macOS Tahoe

https://www.apple.com/os/macos/

by Wingy • 10 months ago

630 994 10 months ago

WorldPeas• 10 months ago

are they giving any hints that in high vis/accessibility modes this will be fully disabled? I've been largely insulated from changes like this for a while by that, if that were to change however, more drastic measures may be needed

triyambakam• 10 months ago

Disappointed with the background image. I was expecting a similar treatment like with Sequoia and previous versions with a beautiful and inspiring scene in nature. Instead it is vaguely inspired by water?

jonny_eh2• 10 months ago

To help highlight the new "Liquid Glass" UI?

jen20• 10 months ago

Or because Tahoe is a lake?

bombcar6• 10 months ago

Is there alternative backgrounds included? Often there are two or three.

Aloisius• 10 months ago

There are four alternative Tahoe backgrounds/screensavers in Landscape. They're the same shot of the lake at different times of day.

unsnap_biceps2• 10 months ago

The Tahoe beach pictures are pretty nice.

https://mrmacintosh.com/download-the-new-macos-tahoe-wallpap... has them at the bottom of the link

ksec2• 10 months ago

Any actual interesting changes under the hood other than UI changes? I cant remember the last time macOS release that actually brings any useful feature I use.

cosmic_cheese11• 10 months ago

Spotlight got a major upgrade. It’s notably faster and deeply integrates with Shortcuts (letting you specify input variables, for example) among other things.

pants23• 10 months ago

Anyone using Raycast has had these features forever. Nice to see some attention on Spotlight but it's still nowhere close to the functionality you get from Raycast.

daveidol• 10 months ago

I'm curious if it will get me to stop using Alfred

lukasb• 10 months ago

Can it find my files now?

rick_dalton5• 10 months ago

I actually preferred the pre-tahoe spotlight. The information density was higher and while it did not always give me the most relevant result atleast it was consistent and I could scroll down to find it. New spotlight is less dense and jumbles everything together.

chatmasta• 10 months ago

I’ve got Spotlight configured to index nothing but my applications (which is surprisingly difficult to configure and breaks with every major OS upgrade). Disabling all its default indexing has alleviated 95% of unexplainable CPU spikes and autocomplete pollution, so now I can finally use it for what it’s meant to be: the most overengineered fuzzy finder application launcher.

airstrike2• 10 months ago

Does "BetterDiscord" still show up as the first choice after you type "Disc"?

kemayo3• 10 months ago

Even more importantly: there's a clipboard manager built into it now.

tiltowait• 10 months ago

Native container support is pretty exciting.

riffic• 10 months ago

Linux containers, not Darwin containers.

w10-12• 10 months ago

ICYMI: Apple's new native containers start in ~100ms and have better security. I updated to Tahoe just for this.

And it's open-source:

https://github.com/apple/container

It's not really supported before Tahoe, presumably due to required hypervisor support.

mattgreenrocks• 10 months ago

Does this mean I can dump Docker Desktop for good?

ryandrake5• 10 months ago

It's been so long since Apple has released anything in either iOS or macOS that excited me as a user. I don't seem to be their target customer anymore.

The only reason I even have to "upgrade" to a higher version number is how quickly app developers (including Apple themselves) drop support for older OS's. My iPhone which is stuck on iOS 15 runs just as well as the day I bought it, but every other app I download tells me (in essence) "LOL your phone is too old and our developers are too lazy to keep our software running on it. Upgrade your OS or get lost loser".

That's literally the only thing motivating me to upgrade anymore: The treadmill of software compatibility. Apple doesn't have to innovate--they just need to make sure the ecosystem is broken after ~5-10 years or so.

mrweasel• 10 months ago

Isn't that true for pretty much every OS? The feature set we need to be able to do our jobs and computing hobbies have been available for two decades.

Operating systems like Debian is sufficiently boring that I can just upgrade and continue computing. macOS upgrades have become a small gamble, the stuff that I depend on may not continue to work, or at least it will take a good deal of work. There are however no reason to upgrade, so the risk isn't really worth the hassle of upgrading and breaking Java or Python.

skydhash5• 10 months ago

Sometimes it’s Apple and Google that are forcing developers. The system is perfectly capable of running the app (you’re not using any new API) but store policies force you to add the restriction anyway.

cosmic_cheese11• 10 months ago

Support rapidly being dropped happens mostly with smaller devs, because when resources are limited in the Apple platform world you can either adopt newer APIs and language features or you can support old OSes 3+ versions back. Trying to do both lands you in feature check conditional hell and requires a large matrix of test devices to ensure that nothing is being broken.

It’s less of a burden for corporate giants which is why you see much longer support timelines from e.g. Google.

pttrn• 10 months ago

https://xkcd.com/2224/

But yeah, I agree with you.

theshrike794• 10 months ago

When was the next Windows or Linux (distro) release that "excited" you?

It's all slow incremental updates pretty much.

setopt• 10 months ago

I got my first MacBook at Catalina, and still miss it. For a while, I downgraded my Intel Mac to Catalina again; I love the aesthetic compared to the newer releases, and it’s fast and snappy.

But the situation now is: No recent apps work on Catalina since it’s considered obsolete (except open-source apps you compile yourself). But Big Sur and higher are ridiculously slow on Intel hardware, to the point where it’s unusable. I now have an otherwise perfectly good 2019 Intel MacBook that has been gathering dust for the past years.

elpakal• 10 months ago

The on-device foundation models framework is interesting to me. So far the responses have not been good but the potential is appealing.

NaomiLehman• 10 months ago

I was in Beta since Beta 2, and I saw massive improvement in energy efficiency on my MacBook Air M2 and Pro Max M4

dylan604• 10 months ago

The fact that so much of the page is devoted to this liquid glass feature pretty much tells you the answer is no. Plus the fact that the "And so much more" section lists 10 different updates in the same space as their poster with a link to a PDF instead of building out a larger webpage speaks volumes.

Bondi_Blue2• 10 months ago

- Apple Sparse Image Format allows you to create virtualized disk images with a virtualized file format that can be formatted to any kind of file

- Terminal.app now supports 24-bit color and powerline glyphs

- Vehicle Motion Cues to reduce motion-sickness when in a moving vehicle

rcarmo7• 10 months ago

Good catch on the terminal. I missed that, and it might get me off Ghostty (I prefer to have less apps installed in general).

FBISurveillance• 10 months ago

I have 5000+ git repos locally that I grep through regularly and I have to admit my hopes for ASIF being faster were busted. It is faster than sparsebundle, but nowhere near native, unfortunately.

alana314• 10 months ago

TextEdit has a styling toolbar now which I appreciate. The new spotlight has more functionality and seems faster (and less likely to pull up a website instead of the app I'm trying to launch)

ddtaylor• 10 months ago

This seems like a relatively minor update.

jsheard2• 10 months ago

This is the last ever version with Intel support, right? That's a milestone of sorts.

highwaylights4• 10 months ago

Which is a bit sad. There were some choices that didn’t pan out in the last Intel era (butterfly, touchbar), but part of me loved those changes (the keyboard and the touchbar felt super premium, until you tried to work with them for any amount of time).

minimaxir• 10 months ago

I'm not sure what I'm going to do with my 2020 iMac in a year. I really want to be able to repurpose that 5k screen but Apple does not make it easy.

I might just leave it in perma-Windows Boot Camp.

jgbuddy• 10 months ago

I really hope spotlight didn't just get ruined

highwaylights4• 10 months ago

I mean it’s gotten bad already, but I think people’s hope is that they fixed it that if I type in a file name I work with all the time it’ll be the first result. At least that’s what I’m hoping for.

GuinansEyebrows• 10 months ago

that and some kind of weighted memory for search history. i use photoshop almost daily, photos once a month or so, and photo booth once a year, but they appear in reverse order based on alphabetization.

theshrike794• 10 months ago

"ruined"?

It hasn't been able to find anything in years.

It's faster to scroll down in Finder than use the search box to locate anything =)

BruceEel• 10 months ago

I'm not quite sure what to make of Liquid Glass, I developed an allergy of sorts to the term while listening to the keynote. Any 'relevant' new features for power users / cmd line geeks that you know of?

highwaylights4• 10 months ago

Not a direct response to your question but (I guess like you) I often find with these releases that the changes I actually care about aren’t flashy enough to even warrant a mention in the presentations or on the main web page.

There seems to be some expansion of screen time, finally, but I haven’t been able to figure out what it is yet based on the only *os 26 update I’ve done so far is the public beta on a single Apple TV.

downrightmike• 10 months ago

I think we'll have to wait for benchmarks to see if this is a leopard or a snow leopard

ftigis• 10 months ago

https://github.com/apple/container is supported from macOS 26

kemayo3• 10 months ago

The changes to Spotlight are fairly power-user focused. There's a lot of enhancements to make it quicker to set up shortcuts within it, and they've added a clipboard manager feature to it.

This summary looks acceptable: https://www.computerworld.com/article/4041433/spotlight-is-m...

al_borland14• 10 months ago

Apple Notes now supports Markdown import and export.

Spotlight now supports actions, so you can do things directly from Spotlight (kind of like Quicksilver back in the day, or Raycast more currently). Your custom made Shortcuts can also be triggered. It’s also context aware, so you can do things for the app/document you’re in.

Spotlight also integrates clipboard history.

The Terminal gets Powerline glyphs, new themes, and new fonts.

The full list of changes is here:

https://www.apple.com/os/pdf/All_New_Features_macOS_Tahoe_Se...

deafpolygon3• 10 months ago

What new fonts?

robin_reala2• 10 months ago

A reminder, if you dislike the liquid glass look, that going into System settings / Accessibility / Display and toggling “Increase contrast” gets you a properly nice design with actual borders and solid backgrounds. 100% recommended.

everdrive• 10 months ago

Back on Sequoia, but this is great advice, thank you!

cyberpunk4• 10 months ago

Weirdly, I had that enabled pre-Tahoe and have had to turn it off as it was even worse with it on for me.

Everyone’s different I guess :)

asadotzler3• 10 months ago

We're all disabled now. Thanks, Apple.

robin_reala2• 10 months ago

If you use the societal modal of disability as your lens on liquid glass you can see that it’s not you with a disability, it’s Apple disabling your ability to use the system with their design choices.

buraktamturk• 10 months ago

This settings turns reduce transparency and it turns makes the menu bar gray, which looks horrible on a display on notch.

Is there any way to make it black? Like it appears on full screen applications? (apart from enabling the transparency together with a black wallpaper)

Currently even on dark mode it doesn't have a black background while reduce transparency is toggled on.

nsagent• 10 months ago

I initially tried that and thought it improved some things, but it increased contrast across the OS, such that some webpages, including stock HN became too blinding. I instead switched to "Reduce Transparency," but that has its own issues.

Overall not pleased. I really did not want to care about the UI changes at all. But having experienced it now, I'm so annoyed I upgraded to iOS 26 and I'm having trouble focusing on the screen. I want WebGPU support, but I'm very hesitant to upgrade to macOS 26 (which is required for WebGPU in Safari).

pants23• 10 months ago

How has Apple still not addressed many basic UI issues, such as menu bar icons disappearing behind the notch with no way to see them?

iambateman• 10 months ago

I love my Mac and yes, this is easily the most absurd problem. It happens to me all the time and I can’t believe they haven’t fixed it.

Apple…if you’re listening…please fix this.

self_awareness3• 10 months ago

Apparently it's not important.

hombre_fatal• 10 months ago

And the apps that provide solutions for it, like Bartender, need screen reading permissions which I just can't bring myself to grant.

kstrauser4• 10 months ago

If you really want to use such a thing, switch to Ice. It’s an open source thing similar to Bartender, before BT was bought by a shifty outfit. It still requires those permissions, but at least you can look at the code. I have a paid Bartender license. I liked it enough to pay for it, but don’t like the road it went down and stopped using it.

Tahoe lets you selectively remove app icons from the menu bar. I’m going to try that for a while and see if I can tolerate not using Ice anymore.

nozzlegear3• 10 months ago

I think they kinda did? I'm not sure where to look for a link to this info, but I remember watching a YouTube video showing the ability to group and hide menu bar icons in Tahoe so they take up less space (and therefore encroach less toward the notch).

Maybe I'm misremembering the video though.

(edit) The linked page seems to hint at it:

Personalized controls and menu bar. Your display feels even larger with the transparent menu bar. And you have more ways to customize the controls and layout in the menu bar and Control Center, even those from third parties

wrs• 10 months ago

In case you don't know, at least there's a setting to help:

    defaults -currentHost write -globalDomain NSStatusItemSpacing -int 8

nntwozz2• 10 months ago

I have collected a long list of these types of settings over the years, for example disable font smoothing:

  defaults -currentHost write -g AppleFontSmoothing -int 0

It used to be a checkbox, now there's only this command.

Eventually that will be gone too, and none will be the wiser except the old who remember the good old days.

I'm starting to think these settings are left there by rogue engineers who fight against the oppression while staying under the radar. It's like a secret cabal that works to maintain sanity while the plebs are left to suffer at the mercy of their own ignorance.

adregan• 10 months ago

They need to bring back the control strip!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_Strip

Solves this exact issue.

DonHopkins• 10 months ago

It was great, but they had to quietly retire it when somebody pointed out it looked like a dick.

EarthLaunch• 10 months ago

I take it as a sign of typical increasing corporate dysfunction. Obvious problems, some even easy and uncontroversial, don't get fixed. Why?

The people who can fix them are not in control. The org must be very top-down. But Steve Jobs had a top down style, so what's the difference? Its: Using and caring about the product.

It's top down direction with the people at the top not using/caring about the product. Presumably they're concerned with other things like efficiency, stocks, clout.

jedberg• 10 months ago

Also if you had a majorly obvious bug, you could email steve@apple.com, which he would forward to a VP, who would be fired if it wasn't fixed ASAP. Knew a guy who lost his job that way, so it's not just a myth. Steve really was like that.

The wrath of Steve was a real thing that people feared.

cosmic_cheese11• 10 months ago

Menu extras were never intended to be treated like Windows tray items. For the earlier portion of OS X’s life, there wasn’t even a public API to create them and required a hack and a private API, and the current API is intended for ephemeral menu extras that disappear when their host app isn’t running. In short, the menubar isn’t designed for users to collect menu extras like Pokémon.

D13Fd• 10 months ago

But that’s exactly how it is used, and them disappearing behind the notch feels like a bug.

vintagedave2• 10 months ago

Sure, but for twenty years that’s not how they’ve been used.

dsego15• 10 months ago

Notice how on the menu bar, when you click File and then the dropdown appears, you can move the mouse arrow to the right (without clicking) over Edit and now the Edit menu shows up. But the same doesn't work on the status menu icons, if I click on the volume icon and move the mouse, nothing happens, the volume menu stays open, even if hover over the battery indicator. So many little things like this that never worked consistently.

lloeki• 10 months ago

BetterDisplay has an option to "disable" the notch i.e push the menubar down, essentially making the screen the same as before there were a notch. Lose a little bit of real estate, but regain sanity.

There are some dedicated apps for that like Say No To Notch.

xnx• 10 months ago

I had thought Tahoe was the first version to drop Intel CPU support, but it looks like it will be the last version to still support Intel Macs.

mikestew• 10 months ago

Two of the latest Intel MacBooks, and the last Intel iMac, so technically, yes, there’s still some Intel support in there. My 2019 iMac is one version too old.

w10-12• 10 months ago

does not support 2018 Mac mini

tom_2• 10 months ago

Apple have always seemed to drop support for hardware after 5-7 years, and then it's just a question of the last supported OS becoming itself unsupported too. My early 2015 Macbook Pro (new in April 2015) got as far as macOS Monterey (released October 2021) - and they stopped updating that in October 2024.

(I'm not digging through Wikipedia to double check but my previous 2 Macbooks Pro felt like they lasted about as long.)

It'll be interesting to see if they change this with the (presumably cleaner slate) Apple Silicon-based hardware.

karlgkk• 10 months ago

I'm on the beta right now and a "<<" icon has appeared.

It's embarrassing that it took them that long but they have in fact fixed it.

joshstrange2• 10 months ago

I'm normally on about 1 year delay on upgrading macOS for a multitude of reasons. I might not wait the full year but something else will have to force me to upgrade within the first few months.

I'd heard from people who were running the betas that it's not ready and they are surprised Tahoe wasn't delayed.

No way I'm upgrading any time soon to Apple's least cared for OS with a change this big (and this untested).

stouset• 10 months ago

I'll be honest, I hear this every single time. But I've never delayed upgrading, and I've never regretted it. That's not to say every upgrade has been a strict improvement, but going back to my first Mac at 10.4 (Tiger) I've never wished I had stayed on an older version. We'll see how I feel after going to Tahoe, maybe this will be the one that breaks the trend.

Windows, on the other hand…

joshstrange2• 10 months ago

You always have to be moving forward and I'll never say "I'll just stay on Sequoia for forever" but delaying a bit does make life easier. I know I'll eventually upgrade but being there day 1 or even month 1 is not something I'm interested in. There are never new features that outweigh sending my development workflows into disarray or dealing with broken apps.

