One of the most annoying things after installing Tahoe for me, that for no good reason an ordinary app would randomly lose its focus. In the midst of my typing. This is unbelievably preposterous and I just can't stop hating Apple for this crap. How the fuck this is acceptable? I just have no words. What makes it even worse that I couldn't even complain about it on their support pages - they just keep removing my comments for being "non-constructive". This is some random bug, and many people have complained about it, how am I suppose to make it "more constructive"? Send them the exact configuration of constellations, the number of monitors I use and their positioning angles, log the keyboard rate and delay, the latency, the level of magnetic interference caused by my Bluetooth devices, etc.?

> Luckily for Apple, Windows 11 is not exactly in a position to attract switchers.

Yes, but Linux is finally in that position, not to mention we're seeing silicon from intel and amd that can compete with the M series on mobile devices.

Apple's worst release in years (maybe ever), Microsoft's worst release in years (maybe ever), meanwhile mainstream Linux UX has been taking baby steps forward on a nearly-daily basis for a decade straight.

I'm not saying 2026 is the year, but...

Not to beat on my own drum but as a mac convert from the days of Tiger I saw the writing on the wall from miles away.

Still on iOS 18 and macOS 15 (Sequoia). I was a day one upgrader up until now, never had any regrets but this time things seemed very different.

It's worrisome but all is not lost, I'll start sweating for real if next year's releases don't improve things substantially.

Apple software has noticeably declined from my experience, both iOS and macOS. I find the lifecycle of Apple products to be offensively short, also.

If I buy a product and the hardware is good for 10 years (because I looked after it), I expect the software to also run just as well as when I purchased it - that is the case with Linux, why isn't it the case with macOS?

Every year the software upgrades invariably degrade system performance. Outrageous.

I don't understand why Apple change things needlessly. What other purpose does it serve? How does this positively affect the bottom line? How does it improve life for Apple's users? Breaking basic interaction with windows purely because someone feels we should waste more screen real-estate on ornamentation by having bigger radius rounded corners is, for lack of a better word, stupid.

I'd like Apple to focus more on the things that actually matter to users. To fix bugs, to work on performance, to simplify things rather than complicate them. Focus on making it a better platform for doing work and less a playground for pointless fiddling with design and sloppiness.

I agree. This is the first time I regret updating macOs.

I hoped the .1 or .2 would fix things, but I'm still seeing glitches and even random freezes.

Microsoft is a disaster right now, but if the new intel processor can compete on battery life with mac I might go back to linux.

When I read the welcome screen which includes the "hit features", all I remember was

"You can change your icons!" - What? Was that the big issue of my day? (Although, after I saw what they had done to them, it certainly loomed larger in my mind)

and

"Notification summaries that may be incorrect"

Miserable. Won't be upgrading the personal computer, am fast moving away from Apple as a whole, am telling others not to upgrade for as long as possible.

first time i used tahoe to help a friend w/ their laptop i legit thought it was like a knockoff macos or something, genuinely the ugliest macos version and even in the brief time that i've used it, i've encountered annoying bugs, QC at apple is dead lowkey

> "I wish I didn’t.”

Can't you do a factory reset/recovery on Mac that lands on the version of macos shipped with the device? Then you could re-upgrade to the os you wanted, without trying it it seems Sequoia is still available in the app store

I'm not sure if it's pure nostalgia but I long back to the "Lion era" of OS X.

Apple had a HIG and third party developers used it. Different apps looked consistent: toolbar, sidebar etc.

Apps had borders. If there was too much content there were big blue scrollbars.

Buttons had borders. Windows had texture. You could find stuff.

I could go on forever. But the OS was simultaneously better visible to the eye, and less visible to the mind. Stuff worked.

At least on Windows 11 it’s possible to disable the rounded corners.

Thanks for the advise. I have not upgraded, and have no plan to.

I have maybe unpopular opinion, but Apple always been terrible in UX.

Just to give a few examples which annoys me the most:

- Finder. It just something else. After 10 years of using OSX I still can’t figure out how to use it efficiently for selecting the path - this experience is different every time, depending on the context where Finder was called from. I just don’t get.

- Lack of the true tiling window manager experience. Yes, there is Yabai, but it still suck due to the fact that you can’t have truly independent spaces each with individual layout and stack of windows.

- Infamous Magic Mouse’s charting port at the bottom.

I just wish I could have normal Linux natively on MB Pro.

Windows vista was a good OS. Windows 7 was vista with a new skin. People were just really dumb and didn’t realise vista needed new drivers and when 7 came out all the drivers were written so stuff worked and for some reason it made people think 7 was good and vista was bad.

I wonder if they'll show charts of how few people have upgraded in the same way they mocked Windows 10 adoption and Android versions a few years ago at the Keynote, to rapturous applause. I for one am staying on Sequoia as the OS looks like a children's toy on Tahoe.

> iOS 8+ did improve on iOS 7’s worst bits

Or iOS 8 and 9 did revert back a lot of iOS 7 changes.

I am not against changing UI, but it seems every time they are doing it they forgot all the lesson learned from previous attempt, and in such short period of time suggest they haven't learned anything.

I agree. I have been kind of an Apple fanboy but the Tahoe thing is one of the worst products to come out of the company. I really think people should be fired for releasing this.

This is akin to MobileMe -

https://www.cultofmac.com/apple-history/steve-jobs-mobileme-...

I am still on Sequoia and dont plan to move to Tahoe.

Given the departure of Alan Dye and his replacement with someone (whose name I have temporarily forgotten) who comes from an actual UI design background, I am very optimistic that the next few iterations of macOS and iOS will actually start to improve the UI situation.

I regret dearly the upgrade as well. I've turned a beautiful $3500 hardware into a close to Windows Vista machine that frustrates me daily. Just looking at it kills my productivity instantly, I just use full screen for all my apps now.

> Luckily for Apple, Windows 11 is not exactly in a position to attract switchers.

Yes, because my apple hardware does not run properly with any other operating system. I would have switched to linux a while ago otherwise.

