The day that I need to update to macOS 26 for continued security patches is the last day I'll choose to run macOS. I'm pretty much all on Linux for non-work stuff anyway with an old Windows 'gaming' PC that only runs a 10 year old game.
I don't mind how Liquid Glass looks at all. It's just insane how buggy the system has become. Even Messages will bug out, like deleting my first word if I type too fast after opening a conversation or auto scrolling and not letting me scroll down until I exit and re-enter.
Unacceptable for the premium you pay for Apple software. Unacceptable for any software one is paying for. I hope they get their shit together and start fixing before they continue adding new stuff. 26.2 doesn't inspire me that they're on that trajectory.
The thing that amazes me most is that everyone on the teams responsible is probably using their Apple devices and running into these same bugs!
I do, and the fact that it isn't even optional is crazy.
Windows Vista vibes where they first looked at what the could technically pull off on todays' hardware. And mind you: Liquid Glass is very impressive!.
I've had similar observations with different behaviors in Safari and Finder. One would think the quality of Apple's software would be increasing with the usage of Swift over Objective-C, but the opposite seems to be true.
Spotlight is also slow and buggy now, on an M3 Pro no less. I loathe the feeling of being faster than my computer and having to wait for it to catch up, something that I haven't felt since the M1 came out.
There are like a half-dozen blatant bugs I encounter between daily and weekly in Safari. Text input and textarea editing is buggy in a couple ways, Apple Pay has a positioning bug where sometimes its bottom button is about 1/3 off the screen, certain elements on a couple pages smear when I scroll (but only sometimes). Not even counting ways the keyboard itself is worse now.
I haven’t seen browsing this buggy outside weird niche Linux browsers in… 15+ years?
My issues with Safari have mostly been iCloud-related. The latest one being the iCloud tabs SQLlite database getting corrupted constantly and keeping stale tabs around that I have long closed. 26.2 seems to have fixed it, but it was around at least since Sonoma. I've had similar issues with Reading List, where again, the database gets corrupted and changes that I've made to Reading List get reverted. It is just little stuff like this that adds up and creates poor UX.
What's also telling is how long the bugs stayed around, too. They were reported on Reddit and Apple's forums for awhile with various workarounds, like deleting the phantom entries from the SQLlite database manually and doing some other gymnastics like removing the other devices from iCloud in hopes that everything would sync up nicely. No one at Apple had the time or took the time to chase down the bugs. In a world of Claude Code or Codex you would think they would have at least tried a cursory "fix this".
On a related note, maybe one of these days iCloud will have a force sync option that tells the other devices to trash their copies vs having to remove all devices and re-add to get everything coherently synced.
Indeed - the system as a whole is starting to feel bloated. Today’s macOS design is akin to the cosmetic mufflers/exhaust pipes in cars, which serve only to justify the “Sport” badge. I long for the days past.
Apple employees should have kidnapped Alan Dye from his office and deposited him on Facebook's doorstep wrapped up in a straightjacket with ribbons and a bow years ago before he finally left voluntarily.
Using Dye as a scapegoat feels like cope. The rest of the executives were fully content with this effort, and in the end he wasn't even forced out. There's no evidence that Apple will correct its course without him.
Yes, there is: Lemay, who replaced him, is a career UI guy.
Regardless of whether the C-suite recognized the problem or made a conscious decision to replace Dye with Lemay, it is likely that this outcome will, indeed, result in improved UI.
I think parts of Liquid Glass on macOS looks pretty bad. But I don't care that much about how things look, so it doesn't offend me.
What does offend me are all the bugs, as you say. It's still utterly broken all these months after the public release. Spotlight is a mess; I've seen it take DAYS before it has made an app in '/Applications' findable through search (even as the app shows up in Spotlight's long scrollable list of apps), and the animation where it comes in as a result of the four finger gesture has so many bugs I won't go through them all here. The most annoying is that it can end up in a state where Spotlight is not on screen, but you need to do the "make Spotlight go away" gesture before the "make Spotlight appear" gesture works again. It also often loads icons slowly; sometimes loading them in one by one over time, sometimes all at once after thinking for a second. It's arguably better from a UX design perspective than Launchpad was, but Launchpad was so much more polished and better performing.
There's also just constant minor graphical glitches. Things which pop in, things which load in with the wrong background color, that sort of stuff. The Settings app sometimes loads in stuff gradually and parts of the app jump around for a second before it settles, like a bad web app. It feels janky.
Mac OS X used to feel like a solid operating system. It has been going downhill for a while, but macOS 26 is the biggest leap in a long time.
> I think parts of Liquid Glass on macOS looks pretty bad. But I don't care that much about how things look, so it doesn't offend me.
I don't care overmuch about the purely cosmetic side of it, but Liquid Glass looks absolutely terrible from an ergonomics point of view. It's just plainly, objectively bad UX.
Tip: in accessibility , enable High Contrast and disable transparency. Optionally disable animations. Decent experience imo. I can now see what areas are clickable.
Nb I see tons of rendering bugs across a bunch of apps and I suspect it’s because I disabled as much animation and transparency as I could. Things like the keyboard opening slightly off the screen to the right then jumping into place, some apps going black when certain overlays are open, stuff like that.
I did basically that on my iPhone. My laptop was needing a cleanup, so I just wiped it and re-installed Sequoia. the Mac Studio never got the upgrade at all. If at some point I find there's something in Tahoe that I particularly need, I'll revisit upgrading.
This year I've had to perform many hard resets on my MacBook, iPhone and even Apple Watch because they've locked up. And they're all relatively new devices. Apple needs to get its shit together. I already expect to move away from their mobile ecosystem when it comes time to upgrade.
It's Apple itself that needs a hard reset. Maybe if we all at the same time collectively hold our power buttons down for sixty seconds, Apple Park will reboot.
> The thing that amazes me most is that everyone on the teams responsible is probably using their Apple devices and running into these same bugs!
This is what surprises me the most to be honest. CarPlay seemingly still suffers from a (sometimes deadly) issue of covering the entire map on your dashboard with the avatar/number of the person calling, so if you're actively using it for navigation (since, you know, there is a map there and all) someone calling you is a highly stressful moment and more than not you need to hang up because otherwise the call is in the way.
I've had my iPhone 12 Mini for so many years now, and this is still an issue, the only conclusion I can take from this is that people at Apple actually all have Android phones.
The Apple release schedule is unremitting. We know that bugs are reported to Apple by developers, and we know that reported bugs get ignored for years, or forever. I suspect that every Apple engineer has a mountain of bugs in their queue.
If Apple leadership doesn't care about software quality, then Apple engineers can't care about software quality. They use the same buggy crap that we do, because they have no choice.
I have these insane bugs where my apple tv will connect to my mbp even tho my mbp has blutooth disabled. I'll be listening to a podcast on my mbp with airpods while my wife is watching some show on the apple tv. It will still randomly connect to my airpods when my wife never tries to connect them.
Apple is quickly becoming a trash company and we're seeing the effects of an industry writ large when you only hire leetcode monkeys.
I think for the first time I’ve been considering moving off iOS because of liquid glass. The bugs on apple products have hit a breaking point for me. Mac is still unequivocally the best laptop around imho, but it’s less clear cut for phones. My iPhone 15 pro is borderline unusable. Every day is a new issue. I’m very much over it.
You used to be able to count on the basics working smoothly, but stuff like the camera and messaging are frequently broken for me
I recently switched from a 13 Mini to a Motorola Razr and wow Android is so much nicer than iOS. Notifications don't randomly disappear on Android, I have a Back button, and I can use real Firefox!
I've recently been using an Android phone a family member gave me after they upgraded and to my shock it's...fantastic? It's not at all like I remember Android from back in the early Android days.
Android has frequently been ahead of Apple in terms of features for years at this point. But Apple's overall "ecosystem" is (or was) much more cohesive, so everything felt very Apple, while Android's has (for better or worse) been something of a wild west situation; and iPhone's have excellent cameras. If you go with a flagship Android phone, though, you're now getting an equally good camera (if not better in some cases) and the benefit of Android's more freedom, in relative terms of course.
NA seems to really fixate on the luxury and social significer aspect of having an iphone though. But I think this update is finally ending that for some people. I have many friends who were diehard iPhone users that are now thinking of moving to Android. There's also a growing sense that new gens of most phones are making only marginal advances. Keeping a phone for 3 or more years is much more common and some mid-tier phones are now getting long security and update commitments.
Fair if you haven't looking at it in a while but they have largely been on par for a decade.
The Apple hardware is more consistently premium of course but if you compare the Samsung Galaxy whatever with the iphone they have been pretty close for a while. The entire industry has been in incremental innovation for a long time.