There aren't always huge issues or huge time sinks but I'm happy to let other people be on the bleeding edge and I'll upgrade once the Github issues, blog posts, etc have been created/fixed so that when I upgrade I can easily find solutions to any remaining issues I might run into. Especially with Tahoe, I've heard that some apps are just broken, period, unless the developer makes (sometimes significant) changes to get the same functionality working again (that was working fine in Sequoia).

baq• 10 months ago

You obviously haven't had firewall issues with EDR software a couple years ago or so.

I won't ever touch a .0 macos release again.

Aurornis• 10 months ago

But I've never delayed upgrading, and I've never regretted it.

I was the same way for until one of the upgrades, I forget which, broke resume from suspend about 10-20% of the time for my combination of laptop and monitor. Every morning I’d get a sense of dread when I tried to open the laptop to see if today was a day where I’d get to pick up where I left off or if I was in for a crash and reboot as soon as I tried to use the laptop.

I thought for sure it would be fixed with one of the point updates, but it went on for the better part of a year.

kilroy123• 10 months ago

I don't wait a full _year_, but I definitly give it many months before upgrading. This one I might wait longer...

swader999• 10 months ago

Same here, I'm not dogfooding this for Apple, I pay them enough already.

asdhtjkujh• 10 months ago

I should know better, but I'm still surprised they're shipping this version of Liquid Glass. Performance is stable but there are so many UI bugs and inconsistencies that haven't been fixed from early betas, including low-hanging fruit that a second year design student would notice. I don't mind change or interface elements moving around but keynote-level UI overhauls should be fully implemented at launch, otherwise people are stuck using a broken OS for a year.

At this point I'm doubtful that these will be addressed in the 26.X updates, so the wait begins for 27.0...

thewebguyd4• 10 months ago

Yeah I shouldn't be surprised this was allowed to launch today, but yet I am.

I ran the whole beta on all my devices. Every new beta I'd ask myself "Surely they fixed 'x' by now, right?" and we advanced, beta after beta, with the same bugs and performance regressions all the way up to launch.

The icons still need to redraw in the settings app and app library. It's overall sluggish. The drop shadows are huge in the finder and other apps top bar. If you turn on always show scrollbars they get cut off at a weird angle due to the excessive corner radius.

My iPhone 16 PM runs hot all the time, even on release now, vs. iOS 18.

I don't mind the transparency or glass effects. I actually like it in some areas. But man does it need some serious polish and bug fixing, and a lot of time and effort spent on consistency.

This should never have went live in this state. I consider .0 just another beta, really. Actual release will probably be .2 or .3

jihadjihad• 10 months ago

I consider .0 just another beta, really. Actual release will probably be .2 or .3

This is good advice for Apple software in general. Always let it burn in for a couple patch releases. Being a guinea pig for Apple is a losing bet.

pndy5• 10 months ago

Heh. I can imagine Cook having his own O'Reilly's "We'll do it live!" moment for Liquid Glass initial backlash.

Fixing this mess will surely take a while but then they use that as PR in future keynotes, saying how hard they were working on it.

al_borland14• 10 months ago

This is always how it goes. The big change happens, and it’s refined over time.

For what it’s worth, there where threads here on HN where people complained at length about the bugs and inconsistencies in the previous version of the Apple operating systems.

AlexandrB15• 10 months ago

Yes, and many of those bugs and inconsistencies never went away. We're now at the point of Apple piling new bugs on top of old bugs.

pacifika• 10 months ago

First macOS version I’m holding off on. Just too unusable.

rramon• 10 months ago

They went way too far with the corner radii and pill shapes imo, looks like a Fisher Price toy. Some inner buttons retained the old radii and don't match the outer window radii anymore.

sitzkrieg• 10 months ago

totally agree, this is kind of an embarrassing look for supposed workstations

t0lo2• 10 months ago

The humiliation " " "

cosmic_cheese11• 10 months ago

It’s a trend that’s visible in other designs too, like Material 3 Expressive.

I’m not a fan of Windows but I believe that probably the best modern UI design system for desktops right now is probably the flavor of Fluent used in Windows 11. It still retains somewhat desktop-like information density, doesn’t go overboard on radii, and has a touch of depth. I’d like to see more design languages exploring in its general direction.

bayindirh6• 10 months ago

I still find KDE superior in productivity, information density and "useful effects" category.

Apple still has the best "get out of the way, be invisible" UI.

Both are valid ways to approach to a problem, but I like KDE's batteries included, infinitely customizable way better.

sys_647383• 10 months ago

It's truly hideous to look at. I really can't believe they went for these massively rounded corners. They're too stubborn to allow you to select an option for right angled corners again. They just tinker as there's no other real UI enhancements.

_2d308• 10 months ago

They're too stubborn to allow you to select an option for right angled corners again.

"right angled corners again"

I have a feeling you aren't and haven't been a Mac user for a long time. When was the last time Macs had right angled corners!? 30+ years ago?

al_borland14• 10 months ago

Whenever I see people try to make their Linux environment look modern and fancy, they generally include extremely rounded corners.

simianparrot• 10 months ago

It reminds me of the Wii U interface[1]. Except less playful. It really is a disaster.

[1] https://wiki.cemu.info/images/1/1a/Wii_U_Menu.png

pndy5• 10 months ago

Not sure if people remember but Fisher Price was actually used to describe Windows XP's Luna theme.

nicbou• 10 months ago

Okay that seems pretty nice. A lot of small improvements to day-to-day use. This is what I want from a desktop OS update.

12_throw_away• 10 months ago

I swear I don't usually complain about UI styling updates, because it's usually not a big deal - but this looks really, really bad [1]. It's less functional with bizarre transparency choices destroying legibility, and big rounded corners taking up more dead space. And stylistically, the layouts just look unbalanced and amateurish (It reminds me of what happens when I attempt to do CSS layouts). Most Linux desktops unironically look better than this.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/09/macos-26-tahoe-the-a...

cyberpunk4• 10 months ago

I absolutely hate it. I guess we’ll probably get used to it but until then… gah ugliest MacOS ever?

self_awareness3• 10 months ago

You'll get used to it.

rick_dalton5• 10 months ago

Hoping the next update is the iOS 8 to the iOS 7 redesign and then it'll be fine.

throw-the-towel• 10 months ago

Don't think of it as the ugliest MacOS ever, think of it as the most beautiful MacOS of the rest of your life.

keyle• 10 months ago

What's not to love about macOS Vista?

eloisant3• 10 months ago

Ugliest macOS... So far!

smileson2• 10 months ago

You're just old, kids love this shit

mrandish• 10 months ago

It's ironic that Apple makes screen size incredibly expensive for every millimeter - and then designs UI which proceeds to waste that pricey real-estate as well as user time by burying options (or worse, simply removing many advanced user options "because they don't fit").

eviks• 10 months ago

Same irony applies to storage

Sequoia install used 21.6GB and a Tahoe install used 27.4GB, a nearly 6GB increase

Hamuko• 10 months ago

I do dislike how toy-like the user interface looks, but I really hate how illegible notifications are on iPadOS. I had to turn on the reduce transparency setting so I could read the notification text against my lock screen wallpaper.

asadotzler3• 10 months ago

You've been disabled by Apple. There's no other way to characterize your (and my) need for an accessibility setting to make the OS usable.

christophilus6• 10 months ago

Wow. I know I’m not the first to say it, but it really does give me Windows Vista vibes. No bueno.

dijit3• 10 months ago

vista was pretty nice looking tbh (or, it was to me, especially the black ultimate edition with the frosted glass).

It just chugged like madness, the UAC dialogs were slow to fade in (and numerous) and the widgets and moving wallpaper was about 10y too early.

I was distinctly not happy with the control panel changes, but hindsight tells me that I should have been.

kcplate5• 10 months ago

I see people making this comparison but as someone who used vista back in the day and someone who has been using all flavors of 26 for over a month now, it really bears no resemblance in UI or UX to vista at all.

I kind of think the people making this comparison are doing it off screenshots and not actual experience with the two operating systems.

heavyset_go9• 10 months ago

Windows Aero is back

sylens2• 10 months ago

Aero was peak HCI compared to this

HeckFeck• 10 months ago

Aero didn't have absurd padding. It made good use of texture, colour and shade. It actually looked quite appealing. We've been steadily downhill since.

BatteryMountain4• 10 months ago

Agreed. Very few UI's has surpassed Windows 7's Aero

michaelanckaert• 10 months ago

oooh, nice burn ^^

Crontab2• 10 months ago

So far the only thing bothering me so far is the way the tabs look (in Finder and Safari). And I did turn on the menu bar background.

dsego15• 10 months ago

Have the tabs in Finder always been slow to appear? Right now there is a noticeable delay from when I press cmd+tab to when tab animates itself into existence, reminds me of lag in windows 11.

veeti• 10 months ago

Imagine if Steve saw this...

https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/tahoe...

crinkly2• 10 months ago

Think something is borked there. Mine doesn't do that.

dsego15• 10 months ago

I had the same issue on first start, the icons had to load while I was scrolling.

jimmydoe• 10 months ago

my iphone 16 and m1 mac are much slower on this.

sbuk6• 10 months ago

Steve saw this and approved it...

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f2/Apple_US...

larholm2• 10 months ago

Major throwback to icon rendering on the Amiga Workbench.

whatever1• 10 months ago

These are machines with SSDs with multiple GB/s of throughput and memory throughput of over 200GB/s. How it is even possible to load this slowly these icons ?

dreamcompiler4• 10 months ago

Seems like it takes the worst feature of React and moves it to the desktop.

data-ottawa4• 10 months ago

I'll give it a try, I installed the iOS and iPadOS betas and I actually like some of the changes.

But I do not understand how the color-tinted UI/icons ever got shipped. They just look... bad...

cyberpunk4• 10 months ago

That’s just a psychological experiment to see how many people go through the standard: enable puke disable cycle.

I too fell for it.

jeffybefffy5192• 10 months ago

Didnt vista try and do a similar thing when it came out, lots of "widgets" and transparency crap that felt cool then tacky after 2 minutes...

AlexandrB15• 10 months ago

As a rule almost any UI redesign of just about any product in the last decade will increase padding and reduce information density. I don't know if it's because the average designer/user is getting older or large screens are more common so it seems like there's lots of room available thus it can be wasted.

Sadly, this often applies to Linux as well, so there's no escape. I guess Xfce is still around at least.

codr710• 10 months ago

People tend to behave as they're treated, so treat them like toddlers and ruling them becomes a lot easier.

brailsafe• 10 months ago

Can anyone speak to whether the performance of the Settings app has been improved? In Seq and every version since they redid it in presumably SwiftUI, if you select one of the navigation panes and then hold either the up or down arrow keys to quickly navigate between them, something like a memory leak occurs due to (seemingly) launching all of the nested panes as separate apps (this is what appears to be the case in activity monitor) and the Settings app will start lagging until you fully quit and reopen.

smcleod2• 10 months ago

No, it's worse. Basically it's the same experience but with an uglier UI

lynndotpy2• 10 months ago

The search textbox overlaps with text which scrolls underneath.

The search box did not work for a few minutes after updating, but I assume that was a temporary indexing bug.

crinkly2• 10 months ago

Running it already. Seems pretty solid. No compatibility issues. UI changes are fairly ok. Glad they got rid of launcher and merged it into spotlight.

tkiolp42• 10 months ago

Never used spotlight. I have it disabled permanently. I don’t like the indexing.

rcarmo7• 10 months ago

If you ever used Quicksilver, the new Spotlight feels a lot like it.

IshKebab6• 10 months ago

Have they got any further on their roadmap to only allowing apps from the Mac store in this release?

cassianoleal3• 10 months ago

What evidence do you have that they are trying to do that?

IshKebab6• 10 months ago

All of the major commercial OS vendors are trying to do that. Apple started it with iOS. Google have gradually been tightening the net. Microsoft are furthest away but they have the longest legacy of freedom so they the furthest to go.

Obviously they aren't going to publicly say that's their intent, but you don't have to be a genius to read between the lines.

As for why... money and power are pretty big motivators.

timeon2• 10 months ago

I remember when there was option to run any application. With Sequoia there are only 2 options: App Store; App store + Known developers. Third option was removed. You can still run other apps but you need to manually approve them with ~3 popups where first option is "move to Bin". You need to do this after every OS or App update. I wonder when this option will be removed as well.

musictubes• 10 months ago

This is tiresome. You cannot lock down development machines. If you pay attention you'll see that OSes made for development work will be the only ones not locked down. Android was a holdout but Google is now tightening the screws. MacOS, Linux, BSD, and Windows are the only OSes that can't be locked down. Microsoft tried but they abandoned that.

drnick13• 10 months ago

Good point, but it is entirely possible for Apple/Microsoft to lock down "consumer" versions of their operating systems, effectively turning the common man's computer into a glorified phone and a new cash cow. Add to that a requirement for an online account, age verification, and other malware.

IshKebab6• 10 months ago

You cannot lock down development machines.

Of course you can. What makes you think you couldn't?

drnick13• 10 months ago

They will certainly be enough idiots who think that it is for the user's own good, so that apps are more "secure."

losvedir• 10 months ago

Is that call screening example a new feature or something I can do now that I didn't know about? That's something I've missed since switching from a Pixel to an iPhone last year.

kemayo3• 10 months ago

That's new in the 26 OSes.

smcleod2• 10 months ago

I've been running it since the RC and am currently in the process of uninstalling it. The new UI is so incredibly ugly I honestly cannot understand how they thought it was acceptable to even released as a beta let alone an RC and now release.

There's SO much padding and wasted screen real estate, disjointed looking floating inner panels, window corners that are so rounded you see gaps in full screen apps, inconsistencies everywhere and - well, I could go on.

Basically the vibe I get from it is that they think their users are dumb - they won't care about things like this and that they want everything to look like a preschoolers tablet.

msk-lywenn• 10 months ago

Did you notice any impact on battery life?

kcplate5• 10 months ago

Mine has been fine, literally no perceptible differences on my MBA M4 since I loaded the public beta a few weeks ago.

reddalo6• 10 months ago

I'm afraid for the battery life of my MacBook Pro 2019 (Intel).

I'll think I'll never update and just keep using Sequoia until I switch to Linux.

rick_dalton5• 10 months ago

I was on RC too, for a few days, and also uninstalled. I'm glad I did, the fresh Sequoia install feels much nicher. Even with reduce transparency on, the design was too ugly and the drab gray icon jails for non-squircle icons were downright offensive. First macOS version I'm gonna skip and I've been a day one updater since mountain lion, very sad.

cmckn• 10 months ago

lol are you an ATP listener?

I don’t think the icon situation is enough to keep me off the release, but agree that the design is just kind of a mess and not my taste.

00deadbeef2• 10 months ago

Everything I've seen of it looks a disaster. I'll wait for macOS 27.

lysace2• 10 months ago

Waiting an extra year to jump on new macOS releases has been the norm for sane people for quite some time now.

It sucks if you buy a new mac which isn't supported by older macOS releases though, so maybe don't do that for a year or so. I guess you sometimes just have to put your new Apple device in storage for a year until there's functional software.

vunderba• 10 months ago

I have a Mac M1 that's been on MacOS 14 Sonoma for a couple years at this point - I've not seen anything even remotely interesting in later releases that could incentivize me to roll the dice and upgrade.

rvrb3• 10 months ago

It was the straw that broke the camel’s back for me. After trying out the preview for a month, the writing was on the wall, and I began the process of switching to a Thinkpad with Linux. I am now fully off macOS for the first time in 20 years of being an Apple die hard. I could use a lot of emotionally loaded words to describe how I feel about this release, but the long and short of it is that I am no longer the target audience for Apple.

caycep5• 10 months ago

Just run linux with utm!

stock_toaster• 10 months ago

Similar story here. Loong time Apple fan, but as they say.. "trust arrives walking, but leaves on a horse". I'm real mad!

I installed tahoe in a virtualbuddy VM to see how it was before running on my main system... and.... I will be definitely be keeping Sequoia for a while (at least a year, probably).

If the situation does not improve in the meantime, I will probably switch to a framework laptop running cosmic desktop or something like that.

leptons4• 10 months ago

Similar story here, but going from Windows to Linux. It seems like Linux is gaining some market share with the OS disasters from both Apple and Microsoft.

Lio3• 10 months ago

Yep I feel the same. To know if you're the target user or not I guess you go to Apple's marketing material.

Do you see anyone that looks like you, doing anything that looks like what you do? I don't and I can't remember the last time I did.

It seems to be a lifestyle brand now for people I have little in common with.

At least with Linux there's the possibility that you can make it your own even if it's not that way right now.

ksec2• 10 months ago

I have no where to go. I want to move away from iPhone, but Pixel is not available in my place, and Google doesn't seems to care about distribution. Nor does it do enough with its SoC development. There aren't anything come close on Laptop. And Windows or Linux aren't exactly in good shape either. I have no where to run. And I have wished for a third option for a very very long time.

yesnomaybe2• 10 months ago

In the same boat. After like 15 years I had enough. I've started de-Apple'ing my life in 2024. Still run M1 Pro Mac from work, which is great. 2 days ago I've finally ordered all the parts for a Linux PC, high spec. Not for gaming or so, just for compute. I'm soooo looking forward to the freedom that this will bring. The stuff that I already run on Linux, the distros are all great. I love Gnome for how it looks and KDE for how seamless it works. The new PC will let me tinker and try and hop and swap like I could never dream of for so many years.

diffrinse• 10 months ago

So the Gnome 3 gang were ahead of their time?

betaby• 10 months ago

Indeed, gives old Gnome vibe.

etempleton4• 10 months ago

I have been running the beta from the beginning and they have improved quite a bit, but I am actually shocked they didn't delay Mac OS 26, because the design is so rough around the edges. Some of the larger aesthetic changes, such as the menu bar and the dock look good, but there is so much more that looks objectively awful.