I had to upgrade my iPhone to iOS 26 to setup my watch. I wish I had never done it. Nothing is where it's supposed to be from a UI perspective. Stuff breaks often. I can't use my contact search bar to search contacts. It only searches past calls. What the hell.

I was in the market for a new MBP (still on my 2015 MBP). After all of these articles and reports of how terrible Tahoe is, I’m holding off.

I’m hoping they’ll wake up and fix this with the next release, but I’m not super optimistic.

We’ll see.

When I saw the first liquid glass demo I decided not to upgrade both my phone and macbook for couple of years to come till they fix it.

Staying with Sequoia and iOS 18 for as long as I can.

The most annoying part about it is they won't admit the obvious colossal mistake and fix it.

I've blocked Apple's update servers via /etc/hosts so this monstrous thing doesn't sneak onto my machine in the middle of the night, still happily on Sequoia.

Tahoe is a bit shit, yes. But I was there for both Vista and Windows 8 and they were both utterly unusable.

Vista ate every bit of RAM it could find, had severe driver issues and riddled with instabilities. It would not run on half the hardware at the time. I faintly remember a DX10 shitshow as well. And 8 hopelessly tried to apply Metro to the desktop and added a third (or was it forth?) settings panel. Also killed the Start menu.

Tahoe: The opposite of Snow Leopard.

Tahoe actually harms their hardware sales. I would normally upgrade to the latest MacBook Pro as soon as they become available, but I know that the next M5 generation will come with Tahoe installed and I intend to keep my current machine for as long as I can…

though use linux is in a great state. tahoe and windows are really bad right now and i don't regret moving to linux even a little bit.

Unfortunately for Apple, Linux has not rotted the same way that macOS has. Will Linux win the desktop wars through attrition because it won't suffer the same enshittification as for-profit software?

If it wasn't for Apple Silicon and its stellar impact on battery life, I'd be gone. iOS 26 might make it happen anyway!

oof. i'll be holding off after seeing all this. already have to deal with adobe's bad updates

same here. still running on the previous version on all devices. Gonna sit this out ...

> Tahoe is a macOS mis-step on par with Windows 8 or Windows Vista

Not even close.

It's taken a few steps in the wrong direction, but nothing compaered to the user-hostility of Win8 (attempting to move users from 'real Windows' into locked-down dumbed-down touch-centric mobile-like app store hell), let alone Win11 (creating an e-waste mountain, then pushing AI slop into everything)

The worst part is the audiocore substack that is glitching. I waited to major subversions to upgrade and still got bit. I hate this.

I switched from Windows 11 to macOS after a disastrous upgrade experience and drastic downgrade in performance on my Windows laptop.

I mean Windows 10 wasn't great but I got used to the taskbar searching the web somehow and the dual config menus everywhere and so on. But 11 was just terrible.

macOS has its pain points but man oh man what a disaster Windows is.

I have had Linux on my personal desktop and laptop forever so that hasn't been an issue, only used Windows for work.

>Tahoe is a macOS mis-step on par with Windows 8 or Windows Vista.

Are you just saying that because it has new glassy windows and is a resource hog? What is that different about Tahoe vs Sequoia?

I hope so, Tahoe seems particularly bad, but the downhill slide has been happening for several releases.

> Tahoe is a macOS mis-step on par with Windows 8 or Windows Vista.

Other than that weird resize thing written about here (which I didn't notice, thanks SizeUp for providing me with hotkeys remarkably similar to Windows) - why? Vista and 8 were immediately obvious changes in the UI, but in general it still looks and feels just like macOS has for well over a decade now.

New icons, new fonts, but... that's it?

Oh and HyperSwitch for some reason can't switch to Finder windows any more, but that's probably because HyperSwitch hasn't seen an upgrade in years...

Can you interpret this comment for those of us that haven't used windows? All i can recall from "vista" is that it looked good

It’s such an utter piece of crap.

I'm as picky as the next guy, but I'm not seeing Tahoe being THAT BAD. I was holding off, but various events led to me buying a new laptop so I got it by default.

Resizing isn't great, but it's also deeply shitty in Win 11. I feel like window manager thought leadership has failed across the board, but the regression isn't that big of a deal in day to day usage, and is definitely not unique to Apple.

Yea, the programmers aren’t to blame here. In fact some of the visual effects they have achieved are pretty cool. The designers are at fault because they prioritized visuals over usability. Literally nobody I know thinks “Liquid Glass” has been an improvement. The feedback is universally negative.

I know enough people at Apple who are at the mercy of the overlord design teams, and it sounds exactly like what you described

> I swear, this reign of visual artists as dictators has to stop.

> I'm sure people noticed this issue internally and brought it up but some thing by some designer was seen as biblically sacred and overruled all reason.

Funny how Apple went from Jony Ive sacrificing hardware usability for "beauty" (touch bars and butterfly switches) to Alan Dye mucking up macOS and iOS with Liquid glAss.

I worked for a company with a large website. The designers were elite and worked in a darkroom on expensive Apple equipment. At some point, it turned out that users couldn't see a certain color on the website because it could be seen on an Apple monitor, but not on a mass-market laptop's TFT screen.

Seems like you could make the corners round (not making a judgement on that in any way) and still give the resize handle a more sensible size/shape/location right? As in this isn't a visual design problem.

Your comment reminded of these fantastic sketch.

The Expert (Short Comedy Sketch) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg

I want OS vendors to stop prioritizing "design" above performance. Opening a Finder window used to be instant, now it takes 0.3s-1s. Opening Safari used to be instant, now it takes seconds. Even menus in the menu bar take a few dozen milliseconds too long, which becomes obvious when you compare it to apps with custom truly-instant hamburger menus.

Computers are faster than ever, every task other than UI rendering is finished faster than ever, but these geniuses keep slowing down the UI with every update. It's criminal.

>I swear, this reign of visual artists as dictators has to stop.

Visual artists and graphic/ux designers weren’t exactly claiming for Tahoe either.

> fixing an obviously broken spec

Going off spec is not the correct way to deal with this, and I could see how that might get you in trouble. It's counter productive.

