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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So: that is Apple's CEO for you.

That seems to be a growing trend ever since "UX designers" started taking over (early 2010s?), to the point that I wonder if they're trying to see how far they can take it.

I'm contemplating rolling back to Sequoia.

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

Aren’t they/we? :-)

*majority of

Well, hasn’t this been the single biggest reason for their sustained stellar returns year after year where often (or maybe most of the time) the biggest change their devices (like iPhones) used to see was the version number change e.g. iPhone 13 -> 14.

For the rest of their users — they make a noise (which is not even feeble in comparison), bicker around, lament the fact that the other alternative is Google (Windows and the Wild Linux West), and they stay. Rinse, repeat.

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

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

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

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

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

Remember in the beforetimes when we decoupled themes from OS updates? Wouldn't it be nice if once again we discovered this lost technology that let different users have different UIs?

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

1. Apple photos redesign from last year sucks and I’m already frustrated with iCloud abstraction and lack of cross platform friendliness

2. Switch to an alternate cloud photos provider

3. Find out about Liquid Glass, looks like shit, impulse sell my MacBook Pro in favor of a Framework

4. Surprise surprise, it’s actually the year of the Linux desktop. My gaming situation is way better on Linux and it does everything my Mac did. The only compromise is my need to carry a big extra battery around.

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

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

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

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

It’s a strange omission.

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

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

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

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

Looking at the screenshots and review videos, I cannot believe how ugly and out of proportion it is. Normally, there would be a consistent design and some people like it while others don’t. But this is simply ugly.

Here’s some of the UX regressions:

- Apple Music: the “next track” button is only visible if the tab bar is expanded. So now we have to scroll or tap, wait for an animation and then click next. - Web views search web for selected text: previously we could highlight, swipe the action menu and then tap the button. Now we have to highlight, tap the small arrow, wait for the horizontal list to animate into a vertical list, tap the button. They removed the ability to swipe the action menu. - Tab bars: since 2007, you could change tabs with one tap. Now it’s one or two taps, depending on whether it’s collapsed or expanded.

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

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

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

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

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

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

What the hell happened to the Apple design guides. Did all the engineers who read them retire.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-- Sent from my MacBook Air.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Windows, on the other hand…

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

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

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

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

Other than old people that always send gifs on Facebook and children who this is probably one of the only AI art things they have access too, idk who else uses this.

If one tech giant has it then they need to too for feature parity. Not a whole lot of use cases for generative AI for the masses, so if someone comes up with one, gotta copy!

Remember, those of us on HN aren't really the target demographic. They are targeting people who use their device(s) for fun and entertainment.

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

https://www.apple.com/shop/product/G1FW7LL/A/Refurbished-16-...

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

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

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

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

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

Overall not pleased. I really did not want to care about the UI changes at all. But having experienced it now, I'm so annoyed I upgraded to iOS 26 and I'm having trouble focusing on the screen. I want WebGPU support, but I'm very hesitant to upgrade to macOS 26 (which is required for WebGPU in Safari).

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

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

Everyone’s different I guess :)

Open System Settings right now, do a search, then scroll the view. That’s the least worst you’ll find.

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

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

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

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

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

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

    defaults -currentHost write -globalDomain NSStatusItemSpacing -int 8

Maybe I'm misremembering the video though.

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

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

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

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

Solves this exact issue.

I don’t say that to argue that macOS is better at it, just that I strongly prefer the Mac way as much as you prefer the way Windows does things, and that’s perfectly fine.

I’ve used both interchangeably for decades and can swap between them without slowing. So much of this comes down to knowledge of and experiences with the quick/er ways for getting around.

For quite sometime using search tools is vastly more efficient for navigation and file movement than Explorer or Finder anyway.

Just a joke of a company

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

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

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

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

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