Make macOS consistently bad unironically

by speckx • 4 months ago

539 363 4 months ago

post-it• 4 months ago

I can't say I've had any issues with the corners, or noticed any difference after upgrading to macOS 26. But this is neat.

rafram3• 4 months ago

This isn’t a part of macOS 26 that bothers me, honestly. I don’t spend a lot of time stacking windows and measuring their corners.

dilap• 4 months ago

i use a an auto-layout tool, so having windows stacked on top of each other is super-common for me, and the fact that they all peak thru each other (like the screenshot in the blog) looking absolutely terrible drives me crazy

JellyPlan• 4 months ago

I don't either, the only thing that annoys me is it's much harder to resize windows, so the usability is worse

mabedan• 4 months ago

To me it's a little like the situation with charging the Mighty Mouse. It's become a meme to post a picture of it on its side being charged, but if you own one it doesn't really matter, as you charge it once a month for 15 minutes while you're at lunch.

There are things which definitely do bother me like the Liquid Glass, but the window corners really don't bother me. And I'm into design and constantly inspect parts of ui with Digital Color Meter app.

yborg• 4 months ago

You have a truly Magic Mouse if yours charges in 15 minutes. In my experience, it is hours to charge from zero, which until I put an always-running monitor in the menu bar for the mouse battery level is what you are guaranteed to have since there is no other indicator of mouse battery level.

I used to roll my eyes at the complaints until I actually had one of these, and it is appallingly bad engineering. Especially since the previous design, which was functionally identical just needed a 10 second battery swap.

kibwen2• 4 months ago

In other words, MacOS is fine as long as you're undiscerning and not at all detail-oriented. Imagine telling Steve Jobs that this was the prevailing attitude needed to make using a Mac bearable.

rafram3• 4 months ago

These inconsistent corner radii are actually intentional, FWIW - the radius depends on the window’s function (main, utility, etc.). I don’t think it looks great, but there’s no lack of attention to detail.

rc_kas2• 4 months ago

I truly hate it, so so much. Mentally I'm already planning out what OS I'm going to migrate to.

LtWorf3• 4 months ago

Try both gnome and kde if you come on linux, and remember that on kde you can customize anything you don't like.

pram• 4 months ago

I'm not a fan of the look in Tahoe (especially Apple Music wtf happened there) but most of it I can totally ignore, and don't even notice anymore. Except for the tabs. I have Sequoia and Tahoe machines, and the tabs in Tahoe are so unbelievably bad in comparison. Like this ugly pill shape. I rarely hear this get brought up but they're astonishingly ugly, worse than the previous design in every way.

hbn5• 4 months ago

You're not alone, I was calling out how ugly Safari is in Tahoe a few weeks ago!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47282085#47310011

Probably my least favorite redesign in the whole update. Why is everything an oval? It's just bizarre.

skrrtww• 4 months ago

I'm not sure if these selectors are hit in SwiftUI or not.

gnarlouse3• 4 months ago

One of my claude code projects was going to be "theghostofsteve", a social media platform where people post things they love and hate about appleOS things. Likes/Dislikes would be "genius/it's shit". And in all likelihood, the platform would surface that most users think "it's shit."

The platform would aggregate by major/minor version, and you could see in totality whether the current version of macOS/iOS would make Steve proud of miserable.

Ultimately I decided against it, for defamation/cease-and-desist reasons, and not wanting to find out. But it needs to exist.

ykl• 4 months ago

Wouldn’t “insanely great”/“it’s shit” be more Steve than “genius”/“it’s shit”?

gnarlouse3• 4 months ago

Sure, you could use whatever binarism you want

Joel_Mckay2• 4 months ago

Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were a team, and Jobs would regularly tell people their work was "shit" if it didn't make sense.

Apple traditionally burned out its talent, and is no longer structured to follow Jobs original vision. There is a lot of goodwill with the users, but just like Sony/HP/IBM/Microsoft/Sun it can't last forever. The process-people entrench themselves, and ruin everything... just as Jobs predicted. =3

gnarlouse3• 4 months ago

What does Woz have to do with it

dcrazy3• 4 months ago

FYI, the article incorrectly claims that SIP just controls write access to /. It does way more than that.

lapcat2• 4 months ago

I don't see where it says that. Can you provide a direct quote?

dcrazy3• 4 months ago

Footnote 2.

_jab• 4 months ago

Between the rounded corners that don't reach the edges of the viewport, and the behavior when opening a new app for the first time, it feels like Mac's UI is optimized around the assumption most users won't expand windows to fill the whole screen, but rather leave them half-sized somewhere in the middle.

Does anyone actually do this? Especially for heavy-duty applications like my web browser and IDE, this has always felt like a bizarre assumption to me.

doubled1123• 4 months ago

Probably not the norm, but I use a large 4K monitor and no scaling.

I haven’t maximized a window in years. They look ridiculous like that. Especially web pages with their max width set so the content is 1/4 the screen and 3/4 whitespace.

amelius4• 4 months ago

Without scaling, those rounded corners look not so rounded.

alex_c• 4 months ago

I use a 40” 4K screen.

If I ever accidentally full screen a window, and it’s not in night mode, I am instantly blinded by a wall of mostly white empty background!

ryandrake• 4 months ago

I have three 27" screens (iMac in the center and two thunderbolt displays on each side) and I use most of my "daily driver" applications fullscreen (single monitor). So, things like Xcode, VSCode, web browsers, mail, Quicken, Spreadsheets and Word Processing, and so on. This gives me usually at most 3 things to do at once. Occasionally, for smaller apps, like calculator, messages and so on, I won't fullscreen them. But for my main workflows, it's fullscreen all the way.

My actual biggest pet peeve with this setup is the vast number of web sites that deliberately choose to limit their content to a tiny column centered horizontally in my browser, with 10cm of wasted whitespace on each side.

amarant5• 4 months ago

I too have a huge monitor. How anyone can use one without a tiling window manager is beyond me

eightys3v3n• 4 months ago

I've seen half a dozen Mac users and none of them maximized the window very often. They usually had a mishmash of like 12 windows open and randomly all over the screen. Then they used the Alt-Tab to get between them. Basically wherever it opened is where it stayed.

eszed• 4 months ago

This is me. I tend to order projects onto their own desktops[0], each with several app windows open. With an external monitor there's plenty of space, and... Yeah: with command-tab thoroughly committed to muscle memory it usually doesn't matter much if they end up on top of each other. If it does, I'll put them next to each other. Stickies usually go out of my eye-line to the left side of the screen, so I'll keep that otherwise clear.

I sometimes maximize something - other than video calls: those are always full-size - on the laptop screen, but otherwise not at all.

I can see how a full-screen IDE makes sense, but I don't use one, so I always want a couple of terminal sessions running alongside my editor.

There are vanishingly few contexts in which I find full-screen helpful. Not criticizing anyone else, or recommending my way of working, but it's what works for me.

[0] I would like better support for desktop management: naming and shortcutting, particularly. Years ago I tried some (I think it was Alfred, or a predecessor) add-on that promised that, but it was super flaky. Does anything exist that works well?

akdev1l4• 4 months ago

Yes MacOS breaks down the user until they give up on window management

wmil• 4 months ago

Window management is one thing that MacOS has long been weirdly bad at.

I think there's a conflict between the users who use it on studio displays and users who use it on 13 inch laptops. The Mac team at apple won't pick a side or come up with two solutions.

That's not completely true, they've been pushing swipe between fullscreen apps for a while.

But that doesn't make any sense on an iMac.

So the recommendation from pro users is to use Alfred to manage windows.

Spunkie2• 4 months ago

Maybe this explains some of the bizarre questions I've gotten from mac designers.

The other day I was explaining to one that their designs fixed width looks silly once it got up towards 4k resolutions. But the designers main concern was if people actually used full screen browsers on 4k monitors and if there was any point in thinking about the design at that resolution.

There are plenty of times I enjoy have 2 browsers side by side of even 4 browsers in a square, and being able to do that is one of the benefits of having a 4k monitor. But without a doubt the majority of my time is spent with a full size browser window open, and I observe the same from all the other windows/linux users I manage that use a 4k monitor.

In service of keeping this post simple, I've ignore system display/ui scaling. But still... the question/assumption from the mac designer completely blew my mind.