Better choice is to escalate, but at some point you have to simply disagree and commit.

In my experience, part of the problem lies in visual artists not wanting to iterate the way software development does. Sure, they might iterate on the design as they work on it, but once they've found their final design, they strongly resist changing it, even as the actual development and testing of the software to implement it iterates and finds problems.

It's a throwback to BDUF.

>I'm sure people noticed this issue internally and brought it up but some thing by some designer was seen as biblically sacred and overruled all reason.

I disagree. Seems more like the group that implemented border radius at the OS UI implementation level did not work with the group that handles window sizing. Not everything is a conspiracy.

I think the mistake comes from when UI/UX started calling themselves a part of product leadership, vs basically being one of the team.

I believe the heavy sarcasm is completely justified, I second it.

Most of the software creeping towards complete unusability devolve through non-practical apparence tweeking bullshit, ruining usability, while the functionality is intact (apart from bugfixes).

The other reason for decay is the overcomplication - pilin new and new marginal things on the top of the functionality heap - combined with sloppines, rushing through things, but that's an other discussion.

Did we reach a peek in software quality recently? So things only go down from here? I have this growing itchy feeling. I feel obstructed, forced to jump hoops, also disgust touching an increasing amount of software, most of those used for many many years without trouble (i.e. did not really registered its usage, it was doing things silently and well, but now starting to jump into my face or kick my legs).

It also - as seen in that screenshot, had large, always visible scrollbars where it was easy to see how far down you were in a folder or document, and could easily click and drag to scroll to where you needed. Now in the service of minimalism we have scrollbars that consist of a thin, semi-transparent line that fades out after half a second and is nearly impossible to click and drag due to how small it is.

In the Aqua image the big bright blue scrollbars stand out far, far more than the content. That sucks, honestly. So does the percentage of the screen dedicated to their presence.

Also, horizontal scrollbars suck. One thing later versions of Finder did well was adjust columns to minimize the presence of them.

We just don't need UI that big anymore. These days our cursors are much more accurate, from the magical Mac trackpad to high DPI optical mice, and we're 40+ years into GUIs so the limited number of people who opt-in to a full computing experience can already be expected to know the basics.

Yes Tahoe sucks, but going back to Aqua or classic MacOS would also suck, just in a different direction. If you actually spend time using classic MacOS and Aqua these days, man is it frustrating to get basic things done. Everything is so slow and you're constantly resizing windows to see whats in them. I own several Macs from the 80s-00s and they are really in need of many quality of life updates that later MacOS revs added. On a modern Mac, enabling 'show scrollbars' gets you to a pretty optimal Finder experience, minus all the stupid Mac bugs and Tahoe nonsense like this article points out.

It should be noted the drag handle was removed back in Lion. And the square cutout was removed in Panther, both of which were iterations of Aqua.

(and yes Lion was garbage, first upgrade I skipped since Tiger, and definitely the first "what the fuck are they doing").

Note that downside: you could only resize from that bottom right corner, not from any other edge!

I do think that was better overall, and it's something I miss about Snow Leopard, but I can see why they changed it.

Windows also used to have a "grip" indicator. Nowadays I only see this in resziable textboxes in browsers...

Yeah, but scrollbars are bad and every bathwater has its baby.

(P.S. scrollbars aren't even bad)

Better in that it was clear, but worse that you had to resize from the bottom right. Made expanding to the left, or up, very annoying. I'd take the current situation over this.

Man, I love platinum. I know the internet favours Aqua by a wide margin (and fairly so, it is gorgeous), but something about platinum just feels right to me.

Great comment. I had forgotten how much better things were in terms of visual indicators. Slick looking design should never come at the expense of usability.

Why did they stop this?

It was parctical (just like clearly visible scrollbars).

And my conviction is that computers are for practical and not the pretty things primarily. Can be pretty but not on the expense of usability. This last one is increasingly and sadly untrue nowadays!

I especially liked the part with the hand trying to grab the plate. Perfect imagery.

It's funny. one of the most significant UI axioms I ever learned came from Bill Atkinson: "Always make the 'click zone' a little larger than the visual indication of the affordance." This becomes tricky or impossible for some things like touch-keypads, but for most things it makes the difference between frustrating and magical.

Apple seems to have forgotten its own innovations.

What feels plausible to me is changing the underlying 19x19 px control would break layout of many existing apps, and the design team was hell bent that window corners had to be that round. I’d say it’s simply form over function, and that likely a meta-level argument about user empowerment or whatnot won.

I hope "cutting corners" in this context was an intentional pun.

It did seem like they fixed iOS slowly after 7, where they went too far with flatness.

It’s not cutting corners. Apple does most of their testing using strictly internal resources, like secret “mini malls” in the Silicon Valley area. They fail because this testing biases their sampling; users must sign draconian NDAs to participate, among other things. These samples are effectively biased due to Apple’s corporate culture regarding secrecy and competition. So, Apple actually works very hard. It’s just they culturally prefer a lot of techniques that their competitors (e.g. Google and Facebook) have throughly proven as inferior.

But is Google better? Not really, they killed a lot of good products like Reader.

But is Facebook better? Not really, Cambridge Analytica and Metaverse and .. facebook products are disposable.

But I think these Apple UX bugs are misdiagnosed. Yes they are atrocious. But think about how atrocious and non-representative and non-competitive Apple’s testing population is.

>This feels like a surprisingly good moment for Linux desktops to...actually gain ground.

I agree, and its likely that both macOS and Windows will continue to get worse.

That said, it's important to be realistic because users can and will put up with quite a lot of discomfort before switching, and this is because for every bad feature or misstep, there are 100 others that are so good you don't even notice them. And when you switch, you start noticing all those others features you never noticed before, because they are now gone. Some of these features will be hardware, some OS, some application support, and some of them you can fix and some you just have to get used to.