If you want to see daily bugs on top of it: disable animations in accessibility. Constant, 10x-daily-or-more issues in system UI (apps are surprisingly much better normally). E.g. it has partly or completely broken the recent app switching for the past 4 major versions so far, especially if you use a non-stock launcher.
I still prefer it over iOS due to being able to install stuff outside of the Play Store. If/when Google kills that, I'll be switching to a Linux mobile something. (I'm aware of the verification nonsense, but that isn't in place yet, and it has been shifting a bit)
I had (the same) Samsung android phone from 2017-2025. I bought an iPhone, mainly because of privacy concerns (for which I consider apple to be the least bad mainstream option, not good).
But I couldn’t get over how bad the ux is compared to my 7 year old phone. Things like highlighting, autocorrect, placing the cursor where you want “just don’t work”, the setup is unintuitive, the hotspot doesn’t work half the time, there are bugs (like email not connecting) that based on my searches are prevalent and have no solution “did you try updating and restarting”. I really couldn’t believe how bad it is.
But evidently people really like them, and I imagine they could find things not to like about my old Samsung, so to each his own I guess.
Answer: sometimes apps let you swipe right from the left margin, sometimes there may be a left arrow in the upper left, but it may not be visible unless you enable tinted Liquid Glass, but also look in the bottom left, there may be a less-than sign, and some times you have to force-quit the app and restart (like with Libby books borrowed via Kindle…)
iOS UX-affordance has done an incredible reversal from "one of the best" to "unambiguously the worst" over the years :| it's stunningly unapproachable nowadays, and Android seems excited to follow them
I’m actually glad because it seems like we are finally leaving behind the flat design that started in iOS 7, if I remember correctly. I’m not sure it would be good to go full skeuomorphic but at least a button looks more like a button again
I just hope that my current Mac keeps being usable long enough that Liquid Glass has been fixed or replaced entirely by the time I'm forced to upgrade to whatever's shipping on my next computer.
I thought Liquid Glass was cool & interesting when I first saw it in the Developer releases, but I find myself yearning to go back to Sequoia. Hopefully, Apple decides to go back to "simple" soon.
Eventually it will go away just like brushed metal, lickable, green felt, and woodgrain. Unfortunately for that to happen they will need to invent something so heinous you will wish for liquid glass.
My kid dumped a glass of water all over my MBP M1 a few days ago. Deciding between an inferior M4 with Sequoia or a fancy new M5 with Tahoe has been rough :/
If it helps, I've been using XFCE since 2007 and it's remained functionally identical for all of those almost 20 years. It just works, it improves a tiny bit with each major upgrade, and they don't rearrange everything every couple years for the sake of justifying a salary.
Maybe it's a good opportunity to consider whether you actually have to keep running on Apple's treadmill.
I’d love an XFCE (or even gnome tbh) environment on a properly built laptop, unfortunately only Apple is able to build something that works in all areas that matter: sleeps when lid closed, wakes when lid opens, touchpad and display don’t suck.
FWIW that all worked out of the box for me on my Intel Framework. But yes, it's fair to say there are tradeoffs for each solution. Maybe Apple's cons are getting big enough these days. Worth considering.
For me the touchpad experience is not just about the hardware. I got a Magic Trackpad for my Linux desktop hoping that it would at least be somewhat comparable to my MacBook. But scrolling and gestures are nowhere near as consistent fluid as in macOS since the software support just isn't there.
As a fairly typical example, getting Firefox on Linux to actually scroll smoothly takes googling and fiddling with settings. Gesture support is hit or miss. On macOS, Firefox behaves just like any other native app in this regard.
Which version? I have a X1 Carbon from, uhh, 2017? It supports S3 sleep. I'd think about an upgrade, if only I wasn't worried about sleep issues. I run Debian if that makes any difference.
Actually now that I think about it, my visceral reaction is one of dread: a feeling the trouble will be more than the benefit of a new computer.
> all areas that matter: sleeps when lid closed, wakes when lid opens, touchpad and display don’t suck.
All of these seem to be fine on my thinkpad (true, I probably have somewhat lower standards for passable display). Battery life sucks a bit, what I can usually fine outlet somewhat to plug into.
I’ve combined my MacBook with a Linux desktop for about five years now. Linux has its pros as a developer, but IMHO daily driving it is like walking around with pebbles in my shoes.
Something as basic as scrolling feels slightly inconsistent in just about every app and keybindings are all over the place. There’s always the allure of getting the config ”just right” but after a while I swear I start seeing Sisyphus’ reflection in my screen.
What DE are you using? Some of the higher profile ones (Gnome, KDE) try to be all smooth and polished and feature-full and in my opinion just introduce more complications and bugs that get in the way of just being a good desktop. I like XFCE because it's just a really good, simple window manager, desktop, and set of basic utilities. Other than that it just gets out of your way and doesn't make you relearn how to do things every few years. It's like if the Win98 desktop got another 30 years of gentle refinement.
But it doesn’t really matter, since the DE doesn’t determine how individual apps behave.
My baseline is OSX from decade ago OSX with native apps where everyone was following the Apple HIG so consistently that using a Java app felt like waking up in the twilight zone. macOS these days have fallen quite a bit from its UX glory days but there’s still quite a bit to go before it hits the level of Ubuntu or Windows.
On Linux it feels to me like every app exists in its own parallell dimension where you never know if even the basic laws of physics still apply.
Fair. I guess I haven't had that experience, but so much stuff is web-based these days that probably 90% of my computing time is just spent in a browser and the rest in just a handful of applications that I know well.
I'd guess that I am unusually picky about UX for being a techie. The story would probably have been very different 20 years ago when fiddling with my computer was more of a hobby than a chore.
Yeah, could be. You mentioned elsewhere in this thread having to tinker a bunch to get scrolling in Firefox to be smooth and I don't even know what that means :) I just put 2 fingers on the touchpad and move them up and Firefox scrolls the page down and I'm happy, haha.
Anyway sounds like you've already done what I suggested and it didn't out work you. I hope for your sake Apple comes to their senses soon!
The worrying thing is that his departure seems in no way like a consequence of his terrible job. He wasn't squeezed out by upper management, he left because Meta made him a better offer. I'm sure Apple's software quality will go up now that he's gone and his replacement is allegedly liked by Apple's competent UX people who disliked Dye; but Cook clearly doesn't recognise the problems, lest he'd have planned to get rid of Dye by now.
It’s honestly hard to tell from outside - execs at that level are very rarely fired. They tend to be asked politely to find something new to do with their time
They also tend to not be featured very prominently on a huge product launch event while in the process of "finding something new to do with their time". If he's actually being squeezed out, that process must've started after the public launch of iOS 26.
EDIT: though I guess you could also read it as, iOS 26 had come too far to stop it, so they let Dye be the visible face of it so that he'd be the fall guy and the next guy would get the credits for fixing it... I don't know, I guess we don't really have enough info to speculate one way or the other
Funny to see the last screenshot of OS X from 2014 in the article. I would love to use a system with such a high contrast and information density. But I also remember very well how many users were upset with the most recent design changes at that time: The all caps section titles in the sidebar, and the gray icons that were previously colored.
For me, earlier versions of macOS/OS X and Windows Vista/7 were the right mix of eye candy and usability. Apple's just showing off with this liquid glass thing. Yeah, it's cool that they attempted it, but it should've remained entirely opt-in. Apple being Apple, there's no opt-in -- once they like it, it's the default.
For a major revamp, you should either do it or not do it. Making it opt-in or even opt-out means every app then has to try to support both different UIs, which is a longterm maintenance cost. Not only for Apple, but the entire ecosystem.
I personally sort of like the liquid glass, but it's also kind of a mess in a lot of edge cases. I feel like it was an interesting idea that didn't really pan out fully and should have been scrapped. It's just too controversial for pure eye-candy.
the market agrees for the most part. VR goggle interfaces just aren't taking the world by storm. When it came out I thought: I'll wait for the iteration that comes 2 years later (the AVP 3 or whatever) since by then they'll have worked out the kinks and it will be a solid computing platform. It's 2 months shy of 2 years since general availability of the AVP and it's essentially identical to the initial release with just a minor chip upgrade. It's a dead product line
It sounds plausible, but only in the shallowest “yeah, make ‘em look the same” way. Just like when they started shipping the Catalyst-based Mac apps of Messages, Photos, etc so that they’d look the same as the iOS apps (and no doubt so they could reuse some code from there instead of wasting developers on the Mac platform they hate).
It’s not as though anything about Liquid Glass makes a meaningful difference in usability.