1. the way window UI elements float in bubbles on the top over a white background is horrible. It looks amateurish.

2. Icons look low detail and blurry. At first I thought they were using low resolution placeholder icons, but no, the layered diffused glass effect just kind of translates to blurriness on many app icons.

3. The side bar, such as on Finder, just kind of floats there. That is fine and looks kind of neat on the Maps app as you can see some of the maps behind it, but on the Finder it is just a white bubble over top of a white background, which... is a choice.

4. The app launcher is gone, and replaced by Spotlight, which is worse.

I could go on. The point is it is bad and Apple should be embarrassed. I say that as someone who likes Apple products alot.

dsego15• 10 months ago

Looking at the Slack icon right now, and it just looks blurry and low resolution, same for Calendar and some others, it's awful.

FabHK2• 10 months ago

4. The app launcher is gone, and replaced by Spotlight, which is worse.

Do you mean the Launchpad? (I've never used it; but always use Spotlight to launch apps.)

thepryz2• 10 months ago

The original, updated version of the Finder icon alone should have been enough of a warning that the UX designers at Apple have lost their minds and any aesthetic sense, let alone an ability to design interfaces that are functional, efficient, and well thought-out.

https://512pixels.net/2025/06/wwdc25-macos-tahoe-breaks-deca...

TomaszZielinski5• 10 months ago

Usually I just go with the flow, because what else I could do :)?

But somehow the missing App Laucher made me bit sad (well, to the extent software can make one sad :)) - even though I can always switch to Finder to browse apps, App Launcher has some nice visual quality to it that makes it more pleasant to use for me..

dangus3• 10 months ago

I agree with a lot of what you said but the app launcher was dumb. It was just the iPhone’s Home Screen ported to Mac.

Spotlight is way faster than that when you’re at a keyboard. I barely even use the dock, just command space and type in the first few letters of the program I want. Clicking is for people with too much time on their hands.

oneeyedpigeon8• 10 months ago

My big issue with the icons-in-menus is that they don't align properly. Each 'row' in a menu is an optional icon with some text to the right of it. But when an icon isn't displayed, the text shifts left into its position, meaning that menu text no longer aligns nicely on the left.

gizajob2• 10 months ago

I cannot believe the current state of affairs where me doing a Spotlight search for "drivers license" when I'm looking for a photograph of my drivers license to upload, that instead of finding it I'm now presented with a list of links to listen to, watch, or find out about the song Drivers License by Olivia Rodrigo. Why? Why!? Who is this helping? I'm fine with telling my computer that I am 42 years old and male and curmudgeonly and have been using a Mac for a good 25 years now and know how to find songs by Olivia Rodrigo online if I really need them.

And okay spotlight can help fill in the blanks on dictionary searches and wikipedia info I GET IT... but my time and my mind are precious to me – if you're forcing me to use Spotlight or making it the way of searching my computer, please PLEASE do not fill my eyes and head with this time-wasting garbage.

And I have a MacBook Pro M3 – it has a camera notch hidden in the black menu bar, the text of which now disappears if my mouse isn't up there, thus giving the appearance that my screen shrinks rather than giving me extra viewing real estate. The text is not some kind of distraction when it's above a tab bar filled with a multitude of jumbled icons and an address bar with text on it. But OH! sweeping left now reveals the camera notch in the middle of a WHITE menu bar.

Just... Apple... for f*cks sake. I'm paying you. Please employ some people with aesthetic taste and judgement rather than the current cohort of yes-people and logistics wizards. Time for Tim Cook to go. The problem is at the top.

sjs382• 10 months ago

The side bar, such as on Finder, just kind of floats there. That is fine and looks kind of neat on the Maps app as you can see some of the maps behind it, but on the Finder it is just a white bubble over top of a white background, which... is a choice.

Agreed. All of the transparency and liquid glass effects look terrible when they're displayed over a solid color, especially white. That said, they look good over top of something colorful and really AMAZING when displayed over something that's moving (video, whatever).

I imagine that the effect REALLY takes off on a display where EVERYTHING is moving, like on top of the real world on a VisionOS display. It's just out of place on MacOS when uses as a dev workstation.

runjake2• 10 months ago

Can you post screenshots of what you mean?

I see grossly rounded corners in some apps, but I don't see the other stuff like gaps in window corners for full screen apps. I may have some config bit flipped that has disabled those.

Yeah, the new corner radius is ugly but by and large, it's not much different than before, from what I see so far.

goalieca• 10 months ago

Try running console with tmux. The window menu just floats there instead of being snugly fit against the bottom from end to end.

mickle00• 10 months ago

https://imgur.com/a/jLPM9oV

this is what I'm seeing with Safari, WhatsApp and Chrome all maximized but with various radius on each corner.

lynndotpy2• 10 months ago

I try not to indulge in negativity and scorn, but I agree with these sentiments. This is resoundly a regression. Text overlapping on text, searchboxes that are broken and now just function as text boxes, increased latency throughout the operating system.

It's so bad that it's kind of fascinating. Unfortunately, even "Reduce Transparency" doesn't fix the LG update.

wilg• 10 months ago

I've been running the RC and I have had no issues. Some of the design choices (sidebars particularly) are strange, but it's generally fine.

I recommend not overcomplicating your life and just staying on the latest macOS.

kcplate5• 10 months ago

It took a day of getting used to it, but I have had no issues either. Some of the commentary on this thread seems overly critical to me, but you tend to see that on any Apple thread on HN. There’s stuff I like, some stuff I don’t, but in the end I’ll adapt.

I think sime people just hate change. I am convinced that some folks complaining here will be complaining when MacOS 28 comes out and changes some OS 26 feature they have grown to like.

bradgessler2• 10 months ago

It would be one thing if they excessively rounded and padded the windows, but they shipped with a bunch of different padding and border radii. So far I’ve counted 4 different borders, and I’m sure there’s more.

rcarmo7• 10 months ago

Yeah, 4 different corner radius sizes is where I’m at too. Won’t be surprised if there are more.

llm_nerd3• 10 months ago

Basically the vibe I get from it is that they think their users are dumb

Your point would have been much more convincing had you refrained from this sort of pejorative assigning of motives. It wasn't necessary.

I've been running the betas to the final release and there are a number of basic affordances and system improvements that are definitely worthwhile. I will not be going back.

Having said that, while I know they had good intentions with this whole design, and probably really thought they were pursing a winner, what a massive, massive miss. This is such an aesthetic disaster that I'm just in awe. I feel like they had a huge push to do some seemingly substantial change, particularly on the mobile side, given the stumbles in the AI space, so they changed a lot of things maybe without quite enough thought.

Ugly as hell. More dead space. On the mobile side they released an update to iOS just today from the RC a few days ago that removes some of the particularly stupid animations (the app tray did some dumb thing where it expanded and shrank, and that and a few similar things are gone).

rcarmo7• 10 months ago

I count four different corner radius sizes currently on my screen, which is maddening.

Apple has a thing against people with OCD. Or taste.

The thing is horribly wasteful of screen real estate, and as someone who’s been writing a Mac blog for over two decades, I am so happy I started using Fedora two years ago—GNOME has its flaws, but it looks nicer than Tahoe.

lysace2• 10 months ago

That's not possible. I saw a video yesterday where Greg Joswiak (SVP worldwide marketing at Apple) assured me that Apple has the best design team in the world.

rvrb3• 10 months ago

Fedora Silverblue is the closest feeling to the macOS experience I fell in love with that I’ve had on Linux in, well, ever. Very happy with it on my desktop and laptop. It’s not perfect but it is less imperfect than modern macOS has become.

Finding a laptop that works well is annoying, however.

nine_k• 10 months ago

I always thought that Gnome developers are imitating macOS. Not copying blindly, but following the ideas and intents.

Finally I hear from real users that the Gnome team has not just reached parity, but has actually exceeded their source of inspiration. (Partly due to the degradation of the latter, but still.)

hajile• 10 months ago

Doesn't MS still have screens rendered like Windows 3.1 or Win95 in some corners of the OS?

iqandjoke• 10 months ago

It is only Apple can do. It needs courage and innovation.

We, as user should not be beta tester.

truncate4• 10 months ago

GNOME does look quite nice and I use it on my desktop everyday. Unfortunately, once I go beyond programming/general productivity (e.g. photography, music recording) there is nothing that comes to MacOS+MacBook combo. Windows usually have ports of these apps, so I'm hoping maybe one day Linux can run those (we are already there with games).

vbezhenar• 10 months ago

Apple has a thing against people with OCD.

Their window close button with slightly off cross in the red circle was a nightmare to my OCD.

whywhywhywhy3• 10 months ago

Do you mean corner radiuses on the edge of windows? Because corner radiuses within windows should be different from the edge ones because the same corner radius stacked within itself creates ugly corners.

Someone• 10 months ago

I count four different corner radius sizes currently on my screen, which is maddening.

I don’t see the mere fact of having multiple radiuses alone is a good criticism of the UI. If seeing multiple corner radiuses infuriates you, how do you survive in the real world? (https://www.folklore.org/Round_Rects_Are_Everywhere.html)

Or do you think it would look or work better with more consistency in corner radiuses? I would think radiuses look best when (somewhat) scaled to the dimensions of their rectangle (and that’s where, IMO, they may not be doing things the best way. For thin, long rectangles, I think the radius they chose is a tad too large, leaving barely any vertical straight lines)

coldtea5• 10 months ago

The Finder looks like shit. The sidebar is like badly retrofited from another program, perhaps from some crappy Gnome theme.

The Control Center (or however they call the drop down window with quick controls for volume, wifi, brigthness, etc) has floating isolated icons like crap.

Bring back Scott Forstall. Give him a big bonus. Let him fix this shit.

Otherwise, the code changes and actual features are probably fine.

laborcontract• 10 months ago

I’m glad to see another member of Club Forstall here. My biggest wish for Apple is to bring back Forstall. Letting him go was their biggest mistake.

sgarland• 10 months ago

I made the mistake of updating my phone, and immediately regretted it. We tried Liquid Glass already, it was called mid-aughts Windows. It sucked then, and it sucks now.

ibfreeekout• 10 months ago

I'm glad I'm not the only one getting Vista vibes with this look.

trinix9122• 10 months ago

Quite an insult to Windows Vista and Windows 7, where Microsoft actually took care to make things consistent and text readable. Here they didn't even put shadows behind all labels!

827a• 10 months ago

Yeah similar situation here. I've been running it since basically the day after WWDC, and I've just had this sinking feeling that its so bad, they wouldn't be able to fix it before release. Or, they don't even view it as something that needs fixing.

I'll begrudgingly get a couple more years out of this personal M2 Air, but my engineering team is prepping to do upgrades on some older M1 Pros we've had since launch, and after seeing Tahoe, the CTO and I formed a plan to give devs the option of getting either an M4 Pro or a Framework. We haven't launched yet, but I think a solid number of our engineers are going to opt for the Framework, hopefully as high as half.

blinkingled• 10 months ago

Ugh I upgraded excitedly and can't stand the UI - there is no upside to any of it. Also for some reason things are also beachballing and VSCode keeps crashing - new M4 MBP. All the system log errors are present exactly as they were and my USB-C dock with Ethernet port still doesn't work.

divan• 10 months ago

Training/preparing users for upcoming AR glasses interfaces?

amarshall2• 10 months ago

SO much padding

No idea on macOS, but turn on Reduce Transparency on iOS and there’s tons of padding most of the time, but then sometimes zero padding. And I mean zero. The edges of buttons and text are at the edge of the underlying background. It’s…embarrassing.

rafram• 10 months ago

I noticed that in iOS Safari. Reduce Transparency brings back the bottom toolbar containing the search/URL field and buttons, but there’s zero padding between the buttons and the edge. Makes it fairly obvious that nobody tested it.

uptown• 10 months ago

How hard is it to downgrade?

jdkee• 10 months ago

Steve Jobs would never have allowed this to be released.

eloisant3• 10 months ago

People need to stop idolizing Steve Jobs like Apple only produced consistent UI when he was there.

Apple have never respected its own guidelines, for example in the early days of MacOSX there were "brushed metal" apps that were supposed to be (according to the guidelines) for small non-resizable windows. Still, there most popular app, iTunes, broke that by being brushed metal despite being a big, resizable window.

itopaloglu836• 10 months ago

It’s ugly as hell and plain stupid.

I couldn’t watch the WWDC and when I saw the screenshots I thought it was a joke. Giant buttons with weird padding and extreme transparency effects.

This is going to sound harsh but it looks like when “working” from home, Apple engineers outsourced their work to amateurs online.

I simply cannot believe that Apple is shipping an OS this out of touch with elegance.

Steve Jobs said in his inauguration speech that he slept on the floor to take typography classes and later obsessed over having great typefaces on Macs. Steve would’ve burn the place down instead of shipping a crap like this.

leptons4• 10 months ago

Or maybe Steve would tell us all that we're "holding it wrong".

codr710• 10 months ago

I've worked as a developer at Apple, I'm not surprised.

throwawaylaptop2• 10 months ago

I float around the VC world in SF. Several of the women that work for VCs in decent positions don't know how to maximize a window on the MacBooks.

throwawaylaptop2• 10 months ago

You can downvote all you want but I've seen it and confirmed it by asking why they don't double click the menu bar. They didn't know it was a thing.

arthurcolle• 10 months ago

It's very unstable, indexing doesn't work anymore

PlanksVariable• 10 months ago

That was my experience with liquid glass on mobile. I’d heard it was bad, thought it couldn’t possible be that bad then tried it and was flabbergasted. Really unfortunate.

quotemstr• 10 months ago

There's SO much padding and wasted screen real estate, disjointed looking floating inner panels, window corners that are so rounded you see gaps in full screen apps, inconsistencies everywhere and - well, I could go on.

Remember in the beforetimes when we decoupled themes from OS updates? Wouldn't it be nice if once again we discovered this lost technology that let different users have different UIs?

ranger_danger• 10 months ago

https://stopthemingmy.app/

dangus3• 10 months ago

My progression:

1. Apple photos redesign from last year sucks and I’m already frustrated with iCloud abstraction and lack of cross platform friendliness

2. Switch to an alternate cloud photos provider

3. Find out about Liquid Glass, looks like shit, impulse sell my MacBook Pro in favor of a Framework

4. Surprise surprise, it’s actually the year of the Linux desktop. My gaming situation is way better on Linux and it does everything my Mac did. The only compromise is my need to carry a big extra battery around.

crossroadsguy5• 10 months ago

they think their users are dumb

Aren’t they/we? :-)

*majority of

Well, hasn’t this been the single biggest reason for their sustained stellar returns year after year where often (or maybe most of the time) the biggest change their devices (like iPhones) used to see was the version number change e.g. iPhone 13 -> 14.

For the rest of their users — they make a noise (which is not even feeble in comparison), bicker around, lament the fact that the other alternative is Google (Windows and the Wild Linux West), and they stay. Rinse, repeat.

kkylin3• 10 months ago

There are also under-the-hood changes that I found truly upsetting: among other things, all the Emacs versions I've tried (stock GNU Emacs or Mac Port, downloaded binary blobs and compiled on my machine) are either immediately unusable or become so slow after a day that they are almost unusable. Tracing things on Instruments suggests a culprit (the culprit?) is NSAutofillHeuristicController. This is not a new feature, but I'm guessing with them pushing Apple Intelligence it was rewritten. AFAIK no obvious way to disable this "feature". (Turning off Apple Intelligence doesn't seem to do it.)

I'm contemplating rolling back to Sequoia.

josteink4• 10 months ago

among other things, all the Emacs versions I've tried (stock GNU Emacs or Mac Port, downloaded binary blobs and compiled on my machine) are either immediately unusable or become so slow after a day that they are almost unusable.

So basically my #1 work tool will no longer work.

That’s a hard deal-breaker right there.

As a longer-term means of escape, what’s the best way to run a «full» Linux desktop on a otherwise managed Mac?

nitros• 10 months ago

The following should fix that:

  defaults write org.gnu.Emacs NSAutoFillHeuristicControllerEnabled "NO"

rick_dalton5• 10 months ago

The developer of ghostty had this exact same issue with his terminal. Ironically apple's iCloud password autofill extension on firefox also practically halves my firefox performance. Seems like they haven't figured out autofill yet. https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/commit/b58a761aba75fa...

userbinator• 10 months ago

There's SO much padding and wasted screen real estate

That seems to be a growing trend ever since "UX designers" started taking over (early 2010s?), to the point that I wonder if they're trying to see how far they can take it.

zarzavat2• 10 months ago

If you live in Figma then you never have to use what you design.

b3ing• 10 months ago

Who cares? if the senior designer is hot and young with 1 yr of experience that’s all that matters

eboynyc32• 10 months ago

Eh. I like it. Seems more modern. Who cares as long as it’s not windows.

sto11z• 10 months ago

I tried 3 betas of ios and then sold my iPhone and bought a Pixel, that's how disappointed I was from what I saw.

pfortuny• 10 months ago

Either Tim Cook does not use a Mac computer or he does not notice/care. I am not saying he should helicopter-parent all the design process but the "finished" product?