An approach I recommend is to add a linux laptop to the mix. You can buy a used, powerful laptop cheap, install Linux on it and try to use it for a time, keeping your other machines around. Chances are you'll find various trade-offs - Linux will NOT be a strict improvement, it will have downsides. Linux is particularly weak with power management and certain devices like fingerprint readers. Depending on the apps you use, it can be weak there, too. That said, Linux is very usable, easy to install, and you should try it. But I think it does people a disservice to imply its better on every axis. It's better on some, worse on others.

Linux desktops aren’t all immune to excessive minimalism and UI churn either. Just look at Gnome where they’ve decided it’s good in terms of usability to put all options in a hamburger menu and remove any sorts of sensible config options from the UI (a while back it was basic things like “show icons on the desktop”) to achieve this supposed sleekness.

GNOME has exactly the same quirky behavior with rounded windows, where the drop shadow is actually the clickable area to resize the window.

Also alternatives to Office, browsers, and pretty much anyone who can come along and say "we make tools that do what you want them to do."

All of these are longshots, but it really feels like we've hit a historic level of discontent.

If you applied these standards of critique to Linux UIs, this post would be an entire encyclopedia, indexed by DE. I'd take even the worst modern Mac OS (Lion?) over that.

Linux isn't there (on the desktop), and I doubt it'll ever be. It lacks so much: newbie support, drivers, easy configuration (user friendliness in general), and software. There's so much software that doesn't run on Linux. Linux also lacks mature frameworks that make development for macOS and .NET easy. The only thing desktop linux does well is browsing. That would be enough for most people, but they also have tablets and phones, and no need for a desktop.

This won't happen until Microsoft Word is available on Linux.

It's like the console wars — different camps say "our console is better, it has more teraflops." In reality, nobody cares about that — buyers will get the console that has the games.

We're at the stage where almost any UI change no matter how small on Macs is heavily criticized. It seems a lot of people are getting very upset over a lot of micro detail. There's no way to please all of them. I've upgraded to Tahoe. Honestly, I barely notice any difference. It looks alright. There's very little for me to get upset over here. I'm pretty sure I'm in a bucket that describes the overwhelmingly large majority of users here: indifferent about the changes, overall not too upset, barely notice it.

As for Linux. I also have a Linux laptop with Gnome for light gaming (Manjaro). It's alright. But a bit of a mess from a ux point of view. Linux always was messy on that front. But it works reasonably well.

The point with the distributions that you mention is that they each do things slightly differently, and I would argue in ways that are mostly very superficial. Nobody seems to be able to agree on anything in the Linux world so all you get is a lot of opinionated takes on how stuff should behave and which side of the screen things should live. This package manager over that one.

I've been using Linux on and off for a few decades, so I mostly ignore all the window dressing and attempts to create the ultimate package manager UI, file managers and what not and just use the command line. These things come and go.

It seems many distros are mostly just exercises in creating some theme for Gnome or whatever and imitating whatever the creator liked (Windows 95, Beos, Early versions of OSX, CDE, etc.). There's a few decades of nostalgia to pick from here.

Moving windows like this is already built into macOS but it's hidden behind a flag for some reason:

  defaults write -g NSWindowShouldDragOnGesture -bool true

I recommend altSnap to get this functionality on Windows.

https://github.com/RamonUnch/AltSnap

Easy move + resize solves this

https://github.com/dmarcotte/easy-move-resize

I worked on Finder/TimeMachine/Spotlight/iOS at Apple from 2000-2007. I worked closely with Bas Ording, Stephen Lemay, Marcel van Os, Imran Chaudry, Don Lindsey and Greg Christie. I have no experience with any of the designers who arrived in the post-Steve era. During my time, Jony Ive didn't figure prominently in the UI design, although echoes of his industrial design appeared in various ways in the graphic design of the widgets. Kevin Tiene and Scott Forstall had more influence for better or worse, extreme skeumorphism for example.

The UX group would present work to Steve J. every Thursday and Steve quickly passed judgement often harshly and without a lot of feedback, leading to even longer meetings afterward to try and determine course corrections. Steve J. and Bas were on the same wavelength and a lot of what Bas would show had been worked on directly with Steve before hand. Other things would be presented for the first time, and Steve could be pretty harsh. Don, Greg, Scott, Kevin would push back and get abused, but they took the abuse and could make in-roads.

Here is my snapshot of Stephen from the time. He presented the UI ideas for the intial tabbed window interface in Safari. He had multiple design ideas and Steve dismissed them quickly and harshly. Me recollection was that Steve said something like No, next, worse, next, even worse, next, no. Why don't you come back next week with something better. Stephen didn't push back, say much, just went ok and that was that. I think Greg was the team manager at the time and pushed Steve for more input and maybe got some. This was my general observation of how Stephen was over 20 years ago.

I am skeptical and doubtful about Stephen's ability to make a change unless he is facilitated greatly by someone else or has somehow changed drastically. The fact that he has been on the team while the general opinion of Apple UX quality has degraded to the current point of the Tahoe disaster is telling. Several team members paid dearly in emotional abuse under Steve and decided to leave rather than deal with the environment post Steve's death. Stephen is a SJ-era original and should have been able to push hard against what many of us perceive as very poor decisons. He either agreed with those decisions, or did not, and choose to go with the flow and enjoy the benefits of working at Apple. This is fine I guess. Many people are just fine going with the flow and not rocking the boat. It may be even easier when you have Apple-level comp and benefits.

My opinon; unless Stephen gets a very strong push from other forces, I don't see that he has the will or fortitude to make the changes that he himself has approved in one way or another. Who will push him? Tim Cook, Craig Federighi, Eddy Cue, Phil Schiller? The perceived mess of Tahoe happened on the watch of all of these Apple leaders.

He will prevent it from getting much worse than it would have under another decade of Dye, but I don't think he can totally reverse the trend.

I think this is just what happens to companies as they get older. Most of the people who pioneered the Human Interface Guidelines aren't at the company anymore, and management doesn't see much financial growth in Mac sales compared to AI and services.

Lemay's appointment was widely celebrated, but he'd been at apple since 1999 and never got the gig. My guess is that there are valid reasons for that that may not be design-related.

Judging by this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46599464

It seems to be common.

