macOS Tahoe windows have different corner radiuses

https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/2026/3/1.html

by robenkleene • 5 months ago

320 205 5 months ago

nikolay2• 5 months ago

It keeps annoying me, too. How can their developers not see this?!

riffraff• 4 months ago

I'm starting to suspect most people at Apple (and Microsoft) just spend time in a browser these days and so they don't notice how the desktop has gone shitty.

pjmlp2• 4 months ago

I won't be public shaming, but on a .NET podcast I just heard of an internal Microsoft project that took 7 years (!), to become public, it was a plain single Assembly .NET library nothing special (1 DLL).

hulitu5• 4 months ago

Then why are they rounding windows corners ? Boredom ?

galad872• 4 months ago

Because that's by design. The windows are meant to have different corner radius, they even explained it at WWDC. Then people forgot and rediscovered it again, like it was some new thing.

I am not saying that it's a good idea to have different corner radius, just that it's nothing new.

mikae1• 4 months ago

they even explained it at WWDC

Did they explain the reasoning?

pjmlp2• 4 months ago

Priorities on what tickets to work on, and Apple being proudly underresourced.

mulmen• 4 months ago

Because they did it on purpose to demonstrate their utter contempt for their users and to show us how wrong we are.

jiehong• 4 months ago

Yep, it’s just ugly IMO

hurfdurf• 4 months ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47320534

robthebrew• 5 months ago

There is a work around if you don't mind lowering the Security settings: https://github.com/aspauldingcode/apple-sharpener

TheFuzzball• 4 months ago

It's annoying, sure, but it's not worth disabling SIP.

unselect5917• 4 months ago

This is one of those stories that I read and I'm like, "Someone wrote an article about that? I am definitely among my people, but I smell a front end developer."

franciscop• 4 months ago

This was one of the very few advantages of moving from Linux => MacOS, that at least most of the software was beautiful and consistent by default. I'm saddened to see that this is not true anymore. Been holding the Tahoe upgrade, and might just keep my macbook air m1 much longer than originally intended because of this.

mrcarrot• 4 months ago

I've started using Linux recently after not touching a desktop distro for 20-odd years, and I was surprised how good both Gnome and KDE look these days.

It certainly doesn't feel like there's a trillion-dollar-company difference between those two and Tahoe.

chang1• 4 months ago

Same! I hadn't touched Linux since 2005-06. I've been trying out Niri and Noctalia. I've been pleasantly surprised how close I'm able to get to match most of what I do on a Mac.

I haven't had this much fun with computers in years. It has certainly helped with my Tahoe grief.

eastbound• 4 months ago

Beautiful, it’s nice, but the polished user experience was the ultimate argument.

- Raising the lid of the laptop and the base wouldn’t stick and fall off on the desk,

- A single-button click,

- A Cmd+C to copy and Ctrl+C for the interruption 7 in the terminal,

But now you have to configure that, yes, activate the right-click; yes, activate the three-finger click (wtf, 3 fingers); yes, activate the swipe-across-desktops on the magic mouse, all those items were selling points, so they should have studied the best behavior and implemented it by default on all deployments. But that requires studies, aesthetics, and a taste that only Steeve Jobs had, otherwise everything becomes an option. That’s right, I’m going to paraphrase Jobs’ argument against the 1990ies Microsoft:

The problem with Apple is they have no taste.

ant6n5• 4 months ago

What I find confusing and unhelpful is how The Apple OS deals with windows. Say if you have 4 safari windows, 3 excel windows, 5 window word documents and a bunch of terminals spread across a bunch of desktops. To me, I have clearly conceptionalized different work streams into desktops.

Apple doesn’t understand and respect that.

Firstly, alt-tab doesn’t consider windows, it considers apps. So if you have multiple browser windows or word windows open, you can’t alt-tab between them. It’s totally confusing. So I install an app just to get the normal alt-tab behavior of other OSs, to alt-tab between windows (mine is called alt-tab, and it’s a bit buggy and slow, I think they all are)

Next, Apple does not respect the multiple desktop boundary. If I click on the safari icon in the dock, it will switch to some seemingly random safari window in some other desktop. If I close any window, it will also run off to some other window of the same app in some other desktop (who came up with that behavior?) when I dismiss an outlook notification, it will run of to another desktop to look at outlook (actually I think this one is Microsoft’s fault, but Apple could probably do something about this one).