LtWorf3• 4 months ago

That's because windows management on osx is terrible.

dbatten• 4 months ago

it feels like Mac's UI is optimized around the assumption most users won't expand windows to fill the whole screen, but rather leave them half-sized somewhere in the middle

IMO, this has been their assumption for years, and it actually turned me off when I tried getting used to Mac circa 2006-2007. Coming from Windows at the time, I just couldn't get over a weird anxiety that my application window wasn't maximized, because it didn't look like it completely snapped into the screen corners.

Now, using 34-inch ultrawide monitors almost exclusively, I never maximize anything... it'd be unusable.

nine_k• 4 months ago

I constantly stretch windows to maximum height.

I maximize windows of graphics and video editors.

ffsm8• 4 months ago

As a 38" ultrawide owner myself, I use vscode or intellij maximized most of the day, depending on the codebase I'm

Browsers only ever get maximized to the left/right half screen for me too

Which is something macos should really improve on though, the ux is pretty bad compared to Windows and Linux there

bobthepanda• 4 months ago

While I don't maximize anything on a monitor that wide, I do appreciate Window's snap to half/quarter functionality for monitors that wide, and I wish Mac had the same ability natively.

wingmanjd• 4 months ago

I just installed Kubuntu last week so I could get the additional shift-drag targets to split my 34" ultrawide into 3 sections, or bump to the edges for the half filled.

anal_reactor• 4 months ago

Brother, I have 42 inch 16:9 and I always maximize everything.

leptons4• 4 months ago

Ultrawide without a virtual screen manager is a missed opportunity. Maximize window is still very useful with virtual screen areas on large screens.

moron4hire4• 4 months ago

Yeah, anything that has an MDI metaphor going on should be ran fullscreen. Otherwise, what's the point? If the idea is to use the OS desktop space as the application window organizational space, then don't let people make apps that have different document panes.

This goes towards something that I've felt for a little while: at some point in time around the early 2000s, operating system vendors abdicated their responsibility to innovate on interaction metaphors.

What I mean is, things like tabbed interfaces got popularized by Web browsers, not operating systems. Google Chrome and Firefox had to go out of their way to render tabs; there was no support built into the OS.

The OS interfaces we have now are not appreciably different from what we had in the early 2000s. It seems absurd that there has been almost no progress in the last 25 years. What change there has been feels like it could have been accomplished in user-space, plus it doesn't get applied consistently across applications, thus making it feel like not a core part of the OS.

MacOS in particular was supposed to an emphasis on the desktop environment being the space of window and document level manipulation, as exemplified by the fact that applications did not have their own menubars. All application menu bars were integrated together at the top of the screen. Why should it be any different with any other UI organizational feature? Should not apps merely be a single window pane, accomplishing a single thing, and you combine multiple apps together to get something akin to an IDE out of them?

Well, I don't know if they should be. But they can't. Because OS vendors never provided a good means to do it. Even after signalling they wanted it.

fwip• 4 months ago

I seem to remember Windows XP using tabs in a lot of its settings pages - and possibly earlier versions as well.

kelvinjps10• 4 months ago

I'm not sure if I understood correctly but i3 has tabbed windows and no window titles

anthk2• 4 months ago

Opera had tabs. Tabbed under Unix had tabs. Dillo had tabs. TCL/TK had damn tabs in 1997.

thesuitonym3• 4 months ago

I actually feel the opposite? The current green button action not only makes the window fill the entire screen, it also hides the menu bar AND creates a new virtual desktop and hides all of my other apps. And it seems to me that's what the majority of people want.

Meanwhile, I want to use my graphical, mutli-window preemptive multitasking operating system to, you know, use multiple applications at the same time.

RussianCow• 4 months ago

I honestly can't say I've ever seen a non-techie expand a window to full screen using the green button on macOS. I'm not sure why, because in theory, I agree with you.

akdev1l4• 4 months ago

It does weird things in multi monitor because dragging a window on top of the newly “maximized” window somehow does not work

jiehong2• 4 months ago

One issue with windows maximised with the green button is if you have more than 1 window of the same app: you might alt-tab to the app, but cmd-` is not switching to the other window of the same (while id does if not maximised.

cpuguy83• 4 months ago

Yeah this is the assumption, even pre-OSX. I won't claim to know the majority of mac users, especially not since the large uptick in the 2010's... but it seems, in my experience, very much the norm to not maximize windows and I wouldn't be surprised if people who do maximize are mostly Windows converts (not that there's anything wrong with that).

cdaringe• 4 months ago

It’s painful for me to watch senior engineers drag windows around and resize, hunt and peck for what they’re looking for. I suppose that’s what an emacs user may think of me when I move code around, but I suppose such things aren’t critical for overall productivity

Reason077• 4 months ago

It depends very much on the size of the screen. On a small 13” laptop screen? Sure, you’re going to be running apps full-screen a lot of the time. On a big desktop monitor? No, except for games and playing movies, I’ll almost never expand an app to fill the entire screen.

al_borland7• 4 months ago

Last time I had to work on just my laptop screen (16”), I actually found Stage Manager pretty useful. On a larger screen, or for more casual use, I do not.

mulmen• 4 months ago

In the office I have dual 24" monitors. At home I have a single 38" ultrawide. In desktop mode I almost never have one app taking up my full screen. In portable mode yeah, all full screen. The only exception is IDEs which get their own spaces and are basically self-contained tiling window managers anyway.

pdpi• 4 months ago

I do this on macOS much more than I do on Windows, yes. MacOS flows a lot better if you're willing to adopt its window management style.

As you said, browser and IDE are the big exceptions, plus things like Lightroom or my 3d printer's slicer.

Even VS Code usually lives as a smaller window when I'm using more a text editor rather than as an IDE.

akdev1l4• 4 months ago

The window management style of Mac OS is complete chaos imo

I have been using it for years and I just gave up entirely on managing anything and if I zoom out to see all my windows it looks like the freaking Milky Way from windows I forgot

crest• 4 months ago

Yes. I think the assumptions are made by people with two displays of at least 32" and ≥4K resolution.

al_borland7• 4 months ago

I think it’s more of a carryover from the original Mac’s in the 80s.

Trying to maximize a window, even 23 years ago when I first moved to OS X, was a completely manual process. It was designed around windows, not walls. And screens were much smaller and lower res back then.

Latty• 4 months ago

People do this, yeah. Even on Windows I've been over someone's shoulder walking them through something and it drives me nuts they work in a tiny window in a random part of the screen.

al_borland7• 4 months ago

macOS only recently got an option to make windows fill the screen. For most of history what most people would assume is a maximize button (the green one) was actually a zoom button. It sized the window to what the OS thought was appropriate for the content (to the best of my knowledge and experience with it).

Apple then made things go full screen, but in a special full screen mode, so macOS worked more like the iPad.

By the time they added a way to maximize windows in the way Windows does, the idea of maximizing an app has largely worked its way out of my workflow. It was always too much trouble, and I find very few apps where it provides much benefit. Web browsers, for example, often end up with a lot of useless whitespace on the sides of the page, so they work better as a smaller window on a widescreen display. In an IDE, it really depends on what’s being worked on and if text wrapping is something I want. Ideally lines wouldn’t get so long that this is a problem.

With the way macOS manages windows, I often find it easiest to have my windows mostly overlapped with various corners poking out, so I can move between app windows in one click. The alternative is bringing every window of an app to the front (with the Dock or cmd+tab), or using Mission Control for everything, neither of which feels efficient.

I could install some 3rd party window management utility, I suppose, but in the long run, it felt easier to just figure out a workflow that works on the stock OS, so I can use any system without going through a setup process to customize everything. It’s the same reason I never seriously got into alternative keyboard layouts.

hbn5• 4 months ago

You can double click the grab handle area of a window (which is less obvious than ever in Tahoe) and it'll fill the window to the display.

Except Safari, which just fills out the window's height vertically. Kinda weird to make an exception like that but I don't hate it, because I generally use Safari for reading, and shrinking the browser's width forces lines of text to not get too long if the website's styling isn't setting that manually.

achandlerwhite• 4 months ago

by only recently do you mean 15 years ago with Lion?

flomo2• 4 months ago

Right, Macs always have had the premise of "spacial window management" (or that's what Siracusa called it), so that's probably how you are 'supposed to' do it.