I think this goes deeper. Transparency is clearly not a good fit for desktop or mobile apps, but imagine smart glasses where every app completely blocks your view of the things behind it. It just wouldn't work.
To move around safely with smart glasses on your face, apps need to be semi transparent from day one. It's not about superficial stylistic similarities this time. And it's not primarily about design either.
This is absolutely about core usability, just not for macOS or iOS.
It would help if it wasn't 3500 dollars, they did not embrace games, and were expecting developers to buy such devices for so little return in development cost, released at a time most headsets were already on yet again going down on another VR headset cycle.
Are there even enough active Vision Pro users to make the $3500 back selling an app for it, not even considering the cost to develop it, or Apple's 30% app store tax?
How about porting "I Am Rich" to the Vision Pro, and it could just show a glowing red orb floating in front of your face.
I would be shocked if Apple was making any product decisions to benefit visionOS at the expense of anything else. It’s so abundantly clear that the vision pro was a failure, it would be a horrible mistake to sacrifice anything to try and save it at this point. I think Apple is done with that experiment.
> Maybe this is because I’m getting older, but that gives me the benefit of having experienced Apple’s older interfaces, with their exceptional quality and functionality.
i really missed snow leopard for about 10 years all the way up to when i moved on from my macbook circa 5 years ago.
Snow Leopard, Mountain Lion were so peak. The first step into minimalism was beautiful, too, I'll admit, but it's culminated in this Liquid Glass garbage, so it was ultimately a misstep.
I feel so old saying this, but back in the days both Apple and third party developers would follow the HIG closely enough that something felt off right away when an app wasn't behaving 100% native. Running something like a Java app was jarring to say the least even if they were supposedly using a "cross platform" UI library.
But then Gruber said that the HIG was dead and the decline gained more and more momentum...
Perhaps the thing I hate most about Tahoe is the embedded rounded rectangle around the menu inside of the larger rounded rectangle window. They're trying to go for this look of a menu floating above the rest of the window it belongs to, but it just looks sloppy to me in dark mode.
Personally I couldn’t get past the horrible gray squircle jails for icons that don’t adhere to their boring new standard. They didn’t even update the pixelmator icon for quite a while, which they themselves acquired. Shows you how much effort went in to this.
Looks sloppy in any mode. The amount of wasted space has gone from “well a little bit of rounding/padding is alright to achieve a unified unique look” to “holy shit this is just Fischer price laugh and learn garbage”.
1/2 pixel strips everywhere, around tons of elements. Huge rounded corners. Slow showy animations.
This isn’t a UI for adults, this is a UI for a fake computer sequence in a cheap Netflix movie.
> That was little more than a decade ago, in 2014. Not that I want to turn the clock back, but it would be really helpful if I could read clearly what’s on my display once again.
I want to turn the clock back. It’s not a reflexive opposition to anything new. I thought OS X clearly got better from 10.0 to 10.4. But in the last vie versions it’s been a regression.
I booted a G4 Mac the other day, running 10.4.something. I was thrown back in time to a period where OS X was clearly their flagship software stack. Everything was coherent and cohesive - and shockingly - fast. I'd daily 10.4 again if it could operate on the modern internet comfortably!
One of the most egregious issues with macOS 26 is the accessibility/usability regression. Apple prided itself on making their operating system accessible. Good ux is inherently accessible.
There are so many parts of the os that flagrantly ignore well-established accessibility standards, some of which Apple themselves advocated for
It’s what you get when you install a hack print designer who knows nothing about UI as the head of software design and leave him there for a decade. Even Jony Ive, who also had no business designing software, didn’t respect Dye.
Thank goodness Meta has done Apple the biggest favor of the century by poaching him.
What's obvious to me is that the PRIMARY motivation for Liquid-Glass-ifying MacOS was not to improve MacOS, but simply to make it look consistent with the new version of iOS/iPadOS.
So for Apple to start with a level of disrespect for the existing product where the question of whether each change is actually an improvement is effectively off-topic, it's no wonder they made a dog's dinner of Tahoe.
It would not matter if they dogfooded it, the decision makers higher up in the chain are getting paid more to make a visible change and/or increase revenue, not to make a better user experience.
Famously, Jobs' demands pushed engineers to think and work harder to achieve what they think was impossible, which resulted in many of the most iconic designs of personal electronic devices in history.
On the other hand, we have butterfly keyboard and this.
I 100% agree with OPs take, though I don't really mind it as much as he does. I do hope the changes will be rolled back in 27, or at least controls given to us that allow us to roll back changes.
These articles always make me laugh. Everyone complains and then everyone lines up and buys Macs again. macOS has been on the decline for literally years now. If you really want things to change put your money where your mouth is and switch!
I think a lot of people on HN don't realize that some people require software outside of a terminal and a web browser. Can I run Ableton on linux? can I run all the audio plugins that only ship windows/mac versions? is there a decent graphics editor? (gimp is not it.) If all I did was play in the terminal and a web browser, I'd have switched to Linux by now.
Linux has loads of problems, but at least to me, I register these problems in a very different way.
The problems with Windows and MacOS are almost all the result of bad incentives, user hostile arrogant design, or just neglect. As such, the presence of these problems feels malcious, and it always feels like I'm pitted against the very company that I'm paying quite a bit of money to. I'm left with very little hope of things actually improving, because these companies seem to have no incentive to actually make their operating systems more useful or aligned with my needs.
On Linux, the problems are almost always just a result of "hey man, I tried my best to make something good and useful, but I either don't have the resources or the skills to get it all the way there." Sometimes things break or are ugly or whatever, but it's not malicious. There's a strong sense that things are rapidly improving, and that I can play a small part in helping those improvements along (via the patches I submit, or with donations or other forms of support). Because of this, I find the problems on Linux so much less frustrating than analogous problems on MacOS or Windows.
I also think a lot of people might not realize just how rapidly things have been improving on Linux. The situation today is pretty different versus even just 3-5 years ago.
Windows is horrible, yes. But Linux definitely isn't "just as bad" as MacOS, it's already better, and it keeps getting better every year while MacOS keeps getting worse.
Since macOS went to a yearly cadence, I usually upgrade during Christmas break, this allows for a couple of point releases to work out the kinks. I won’t be upgrading this year. I hope macOS 27 fixes this abomination. Otherwise, this 30+ year Mac user will be moving on…
You would do well to avoid 26. I upgraded to be a Guinea Pig for a few colleagues and I regret it. Things like apps and scripts work in the technical sense, but it is worse because the myriad of graphical and interactive issues.
All the non-technical people I know loved it. It's pretty. It's neat. It looks cool. Apple is a consumer products company.
My personal feeling on it is just "meh." My productivity with my laptop hasn't changed. I'm not a huge fan but it's not a deal breaker. I still find it better than Windows 11 for the most part, and Linux has other issues as a daily driver for me.
IMHO Apple needs a "tick" release where they only polish and fix bugs and usability issues with an almost total feature freeze. I've heard they may be doing that.
Looking at popularity of similar design on iOS it would be surprising “non-technical” users like it. People HATE new iOS. Low contrast, not clear layering and focus, things being moved around for unknown reasons.
Also who uses MacOs beaides developers? Majority are creative prosumers in arts/design and they are even more annoyed by messed up designs. What you are left with are lawyers, writers, students? I guess they might like it.
I said that in the next sentence. Than again this is really true only in US. In rest of the world (including europe) Macs are seen as luxury environment.
Macs are not seens as a luxury environment in Sweden at least.
Of the people I know only old folks, gamers and some techies own PCs. A lot of people will however just use whatever wintel laptop their employer provides them with.
I’ve deferred my next Mac upgrade to when my current M1 air on Sequoia stops being supported. If they mess it up further I may just move off the platform. Such a shame because the hardware is great.
My MacOS has this insane bug where the cursor sometimes won't change to a pointer/loading/any other state on my second monitor. This is really bad, but even worse for me who writes websites for a living, and need to check that my CSS cursor pointer class actually worked. I can't count how many minutes I've lost refreshing my browser and double-checking my code. Now I just keep my browser on my primary monitor. I've found many other people with this bug on the internet, and it has been happening for YEARS. I honestly can't understand how a premium product aimed at developers can have something like this for YEARS without a fix. I'm moving away from MacOS, and might ditch my iPhone too as I won't have all the nice integration with MacOS anymore.
Do you have a trackpad? If you re-enter focus by right clicking (very easy to do with gestures), focus stops working until you leave and re enter by left clicking. Unfortunately not a new issue.
