Rounded corners (and the utterly massive drag area next to them) are touchbar 2.0. Features that no one asked for, has questionable value, and that provides marginal benefit even for its intended audience (touchscreen macs, no doubt).
This 100%. I _like_ new features and new UX when it enhances things or makes them easier to work with. That used to be a huge selling point when purchasing a Mac vs PC, genuine thought and consideration had been given to every single interaction and user impact.
And then ... Apple lost its way. Now when I get a new Mac I spend the better part of a day turning off as much of the pointless eye candy as I can so that I can focus on the task I'm working on, not the distracting UX conventions.
I want a computer, not an iPad with a keyboard. That already exists, and there is a reason I don't have one.
> turning off as much of the pointless eye candy as I can so that I can focus on the task I'm working on, not the distracting UX conventions.
What's worse too is that the means of reducing this distraction and visual mess are arguably only a trade for a different, often equally (though sometimes even more) poorly implemented interface. The high contrast and reduced transparency modes are not well designed at all in my opinion, and they seem like vague afterthoughts in this transition.
Mac OS's UX design has been in free fall the last 5-10 years (ever since the "iOS-ify everything" zeitgeist took root). Sincerely hope that they one day revert back, because the current UX is just godawful for any usecase I can imagine.
In hindsight, 90s through 2000s, I think we were coming up in an era of consistent UX refinement and improvement that we took for granted, and that improvement got nailed by mobile transitions (first to phone then to pad and now to AR). MS missed the web, then missed the phone. Apple surpassed them on the desktop but they also made the golden goose (iPhone), pulling focus and consistency away.
I assume it’ll rectify in the vast future, but it’s weird to see regressions in core areas because the new hotness has made it so that these gigantic-corps can’t walk and chew gum at the same time.
I really hope they roll back some of the more obnoxious and pointless aspects of "Liquid Glass" in macOS 27. And the super-rounded window corners are high up on my list. Looks childish, wastes screen space, causes so many little annoyances...
No need for a retro Mac. macOS Sequoia runs great on all but the very newest Macs, and is still getting maintenance updates. And unlike with iPhones, it's perfectly possible to downgrade Macs back to older macOS versions if you want.
"Dye also contributed greatly to the design language of iOS 7 in 2013. In 2015, Dye became the head of Apple's user interface design team. In 2022, he played an integral role in the creation of the Dynamic Island, a feature on iPhones and then in 2025, he led the design of Liquid Glass."
Left for Meta in Dec 2025. Hopefully things normalize a bit? Wishful thinking, I suppose.
Uber flat, you don't know what's a button, what's a text. I dunno if I just adjusted to it or it actually somewhat got better up to iOS/macOS 15. Though with iOS/macOS 26 - it's iOS 7 moment yet again.
NB: not sure about Liquid Glass - though I was recently (and weirdly) recommended to watch iOS 7 trailer on youtube[2]. Comments are overwhelmingly positive. Dunno if it's just people who were kids/teens looking through rose tinted glasses. Though I am not sure anymore, maybe people actually like such designs and it's just HN bubble complaining (IMHO complains here are 110% valid) about nothing. Maybe in 10+ years ordinary guy will praise iOS/macOS 26.
> Comments are overwhelmingly positive. Dunno if it's just people who were kids/teens looking through rose tinted glasses.
idk, its a trailer so lots of beauty shots and also selection bias at work... i think also the previous ui though wasnt gods gift to ux either (thinking about that "oompaloompa skin" [0] calendar app lol) so there is a lot of "refreshness" that does look good (again that new calendar app looked slick). that being said also after release i remember everyone blasting it for super thin fonts and low contrast so im inclined to say rose-colored glasses....
as an aside: personally (and at $work in user tests) very flat design seems to lead to cognitive load increase and difficultly discerning interactive vs non interactive elements so i'd say we have one step forwards two steps backwards for sure...
They finally managed to get feature parity with the Windows start menu :)
For around a decade typing "word"+return into the windows start menu search box usually opened Edge with a search result of "ord". Recently it opens Word most of the time.
Love it when it forgets the Mac apps exist, and launches Maps or Calendar in phone mirroring. I use mirroring a fair bit, but never for anything where I have the Mac app installed.
I hide my Dock completely and used to rely entirely on Spotlight for launching. After it failing to work so often, I found Raycast which has not failed me once. I can't see how they don't decide an indexing method/schedule based on a user's Spotlight settings.
This. Spotlight has gotten awful under Tahoe. I was forced to upgrade at work but in my humble opinion, it's best not to update MacOS unless I really need to. Things get worse, things get better, but overall the experience is diminished.