Full Screen Mode was their answer to maximize, going back many years now (10.7).

otikik• 4 months ago

rectangle [1] is pretty much essential for me because of this. I use only a few keypresses (maximize window, move to one of the halves of the screen horizontally) but that is enough. My mouse very rately interacts with the borders of any window, or those buttons. I had to click on the green one that you mentioned in order to see what it did (yuck).

[1] https://rectangleapp.com/

stevage• 4 months ago

I use a third party tool with shortcut keys that cycle between: full height, left half of screen; full height, right half of screen; full height, full width.

It works well for me, makes it easy to get two things side by side without wasting space.

hedora2• 4 months ago

Note that fullscreen breaks command tab. Create two safari windows (or FF, Chrome, doesn't matter - except that Apple shipped safari, so we'd expect that to be able to render a window to the screen correctly).

Full screen one. Switch to the other. Now, use just cmd-tab and cmd-` to get to the full screen safari window (cmd-` switches between windows in the same application, which is literally never the right thing, but I digress).

For what it's worth, the third party tool 'altTab' mostly fixes this.

Bonus MacOS UI bug: I had to exit altTab to confirm they still hadn't fixed cmd-`. When I re-opened it using cmd-space, finder defaulted to the version in ~/Downloads instead of /Applications, then read me the riot act about untrusted software trying to change accessibility settings.

One more thing: I'm still not using MacOS 26, so all my complaints are about the "last known good" release.

raydev• 4 months ago

It's been more than 10+ years that I've been able to Option+Click the green button to fill the screen. Works for any app, and always has, unless that app explicitly disallows resizing. That's not recent.

FroshKiller• 4 months ago

I use a MacBook and a Mac mini personally, and I do not generally maximize any application that isn't implicitly a full-screen experience (e.g. a video player or a computer game).

peacebeard• 4 months ago

Yes, all the time. I understand that if you have a setup where you do everything in your IDE you could reasonably leave it full screen all the time and I get why that works for some people. I'm not one of those folks and I use separate IDE, terminal, browsers, and other windows and use window management to allow myself to see multiple of them at the same time and switch between them by clicking on what I want.

Also just want to be 100% clear: Tahoe is bad and I hate the changes and I don't think the OS should prefer one way of working over the other. I just hope it's helpful to explain my perspective.

freetime22• 4 months ago

I use Rectangle [1] for window management. I only use three shortcuts: full screen, left half of the screen, and right half of the screen. My editors and Chrome are always running in one of these modes.

But for other apps where interactions tend to be brief like Finder, Messages, Notes, Music, etc - yeah I don't usually expand them to full screen.

[1] https://rectangleapp.com/

9dev• 4 months ago

Hey, workflow buddy! I do the exact same. I feel seriously handicapped without these shortcuts.

paustint• 4 months ago

Exact same for me - but I also use the shortcut to move windows between monitors.

I use cmd+tab and cmd+~ a ton also as I have multiple browser profiles and windows open and usually a few instances of ide with different projects.

And always close tabs with cmd+w and apps with cmd+q to avoid running apps with no visible windows.

I feel super productive with this workflow, never need to fiddle with manual resize.

When someone is screen sharing and they have a bunch of random sized windows it drives me crazy.

sarmasamosarma• 4 months ago

I never work in full screen. It’s bizarre to me that people do. I don’t need full screen for anything, even Pycharm.

qingcharles• 4 months ago

I've always disliked MacOS because it is so janky about maximizing windows.

I have a 39" ultrawide and I keep every window maximized. I have OCD about this. I can't stand things all layered on top of each other. I like to focus on one screen at a time.

Chromium browsers have been rolling out split tabs and I use that on a couple of tasks where I'm constantly cutting/pasting between sites, but that's about it.

janwirth• 4 months ago

I just use yabai...

wryoak• 4 months ago

It’s very rare that I maximize an application. I’m always stacking. However, I don’t think it’s an optimizing assumption: I am frequently fighting with the window manager as I rearrange my windows and it automatically maximizes them because I got too close to an edge of the screen

In general my browser is dead center or slightly to the right so I can access my other windows (terminal, throw away text editor, etc) easily where command tab is insufficient (when I have multiple terminal windows, eg)

1e1a• 4 months ago

Turn off System Settings -> Desktop & Dock -> Windows -> "Drag windows to menu bar to fill screen"

alpaca1288• 4 months ago

I am frequently fighting with the window manager as I rearrange my windows and it automatically maximizes them because I got too close to an edge of the screen

Strange, I constantly get annoyed by how slow and unresponsive the Mac's tiling is when dragging windows to the edge. At the top it has at least half a second delay for no reason. But at least the newest version now has caught up with Windows 7.

stalfosknight• 4 months ago

Maximizing everything whether the document fills the screen or not is very Windows user behavior. macOS is not meant to be used that way.

brooke2k• 4 months ago

for the longest time I never did this, but then I got a gigantic 4K screen, and I realized that it was almost giving me vertigo having apps like my IDE fullscreened, because I literally have to move my head in order to look everywhere.

so in response I changed my windowing strategy to having a set of windows floating around at exactly the size I want them, and then the advantage of the enormous screen is just how many windows I can have open at once

that being said, I use KDE not MacOS, and 90% of Mac users I'd guess are on laptops, so using this strategy sounds completely insane to me. On laptops I still default to fullscreening or "half-screening" most apps.

daemonologist• 4 months ago

Yes! After many years of using only linux or windows machines, I was assigned an iMac at an internship and noticed the friction with fullscreening things. I decided not to fight it and spent the next year happily working in little windows and making frequent use of the "mission control" gesture.

However, after the internship I went right back to fullscreen/window tiling in linux, so I can't say I really preferred it. Even now as a Gnome user with a big monitor and magic trackpad on my desk - which gives me ~equal access to either approach - I fullscreen everything.

bombcar• 4 months ago

I don't know what it is, but fullscreen on Mac (even dock-showing "fullish screen") feels wrong in a way that fullscreen on Windows/Linux feels "right".

kogir• 4 months ago

MacOS assumes you won’t full screen every app because all of them ship with large enough, high enough resolution monitors that full screening a single app is a waste of valuable space. Unlike on cheap laptops with 1080p screens.

I suppose you could splurge for a Mac desktop and then get the cheapest, smallest screen possible, but I hope it’s rare.

kellpossible2• 4 months ago

writing this reply on a 13 inch macbook air...

LeifCarrotson• 4 months ago

I run 27" 4k and a 34" ultra wide monitors on my desktops, and my main laptop is a P16S with a 16" 3840x2400 OLED typically docked to one of those screens when not on the go, and I almost never use windows that are not snapped to fullscreen or at the very least to halves or quarters. "Large enough" scarcely applies to a MacBook Air or Neo with a 13" display, and I bet a TON of those get docked to cheap 21, 24, and 27" 1080p screens.

I'd like to be able to snap things to the middle third, especially on the ultrawides.

Only little calculator widgets, property panels, and modal dialogs that get immediately closed after use don't get maximized or at least docked to fill some region. I hate the cluttered, layered feeling of having a bunch of non-full-screen windows overlapping, I want to have a dozen apps open and making optimal use of the available display area.

alpaca1288• 4 months ago

full screening a single app is a waste of valuable space

Any space not used for the task I'm focused on is wasted. For me the actual problem is that switching apps/windows is too slow because of UI animations.

karlgkk• 4 months ago

Mac's UI is optimized around the assumption most users won't expand windows to fill the whole screen, but rather leave them half-sized somewhere in the middle

The assumption is that the window should be the size of the content of the document inside.

It turns out that this approach works well for many applications, especially what the mac was designed for in the 80s and 90s. And it's horrid for modern "pro" applications.

donatj• 4 months ago

Bring back the floating toolbars of the early 2000's and it'd be fine.

joemi• 4 months ago

When I'm using my macbook's screen, I usually expand a browser window to fill the whole screen -- it's a 13" screen so not using the whole thing makes things feel small. But most of the time my computer is plugged into an larger external monitor (20-something inches, maybe 27?), and there I don't expand any windows to fill the whole screen. I like having separate not-full-screen windows which partially (or mostly) overlap.