So: that is Apple's CEO for you.

tobyhinloopen• 10 months ago

He gets older so everything must get bigger

rxyz2• 10 months ago

Wouldnt be surprised if he spends more time on an iPad than Mac these days

whywhywhywhy3• 10 months ago

Why would he when he's a numbers and supply chain guy not a product and vision guy.

monkeyelite• 10 months ago

It’s Craig, not Tim.

BatteryMountain4• 10 months ago

Honestly, Windows 7's Aero effects are better looking. Best thing after that is KDE (with light customizations). Everything else has regressed.

esskay• 10 months ago

The whole "Liquid Glass" UI is by far their worst ever take on a design language. It feels like stepping backwards to web 2.0 but with even bigger accessibility issues.

It doesn't look or feel modern, its ugly, inconsistent and just all around crap. God knows what they were thinking with this.

Also who on earth green lit these low resolution looking blurry icons everywhere?!

karel-3d• 10 months ago

I don't mind it on iOS I need to say, I was expecting to hate it and it's... okay. I like that I can make all icons just black.

It's really atrocious on macOS though. The new Finder looks so stupid. Preview now has artificially rounded corners in PDFs! What are we even doing here.

andrepd3• 10 months ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmWOtf4Ziso

Look how far we've fallen.

figassis• 10 months ago

This is quite a departure from the company the pioneered UX obsession and attention to the smallest detail. What's happening here?

Lutzb• 10 months ago

Steve Jobs is no longer there to reign in the designers.

Vegenoid• 10 months ago

I think we are seeing one of the downsides of vertical integration: the team running part of the stack can shit the bed without consequences because they're carried by the whole.

Apple's software design and quality has been going downhill for a while - but their hardware is fantastic and keeps getting better. I've been putting up with the software because the hardware is worth it, and I guess that's going to be put to the test.

For all the griping, it matters little in the face of money. People won't be replaced until sales suffer.

shelled2• 10 months ago

I just installed it (had to; if I am using the Mac, I'd rather be on the latest OS for security and compatibility reasons), and it is just disgusting. It is more disgusting than the iOS 26 monstrosity.

I mean, how do you even provide constructive feedback to such a pathetic design choice? Not that this company ever deals in feedback (unless it's a strong feedback directly to its wallet).

I do believe they are just exhibiting sheer incompetence and intellectual bankruptcy as a corporation. Is it beginning of an end? I don't know. Do giga corps even die anymore?

josteink4• 10 months ago

The new UI is so incredibly ugly I honestly cannot understand how they thought it was acceptable to even released as a beta let alone an RC and now release.

I just tried it and maybe I've just been primed by the internet, but by god, I did not like it.

The side-bar design is terrible and lots of application (Maps, Music, etc) always look like they have a window overlapping the current application. So even with a single window open, my desktop already looks messy.

For people like me, with a slight OCD about certain details (don't talk to me about notification-bubbles), this is absolutely infuriating.

I'll disable auto-updates on all iDevices and Macs, and just keep on security-updates for previous gen OS as long as I can.

Eww.

coldpie• 10 months ago

The new UI is so incredibly ugly I honestly cannot understand how they thought it was acceptable to even released as a beta let alone an RC and now release.

I feel like if you replaced all of the paper in a company's printers with transparency sheets you'd be fired because that's obviously a stupid idea that would never work. But then I guess that's why I'm not a software UI designer.

jesterson• 10 months ago

I am lucky to read this after before deciding to update. Unforunately did update to the new ios and it's incredibly ugly. Wish there would have been an easy way to roll back on iphone

earthnail• 10 months ago

Yeah, agree the UI is not great, but after using it for a week I feel it's actually... fine. Probably because I use a lot of third-party apps who don't use the new design.

dsego15• 10 months ago

Awful cheap UX, cartoonish style with huge padding, lack of structure and hierarchy. The spacing is inconsistent, everything is rounded. The app launcher stutters, the icons load one by one, it flickers each time I do the 4 finger gesture. Why does the volume bubble have tick marks but the one in the menu doesn't? The trash icon looks like the windows recycle bin or gnome theme from 20 years ago, not sure why it's flattened like that.

dsego15• 10 months ago

Oh boy, I opened the settings app to change the wallpaper, the scrollbar gets cut off by the right bottom rounded corner. The wallpapers can be scrolled horizontally and they show up under the side rail (blurred), looks like a glitch, and I still can't resize this window to see more of the wallpapers. They may have fixed the custom color bug though.

mhuffman• 10 months ago

It really does look like ass on the laptop. Maybe it works on mobile, idk, but terrible on laptop. Also not a good sign since apple is not known for rolling back releases.

itopaloglu836• 10 months ago

I think this might be the one.

Realistically speaking, they’re not going to rollback anything. They even kept and even double downed on that’s stupid photos app redesign on iOS.

At least the review sites are making some noise this time instead of parroting Apple’s announcements. They all sold us that awful photos app as the great new thing.

itopaloglu836• 10 months ago

You explained the design inconsistencies the best. Though I’m worried that instead of fixing the underlying problems, they’re just going to make a bullet list of what people mention here and change those only. Then we’re going to have an OS where no two screens have the same paddings etc.

What the hell happened to the Apple design guides. Did all the engineers who read them retire.

thehamkercat2• 10 months ago

they’re just going to make a bullet list of what people mention here

bold of you to assume they're reading this (and will fix this)

richstokes• 10 months ago

It’s like a crap Linux theme pretending to be windows vista or something. I don’t get it.

cyberax• 10 months ago

They didn't even fix the horizontal resizing in the Settings app.

Sigh.

dsego15• 10 months ago

I still need to use the Scroll Reverser because the scroll direction (aka natural scrolling) can only be turned on or off globally, not per pointing device. I love natural scrolling on the trackpad, but it doesn't make sense on the mouse scroll wheel.

vehemenz• 10 months ago

I use a Shortcut for this because it cuts down on the unnecessary apps. Hammerspoon.app would work too though.

  tell application "System Settings"
   activate
  end tell
  delay 0.1

  tell application "System Events"
   tell process "System Settings"
    click menu item "Trackpad" of menu "View" of menu bar 1
    delay 0.25
    click radio button 2 of tab group 1 of group 1 of group 2 of splitter group 1 of group 1 of window 1
    click checkbox "Natural scrolling" of group 1 of scroll area 1 of group 1 of group 2 of splitter group 1 of group 1 of window 1
    tell application "System Settings" to quit
   end tell
  end tell

markdog12• 10 months ago

Whoa, you can now search clipboard history. Go to Spotlight Search, Command+4. You'll get a list of entries, each with a copy button, and is searchable. Even shows the app it was copied in.

merrvk• 10 months ago

Wow, didn't realise there was more than one tab

al_borland14• 10 months ago

When you open it for the first time there is a display that tells you all the shortcuts.

Beyond that, if you move your mouse while Spotlight is on-screen, it shows the tabs and tells you the shortcuts as you hover over them.

bayindirh6• 10 months ago

At last Apple implemented a decent clipboard history. KDE has this thing for a decade now, I guess...

KDE also can encode entries as QR codes, so you can make URLs transferable to your phone or whatnot.

-- Sent from my MacBook Air.

heavyset_go9• 10 months ago

If you use KDE Connect, your clipboard history immediately goes to your phone's clipboard :)

ubercow132• 10 months ago

More like, almost 3 decades.

pabs33• 10 months ago

KDE doesn't have infinite clipboard history yet, like the GPaste extension for GNOME Shell has.

dsego15• 10 months ago

Does that mean that add-on clipboard managers like Maccy are obsolete now?

latexr2• 10 months ago

No. Spotlight’s clipboard history doesn’t even keep items for longer than eight hours.

al_borland14• 10 months ago

In most cases Apple’s integrations do the 20% that 80% of users want. Third party apps give the additional 80% of features that the 20% may want.

How obsolete those apps are depends on you as a user.

burnt-resistor3• 10 months ago

There were already a zillion and one apps (Maccy, ClipMenu, Jumpcut, Flycut, Alfred, ...) that provided this.

It'll be one of the first things I turn off whenever I get around to installing it ~6+ months from now.

afandian2• 10 months ago

Including passwords from password managers?

TomaszZielinski5• 10 months ago

Pretty handy, right :)?

And seriously, managers like 1Password clear the clipboard after some time. I would guess that there’s some clipboard API that allows managers to exclude copied passwords from being permanently added to the history.

Still, there are pieces of data that one might not want to store in such unobvious place as clipboard history so it’s good to know about it.

hu3• 10 months ago

Windows has this with Win+V for those wondering.

Bondi_Blue2• 10 months ago

For a more granular features list: https://www.apple.com/os/pdf/All_New_Features_macOS_Tahoe_Se...

burnt-resistor3• 10 months ago

I, for one, am going to wait a much longer while before installing this.

The internets suggests the following disables glass effects:

    defaults write com.apple.universalaccess reduceTransparency 1

fair_enough2• 10 months ago

Shwiggity shwagg, the GA release hath come!

Can't wait to write a beamline control application for crystallography on this sumbitch!

fair_enough2• 10 months ago

Whoever downvoted this despite the fact that it was neither factually inaccurate nor disrespectful to another person, congrats on being an incel.

P.S. My hot Japanese fiancee thinks you're pathetic too. Her exact words were: チー牛

asadotzler3• 10 months ago

Apple no longer cares about disabled people.

Transparent UI, with controls sitting on top of arbitrary and changing content can NEVER be legible/discernible. Apple knows this, but fashion was more important than function and they decided, "who cares about disabled people, anyway."

Microsoft learned this lesson back in the Vista era but Apple's charging ahead with this terrible set of changes that will literally disable millions of users, people who will need to visit the accessibility settings to reduce the transparency.

It's a sad day when a company that has often lead in accessibility ships the least accessible OS in modern history. I guess it was a nice run having a Big Tech company to point to as a good example of doing various accessibility things well. Damn.

commandersaki• 10 months ago

I've been submitting endless feedback about how Liquid Arse breaks dark mode during the beta. I keep seeing dark text on dark backgrounds all over the place in both Tahoe and iOS 26, for example: https://imgur.com/a/R3DTcSd

I've pretty much given up with submitting feedback though.

brandon2722• 10 months ago

CarPlay has dark text on dark backgrounds in the latest version of iOS. And I’m talking about stock apps like Messages, not some obscure text buried somewhere deep in the operating system.

Absolutely brutal.

layer8• 10 months ago

It might be more accurate to say that they are giving non-disabled people an experience akin to that of disabled people. ;)

burnt-resistor3• 10 months ago

This is what happens when designers are treated as royalty and are told that their new "clothes" are "awesome" all the time.

It's also a symptom of consumption addiction where there is demand/motivation for drastic, superficial changes that don't really offer any value except to those who are consumed by the need for constant change for change's sake.

Apple used to care more about disabled people because of how the Accessibility APIs worked and were required for most apps.

AlexandrB15• 10 months ago

It's also a lack of real competition. If a car company ships an ugly car, you can easily avoid buying it and go with a competitor. With tech products you're often locked into, at best, a duopoly. Worse, the products have become increasingly integrated such that it's impossible to pick and choose components from multiple vendors.

If you want Apple's hardware you're stuck on their software. If you want access to some professional software, you're stuck on Windows. Etc, etc. This all means that bad ideas or user-hostile behavior are rarely punished in the market. The biggest competitor to Windows is older versions of Windows. The biggest competitor to macOS is older versions of macOS.

nomel3• 10 months ago

Apple no longer cares about disabled people.

Did you enable the relevant accessibility options that are there for this purpose?

_2d308• 10 months ago

Why do that? If they did any investigation into the accessibility options whatsoever then they wouldn't be able to treat us to Kanye style analysis.

o11c• 10 months ago

Much the same on Linux with Wayland.

I haven't touched Windows for over a decade, does it still have a decent story for disabilities? They've certainly regressed in other areas ...

basisword5• 10 months ago

You can turn off the transparency in the accessibility settings. Sure products could be 100% accessible out of the box but unless you had some sort of limit on that it would likely make the experience worse for the majority of users. I can’t imagine Helvetica Neue Extra Light was particularly accessible as the system font a decade ago - but there were accessibility settings.

otterley• 10 months ago

literally disable millions of users, people who will need to visit the accessibility settings to reduce the transparency.

I'm confused. You're condemning them for not accommodating the disabled, yet admitting they provide an accommodation in the same sentence.

data-ottawa4• 10 months ago

Changing toolbars to text-only is pretty bad. The button hotboxes are tiny

Generally I think the toolbar settings needed more testing, they can be wonky (e.g. in Automator for text+icon it causes the traffic lights to misalign, in Safari toggling the sidebar on and off is janky).

comprev2• 10 months ago

Apple's accessibility features enabled my mother to enjoy what little independence she had due to a rare debilitating illness [Multiple System Atrophy].

She could read eBooks & emails, listen to audio books, view photos and call her family by herself (iPhone use extends to many uncles/aunties/cousins).

Every few months I would help her recalibrate her iPad as it was a vital life line.

pndy5• 10 months ago

It's unreadable even for normal people least to say for disabled folks.

Tahoe is Apple's very own "Windows 8".

steeleyespan• 10 months ago

Looks like a niche Gnome theme that’s trying to clone a MacOS look.

I don’t think it’s that bad, nothing to get upset over - but yeah sort of like candy iMac aesthetic.

GrumpyGoblin• 10 months ago

Widget appearance is tied to *icon appearance. Grumble grumble. I want clear for my widgets but default for my dock and other icons. Too bad so sad me I guess.

edit: replaced dock with icon, because it affects much more than just dock

Ecco• 10 months ago

I feel like we’ve gone full circle. For decades Apple hardware sucked and was badly overpriced, but you paid the price to enjoy running Mac OS X. Now Apple makes amazing hardware (especially laptops) but the drawback is that you have to run macOS on them.

I really wish Asahi Linux had more support, I would have bought a couple M4 Minis.

OGEnthusiast4• 10 months ago

Without knowing your specific workloads, I'd imagine an M2 Pro Mac mini (which is supported by Asahi) is still plenty fast.

dcchambers2• 10 months ago

If you don't need the battery life of a MacBook and you're happy getting a desktop device, there's plenty of machines running new AMD chips that are just as fast as an M series mac, if not faster. And they'll run Linux with no compromises. Check out Bee-Link (https://www.bee-link.com/) for some mac-inspired hardware.

Alifatisk2• 10 months ago

That's not a full circle, a full circle would be if Apple later returned to badly overpriced yet enjoyable macOS again

comprev2• 10 months ago

That's going the opposite direction not full circle. Hardware bad, OS good is now hardware good, OS bad.

rekoil• 10 months ago

If Asahi Linux had support for Thunderbolt and DP alt-mode I would be running it today, but those are dealbreakers for me unfortunately.

I'm donating to them and hoping they eventually get those implemented.

andrewmcwatters• 10 months ago

Actually, save power efficiency, Apple is still behind the curve and has been for decades. Nvidia has reigned uninterrupted for longer than I can remember and regularly beats Apple in raw performance on available hardware, and AMD has regularly topped benchmarks for years.

In fact, AMD and Nvidia have been the de facto high-performance combination for so long, that I can't remember when it was any different. But prior to that, it was Intel and Nvidia. Apple was never a real high quality hardware competitor. The only thing they ever had to offer were products produced by a production process almost no one replicates.

Razer started used CNC unibodies for their laptops 14 years ago, but they're maybe the only company I can think of that does so other than Apple.

And MSI has shipped high performance laptops for so long that even Apple used their laptops for comparison during the M-series chip releases in the MacBook Pro.

zenmac3• 10 months ago

I really wish Asahi Linux had more support, I would have bought a couple M4 Minis.

Me too. Just wonder instead of reverse engineer to SOC to get Linux running? Why can we just use the Darwin Kernel (which is suppose to be Open Sourced right? ) and build something like FreeBSD desktop for the M3/M4? Would that be more long term viable than reverse engineering SOC? Is there any project in that direction?

rcleveng2• 10 months ago

I always considered the butterfly keyboard[1] the point at which Apple's design system jumped the shark as it focused on it's own aesthetics vs. building quality and reliable products.

Funny enough, it's the only time period since 1999 that I was apple free for a while. My MBP broke. I've previously had a butterfly keyboard on my work mac, and it got replaced on a regular bases. While unfortunate for a work computer, this was not acceptable as my personal one with no spares)

Thankfully Apple returned to making great products that work, and I bought the next MBP.

Seeing that Apple's returning to it's "design roots"[2], I really hope they do not loose sight of building great products that work well for their customers.

[1] https://apple.fandom.com/wiki/Butterfly_keyboard

[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2025-09-14/apple-...

stevage6• 10 months ago

I always considered the butterfly keyboard[1] the point at which Apple's design system jumped the shark as it focused on it's own aesthetics vs. building quality and reliable products.

