Posted by soheilpro 19 hours ago
The dock is suppose to look like the icons float in a class panel, but the reflections in the glass look pixilated and the effect isn't there. The dock icons are centred in the dock, but the activity indicator on the "glass" pane make it look like they're not.
In the control panel, and other windows with a left panel, it's clear that the window curve and the panel curve aren't the same and the transparency of the panel makes it even more clear. I don't understand why some panels can be transparent, but other parts of the window isn't. There's no reason for the transparency.
The Tahoe looks like Gnome theme from 2005, it's interesting, sort of pretty, but the details makes it clear that the authors doesn't quite have the skills to perfect it.
Apple have been slacking in the UI quality control department in the past few years. I have similar issues on my iPhone SE, Apple (and app authors) clearly doesn't test on this phone, because UI elements frequently overlap.
Also I'm still annoyed about the control panel being ported over from iOS. You can't find anything and the window can't even be made wider.
(Yes, I know, don’t give them ideas.)
I hope Apple will backtrack on Liquid Glass after Tahoe. Otherwise, I'll just switch to Linux.
Companies like Apple typically don’t make reversals quickly (the butterfly keyboard took years to remedy).
Any specifics in mind? I, personally, haven't noticed much, beyond the initial difficulty in resizing windows.
New head of design, surprise surprise: Apple's new software design chief, Steve Lemay, was "a driving force" behind Liquid Glass and was "deeply involved in its development." https://www.macrumors.com/2026/03/15/ios-27-macos-27-no-majo...
[1] I have small rant about this pervasive view here: https://dmitriid.com/the-curious-case-of-alan-dye
Plus I have a 2016 MBpro I keep around in case I absolutely need a Mac (rare). Usually it’s an old drive formatted for Mac and I don’t feel like futzing around with software that allows it to read on my main computer.
I've actually quite enjoyed some design changes in Tahoe, and looking at older versions of MacOS just looks old fashioned once you're used to them.
Tahoe I've been using since it came out and every time I see a screenshot of prior versions I think "wow it used to look so much better"
https://pxlnv.com/blog/window-chrome-of-our-discontent/
The usability of older versions was so much better. Tahoe is a huge regression, making everything look like one big drab.
(Though Big Sur already entered the path of monochromatic toolbar icons, etc.)
It’s a shame, because their hardware has improved significantly since Jony Ive left.
Not this much, they don’t.
> looking at older versions of MacOS just looks old fashioned
It’s an operating system, not a dress to parade around on a catwalk. I don’t want it to be fashionable and change with the seasons, I want it to be usable and intuitive. And yes, it should look good (which Tahoe doesn’t) but to the extent that it makes usability better, never in detriment of it.
It's fine. I'm not going to rail about how it's unusable, or say that it makes me want to gouge out my eyes, or whatever. But it's enough to dissuade me from ever wanting to buy another Mac, if I have the option of using a desktop Linux system.
That's a pretty big caveat. But those curved window borders and the rounded widgets in e.g. the settings menu are kind of awful. Not unusable. But every time I open a terminal and I deal with the choice of either having obscene padding around my content or seeing a few pixels of my prompt's corners shaved off, I get just a little more irritated, and a little less likely to pick up my Macbook the next time I'm deciding which device to use.
On iOS it's manageable with reduced transparency, but on macOS it's just so awful I won't upgrade.
So I’ve enabled reduced transparency and all the other accessibility settings I can find to remove the terribleness.
The UI is now mono-coloured gray and looks like MacOS back in the days before OS X was a thing - but it’s still better than what Apple “envisioned” with Tahoe.
To be honest I struggle to notice many changes, my machine was already configured the way I liked it and at work I basically live in only four applications:
Firefox for personal-browsing, chrome for work-browsing, terminal for running terraform, git, etc, and emacs for all development work.
Sure resizing is less good, but I do that once a day, in the morning, when I login. The rest of the changes I just don't notice or care about.
I kind of wonder if this is like overdoing your watch logo stuff like in this article: https://paulgraham.com/brandage.html
For a company that used to pride itself on its clean and consistent UI, this is really shoddy work. It feels like Microsoft now, every app designed by a different team and nobody coordinating together.
And this would have been a really minor job to coordinate properly. It probably would have saved time in fact having predefined icons for common functions. Now theres been 8 designers working on a different icon for the same function. It seems just complete disinterest in consistency. "Just do whatever" is not the apple way.
--- start quote ---
Get a bunch of people in a room, show them menus where the textual labels are gone, and see who can get the most right.
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Icons won't help you when they are inconsistent, or don't mean anything.
It's impossible to find a suitable visual metaphor for every possible action of every possible app and cram it into a tiny monochrome icon.
Processing images is always faster than processing text for everyone.
I like it in theory but the execution seems more harmful than helpful so far. If I'm wrong and it's helping some people, that's great.
Why should OS presentation be tightly coupled to kernel version?
Or why should it even be coupled to the vendor of the hardware?
And you can ask the same question about content filters, app stores, ...
Prior to Apple, I was a senior engineer on the dev tools team at Microsoft. We did the same exact thing wrt full-release testing and vendor hardware.
I'm not saying I agree with the way either company handles coupling, lock-in, etc. but if you don't think that the Windows UI is coupled to ring-0 you don't understand how it works.