Somewhat relatedly, we use Windows at work, and it drives me crazy when I hop on a computer after someone's been using it and they have every single thing maximized, even Windows Explorer, on 27" monitors. A maximized browser, I get... I don't do it myself but I understand how it can be useful, but maximizing Windows Explorer is just insane to me, and yet a lot of my coworkers do it.

massung• 4 months ago

Just wanted to note that this is how I work. I rarely have any window full screen/maximized and hate it when a website or application is built assuming a giant monitor with a maximized window.

I’ve never found a setup with multiple desktops or similar with a way to quickly switch between apps I’m using more than “editor slightly more left, browser slightly more right, …” and just clicking on a border I know brings that app to the front. I’m sure many think I’m crazy. That’s ok. :)

That said, I generally hate the new OSX UI. Every UI element that is non usable just became larger and wastes space I should be able to utilize. Likewise, it made some operations insanely frustrating (here’s looking at you, corner drag resize!).

wouldbecouldbe• 4 months ago

I exclusive use complete fullscreen mode for apps i'm actively using and on large screens connect the workspaces, on small screen swipe back and forth. So I you never actually use that.

justonceokay3• 4 months ago

I’m not trying to defend because I don’t like it either. But the Mac workflow has always been much more alt-tab focused than windows. With alt-tab and alt-shift-tab (reverse order) I feel like I can fly through my apps at the speed of thought.

Lots of native applications also pop up multiple windows with the expectation that they kind of just float around. But at least in Mac you can scroll on an app that isn’t in focus…

zahlman• 4 months ago

Does anyone actually do this?

Yes (but not for a browser). My terminal windows are 80x24, pretty much always. I do this today on Linux, I've done it through multiple versions of Windows, and I did it in my childhood on a 9" B&W "luggable" Mac screen.

I just like it, okay?

piekvorst• 4 months ago

I never have any window in the fullscreen/maximized mode. Some are pretty large, such as IDE, and they sometimes touch one or more edges of the screen/dock/panel, but never occupy the entire space. That was true even on my 14in MacBook with 125% DPI.

That said, I am a huge fan of manual window management.

stavros• 4 months ago

I hever have any window in fullscreen, but I always have all windows maximized (obviously except the ones that can't be maximized, because of course settings couldn't possibly be made maximizable, what, that's crazy talk).

michael_storm• 4 months ago

Some users switch apps by dragging windows around the screen, like a messy stack. A friend of mine didn't even know about Cmd+Tab to cycle through open apps. Users are weird.

matwood2• 4 months ago

I use a mix of Cmd-Tab and a hot key to see all non-minimized apps (Mission Control?) to pick from. I’ve realized that that I’m faster at seeing the color of the window I’m looking for than remembering the app name.

kccqzy2• 4 months ago

I hate maximized windows. I like it when my windows are not maximized but I usually do have significant overlap between windows. Then I switch between windows based on the sliver of window that’s visible even when other windows are in focus. It’s the spatial way of thinking; just like how Finder purists think each folder on your disk should remember its own window size and location so you use your spatial memory to locate Finder windows. I find that this is significantly faster for my brain to process compared to the Windows style where almost all windows are maximized and people use Alt-Tab to switch between windows.

I would in fact say that the culture of not maximizing windows was a small reason why I switched to Mac OS X in the early 2000s.

alpaca1288• 4 months ago

compared to the Windows style where almost all windows are maximized and people use Alt-Tab to switch between windows

Or just use the taskbar, which is literally made for switching between windows. Or it was, before Microsoft forgot its purpose.

kelnos• 4 months ago

I know lots of people on laptop screens who don't maximize windows. It seems weird to me to only use like 80% of the screen's real estate, but sure, whatever.

On large external monitors, I think it makes total sense not to have every window maximized, though. Probably less usable that way.

jlarcombe• 4 months ago

Actually yes, I have all windows overlapping and none expanded to fill the screen, unless I'm really doing something very specific that needs as much space as possible. But the rounded edges are still slightly annoying.

pico303• 4 months ago

I’ve been using Macs for development for 20 years, and even on a small laptop screen I don’t expand windows to fill the screen. So I guess, yes, there are a few weirdos out there at least?

matwood2• 4 months ago

Consider me another weirdo. I don’t know why anyone would use full screen. Even games I want in a window…

VerifiedReports• 4 months ago

I almost never expand an application to be full-screen, even on my laptop. This despite the fact that I'll resize an application's window to fill the whole screen except for the dock. I think that's why I don't maximize it: I want the dock to remain accessible.

A lot of stupid things about Mac window management stems from the mistake of forcing all applications to share a single menu that's glued to the top of the screen. This essentially turns your entire desktop into ONE application's window, within which its actual windows float around.

Historically this led to the Mac's penchant for apps that spawned an irritating flotilla of windows that you had to herd around your screen. Not only did this deny users a way to minimize the whole app at once, but it also sucked because you could see everything on your desktop (or other apps' UIs) THROUGH the UI of the application you were trying to use. A dysfunctional mess.

Around 15 years ago, I estimate, the huge advantage of a single application window finally permeated the Apple mindset and things have gotten much better in that regard. But Apple should have abandoned the single menu in the transition to OS X, and put menus where they belong: on applications' main frames. That would make the desktop a truly unlimited workspace and eliminate the daily irritation of the menu changes its contents behind the user's back because he clicked on another application's window (perhaps to move it).

Multiple times a day I minimize an application and then attempt to do something in the application that's now filling the screen... only to find that the menu still belongs to the application that isn't even shown. It's just so dumb.

But then... this is the GUI that, for decades, would only let you resize windows from ONE corner and NO edges. Apple grudgingly, half-assedly, and unreliably addressed that in the 2000s, only now to make it even less reliable in the shambolic Tahoe UI.

thatfrenchguy• 4 months ago

That’s because you use the button to make them whole screen?

dubya• 4 months ago

I almost never use full screen windows on a Mac. Things like video are full screen, but that's a swipe to another workspace. Half-screen windows on a 27" screen are already bigger than a sheet of letter paper. Lots happens in terminal windows, which vary a bit, but are usually around 100x60, and maybe 1/6 of the screen.

I do have Rectangle installed, so apps generally get at most the left or right half of the screen, with a shortcut for badly behaved websites that need 2/3 to look right. Apps are usually pretty good about remembering window positions, so mostly you futz with it once and you're done.

sumanthvepa• 4 months ago

I rarely run my apps fullscreen. It's because I have multiple 4k monitors connected to the machine. Using an app even chrome or an IDE fullscreen would be too big.

But do use apps fullscreen when Im traveling. The laptop screen is too small to use chrome or vscode any other way.

jonhohle• 4 months ago

I never understood running apps in full screen. Unless it's an IDE, Video Editor, or some other app with tools filling all nooks and crannies, I want windows that fit the content. I don't want to launch a text or document editor in full screen, read a PDF in full screen. Typically I don't even want to watch a video full screen. I also generally don't want tiling. I want to arrange windows with parts peeking out behind other windows to reference while I'm working on something else. I want some sense of "space" related to where I left a window.

dwb• 4 months ago

“Maximising” windows full screen, apart from the genuinely-full-screen-takeover mode you can put windows in (where they take a virtual desktop slot too) has never been an idiomatic part of the Macintosh UI, since the beginning. The “zoom” button traditionally meant “toggle between a user defined window size, and a size that is just big enough to avoid scroll bars appearing, where possible”. It goes back to the spatial desktop metaphor.

Personally I try and work with that as much as possible, though it’s not always ideal.

viktorcode• 4 months ago

I use several non-fullscreen windows over desktop. Stage manager makes switching between them very convenient. But I do use full screen windows, they live in their separate spaces. I see no reason whatsoever to maximise any window without it going full screen mode

barbazoo• 4 months ago

This has always been quintessential Mac for me. First thing I noticed people do on macs much more than PCs was not expanding the windows. Windows are always just floating around. There's no equivalent to the maximize button, it's funny but I don't even know anymore what that "maximize" button on macs does but I remember it's not what I would expect.

lucasay• 4 months ago

The pill tabs are what get me too. I can ignore most visual changes after a while, but those somehow manage to feel both more distracting and less informative at the same time.

amarant5• 4 months ago

I must say that all this fuzz about the corners actually reflects rather well on macos.

