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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

It's hard to justify snowflake animations on your website...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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?

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.

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.)

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.)

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?

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!

> 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.

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!

28 days ago. 334 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46196688

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.

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.

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

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

Hard to justify snow falling in front of the text on a blog post about how a redesign isn’t helpful design.

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.

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.

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.

It's a blunt instrument, but this is how I would justify the Tahoe icons:

    .icon {
      text-align: justify;
      display: none;
    }

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.

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. :-)

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.

The number of elements and their behaviors should be limited

Reading that as an animation of snow completely blocks my ability to read

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Someone managed to read that article? With the constantly falling snowflakes? Dang, his UI choices seem worse than any he might be criticizing..

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.

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).

Love Tonsky's articles. My favorite is about centering things: 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?

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

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.

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...

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/, 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.

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.

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/Restore-32-bi...

https://github.com/LukeZGD/EverPwnage

https://sideloadly.io

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).

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?

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...

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.

I'm not going to take design advice from somebody who animates snow falling over the text and images of his blog

I love that I'm reading this on a site that has decided to obscure the content with falling snow for the holidays

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.

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).

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...

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...

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.

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.

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.

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?

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

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.

Funny thing is that i didn't see that "icon" that disables snow effect.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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

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.

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.

Wow: horrifying. I've been delaying the upgrade, and looks like I'm going to keep right on delaying it.

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.

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.

Apple has been poisoning the design space the last 5-10 years, they're not just doing it to themselves.

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.

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.

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.

Those who want to complain about the snowflake animations, wait till you try out the dark mode

Ironically adding a snowfall CSS effect to this blog also makes it difficult to read and use.

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.

https://web.archive.org/web/20121225011818/http://www.useit....

Old but gold

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.

This talk by Scott Jenson is just fantastic and he explains some nuances and missed opportunities

https://youtu.be/1fZTOjd_bOQ?si=Kiyy_W3Zg3jkCWLG

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.

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.

Excellent article. What really got my respect was the fact that his videos listed at https://tonsky.me/talks/ are not hosted on YouTube.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

Similar discussion on similar blog post from last month: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46196688

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.

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.

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.

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.

Page about usability has distracting snow all over the page :)

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.

Is there a recommended modern day, non mac specific, equivalent to those "Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines" linked at the beginning of the article?

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?

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.

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

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.

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).

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

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.

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.

Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46196688

This one better hurt the Apple employees who still cares:

"On the upside: it’s not that hard anymore to design better than Apple!"

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.

You know what's the other thing that's hard to justify - the incredibly distracting falling snow background.

Agreed about the icons, but sweet mercy, that was a challenging read with the snowflakes falling in front of the text.

On my phone that website had some ash rain animation all over it, making it unreadable without reader mode. WTF.

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.

What is with the annoying snow going over the text? That is a pretty “arbitrary” graphic element

Reminds me of me when I started building gui applications. Hopefully they'll get over it.

Apple still get quite good revenue and best in class engineers, how does this allowed to happen?

A bit ironic that the website complaining about UI has virtual snow on it making reading hard.

I like seeing the icons. It helps me pick the right thing without reading. Seems easier for me.

Oh, that snow backdrop really hits hard while talking about other people's UI failures...

I don't mind the icons, but the snow effect on the website makes it much harder to read.

Well at least lots of designers at apple can now claim "I created icons for mac os"

Posting about the finer points of UX while your whole page has a geocities snow animation.

It’s hard to justify the UI rant when there is annoying snowflakes animation on top of it.

So much effort is spent in the computer industry to un-solve previously solved problems.

It's hard to justify caring about one company's cosmetic design decisions.

Introduce UX problems today —> enables a big win when you remove them next version.

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.

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.

Oh god, collecting these screenshots must've magnified the pain so much.

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.

Sorry, it's because they are busy with marketing liquid glass theme.

The snow falling in front of the text here really drives the point home

I love the snow on the web page, it highlights the message really well!

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.

Isn’t this post a bit ironic given all the random snow on the page?!

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 ?

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.

It's lacking taste, as is everything from Apple these days.

Next article should be about snow on web page and readability.

It’s hard to justify the snow effect on that web page too…

The snow effect made it unbearable for me to finish reading

Man that pre-XP Windows menu really had soul. I miss it.

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.

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. :(

Very much agree! Apple has been dropping the ball lately

Including the statement "Adding unpleasant, distracting, illegible, messy, cluttered" on a page with unpleasant, distracting, illegible, messy, and cluttered snowfall is certainly a choice.

Why are Close and Save so next to each other?

All the icons look easily center-justified to me!

I love this post. Had me laughing quite a bit.

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?

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.

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.

Reminder, you can turn off the animated snow effect with the snowflake icon at the top

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?

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.

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.

Big words coming from the guy rendering dense falling snow over the entire article content.

This is so well written

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.

I just think it's funny he has an obnoxious snow animation all over his screed against arbitrary graphic elements.

I hate liquid glass a lot but it's hard to take seriously this when there are snowflakes falling in front of the text.

no cuz its easier to read that context menu with icons

> 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.

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.

The snow flakes of the website are really bad for UX, just saying.

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?

Another great one from Tonsky:

https://tonsky.me/blog/disenchantment/

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

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.

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.

It's hard to take anything this author says seriously when it's snowing all over their text.

For someone critical of UI, he has an awful lot of animated bullshit on that site.

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 :)

Are the annoying little white circles falling part of the critique?

yes

Typical growing pains for a 4 trillion dollar company.

Now I am more afraid than ever to upgrade to Tahoe.

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.

am i the only one who likes liquid glass

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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).

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.