This statement describes pretty much every mouse Apple ever made, from the circular ones to the horrendous magic mouse with charging port underneath.

nailer2• 10 months ago

This is true, but Apple mice have always been consistently bad. A laptop where getting a single grain of dirt under the keyboard meant you couldn't type was a very new thing in 2015.

rogerrogerr• 10 months ago

Ooh, the mouse myth! Love it when this one gets dragged out. Turns out it’s not really a problem - the battery life is measured in months, you’ll get several hours from plugging it in for thirty seconds, and days if you plug it in for a few minutes while getting coffee.

People love to hate it, but it’s never been a real problem. The ergonomics are bad. The charging isn’t.

nailer2• 10 months ago

Funny enough, it's the only time period since 1999 that I was apple free for a while.

Same here. After the butterfly keyboard era, I spent about 5 years with Windows 10/11 and powershell, then WSL. There's still a lot of annoyance in the Windows space (NTFS is slow due to all the filesystem filters), but Linux package managers are much better than homebrew and WSL does make Windows a pretty reasonable developer system. I'm back on the MacOS now but I wouldn't hate a nice Windows machine.

rcleveng2• 10 months ago

Yes, WSL2 is quite good. WSL1 was even a step up, but WSL2 gives me an environment that I can use quite well and be productive with.

The NTFS speed thing is kinda amazing. I use cursor on MacOS. My friend has a windows laptop which is likely 2-3x more powerful than my Macbook Air. I can install a new cursor in 2-3s tops, on the Windows machine it takes minutes. Wow. It's all file copying speed.

spartanatreyu• 10 months ago

Seeing that Apple's returning to it's "design roots"

There's a very important and relevant design quote from Steve Jobs that keeps popping up in my head:

https://mastodon.world/@lensco/115184866965741757

nixpulvis• 10 months ago

When Steve died, so did the Apple we all knew and loved.

I worked at Apple in the years shortly after his death, and was trying to convince myself this wasn't true, but it is.

Tim should find someone smart and willing to take a real look at the company and ceed power to the next generation.

tkiolp42• 10 months ago

The new UI is horrible. That’s it. No need to deep analysis.

OGEnthusiast4• 10 months ago

The reason Liquid Glass on macOS specifically is getting so much blowback is that it isn't just updating the translucency effect with the new glass refraction effect - they've also increased the border radius of most windows, increased paddings in toolbars, sidebars, etc. and overall made the UI much less information-dense, which is wild for a desktop OS. If they had just changed the translucency effect, I think this would be much better received.

Personally, I'm sticking with macOS Sequoia for now, and if macOS 27 goes even more in the less-information-density direction, I'll probably fully move off of macOS, which is a shame as a 20-year Apple user.

bitmasher9• 10 months ago

I feel like every macOS update has been worse than the last, since like 2015-2018 or so. Still, their only real competition is Windows 11, which isn’t well received either.

OGEnthusiast4• 10 months ago

Possibly, although I definitely don't recall the macOS Big Sur re-design being as disruptive UI-wise as Tahoe is.

spudlyo• 10 months ago

I'm still on Sonoma on my Mac, but I've recently been splitting my time between macOS and Linux and I'm starting to be pretty happy with Linux.

The main problem I had with living in a Gnome desktop environment, is with the keyboard. I'm not willing to abandon my use of Emacs control+meta sequences for cursor and editing movements everywhere in the GUI. On macOS, this works because the command (super/Win on Linux/Windows) key is used for common shortcuts and the control key is free for editing shortcuts.

I spent a day or so hacking around with kanata[0], which is a kernel level keyboard remapping tool, that lets you define keyboard mapping layers in a similar way you might with QMK firmware. When I press the 'super/win/cmd' it activates a layer which maps certain sequences to their control equivalents, so I can create tabs, close windows, copy and paste (and many more) like my macOS muscle memory wants to do. Other super key sequences (like Super-L for lock desktop or Super-Tab for window cycling) are unchanged. Furthermore, when I hit the control or meta/alt/option key, it activates a layer where Emacs editing keys are emulated using the Gnome equivalents. For example, C-a and C-e are mapped to home/end, etc.

After doing this, and tweaking my Gnome setup for another day or so, I am just as comfortable on my Linux machine as I am on my Mac.

[0] https://github.com/jtroo/kanata

dsego15• 10 months ago

Oh, apple would have to do much worse for windows 11 to look good.

stevage6• 10 months ago

Yeah me too. I think I liked Mavericks or Yosemite or something and have pretty much hated every upgrade since.

sbuk6• 10 months ago

I feel like every macOS update has been worse than the last, since like 2015-2018 or so.

Tha's been going on for as long as the Mac has been a thing.

neor• 10 months ago

Depends on what you're using it for. Windows 11 is the only main stream competition, but for work I've used Pop OS for a few years and was amazed by how stable and usable it is for work.

Back to Mac OS now due to a change of workplace, and while I'm absolutely blown away by the M3 performance and battery life the OS is something I'm still struggling with a bit.

josteink4• 10 months ago

Still, their only real competition is Windows 11, which isn’t well received either.

It was at a certain point revealed that the people creating the new Windows-designs were in fact not using Windows anymore, they were using Macs.

In short they didn’t have to eat their own dogfood.

I’m starting to suspect the same thing have happened to Apple-designers…

fridder• 10 months ago

If there is an alternative to the m-series that lets me keep the battery life I'd jump ship. The m-series chips are just so good though

christophilus6• 10 months ago

I’m using one of the Lenovo Aura editions. It doesn’t match the MacBook, but I also don’t worry about battery at all any more and perf is just fine for my needs. I don’t miss Apple at all. Now, if only there was a Linux phone…

llm_nerd3• 10 months ago

You'd jump ship because of the .0 release of Tahoe? Really? People get a little hysterical about things like this.

You know you don't have to upgrade to it, right? They'll support Sequoia for years, and you could even be running Sonoma if you wanted.

The response to this design is likely to be so overwhelmingly negative that we'll see a lot of subtle retreats in the point releases going forward, and when the macOS 7 version replaces TahoeVista, you can upgrade then.

Reubend2• 10 months ago

There are now plenty of ARM laptops with Windows (and Linux) support and very similar, if not better, battery life.

cedws• 10 months ago

Border radius on everything on Apple devices has been progressively increasing, eventually I expect everything to be circular. No rectangles allowed.

thehamkercat2• 10 months ago

And then they'll go back to rectangles and call it "innovation", "giving users more space"

Pesthuf• 10 months ago

Maybe once it’s round enough, we’ll get a round Apple Watch screen.

kalleboo• 10 months ago

The only thing that really bothers me with the macOS 26 design update is the complete lack of contrast. Everything is white-on-white with super subtle shadows. You can't see what tab is selected in Safari, you can't see what is a button, etc. And it doesn't even look good - it just looks like something is broken, like a texture failed to load.

axolttl88• 10 months ago

Tab styling across the board is terrible. I'm struggling to read inactive tab labels in Terminal.

I've used and loved macs for decades. This is the first time (maybe the second, if you count early Apple Music) that I've thought they've lost their way.

itopaloglu836• 10 months ago

Just thinking out loud.

Maybe some people took remote working really seriously and just delegated their work to amateurs online while they traveled the world.

Just saying. There’s no other explanation to how bad this is.

leptons4• 10 months ago

This is incompetence on display. Hundreds of people were involved in this from concept, to implementation, to testing. And they all thought this was okay.

baxuz2• 10 months ago

Is it me or did they also fiddle with the font rendering?

On the few screencaps I saw from external ~100 DPI non-retina displays, everything looks a lot blurrier.

jeffybefffy5192• 10 months ago

its insane to me that apple could feature "liquid glass"... the amount of devs that must of worked on this is probably not insignificant and could have been used on better things...

dvrj101• 10 months ago

overall made the UI much less information-dense

is this an attempt make, users buy bigger screen models ?

ChrisRR2• 10 months ago

The huge amount of padding is one of the reasons I hate the official reddit app compared to redreader. There's just such a huge amount of padding between every UI element that it means half the screen is just empty space

paulsmith• 10 months ago

Aside from the Liquid Glass stuff, has anyone detailed the changes to the Unix bits of the OS? What's new, deprecated, moved, locked-down, etc. ... ?

geraneum• 10 months ago

How dare you not complain about the UI?

CharlesW6• 10 months ago

The most notable change is probably the new native container runtime: https://github.com/apple/containerization

Metal 4 is interesting: https://developer.apple.com/metal/whats-new/

New enterprise-y stuff: https://support.apple.com/en-us/124963

FireWire support is gone, and this is the last macOS release for Intel.

flenserboy• 10 months ago

Apple had a chance to bring back taste when they got rid of Ive, but missed it entirely. The overly rounded windows, the weird amount of blank space, the lack of clarity in general — the only thing that makes sense is that middle managers brought this about.

edit: Things are even worse — they already made newer apps much more difficult to read, likely because they have been brought from mobile to desktop. Now fonts are even smaller in System Settings, for example. What are they even thinking?

thewebguyd4• 10 months ago

Now fonts are even smaller in System Settings, for example. What are they even thinking?

It's worse on the iPad. They apparently think an iPad is now also a mouse and cursor device because they made touch targets so small, and the fonts in menus shrunk down making them more difficult touch targets as well.

RomanPushkin• 10 months ago

Maybe it's new and controversial, but I like it. Honestly, I think there is something more about it. Like another Apple product that we're going to see in the future, like Apple glasses would work perfectly with this UI.

CharlesW6• 10 months ago

I've been using it for ~6 weeks, and I'm also a bit confused by the hate since it's barely changed. I'm a fan of the improved UX harmonization across form factors. My intuition is that the minor and gradual "Duploization" of macOS in Sequoia and now Tahoe foreshadows touchscreen MacBooks.

reaperducer3• 10 months ago

I agree with you. It really hasn't changed all that much. It's a bit more cartooney, but as long as it doesn't get in the way of my work, I don't care.

It looks like a lot of the hate flowing on HN is just people looking at worst-case screenshots on blogs and piling on. They haven't even used it.

There are a few things I'm not wild about, but for the most part it's a bunch of shoulder-shrugs. This isn't the end-of-the-world scenario that people are making it out to be.

I have a regular non-techie person in the family with a Mac who I think will like the changes. Those are the people who Apple is targeting. Not the tech bros and the wannabe posers who are desperately clutching their 10-year-old iPhones out of some kind of righteous indignation.

AlexandrB15• 10 months ago

I'm a fan of the improved UX harmonization across form factors.

Don't understand why. A ~6" phone screen and a 3x1440p setup have little in common regarding what "effective" UX looks like. Unifying them for the sake of consistency risks making both worse.

al_borland14• 10 months ago

Same. I like it so far. After the upgrade I spent a lot of time looking around, trying things out, and generally exploring. I haven’t haven’t felt that sense of exploration and discovery since the first iPhone.

ivraatiems• 10 months ago

Reminder that if you have an old Mac, and you'd like to run more recent versions of macOS on it, you can do so with Dortania OpenCore (https://dortania.github.io/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher/).

They don't have Tahoe support yet, but almost certainly will in the coming months.

I highly recommend doing this instead of throwing away a 5 or 6 year old computer as ewaste!

(Windows and Linux also work on Intel Macs.)

yogorenapan• 10 months ago

Thank you so much. I only need a Mac to compile/debug with Xcode (still can't get USB pass through with quickemu working) but Apple has been killing old versions such that projects wont build and home brew has no bottles and whatnot.

bsimpson• 10 months ago

I'm so bummed that the workarounds to keep a 5k iMac in commission all seem to be really likely to piss off your corporate IT department.

Patching the bootloader in memory seems like a big op-sec no-no.

Last time this came up on Hacker News, someone pointed out that there are new display boards you can buy from China to reuse a 5K's panel as an external display.

I think we're only allowed to run Linux at work on blessed devices. Last I looked, the 5K panel in the iMac was actually presented to the firmware as two smaller displays, which were glued back together in software. Apple does that magic to support its own hardware, but it sounded like Linux doesn't.

AHTERIX5000• 10 months ago

It's not as bad as the first previews but ugly nonetheless and overall accessibility nightmare.

All I hope is that the design language stays contained in Apple ecosystem and does not spread.

CharlesW6• 10 months ago

Accessibility hasn't changed at all, and it remains trivial to turn off visual effects that present a problem. https://imgur.com/a/Vw55f8V

hermitcrab2• 10 months ago

Does anyone know what Qt 5 or Qt 6 applications look like on macOS Tahoe?

rcarmo7• 10 months ago

OpenSCAD and others look like they did even before Sequoia, with a small corner radius and older control spacing.

hermitcrab2• 10 months ago

It looks like you can make your Qt app look like it did for previous OSes:

https://www.qt.io/blog/qt-on-macos-26-tahoe

That might be a useful stop gap.

Angostura• 10 months ago

It’s butt-ugly, but I find the usability better. Previously everything was so white that I found it difficult on occasion to distinguish between windows above and below. The heavier drop shadows and rounded corners are actually quite helpful

Aaronstotle• 10 months ago

I wish Apple would skip yearly macOS releases, there is no need.

AlexandrB15• 10 months ago

Or alternate feature releases with bug fix releases. I'd love to see a "Snow Leopard" every other year.

bergfest• 10 months ago

A small but important detail of Aqua was that the assumed light source was pointing straight down, whereas everybody else was usually using a 45 degrees angle. I wish Apple took a lesson from the old masters.

Also these colors make my eyes bleed. And the border radius is ridiculous.

proee• 10 months ago

The juxtaposition in the marketing speak is ridiculous.

"...all with a whole lot less effort."

Seriously Apple, a whole lot less?

gigatexal2• 10 months ago

Ios26 isn’t bad. Installing it on my non work MacBook.

robinhood• 10 months ago

First rule of MacOS upgrade: don't. Second rule: wait for x.1 or x.2 releases, so it's more stable and most importantly, the dependencies you need get updated.

brodo• 10 months ago

Christmas is a good time to update usually.

randyrand• 10 months ago

I always wait until x.6 or x.7! usually around May

sho_hn• 10 months ago

Whew. Those screenshots: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/09/macos-26-tahoe-the-a...

As a KDE Plasma dev, I always counted on us getting better, but I didn't expect the competition to get so much worse. We'd be flamed to high and heaven for shipping broken notification popups and rendering glitches like that in a prod release.

What happened internally to cause this, I wonder?

shantara• 10 months ago

The rumor mill speculates that Apple needed to ship something big and flashy to distract people from calling them out on their failure to deliver on the AI features promised (and previewed!) more than a year ago.

anakaine• 10 months ago

They probably should have just eaten the AI non delivery instead of now having two major failures.

touristtam2• 10 months ago

I've heard another take that is interesting and a clear departure from that never ending moaning: Like the ultra slim new iPhone that could be a step to validate the technical challenges to a foldable device, this change in UI is to prepare the user base for a complete change in the form factor, be it a glass slab or a greater focus on wearable (ala glasses).

justahuman74• 10 months ago

My guess is organizational inertia around dependency chains

vachina• 10 months ago

Wow those looks broken. I switched to Mac precisely thinking Apple knew best. Whatever happened to don’t change it if it ain’t broken?

itopaloglu836• 10 months ago

There’s no way this was developed by Apple. I keep thinking that they outsourced the macOS development to some amateurs online and took a year off traveling the world.

Looking at the screenshots and review videos, I cannot believe how ugly and out of proportion it is. Normally, there would be a consistent design and some people like it while others don’t. But this is simply ugly.

travisgriggs• 10 months ago

My guess is that it’s all product managers and “designers” now, a whole religion of procedures and terminology, and unfortunately very little engineering of the kinds that some of the early Ux pioneers applied.

heavyset_go9• 10 months ago

At this point, I have Plasma configured as a better macOS shell. Not a clone, those always look bad, but layouts close enough that my macOS muscle memory can't tell the difference.

pndy5• 10 months ago

After years with Xfce and GNOME, I recently switched to distro that by default prefers KDE, and I'm overall satisfied - Qogir theme, little customization and I'm as good as I was with Win7. Plasma 6.4.5 feels way more stable than line 5 that would crash during stupidest things.

As for what happen at Cupertino: it seems that they replaced people who knew theory and practice, principles of interface design with designers who were told to make a product that looks "fresh" and will diverge attention from Apple's AI failure.

Because why this Liquid Glass now if not as "rattling keys" effect? It's not a technological breakthrough - we've seen translucent plastic/glass/acrylic elements and fancy animations in operating systems before. Hell, even Plasma had that glass stuff in initial line 4 of release. And OSX had Aqua interface, window animations long before Microsoft wasted years for Longhorn finally releasing it as Vista with Aero. Not mention Compiz on Linux around same time.

My partner is already baffled with lack of polish and consistency across the system in this release. In some places it's just a transitional animation added on top of flat style for "wow" effect because hardware nowadays doesn't tax much for that. Tahoe feels like it tries to follow GNOME/Adwaita big interface elements that should stay exclusively on mobile devices, and it does this quite late and also really bad.

deprave• 10 months ago

That’s the important question. Someone else on the thread suggested it was to divert attention from one failure (AI) and now they have two. I wonder how Steve Jobs would react to this mess. Maybe he’d say he would not have been in such a mess in the first place. :)

sbuk6• 10 months ago

People in glass houses...

toyg• 10 months ago

Have you seen Windows 11? It's like they copied random ideas out of KDE 4 and bolted them on top of Windows, badly.