The result is that while working, I have trouble staying on the desktop I’m working on, I constantly am getting sent off to some other random desktop, and have to find where I am and where I was.

There must be a better, more productive way to manage windows and desktops.

(Also what’s up with the autocorrect, I had to retype every instance of “I think” in this message, because it insists it should be “o think”)

vbezhenar• 4 months ago

- A Cmd+C to copy and Ctrl+C for the interruption 7 in the terminal,

I really miss that in Linux. That said, some terminals implement smart Ctrl+C which will interrupt if there's no text selected and copy otherwise. But terminal I use (Gnome Console) does not, so I have to press Ctrl+Shift+C to copy text and then I press that in browser and everything exploded because it opens developer tools. So annoying.

dagi3d• 4 months ago

I am in the same boat. I would like to buy a new m5, but being forced to keep Tahoe is preventing me to get it until they fix this clusterfuck

bityard• 4 months ago

I hear KDE Plasma is nice this time of year. Computers should adapt to fit the user, not the other way around.

nullpoint420• 4 months ago

Modern Gnome on Fedora feels like MacOS in a good way. Consistent design

postalcoder• 4 months ago

This one really bothers me. Whenever maximizing or tiling my windows (which is all the time), I see multiple layers of oddly rounded corners.

I think if there's any upside to Tahoe, the grievances may push me into blogging for the first time ever, because I can't keep these to myself.

I actually feel sorry for Apple's developers because there's no way you ship software this bad and inconsistent unless you've been handed a terrible design spec from Dye's team.

edit: On my screen, three layers' corners https://hcker.news/tahoe-corners.png

create-username2• 4 months ago

“Calm down, Postalcoder. We can vent tonight on our blog”

torben-friis3• 4 months ago

There is so much of that in modern apple. Clear issues caused by a seemingly bright idea, but the idea still pushed forward no matter what.

One example that I hate on iOS: the notification/lockscreen curtain is supposed to cover the content as it slides down. That’s what a curtain does, this has been the language for years. Now the curtain is transparent, so it can’t cover the content behind. How does the content disappear then, as you slide the curtain down?

… it doesn’t. Icons do a buggy looking animation crashing toward the user and through the screen, and if it’s an app there is just no transition. You can check by sliding the curtain down slowly and then letting go.

aucisson_masque2• 4 months ago

Yeah I found that surprising too and assumed it was a bug.

I see this kind of trend with apple since big sur. It's not new but it's becoming more obvious with every release.

merlindru4• 4 months ago

seemingly bright idea

i disagree about that one.

im not a UX expert by any means but my first impression at WWDC seeing liquid glass was "holy shit, they pulled that off? i know apple would never compromise on legibility, so... how? there are so many situations where this won't work, and they can't exactly control the content that the buttons are overlaid on top of"

cue my confusion when it was exactly that: an obviously problematic idea implemented with all the obvious flaws showing up

they have largely fixed it now, half a year later, but the liquid glass isn't very liquid anymore. it's frosted. which is fine, but obviously not the original idea they were going for

contrasty backgrounds are fundamentally incompatible with legibility

s3p• 4 months ago

This one has always confused me. And then, to be even more confusing, if you start sliding up slowly, the background does not disappear. It stays this time around. Pull down slowly, no background, just the glass effect. Pull up slowly, still have the background, no glass effect. I guess I don't necessarily hate it, it's more of a neutral thing, but who is deciding these strange things??

stateofinquiry• 4 months ago

"Clear issues caused by a seemingly bright idea, but the idea still pushed forward no matter what." .. well put. It occurs to me that this is the case on the HW front with Apple as well. I remember the butterfly keyboard, the notch, everything glued in and unservicable, the removal of ports like magsafe, ethernet, USB-A... well, at least some of the HW mis-steps have been reversed. We see some movement in that direction from the later versions of Tahoe.

wmeredith• 4 months ago

Steve Jobs may have been the ultimate editor. Jobs was an expert at saying "No" when it came to product decisions. He is sorely missed at modern Apple. It took a while for the cracks to pile up, but the dam has fully broken now.

unfunco• 4 months ago

Are the Apple-owned app windows inconsistent too? I see some inconsistencies but it's generally 3rd party apps mixed with Apple's apps.

isanengineer• 4 months ago

Yes, I noticed this shortly after the update. I forget the specifics, but Apple first party apps definitely have this issue.

coldtea2• 4 months ago

Some do, yes.

embedding-shape• 4 months ago

Are the Apple-owned app windows inconsistent too? I see some inconsistencies but it's generally 3rd party apps mixed with Apple's apps.