I'm not sure "it works this way in Application A, and this other way in Application B" is a particularly strong rebuttal.

This is absolutely true. The demo in the original article seems quite deceptive in that respect. Nobody would attempt to resize a window by launching their cursor at the corner with great speed as the demo shows. The resize pointer seems to show in exactly the right place, and allows for an extra hit area slightly outside the rounded corner — I don’t see any problem with that.

As for the fact that one cannot resize from inside the window, it makes absolute sense for every other corner of the window, where the user would instead be clicking an icon or some other button (try the top right corner of the finder, where the search button sits).

So, while I agree on the whole that Tahoe is a huge step backwards in terms of design, this seems like an odd gripe to point out, as it doesn’t in fact seem to be an issue at all.

Edit: clarification

I agree with this. I was curious and tried it out just now - there's a good part of the inside corner that is draggable and a decent amount outside as well. The cursor changes to indicate resizability make it quite difficult for me to make a mistake here.

I have been using OS X since 10.4 Tiger. I still remember standing in line at midnight trying to get a copy on DVD. Getting to test all the new features back home in the middle of the night was so exciting! Well worth the €129/€29 they charged for it. Nowadays the yearly releases are more of a "meh". I hit install, they added a new grouping feature to Reminders and that is about all I use from what they added.

Still bitter that my 2006 Core Duo MacBook only had support up to 10.6 Snow Leopard but back then that was over 4 years of being able to use the latest OS, so comparable to four releases with the current cycles.

Call me cynical but I think designers need to occasionally break things that were already solved long ago to justify their continued relevance. Explains a lot of redesigns that make things only worse, reshuffling interfaces, hiding things behind menus in form over function redesigns, etc.

Fun fact: NEXTSTEP went 10 years without shipping a basic design refresh, except in prereleases (4.0PR1 and traces in 4.0PR2.) This was because it was a good fucking GUI that did its fucking job, and had "usability before aesthetics" as a core design tenet in its developer documentation.

Steve's brain fell out when he got back his throne at Apple. Aqua was a mistake.

This is probably not a coincidence. I can pretty much guarantee you a developer said something to a designer like "hey, most of this is outside the window, is that fine?" and the designer said back "well, I think so, but let's check what Windows did," and then they okayed the decision at least in part because Windows did it.

Engineers (hopefully) come to learn the value of Chesterton's Fence young, because engineering failures tend to make themselves known quickly and loudly.

Designers probably have perverse incentives. Showy new designs get promotions. Even when they hurt usability, it's often only in insidious ways.

History always repeats itself. The young generation always thinks the old generation was rubbish and they have nothing to learn from them and can do better.

IIRC, win8 was the last windows to have thick graphical window borders, and that was after they got rid of the texture/aero look from vista/7, so at that point you at least had something graphical to grab onto which (mostly?) matched where the cursor was. Then in win10 onwards they shrunk the border down to one pixel with the zone around it where you can click off the window but still affect it.

On the back of my mind I think part of this was the move to fit scaling to large resolution monitors (i.e. 4k+) work better, as a graphical border of a fixed pixel width will shrink proportionally compared to a border that is as thin as it can be. For a while I've felt that it's a missed opportunity on high res displays to not use more detailed art for window chrome as pixel wide will only get smaller and more difficult to distinguish, such as the minimize/maximize/close icons which remain pixel wide line art even at big scaling.

My guess is that both Apple and Microsoft people see this as a tradeoff.

If the anchor point for window resizing was more inside the window, then you encounter an annoying problem where youre trying to click or drag content, but you end up just resizing your window instead.

The obvious solution is to just keep the old bezel that separate the content from the scroll wheels / resizing handles and make it visually obvious what you're doing, but apparently they think that's too ugly.

I think the designers at Microsoft use Macs as their daily driver or so. So much usability thrown away the last years to look more like Apple.

the inability to just hold win+mouse1 to move or win+mouse2 to resize is driving me insane compared to KDE

> Why does the UI have to change all the time? Can't they just keep it the same?

Because if they kept it the same, then there would be no need to continue to employ all those UI designers. Therefore, to be assured of their continued employment, the UI designers have to make constant changes to justify their existence. Meanwhile, we get to suffer with their changes.

I agree with you, on Ubuntu MATE 24.04.2 enjoying getting work done instead of popups and unfathomable UI changes. Let's be friends.

Car designs do change all the time, mostly just for novelty too.

Most of these changes aren't that disruptive because they keep the fundamentals, but there are a few things Apple makes sure you never get used to like iTunes/Music or iPhone Photos.

What bothers me about Linux is that realistically your entire DE will change at some point if/when the one you're staying on becomes too unsupported. They did this kinda recently at work, not cause IT wanted a fresh new look but because of some compatibility issue.

Cars have similar UX issues as well. See the whole touchscreen saga.

It's also an issue on Linux, to an extent. GNOME has a tendency of forcing UIs on users, and Ubuntu with Unity, now GNOME again, etc. Though, thankfully, since the user is free to choose their own desktop environment and window manager, it's not as pressing of an issue.

I realized many years ago that simpler UIs deliver the best UX. This is a large reason why I love the command line so much. Most programs have a fixed and stable interface, and can be composed to do what I want. For graphical programs I prefer using a simple window manager like bspwm on X, and niri on Wayland. These don't draw window decorations, and are primarily keyboard-driven, so I don't need superfluous graphics. I only need a simple status bar that shows my workspaces, active window, and some system information. I recently configured it with Quickshell[1], and couldn't be happier. I plan to use this setup for years to come, and it gives me great peace of mind knowing that no company can take that away from me. I will have to maintain it myself, but there shouldn't be any changes in the programs I use to break this in a major way.

[1]: https://github.com/imiric/quickshell-niri/tree/main/fancy-ba...

MacOS always had its own quirks, but it had a good intuitive design that was well thought out.

All the Apple engineers and other visual designers get quite defensive really quick when we mention that Tahoe really screwed things up, because it's more than just a transition into glass design, but a complete dismissal of design principles, to the point that the entire system is slowly becoming user hostile.