If the biggest flaw of a OS is the border radius of its windows, you've got yourself a pretty decent OS!

It's not gonna make me leave my darling Linux, ofc, but i think this whole debacle can only be interpreted as praise.

On second thought, it might also be considered a mediation on people's tendency to bike-shed.

intrasight2• 4 months ago

I disagree as it shows a fundamental flaw in terms of separation of concerns that's probably manifest throughout the operating system.

Or to stay it another way, if we see shit like this then we know the whole thing is a hack.

amarant5• 4 months ago

Hmm, that's a good point actually! Hadn't considered that!

brailsafe4• 4 months ago

Eh, it might be or it might not, why is that a valid indication that everything else is wack? There certainly are other things that are bad, maybe many, evidently, but I don't think the corner problem is a fair indicator of that exactly. Numerous things can be discretely bad and poorly directed without there being some ebola virus of bad throughout

justonceokay3• 4 months ago

That’s funny to call Mac OS a hack compared to windows. Now windows is trying to be backward compatible with DOS and that’s… something. But when we read blog posts explaining why things are how they are in windows i always get the heebie jeebies.

NwtnsMthd• 4 months ago

It's not the biggest flaw, there are plenty others, but it does seem to be universally disliked.

For example, there is not much you could do to Finder to make it worse.

leptons4• 4 months ago

Finder used to suck. I mean, it still sucks, but it used to suck too.

mikey_p• 4 months ago

On the other hand the fact that it sometimes makes it hard to resize windows means that it breaks something that Apple operating systems have been capable of doing without issue for nearly 45 years.

leptons4• 4 months ago

It took decades before Apple finally let windows be resized from any side. For so many years the bottom right corner was the only way to resize a window. Their window system has always been crap.

chimeracoder• 4 months ago

If the biggest flaw of a OS is the border radius of its windows, you've got yourself a pretty decent OS!

There are loads of other flaws with the OS. It just so happens that people care a lot about the design of Apple's products, so people talk about these details.

amelius4• 4 months ago

The biggest flaw is that the system is opinionated, so you cannot change anything you dislike.

layer8• 4 months ago

It’s not only that it’s opinionated, it’s that it’s idiosyncratically opinionated. It would be different if it had a boring, middle-of-the-road opinion.

thesuitonym3• 4 months ago

It's not even close to the biggest flaw, it's just the most obvious one.

bloomca• 4 months ago

It is just the most obvious, macOS is a death by thousands cuts

ablob• 4 months ago

If the biggest flaw of a OS is the border radius of its windows, you've got yourself a pretty decent OS!

This argument would also make Windows 11 a pretty decent OS by extension via "If the biggest flaw of a OS is the position of the start menu you've got yourself a pretty decent OS".

In general I could use any minor nuisance as a proof of decency - or inject some to form this argument on purpose as a manufacturer.

People don't like if their environment changes in minor unsolicited ways. There's always gonna be fuzz about these things and that means that the fuzz itself can't be used to make any strong argument whatsoever.

akdev1l4• 4 months ago

I think people are more complaining about windows crashing on updates or Microsoft putting ads everywhere or forcing one drive

That’s way more than just the “position of the start menu”

contextfree2• 4 months ago

On the specific issue of window corner roundedness, Windows 11 is great IMO. The corners are rounded when the window is floating free, but change to square when it's maximized or snapped to a side of the screen. The perfect design.

red_admiral2• 4 months ago

For Windows, you also have an ad, an AI, or both appearing in every other app.

gcapu• 4 months ago

I think you miss the point. How would you feel if you had a Ferrari with a noticeable scratch? Yes, it is great to have such a nice car, but it'd be a pity. So much much effort was put into the whole thing and this little detail is what lingers on your mind.

iLoveOncall• 4 months ago

This is not the biggest flaw, this is just the most recent flaw.

MacOS has been shit for as long as I've used it (8 years) and probably for much longer than that. There are many lists available of MacOS problems (https://old.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/12rw1sn/a_long_list_... for example), it's just that there's not much point making a new article about the Finder that's been shit, and unchanged, for a decade.

SunshineTheCat• 4 months ago

I was thinking the same thing. I actually agree with most of the complaints people have made about the corners, but it seems so small compared with literally every interaction I have with Windows.

As someone who works on Windows, Mac, and Linux; Windows stands alone in my opinion as the "stepping on legos with no socks on" of operating systems.

bengale3• 4 months ago

I think for a lot of us mac users we never get contact with another OS so it can seem like the world is ending. Reality is the Tahoe is terrible compared to older versions, but still incredible compared to others. IMHO as ever.

freetime22• 4 months ago

Yeah "notorious inconsistency issues in windows corners" almost feels like an oxymoron to me. Perhaps it is notorious among graphic designers, but I'm sure the vast majority of MacOS users will never notice or care.

hennell• 4 months ago

My colleague update his Mac a while back and I commented on the wild difference in corners between finder and word from across the room. I had to walk round and physically point at them for him to know what I was on about, and then he says "oh yeah, guess they are a bit different"

To my designers eye it was the first thing I saw, to him it was nothing.

I still think it's bad and a sign of a change in apple focus/style, but it's clearly not an issue at all for a lot of people.

Said colleague did get cross when he struggled to resize a window though. Turns out inconsistent corners means inconsistent handles. And that is a real problem.

alpaca1288• 4 months ago

The border radius would be less jarring if the UI was actually designed for it. But it just cuts off elements like the scrollbar, which looks quite janky.

steve19773• 4 months ago

Yeah there's even first party applications like Logic Pro where the rounded corners cut off text.

annie511266728• 4 months ago

Or maybe people focus on corners because it’s one of the few visible things they can actually complain about — the real issues are harder to pin down.

arendtio• 4 months ago

I think it is more like the newest incarnation of sub-optimal user experience decisions. 20 years ago, their system was great for the time. However, nowadays it feels like a system that has been developed over time by different people with different concepts in mind.

Currently, MacOS has the worst window management compared to Windows and (all) the Linux desktop environments. I mean, where else do you have such problems with resizing windows or just switching between windows, not to mention the inconsistent feature sets when you want to work with virtual desktops...

beAbU• 4 months ago

How horrible and hacky must your underlying OS subsystems be if you can't even get consistent corner radii for all windows?

nostromo• 4 months ago

Clearing notifications on macOS Tahoe is ridiculously tedious. The "Liquid Glass" button is slow to respond, the notifications hang for a bit before being cleared, and then sometimes you have to jiggle the cursor to clear the next one. It's absurdly frustrating.

And the updates to Music (formerly iTunes) are so bad the entire team should be dressed down, Steve Jobs style.

batmanthehorse• 4 months ago

The notification buttons have always felt a little squishy and unresponsive since they were added. They’re terrible.

ymolodtsov2• 4 months ago

I think these buttons weren't too responsive for about three major MacOS versions

sooheon• 4 months ago

Also went from one click to two clicks

sampullman• 4 months ago

Agreed, I've blocked all notifications for years. Maybe it got worse recently, but I thought they were annoying since at least Big Sur.

alexalx666• 4 months ago

The "Liquid Glass" button slowness on macOS is tolerable (coz I can really point at the center of a button with the mouse pointer) compared to the same problem on iOS 26. I have to literally tap several times on core system UI elements like navigation bar left and right buttons for the touches to register, this is Bad.

jasonhemann• 4 months ago

I love that there are people who are observant enough to notice these kinds of things, a vanguard for those of us who are blithely unaware and protected due to their vigilance.

tencentshill• 4 months ago

Apple used to know this. You don't notice these things, but your subconscious does. You start to trust it less when things get inconsistent and don't "just work".

amelius4• 4 months ago

Never trust people who play mind tricks like this.

cardanome• 4 months ago

I wish I were less observant.

My neurodivergency makes me feel actual distress over those corners. I am not being dramatic. It sucks.

hmokiguess• 4 months ago

I use this https://github.com/FelixKratz/JankyBorders to try and have a consistent feel to it, but I wish I could make it less rounded

streetfighter64• 4 months ago

disabling MacOS system integrity [protection], which results in making them possibly vulnerable

Not really, if you have malware that has root access on your system I think you're already pretty screwed, especially considering that you don't even need root to read all your saved passwords and personal files https://xkcd.com/1200/

dmix• 4 months ago

I've been using Tahoe since the beta and the borders haven't bothered me once.

