I can't remember windows vista actually making content illegible or reduced the content area in a focused window like Apple has done.

Although outright opt-out isn't possible, it seems like heading to Accessibility -> Motion -> Reduce Motion (on) and Prefer Cross-Fade Transitions (On) reduces the effect.

I'm not sure if this reduces the buggy artifacts though.

Necessary has never been the deciding factor for Apple’s decisions, especially when it comes to design. Nor has “optional” ever really been part of that discussion. They know, like most people, supporting multiple interface simply creates more BS to maintain for the few resistant people who don’t accept change. Like it or hate, you bought an Apple.

I don’t particularly like it either — reality is what it is and if I don’t like it that much, there are other phones I can buy when I upgrade.

Who decided things that slide in place need to jiggle like jello?!

It's felt bloated for a while. Everytime I setup a new Mac I have to remove all of the icons from the doc. A new Dell isn't that bloated.

It's time to buy a new phone then! Surely that new phone won't feel so bloated, rinse and repeat.

Apple employees should have kidnapped Alan Dye from his office and deposited him on Facebook's doorstep wrapped up in a straightjacket with ribbons and a bow years ago before he finally left voluntarily.

Spotlight is also slow and buggy now, on an M3 Pro no less. I loathe the feeling of being faster than my computer and having to wait for it to catch up, something that I haven't felt since the M1 came out.

Swift was the worst thing that happened to Mac OS, because we’re now suffering second system syndrome.

There are like a half-dozen blatant bugs I encounter between daily and weekly in Safari. Text input and textarea editing is buggy in a couple ways, Apple Pay has a positioning bug where sometimes its bottom button is about 1/3 off the screen, certain elements on a couple pages smear when I scroll (but only sometimes). Not even counting ways the keyboard itself is worse now.

I haven’t seen browsing this buggy outside weird niche Linux browsers in… 15+ years?

Maybe the sharper edges of objective-C lead to a programming practice that was more careful, which has been abandoned under the impression of Swift's increase default safety.

> I think parts of Liquid Glass on macOS looks pretty bad. But I don't care that much about how things look, so it doesn't offend me.

I don't care overmuch about the purely cosmetic side of it, but Liquid Glass looks absolutely terrible from an ergonomics point of view. It's just plainly, objectively bad UX.

> But I don't care that much about how things look, so it doesn't offend me.

So I'm guessing you use some default Mac editor (Xcode?)? You don't change your color scheme, you don't change your font, etc?

Aside: Software devs are very weird, they spend all this time crafting their dev setup and but when it comes to their OS they just give up and whatever Tim Cook feeds them their in. Makes no sense. Anyway, off to Linux land. See ya'll!

> It also often loads icons slowly; sometimes loading them in one by one over time, sometimes all at once after thinking for a second.

This is frequent, if not constant, on iOS for me. I never witnessed it before the 26 update.

How can it take an entire second or more to display an icon in list in the settings application? It was literally a solved problem for every iOS version I've ever used.

This year I've had to perform many hard resets on my MacBook, iPhone and even Apple Watch because they've locked up. And they're all relatively new devices. Apple needs to get its shit together. I already expect to move away from their mobile ecosystem when it comes time to upgrade.

The Apple release schedule is unremitting. We know that bugs are reported to Apple by developers, and we know that reported bugs get ignored for years, or forever. I suspect that every Apple engineer has a mountain of bugs in their queue.

If Apple leadership doesn't care about software quality, then Apple engineers can't care about software quality. They use the same buggy crap that we do, because they have no choice.

Often it is that people who use the devices learn how to work around bugs and then they forget they exist.

There is also subconscious resistance to create an action that will uncover a bug and then remind of personal failure.

Then once whole teams get used to this, it's not possible to get it fixed as it gets deprioritised always.

I'll bite. Why is it like this (in your opinion of course)?

You can disable the automatic handoff in the Apple TV settings. That drove me crazy as well.