My theory is that big companies like to compress salaries. To compress salaries, you hire young and fire old, which means losing historical knowledge.

The other theory is that people who grew up with Kde-look.org are now running the asylum, without ever going through the sort of formal training that the previous generations of UI designers had to experience.

coneonthefloor• 10 months ago

The GUI of an OS has never concerned me. Seems like a red flag when the main selling point is a slight bit of transparency.

jaredklewis• 10 months ago

Well, that's why there is a lot of complaints.

The main selling point of a macbook is not a UI with transparency. It's hardware stuff (like ARM processors, battery life, aluminum frames, etc..) and a decent, stable, unix-ish software environment. No one is using macOS for the visual effects, so it is annoying that Apple is revamping the UI everyone is used to in order to add more visual effects.

Seems nuts to me, but I'll be curious to see how this all pans out.

al_borland14• 10 months ago

The new Spotlight seems like a strong selling point for power users.

_2d308• 10 months ago

I decided to install this and the updated iOS today to see how I felt about it.

My very initial impressions on MacOS:

(1) I like the look of Safari better and the Mail app compared to the prior designs. They both look really nice to me and the Mail app especially looks like a huge improvement in terms of design unification with some of the features like summaries and unsubscribe options that looked bolted on in the past now blending in seamlessly.

(2) I really, really don't like the new icons! Especially so on iOS.

(3) On iOS the app group/folders look terrible to me with the way they distort my wallpaper. Not a fan.

(4) A lot of people are complaining about transparent icons. It's not a valid complaint and is strong evidence whoever is saying that hasn't used the new OS as that is a choice you can make if you want. The default is not transparent.

(5) The increased radii in some places doesn't seem to have any meaningful impact to my information density. A simple comparison of Chrome (old styling) and Safari (with the liquid glass design) shows that Safari has a few pixels fewer in height search + tab bar as a concrete example.

(6) Messages app in MacOS looks like shit. I hate almost everything about it.

(7) Spotlight search has marked improvements! UI is nicer and functionality has expanded greatly (eg clipboard search).

JumpCrisscross• 10 months ago

I weirdly like the clear apps on iOS. Less visually stimulating.

_2d308• 10 months ago

I've been trying this now too based on your comment. I think I like it too but I also think it only works for me because I know where everything is on my phone. If I ever reorganized or expand my regular app usage to new things, I think it will be much harder as differentiating the apps is much harder.

hk13372• 10 months ago

I really like the Apps change. Instead of opening up the icons full screen, it opens in a spotlight search window.

piskov3• 10 months ago

Which is shit because with launchpad you had muscle memory.

Imagine you no longer have pages with icons on your phone and instead only have a search bar

cornedor• 10 months ago

Except when I forgot the name of an app

browningstreet2• 10 months ago

What I find weird: you can have light icons with color, dark icons with color, but not clear (and/or tinted) icons with color.

It’s a strange omission.

reaperducer3• 10 months ago

No more *poof* animation when you drag a control out of the toolbar during customization.

wpm2• 10 months ago

But I was told Liquid Glass was going to add a bit more whimsy to the OS!

itopaloglu836• 10 months ago

The poof animation was such a lovely touch. Removing it feels like a crime honestly.

Most of the friendly computer interactions are being removed. I presume someone thinks it takes too much effort to replicate. They’re making the computer soulless, just like Windows, they might as well remove the Mac name as well.

micromacrofoot• 10 months ago

Spotlight improvements are one of the only things I actually like about it so far, it's unbelievable how bad messages app looks... we're certainly losing some space in cases where they're doing this weird sidebar container

_2d308• 10 months ago

Being able to search an app from spotlight is so great.

CMD + SPC => "Mail" => TAB => then I'm searching all my emails is fantastic. Spotlight really is a huge improvement for me.

coldtea5• 10 months ago

Anytime a UI redesign comes with bullshit abstract designer justifications ("a translucent new material that reflects and refracts its surroundings", etc) you know it's bad.

sylens2• 10 months ago

Open up the Calendar app on macOS Tahoe. Look in the upper right at the time zone selector. It is left justified to a fault, leaving a very awkward amount of space between it and the expand arrow/flyout arrows.

metaltyphoon• 10 months ago

That looks so bad :D

christophilus6• 10 months ago

Just upgraded my wife’s laptop and my iPhone. It’s fine. I think her use (she lives in the browser) and my iPhone use (calls, camera, browser) don’t really reveal anything terrible. It’s kind of a dumb gimmick, but it’s mostly fine so far. It would annoy me if a UI that I frequently used “upgraded” to this, though.

dayvid• 10 months ago

Looks like they're putting an AR UI in a Desktop

basisword5• 10 months ago

A lot of the focus here is on the design (obviously). It took me a while to get used to it. But there are a lot of really great improvements in this release that make it worth it. Spotlight gets big updates. Live activities and notifications syncing from your phone. Journal. Music app has been massively updated and redesigned. Phone app. And surprisingly it doesn’t feel like a launch release - definitely less buggy than previous efforts.

dsego15• 10 months ago

Music app has been massively updated and redesigned.

How is this good design? I have to precisely hover over the puny slider and then it blurs everything? There is enough space to show proper controls for playback. And why are the controls at the bottom.

https://imgur.com/a/vdBeG8g

basisword5• 10 months ago

That doesn't take away from the fact it had a major update and redesign. There are definitely still issues but it seems much snappier than the previous iteration where it felt like using embedded web views. Pins are great too.

DavidPiper• 10 months ago

Windows XP had Theme Settings. I never used them, but at least they allowed you to choose.

hk13372• 10 months ago

I feel like Joey Tribbiani with Rachel’s Traditional English Trifle, because I like it. iOS, macOS, ipadOS, tvOS.

I like the new feature in tvOS to see incoming calls on the tv.

p_ing5• 10 months ago

The pixel above the menu bar Weather widget isn't clickable. Sound, wifi, battery, Control Center, clock are just fine.

Let that one get under your skin.

mmastrac• 10 months ago

This is the first time I've ever seen a macOS update and not seen a single feature worth bothering to upgrade over. Is there anything developer-facing? I don't use any Apple ecosystem stuff and this is all that AFAICT

dhruvkb• 10 months ago

There is support [1] for containers.

[1] https://github.com/apple/container#requirements

t0lo2• 10 months ago

I love how when apple could offer nothing more, their ui became nothing, and a celebration of blankness

al_borland14• 10 months ago

That’s the goal of all their products, the hardware as well. Get out of your way, and effectively disappear, so you can focus on what you’re actually working on.

_7acn• 10 months ago

The key question - now that Liquid Glass is a reality, will Tim Cook lose his job like Ballmer did over Windows 8 metro design?

AlexandrB15• 10 months ago

I thought it was Sinofsky who lost his job over Windows 8.

s09dfhks• 10 months ago

Is there anywhere to find a comprehensive list of updates made "Under the hood"? Sure the new UI is cool and all, but what are they doing to make the OS better? In a previous life I was a mac administrator and every update, apple would remove some binary and suddenly we couldn't natively make calls to LDAP or something.

vintagedave2• 10 months ago

That’s why I miss the old Ars Technica reviews.

The closest I’ve seen is this Apple PDF and I’m not sure it’s what you’re after: https://www.apple.com/os/pdf/All_New_Features_macOS_Tahoe_Se...

outlore• 10 months ago

i really wish they didn't give up on stage manager. every beta i would look if they fixed the opening behavior to open a new application in the same stage :/ but stage manager seems like it would have potential to fix window management on the mac without needing rectangle, yabai, alt tab etc

CharlesW6• 10 months ago

Stage Manager works fine in macOS 26: https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/use-stage-manager-m...

diebeforei485• 10 months ago

I usually wait a couple weeks for the bugs to be worked out before installing.

kstrauser4• 10 months ago

Am I the only one here who thinks liquid glass is pretty? I like it.

More than that, I love the new Spotlight features, and the ability to remove apps from the menu bar without installing Ice (or the legacy Bartender).

dcchambers2• 10 months ago

Screenshots of this OS sure are...something. I'm gonna hold off on upgrading. Maybe they'll tone it down next year.

hexvalid• 10 months ago

Looks horrible on non-hdpi monitors

TheJuli• 10 months ago

Eh, it has always looked horrible. Non fractional scaling is just too much to ask at this point...but hey look at this tiny toggle element doing this cool liquidy effect wohoo

trinix9122• 10 months ago

Only since OS X Yosemite. Then they decided to mess with the font smoothing and it went downhill from there. And no, it wasn't because of Retina, as OS X Mavericks had Retina support and still worked fine on low DPI screens.

wpm2• 10 months ago

Apple straight up doesn't give a fuck about us third-party monitor users. Timmy says 1440p at 27" is big enough for anyone.

Just a joke of a company

FireBeyond• 10 months ago

They openly fucked DP 1.4 to make the ProDisplay XDR work.

Catalina, sure, you can drive a DP 1.4 monitor at 144Hz in HDR10. Big Sur, coinciding with the ProDisplay...? No, that will get you 60Hz HDR10 or 95Hz SDR.

So stupidly that downgrading my monitor (mine would allow you to select advertised support) to DP 1.2 would increase your refresh and HDR options.

And it was never fixed, not in Big Sur, Monterey or Ventura, when I had switched monitors.

People were wondering how Apple made the math work. Simple, by "Fuck you if your monitor isn't our $6,000 flagship".

mickgardner• 10 months ago

What an ugly UI update. I usually don't mind too much about the changes in MacOS UI and visuals, but opening up Finder leaves me shocked that this actually got the green light. Who in their right mind looked at this and thought: "yep that's the future, it looks fantastic!".

data-ottawa4• 10 months ago

For Finder I discovered that changing the Toolbar to Icon Only significantly improved it. Then I set the sidebar icons to small in the Appearance system setting. That helped a lot.

Most of the new UI is designed almost exclusively for icon only toolbars.

a2128• 10 months ago

    More ways to express yourself with images.
    Mix emoji and descriptions to make something brand-new. In Image Playground, discover additional ChatGPT styles. And have even more control when making images inspired by family and friends using Genmoji and Image Playground.

I have to say, is AI image generation really the job of an operating system? I've also seen this sort of stuff on Pixel Android, it's now built into mspaint on Windows 11 and there's also copilot everywhere. Does anyone even use this stuff? It requires constant updates and maintenance to support newer models, in my experience it gets stale and outdated much more quickly. I think it would be better served by the user just opening their web browser to go to ChatGPT (or other service) which receives latest model upgrades first. Am I going crazy or is this just a horrible idea?

mdavid626• 10 months ago

Agreed.

bl4ckneon• 10 months ago

It always seemed quite cringe to me. A use it once and "Ehh I guess it works and is cool, sure" and then never touch it again sort of feature.

Other than old people that always send gifs on Facebook and children who this is probably one of the only AI art things they have access too, idk who else uses this.

If one tech giant has it then they need to too for feature parity. Not a whole lot of use cases for generative AI for the masses, so if someone comes up with one, gotta copy!

deafpolygon3• 10 months ago

People want this.

Remember, those of us on HN aren't really the target demographic. They are targeting people who use their device(s) for fun and entertainment.

EZ-E• 10 months ago

This seems more of a toy. I hope we get to eventually able to use a local Apple LLM model with more flexibility.

Tankenstein• 10 months ago

Something quite cool they shipped with the 26 family of operating systems is a new system-level API to let developers access the built-in on-device models directly: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/FoundationModels

vadepaysa• 10 months ago

I've grown so used to Apple shipping buggy software that I wait a year or more before upgrading my mac to a major version. I do all the minor releases and security patches, of course.

anon7000• 10 months ago

(This about iOS, not Mac, but obviously a lot is similar.)

I might be in the minority on hn, but I’m using iOS 26 for the first time today and am pretty happy with the new design. For one, it’s a lot snappier and faster. I’m glad they finally did something about the slow-ass animations iOS had in a lot of places. Secondly, it has a lot more personality. I enjoy that. Thirdly, they finally moved more basic UI stuff close to the thumbs instead of literally 6 inches away at the top of the screen. Love that. Knowing app designers, my apps are about to get easier to use just by migrating to the new UX concepts Apple is pushing.

The glass look is mostly fine. iOS had contrast issues before, and I don’t think it’s any worse. If anything, it’s more adaptive to different types of backgrounds now.

There are some visual glitches and weird things, but they’re pretty minor and will be resolved with time. The glass panes for, say, folders look nice, and I like it more than the previous blur.

piskov3• 10 months ago

The worst thing is Safari removing all tabs button.

Quick way is to pinch out with two fingers but that is impossible one-handed.

Another is to swipe up (or left/right) on address bar but that often triggers app switching because he indicator is 3mm lower

kstrauser4• 10 months ago

It’s still there, just moved. Tap the … icon next to the address bar. “All tabs” will be under your thumb.

mitemte2• 10 months ago

Settings > Safari > Set tabs to “Bottom”. This gives you back the old style bottom bar, including the all tabs button.

The “Compact” UI option is complete and utter garbage.

mrexroad• 10 months ago

I’ve settled on swiping up on the (…) button. But yeah, either way I’m bummed that usability had been traded for shiny/trendy aesthetics here. Worst part is that they know and have provided options to have “classic view”/“try new ui” rather than iterating and polishing it to the point it’s substantially improved and there’s no choice but to release it.

Design is a series of decisions. Those decisions should be rooted in a strong, thoughtful, point of view. It’s a problem when the final product embodies multiple points of view; view options should be the extreme exception, not the norm we now see in phone, mail, safari, etc.

e40• 10 months ago

I don't really like the look, but I noticed it feels a lot faster, too. That is certainly welcomed!

mitemte2• 10 months ago

I don’t mind the visual appearance of iOS 26. My main gripe is that this update introduces some pointless additional taps for common interactions.

Here’s some of the UX regressions:

- Apple Music: the “next track” button is only visible if the tab bar is expanded. So now we have to scroll or tap, wait for an animation and then click next. - Web views search web for selected text: previously we could highlight, swipe the action menu and then tap the button. Now we have to highlight, tap the small arrow, wait for the horizontal list to animate into a vertical list, tap the button. They removed the ability to swipe the action menu. - Tab bars: since 2007, you could change tabs with one tap. Now it’s one or two taps, depending on whether it’s collapsed or expanded.

al_borland14• 10 months ago

Personally, I like the vertical list in the web view for highlighted text. The action menu was so annoying. The items were always in a different order and I always had to highlight, tap, tap, tap… on small targets to get to what I wanted.

AlexandrB15• 10 months ago

The keyboard on iOS 26 is all messed up. Letters on the keys are no longer vertically centred and are shifted up slightly, while the shift and delete glyph are still in the middle. It looks like a mistake replicated 26 times.

Edit: Also, information density is down across the board. Of course.

bobbylarrybobby• 10 months ago

Interesting. Looks like they decided to vertically center lowercase letters at the expense of the rest. The lowercase L key looks particularly bad.

caycep5• 10 months ago

they need to bring Scott Forstall or someone Bertrand Serlet-esque back, and a designer who isn't Alan Dye

sbuk6• 10 months ago

Rich Corinthian Leather? Green baize backgrounds? Really..?

caycep5• 10 months ago

At least he was consistent and the UI design made sense, textures aside. And UI gossip aside, all the accounts from every engineer who worked under him consistently praised him.

Safari with its KHTML underpinnings was also created under his watch, apparently.

MobileVet• 10 months ago

The part that I am so tired of is the ‘we are the best at this and this is amazing’ pitch that comes with every release. Never mind that this release’s design ‘language’ DIRECTLY conflicts with things they used to say ‘never do that’.

So what changed exactly? Change is understandable but this is a full 180. - floating anything was verboten - accessibility was paramount - clarity was prioritized

How did this release come about??

brandon2722• 10 months ago

New people in design roles that no longer care about old rules.

Declining institutional taste and no one at the helm who appreciates or enforces old rules when necessary.

daveoc64• 10 months ago

Isn't that just how Apple has always operated?

2004: You don't need an iPod that plays videos. 2005: Here's an iPod that plays videos.

gowld• 10 months ago

https://www.apple.com/v/os/c/images/macos/highlights/mac_pho...

Two different fonts (Mac vs iOS) for the same data display?

And replacing all humans by AI avatars, to make it easier for spambots to impersonation people?

jmull2• 10 months ago

I'm baffled by the hate. So far, it's just some nice looking cosmetic changes.

All entirely inconsequential -- I've seen nothing yet that will affect my workflows in any way.

latexr2• 10 months ago

Wait until you use it a bit more and get some overlap into an unreadable mess.

Open System Settings right now, do a search, then scroll the view. That’s the least worst you’ll find.

jmull2• 10 months ago

I tried it and it works well, and looks good.

What's the bad thing I'm supposed to be seeing?

dsego15• 10 months ago

I don't think so, apple supposedly cares about aesthetics and design. If I didn't care about little details I would use windows. Like Steve Jobs said, it comes down to taste. Why would I use a flawed unpolished product, it doesn't reassure me that the technical side was even done well.

al_borland14• 10 months ago

This UI refresh seems better than Jony Ive’s attempt. The first version he was in control of was probably the worst UI they’ve had. Poor contrast, ultra-thin fonts, strange color pallet, and the buttons were gone. Need a back button, here: <. Liquid Glass seems much better than that, and they will continue to refine it, just like they did Ive’s design.

jm4• 10 months ago

This looks like their Windows Vista.

watersb• 10 months ago

Sure, sure... The UI is a waste.