Every critique of the 26 series can be explained like this article with really in depth design principles, which is already engraved in Apple design guidelines, but Apple itself just dismissed it all. Everything from being able to clearly distinguish UI elements, to general accessibility, to discoverability, everything got worse.

Operating Systems are one of the most complicated systems we created, not because they're a collection of processes and thread, but because everything is built on top of them and creating something that's well thought out and stable, and intuitive is really hard. Designers just randomly creating visual elements just because it looks cool and not paying attention how people are going to use it is simply half assing the whole thing.

That's still one of the reasons I believe Alan Dye was let go, fired in a sense, he had power over the company, but with that power he screwed things so much that we need to rediscover all the things related to usability in very high detail as if we're rediscovering the wheel, just so that we can get back to square one.

At a meta level, good design is a very useful tool for discussions about good design!

I swear Apple broke the iPhone keyboard permanently in like 2015. I don't know what it is, but I can't type reliably on any newer phone I've had, to the point where I call instead of texting. And the rare times I go back to use that iPhone 5 in my car for music, it's so easy to type, so I'm not just remembering wrongly.

This is Windows, but it might shed some light on the situation. I have a Qt application that I made, and occasionally when I switch from one window to another, the cursor doesn't switch from resize to normal, or vice versa, until I move the mouse. The precise effect is consistent, but difficult to describe, hence why the "sometimes". I think it happens because I'm not handling the window switch event as one that may require re-evaluating the cursor shape.

The removal of Launchpad was an inexplicable blunder. The OS now provides no way to organize your applications.

Why would I want my dev tools, audio apps, 3-D-modeling apps, and office apps all jumbled together?

It's as if Apple is trying to catch up to Microsoft in the race to regress.

This is a weird one. I think their reasoning was that most people don't use Launchpad, so they integrated it into Spotlight to eliminate redundancy.

I much prefer the new app launcher in Tahoe, but it was created at the expense of Launchpad, which some people actually relied on. I don't know why they couldn't have kept both options.

I was shocked when I first hit this. I'm also confused as to why the settings app constrains the window size but I think it did that in the previous version too - not a justification!

I complained about it to a team mate and he thought it was fine and I was weird for using the app launcher and not cmd-space. Although on Windows I always use win-r to run stuff.

Tahoe UI changes and LG are such a mistake and Apple being Apple will probably just double down on it.

I don't know why it's so laggy when you open it. First time you open and scroll it jitters and not all app icons are loaded, so they kind of chunk and overlap.

You get worse icon pop-in if you add your app folder with grid view to the dock. These aren't stored on the network, so it's baffling they take so long to load the icons.

> It feels like a 'unification tax. Sacrificing desktop utility to align with non-Desktop modalilties

No. Launchpad is just the iOS springboard brought to Mac, with big icons and folders and pages. When it was added people complained of "iOS-ification".

This time they made a proper, unique Mac equivalent, integrated in Spotlight and built around the keyboard. It's not as good, the window was too small in 26.0, doesn't support uninstallation like Launchpad, but it's definitely less iOS-like.

Maybe they didn't want people seeing their awful new icons at large enough sizes that the seams would be showing...

It’s consistency with the rest of Spotlight. I imagine they want to enhance it, but getting people to use it might be the first step.

Yep. I hate it. Its easier to open the Finder and use the shortcut to open the application folder.

It may have jumped the shark, but it may be that now there's space for actual experimentation and innovation again. This talk from Scott Jenson (who worked at Apple in Human Interfaces) was thought-provoking and gave me a little optimism: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fZTOjd_bOQ

I'm so glad I haven't updated.

It looks wrong because it isn't symmetrical. If you go into System Settings -> Accessibility -> Display increase your pointer size, screenshot it, and rotate it, you can see that it's not symmetrical. It looks wonky because it is wonky.

I might even give Apple a tiny bit of credit if some designer had piped up at some point and said "you think we should square off the corners when the app is 'maximised'"? But, no, either nobody pointed out that the emperor wore no clothes, or they were ignored.

(I say "maximised", even though that isn't the right term, because there is no right term. I don't mean 'full screen', since the borders are actually squared off properly in that mode, thank the lord; I mean 'full screen except for the global menu bar')

It's not just Apple though. Something is wrong in the software industry. Desktop/PC operating systems aren't going away, but the industry have decided that it's no longer a relevant product category.

Windows is going down a strange path, where it's productivity is suffering because Microsoft is measuring success in terms of CoPilot adoption. Apple is stuck trying to invent the next iPhone, but in the meantime they are trying to make the iPhone sexy by slapping on a new skin. Then they forgot about macOS and quickly moves over some stuff from iPhone. Neither of the products apparent have UX designers anymore and QA is meeeh.

I don't understand either company. Both use to have talented UI/UX teams and actually listened to them. Is it really just short term stock price thinking that make them both forget that their operating systems should be about productivity and user ergonomics?

>"The products suck! There's no sex in them anymore!"

Enter "Lickable Pixels" -- the phrase that stuck to describe the Aqua era.

Introducing Mac OS X's Aqua interface, Jobs said at Macworld in January 2000: "We made the buttons on the screen look so good you'll want to lick them."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aqua_(user_interface)

Then there was the red hot irresistibly sexy and well designed IBM Thinkpad TrackPoint -AKA- Keyboard Clitoris -AKA- Joy Button, and IBM's explicitly lascivious "So Hot, We Had To Make It Red" ad.

https://www.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/hodidb/so_hot_we_...

Ted Selker, the inventor of the TrackPoint, told me the story of how that ad got written and refined by focus groups: He slyly suggested the slogan, and IBM's ad designers begrudgingly put it on the page in small text in the corner, below the photo and ad copy. Then they A/B tested it with the text a little bigger, then a bit bolder, then even higher, and it finally worked its way up to the top of the page in BIG HUGE BOLD TEXT!