While the UI designers are rearranging deck chairs, the UX is totally failing to love up to the promise of an ecosystem. Cross system cut n paste is a neat trick, but I just want timers and alarms to actually work as expected.
I shouldn’t be surprised given that the mac save as dialog box has a name field that is still hard coded to 32 characters visible. Whenever I bitch about it I get pushback that filenames shouldn’t be longer than that! Um hello - tell me you have never worked in the real world outside your iphone bubble without telling me.
Tahoe has to be the worst software Apple has released in three decades. It's unbelievable it got through. If Macs and macOS were not a tiny portion of their revenue I would short the stock.
One thing that made Tahoe even worse is that Apple changed what they considered an update or upgrade, so for Tahoe it was suddenly considered as a update and not an upgrade, in all management solutions.
This force-upgraded a lot of Macs at work and we lost days of effective work across many engineers. The machines was practically useless for weeks.
They clearly don't care about power users anymore, and haven't for quite some time. It's so sad.
iOS 26 is also very bad. Many Christmas conversations between boomers baffled by their phones, and as I younger (than boomer) person I am not as baffled but there are a number of things that take more button presses than they did in previous versions for no apparent reason. And it’s real ugly imo.
MacOS aesthetically peaked with Leopard in '09, but speaking frankly the OS has felt abandoned to me since around 10.2, with so many basic interaction issues with window management and the dock just never getting fixed properly and a long list of half-assed bandaids and abandoned experiments over the years.
There is no true passion in MacOS, and the marketing has come face to face with reality in 2025. It's the neglected step-child of a company distracted by other things.
There's been some impressive engineering done by lower-level folks under the hood of it all, though.
The thing that’s weird about this though is it isn’t enshitification. I don’t want to defend the worsening of software quality/ux/ui for monetary gain but at least it’s somewhat rational. This is not a change that emphasizes profit driven changes over user driven ones. Maybe I’m missing some profit motive but it just seems like an awful design choice.
Edit: Not to disagree though. I too have a Linux gaming pc and are helping friends do the same.
I'm holding off upgrading my laptop (2013 MBP running Catalina) until they get their UI stuff together. I'd just gotten used to Sequoia on my desktop but this is unbearable.
Not a single update since 2019 has improved the UI more than it regressed it in my opinion. Too much whitespace, too little contrast, too big controls, and now too little readability.
It's almost like their entire UI department is under threat of being fired unless they invent a radical UI update every other year.
Even Vista was a readability zen compared to this and they aren't listening to feedback at all.
> After three months of strong feedback during beta-testing, I was disappointed when Tahoe was released on 15 September to see how little had been addressed
Now it was a while ago I left the Apple ecosystem as it became clear they didn't actually care about UX anymore, but did "strong feedback during beta-testing" ever actually result in any results? I remember doing something similar back in 2012-2013 sometime, and friends having similar feelings across the years, that it makes me think that Apple never really did any changes based on feedback receiving during the beta testing.
Has anyone here ever written something in via the traditional feedback forms/venues and actually had something changed before the final release? I even asked around my circle of acquaintances and even the ones 110% into the Apple ecosystem seem to never have noticed anything changed based on their feedback.
I do enjoy the liquid glass controls in some places. The glass effect is really beautiful. What I hate about it is the way the overall UI constantly gets in the way of my content.
I expect and demand a level of, for want of a better term, UI crispness.
It is equally aggravating to err on either side: Windows 3.1 clunk to the left, Tahoe's operationally useless (indeed, operationally detrimental) visual fireworks to the right.
Apple needs to hit a sweet spot of crisp, but the priority must be fast, logical interaction that lets me operate at the speed of thought. With Tahoe, Apple tried to gild the lily.
M2 MBP here. Definitely skipping Tahoe. Sequoia is already just terrible, not only is the UX clunky and hostile, but Apple seems to have flat out broken its Bluetooth and networking stacks in multiple ways, and in general the system is extremely unstable.
Best hardware around, but at this point I might even take W11 over this locked down mess. At least Asahi support is decent these days.
And I'm tired of paying for things that should be stock, such as proper window and mouse management, or reasonable fan control so that the keyboard doesn't burn my fingers under moderate workloads.
It seems obvious to me that liquid glass is no designer's idea of a good UI. It's a business move to force developers to support the upcoming iGlasses where transparency is actually necessary.
Perhaps Apple is willing to accept that most macOS users will enable "reduce transparency" so long as devs implement support for transparency.
But there is another explanation making the rounds, possibly a conspiracy theory. Some people claim that Apple is doing this to make cross-platform technologies look obsolete and hard to implement.
If there's any truth to this, it's a terrible idea that could easily backfire. People could get used to there not being a consistent platform look and feel. Like on Windows, "native" could lose its meaning.
Whatever Apple promotes as "native" could become just another style among many.
I am trying hard to have strong feelings about it, but I just can’t bother. The only thing constant is change.
What I do know for a fact, is that for each error I have on my MacBook, I’ll have ~10 ungoogable errors on any other OS. I rage-sold my last Windows due to losing my Java installation (or just confusing which terminal I installed it in).
Please, crop all thumbnails in the corners, as long as you come pre-installed with just one working terminal.
> I’ll have ~10 ungoogable errors on any other OS.
If you ever attempt to compile software, the shoe instantly hits the other foot. WSL is a godsend, and Apple's "native" terminal environment becomes a confusing liability.
The day that I need to update to macOS 26 for continued security patches is the last day I'll choose to run macOS. I'm pretty much all on Linux for non-work stuff anyway with an old Windows 'gaming' PC that only runs a 10 year old game.
I don't mind how Liquid Glass looks at all. It's just insane how buggy the system has become. Even Messages will bug out, like deleting my first word if I type too fast after opening a conversation or auto scrolling and not letting me scroll down until I exit and re-enter.
Unacceptable for the premium you pay for Apple software. Unacceptable for any software one is paying for. I hope they get their shit together and start fixing before they continue adding new stuff. 26.2 doesn't inspire me that they're on that trajectory.
The thing that amazes me most is that everyone on the teams responsible is probably using their Apple devices and running into these same bugs!
>I don't mind how Liquid Glass looks at all.
I do, and the fact that it isn't even optional is crazy.
Windows Vista vibes where they first looked at what the could technically pull off on todays' hardware. And mind you: Liquid Glass is very impressive!.
It's just not necessary.
I've had similar observations with different behaviors in Safari and Finder. One would think the quality of Apple's software would be increasing with the usage of Swift over Objective-C, but the opposite seems to be true.
Spotlight is also slow and buggy now, on an M3 Pro no less. I loathe the feeling of being faster than my computer and having to wait for it to catch up, something that I haven't felt since the M1 came out.
There are like a half-dozen blatant bugs I encounter between daily and weekly in Safari. Text input and textarea editing is buggy in a couple ways, Apple Pay has a positioning bug where sometimes its bottom button is about 1/3 off the screen, certain elements on a couple pages smear when I scroll (but only sometimes). Not even counting ways the keyboard itself is worse now.
I haven’t seen browsing this buggy outside weird niche Linux browsers in… 15+ years?
My issues with Safari have mostly been iCloud-related. The latest one being the iCloud tabs SQLlite database getting corrupted constantly and keeping stale tabs around that I have long closed. 26.2 seems to have fixed it, but it was around at least since Sonoma. I've had similar issues with Reading List, where again, the database gets corrupted and changes that I've made to Reading List get reverted. It is just little stuff like this that adds up and creates poor UX.
What's also telling is how long the bugs stayed around, too. They were reported on Reddit and Apple's forums for awhile with various workarounds, like deleting the phantom entries from the SQLlite database manually and doing some other gymnastics like removing the other devices from iCloud in hopes that everything would sync up nicely. No one at Apple had the time or took the time to chase down the bugs. In a world of Claude Code or Codex you would think they would have at least tried a cursory "fix this".
On a related note, maybe one of these days iCloud will have a force sync option that tells the other devices to trash their copies vs having to remove all devices and re-add to get everything coherently synced.
Indeed - the system as a whole is starting to feel bloated. Today’s macOS design is akin to the cosmetic mufflers/exhaust pipes in cars, which serve only to justify the “Sport” badge. I long for the days past.
It is akin to some military operations doomed to fail, and everyone ends up dying because of the chain of command no one is willing to speak against.
That is how the current chaos feels like.
Apple employees should have kidnapped Alan Dye from his office and deposited him on Facebook's doorstep wrapped up in a straightjacket with ribbons and a bow years ago before he finally left voluntarily.
Like the Hong-Kong guy in The Dark Knight!
Using Dye as a scapegoat feels like cope. The rest of the executives were fully content with this effort, and in the end he wasn't even forced out. There's no evidence that Apple will correct its course without him.
