included? Often there are two or three.

To help highlight the new "Liquid Glass" UI?

Never used spotlight. I have it disabled permanently. I don’t like the indexing.

I think this is just 'sales writing'. As if written for a trailer video.

It's Apple house style. Marketing writes in tiny sentences. Even fragments. Makes the copy more punchy. And it's been like this for decades.

Now imagine it being said by someone presenting and doing the same hand pyramid stance that they make every Apple employee in WWDC videos do.

All kidding aside, it’s weird to read. Ever since I was a kid, I was taught that beginning a sentence with “And” or “But” is not “correct”. Times change and all that, I get it - it’s just weird though.

What evidence do you have that they are trying to do that?