This is not an argument that works for the company proudly pairing hardware and software as their core business.

Funny, last time I used macos there were so many annoyances and every suggestion was to use some paid third party app. I finally caved and used hammerspoon to write everything I needed myself.

You pay for it in lots of ways, including an obscene premium on minor hardware upgrades, not to mention you have to buy their hardware to even use the software itself.

As an Android user since the T-Mobile G1, I tried switching to an iPhone 15 Pro as my primary phone from a carrier deal as the hardware looked nice plus Android/iOS has converged so much over the years with all the same apps available on either. I was pretty used to iOS from iPads and as a backup phone so the switching costs were minimal and the better MacOS integration seemed cool.

But man, the notifications are a constant thorn in my side. I have missed so many work notifications due to the lack of persistent notification indicator (other than on the lock screen), and the overall weirdness of iOS lockscreen notification panel (segmentation between "old" notifications that can be mass dismissed and "new" notifications that pile up individually-ish). I use an Apple Watch and somehow still miss Teams notifications as they come in, I'm not even sure how that happens...

I'm so close to abandoning the iPhone as my main phone and going back to my S23 Ultra pretty much entirely because of notifications, it's been a disappointment...

> I can use real Firefox!

This is the only reason I'm using Android when the rest of my family is on iOS. uBlock on Firefox Android is essential.

Android has frequently been ahead of Apple in terms of features for years at this point. But Apple's overall "ecosystem" is (or was) much more cohesive, so everything felt very Apple, while Android's has (for better or worse) been something of a wild west situation; and iPhone's have excellent cameras. If you go with a flagship Android phone, though, you're now getting an equally good camera (if not better in some cases) and the benefit of Android's more freedom, in relative terms of course.

NA seems to really fixate on the luxury and social significer aspect of having an iphone though. But I think this update is finally ending that for some people. I have many friends who were diehard iPhone users that are now thinking of moving to Android. There's also a growing sense that new gens of most phones are making only marginal advances. Keeping a phone for 3 or more years is much more common and some mid-tier phones are now getting long security and update commitments.

Dunno man, I’ve used Android recently and it’s still as bafflingly confusing and crappy as I remember it being.

Definitely an “to each their own” kind of situation.

Fair if you haven't looking at it in a while but they have largely been on par for a decade.

The Apple hardware is more consistently premium of course but if you compare the Samsung Galaxy whatever with the iphone they have been pretty close for a while. The entire industry has been in incremental innovation for a long time.

Things like media playback via a web browser (and really browsing in general) are so superior to iOS it's not even a fair comparison.

It’s honestly hard to tell from outside - execs at that level are very rarely fired. They tend to be asked politely to find something new to do with their time

Personally I would be down for a return to woodgrain or brushed metal.

https://imgur.com/a/5uHuYyV

If it helps, I've been using XFCE since 2007 and it's remained functionally identical for all of those almost 20 years. It just works, it improves a tiny bit with each major upgrade, and they don't rearrange everything every couple years for the sake of justifying a salary.

Maybe it's a good opportunity to consider whether you actually have to keep running on Apple's treadmill.

> dumped a glass of water all over my MBP

I believe that's how the designers at Apple came up with Liquid Glass

There could be hope for it, but it might be too late now. I dumped tea on my M1 Macbook air earlier this year. I managed to save it - sort of. I had to replace the battery. The screen was working but also had liquid damage so I replaced it as well.

Immediately after spilling tea on it I shut it off, took off the bottom plate, rinsed it with water, and rinsed it again with isopropyl alcohol. I think I waved a heat gun over it for a bit and then left it in front of a fan. This was about 8 months ago and it still works!

The only lingering problem is that when caps lock is off, the light on the key is slightly illuminated. Weird, but I can tolerate that!

are macs m5 out? can you wait that long?

Liquid Glass is not that bad lol.

How is using an already paid for computer giving more money to Apple?

Especially when Sequoia will be supported by security updates for at least another 1-2 years. There aren't any compelling "gotta have it" reasons to upgrade to Tahoe.