Does it matter if it's 3rd party apps or not? Wasn't a huge part of the sell with Apple's own GUI toolkits that all native apps work uniquely, but look familiar and like part of one and the same? The consistency and "all apps look and work great" I seem to recall being one of the "features" people used to tout about OSX.

FWIW; TFA compares the border radius of TextEdit and Calculator, both two Apple apps, built-in nonetheless.

steve19773• 4 months ago

Yes, for example Safari and Terminal have different radiuses. Most of the 1st party apps seem to be the same as Safari, so I guess Terminal didn't fully get "glassed".

bitvoid• 4 months ago

Yes. The article only shows Apple-owned apps: TextEdit and Calculator. And it shows the various border radiuses for different elements straight from XCode's UI builder.

WillAdams2• 4 months ago

The thing which killed me is this is one of the things Windows 10 got _right_ (well, took the path of least resistance) with square corners which made screen grabs look good/work more easily --- I run a utility to get them back in Windows 11 (and have seriously contemplated investigating if removing the glass from my laptop screen and scraping away the paint which obscures the corners is an option to get those pixels back....)

Used to be this sort of thing "just worked" on Mac OS --- you'd think with a diminishing number of UI tool kits/dev tools this sort of thing would get better/more consistent.... always liked "Themes" and this just gives me one more reason to wish that they would come back.

mring33621• 4 months ago

The 3 slightly different corner styles are, honestly, pretty funny.

Or some well-done malicious compliance.

ulfw• 4 months ago

OCD is a real thing

eproxus• 4 months ago

They obviously have been cutting corners.

ncr100• 4 months ago

This made my spin my head right round.

CGMthrowaway• 4 months ago

Assuming the corner radius scales with the size of the window, there is an argument to be made (I won't sign onto it) that the different corners actually give you additional useful information about which window each belongs to, helping you select the right one.

etchalon2• 4 months ago

This feels like one of those "done for backwards compatibility and we tested not doing it and it was worse" things where everyone assumes incompetence over good-faith trade-offs being driven by release schedules.

iknowstuff• 4 months ago

Did the radius need changing

afandian3• 4 months ago

Something needed changing! And the radius was something!

etchalon2• 4 months ago

Does any new design ever need to be done?

jeroenhd• 4 months ago

It's by design. This isn't a bug or a skipped test case.

https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2025/310/?time=4...

Each element is designed with a curvature that sits neatly within the corner radius of its container, in this case the window itself. And this relationship goes both ways. In the new design system, windows now have a softer, more generous corner radius, which varies based on the style of window. Windows with toolbars now use a larger radius, which is designed to wrap concentrically around the glass toolbar elements, scaling to match the size of the toolbar. Titlebar-only windows retain a smaller corner radius, wrapping compactly around the window controls. These larger corners provide a softer feel and elegant concentricity to the window but they can also clip content that sits close to the edge of the window.

troupo• 4 months ago

Design for the sake of design. That entire paragraph reads like a post-hoc justification for a design decision they never thought through

17186274402• 4 months ago

This quote still fits the story, that they tried a consistent radius first, found that it looks ugly for either with or without toolbars and then implemented the current solution.

satGuess• 4 months ago

I hadn’t noticed this before, but now I can’t unsee it. UI inconsistencies like that tend to stand out once someone points them out.

MaxikCZ• 4 months ago

Im gonna go against the grain here, so hold your pitchforks please, but I think its better than if it were consistent. Let me explain:

The author notices that adding a toolbar changes the radius, and to me it makes sense. If theres a toolbar, I know how much I can cut the corners, because the icons in the toolbar are not gonna be in far corner. At the same time, when I am unsure about what type of content might get cut by the corner, I will reduce the cut slightly to give that content more space.

I couldnt care less that one radius is not the same as another, I guess my OCD levels are not that high (yet?).

