This is pushing AI down my throat (+ privacy, but IMO Apple is at least okay-ish in this regard) is my main reason why my next laptop will not run macOS. Maybe Asahi Linux will finally support Thunderbolt, but maybe I'll just switch to a Framework. I'm just happy that I stayed on 15.7.5 until now. As soon as this gets no updates anymore, I'm gone.
And then just above is a bunch more ovals and circles. The sidebar button is an oval, the back/forward buttons are in an oval, the Wipr extension icon is in an oval, the URL bar is an oblong over, etc. And (at least in light mode) this is all white ovals on a white background. It all looks so amateurish.
I'm so glad that Hack Alan Dye is gone and I pray to God that Stephen Lamay can get us back to reason. I doubt they'll do an overnight Cmd+Z update in macOS 28 or whatever, but perhaps he can direct Liquid Glass in a direction that isn't just rounding things for the sake of it.
Liquid Glass does have some good points, but it feels like someone turned in C- level work.
It had a glassy aesthetic but the similarity doesn't go much further than that description. They didn't make all the buttons into glass blobs floating on top of the content with distracting warping effects; the window chrome was still generally separated from the content.
Let liquid glass be your red pill - come join us in the real.
The cross platform scene is much different these days. Electron apps suck, but at least they suck equally across all platforms. And there are many Electron apps.
But a lot of people rely on Adobe, Microsoft or Windows-only, Mac-only apps. I don’t see that changing anytime soon, unfortunately.
AI is making handling the edge cases that kept people locked in almost trivial. Any workflow, custom spreadsheet, specific OS-only app can be worked around, easily. Staying stuck on Apple or Microsoft is a choice - they're no longer returning value concurrent with the money they charge.
You're free to continue giving them money, but the reasons to do so make less and less sense each day that goes by.
Inkscape is not an option, nor is anything involving importing PDF/SVG, those have to expand a huge ton of stuff that's represented much more compactly in an .AI file. It's about as large a difference as that between an executable file and its source code.
There’s nothing that comes even close to Photoshop. Same for a lot of similar professional tools.
> AI is making handling the edge cases that kept people locked in almost trivial
Not for anything remotely complex. Let’s see how that looks in 5 years, but I’m skeptical.
What's the AI workaround for Illustrator/After Effects/etc.? You're not suggesting generating vector art or video assets via LLM replaces these, surely?
I'd rather Linux developed an identity of its own. I feel like keyboard driven tiled windows are the closest it has to that.
They just need to get back into the mindset that design is how it works. Not forcing some aesthetic into everything with the superficial idea of "focusing on content" as a backwards justification for making everything transparent cause someone thought it was prettier.
Linux is for people who want to get rid of "they". If "they" start screwing things up, you switch to a different "they". Alternatively, you become "they" by forking the project.
Do most people want to get through that research? Absolutely no, I don't expect many people to follow me into that rabbit hole. They can get the default or Windows or a Mac, no problem with that.
This doesn't make sense for the vast majority of people.
Linux desktop doesn't have the vast majority of the niceties that living in the Apple ecosystem gives you. If I was going to rebuild any one of them for Linux, it would easily become a major project that would suck up all my free time.
I think Liquid Glass looks good.
I love Liquid Glass - the blur and refractive effects are so pretty and technically impressive - but it should be used tastefully instead of this nonsense. I feel like Tahoe in general is straying way, way too far from the battle-tested Cocoa foundation and into this total top-down crap. Liquid Glass feels like some sort of shareholder-enforced enshittification.
macOS is supposed to be defined from the bottom up; it always has been. There has always been importance in having a solid base; a robust foundation for developers to build on. HIG, Cocoa, CoreGraphics, all of that is in service of this. The user experience and vertical integration is a result of this and couldn't exist without it.
There's so much wrong with Tahoe that goes against everything Mac has ever been. We don't want to dumb down the interface; that has never been the goal. The goal has always been to make the interface intuitive enough that anyone can learn it. macOS and iOS are fundamentally different platforms with fundamentally different design constraints and considerations.
Icons being able to escape the squircle was supposed to be a reflection of the fact that apps on Mac are less contained than apps on iOS. They have more expressive power and more advanced capabilities. You're working closer to the metal and in a less controlled environment. Because of that, you can do more and you're not constrained to the flows of the system.
iOS always hasn't been this. The constraints of touch are different than the constraints of the desktop. Steve Jobs spoke about this a lot back in his day, about why iOS is so much more locked-down than Mac.