But: 24-bit color support in Terminal.app!

Finally.

(Next year, macOS Ukiah will use Apple Intelligence: just describe the UI you want in Spotlight, and macOS will vibe-code it up for you.)

atomchild• 10 months ago

It's like every macos release. The internet rushes to upgrade to it and then tries to be the first to sh*t on it. Nothing to see here. Winning.

aljgz• 10 months ago

Writing this comment from my FrameWork laptop with AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370, 96GB Ram, 4TB Storage, that I got for $4k. Running Fedora with KDE. How much would I need to pay Apple to get a laptop with this much ram?

The day I got my only Apple device, an ipad, only to know they will kill my browser download as soon as I switch to a different app, it became my last. I don't want to pay a company only to be subject to their decision of what I can and cannot run on my machine.

If I vote for that with my wallet, I deserve it.

SparkyMcUnicorn• 10 months ago

You can get a 128GB MacBook for around $4300. With a 4TB SSD it'll be around $5k I think.

https://www.apple.com/shop/product/G1FW7LL/A/Refurbished-16-...

janitor77swe2• 10 months ago

You could buy a Lenovo with the same spec for a good grand less. And people buy Macbooks so that they don't have to deal with the abomination that is called Linux/GNU and GPL, not for the hardware.

andsoitis2• 10 months ago

Tim Cook has no taste

joduplessis• 10 months ago

If Apple stopped at the over-saturated/rounded-corners, it would have been a decent iteration on something established (and very much not broken). I realise the transparent icons are optional - but it now looks like a budget Android theme.

mamami• 10 months ago

Am I the only one finding this design extremely dated? Like Android Kitkat like from 10 years ago?

rd07• 10 months ago

This is unrelated, but in Indonesian language, "Tahoe" is a word for tofu but spelled the old way

ObscureMind• 10 months ago

This is the Windows 7 version of MacOS

samgranieri• 10 months ago

I think I’m going to stick with the previous version of macOS on my work laptop until I’m forced to upgrade.

curvaturearth• 10 months ago

I still hurting from the crappy System Settings. Please Apple, make System Settings better... It's a mess

WuxiFingerHold• 10 months ago

I hate to say it, but Windows is much more productive than MacOS for the usually tasks you perform on an OS (with GUI, both have CLIs, but I'm not talking about them). I'm using both at work all day long switching between them. When reflecting why, I think it comes down to windows management and the file explorer (vs finder).

ejoso• 10 months ago

I disagree on this.

I’ve used both interchangeably for decades and can swap between them without slowing. So much of this comes down to knowledge of and experiences with the quick/er ways for getting around.

For quite sometime using search tools is vastly more efficient for navigation and file movement than Explorer or Finder anyway.

kstrauser4• 10 months ago

That’s an entirely subjective thing, though. I’ve used Macs more than PCs and I can’t stand what feels to me like Windows’s abysmal window management.

I don’t say that to argue that macOS is better at it, just that I strongly prefer the Mac way as much as you prefer the way Windows does things, and that’s perfectly fine.

heavyset_go9• 10 months ago

Has anyone gotten this running in with QEMU and kvm?

ntnbr• 10 months ago

I really dislike how everything MUST become rounded to be "more user-friendly and fluid". The UI looks awful and I will probably never be upgrading.

aaronbrethorst• 10 months ago

I've run every version of macOS since Mac OS X Public Beta. I'm pretty sure I'm going to skip Tahoe. macOS 15 Sequoia is great; why would I switch to something profoundly ugly and unpolished if everything will keep running on my current OS and Apple's liable to make macOS 27 look tolerable?

drnick13• 10 months ago

I am the only one to think that these days, GNOME and KDE are more usable than anything made by Microsoft or Apple? I think part of the reason is that devs working on these projects don't have an incentive to make arbitrary changes like people who need to justify their paychecks.

unboxingelf2• 10 months ago

You’re not the only one.

reddalo6• 10 months ago

I agree, except for the GNOME part. I think GNOME 2 was the last usable version, everything went downhill since GNOME 3.

KDE or Cinnamon (Linux Mint) are good though.

Rochus3• 10 months ago

You can still use Gnome 2 with e.g. the Mate desktop. I use it every day and it works good enough (though it has some bugs in the file manager).

BatteryMountain4• 10 months ago

Been using Fedora + KDE since ~March on my main dev machine (hp laptop), basically without any issues and it hasn't broken itself yet. Works amazing. KDE has cured my last bit of distrohopping I had left and I moved on from Gnome too. Things that irritate me on my last macos machine is literally 3 config toggles away in KDE.

In the coming month will install Fedora+KDE on 5 more machines for family members due to Windows 10 hitting end of life.

Rochus3• 10 months ago

Even Mate is more usable, and to do decent work on a Mac I need a Lenovo Thinkpad external keyboard, which is much better than anything Apple has to offer and it even has a trackpoint and two mouse buttons.

hoherd• 10 months ago

With KDE Plasma being so great, and Tahoe desktop UI being so awful, I am being nudged more and more towards using linux as my desktop instead of just using it headless.

zwilliamson• 10 months ago

I’ve been using Omarchy (Arch+Hyprland) as my daily driver for over a month. It is faster, prettier and more efficient than macOS in my opinion. I have a Framework 16” on order. I can’t wait to get it.

Lio3• 10 months ago

Is there an equivalent to macOS' Ctrl-scroll to zoom the screen yet?

It's little accessibility features like that keep me coming back to macOS everytime I switch to Linux.

articsputnik4• 10 months ago

try this, works great https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/mouse-pinch-to-zoom... (I already used it on MacBook, but also on Omarchy now)

unboxingelf2• 10 months ago

Who is macOS designed for? I assume a non negligible customer base are software professionals and this iOSification of the desktop is borderline hostile. I don’t get it.

Rochus3• 10 months ago

66% of Mac users are female,

around 55.7% of Mac users in 2024 are aged 18-34,

macOS has a 29.62% share of the U.S., but only 15.1% of the global PC market

Macs still maintain strong pedigree in graphic design and visual arts

(from https://www.spyhunter.com/shm/macos-stats/)

I'm a software developer as well and I avoid programming on the Mac whenever possible (i.e. developing on Linux and just go to the Mac to build and test). Since the last OS version, you cannot even download and run precompiled open source software without being an expert, and we can expect that Apple will even close the present work-arounds for "security reasons" (what a good justification for all kinds of monopolistic and patronizing business decisions).

avazhi2• 10 months ago

Looking at this webpage I realise I am absolutely no longer part of Apple’s demographic for MacOS. I couldn’t care less about any of these new features. I was hoping the UI would be improved but it’s just a diabolical clusterfuck.

Hard pass.

lazycouchpotato• 10 months ago

Updated to iPadOS 26 on my iPad 9.

It's so laggy on the home screen now. Absolutely ruined the poor thing.

deafpolygon3• 10 months ago

I suppose I'm in the minority, but I do like the new changes. It's refreshing, and looks good. Most issues can be tweaked away if you desire that. (disabling transparency or removing tint window with background wallpaper)

What I want is my single row Safari address+tabbar back - why did they take it out? And where the hell is the newly refreshed Terminal.app?

k8sToGo• 10 months ago

I hate it. Everything has become larger and weirder and uglier? When I reboot the machine the time on the lock screen is in liquid glass but the date isn't?

It reminds me of Cydia Themes

rckt• 10 months ago

The new approach they took is a disaster, technically and visually. This is a joke.

reddalo6• 10 months ago

I agree, it's hideous. I miss the cleanliness of macOS Sierra.

I'll just stay on Sequoia for the time being, and then switch to Linux.

niek_pas• 10 months ago

Curious what your life is like that you can 'just' switch to Linux. For me changing desktop OSes at this point would be like moving to a different country.

gregoriol• 10 months ago

Long time Apple user advice: don't update before .1 version if you use your mac for important things.

Alifatisk2• 10 months ago

Will I be able to disable the glass effect so there isn't any load on the system just for the ui to exist?

ksynwa• 10 months ago

I'd like to see the presentation they used internally to sell the liquid glass aeshetic. I bet it is sillier than the famous Pepsi logo redesign document.

fainpul• 10 months ago

I don't want the low contrast glassy stuff or even bigger corner radiuses on my iPhone or mac, so I disabled automatic OS updates for the first time.

When I updated to iOS 18.7, it automatically re-activated iOS updates! Fuck you very much, Apple!

So be warned, if you don't want to update, check your settings.

pndy5• 10 months ago

Maybe it's some A-B stuff - I've updated to 18.7 both phone and tablet and updates settings were untouched

Ecstatify• 10 months ago

The new UI is incredibly disappointing, it looks like an old Android theme from 2005.

philipallstar• 10 months ago

More you. Shines through.

It just sounds like a shampoo commercial.

BatteryMountain4• 10 months ago

If anyone here feel aggravated by both Liquid Glass and whatever Windows 11 calls their UI, give KDE a try (Fedora is pretty stable with it). After tweaking a few things (display dpi, theme, wallpaper) - its a very coherent experience & information dense. You can do 95% of your computing in this environment. After getting used to KDE, it will be hard to go back to windows or macos.

caro_kann• 10 months ago

I hope they'll acknowledge what they've done and fix most of this nonsense. I like macOS how it is right now, and I switched from Linux partly for this. I always wonder why don't they just add new stuff based on user feedback?

eloisant3• 10 months ago

I can't remember the last time I was excited for a macOS release. This time again there is nothing I'm looking forward in this new release.

artk42• 10 months ago

If there are enough OGs, they should recall Windows XP with all those bells and whistles AND those life-saving switch to "Windows Classic" that survived next three generations of Windows.

I personally pray for that "MacOS classic" switch... It's sad to enter that decay era for Apple where every next software upgrade for the device feels effectively as a hardware downgrade.

Etheryte• 10 months ago

The global reduce motion and reduce transparency settings help you a little, but that only goes so far.

notsydonia• 10 months ago

Had such a bad experience with Sonoma, multiple micro-glitches that stole time and focus, that I dropped back to Ventura and have been avoiding updates ever since. The weird thing is that despite numerous bugs being logged all over the place, the 'new features' updates from Apple OS didn't seem to address any of them. They were mostly weird gimmicky new add-ons that don't mean anything to a power-user.

I might be interested in trying Tahoe if they'd undone whatever the awful policy is that puts a tonne of unwanted apps and desktop pics etc into your desktop that cannot be removed. I don't want Apple News, the clock in the menu bar and even Airplay - I purchased the computer, why can't I have what I want on it without compulsory apps from Apple?

cyberpunk4• 10 months ago

You can remove the desktop widgets, no idea about turning off the clock though…

accrual• 10 months ago

The latest macOS updates have me pining for macOS Mojave. I really liked that release - first-class dark mode support that felt reasonably polished, it still had a "normal" Mac OS X style UI, 32-bit support if you wanted it, it was snappy even on my 3 year old 2015 MBPr, and I think it wouldn't look out of place on a modern M4 Mac even though it's a seven year old release.

a0122• 10 months ago

I posted this before but again, this new OS from Apple is the deal breaker for me to buy any new devices from Apple again. And I’ll hold on the existing OS until Apple won’t provide any security updates anymore.

gigatexal2• 10 months ago

the launcher is amazing

day one upgrade here nothing broke, im very happy so far

m3max mbpro 14

Mindwipe• 10 months ago

This is a really rough UI update to ship out of Apple.

I don't want to use "the worst UI thing they've ever done" lightly, but it is hard to think of something that feels this unfinished and hard to use. Why are none of the corner radii consistent? This is literally the sort of thing Apple's entire reputation is built on getting right! It's like an amateur hour Linux skin.

dim13• 10 months ago

Read most of the comment, was hesitated. Then thought "it can't be that bad". Ok, it is that bad. I absolutely hate extra round corners and extra margin in the windows. Sigh.

al_borland14• 10 months ago

It’s just change. People complain every time the UI changes on anything.

People will get used to it. Apple will refine some things over time.

It will be ok.

otter-in-a-suit• 10 months ago

I usually agree (and enjoy reading angry threads years later), but wasting screen real estate and getting measurably worse in terms of accessibility is simply not a good design decision.

supr_strudl• 10 months ago

I like it. There's hardly any difference for me.

major5054• 10 months ago

To be honest I just installed last night and the only significant change I notice are the round corners. And now the email app have a progress indicator.

Other than that is just windows vista visuals, but not as shit as windows vista.

dsego15• 10 months ago

But it's bad, because the new rounded style with floating buttons doesn't match the traditional UI toolkit and it shows. They've messed up the whole layout where windows have a title bar and then a sidebar, etc. Now the side rail is on top, and all the toolbar buttons float, but you're still supposed to know you can drag on the title bar, but there are no visual signifiers (affordances). It's harder to visually parse the mess, there is no visual hierarchy and everything is floating and has a drop shadow now. And then there is the double border on the left side, where for some reason the sider rail also needs to be floating, which just takes up more space. And it's just for visuals, some apps show content under it (like the wallpaper), while finder for example doesn't, so it's really inconsistent and means nothing.

I took screen shots of a few inconsistencies that bother me, things getting cut off or looking visually messy. The most egregious is the music app showing a dinky progress bar that's almost impossible to mouse over and when you do it blurs everything so you don't see the song name. There was real estate for that whole currently playing section to be bigger so you can start dragging that slider immediately without hovering over it first.

https://imgur.com/a/1PsFAQi

and a few more I forgot

https://imgur.com/a/1CWFqRP

major5054• 10 months ago

Ok, the clipping of the end of the scroll bar is really terrible.

somelamer567• 10 months ago

The poor application scripting story on macOS has made me grumpy for the last few releases of macOS.

AppleScript was never good, but the tooling has been left to rot and other language bindings steadily deprecated. And it seems it has not improved in Tahoe. I know the product manager of scripting for macOS ran it into the ground before being let go, but I've seen no discernible improvements.

For a platform touted as the first choice for technical users, this is a really poor showing.

ktosobcy• 10 months ago

I don't like things getting more and more round (quite often having custom css with `* { border-radius: 0px !important; }`) and they are going even worse with it.

I don't like transparency - it's flashy but in overwhelming majority of cases is just a gimmick distraction (like transparent terminals on linux)

Sticking to Squoia

tyleo• 10 months ago

I've been using Tahoe since yesterday and so far I find the glass changes fine. I don't have any sort of accessibility requirements and I can understand how loss-of-contrast may impact folks but to me it feels fresh.

dreamcompiler4• 10 months ago

Every new version of MacOS exhibits four phenomena:

1. Old bugs are not fixed.

2. New bugs are introduced, and I have to spend hours online figuring out workarounds.

3. Old features I depended on are removed, and I have to spend hours online figuring out how to replace them.

4. New features I don't need are added and they get in my way, and I have to spend hours online figuring out how to disable them.

My workflow productivity takes a months-long hit every time Apple upgrades MacOS. As a result I rarely upgrade MacOS until it's around 3 years old and I have no choice.

It appears that Tahoe is going to be the worst example of this in a long time.

Which is why I'm moving as much of my daily workflow as possible to Linux.

ransom1538• 10 months ago

Nothing on this list compares to removing an ESC key. That was apple starting to leave reality. I had to buy used laptops for that time period.

mmmnnn• 10 months ago

super lolllz

AlexandrB15• 10 months ago

Definitely the worst era of Mac laptop hardware that I lived through. I still have a work-provided 2019 MBP and the keyboard is shot (even though I never use it because it's docked to a monitor + keyboard 99.9% of the time), while the Touch Bar flickers with random white rectangles regularly while the machine is asleep. I personally kept using a 2015 MBP until last year for just this reason.

KaiserPro• 10 months ago

As a Vim user, I thought it would be a deal breaker, but it really wasn't that bad.

The rest of the laptop was though.

theshrike794• 10 months ago

If they just put the fancy bar ON TOP of the f-row, we'd still have it.

ubercore3• 10 months ago

You're right about the hubris, but Caps Lock -> Esc is The Way regardless!

nik736• 10 months ago

Wow I already forgot about the touch bar. And imagine being so stubborn to keep the touch bar but introduce a physical ESC key, they lost their minds during that time.

icedchai• 10 months ago

The early touch bar models were terrible. I still remember the day I traded that thing in for an M1.

coldtea5• 10 months ago

1) and 2) are common to all major software releases (whether it's an OS like macOS a DE like Gnome or some complicated program like Photoshop or Blender or something). Inevitable to a degree as you can't fix everything, and you can't ship 100s of thousands of new lines of code without some bugs.

These are only a big problem if those bugs bugs are major, and/or widely applicable to different user setups, and/or very annoying.

3) is the worse though, especially when it happens for no good reason, or for novelty value.

4) is not that bad

TomaszZielinski5• 10 months ago

Re 1., based on [1] it seems that some data loss bugs are getting fixed. Asymptotically :)

[1] https://mjtsai.com/blog/2019/10/11/mail-data-loss-in-macos-1...

dreamcompiler4• 10 months ago

I used to love Apple Mail but it was precisely this bug that made me move permanently to Thunderbird. It's hard for me to fathom a bug so severe that it caused data loss on an IMAP server, but Apple created said bug and put it into production.