I haven’t had a single issue with this. I’m guessing many people had this issue immediately after upgrading while Spotlight was still re-indexing and are just running with it since it’s cool to hate Tahoe right now.
No, if this happened to people 2-3 times right after upgrading this wouldn't be something they bring up because the indexing doesn't take months. It's broken. Spotlight used to work almost perfectly since it was introduced and it's been lagging and somewhat defunct since Tahoe.
My search never recovered but I just didn't care to fix it, too many things to fix and my IDE has its own spotlight. I'm normally a vanilla-don't-touch-settings guy.
When I try to launch system settings through spotlight, it launches system info. They have the same prefix, but that's no excuse. Never happened since Tiger or so.
I'm specifically commenting on their UX decisions, and in that respect literally everything. Tahoe, like every major upgrade, is iterative. Very few things that bowl a person over. Somethings are good, some things are "meh". But Liquid Glass is an abomination.
Having used Whatsapp for the majority of my messaging the last decade or so, every time I'm forced to use iMessage for communicating with family I can't help but think it's absolutely a garbage interface. Buggy, slow, difficult to really get anything done effectively. Threaded messages is a nightmare. I really can't wrap my head around how anyone prefers using this over literally anything else.
IMO it’s better than Signal as far as UX goes with enough privacy to be practically for everyday chat. I actively avoid WhatsApp because Facebook. They recently changed their privacy policy to no one’s surprise.
no one actually prefers it, its just the default for ios users and what everyone uses in the US
this means that i either use ios or i have to be "that guy" always asking everyone to send something in a different format or to please move the conversation to some other app - no one wants to be that guy - apple's got us right where they want us
and to be honest, when texting other people, it makes a huge difference, believe it or not, if your chat bubbles on their screen are blue vs green. it shouldn't matter - people who would care about this aren't people you would want to talk to anyway blah blah - that's all fun and great but it does matter, unfortunately
Completely agree. Now if they would just add a meta key to the bottom row of the keyboard I'd be a happy user. Ctrl and Alt are not enough. And seriously, they are comically large on every chromebook I've owned. Give me a meta key in all that wasted space.
Oh true, I'd forgotten that. Of course the issue with it being in a different place is that many people use multiple OSs and muscle memory is a thing. I'd rather have a reprogrammable key where meta should be.
And that sort of begs the question doesn't it? why isn't buying healthcare basically the same as buying groceries? both are large complex industries with lots of moving pieces that rely on vast networks of distributors. what makes healthcare so special that a person could see a 200x increase in the amount they were quoted for a service vs what they paid?
From my own anecdotal experience, my domestic partner had to be hospitalized for a suicide attempt. The ambulance took her to the hospital in my neighborhood which was in my network. By law they had to place her on a 72 hope suicide watch in the intensive care unit. I called my insurance company to relay all this information and was assured that it would all be covered by my insurance since a) the hospital was in network and b) the treatment was legally required.
Fast forward to 6 months later when I finally get the bill. For $40,000 ... because the insurance company only authorized a 2 day stay in the hospital when state law said the hospital couldn't release her until after the third day and despite the fact that this information was provided to the insurance company both by myself as well as the emergency room staff before she was admitted (I was sitting right next to them as they called, so there is no question they were aware of the circumstances).
The insurance industry is an absolute nightmare and a parasite, providing no value to the ecosystem at a dramatically inflated cost. The sooner it is abolished and healthcare is made a fundamental human right and socialized the better off we will all be.
FoldingText was an absolute work of art, best outliner I've ever used. It's one of those pieces of software I keep using, long after it has been discontinued, holding my breath with each OS release to see if this is the one that breaks it. That will literally be the only thing that keeps me from using it. I sincerely hope Bike adopts a lot of the same features!
Thanks I'm glad you liked it. Please note that I sold FoldingText to https://doubledogsoftware.com and it's still being worked on. I don't know full set of plans, but when I sold last summer (right before dedicating fully to Bike) the goal was to get the code into a modern state that would keep working for years to come.
I had many of the same complaints with my remarkable 2... returned it and got an onyx boox note air 2 instead. Still not perfect, but I find the experience much better for my needs.
The writer complains about not being able to find/do the "next page" gesture. That seems hard to believe when it's just a swipe. Did you also experience this?
And his defense of his mind numbing stupidity was that he was at a Bureau of Land Management meeting and so it was a completely coherent thing to say. Clear cut forests, build a really tall jenga tower, and push the moon from there... was that the idea?
The idea was that because in his mind, climate change is only caused by changes in Earth's orbit, the BLM can't do anything to help. Asking if they could change orbits was sarcastic.