But Mac has always been a platform for freedom and control. And Tahoe strips the soul of that.
My impress has always been the opposite: MacOS is "opinionated", and the user can either accept the Apple way of doing UI or can take a hike.
MacOS has offered token customization, such as allowing the user to change the color of menu bar highlights, but any substantive change required 3rd party intervention, which would inevitably cease to function at the next upgrade.
These days the OS is even more locked down, making it all but impossible to modify OS files.
I don’t like it either, but I wonder if that’s to support the touch-enabled Macs that the rumor mill is reporting about right now.
In any case, Tahoe has many other issues beyond padding.
They blur together. I can't see which is document and which is chrome. This is the article's point, but... how can Apple be saying what they have, when I feel that since Big Sur at least it's not only perceptively but arguably objectively not true?
But we're making the UI gEt OuT oF tHe WaY .
One of so many reasons why I love mpv so much. Fine control via keyboard, allows turning off all the UI elements. Always a pleasure to use. I hate having to use any other media player.
NNGroup has written about this trend: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/content-chrome-ratio/
Liquid Glass also makes more sense on tablets. I think Apple is copying Microsoft because Apple is also moving toward full UI-level unification between their desktop mouse-and-keyboard UI and their mobile/tablet touchscreen UI. They've already done it for some apps (e.g. Notes.)
[1] https://www.macrumors.com/2026/03/08/apple-planning-macbook-...
Apple copying Microsoft is a mistake. It used to be the other way around.
I actually really did like Windows Phones though. I can imagine a world with a third competitor in that space today... But MS didn't seem to have any understanding or ability to develop an ecosystem that works. Even when they were literally paying people to write apps for their app store, it was just terrible.
What puzzles me is that information like this is out there. How did Apple get it so wrong?
I am hopeful for the new UX VP. He has his work cut out for him.
Remember also the "Get a Mac" ads that parodied Windows Vista permission dialogs, but now macOS is a permission dialog hell.
Tim Cook was an IBMer. I'm sure that Cook was a fine hire as an operations manager, but I doubt that Steve Jobs intended for someone like Cook to be in charge of everything at Apple, including UI design. (Jobs never put Jony Ive in charge of software, by the way, whereas Cook did.) Indeed, I doubt that Jobs groomed anyone to be his successor. By the time Jobs learned he had a fatal illness, it was too late, and he had to turn over the company to someone the board of directors would accept, which was Cook. Jobs was CEO but didn't own the company; infamously, the Apple board of directors chose John Sculley over Jobs in an earlier power struggle.
When Cook took over, he was unequivocally the only choice. He steered the company in his own direction, with a focus on operational health to the detriment of other things. He kind of lost the plot somewhere in there and has been spinning his wheels for a while. That's not what I'm contesting. It's your idea that Jobs didn't want Cook. Jobs loved Cook.
Any time Jobs had to step aside from the CEO position temporarily, Cook took over immediately. Metaphorically speaking, Cook kept the trains running on time. Cook did not set or change the direction of the company at the time, and Jobs was still available for consultation.
Sick is not the same as dying. Jobs initially didn't think he was dying, and tried to treat his illness with some hippie-dippie "alternative" medicine, when aggressive treatment might have saved his life.
> He was Jobs' designated successor for a decade when he learned he was sick.
Citation needed.
> Jobs loved Cook.
In what way? According to biographer Walter Isaacson, Jobs lamented that Cook was "not a product person".
In subsequent examples the controls have made less space for content and obscured it. And takes up space with less-often used things like line spacing and and drop caps. Feels like I'm being told that up is down.
And the smudgy liquid glass effect just makes everything look grubby. Not classy.
I need contrast in order to differentiate content. I need contrast on buttons to know where to click and what is clickable. I don’t need to depend on muscle memory. On Catalina it was automatic. Chrome in moderation is not bad.
From a commercial point of view branding and how it looks is more important. People buy what looks simple - they are not going to spend time trying something out to asses what is simple.
I do wonder if we'll see the pendulum swing the other direction. We used to have UX designers that actually studied users and how best to mold the interface to them. I think now is the best time ever to get into UX design and make your mark by showing the world that software doesn't _have_ to be flat, lifeless, and radiused to hell and back in order to be great.