I think if there's any upside to Tahoe, the grievances may push me into blogging for the first time ever, because I can't keep these to myself.
I actually feel sorry for Apple's developers because there's no way you ship software this bad and inconsistent unless you've been handed a terrible design spec from Dye's team.
edit: On my screen, three layers' corners https://hcker.news/tahoe-corners.png
One example that I hate on iOS: the notification/lockscreen curtain is supposed to cover the content as it slides down. That’s what a curtain does, this has been the language for years. Now the curtain is transparent, so it can’t cover the content behind. How does the content disappear then, as you slide the curtain down?
… it doesn’t. Icons do a buggy looking animation crashing toward the user and through the screen, and if it’s an app there is just no transition. You can check by sliding the curtain down slowly and then letting go.
i disagree about that one.
im not a UX expert by any means but my first impression at WWDC seeing liquid glass was "holy shit, they pulled that off? i know apple would never compromise on legibility, so... how? there are so many situations where this won't work, and they can't exactly control the content that the buttons are overlaid on top of"
cue my confusion when it was exactly that: an obviously problematic idea implemented with all the obvious flaws showing up
they have largely fixed it now, half a year later, but the liquid glass isn't very liquid anymore. it's frosted. which is fine, but obviously not the original idea they were going for
contrasty backgrounds are fundamentally incompatible with legibility
That's what I mean, even if worded badly. Someone probably managed the glass distortion effects as an experiment, or demoed a transparent redesign of a small portion of the UI, and it looked awesome. I think it's cool that they can green light weird ideas, otherwise there's stagnation. But it is obvious that there were fundamental unresolved issues, and yet something in the process pushed the idea forward anyway.
It signals something very wrong in company structure. If you can't trust the process to drop what doesn't work, then trying new things is risky. And as you say, it's an experiment that feels so unlike apple, to disregard polish and accessibility that way.
Is this compromising readability? Yes, but now there's another kind of perception problem, and it's whether you can see what's literally in front of your eyes in physical space.
VR setups make you isolated and vulnerable. Any VR device is really awkward to use in public (read: in your living room or in an office).
In turn, AR setups that let the world through reduce image quality by virtue of being transparent, and it is unclear that they provide advantages. You get a slightly more immediate access to notifications in return for permanently pointing a camera towards anything you look at, which is understandably not well received.
And that's just for content consumption. When you introduce work, input is still significantly worse unless you're sitting in front of a keyboard and mouse, in which case you might as well have a full laptop.
Why ? I'm sick of square windows. I want disc windows. And instead of scrolling them, i want to rotate them. /s
Fixing bugs is hard. Better focus on the aesthetics.
Probably nobody, just some artifact of the overlay APIs used default behavior that they didn't bother to streamline.
I see this kind of trend with apple since big sur. It's not new but it's becoming more obvious with every release.
Used to be this sort of thing "just worked" on Mac OS --- you'd think with a diminishing number of UI tool kits/dev tools this sort of thing would get better/more consistent.... always liked "Themes" and this just gives me one more reason to wish that they would come back.
If they have managed to fumble something so basic then one can't help but extrapolate what the state of the rest is.
Because we fucking have to see it every day. And the sloppiness compounds and is indicative of further rot.
Of course the different radii also means different code paths were used, which points to a mess of APIs and frameworks underneath too.
And that's before we add the usability issues (like hard to read labels due to the glass effect and such, or bizare dragging boundaries, etc).
>Doesn't that seem a bit... particular?
Good software is about being particular.
If we wanted any random crap, we'd use any random crap.
The number of times auto update of some app has caused the thought process “but that wasn’t like that yesterday… or was it… hm… oh it was an update”. Just minor things, small mostly unnoticeable if don’t have an “eye for details”.
It's wrong though, because the window is the higher element in the hierarchy (container) and should not be affected by what is inside. It creates a larger inconsistency than the "consistency" it supposedly brings.
A better solution would be to adjust the sizing/placement of the window controls (and allow the hit area to include the original placement maybe?).
Notice two things:
1) The window chrome with traffic lights and title is entirely separate from the toolbar, not unified with the toolbar.
2) The top of the window is rounded, but the bottom of the window is not!
I think the old design was superior for several reasons, one of which is that it made the windows much easier to drag around the screen. In any case, though, even if there's an argument about concentricity and window controls, it makes no sense that the bottom of the window has the same corner radius as the top when the toolbar is only at the top.
I assume it’ll rectify in the vast future, but it’s weird to see regressions in core areas because the new hotness has made it so that these gigantic-corps can’t walk and chew gum at the same time.
I won’t be surprised if there is a rollback in 27 (i’m hoping there will be - else going to buy a retro mac with a magic bar upon no tahoe runs).
That started in 2010, a bit more than 5-10 years.
Uber flat, you don't know what's a button, what's a text. I dunno if I just adjusted to it or it actually somewhat got better up to iOS/macOS 15. Though with iOS/macOS 26 - it's iOS 7 moment yet again.
