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.
Let liquid glass be your red pill - come join us in the real.
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.
I'd rather Linux developed an identity of its own. I feel like keyboard driven tiled windows are the closest it has to that.
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.
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 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.
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.
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. Cook did not set or change the direction of the company at the time, and Jobs was still available for consultation.
> 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".
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
Pretty sad state of affairs. Software isn’t build for usability but purely for whatever designers find fashionable at the time.
Now the visibility of the liquid glass stuff, that is definitely a problem. Can't recognize a UI element if it's constantly rendered differently and with very little contrast with the background elements.
Well, I guess someone is going to vibecode a decent Linux GUI or fix the driver pains there or something and we'll be free of this. Because Microsoft/Apple and to a lesser extent Google have jumped the shark with their UI these days.
The sidebar for formatting they added is strictly worse than the inspector UI in old Pages ’09. The sidebar is constrained not to overlap with content, but the user can choose to overlap the inspector. It’s strictly better flexibility for users. If you are doing a lot of fine adjustments to a single text box, then of course it’s fewer mouse movement if the inspector is located right next to the text box, despite that it has obscured other irrelevant text boxes. I dearly miss Pages ’09.
I really REALLY love the Lion icons. Colorful but subdued with only mild saturation, distinctive shapes, strong line borders with very slight halo, and mild gradients to make them pop.
In the example, we have a sidebar for the formatting in the newer example vs havign that in the toolbar in Lion. Was it that back then, people were more likely to configure fonts & formatting settings, and we've gradually as a society de-emphasized our formatting in word processing? Or did UI changes such as this, hiding formatting options push us towards a world where we care less about formatting? I'd like to think it's a bit of both; as the user-based broadened, you had less percentage-based people that cared so heavily about formatting, so UI changes were made to optimize for that, further pushing people in that direction.
On a different note, I want to call out just how badly the sidebar is laid out compared to the toolbar. In the Lion toolbar, there were unlabeled sections but it was pretty clear what the purpose of each group was. Then you have the sidebar, where labels are added in some places, excessive space given where uneccesary, tabs that are sectioned off from the settings they'll show/hide, collapsible sections that can also be shown/hidden, some dropdowns using up/down caret while others just use the down caret, most dropdown carets being right-aligned but not the gear one, and in the liquid glass versions, the overlay of toolbar buttons over the sidebar creating confusion.
I can guarantee you they have done no such research. This redesign is a clear top-down imposition to make the visual language uniform and match some lead designer’s specs, not to actually make anything more useful or usable.
Arguing aesthetics is pretty pointless (it’s a decided question to me: my taste is great; most others have very poor taste).
What bothers me about Tahoe are all the sloppy bits, like things you can no longer click or scroll to. We’re on 26.3.1 now and it looks/works like 1.0.
I'm still on macOS Sonoma 14 and iOS 18