Yes, there is: Lemay, who replaced him, is a career UI guy.
Regardless of whether the C-suite recognized the problem or made a conscious decision to replace Dye with Lemay, it is likely that this outcome will, indeed, result in improved UI.
I agree with bugs, you can't even scroll through settings with touchpad without permanently enabling scroll bars.
I think parts of Liquid Glass on macOS looks pretty bad. But I don't care that much about how things look, so it doesn't offend me.
What does offend me are all the bugs, as you say. It's still utterly broken all these months after the public release. Spotlight is a mess; I've seen it take DAYS before it has made an app in '/Applications' findable through search (even as the app shows up in Spotlight's long scrollable list of apps), and the animation where it comes in as a result of the four finger gesture has so many bugs I won't go through them all here. The most annoying is that it can end up in a state where Spotlight is not on screen, but you need to do the "make Spotlight go away" gesture before the "make Spotlight appear" gesture works again. It also often loads icons slowly; sometimes loading them in one by one over time, sometimes all at once after thinking for a second. It's arguably better from a UX design perspective than Launchpad was, but Launchpad was so much more polished and better performing.
There's also just constant minor graphical glitches. Things which pop in, things which load in with the wrong background color, that sort of stuff. The Settings app sometimes loads in stuff gradually and parts of the app jump around for a second before it settles, like a bad web app. It feels janky.
Mac OS X used to feel like a solid operating system. It has been going downhill for a while, but macOS 26 is the biggest leap in a long time.
> I think parts of Liquid Glass on macOS looks pretty bad. But I don't care that much about how things look, so it doesn't offend me.
I don't care overmuch about the purely cosmetic side of it, but Liquid Glass looks absolutely terrible from an ergonomics point of view. It's just plainly, objectively bad UX.
Tip: in accessibility , enable High Contrast and disable transparency. Optionally disable animations. Decent experience imo. I can now see what areas are clickable.
Nb I see tons of rendering bugs across a bunch of apps and I suspect it’s because I disabled as much animation and transparency as I could. Things like the keyboard opening slightly off the screen to the right then jumping into place, some apps going black when certain overlays are open, stuff like that.
I did basically that on my iPhone. My laptop was needing a cleanup, so I just wiped it and re-installed Sequoia. the Mac Studio never got the upgrade at all. If at some point I find there's something in Tahoe that I particularly need, I'll revisit upgrading.
This year I've had to perform many hard resets on my MacBook, iPhone and even Apple Watch because they've locked up. And they're all relatively new devices. Apple needs to get its shit together. I already expect to move away from their mobile ecosystem when it comes time to upgrade.
It's Apple itself that needs a hard reset. Maybe if we all at the same time collectively hold our power buttons down for sixty seconds, Apple Park will reboot.
> The thing that amazes me most is that everyone on the teams responsible is probably using their Apple devices and running into these same bugs!
This is what surprises me the most to be honest. CarPlay seemingly still suffers from a (sometimes deadly) issue of covering the entire map on your dashboard with the avatar/number of the person calling, so if you're actively using it for navigation (since, you know, there is a map there and all) someone calling you is a highly stressful moment and more than not you need to hang up because otherwise the call is in the way.
I've had my iPhone 12 Mini for so many years now, and this is still an issue, the only conclusion I can take from this is that people at Apple actually all have Android phones.
The Apple release schedule is unremitting. We know that bugs are reported to Apple by developers, and we know that reported bugs get ignored for years, or forever. I suspect that every Apple engineer has a mountain of bugs in their queue.
If Apple leadership doesn't care about software quality, then Apple engineers can't care about software quality. They use the same buggy crap that we do, because they have no choice.
Often it is that people who use the devices learn how to work around bugs and then they forget they exist.
There is also subconscious resistance to create an action that will uncover a bug and then remind of personal failure.
Then once whole teams get used to this, it's not possible to get it fixed as it gets deprioritised always.
I have these insane bugs where my apple tv will connect to my mbp even tho my mbp has blutooth disabled. I'll be listening to a podcast on my mbp with airpods while my wife is watching some show on the apple tv. It will still randomly connect to my airpods when my wife never tries to connect them.
Apple is quickly becoming a trash company and we're seeing the effects of an industry writ large when you only hire leetcode monkeys.
I think for the first time I’ve been considering moving off iOS because of liquid glass. The bugs on apple products have hit a breaking point for me. Mac is still unequivocally the best laptop around imho, but it’s less clear cut for phones. My iPhone 15 pro is borderline unusable. Every day is a new issue. I’m very much over it.
You used to be able to count on the basics working smoothly, but stuff like the camera and messaging are frequently broken for me
I recently switched from a 13 Mini to a Motorola Razr and wow Android is so much nicer than iOS. Notifications don't randomly disappear on Android, I have a Back button, and I can use real Firefox!
I've recently been using an Android phone a family member gave me after they upgraded and to my shock it's...fantastic? It's not at all like I remember Android from back in the early Android days.
Android has frequently been ahead of Apple in terms of features for years at this point. But Apple's overall "ecosystem" is (or was) much more cohesive, so everything felt very Apple, while Android's has (for better or worse) been something of a wild west situation; and iPhone's have excellent cameras. If you go with a flagship Android phone, though, you're now getting an equally good camera (if not better in some cases) and the benefit of Android's more freedom, in relative terms of course.
NA seems to really fixate on the luxury and social significer aspect of having an iphone though. But I think this update is finally ending that for some people. I have many friends who were diehard iPhone users that are now thinking of moving to Android. There's also a growing sense that new gens of most phones are making only marginal advances. Keeping a phone for 3 or more years is much more common and some mid-tier phones are now getting long security and update commitments.
Fair if you haven't looking at it in a while but they have largely been on par for a decade.
The Apple hardware is more consistently premium of course but if you compare the Samsung Galaxy whatever with the iphone they have been pretty close for a while. The entire industry has been in incremental innovation for a long time.
Dunno man, I’ve used Android recently and it’s still as bafflingly confusing and crappy as I remember it being.
Definitely an “to each their own” kind of situation.
If you want to see daily bugs on top of it: disable animations in accessibility. Constant, 10x-daily-or-more issues in system UI (apps are surprisingly much better normally). E.g. it has partly or completely broken the recent app switching for the past 4 major versions so far, especially if you use a non-stock launcher.
I still prefer it over iOS due to being able to install stuff outside of the Play Store. If/when Google kills that, I'll be switching to a Linux mobile something. (I'm aware of the verification nonsense, but that isn't in place yet, and it has been shifting a bit)
I think that is what you get used to. I've been using Android for over a decade and my wife's iPhone is super confusing to me.
I had (the same) Samsung android phone from 2017-2025. I bought an iPhone, mainly because of privacy concerns (for which I consider apple to be the least bad mainstream option, not good).
But I couldn’t get over how bad the ux is compared to my 7 year old phone. Things like highlighting, autocorrect, placing the cursor where you want “just don’t work”, the setup is unintuitive, the hotspot doesn’t work half the time, there are bugs (like email not connecting) that based on my searches are prevalent and have no solution “did you try updating and restarting”. I really couldn’t believe how bad it is.
But evidently people really like them, and I imagine they could find things not to like about my old Samsung, so to each his own I guess.
> Things like highlighting, autocorrect, placing the cursor where you want “just don’t work”
Hilariously, those things actually did work back in 2017, and Apple has since broken all of them in various OS updates
That’s a good observation, I think you’re right.
Yep, my parents are both Android users and have to ask "where is the home button" when someone passes them an iPhone.
Followed by “where is the back button.”
Answer: sometimes apps let you swipe right from the left margin, sometimes there may be a left arrow in the upper left, but it may not be visible unless you enable tinted Liquid Glass, but also look in the bottom left, there may be a less-than sign, and some times you have to force-quit the app and restart (like with Libby books borrowed via Kindle…)
Does apply still sometimes put the back button in the top left?
That used to drive me nuts especially as they grew the phone to size 5+ inches
iOS UX-affordance has done an incredible reversal from "one of the best" to "unambiguously the worst" over the years :| it's stunningly unapproachable nowadays, and Android seems excited to follow them
I’m actually glad because it seems like we are finally leaving behind the flat design that started in iOS 7, if I remember correctly. I’m not sure it would be good to go full skeuomorphic but at least a button looks more like a button again
I just hope that my current Mac keeps being usable long enough that Liquid Glass has been fixed or replaced entirely by the time I'm forced to upgrade to whatever's shipping on my next computer.