NB: not sure about Liquid Glass - though I was recently (and weirdly) recommended to watch iOS 7 trailer on youtube[2]. Comments are overwhelmingly positive. Dunno if it's just people who were kids/teens looking through rose tinted glasses. Though I am not sure anymore, maybe people actually like such designs and it's just HN bubble complaining (IMHO complains here are 110% valid) about nothing. Maybe in 10+ years ordinary guy will praise iOS/macOS 26.
For around a decade typing "word"+return into the windows start menu search box usually opened Edge with a search result of "ord". Recently it opens Word most of the time.
I'm specifically commenting on their UX decisions, and in that respect literally everything. Tahoe, like every major upgrade, is iterative. Very few things that bowl a person over. Somethings are good, some things are "meh". But Liquid Glass is an abomination.
It certainly doesn't feel like there's a trillion-dollar-company difference between those two and Tahoe.
- Raising the lid of the laptop and the base wouldn’t stick and fall off on the desk,
- A single-button click,
- A Cmd+C to copy and Ctrl+C for the interruption 7 in the terminal,
But now you have to configure that, yes, activate the right-click; yes, activate the three-finger click (wtf, 3 fingers); yes, activate the swipe-across-desktops on the magic mouse, all those items were selling points, so they should have studied the best behavior and implemented it by default on all deployments. But that requires studies, aesthetics, and a taste that only Steeve Jobs had, otherwise everything becomes an option. That’s right, I’m going to paraphrase Jobs’ argument against the 1990ies Microsoft:
The problem with Apple is they have no taste.
I really miss that in Linux. That said, some terminals implement smart Ctrl+C which will interrupt if there's no text selected and copy otherwise. But terminal I use (Gnome Console) does not, so I have to press Ctrl+Shift+C to copy text and then I press that in browser and everything exploded because it opens developer tools. So annoying.
Apple doesn’t understand and respect that.
Firstly, alt-tab doesn’t consider windows, it considers apps. So if you have multiple browser windows or word windows open, you can’t alt-tab between them. It’s totally confusing. So I install an app just to get the normal alt-tab behavior of other OSs, to alt-tab between windows (mine is called alt-tab, and it’s a bit buggy and slow, I think they all are)
Next, Apple does not respect the multiple desktop boundary. If I click on the safari icon in the dock, it will switch to some seemingly random safari window in some other desktop. If I close any window, it will also run off to some other window of the same app in some other desktop (who came up with that behavior?) when I dismiss an outlook notification, it will run of to another desktop to look at outlook (actually I think this one is Microsoft’s fault, but Apple could probably do something about this one).
The result is that while working, I have trouble staying on the desktop I’m working on, I constantly am getting sent off to some other random desktop, and have to find where I am and where I was.
There must be a better, more productive way to manage windows and desktops.
(Also what’s up with the autocorrect, I had to retype every instance of “I think” in this message, because it insists it should be “o think”)
I assume you mean cmd-tab.
>doesn’t consider windows, it considers apps. So if you have multiple browser windows or word windows open, you can’t alt-tab between them. It’s totally confusing.
You use cmd-tilde to switch between windows.
>So I install an app just to get the normal alt-tab behavior of other OSs, to alt-tab between windows (mine is called alt-tab, and it’s a bit buggy and slow, I think they all are)
You don’t need an app.
>Next, Apple does not respect the multiple desktop boundary. If I click on the safari icon in the dock, it will switch to some seemingly random safari window in some other desktop. If I close any window, it will also run off to some other window of the same app in some other desktop (who came up with that behavior?) when I dismiss an outlook notification, it will run of to another desktop to look at outlook (actually I think this one is Microsoft’s fault, but Apple could probably do something about this one). The result is that while working, I have trouble staying on the desktop I’m working on, I constantly am getting sent off to some other random desktop, and have to find where I am and where I was. There must be a better, more productive way to manage windows and desktops.
This is a configurable setting.
>(Also what’s up with the autocorrect, I had to retype every instance of “I think” in this message, because it insists it should be “o think”)
This is a configurable setting.
All this version alignment, the blurring of "here is a laptop with A processor and iOS" points to that direction.
The errs of Tahoe are basically a result of the rush on that direction
they also briefly took away the ability to disable gatekeeper per terminal command (now back)
next they wanna launch a touchscreen macbook, presumably this fall
Maybe I’m missing something. How would a touchscreen MacBook improve on something?
That being said, based on what I’ve been seeing at Apple, I would not be surprised if they did go down that mediocrity route.
But macOS? Good lord. I can only hope 27 will unfuck things somewhat, there are so many small annoyances and all of them add to a constant sense of unhappiness throughout the day. I’m really tempted to downgrade back to Sequoia. At least the M4 will be good enough for years if this truly is the new path Apple will take.
See Windows 11.
So this is what they decided to do? Use so many different rounded radius variations that competitors don't know which one to copy?
What do macOS window styles have to do with iOS? iOS (mostly) doesn't have windows!
What does the MacBook Neo have to do with iOS, other than coincidentally using some of the same components? Maybe Apple decided to make a cheaper Mac because they thought people might want to buy a cheaper Mac.