And I say all of this as someone who dislikes the glass design, and especially hates the small, slowly fading in volume/brightness indicators in the corner replacing the mid screen beautiful instant indicator.

gattilorenz• 4 months ago

So… the moment the Interface Designer in XCode can identify the app only has a single button at the center of a window, the window should be a circle? :)

oniony• 4 months ago

No, because circles are not as cool as squircles.

sgt• 4 months ago

Maybe this is intentional? Either way, doesn't look bad.

steve_adams_862• 4 months ago

I suppose that's subjective, because to me it looks distracting and tacky. I want the window chrome to be present, opinionated, yet consistent and plain. This is one of the many Tahoe-isms that violates the latter two. It's visual noise that detracts from one of the most basic utilities of the UI, which is to simply hold my applications in a regular, cohesive, predictable manner.

Maybe it shouldn't irritate me, but it's the first time I've encountered it in 30 years. I'm all for change and trying new things, but this doesn't feel like progress.

nnwright5• 4 months ago

This 100%. I _like_ new features and new UX when it enhances things or makes them easier to work with. That used to be a huge selling point when purchasing a Mac vs PC, genuine thought and consideration had been given to every single interaction and user impact.

And then ... Apple lost its way. Now when I get a new Mac I spend the better part of a day turning off as much of the pointless eye candy as I can so that I can focus on the task I'm working on, not the distracting UX conventions.

I want a computer, not an iPad with a keyboard. That already exists, and there is a reason I don't have one.

wahnfrieden2• 4 months ago

It is intentional - it was explained at WWDC. And it looks good.

altern82• 4 months ago

OK, Tim Cook, nice try but it looks awful.

ulbu2• 4 months ago

read somewhere that maybe they’re preparing for OLED screens

ant6n5• 4 months ago

How does that argument work?

defraudbah• 4 months ago

which will be even worse so you don't get that angry after years of bad design, lol

hulitu5• 4 months ago

O from OLED is round. That's why they need rounded windows. /s

Y-bar• 4 months ago

All iPhones since the iPhone X (2017), and not the iPhone SE line, has an OLED display. iPad Pro also has OLED.

Reason0773• 4 months ago

There's also been rumours of a new high-end OLED MacBook ("Ultra"?) in the works, possibly this year.

crote• 4 months ago

If it is that crucial, they should add a few pixels of margin around the entire desktop, and randomly shift everything around. Doing only corners and not straight edges, and doing it by a fixed per-app amount, seems a bit silly.

ulbu2• 4 months ago

is there a reason to downvote this?

ant6n5• 4 months ago

you didn't explain what the connection is supposed to be. even when asked.

wahnfrieden2• 4 months ago

Why should the two window varieties have the same corner radius? There's no design analysis here, only conservatism.

AlexandrB2• 4 months ago

The bottom of windows show have no corner radius at all. For most types of content it sacrifices usable space for UI chrome. It also makes resizing harder and scroll bars ugly.

hulitu5• 4 months ago

Because when they overlap, you want to resize the top one.

nnwright5• 4 months ago

Mac OS's UX design has been in free fall the last 5-10 years (ever since the "iOS-ify everything" zeitgeist took root). Sincerely hope that they one day revert back, because the current UX is just godawful for any usecase I can imagine.

Reason0773• 4 months ago

I really hope they roll back some of the more obnoxious and pointless aspects of "Liquid Glass" in macOS 27. And the super-rounded window corners are high up on my list. Looks childish, wastes screen space, causes so many little annoyances...

aucisson_masque2• 4 months ago

I wish too but they can't just back up, that would be a very bad sign for investors.

marxisttemp4• 4 months ago

What is godawful about it? Tahoe is great. Spotlight shortcuts, LLM actions. “Design is how it works.”

Ultimatt2• 4 months ago

Because Spotlight now rarely finds your applications in search so you can't just quick launch anything.... from a launcher widget

nnwright5• 4 months ago

What is godawful about it?