More about Ted's work:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34425576

Ted Selker fondly reminds me of "Mr. Lossoff" the "Button Man" in "A Nero Wolfe Mystery” episode “The Mother Hunt”, where Archie drops in on "Mister Lossoff’s Distinguished Buttons” in the garment district of New York:

https://youtu.be/h-QgWOSVKm4?t=724

He's totally THAT enthusiastic, a distinguished expert fiendishly obsessed with buttons! He even carries around a big bag of replacement Joy Buttons that he hands out for free like candy to anyone who’s worn theirs out.

I know this from personal experience: Ted and his wife Ellen once ran into me working on my Thinkpad at some coffee shop in Mountain View, and Ted noticed my worn out Joy Button. He excused himself to run out to his car to fetch his Button Bag, while Ellen smiled at me and rolled her eyes up into her head and shrugged, and we hung out and talked until he got back. I really appreciated a nice new crisp one with fresh bumpy texture, because mine was totally worn down, and it made his day to get rid of a few. (I imagine their house has hoards of boxes and piles of bags full of them!)

The common thread: design that makes you come. Back for more, that is. Buttons to lick till they click. Nubs to rub till they're bald. Products you touched obsessively until they're worn smooth. Tahoe gives us clownish corners we can't even grab. Apple dropped the ball -- and frankly, it's a kick in the nuts.

I use https://rectangleapp.com which has been a lifesaver. I only use the following three shortcuts and disable the rest:

cmd+option+f = maximize to fill entire screen

cmd+option+ctrl+left/right = move window to other monitor on left/right

I occasionally use cmd+option+left/right if I need to have two windows side-by-side on the same monitor.

MacOS window sizes have always felt weird to me - no easy way to maximize without making it go into full screen mode.

As I was writing this, I just realized that hovering on the green traffic light shows a menu to choose some window placement options.... not sure how I never realized this before, but even the "maximize" option there doesn't go all the way to the edges - weird.

The doco mentions "left" and "right" mouse. I have the ctrl-click already mapped to right mouse on my trackpad. Before I take the plunge, how well does this work with a trackpad on a MB Air?

Just tried this. Pretty cool. Kinda strange how the mouse cursor doesn't move with the window, but still might be worth using.

I came here to say something similar. Ever since I found out about alt + left click drag anywhere in window to move, and alt + right click drag practically anywhere on any side to resize, anything else feels user-hostile.

I rarely use windows anymore, but just like you installed a tool to get this behavior.

This UI feature saves approx 3 seconds on average for resizing windows. Plus, more importantly it more predictably works, and is an easier target to hit than a 2-10 wide pixel line or square region.

It’s a great analogy but I wish, in the video, he had been grabbing the plate and it somehow didn’t move. Then, when he grabbed the air outside of the plate it should have magically moved. That would have highlighted how crazy Tahoe is.

Yeah, but to be fair to Apple, the guy wasn't even trying to grab the shadow of the plate.

No. Direct that money to open source projects and let Apple ruin itself.

If you do, make them play that scrambled egg GIF from TFA in an endless loop. They'll eventually get it.

Yes, I would gladly contribute $25. You can rent partial time on an electronic billboard on Highway 101 for under $2K per month.

I'd like to see a Super Bowl ad sponsored by one or more of the big Linux players.

"Hi, I'm a Mac."

"And I'm a PC. Wow, you suck, Mac. What the hell happened?"

"Yo momma, PC."

<wild gesticulating and arguing ensues for 20-30 seconds>

"Hi, I'm Linux. Neither of these people care anything about you. You see, you're not their customer anymore. When you're ready to make computing personal again, check us out."

If they didn’t realize how broken things are by themselves, mere pressure from the outside won’t be turning the ship around.

A translucent billboard with some white text would drive home the point.

the person responsible for this mess was poached by meta a month ago.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46191194

Are there even any billboards in Cupertino?

please yes, they could use some real world roasting

I mean, I don’t hate it, but it seems like a clear step back.

I still call it liquid ass.

Yeah, I have to agree. The blog post seems convincing when you look at the images, but now that I've actually been playing with it, I can always drag the corner to resize. In fact, the corner provides much more draggable area than the window edges do. There's no problem.

So I agree it's strange that the drag zone extends so far beyond, but that's not really something to complain about...? Everywhere inside the corner where it feels reasonable to resize, it resizes. The article is expecting an absurd level of a drag zone on the inside.

Again, the large drag zone outside the corner is kinda weird. But honestly that's more just an understandable artifact of the corner drag zone being a square. If it were me, I probably wouldn't bother to round off one corner of the drag zone either.

There's a lot of stuff to criticize about Tahoe, but this would be about last on my list...

There is this obscure setting you can enable to be able to click anywhere on a window while holding Command + Control to move it.

defaults write −g NSWindowShouldDragOnGesture −bool true

This only supports moving around windows, not resizing.

And yet Mac OS didn't support resizing from edges, or any corner of the window except the lower-right ONE, until well into the 2000s. Incredibly dumb.

>Apple actually caring about UX again

I doubt Apple ever really cared about UX. It took Apple 24 years after Microsoft's Windows 2.0 introduced resizing a window from any edge, for Apple to finally implement it in MacOS Lion in 2011. Apple UX is ridiculous.

If they cared about UX, they'd throw out their "HIG", hire some competent people, and start over.

Why is the first item on the first menu of every software program "About this software"? Is it because the most frequently used thing by every user is to know what version of the software they are running? Apple specified this in their "HIG" long ago and it never changed, and it's been stuck there ever since. And it's completely stupid. MS Windows applications typically have "About this software" as the last menu item on the last menu, which is objectively a far better place for it than the first thing on the first menu, since it is rarely needed when using an application.

Nice - I didn't know about that one!

I just found out today that hovering over the green traffic light icon shows an arrange menu... but the "maximize" option there leaves some padding on all sides of the window - weird.

I swear by https://rectangleapp.com/ - same outcome but with keyboard shortcuts instead of the mouse.

Ah yes, the classic Apple move of hiding basic functionality behind obscure shortcuts. Thanks for the tip.

But is it really stunning? When we first got Aqua and Vista they were stunning because nobody had seen anything like that before. But Liquid Glass isn’t really new in that sense. It’s just some transparency with background blur which anyone who’s used, say, Windows 7, has already seen.