I thought Liquid Glass was cool & interesting when I first saw it in the Developer releases, but I find myself yearning to go back to Sequoia. Hopefully, Apple decides to go back to "simple" soon.
Eventually it will go away just like brushed metal, lickable, green felt, and woodgrain. Unfortunately for that to happen they will need to invent something so heinous you will wish for liquid glass.
https://imgur.com/a/5uHuYyV
My kid dumped a glass of water all over my MBP M1 a few days ago. Deciding between an inferior M4 with Sequoia or a fancy new M5 with Tahoe has been rough :/
If it helps, I've been using XFCE since 2007 and it's remained functionally identical for all of those almost 20 years. It just works, it improves a tiny bit with each major upgrade, and they don't rearrange everything every couple years for the sake of justifying a salary.
Maybe it's a good opportunity to consider whether you actually have to keep running on Apple's treadmill.
I’d love an XFCE (or even gnome tbh) environment on a properly built laptop, unfortunately only Apple is able to build something that works in all areas that matter: sleeps when lid closed, wakes when lid opens, touchpad and display don’t suck.
FWIW that all worked out of the box for me on my Intel Framework. But yes, it's fair to say there are tradeoffs for each solution. Maybe Apple's cons are getting big enough these days. Worth considering.
I have an oled thinkpad running fedora that has never had a sleep issue. Excellent touchpad as well. Thinkpad X1 Carbon.
For me the touchpad experience is not just about the hardware. I got a Magic Trackpad for my Linux desktop hoping that it would at least be somewhat comparable to my MacBook. But scrolling and gestures are nowhere near as consistent fluid as in macOS since the software support just isn't there.
As a fairly typical example, getting Firefox on Linux to actually scroll smoothly takes googling and fiddling with settings. Gesture support is hit or miss. On macOS, Firefox behaves just like any other native app in this regard.
Which version? I have a X1 Carbon from, uhh, 2017? It supports S3 sleep. I'd think about an upgrade, if only I wasn't worried about sleep issues. I run Debian if that makes any difference.
Actually now that I think about it, my visceral reaction is one of dread: a feeling the trouble will be more than the benefit of a new computer.
> all areas that matter: sleeps when lid closed, wakes when lid opens, touchpad and display don’t suck.
All of these seem to be fine on my thinkpad (true, I probably have somewhat lower standards for passable display). Battery life sucks a bit, what I can usually fine outlet somewhat to plug into.
I’ve combined my MacBook with a Linux desktop for about five years now. Linux has its pros as a developer, but IMHO daily driving it is like walking around with pebbles in my shoes.
Something as basic as scrolling feels slightly inconsistent in just about every app and keybindings are all over the place. There’s always the allure of getting the config ”just right” but after a while I swear I start seeing Sisyphus’ reflection in my screen.
What DE are you using? Some of the higher profile ones (Gnome, KDE) try to be all smooth and polished and feature-full and in my opinion just introduce more complications and bugs that get in the way of just being a good desktop. I like XFCE because it's just a really good, simple window manager, desktop, and set of basic utilities. Other than that it just gets out of your way and doesn't make you relearn how to do things every few years. It's like if the Win98 desktop got another 30 years of gentle refinement.
I’ve tried XFCE, i3, Pop Shell and plain Gnome.
But it doesn’t really matter, since the DE doesn’t determine how individual apps behave.
My baseline is OSX from decade ago OSX with native apps where everyone was following the Apple HIG so consistently that using a Java app felt like waking up in the twilight zone. macOS these days have fallen quite a bit from its UX glory days but there’s still quite a bit to go before it hits the level of Ubuntu or Windows.
On Linux it feels to me like every app exists in its own parallell dimension where you never know if even the basic laws of physics still apply.
Fair. I guess I haven't had that experience, but so much stuff is web-based these days that probably 90% of my computing time is just spent in a browser and the rest in just a handful of applications that I know well.
I'd guess that I am unusually picky about UX for being a techie. The story would probably have been very different 20 years ago when fiddling with my computer was more of a hobby than a chore.
Yeah, could be. You mentioned elsewhere in this thread having to tinker a bunch to get scrolling in Firefox to be smooth and I don't even know what that means :) I just put 2 fingers on the touchpad and move them up and Firefox scrolls the page down and I'm happy, haha.
Anyway sounds like you've already done what I suggested and it didn't out work you. I hope for your sake Apple comes to their senses soon!
> dumped a glass of water all over my MBP
I believe that's how the designers at Apple came up with Liquid Glass
Liquid Glass is not that bad lol.
Neither is an M4 Pro.
It’s infuriating that you can’t downgrade.
eh, the problems aren't prominent on macOS.
Liquid Glass appears to be the culmination of the Alan Dye era at Apple, where UI terms like "radio buttons" were derided as "programmer talk".
https://daringfireball.net/2025/12/bad_dye_job
Thankfully he has now left. Things could hopefully pick up again usability-wise within 2-3 years.
The worrying thing is that his departure seems in no way like a consequence of his terrible job. He wasn't squeezed out by upper management, he left because Meta made him a better offer. I'm sure Apple's software quality will go up now that he's gone and his replacement is allegedly liked by Apple's competent UX people who disliked Dye; but Cook clearly doesn't recognise the problems, lest he'd have planned to get rid of Dye by now.
It’s honestly hard to tell from outside - execs at that level are very rarely fired. They tend to be asked politely to find something new to do with their time
They also tend to not be featured very prominently on a huge product launch event while in the process of "finding something new to do with their time". If he's actually being squeezed out, that process must've started after the public launch of iOS 26.
EDIT: though I guess you could also read it as, iOS 26 had come too far to stop it, so they let Dye be the visible face of it so that he'd be the fall guy and the next guy would get the credits for fixing it... I don't know, I guess we don't really have enough info to speculate one way or the other
I'm hopefully optimistic that he can destroy Meta in less time than that!
Funny to see the last screenshot of OS X from 2014 in the article. I would love to use a system with such a high contrast and information density. But I also remember very well how many users were upset with the most recent design changes at that time: The all caps section titles in the sidebar, and the gray icons that were previously colored.
Yes, IMO Tiger was actually peak Mac UI.
As soon as Apple released iPhone, the Mac took a back seat.
For me, earlier versions of macOS/OS X and Windows Vista/7 were the right mix of eye candy and usability. Apple's just showing off with this liquid glass thing. Yeah, it's cool that they attempted it, but it should've remained entirely opt-in. Apple being Apple, there's no opt-in -- once they like it, it's the default.
For a major revamp, you should either do it or not do it. Making it opt-in or even opt-out means every app then has to try to support both different UIs, which is a longterm maintenance cost. Not only for Apple, but the entire ecosystem.
I personally sort of like the liquid glass, but it's also kind of a mess in a lot of edge cases. I feel like it was an interesting idea that didn't really pan out fully and should have been scrapped. It's just too controversial for pure eye-candy.
liquid glass is a total disaster. what the hell is going on in the ux teams at apple? this is like their windows vista era. i hate it so much
I'm almost positive that it's because they want to make as many apps as possible VisionOS-friendly.
I suspect that they were rather shaken at how poorly AVP was received.
I don’t want to wear one of those things on my face. I want a high-quality computer and phone. Apple executives are out to lunch.
Alright grandad. You said the same thing about touchscreens, and look how well that went for blackberru.
the market agrees for the most part. VR goggle interfaces just aren't taking the world by storm. When it came out I thought: I'll wait for the iteration that comes 2 years later (the AVP 3 or whatever) since by then they'll have worked out the kinks and it will be a solid computing platform. It's 2 months shy of 2 years since general availability of the AVP and it's essentially identical to the initial release with just a minor chip upgrade. It's a dead product line
AVP may be dead but VisionOS is not. I'm pretty sure Apple smart glasses are coming.
Counterexample: how did the metaverse go? Is there anyone using it? Facebook even rebranded to Meta on that bet.
Bring him inside, we're just about to start another round of Ultraman Quiz King on the family Pippin.
I keep seeing this take lately and I don’t understand it at all because there is ~zero Liquid Glass in visionOS, including in visionOS 26.
It sounds plausible, but only in the shallowest “yeah, make ‘em look the same” way. Just like when they started shipping the Catalyst-based Mac apps of Messages, Photos, etc so that they’d look the same as the iOS apps (and no doubt so they could reuse some code from there instead of wasting developers on the Mac platform they hate).
It’s not as though anything about Liquid Glass makes a meaningful difference in usability.
I think this goes deeper. Transparency is clearly not a good fit for desktop or mobile apps, but imagine smart glasses where every app completely blocks your view of the things behind it. It just wouldn't work.