I'm specifically commenting on their UX decisions, and in that respect literally everything. Tahoe, like every major upgrade, is iterative. Very few things that bowl a person over. Somethings are good, some things are "meh". But Liquid Glass is an abomination.

bonesss• 4 months ago

In hindsight, 90s through 2000s, I think we were coming up in an era of consistent UX refinement and improvement that we took for granted, and that improvement got nailed by mobile transitions (first to phone then to pad and now to AR). MS missed the web, then missed the phone. Apple surpassed them on the desktop but they also made the golden goose (iPhone), pulling focus and consistency away.

I assume it’ll rectify in the vast future, but it’s weird to see regressions in core areas because the new hotness has made it so that these gigantic-corps can’t walk and chew gum at the same time.

EdiX• 4 months ago

ever since the "iOS-ify everything" zeitgeist took root

That started in 2010, a bit more than 5-10 years.

nnwright5• 4 months ago

How dare you remind me how old I am ;)

trymas3• 4 months ago

IMHO it started with iOS 7 [1] - year 2013.

Uber flat, you don't know what's a button, what's a text. I dunno if I just adjusted to it or it actually somewhat got better up to iOS/macOS 15. Though with iOS/macOS 26 - it's iOS 7 moment yet again.

NB: not sure about Liquid Glass - though I was recently (and weirdly) recommended to watch iOS 7 trailer on youtube[2]. Comments are overwhelmingly positive. Dunno if it's just people who were kids/teens looking through rose tinted glasses. Though I am not sure anymore, maybe people actually like such designs and it's just HN bubble complaining (IMHO complains here are 110% valid) about nothing. Maybe in 10+ years ordinary guy will praise iOS/macOS 26.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IOS_7

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xzLr7xSr-g

zombot• 4 months ago

They just might do that, and sell it as revolutionary progress.

htk• 4 months ago

"In 2015, Dye became the head of Apple's user interface design team"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Dye

vanc_cefepime• 4 months ago

"Dye also contributed greatly to the design language of iOS 7 in 2013. In 2015, Dye became the head of Apple's user interface design team. In 2022, he played an integral role in the creation of the Dynamic Island, a feature on iPhones and then in 2025, he led the design of Liquid Glass."

Left for Meta in Dec 2025. Hopefully things normalize a bit? Wishful thinking, I suppose.

stein1946• 4 months ago

It just seems to me that that Macbook Neo is basically them telling us that come next year they will unify iOS and MacOS and they are testing the waters at the moment.

All this version alignment, the blurring of "here is a laptop with A processor and iOS" points to that direction.

The errs of Tahoe are basically a result of the rush on that direction

nashashmi3• 4 months ago

I think they have the pathway to merge it right now. But it will cannibalize their sales so they dont want to do that.

merlindru4• 4 months ago

i hope you're wrong. they certainly have seemed to test the waters on many other fronts. the $99/yr notarization fee is now basically required as running unnotarized apps is made hard and scary enough to turn off probably 97% of average users

they also briefly took away the ability to disable gatekeeper per terminal command (now back)

next they wanna launch a touchscreen macbook, presumably this fall

roysting• 4 months ago

I hope they don’t ever do a touchscreen MacBook. They already have every angle of that use case covered far better than the competition; either you get an iPad if you absolutely need to be pawing at a screen, or you have the excellent trackpads that are far and away par excellence. I don’t see how a touch screen on top of also the industry standard for screen quality will in any way improve by having greasy finger trails distorting the tiny pixels.

Maybe I’m missing something. How would a touchscreen MacBook improve on something?

That being said, based on what I’ve been seeing at Apple, I would not be surprised if they did go down that mediocrity route.

selimthegrim• 4 months ago

they also briefly took away the ability to disable gatekeeper per terminal command (now back)

Does this require a Tahoe upgrade?

aurareturn• 4 months ago

If anything, Neo signals they will not merge macOS and iOS.

Why would they if they just released a brand new MacBook?