I don’t want to wear one of those things on my face. I want a high-quality computer and phone. Apple executives are out to lunch.

It sounds plausible, but only in the shallowest “yeah, make ‘em look the same” way. Just like when they started shipping the Catalyst-based Mac apps of Messages, Photos, etc so that they’d look the same as the iOS apps (and no doubt so they could reuse some code from there instead of wasting developers on the Mac platform they hate).

It’s not as though anything about Liquid Glass makes a meaningful difference in usability.

I keep seeing this take lately and I don’t understand it at all because there is ~zero Liquid Glass in visionOS, including in visionOS 26.

More likely the UX team touched AVP last, so some of the design language influenced what they were building.

The goal is most likely to unify the experience around iPadOS, so that one codebase ports down the phone and watch and over to the Mac and AVP.

The delta between Mac and iPad UX elements goes down every release. The latest one gave the iPad a menu bar and multi window support.

Looking at it from a certain angle, the iOS codebase is the only one which has a native team for a lot of large companies - they might not even create larger views for an iPad native version, and may instead ship Electron for the macOS release. Apple is trying to recruit the native mobile team to be able to support native releases for the whole ecosystem.

VisionOS doesn't actually have the degree of transparency of Liquid Glass, though, which makes the whole thing particularly weird. It has a much more opaque frosted glass effect.

Remember when Windows 8 tried to make all desktop applications touch-friendly? The situation seems remarkably similar.

It would help if it wasn't 3500 dollars, they did not embrace games, and were expecting developers to buy such devices for so little return in development cost, released at a time most headsets were already on yet again going down on another VR headset cycle.

It was bound to fail since day one.

Sure, supposedly.

Except Liquid Glass looks nothing at all like visionOS. If they had just taken a carbon copy of the visionOS UI and put it on Mac and iPhone, I doubt there would have been any controversy. Buttons don't look like they hover way higher than the UI. Sidebars and toolbar buttons are indented, they don't scream "LOOK AT ME!".

Dye is just a moron.

I would be shocked if Apple was making any product decisions to benefit visionOS at the expense of anything else. It’s so abundantly clear that the vision pro was a failure, it would be a horrible mistake to sacrifice anything to try and save it at this point. I think Apple is done with that experiment.

Liquid (Gl)ass

Tiger with 10.5/10.6-style 2D grid virtual desktops and Mavericks traffic light buttons, or alternatively Mavericks with aqua scrollbars and 10.5/10.6-style 2D grid virtual desktops is very close to my ideal desktop environment.

Even Jony Ive, who I thought was a bad UI designer when that job was unwisely given to him, thinks Alan Dye has no taste. That’s saying something.

> back in the days both Apple and third party developers would follow the HIG closely enough that something felt off right away when an app wasn't behaving 100% native.

That's only true for desktop productivity apps and widgets. Apple and 3rd party "creativity" apps never followed the HIG religiously, if at all.

Very much yes. When "affordance" was one of the primary goals, rather than "breathing room". Information density took a nose-dive and we lost all visual separation and gained... what? Less battery life?

I hope I'm wrong but I don't see quality control improving with Dye's leave.

The man had a bad taste for design but bug prevalence is endemic and changing head of design won't fix that.

That's egregiously bad, and malicious.

Viewing all tabs in Safari is the thorn in my side.

They’ve achieved sufficient lock-in that they can enshittify everything as much as they want with no consequences. Switching has too high an ecosystem cost, plus in the US it’s a special case that a lot of people think if you don’t use all Apple products you are probably poor.

Nevertheless, I also remember that in the 10.4 days, OS X had the reputation of being sluggish compared to Linux or even Windows (I guess it was Windows 7 at the time?). And it kinda was. Bouncing ball when launching an app.

How high the bar was back then.