They are trying to use a common design language across all their devices, sure. But you would hardly expect them to do the opposite! They might try to make a hybrid tablet/laptop or something at some point, sure, but none of their current moves point inevitably in that direction. Except maybe for software notarization, but that has nothing to do with window corners or cheaper laptops.
I just did an image search for "classic macos" and one of the first hits was from https://www.versionmuseum.com/history-of/classic-mac-os. Look at those System 1 screenshots, from 42(!) years ago -- round corners on Puzzle and Calculator, square corners on Note Pad and Control Panel! No consistency at all, isn't it infuriating?
Some cool details here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desk_accessory
Like Tahoe, it was deliberate and there's an explanation for the difference.
But I do wonder if people at the time felt the same way.
I particularly like this Bill Atkinson tidbit at the end:
Bill Atkinson complained to me that it was a mistake to allow users to specify their own desktop patterns, because it was harder to make a nice one than it looked, and led directly to ugly desktops. [...] So he made MacPaint allocate a window that was the size of the screen when it started up, and filled it with the standard 50% gray pattern, making his own desktop covering up the real one, thus protecting the poor users from their rash esthetic blunders, at least within the friendly confines of MacPaint.
(He was totally right, making your own desktop patterns was fun but the standard checkerbard was far and away the best choice.)
Also, it’s almost as if you can’t imagine that other users might have needs and preferences different from yours.
I am not saying that it's a good idea to have different corner radius, just that it's nothing new.
Did they explain the reasoning?
I feel like this is the design process. You have ideas, they sound ok, you try them out, and then immediately you revert a lot of them. The ideas without the taste to know when not to do something is becoming the new Apple way
When the top right corner contains a search field instead of rounded button, that also seems to use varying curvature instead of capsule with proper circles at the ends. Still results in varying spacing between window corner and the toolbar content.
And that's just the 2 top corners. Attempts to align top corners result in even bigger mismatch with the rest of the window content. For example calculator -> it has a grid of round buttons. While the window corners might match top bar (as good as they can due to different shapes) the main calculation buttons don't match the corners at all.
Similar problem affects many of the popups which have something like confirmation button anchored to bottom right corner.
Rounded scrollbar handle - not aligned with bottom left corner size, instead it awkwardly gets cut of by different amount in each program.
Menus also have this disease. The non circular corner curve of overall menu shape extends way past the corner of item highlight resulting in varying spacing and making it feel almost like whole menu has bulged out instead of flat sides.
And to OC you're replying to: window close/minimise/resize were already equidistant from window edge on macOS 15 and probably earlier.
Here is a screenshot (safari in the background, textedit in front): https://pasteboard.co/OeMBTDKGsTx9.png
In MacOS 26 it's only weirder, because as you say - due to squircle window corners, now we have this constantly varying distance to the edge.
EDIT: I "get" apple's fascination to squircle, but why they made it such a big radius. Probably no one would've complained if they just have changed from current ~15-20px rounded corners into ~15-20px squircles, but they went 50px+ on toolbared windows.
https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2025/310/?time=4...
> Each element is designed with a curvature that sits neatly within the corner radius of its container, in this case the window itself. And this relationship goes both ways. In the new design system, windows now have a softer, more generous corner radius, which varies based on the style of window. Windows with toolbars now use a larger radius, which is designed to wrap concentrically around the glass toolbar elements, scaling to match the size of the toolbar. Titlebar-only windows retain a smaller corner radius, wrapping compactly around the window controls. These larger corners provide a softer feel and elegant concentricity to the window but they can also clip content that sits close to the edge of the window.
(EDIT - and Gemini could create a plausible explanation post-hoc each time)
If you made it this far, know I am totally messing with you. It really is unnerving.
The author notices that adding a toolbar changes the radius, and to me it makes sense. If theres a toolbar, I know how much I can cut the corners, because the icons in the toolbar are not gonna be in far corner. At the same time, when I am unsure about what type of content might get cut by the corner, I will reduce the cut slightly to give that content more space.
I couldnt care less that one radius is not the same as another, I guess my OCD levels are not that high (yet?).
And I say all of this as someone who dislikes the glass design, and especially hates the small, slowly fading in volume/brightness indicators in the corner replacing the mid screen beautiful instant indicator.
I don't see the big deal. That seems like a reasonable design choice. Make nice rounded corners when content allows, but rectangle them up as needed?
Seems like a nice adaptive design choice.
Honestly making different apps slightly more visually identifiable in a sea of sameness doesn't seem like a big deal.
Maybe it shouldn't irritate me, but it's the first time I've encountered it in 30 years. I'm all for change and trying new things, but this doesn't feel like progress.
And then ... Apple lost its way. Now when I get a new Mac I spend the better part of a day turning off as much of the pointless eye candy as I can so that I can focus on the task I'm working on, not the distracting UX conventions.
I want a computer, not an iPad with a keyboard. That already exists, and there is a reason I don't have one.