The SoC is just a way to differentiate from the Air and to keep costs low.

tristor• 4 months ago

I would say the M5 Max MBP, Mac Studio, and the acceptance of Apple hardware as the pinnacle for personal local LLMs are good signs that they are not going to unify iOS and macOS.

mkzet• 4 months ago

I will never upgrade from Sequoia and when I'll have no other options migrate to another laptop!

asimovDev• 4 months ago

I bought a 3k M3 Max mbp just a couple months away from the Tahoe and liquid glass announcement which I am a little miffed about, but it's still an awesome machine I enjoy using while it's on Sequoia. I am really hoping macOS 27 will be this decade's Snow Leopard

nashashmi3• 4 months ago

The rounded corners is such a key element of apple design. They patented rounded corners on the iphone for precisely this reason. They wanted to trademark this but got a design patent instead. And then samsung notoriously copied this one almost verbatim same radius which pissed off apple.

dchftcs• 4 months ago

one almost verbatim same radius which pissed off apple

So this is what they decided to do? Use so many different rounded radius variations that competitors don't know which one to copy?

hulitu5• 4 months ago

The rounded corners is such a key element of apple design.

See Windows 11.

nashashmi3• 4 months ago

Windows corner is a lot sharper/smaller than the apple corner.

donatj• 4 months ago

Containers with different contents look different?

I don't see the big deal. That seems like a reasonable design choice. Make nice rounded corners when content allows, but rectangle them up as needed?

Seems like a nice adaptive design choice.

Honestly making different apps slightly more visually identifiable in a sea of sameness doesn't seem like a big deal.

jacobsyc• 4 months ago

don't know why this bothers me but apple is losing attention to detail

douglee650• 4 months ago

Feels sloppy (is sloppy) but I think the idea is to prioritize OS unification for hardware reasons, and UX across product suite — devices can share data, apps, screens, everything.

iainmerrick5• 4 months ago

I'm seeing a lot of comments here about macOS/iOS unification, but I think people are getting worked up about nothing.

What do macOS window styles have to do with iOS? iOS (mostly) doesn't have windows!

What does the MacBook Neo have to do with iOS, other than coincidentally using some of the same components? Maybe Apple decided to make a cheaper Mac because they thought people might want to buy a cheaper Mac.

They are trying to use a common design language across all their devices, sure. But you would hardly expect them to do the opposite! They might try to make a hybrid tablet/laptop or something at some point, sure, but none of their current moves point inevitably in that direction. Except maybe for software notarization, but that has nothing to do with window corners or cheaper laptops.

zer0zzz• 4 months ago

I actually really like that certain windows have a different corner radius. It wraps around the chrome of the app properly.

If you made it this far, know I am totally messing with you. It really is unnerving.

blackhaz2• 4 months ago

Apple is no longer about Jobs' "simplicity as the ultimate sophistication". It feels like a bunch of kids with no proper design education competing for the security of their salaries. Apple is dead without Steve. The company has no focal point. They're running solely on the inertia from Mac OS X and the first generations of the iPhone.

interpol_p• 4 months ago

That's a pretty extreme take. I've been using the Mac since about 2001. I like Tahoe and a well designed Tahoe app can look really nice on the platform. There are bugs, inconsistencies and other issues, but it doesn't feel that different than many previous macOS / OS X releases

mpalmer• 4 months ago

You've been a Mac user since the original candy iMacs and you don't see the company design ethos slipping in the last five years?

ai-calcium• 4 months ago

Finally, the update we've all been waiting for

iainmerrick5• 4 months ago

I dislike Tahoe too, but this particular thing is not new.

I just did an image search for "classic macos" and one of the first hits was from https://www.versionmuseum.com/history-of/classic-mac-os. Look at those System 1 screenshots, from 42(!) years ago -- round corners on Puzzle and Calculator, square corners on Note Pad and Control Panel! No consistency at all, isn't it infuriating?

afandian3• 4 months ago

Puzzle and Calculator were Desk Accessories (DAs), a special kind of app.

Some cool details here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desk_accessory

Like Tahoe, it was deliberate and there's an explanation for the difference.

But I do wonder if people at the time felt the same way.

iainmerrick5• 4 months ago

That led me to https://www.folklore.org/Desk_Ornaments.html which is a very fun read. Interesting to note that the UI style of the DAs is actually not consistent at all, some have round corners and some don't.

I particularly like this Bill Atkinson tidbit at the end:

Bill Atkinson complained to me that it was a mistake to allow users to specify their own desktop patterns, because it was harder to make a nice one than it looked, and led directly to ugly desktops. [...] So he made MacPaint allocate a window that was the size of the screen when it started up, and filled it with the standard 50% gray pattern, making his own desktop covering up the real one, thus protecting the poor users from their rash esthetic blunders, at least within the friendly confines of MacPaint.