My biggest beef with client-side decorations is that they're not optional. For those of us using tiling window managers those decorations are totally superfluous and only take up space, especially since the Gnome folks seem to have decided that every UI element needs to have lebensraum by adding huge areas of white space around them. I want my windows densely populated and I want lots of them on my screen because I'm using a COMPUTER - not a PHONE - with a LARGE SCREEN and a pointing device. I do not need to be able to fat-finger those buttons, I have an accurate pointing device with which I control a pointy cursor with which I can accurately hit single pixels if needed. Now I need to LD_PRELOAD some library to get rid of those stupid unneeded decorations, I need to find the current iteration of the compact Adwaita theme (for as long as that is still possible...) and I otherwise need to FIGHT the software as if I were running some proprietary blob of malware from the Fruit Factory or from Redmond. Blegh, so much wasted time and effort.

Annnd here they all come to prove my point! I said in my comment “watch people be insulted by the community just because they ran into an issue.” And here they are, insulting me just because I ran into issues… to prove my point wrong?

You just can’t make this shit up, it’s too hilarious.

Throughout using Linux here and there for like two decades or so, my only issues were Ubuntu forcing some very Microsoft-ish decisions on me, which I did not like. Plus, this very very stable very stable Debian breaking upon version upgrades (I have no idea why, I keep running mostly default Debian since forever). These days I mostly use Arch and Fedora (on those shared computers I don’t bother to config to my liking), and they were mostly flawless for like years. I have some things I don’t like, but they aren’t too many and minuscule. I used a MacBook Pro for like over a decade, but left macOS earlier than this LiquidAss fiasco, so I cannot relate really. But still reading all these complaints about Windows and macOS, it looks like your guys only issue with Linux is ‘I did not make any effort to understand the system, I’d use my weird pervert Windows baggage and expect it would just work the same way.’ Hey, it wouldn’t. Take a weekend to research, take a month to play with Linux on some non-critical hardware (buy a used ThinkPad or ThinkCentre). I’d say Linux is quite ready for most things these days. Yes, not all hardware may work well, but once you understand the reasons for that, you won’t blame the community, but rather those who intentionally do nothing to make their own hardware work. I’m looking at you Nvidia. And even them, it looks like, started doing something. Switching my desktops from almost a decade on macOS, I mostly feel like an upgrade. Even on a MacBook! I wish some software to be better, but it’s getting there slowly, even without my help.

> And it won’t be until the community recognises it has a problem, but all I see is denial.

Well, that's not fair to the community or yourself. You didn't outline your yearly install process whatsoever, for all we know you're installing Hannah Montana Linux and throwing in the towel. You can get a SteamOS-style environment on whatever Linux device you want, you just need to copy Valve's steps.

Additionally, you have to accept that you're just outlining perspective here. Linux was "ready" for my desktop in 2019. I played 4 hours of Cyberpunk last week with my GPU undervolted by 33%, no crash whatsoever. Your experience certainly doesn't reflect what most people say, so a lot of people will pass this by and say PEBCAK.

The thing that’s weird about this though is it isn’t enshitification. I don’t want to defend the worsening of software quality/ux/ui for monetary gain but at least it’s somewhat rational. This is not a change that emphasizes profit driven changes over user driven ones. Maybe I’m missing some profit motive but it just seems like an awful design choice.

Edit: Not to disagree though. I too have a Linux gaming pc and are helping friends do the same.

My browser has a half-inch white bar at the bottom constantly, presumably because of this setting.

Using that option suddenly nerfed all my themes in Edge, forcing the window title bars to all be gray instead of the bold colors I use to differentiate the different profiles I use for work. I wish there was a “Reduce bullshit” toggle on MacOS and iOS, and also that it would skip all the increasingly stupid animations. No, reduce motion sucks because it just uses an equally-slow crossfade. Just STFU and let me move to the next task and stop animating everything. Good for you, you have a good GPU, I don’t care.

For years I was begging to get better multitasking and more powerful apps, especially after they introduced the magic keyboard. They can take it all back now. I'd rather they stick with 0 multitasking, if this is the best they can do.