To move around safely with smart glasses on your face, apps need to be semi transparent from day one. It's not about superficial stylistic similarities this time. And it's not primarily about design either.
This is absolutely about core usability, just not for macOS or iOS.
It would help if it wasn't 3500 dollars, they did not embrace games, and were expecting developers to buy such devices for so little return in development cost, released at a time most headsets were already on yet again going down on another VR headset cycle.
It was bound to fail since day one.
Are there even enough active Vision Pro users to make the $3500 back selling an app for it, not even considering the cost to develop it, or Apple's 30% app store tax?
How about porting "I Am Rich" to the Vision Pro, and it could just show a glowing red orb floating in front of your face.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_Rich
I would be shocked if Apple was making any product decisions to benefit visionOS at the expense of anything else. It’s so abundantly clear that the vision pro was a failure, it would be a horrible mistake to sacrifice anything to try and save it at this point. I think Apple is done with that experiment.
It actually runs on Metal so the “GL” wasn’t supposed to be in the name.
Liquid (Gl)ass
> Maybe this is because I’m getting older, but that gives me the benefit of having experienced Apple’s older interfaces, with their exceptional quality and functionality.
i really missed snow leopard for about 10 years all the way up to when i moved on from my macbook circa 5 years ago.
Snow Leopard, Mountain Lion were so peak. The first step into minimalism was beautiful, too, I'll admit, but it's culminated in this Liquid Glass garbage, so it was ultimately a misstep.
I feel so old saying this, but back in the days both Apple and third party developers would follow the HIG closely enough that something felt off right away when an app wasn't behaving 100% native. Running something like a Java app was jarring to say the least even if they were supposedly using a "cross platform" UI library.
But then Gruber said that the HIG was dead and the decline gained more and more momentum...
Perhaps the thing I hate most about Tahoe is the embedded rounded rectangle around the menu inside of the larger rounded rectangle window. They're trying to go for this look of a menu floating above the rest of the window it belongs to, but it just looks sloppy to me in dark mode.
Personally I couldn’t get past the horrible gray squircle jails for icons that don’t adhere to their boring new standard. They didn’t even update the pixelmator icon for quite a while, which they themselves acquired. Shows you how much effort went in to this.
Looks sloppy in any mode. The amount of wasted space has gone from “well a little bit of rounding/padding is alright to achieve a unified unique look” to “holy shit this is just Fischer price laugh and learn garbage”.
1/2 pixel strips everywhere, around tons of elements. Huge rounded corners. Slow showy animations.
This isn’t a UI for adults, this is a UI for a fake computer sequence in a cheap Netflix movie.
> That was little more than a decade ago, in 2014. Not that I want to turn the clock back, but it would be really helpful if I could read clearly what’s on my display once again.
I want to turn the clock back. It’s not a reflexive opposition to anything new. I thought OS X clearly got better from 10.0 to 10.4. But in the last vie versions it’s been a regression.
I booted a G4 Mac the other day, running 10.4.something. I was thrown back in time to a period where OS X was clearly their flagship software stack. Everything was coherent and cohesive - and shockingly - fast. I'd daily 10.4 again if it could operate on the modern internet comfortably!
One of the most egregious issues with macOS 26 is the accessibility/usability regression. Apple prided itself on making their operating system accessible. Good ux is inherently accessible.
There are so many parts of the os that flagrantly ignore well-established accessibility standards, some of which Apple themselves advocated for
It’s what you get when you install a hack print designer who knows nothing about UI as the head of software design and leave him there for a decade. Even Jony Ive, who also had no business designing software, didn’t respect Dye.
Thank goodness Meta has done Apple the biggest favor of the century by poaching him.
I hope I'm wrong but I don't see quality control improving with Dye's leave.
The man had a bad taste for design but bug prevalence is endemic and changing head of design won't fix that.
What's obvious to me is that the PRIMARY motivation for Liquid-Glass-ifying MacOS was not to improve MacOS, but simply to make it look consistent with the new version of iOS/iPadOS.
So for Apple to start with a level of disrespect for the existing product where the question of whether each change is actually an improvement is effectively off-topic, it's no wonder they made a dog's dinner of Tahoe.
its very odd that apparently everyone working in Apple software dev either refuses to dogfood this stuff or just uses iPads for everything.
So many of the rough edges disappear when "Reduce Transparency" is enabled I've theorized that setting must be pretty popular around Apple's offices.
My browser has a half-inch white bar at the bottom constantly, presumably because of this setting.
Cannot reproduce on 26.2 with either Safari or Chrome with the setting on. That would infuriate me.
When first scrolling, the bottom page controls disappear. But they leave their container blocking the page content.
Ironically that would be a new kind of dogfooding.
It would not matter if they dogfooded it, the decision makers higher up in the chain are getting paid more to make a visible change and/or increase revenue, not to make a better user experience.
I think this goes both ways.
Famously, Jobs' demands pushed engineers to think and work harder to achieve what they think was impossible, which resulted in many of the most iconic designs of personal electronic devices in history.
On the other hand, we have butterfly keyboard and this.
Jobs did not run on a fixed annual schedule like Tim Cook does.
Mac OS X 10.3, 10.4, 10.5, 10.6, and 10.7 all took over 12 months to develop, sometimes much more, and 10.5 was famously delayed out to 30 months.
Jobs may have pushed engineers, but he was more careful about what he pushed out the door to consumers.
I 100% agree with OPs take, though I don't really mind it as much as he does. I do hope the changes will be rolled back in 27, or at least controls given to us that allow us to roll back changes.
These articles always make me laugh. Everyone complains and then everyone lines up and buys Macs again. macOS has been on the decline for literally years now. If you really want things to change put your money where your mouth is and switch!
Switch to what? Windows is horrible and Linux is just as bad (but in different ways).
I think a lot of people on HN don't realize that some people require software outside of a terminal and a web browser. Can I run Ableton on linux? can I run all the audio plugins that only ship windows/mac versions? is there a decent graphics editor? (gimp is not it.) If all I did was play in the terminal and a web browser, I'd have switched to Linux by now.
Linux has loads of problems, but at least to me, I register these problems in a very different way.
The problems with Windows and MacOS are almost all the result of bad incentives, user hostile arrogant design, or just neglect. As such, the presence of these problems feels malcious, and it always feels like I'm pitted against the very company that I'm paying quite a bit of money to. I'm left with very little hope of things actually improving, because these companies seem to have no incentive to actually make their operating systems more useful or aligned with my needs.
On Linux, the problems are almost always just a result of "hey man, I tried my best to make something good and useful, but I either don't have the resources or the skills to get it all the way there." Sometimes things break or are ugly or whatever, but it's not malicious. There's a strong sense that things are rapidly improving, and that I can play a small part in helping those improvements along (via the patches I submit, or with donations or other forms of support). Because of this, I find the problems on Linux so much less frustrating than analogous problems on MacOS or Windows.
I also think a lot of people might not realize just how rapidly things have been improving on Linux. The situation today is pretty different versus even just 3-5 years ago.
Windows is horrible, yes. But Linux definitely isn't "just as bad" as MacOS, it's already better, and it keeps getting better every year while MacOS keeps getting worse.
Laughs in very stable Xfce for 15 years.
Although its not for everyone, I run a Hackintosh and stick to 10.15 or lower.
Since macOS went to a yearly cadence, I usually upgrade during Christmas break, this allows for a couple of point releases to work out the kinks. I won’t be upgrading this year. I hope macOS 27 fixes this abomination. Otherwise, this 30+ year Mac user will be moving on…
You would do well to avoid 26. I upgraded to be a Guinea Pig for a few colleagues and I regret it. Things like apps and scripts work in the technical sense, but it is worse because the myriad of graphical and interactive issues.
Adding insult to injury, my fans are constantly going now because I have to pay for this disastrous upgrade with tons more resources.
+1 I only updated my MacBook Air and really don’t like it. Will keep all other macs on Sequoia until macOS 27 hopefully fixes most of the issues.
There are claims that Liquid Glass was in development for three years. If that is accurate, the results are even more appalling.
All the non-technical people I know loved it. It's pretty. It's neat. It looks cool. Apple is a consumer products company.
My personal feeling on it is just "meh." My productivity with my laptop hasn't changed. I'm not a huge fan but it's not a deal breaker. I still find it better than Windows 11 for the most part, and Linux has other issues as a daily driver for me.
IMHO Apple needs a "tick" release where they only polish and fix bugs and usability issues with an almost total feature freeze. I've heard they may be doing that.
Looking at popularity of similar design on iOS it would be surprising “non-technical” users like it. People HATE new iOS. Low contrast, not clear layering and focus, things being moved around for unknown reasons.