I get the UI consistency thing but it's okay to transition to new UI things gradually than making radical changes all at once. If this is still an issue 2yrs from now it will be more of a concern about their commitment.

Octoth0rpe• 4 months ago

With only a little sense of self aware irony, one thing I hate about so much dialog these days is how vehement opinions are. I don't particularly like the rounded corners, and think it's a regression. It's also... fine. It's not the difference between usable and entirely unusable. And I see this kind of attitude all over the place now. A slight change, some slightly non-ideal behavior and all of a sudden a product is THE WORST THING EVER. We will be ok with inconsistently rounded windows. I think people need to be a bit more tolerant of design decisions that are opinionated, and likely worse but also not breaking.

Ads in a start menu can die in a fire though.

bigyabai3• 4 months ago

I feel the opposite. macOS has had excellent UI in the past, and the rationale was usually that Apple took designer feedback seriously. Designers told Apple that advertisements in the notification menu was a no-no, they warned about layering text on low-contrast glass effects. They stopped OSX' UI from becoming visually bloated and low-density like the eventual Big Sur+ design language. We only get these kinds of issues when the chain of communication is cut: https://noheger.at/blog/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/scrambled... https://noheger.at/blog/2026/01/11/the-struggle-of-resizing-...

If you want ads in Spotlight or Launchpad, telling people to tolerate "opinionated, and likely worse but also not breaking" features is exactly how you get it. It's how Windows got there.

haunter• 4 months ago

I usually use Linux and Windows (pretty much split 50/50) and tbh this is why I never could switch to Mac full time even though I've have had and still have several Macs at home. The full screen beahavior is weird. Is the dock should overlay every single window all the time? If not then why is the dock not hidden by default? If yes then full screen is actually "maximum size app window without overlaying the dock"? What's even the point of the dock actually? The other one is the open window =/= running app behavior. Wait 2 hours later this app is still running in the background even though I've closed all windows?

gonzalohm2• 4 months ago

What about the minimize and maximize buttons being swapped without any way to customize it. That one drives me crazy.

brailsafe4• 4 months ago

What do you mean swapped?

LtWorf3• 4 months ago

Come to kde, you can customise everything

Shorel• 4 months ago

The buttons are not swapped. The close button is the one further away from the center, closest to the corner.

Same as in Windows. It just makes sense.

ymolodtsov2• 4 months ago

Apps and windows things is actually great though if you learn yo use it and don't disable minimizing windows to the dock

whatever1• 4 months ago

It makes absolutely no sense to have a windowless app. Why would anyone run photoshop without a window?

There are apps that they need to run in the background, sure. They have a spot in the menubar.

Oh no I forgot, you can only have 5 of them. Not 6. Why? Because FU. Go buy a third party app (bartender) that records your entire screen to do basic app management that the OS should do.

I hate MacOS.

edelhans• 4 months ago

I keep jearing this but after years of using MacOS Is still hate the windowing behavior. There is already a way for windowless apps to run - its in the top right corner of my menu bar. Why not use this if you _really_ need windowless apps to run in the background? Also dont get me started on window switching...

brailsafe4• 4 months ago

Seems like it just depends what you're used to, change is frustrating and sometimes totally unnecessary.

MrDrMcCoy• 4 months ago

Change without further qualifier implies doing something equivalent or better by different means or with a different look. What people are observing is a specific kind of change: regression, where the experience of appearance or result of action are worsened or no longer an option at all. It's a trend I've noticed in Apple since the move to unibody.

htx80nerd• 4 months ago

Half the people in IT have no business being here.

zackmorris• 4 months ago

Not to mention that WindowServer seems to take 100+% cpu since the upgrade. Also I can't paste filenames in the save file dialog in some apps. And the URL field in Safari is just weird.

My computer was running so slowly that I had to minimize transparency in system preferences somewhere. I think I also turned off opening every app in its own space. And I hid the icons on the Desktop in Finder settings somehow, which helped a lot. There are countless other little tweaks that are worth investigating.

I also highly recommend App Tamer (no affiliation). It lets you jail background apps at 10% cpu or whatever. It won't help with WindowServer or kernel_task (which also often runs at 100+% cpu), but it's something.

I can't help but feel that there's nobody at the wheel at Apple anymore. When I have to wait multiple seconds to open a window, to switch between apps, to go to my Applications folder, then something is terribly wrong. Computers have been running thousands of times slower than they should be for decades, but now it's reaching the point where daily work is becoming difficult.

I'm cautiously optimistic that AI will let us build full operating systems using other OSs as working examples. Then we can finally boot up with better alternatives that force Apple/Microsoft/Google to try again. I could see Finder or File Explorer alternatives replacing the native ones.

AceJohnny2• 4 months ago

Not to mention that WindowServer seems to take 100+% cpu since the upgrade

That's because some app is spamming window updates.

It's been an ongoing problem for many releases. AFAICT, WindowServer 100% CPU is a symptom, not a cause.

sunnyps• 4 months ago

But apps shouldn't be able to hammer WindowServer in the first place. If your app is misbehaving, your app should hang, not the OS window compositor!

FWIU there's really no backpressure mechanism for apps delegating compositing (via CoreAnimation / CALayers) to WindowServer which is the real problem IMO.

jbverschoor3• 4 months ago

Symptoms with no way to understand why.

If Apple would give insight about this, the developers wold get bug reports and complaints

Similar to the electron shit

mentalgear• 4 months ago

QubesOS seems a great migration target: it runs Apps/OS in secure sandboxes - and even with that overhead doesn't seem worse than the terrible MacOS 26 performance.

saagarjha6• 4 months ago

I think suggesting QubesOS to someone is coming from macOS is a really bad choice.

aetimmes• 4 months ago

I think we're already seeing the operating systems that AI can build, and I don't think they've been an improvement.

girvo3• 4 months ago

The fact microsoft keeps messing up my Windows 11 gaming desktop, I think you're right.

root_axis• 4 months ago

Computers have been running thousands of times slower than they should be for decades

I've been hearing this complaint for decades and I'll never understand it. The suggestion seems completely at odds with my own experience. Regardless of OS, they all seem extremely fast, and feel faster and faster as time goes on.

I remember a time when I could visually see the screen repaint after minimizing a window, or waiting 3 minutes for the OS to boot, or waiting 30 minutes to install a 600mb video game from local media. My m2 air with 16gb of memory only has to reboot for updates, I haphazardly open 100 browser tabs, run spotify, slack, an IDE, build whatever project I'm working on, and the machine occasionally gets warm. Everything works fine, I never have performance issues. My linux machines, gaming pc, and phone feel just as snappy. It feels to me that we are living in a golden age of computer performance.

mlyle• 4 months ago

My M4 Max 128GB ... 90% of the time is like you say.

10% of the time, Windowserver takes off and spends 150% CPU. Or I develop keystroke lag. Or I can't get a terminal open because Time Machine has the backup volume in the half mounted state.

It's thousands of times faster than the Ultra 1 that was once on my desk. And I can certainly do workloads that fundamentally take thousands of times more cycles. But I usually spend a greater proportion of this machine's speed on the UI and responsiveness doesn't always win over 30 years ago.

yourapostasy• 4 months ago

Regardless of OS, they all seem extremely fast, and feel faster and faster as time goes on.

The modern throughput is faster by far. However, what some people mean when they talk about "slower" is the latency snappiness that characterizes early microcomputer systems. That has definitely gotten way worse in an empirically measurable fashion.

Dan Luu's article explains this very well [1].

It is difficult today to go through that lived experience of that low latency today because you don't appreciate it until you lived it for years. Few people have access to an Apple ][ rig with a composite monitor for years on end any longer. The hackers that experienced that low latency never forgot it, because the responsiveness feels like a fluid extension of your thoughts in a way higher latency systems cannot match.

[1] https://danluu.com/input-lag/*

jclardy• 4 months ago

I think the best example is in iOS. On old iOS versions, the keyboard responsiveness took precedence over everything, no matter what. If you touched the keyboard, it would respond with an animation indicating what you are doing. The app itself may be frozen, but the self contained keyboard process would continue on, letting you know the app you are using is a buggy mess.