I think this goes both ways.

Famously, Jobs' demands pushed engineers to think and work harder to achieve what they think was impossible, which resulted in many of the most iconic designs of personal electronic devices in history.

On the other hand, we have butterfly keyboard and this.

My wife is non-technical and hates it. She said it looks "ugly and childish".

And I made sure to not bias her with my or HN's opinion about liquid glass. I patiently waited for her initiative to comment on the update.

> All the non-technical people I know loved it. It's pretty. It's neat. It looks cool. Apple is a consumer products company.

My partner doesn't like it, and outside of excel she is not a technical person.

Looking at popularity of similar design on iOS it would be surprising “non-technical” users like it. People HATE new iOS. Low contrast, not clear layering and focus, things being moved around for unknown reasons.

Also who uses MacOs beaides developers? Majority are creative prosumers in arts/design and they are even more annoyed by messed up designs. What you are left with are lawyers, writers, students? I guess they might like it.

I don't use a trackpad. I leave my Macbook closed with 2 external monitors and an external mouse/keyboard.

I saw some responses like this. I have zero Adobe apps in my Mac.

The Jobs I and Jobs II eras at Apple prove it is constructive.

I knew at least one armchair UI expert would come out of the woodwork because I dared to have an opinion that was only agreeing with the 99% of what OP said instead of 100%, but the _level_ of obtuseness in your comment still managed to surprise me.

Maybe the quality is reduced, sure. But if you "do some searches" you can find all of those things for any major software release.

Seems to me like people in Apple's walls are forgetting that the outside world is not some Garden of Eden. But yeah, I'd have to use it to say for sure.

Well, Mac hardware is good, but in what universe is anything working better on Windows than Linux?? Same hardware available, less bloatware.

Linux has loads of problems, but at least to me, I register these problems in a very different way.

The problems with Windows and MacOS are almost all the result of bad incentives, user hostile arrogant design, or just neglect. As such, the presence of these problems feels malcious, and it always feels like I'm pitted against the very company that I'm paying quite a bit of money to. I'm left with very little hope of things actually improving, because these companies seem to have no incentive to actually make their operating systems more useful or aligned with my needs.

On Linux, the problems are almost always just a result of "hey man, I tried my best to make something good and useful, but I either don't have the resources or the skills to get it all the way there." Sometimes things break or are ugly or whatever, but it's not malicious. There's a strong sense that things are rapidly improving, and that I can play a small part in helping those improvements along (via the patches I submit, or with donations or other forms of support). Because of this, I find the problems on Linux so much less frustrating than analogous problems on MacOS or Windows.

I also think a lot of people might not realize just how rapidly things have been improving on Linux. The situation today is pretty different versus even just 3-5 years ago.

I think a lot of people on HN don't realize that some people require software outside of a terminal and a web browser. Can I run Ableton on linux? can I run all the audio plugins that only ship windows/mac versions? is there a decent graphics editor? (gimp is not it.) If all I did was play in the terminal and a web browser, I'd have switched to Linux by now.

Although its not for everyone, I run a Hackintosh and stick to 10.15 or lower.

Windows is horrible, yes. But Linux definitely isn't "just as bad" as MacOS, it's already better, and it keeps getting better every year while MacOS keeps getting worse.

Laughs in very stable Xfce for 15 years.

> Windows is horrible and Linux is just as bad

I will civilly contradict you about both MW11 and about Linux.

MW11 is rather good for usability. The failures at this point are the egregious telemetry, the spyware misfeatures (e.g. Recall), and the AI slop being squeezed into everything including Notepad for pity's sake.

Linux with Wayland is sweet. Gnome and KDE now use Wayland by default and they are celebrated for their usability. I personally have taken a leaner approach by opting for Sway (tiled) and labwc (floating) depending on the current task.

TL;dr _ Get with the times, Linux is great. Windows UX is actually rather good, but the leadership of MSFT continues to be ghoulish.