Also who uses MacOs beaides developers? Majority are creative prosumers in arts/design and they are even more annoyed by messed up designs. What you are left with are lawyers, writers, students? I guess they might like it.
> Also who uses MacOs beaides developers?
Students - all of them.
I said that in the next sentence. Than again this is really true only in US. In rest of the world (including europe) Macs are seen as luxury environment.
Macs are not seens as a luxury environment in Sweden at least.
Of the people I know only old folks, gamers and some techies own PCs. A lot of people will however just use whatever wintel laptop their employer provides them with.
If you notice your OS/Window Manager, then they have failed in what they were designed to do.
I don't own a computer for the OS, I own it to run the Applications that I find useful.
Design got worse since Maverick for professional users.
I’ve deferred my next Mac upgrade to when my current M1 air on Sequoia stops being supported. If they mess it up further I may just move off the platform. Such a shame because the hardware is great.
My MacOS has this insane bug where the cursor sometimes won't change to a pointer/loading/any other state on my second monitor. This is really bad, but even worse for me who writes websites for a living, and need to check that my CSS cursor pointer class actually worked. I can't count how many minutes I've lost refreshing my browser and double-checking my code. Now I just keep my browser on my primary monitor. I've found many other people with this bug on the internet, and it has been happening for YEARS. I honestly can't understand how a premium product aimed at developers can have something like this for YEARS without a fix. I'm moving away from MacOS, and might ditch my iPhone too as I won't have all the nice integration with MacOS anymore.
Fuck you, Apple.
Do you have a trackpad? If you re-enter focus by right clicking (very easy to do with gestures), focus stops working until you leave and re enter by left clicking. Unfortunately not a new issue.
I ran into this, and there was a bizarre fix—I think having Adobe apps open in the background caused it, or something.
I saw some responses like this. I have zero Adobe apps in my Mac.
While the UI designers are rearranging deck chairs, the UX is totally failing to love up to the promise of an ecosystem. Cross system cut n paste is a neat trick, but I just want timers and alarms to actually work as expected.
I shouldn’t be surprised given that the mac save as dialog box has a name field that is still hard coded to 32 characters visible. Whenever I bitch about it I get pushback that filenames shouldn’t be longer than that! Um hello - tell me you have never worked in the real world outside your iphone bubble without telling me.
Tahoe has to be the worst software Apple has released in three decades. It's unbelievable it got through. If Macs and macOS were not a tiny portion of their revenue I would short the stock.
One thing that made Tahoe even worse is that Apple changed what they considered an update or upgrade, so for Tahoe it was suddenly considered as a update and not an upgrade, in all management solutions.
This force-upgraded a lot of Macs at work and we lost days of effective work across many engineers. The machines was practically useless for weeks.
They clearly don't care about power users anymore, and haven't for quite some time. It's so sad.
That's egregiously bad, and malicious.
iOS 26 is also very bad. Many Christmas conversations between boomers baffled by their phones, and as I younger (than boomer) person I am not as baffled but there are a number of things that take more button presses than they did in previous versions for no apparent reason. And it’s real ugly imo.
Viewing all tabs in Safari is the thorn in my side.
MacOS aesthetically peaked with Leopard in '09, but speaking frankly the OS has felt abandoned to me since around 10.2, with so many basic interaction issues with window management and the dock just never getting fixed properly and a long list of half-assed bandaids and abandoned experiments over the years.
There is no true passion in MacOS, and the marketing has come face to face with reality in 2025. It's the neglected step-child of a company distracted by other things.
There's been some impressive engineering done by lower-level folks under the hood of it all, though.
Not upgrading to Tahoe for as long as $DAYJOB allows. ‘Defer update‘ dialog can be conveniently moved away to the second display almost out of sight.
Tahoe is such a criminal worsening of UI quality, it really is worrisome that Apple is proudly releasing it.
If this kind of software trend continues in 2026, it might be the first time I take a serious look at Linux distros on Mac.
Installed Mint on my GAMING Windows system, uninstalled Steam on Windows. All is well.
While at it, nuked my old MacBook Pro and Air with Mint too - not like they are getting updates anyway.
It can be done, it should be done. These commercial operating systems have enshitified to a critical point and are beyond repair.
The thing that’s weird about this though is it isn’t enshitification. I don’t want to defend the worsening of software quality/ux/ui for monetary gain but at least it’s somewhat rational. This is not a change that emphasizes profit driven changes over user driven ones. Maybe I’m missing some profit motive but it just seems like an awful design choice.
Edit: Not to disagree though. I too have a Linux gaming pc and are helping friends do the same.
Maybe not enshittification in the sense that every other UIImageView has an ad in it, but definitely a huge regression from the UI it had before.
Sadly it's only a matter of time until everyone copies it because it's cool and it's what Apple does so they must be right!
I'm holding off upgrading my laptop (2013 MBP running Catalina) until they get their UI stuff together. I'd just gotten used to Sequoia on my desktop but this is unbearable.
Not a single update since 2019 has improved the UI more than it regressed it in my opinion. Too much whitespace, too little contrast, too big controls, and now too little readability.
It's almost like their entire UI department is under threat of being fired unless they invent a radical UI update every other year.
Even Vista was a readability zen compared to this and they aren't listening to feedback at all.
> After three months of strong feedback during beta-testing, I was disappointed when Tahoe was released on 15 September to see how little had been addressed
Now it was a while ago I left the Apple ecosystem as it became clear they didn't actually care about UX anymore, but did "strong feedback during beta-testing" ever actually result in any results? I remember doing something similar back in 2012-2013 sometime, and friends having similar feelings across the years, that it makes me think that Apple never really did any changes based on feedback receiving during the beta testing.
Has anyone here ever written something in via the traditional feedback forms/venues and actually had something changed before the final release? I even asked around my circle of acquaintances and even the ones 110% into the Apple ecosystem seem to never have noticed anything changed based on their feedback.
The answer is KDE and GNOME, at least on the machines that support some form of Linux.
I do enjoy the liquid glass controls in some places. The glass effect is really beautiful. What I hate about it is the way the overall UI constantly gets in the way of my content.
I expect and demand a level of, for want of a better term, UI crispness.
It is equally aggravating to err on either side: Windows 3.1 clunk to the left, Tahoe's operationally useless (indeed, operationally detrimental) visual fireworks to the right.
Apple needs to hit a sweet spot of crisp, but the priority must be fast, logical interaction that lets me operate at the speed of thought. With Tahoe, Apple tried to gild the lily.
M2 MBP here. Definitely skipping Tahoe. Sequoia is already just terrible, not only is the UX clunky and hostile, but Apple seems to have flat out broken its Bluetooth and networking stacks in multiple ways, and in general the system is extremely unstable.
Best hardware around, but at this point I might even take W11 over this locked down mess. At least Asahi support is decent these days.
And I'm tired of paying for things that should be stock, such as proper window and mouse management, or reasonable fan control so that the keyboard doesn't burn my fingers under moderate workloads.
I'll have to upgrade my M1 MBP some time and no way am I putting up with this nonsense - back to Linux laptop for me.
What recommendations do people have for good metal-body linux-friendly "ultra books" (or whatever they're called these days)?
It seems obvious to me that liquid glass is no designer's idea of a good UI. It's a business move to force developers to support the upcoming iGlasses where transparency is actually necessary.
Perhaps Apple is willing to accept that most macOS users will enable "reduce transparency" so long as devs implement support for transparency.
But there is another explanation making the rounds, possibly a conspiracy theory. Some people claim that Apple is doing this to make cross-platform technologies look obsolete and hard to implement.
If there's any truth to this, it's a terrible idea that could easily backfire. People could get used to there not being a consistent platform look and feel. Like on Windows, "native" could lose its meaning.
Whatever Apple promotes as "native" could become just another style among many.
i switched this year from windows to mac because windows is unbearable.... but apple seems to want to get rid of desktop user also
Updated iOS overnight and what the fuck man. Also Settings search is so totally broken I can’t even
I am trying hard to have strong feelings about it, but I just can’t bother. The only thing constant is change.
What I do know for a fact, is that for each error I have on my MacBook, I’ll have ~10 ungoogable errors on any other OS. I rage-sold my last Windows due to losing my Java installation (or just confusing which terminal I installed it in).
Please, crop all thumbnails in the corners, as long as you come pre-installed with just one working terminal.
> I’ll have ~10 ungoogable errors on any other OS.
If you ever attempt to compile software, the shoe instantly hits the other foot. WSL is a godsend, and Apple's "native" terminal environment becomes a confusing liability.
Catering to different audiences, I suppose.