Thunderbird has the nice advantage of working on both MacOS and Linux with the same UI. It's not quite as nice as Apple Mail's classic UI (which is no longer available -- see (3) above) but it's good enough.

s_dev• 10 months ago

When I was young I loved getting the latest of everything but that was partly because I didn't have to carry certain workflows or older tech along with me. It's the baggage that we accumulate is the problem.

Now I understand why plenty of old timers just leave the OS version on the MacBook that it came with. All you ever really need is the security patches.

Unless there is some specific new feature that you absolutely must need or some push factor, don't upgrade.

giancarlostoro3• 10 months ago

For me its every time I reinstalled my OS and didn't backup any of my chat convo logs. My wife still has them on all her old Macs, and her first Windows computer we met online through has some (not all) of our MSN convos still on it. I never thought about that unfortunately.

giancarlostoro3• 10 months ago

1. Old bugs are not fixed.

If Apple would open source some of its OS apps, this would probably be a non-issue, I could see people putting in bugfix PRs the second Apple chooses to open source their core apps.

I don't see them doing this any time soon sadly, but it would make macOS much more stable, and probably secure.

The more I have thought about my views on Open Source vs Commercial software, I strongly feel that infrastructure code (an OS) should be more open source, I dont see Microsoft or Apple open sourcing any time soon, but it would make a world of a difference, imagine a world where Windows XP had been open sourced, and the community took it fully over and maintained its security, you'd have a drastically better version of Windows without all the fluff, or heck even Windows 7, which some argue was the last good version of Windows as well.

I wish ReactOS was drastically more usable.

ethbr13• 10 months ago

Of the two, there's a lot clearer line to Apple open sourcing some of its core desktop apps, given market share (~16%?) and lack of internal resource prioritization (iOSiOSiOS).

The best time to do so would have been ~2010, after iTunes revenue provided a clear monetizable carve-out.

The second best time would be today.

The number of people saying 'I love the hardware you sell me, but am switching platforms because your software is trash' should be a flare that even Tim Cook can notice.

And anything that moves MacOS closer to OSS should be welcomed by Apple -- it's their easiest (and most affordable) path to competing with Microsoft (Azure) on desktop.

rcarmo7• 10 months ago

Mail.app alone had enough issues and missing features to sustain an entire cottage industry, and would be one app I would certainly like to contribute to. But it shall never come to pass.

ajross• 10 months ago

I strongly feel that infrastructure code (an OS) should be more open source, I dont see Microsoft or Apple open sourcing any time soon

If only there were another platform vendor with different thoughts about open source infrastructure code. Alas.

articsputnik4• 10 months ago

the same for me (e.g. yabai didn't work anylonger properly with latest update). But for the past 2 months (or so), I couldn't be happier with Omarchy. It's a Linux build that comes with all the Mac specifications out of the box and is set up as a tiling window manager, which is what I used on macOS. But no more bugs, and it just works. Plus I can tweak my own OS, if I need to change something. In case of interest, I wrote a little here: https://www.ssp.sh/blog/macbook-to-arch-linux-omarchy/ (It was also on Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44955923)

IndySun• 10 months ago

Can you say a little more about the "fan always running"? Can it be attended to?

eloisius6• 10 months ago

I used Mac for 10 years and started feeling the same irritation around 2017. In 2020 I finally bit the bullet and switched to Linux. The initial investment into getting a usable Arch desktop was horrible. It took several days just to get to the point of something that I could boot into and be productive. It takes me a long time to get things working the way I want, but I kind of enjoy that aspect of total customization. The best part is, though, nothing ever changes. I get things working the way I want, and it just stays that way year after year. No UI language updates, no replacing my default shell, nothing. It just keeps working the way I like.

Now if they could just produce a touchpad as good as a MacBook's, give me 8-10 hours of battery life, and make the construction feel slim and solid, and not like it's going to get crushed in my backpack, and I'd be satisfied.

Citizen_Lame• 10 months ago

Out of curiosity, what kind of work do you do on Linux. Because, some workflows are simply not possible on Linux due to missing applications.

massysett• 10 months ago

The best part is, though, nothing ever changes.

Wasn’t true when they switched to systemd, or when KDE 4 came out, or when the new Gnome came out, or when the kernel renamed Ethernet interfaces to enps-whatever.

sgt4• 10 months ago

I fully get that macOS is not perfect, but checking out "modern" Linux (like a customized Arch) is a bit underwhelming. It still looks to me like Linux 20 years ago. And I started with Linux in the mid 90s. Not much has changed or improved on the pure fundamentals. I guess it's fine if all you do is sit doing CLI or spending your day in web browsers.

Day to day macOS driving to me is an absolute joy (granted, I'm still on Sonoma).

I do a lot of work in terminals but I also enjoy other apps, where that uniformity of Cocoa comes into play. And if you go deeper into Mach/Darwin, it's extremely powerful. On the userland .. from the launcher to dtrace and dynamic linker tricks and low level hooks. A lot of cool macOS APIs to experiment with, public or private. AppleScript/Automater, private frameworks like SkyLight (nifty!)

Oh and don't get me started on MLX...

To me, as a developer and as a power user, macOS delivers everything - and more.

tjpnz• 10 months ago

The best part is, though, nothing ever changes. I get things working the way I want, and it just stays that way year after year. No UI language updates, no replacing my default shell, nothing. It just keeps working the way I like.

While Arch might make you safer by virtue of choice, some of the more "beginner friendly" distros aren't immune to changing things seemingly overnight. Ubuntu for instance dropped GNOME for Unity which I still have bad memories of to this day.

iLemming3• 10 months ago

My biggest gripe with macOS vs. Linux is that the former allows IT departments to completely control them. They overload these otherwise very capable machines with so much crap that things start to crawl; they enable FileVault and install antivirus and NGFW clients; forcefully diminish the admin role to be a regular user, forcing users to use Admin-by-Request whenever they need to fart out anything sudo in the terminal.

I tried so hard to find reasons to like macOS, but frankly, if workspaces didn't force Macs, I would've totally chosen to use Linux. The only thing I miss in Linux is JXA/Applescript automation engine and Hammerspoon, nothing else - I don't use their web browser, or their mail app, GarageBand, and other crap like iTunes because frankly, they never felt to me like good solutions to solve specific problems, more like freeware before transitioning to better alternatives. Even the built-in terminal I use only to bootstrap Homebrew. Another good thing I should mention is that macOS really does set a good standard for accessibility features, even though I'm lucky not to have to rely on them, I'm sure many people do.

I honestly don't know how Apple has been getting away with so much crap for years - software developers are probably one of the biggest demographics of Mac users, and Apple keeps screwing them over, yet they stay loyal - partly because businesses force them to use Macs, partly because the alternatives suck even more - Linux ain't perfect and Windows is outright evil (really, I can't even rebind Win+L key on my computer? Fuck you MSFT!).

mikae13• 10 months ago

The initial investment into getting a usable Arch desktop was horrible.

It is my conviction that very few should go down the Arch route. If you want to sysadmin Linux or learn how to do so, fine. But if you want to do something else with your computer I'd strongly recommend looking into one of the https://universal-blue.org images (I use https://getaurora.dev btw).

These are based on atomic Fedora and my experience is that they offer extreme stability while still staying on the edge of development. Could we call it NixOS for mere mortals? Probably not if you ask the Nix peeps. :)

major5054• 10 months ago

Just curious, what yype of featureres where removed?

To be honest Im new to macos, but after spending years suffering with gnome, that did removed a lot of features, Macos seens like it dosent suffer of this that much.

user34283• 10 months ago

My mouse and keyboard are connected via the USB dock function of my monitor.

After the update, I can't even login. Great.

Not that it was working well before. To get the second monitor to even turn on, I had to first power off and then subsequently turn on again the primary monitor.

And that ritual was unique to my M2 Pro Mac mini.

On Windows, or a M1 Pro Macbook, everything just works.

And I'm not the only one with this super annoying external monitor issue. Apple apparently never fixed it. It just sucks.

devwastaken• 10 months ago

If apple didnt win in hardware theyd be gone.

veidr• 10 months ago

If Mike Tyson didn't punch so hard back then...

hulitu4• 10 months ago

Every new version of MacOS exhibits four phenomena:

This is specific to almost every new software.

As jwz said "But that's what happens when there is no incentive for people to do the parts of programming that aren't fun. Fixing bugs isn't fun; going through the bug list isn't fun; but rewriting everything from scratch is fun (because "this time it will be done right", ha ha) and so that's what happens, over and over again. "

bastardoperator• 10 months ago

Sounds sensational. If it takes you a month to ignore stuff, I have doubts that your workflow is even productive. I use every OS, you gotta roll with the punches, and they all punch back. There is no silver bullet OS. They all have issues and many of them fit your exact description. Good luck out there!

trollbridge2• 10 months ago

Yep. Contacts.app still has the same bugs where it doesn’t sync to Google unless you create a “note” in your Google account… yet it’s got the full new UI refresh. Truly feels like lipstick on a pig.

nickm12• 10 months ago

I can relate, but generally if I avoid updating in the first quarter of the release, I don't find it is too difficult to get my Mac back to a happy state. I did try to move to Linux a couple of years ago, but just couldn't. The keyboard, mouse, window system, and app ecosystem were far and away less usable for me and there was nothing I could find to do that would make the machine work as well for me as Mac, despite what Apple is throwing at us.

zabil• 10 months ago

Not a fan of the new Safari design. I used to like it for its compact and minimalist look, but now the address bar and tab bar feel like they take up more space than they should.

api• 10 months ago

Things I like: reintroducing a little bit of 3D/skeumorphism. I'm sick of flat. Also the Music and Podcasts app changes aren't bad. Haven't tried the iPhone/desktop tighter integration but it looks interesting. Not UI, but it seems like my wifi is faster, but I could also be nuts. Maybe a driver update?

Things that are "meh": the "apps" thing that replaces the previous launch pad, the translucency, the "dark" icon theme.

Things I don't like: stop wasting my f'ing screen real estate. Stop it with the unnecessary whitespace and the f'ing thicc menu bar. This is a desktop/laptop and it's for real work. It's also ugly. Speaking of ugly, I count several different window corner radii. Why do Windows need gigantically rounded corners?

maxvij• 10 months ago

This might be relevant again: Apple's Liquid Glass: When Aesthetics Beat Function (https://www.maxvanijsselmuiden.nl/liquid-glass)

chaidhat• 10 months ago

It's good

trumbitta2• 10 months ago

So ugly and pointless it hurts. Same for iOS 26.

kgc• 10 months ago

Reminds me of Windows Vista.

xutopia• 10 months ago

For me the main thing is that search is now more prominent for a lot of apps (this is even more true on iOS). It used to be that we had to go to the top on iOS to get search but now it's always at the bottom near the fingers.

zitterbewegung• 10 months ago

Am I one of few people that doesn't have a big negative sentiment torwards Tahoe? I suspect that if it is this bad they will start making a point release to address liquid glass. I do agree though that there is a jarring look to the slabs of glass on glass for the layouts in the system. Another thing that sort of weirds me out is that the system preferences has the icons being loaded after the window is present and I have liked using spotlight for a much longer time. I have also been using Siri by typing in queries and the integration of the dynamic island into the menu bar is pretty great.

janitor77swe2• 10 months ago

It's not bad, I barely noticed the change. Most of the comments are just trolls by people who don't own a Macbook, as you can see from their posts suggesting their Framework laptops and Arch linux.

agrippanux• 10 months ago

These extreme rounded corners are super triggering my desktop OCD

Text on frosted glass over other text is really hard to read

We need an option to turn these “improvements” off

FWIW my system does feel more snappy and the improvements to Spotlight are nice

fulafel• 10 months ago

I wonder if they realized they're recycling the codename from the old BSD version.

lukev• 10 months ago

Is it bad that my primary motivation for considering an upgrade is getting my notes as Markdown?

CalChris• 10 months ago

Worse.

I'm ok with most of it but let us get rid of the stupid rounded corners. Apple clearly does great HW and it does great systems. OTOH, its UI is faddish.

putna• 10 months ago

how to change this enormous windows radius to something reasonable?

prh8• 10 months ago

And Vehicle Motion Cues help reduce motion sickness in moving vehicles.

I love that the copy was directly copy pasted from iOS copy. I don't think vehicle motion sickness is a big concern with macOS

The_President2• 10 months ago

Meanwhile in iOSland I am hesitant to update an iPhone SE 2nd gen from 16 to 18 due to the apparant lack of option to customize the charging limit. To anyone with an engineer mind, this seems like a non-implementation that would have an excuse behind it if it were ever exposed. I also wonder if the Personal Hotspot wifi bug ever will get fixed for old hardware, or will the speculation remain of another service changing its mode to promiscuous momentarily for the sake of more data collection.

zenmac3• 10 months ago

And also AD-Hoc wifi which was quietly taken away. Many many developer rely on it. Yes there are some apps that the added latency via wifi hub vs ad-hoc wifi makes the difference!!!!

The_President2• 10 months ago

I imagine there will be a day soon when disabling wifi and bluetooth will no longer be behind five button presses, rather just always on.

system7rocks• 10 months ago

My first impressions? It's fine.

It will take a bit of getting used to, but there are some design elements that actually do make sense.

semiinfinitely• 10 months ago

I will not be installing this one!

HenriTEL• 10 months ago

Among all macOS apps and their weird choices, finder is the most enigmatic one. The Recents tab sorts by Last Opened by default where I would expect to see the rencently added files first. Sorting by another column will not add said column to the view. Files from the Downloads folders seems to be excluded from Recents, or they take hours to be taken into account.

It does not show the current path, no button to go up the file tree, the only text input is behind this search button and it does not understand relative or full paths.

Well, thank god I have a terminal and an IDE at hand.

roody15• 10 months ago

Email I sent to staff

Good Afternoon,

Apple released its new operating system today, macOS Tahoe. This is a full version upgrade (26.0) with a new look, feel, and many changes. At this time, I recommend NOT updating to Tahoe for the following reasons:

Stability: Version 26.0 is the first release and, like most “.0” versions, contains glitches that will take time to fix. Later versions (26.1, 26.2, etc.) are expected to address these issues.

Release Cycle: Apple now releases a new macOS every year instead of every two years. These initial yearly releases are often closer to “beta” products, and Apple typically patches problems over the first 6–8 weeks.

There is no real advantage to upgrading right now. It’s best to wait 6–8 weeks until the system stabilizes and then reevaluate.

How to Skip the Upgrade

When prompted, simply do not click “Upgrade Now.” This upgrade may pop up on your machine over the course of the next few days.

Close the upgrade window, or scroll down to select other updates.

For reference, macOS Sequoia (15.x) is now at version 15.7, which means it’s very stable and well-patched.

mantra2• 10 months ago

Wake me up when it's 26.1 o'clock.

filchermcurr• 10 months ago

I'm trying to give it a chance but it's kind of rough.

- File save dialog has a massively reduced width sidebar. It has a resize handle. But the resize handle does nothing. This is the most infuriating thing for me because all of my sidebar locations are cut off. - M4 Pro Macbook Pro and I'm now experiencing stuttering when scrolling. - Why is everything in Spotlight enormous?! Was it always like this and I just seemingly never noticed?

Otherwise, if you 'reduce transparency' and turn off 'tint window background with wallpaper color' (both of which I had done already anyway), things are decidedly nicer visually.

AstroBen2• 10 months ago

I'm not a fan of the forced border radius on maximized (but not full screen) apps

Other than that I tilt slightly towards the 'like it' side. Really like it on iOS

AstroBen2• 10 months ago

update: my god how did they release it in this state. The inconsistencies in the UI.. my dark mode widgets are now white.. different border radiuses by app.. I've found 2 UI bugs in under an hour

docmars• 10 months ago

This update is hideous. I'm already regretting the upgrade. So many design flaws that it's too distracting to use.

mind_orbit• 10 months ago

Not gonna lie, it’s still ugly to me. But same story with every macOS - give it a few weeks and you forget about it and just use your Mac

ChrisRR2• 10 months ago

Isn't this what KDE 4 did like 15 years ago?

jemiluv8• 10 months ago

MacOS updates are probably the best I know of for any unix-like OS. It was one of the main benefits of switching from ubuntu. I just did the update this morning and I'm carrying on with my work like nothing happened. I'm a software developer and run everything from docker to ios/android simulators and vscode. All seems fine.

rducksherlock• 10 months ago

THE CURSOR (╯°益°)╯彡┻━┻

Drblessing• 10 months ago

This new UI is incredible! Great job Apple.

drunkensailor• 10 months ago

I am not entirely sure what made Apple to take on this way. Really doesn't make any sense to anyone. Seqouia was fine and no one was asking for a new UI. People wanted to see more featured on the operating system. Meaningfull changes that can make difference in their lives. Apple seems totally out of ideas at this point and now.

What makes me worried is how much money that they probably spending su supress youtube content creators and the press. Everyone is talking about how Tahoe is good like they are given some sort of script. I have seen a youtuber that talking about the features while the visual glitches are right there in front of him and he was desparetly struggling to not take attention to there.

macOS Tahoe

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