(He was totally right, making your own desktop patterns was fun but the standard checkerbard was far and away the best choice.)

bestham• 4 months ago

“Well actually” in System 1 and later Classic macOS the puzzle and the calculator are ”Desk Accessories” that is applications that can run simultaneously as other apps, even though the operating system does not support multitasking. The rounded corners are there to distinguish them from the current running application.

iainmerrick5• 4 months ago

Yep, I'm aware. Just like Tahoe, it's intentional and there's a rationale behind it. It may or may not be immediately obvious depending on the user, and people may or may not like the way it looks.

lapcat4• 4 months ago

this particular thing is not new.

Article author here. I think the quoted claim is somewhat misleading. There are at least two different ways to interpret a UI feature as "not new":

1) The feature has been in the operating system all along.

2) Something analogous existed 40 years ago and then disappeared long ago.

You're referring to 2, not 1.

The only reason I chose Calculator app for my screenshot is that its window is very small, which allowed me to make a small screenshot, because people may be reading the blog post on small phone screens. In other ways, admittedly, Calculator is not a great example, because its window is not actually resizable, and thus it's not the type of window that you would normally place in the corners of your screen, like a resizable document window.

Rounded corners on a "widget" type of app are not as objectionable. As other commenters have noted, the calculator in "classic" Mac was a special Desk Accessory. In contrast, on Tahoe, the varying corner radii affect ordinary document-based apps.

Consider Mac OS X 10.0 Cheetah. The top of the windows had rounded corners, but the bottom did not! https://512pixels.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/10-0-Cheeta...

TextEdit, for example, did not start to have rounded bottom corners until Mac OS X 10.7 Lion, which was itself much maligned for bringing the iPhone UI to Mac.

iainmerrick5• 4 months ago

Thanks for the thoughtful and detailed response!

You're right, what I had in mind was 2, although a bit more general; I think there have been similar kinds of inconsistency in the Mac UI since the beginning, in various forms, almost always intentional.

So I think it would be wrong simply to say "the UI has gone a cliff, they've just thrown away their own HMI guidelines." You can certainly dislike what they've done (and I do dislike it!) but they at least have a somewhat logical goal in mind -- in this case, making the corners neatly fit various different kinds of window content.

Having said all that, there are also some real bugs and unintentional glitches, like scroll bars and other widgets not fitting correctly. I'd agree that seems to be happening more often in recent years, so their quality control has gone downhill.

tomovo• 4 months ago

The justification by Apple is that it keeps the concentricity between window corner and the red/green/yellow window controls. Which, as you may notice, it does.

It's wrong though, because the window is the higher element in the hierarchy (container) and should not be affected by what is inside. It creates a larger inconsistency than the "consistency" it supposedly brings.

WillAdams2• 4 months ago

Agreed.

A better solution would be to adjust the sizing/placement of the window controls (and allow the hit area to include the original placement maybe?).

lapcat4• 4 months ago

Here's a Finder window screenshot from Mac OS X 10.0 Cheetah: https://512pixels.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/10-0-Cheeta...

Notice two things:

1) The window chrome with traffic lights and title is entirely separate from the toolbar, not unified with the toolbar.

2) The top of the window is rounded, but the bottom of the window is not!

I think the old design was superior for several reasons, one of which is that it made the windows much easier to drag around the screen. In any case, though, even if there's an argument about concentricity and window controls, it makes no sense that the bottom of the window has the same corner radius as the top when the toolbar is only at the top.

steve19773• 4 months ago

IIRC, you could even "roll up" the window into the top window chrome, with that transparent pill button on the right.

create-username2• 4 months ago

It’s a great desktop environment. I wish I could install it. I’m trying to install the CDE on a parallel’s FreeBSD VM but it doesn’t relaunch after rebooting it.

trymas3• 4 months ago

my other comment on this post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47321852

Traffic light buttons were already equidistant to the edge of the window. Now they are trying to center circles in squircles[1], breaking window edges and draggability, etc.

It creates a larger inconsistency than the "consistency" it supposedly brings.

That's why I am baffled (as many commenters here) - how did this went out all the way to release, instead of ending as an experiment at design floor.