I'm using Easy Move+Resize, though, I don't recommend using cmd as the only modifier (you're already using ctrl+cmd, so shouldn't be a big deal), since that screws up with cmd clicking on links to open in a new tab.

Yeah, I don't even remember the last time I resized a window by hand.

Whether appointments have an alert by default or not is a setting in the Calendar app.

When has Apple ever really allowed you to do anything like that?

Yeah the really misleading part of the screenshots in this article is that it doesn't show the "resize cursor", which basically makes this a non issue.

Also, for anyone reading this who hates the general aesthetic, go into Accessibility and hit "reduce transparency". This has been a desirable setting for last few OSX versions.

And also, it reminds me of minimalist design furniture design, where e.g. handles are hidden, and you just press a secret area to toggle e.g. a cabinet door open. I wish we could take all designers and architects, and people who encourage them, who wants to do such designs, and lock them inside TESLAs which we then push from a bridge into cold water, and then watch them try to exit those same TESLAs from under the water. If it's good design, it should be be a problem. MUHAHHA.

Funnily, all this weirdness was already solved with the original titlebars, which did not try to be both a drag handle and a menu. Apparently, only peasants use windows that are not maximised. Which reminds me, it has now been 2 years or more since microsoft turned keyboard-layout-switching from a standard feature into a standard bug :-/.

To make this easier in MacOS:

  defaults write -g NSWindowShouldDragOnGesture -bool true

They've made Tahoe available on some older Intel hardware, and in my case it rendered my MacBook Pro barely usable. Obvious planned obsolescence in this case convinced me to fully jump ship.

> If I open Discord and switch tabs a few minutes later the tab is dead and a refresh doesn't work you need to retype the discord address again on the tab window.

I get this on iOS26 all the time and it's extremely annoying since I don't always have the correct URL. Can't make heads or tails of what triggers it (I don't use Discord).

Safari 26 slowly leaks something on older macOS releases and opening new tabs or typing into the address bar becomes unbearably slow after a while[1]. The best solution is to downgrade to Safari 18.6 - though this seems to only work on Intel Macs.

Basically a total mess. I don't want to upgrade my MacBook to 26, but Apple seems to be embracing some dark patterns in their update dialog and I'm worried I'm going to accidentally upgrade and enter a world of pain one day.

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/1nm534e/sluggish_saf...

Not sure if it replaces everything, but I have been using https://rectangleapp.com and would not be able to use MacOS without it.

Wait which powertoy does resizing and moving of windows? I've been using AltSnap while still having powertoys installled for changing caps lock behaviour.

I get your point and think it is a matter of when things are relatively "perfectly" done as in iOS/MacOS, every little anthill seems like an eruption volcano, but let's also not make excuses for some of the rather disgusting issues in Tahoe that Steve Jobs' would have never allowed to ship.

I can't recall them all right off the top of my head, but I waited til 26.2 to update because of all the comments I saw about glitziness, and this resizing issue is just one of the quirks I have noticed are still not resolved; not to mention that my M4 Mac has not crawled and locked up as often as it has since I updated to 26.2. But again, to put it in perspective, that's only been very little hassle compared to what seems to be nothing but misery, suffering, and existential questions suffered by the wretched souls condemned to Windows.

Edit: another issue I have noticed in iOS is that now things like saving bookmarks in Safari is no longer a two step/tap process using long-press, it's a three step/tap process....WHY?? Same with "add to home screen". Also, the long press horizontal context menu (i.e., copy, paste) now does not slide left to reveal more options, it just changes mode to a vertical list. What is going on??? That's sickening...in my opinion. Horizontal, vertical? Pick one.

Second Edit: I just experienced another Tahoe glitch in at least Safari, where hyperlinks become un-clickable and the only way to resolve that is to seemingly restart safari. I don't find that acceptable in Safari of all places.

on a mac you can downgrade freely if the hardware supported it at one point, isn’t like all their other hardware which prevents you from downgrading, all arm mac’s can downgrade to sequoia

I haven’t tried it in many a year but I’m fairly certain that if you have the installer, you can downgrade to any version that runs on your computer.

I didn't realize it was moom giving me my "move app to other monitor" hotkey, and moom didn't launch on startup after upgrading to tahoe. I've been using that hotkey for years.

That's when I realized there's no default hotkey for moving an app to an external monitor. That is absolutely wild. (Happy to be wrong)

Scott Jenson - who worked on the classic Mac for Apple, and Android for Google - recently gave a talk on this:

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

The tl;dw is that copying UX lets others invest energy in identifying the paradigm. Linux, which tends to be starved for resources, has historically been reasonably well served by letting Apple and Microsoft define UX, while Linux focuses on implementing it. However, those headlining companies haven't been investing in desktop UX excellence in recent years. It's time for open source projects to embrace experimentation and take the mantle of cutting edge UX, because Apple et. al. aren't paving the way anymore.

I think we need to call it as what it is, half assed design.

I have had issues with resizing Quick Look windows with their rounded corners on macOS for the last several major versions, well before Tahoe. The resize cursor indicator there also doesn't seem to appear at the correct location for the actual resize handles.

Same. Once in a while I end up on a screen share with someone and see that they have all these odd sized windows and they try to drag them around and resize them - drives me crazy!

I actually wish macOS would clone Alt-dragging from anywhere to drag and Alt-right clicking to resize from anywhere from Linux (at least GNOME and KDE Plasma have this built-in). That would certainly solve most of the complaints in the original post.

KDE doesn't actually suffer from this problem.

*GNOME features, not Linux features. No such issues over here on KDE.

I have often felt like GNOME is the most Apple-y of desktop environments; they're very form over function. Not surprising to me at all that both would pick a design that seems beautiful until you try to use it.

Shortly after Windows 10 came out I was joking that Microsoft finally made a Linux distribution (by replicating all the jankiness we usually associate with it).

Now I guess it's Apple's turn.

Wait, they implemented Alt-Drag/Right drag?