Now in iOS 26, you can just be typing in Notes or just the safari address bar for example, and the keyboard will randomly lag behind and freeze, likely because it is waiting on some autocomplete task to run on the keyboard process itself. And this is on top of the line, modern hardware.

A lot of the fundamentals that were focused on in the past to ensure responsiveness to user input was never lost, became lost. And lost for no real good reason, other than lazy development practices, unnecessary abstraction layers, and other modern developer conveniences.

KronisLV• 4 months ago

Regardless of OS, they all seem extremely fast, and feel faster and faster as time goes on.

This very much depends on what hardware you have and what you're doing on it (how much spare capacity you have).

Back in university I had a Techbite Zin 2, it had a Celeron N3350 and 4 GB of LPDDR4. It was affordable for me as a student (while I also had a PC in the dorm) and the keyboard was great and it worked out nicely for note taking and some web browsing when visiting parents in the countryside.

At the same time, the OS made a world of difference and it was anything but fast. Windows was pretty much unusable and it was the kind of hardware where you started to think whether you really need XFCE or whether LXDE would be enough.

I think both of the statements can be true: that Wirth's law is true and computers run way, way slower than they should due to bad software... and that normally you don't really feel it due to us throwing a lot of hardware at the problem to make us able to ignore it.

It's largely the same as you get with modern video game graphics and engines like UE5, where only now we are seeing horrible performance across the board that mainstream hardware often can't make up for and so devs reach for upscaling and framegen as something they demand you use (e.g. Borderlands 4), instead of just something to use for mobile gaming.

It's also like running ESLint and Prettier on your project and having a full build and formatting iteration take like 2 minutes without cache (though faster with cache), HOWEVER then you install Oxlint and Oxfmt and are surprised to find out that it takes SECONDS for the whole codebase. Maybe the "rewrite it in Rust" folks had a point. Bad code in Rust and similar languages will still run badly, but a fast runtime will make good code fly.

I could also probably compare the old Skype against modern Teams, or probably any split between the pre-Electron and modern day world.

Note: runtime in the loose sense, e.g. compiled native executables, vs the kind that also have GC, vs something like JVM and .NET, vs other interpreters like Python and Ruby and so on. Idk what you'd call it more precisely, execution model?

realo• 4 months ago

Ok. Today we have multi-Ghz processors, with multiple cores at that.

Photons travel about 1 foot per nanosecond ... so the CPU can executes MANY instructions between the time photons leave your screen, and the time they reach your eyes.

Now, on Windows start Word (on a Mac start Writer) ... come on ... I'll wait.

Still with me? Don't blame the SSD and reload it again from the cache.

Weep.

washadjeffmad• 4 months ago

Regardless of OS, they all seem extremely fast, and feel faster and faster as time goes on.

One analogy is that the distance between two places in the world hasn't changed, but we're not arriving significantly faster than we before modern jetliners were invented. There was a period of new technology followed by rapid incremental progress toward shortened travel times until it leveled off.

However, the number of people able to consistently travel between more places in the world has continued to increase. New airports open regularly, and airliners have been optimized to fit more people, at the cost of passenger comfort.

Similarly, computers, operating systems, and their software aren't aligned in optimizing for user experience. Until a certain point, user interactions on MacOS took highest priority, which is why a single or dual core Mac felt more responsive than today, despite the capabilities and total work capacity of new Macs being orders of magnitude higher.

So we're not really even asking for the equivalent of faster jet planes, here, just wistfully remembering when we didn't need to arrive hours early to wait in lines and have to undress to get through security. Eventually all of us who remember the old era will be gone, and the next people will yearn for something that has changed from the experiences they shared.

nixpulvis• 4 months ago

Nobody's been at the wheel for a while, it's just not a race car, it's a barge.

kalleboo• 4 months ago

kernel_task using 100% is the system thermally throttling and the OS spamming NOPs to cool the CPU down

jbverschoor3• 4 months ago

Any way to see that?

fainpul• 4 months ago

I don't know much about CPU internals, but this sounds like bullshit to me. A NOP is still an instruction that uses a cycle - why should that cool the CPU down? The CPU frequency should get reduced to lower the power consumption and hence the temperature.

saagarjha6• 4 months ago

This is usually not the case.

DeathArrow2• 4 months ago

I'm cautiously optimistic that AI will let us build full operating systems using other OSs as working examples.

Even if that would be possible, you can't run commercial software. And for many people, the software they run is more important than the OS.

msla• 4 months ago

Is this a case of "It Just Works" or "You're Holding It Wrong"?

epcoa• 4 months ago

I'm cautiously optimistic that AI will let us build full operating systems using other OSs as working examples.

Why? No one has shown that LLMs produce particularly good code. You can get a lot of useful shit done with what is still slop, but there is no reason to believe there's any evolutionary improvement.

bengale3• 4 months ago

Yeah this is my actual issue with Tahoe. It blows my mind people keep bringing up the corners when WindowServer is complete trash now.

dvfjsdhgfv2• 4 months ago

I'm very worried one day Apple will start enforcing upgrades to Tahoe just like Microsoft is doing with Windows.

bubblesorting• 4 months ago

Kernel_task is often the os thermal throttling, when was the last time you hit the vents with a can of compressed air?

diego_moita• 4 months ago

Windows gets a lot of (deserved) bad rap for bloatware but MacOS is just a little less bad. "Features" that we can't uninstall (e.g.: Siri, Apple Music), arbitrary changes in the UI, ...

True, the "blessing" of forced online accounts, telemetry and advertisement didn't arrive to MacOS, yet. But, I wonder how long it will take us to get there.

gib444• 4 months ago

In window management, anything other than i3 is an unequivocal downgrade.

Rounded corners are just...bizarre. Just because the laptop casing is physically rounded !? (Yet the menubar squares it off off at the top, and the bezel squares it off on the bottom...)

varispeed• 4 months ago

I've been running Sonoma and it's going to stay that way for foreseeable future.

rc_kas2• 4 months ago

wish I did that :(

josteink• 4 months ago

I held out until my work MacBook got force-upgraded by IT.

I've never used my Linux ThinkPad more than after my MacBook got macOS 26.

travisgriggs• 4 months ago

Mac OS has become what would happen if Harley Davidson merged with Volvo Truck and some high up said that to "reduce costs" and "homogenize the brand", the design groups needed to be merged and put forward a unified design. If I was less lazy, I'd have a !AI thing whip me up a mashup drawing.

alzar• 4 months ago

great catch on the corner inconsistency. hadnt noticed until reading this now i cant unsee it.

this is actually one of the reasons i ended up going all in on a tiling wm (aerospace). once youre tiling, windows are edge to edge so the corner radius thing mostly disappears. the trade off is giving up floating windows,

the DYLD_INSERT_LIBRARIES approach is clever though. making everything consistently rounded is way more pragmatic than fighting apples design decisions or disabling SIP.

bmiekre• 4 months ago

Y’all are wild…

zeroq• 4 months ago

Reminds me of Adobe Gripes (https://www.tumblr.com/adobegripes).

When Adobe suite was de facto standard for designing and coding interfaces (you know, Flash) their own software was so immensely bad that there was enough material for a guy to make fun of them on a daily basis for a good couple of years.

ddtaylor• 4 months ago

I have never been happier to be a long time Linux user. Our systems are working significantly better than ever before and I have personally converted more people to Linux in the last year than the 15 years before that.

noisy_boy• 4 months ago

Particularly KDE. They have had some ups and downs but finally they have built a great foundation with Plasma and Plasma dark mode with Breeze is such a great balance of flexibility and fairly consistent look and feel. I stuck around with Gnome for too long in the name of simplicity but once you appreciate that Plasma gets out of your way once things are exactly how you want it, I have come to appreciate not having to install extensions for everyday "normal" things a lot more.

_kidlike• 4 months ago

Plasma has been a bit buggy since v6 :(

they tried to do something with remembering "how you left things" between sessions, and even when disabled things are still weird...

Also some power management related hooks are not working as well as before. Like if you put the computer to sleep at night, and wake it up in the morning, the automatic dark-to-light theme switch doesn't trigger. at least not always.

Still the best system to work with though!

zarzavat2• 4 months ago

People obsess about SIP but just remember that SIP does nothing to prevent the most common type of malware (ransomware).