[1] parent comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47321065

revolvingthrow• 4 months ago

It is difficult to put into words how much I dislike macos 26. I held out on upgrading for a long time since there were so many horror stories, but to my surprise both iOS and ipadOS 26 aren’t really any different than 18. Maybe because you don’t really do any proper work on it? The graphical differences aren’t anything major when the apps fill the whole viewport anyway.

But macOS? Good lord. I can only hope 27 will unfuck things somewhat, there are so many small annoyances and all of them add to a constant sense of unhappiness throughout the day. I’m really tempted to downgrade back to Sequoia. At least the M4 will be good enough for years if this truly is the new path Apple will take.

whywhywhywhy• 4 months ago

I know a lot of people have brought up the corner radius but the left aligned title is such a weird step backwards.

mohsen1• 4 months ago

They missed some other type of windows like Activity Monitor graphs. Those are even sharper corners!

pi-err• 4 months ago

This specific design decision makes so little sense, really curious on how it got approved. It's not an accident or a miss, since the variable radius got quite heavily promoted during WWDC.

Hopeful they don't wait 7 years to change stance.

iamcalledrob• 4 months ago

This is an issue on Linux too, especially when Wayland is used and applications are responsible for drawing their own chrome. Ugh.

HOWEVER, due to the open nature of the platform, you can install an extension to clean this up. Now, all my windows have identical corner radii, strokes, shadows etc. My Linux desktop is, surprisingly, more consistent now than macOS in this regard.

https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/7048/rounded-window-c...

kombine• 4 months ago

The only question remains, why our community (programmers and scientists) continues funding this completely voluntarily?

mfld• 4 months ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory

Synaesthesia2• 4 months ago

Today when cropping an image in Preview.app on Tahoe I ran into an issue where you can't use the bottom of the crop selection rectangle because the rounded corner of the window blocks it.

traeregan• 4 months ago

Pinch (or CMD + minus) zoom out slightly as a workaround.

Synaesthesia2• 4 months ago

Yeah I came right. Just a minor annoyance.

I'm one of the people who actually mostly likes Tahoe. Funny to see how new versions of MacOS always get piled on, in such a groupthink manner.

For me personally, once in used to the new UI, going back seems crude.

hooch• 4 months ago

Sequoia is the new Snow Leopard

gnarlouse2• 4 months ago

A few weeks ago I was thinking about starting https://theghostofsteve.com, where users can come and post their experiences about about Apple devices in 2026. Users would like/dislike with "its genius" or "its shit".

The assumption being that the majority of reactions would be "its shit."

gnarlouse2• 4 months ago

On iOS, there are four little white corners beneath my keyboard when im typing on HN. Because HW & SW didnt coordinate on the size of the keyboard rounding vs the new iPhone 17.

Just so, so sloppy. I'm supposed to trust a multi trillion dollar company with my privacy?

kaizenb• 4 months ago

This is driving me crazy for some time. Worst with Calendar. (don't looook)

mhb• 4 months ago

As jarring as "radiuses"? I guess not.

lapcat4• 4 months ago

FYI I just published a follow-up, "The evolution of Mac app window corners": https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/2026/3/4.html

unconed• 4 months ago

This article's timeline is mostly accurate, but contains a few inaccuracies:

- Unified toolbar and titlebar dates from much earlier... it was 10.4, not 10.7.

- The brushed metal look was supposed to be applied to "appliance-like" apps as opposed to "document-like" apps... But Apple was never able to stick to that rule themselves.

There are a few design ideas that always turn out to be bad when implemented, but which designers seem to have to learn the hard way. Transparency is the biggest one, but I guess so is excessive rounding now.

nxpnsv• 4 months ago

Here's a controversial take. It doesn't bother me at all.

moi2388• 4 months ago

The rounded corners are dumb in general. When you maximise the window, you have rounded corners meaning you see the background behind them near the menu bar and bottom. Because the screen has no rounded corners.

When you maximise, make it have straight corners (at the very least at the top), this is just ridiculous

oompydoompy74• 4 months ago

I’ve come around to Tahoe. Liquid Glass isn’t my favorite, but the tinted appearance setting largely fixes most of my gripes. I suspect this will become the default. They just need to keep tweaking and it will be fine. Most users that don’t lurk on tech forums really enjoy the look.

macOS Tahoe windows have different corner radiuses

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