If you use SIP and use package managers (npm, cargo, pip, etc) outside of a VM you are substantially more vulnerable to attack than someone who doesn't use SIP and doesn't use package managers.

So if you want to fix your corners, you can do it guilt-free by adopting some better security practices around the malware delivery systems / package managers that you have installed on your computer.

nomel2• 4 months ago

Sure, if you run software from strangers on the internet, while explicitly giving them access to your systems, bad things can happen. But SIP is definitely a net good that makes many things directly impossible.

Do you have a system in mind that prevents the user from doing this?

bigyabai3• 4 months ago

Do you have a system in mind that prevents the user from doing this?

Sure, macOS could adopt an iPad-style security system that refuses to run all software outside the App Store. It works on iPhone and iPad just fine, all the prosumers love it.

It's not like native darwin triples are a popular compilation target. There wouldn't be any vast tragedy if the macOS shellutil authors were told to use zsh in a VM instead, it would separate the parts of macOS that Apple cares about from the parts they don't seriously support. WSL and Crostini achieves this on vastly weaker hardware with great results.

halapro2• 4 months ago

SIP protects the OS, not you nor your files. If you run third party software that can run `rm` of course you're vulnerable to data loss. Apples and oranges.

SIP guarantees that you will be able to turn on your computer in safe mode and remove the malware, whereas without it your OS is toast.

saagarjha6• 4 months ago

SIP also backs some security mechanisms to ensure that they remain functional and not easily bypassable.

zarzavat2• 4 months ago

Yes but it's the files that are the important part.

If I had malware then the fate of the hardware is at the bottom of my priority list, I'm probably going to be replacing it anyway. I'd be more concerned that someone is going to steal my AWS credentials to run a cryptominer and I get a bill for hundreds of thousands of dollars!

The only solution to malware is to not install it in the first place. By the time SIP is useful you are already very screwed. SIP makes you safer in the same way that having a parachute on a plane makes you safer, technically yes but the difference in safety is marginal.

7jjjjjjj• 4 months ago

I hate rounded corners. I use stylus to apply "*{border-radius: 0 !important;}" to a bunch of sites, including YouTube.

technical_sway• 4 months ago

I'm sure they'll try to market this as a feature so you can see how many windows you have open

stackghost2• 4 months ago

I feel like the only dude on the planet who uses fullscreen workspaces on Mac.

The number of times I have noticed the corner of my windows is precisely zero because each important application gets its own workspace, so the window frame doesn't get rendered. Sometimes I'll tile two windows side by side on my external monitor but even then this is a complete non issue for me.

Are you guys just running everything on the one desktop workspace in windowed mode? That seems like madness.

fingerlocks• 4 months ago

I asked this same question years ago in one of those threads that was all windows people complaining about cmd+tab. No responses.

That means there are exactly two of us.

stackghost2• 4 months ago

Fullscreen gang assemble!

DeathArrow2• 4 months ago

At some point in time, Apple used nice software to be able to sell expensive but mediocre hardware.

Now they sell expensive but nice hardware and they have mediocre software.

It seems you can only choose one out of three, nice hardware, nice software, good price. Apple is always choosing high price, and they either gave customers nice hardware or nice software, but not both.

search_facility• 4 months ago

Well, this is a business model, not a coincidence... They are in the battle of selling fresh hardware each and every year consistenly

cjmcqueen• 4 months ago

Send Apple feedback https://www.apple.com/feedback/

dmd• 4 months ago

I’m honestly intensely curious what you thought this comment would contribute.

bengale3• 4 months ago

That's not a thread you want to pull on, it applied to the majority of the comments on the internet.

red_admiral2• 4 months ago

Not a mac user here - why can't you use the same method to set the corner radius to 0.1 or something and effectively turn of the roundness, but without root?

duskdozer5• 4 months ago

The reason why you need to disable SIP, is that to edit the dynamic libraries that system apps like Safari (which has crazy bad corners) use, you need to edit system libraries that exist the root.

romanovcode• 4 months ago

This was one of the first things I noticed after upgrade and was confused. I had an understanding that people in Apple UX are extremely meticulous when it comes to every single little tiny detail. I guess those times are over.

leptons4• 4 months ago

They still obsess about it but they seem to be idiots, and always have been. Nobody has ever been able to explain reasonably why "about this software" is the first thing on the first menu of every MacOS program - it isn't useful exept maybe once a year. It's a ridiculous UX choice, always has been. Don't get me started on Finder.

fredgrott• 4 months ago

Somehow this little hidden setting via CLI

defaults write -g com.apple.SwiftUI.DisableSolarium -bool YES

Makes thing bearable....note log out to see it change.

You still need to then turn transparency off via settings see

this

https://tidbits.com/2025/10/09/how-to-turn-liquid-glass-into...

JohannesCortez• 4 months ago

One way to make the mac consistent

imranstrive7• 4 months ago

I tried something similar while building my tool site — biggest issue was SEO indexing. Fixed it by improving internal linking instead of relying on sitemap.

hackrmn• 4 months ago

For all his infamy, Jobs held Apple together in large part through his uncompromising perfectionism and attention to the kind of details that have since been demoted to "we'll fix it in the next version" or the equivalent of "# temporary". Every company is a bit of an ant-farm, but this one either has no single queen to lay down the law, or the queen is "trying things out" :P

Jobs used to laugh at Microsoft for all manner of inconsistencies in behaviour and user experience with Windows, but now Apple is contending with the same problem, in part due to exposure as macOS has never been so popular and prevalent, and now there are ever growing amount of eyes calling them out for those inconsistencies that have been appearing more and more frequently without Jobs' leadership style.

_the_inflator• 4 months ago

I see you point, but I think that Jobs not per se held Apple together. This is Tim Cook doing as well and arguably on a way larger scale.

The one thing that distinguished Jobs from the rest ever since is the fact, that he was Apple's greatest fan boy. If you have a look at the Itunes introduction, Jobs sits there and for around 2 hours showcases every feature and function. He was so into the product, that this keynote is for me the most nerdy ever conducted by him.

The others as well always show him being the company's No 1 fan and host of every feature there is.

Imagine to have a boss like this. He set the standard for product development in every regard.

And this is what slipped. Consistency is lacking and according to biographies about Cook, he has a very huge focus on him as a person. This is always wrong. It is about the product, nothing else.

There will never be a Jobs again. And it is getting worse from here: the old guard is mostly gone. Even the myth of Steve Jobs is nothing Gen Z cares about.

We live in the Post-Jobs phase and Cook seems to be overshadowing Jobs, as sad as this is. All innovations except the headphones date back to Jobs. All the scale that Apple reached to Cook.

I bet Jobs would rather have a way smaller scale with great products. This luxury lifestyle is nothing Jobs liked.

Sad, but true.

kwertyoowiyop• 4 months ago

One wonders what Jobs would think of Liquid Glass.

grliga• 4 months ago

this is why I want Jobs back, not as CEO but as head of software or head of software QA

retsibsi• 4 months ago

I think it's a happy quirk of the blog's tagging system (#Programming is a category tag), but the ending feels quite profound:

Now at least everything is consistently bad. #Programming

podgorniy• 4 months ago

I see in this story organisational boundaries between teams. Teams which don't have common coordination space (or used for something more __important__). Responsible people don't care enough to mitigate such deviations earlier

kirubakaran• 4 months ago

Everyone knows that Tim Cook committed to 100% carbon neutrality. But not many know that they're achieving it by releasing Liquid Glass and attaching a dynamo to Steve Jobs' corpse.

Myrmornis• 4 months ago

The rounded corners are nothing compared to the notch camera making part of the top of my applications invisible.

jtesp• 4 months ago

how are people not seeing what is going on? they are inching the unified ui towards visionOS & spatial computing. and so corners need to have a much larger hit box and stuff needs to be visible (liquid glass) over a backdrop yet not a huge distracting obstruction. this is a slow transition away from the mouse to the finger as the primary input and the static wallpaper background to your living room and surrounding atmosphere. and so when the time comes it will be familiar and natural to use. just imagine what they are doing in the lab. i believe these decisions are intentional even with some flawed execution

jbetala7• 4 months ago

Built DashPane for exactly this — press a shortcut, type a few letters, jump to any open app or window. https://dashpane.pro/

Make macOS consistently bad unironically

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