Tahoe is a macOS mis-step on par with Windows 8 or Windows Vista. If you’re from Apple and reading this, my feedback is pretty succinct: “I don’t recommend others upgrade. I wish I didn’t.”
Luckily for Apple, Windows 11 is not exactly in a position to attract switchers.
Let’s see if Apple can turn things around. iOS 8+ did improve on iOS 7’s worst bits.
I swear, this reign of visual artists as dictators has to stop.
I'm sure people noticed this issue internally and brought it up but some thing by some designer was seen as biblically sacred and overruled all reason.
I've been at companies were you get severely punished... sometimes fired for subordination for fixing an obviously broken spec by a designer emperor.
It's normal to be "I guess 2+2=5 here, whatever" as if the designer went in a tiny room, had a seance with the divine...
Yo, newsflash, everyone makes mistakes. Failure is when you force them to stay uncorrected.
Yea, the programmers aren’t to blame here. In fact some of the visual effects they have achieved are pretty cool. The designers are at fault because they prioritized visuals over usability. Literally nobody I know thinks “Liquid Glass” has been an improvement. The feedback is universally negative.
Yeah I don’t like the glass effect and I realised it’s because it creates movement and drags your attention to things that should be background items. On the phone, video controls and app folders are particularly egregious.
I suppose it’s exactly the programmer’s job to make sure cursor grabs the edge of the curved window border, not the arbitrary point outside.
In this specific case, yea, the programmers might be at fault, but most of my gripes with Liquid Glass are not like this. They are design issues. This seems like maybe more of a bug stemming from an underlying design issue (corner radius being ridiculously large).
Is that something the programmer decides or are they just implementing what the designer decided?
More than anything it looks like a value that was forgotten and never updated from past versions where the radius wasn't so severe.
The worst part here is that the style works decently on mobile but they shoehorned it onto a 25-year-old UI and shipped it.
I'm fond of saying that most problems in the software world are due to one thing trying to do two things, or two things trying to do the same thing. In this case, it feels like the former: getting the same implementation to cater to both desktop and mobile is obviously the most efficient solution from a development perspective, but not an end user (and ultimately business) perspective.
Because they absolutely can't have disparate visual styles in their product lines, practicality be damned ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
To be fair, there is sorta kinda a mobile version: Phosh.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phosh
And amusingly Ubuntu uses Qt for its phone clone of Gnome.
These rumors about touchscreen MacBooks have been going around for at least 10 years. At this point I don't believe any of it. Especially with how they sell keyboards for iPads.
yeah, but somehow consistency was not a concern when picking icons for menu items. as pointed out by some previous discussions on this matter.
i also hate this "consistency" idea. was working on mobile app for android/ios. and a requirement was for apps to look identical on both platforms. whyyyyy. sure for designer it looks nice, but as a user who uses either ios OR android im used to conventions of particular platform. why throw that all away just to look identical an both platforms.
Consistency is the absolute fucking worst design principle.
I hate it too, but to my surprise, all of my colleagues (with an iPhone) said they love because it looks great.
I’ll add a third perspective that’s probably often gone unsaid: I love it on Apple TV, and kinda like it on iPhone and Mac. It definitely needs to be improved though. There are definitely a whole bunch of usability issues, but they shouldn’t be too hard to fix. And Apple has shown willingness to iterate until they get it right. Unlike Microsoft which just moves onto the next thing (the system settings UI design in Windows 11 is fine.. but can they pleeeease just integrate all settings into that UI now.. how many generations of settings / control panes are there in Windows now?)
The huge corner radius is one thing I do wish they reverted in Mac OS.
I love it both on an iPhone and a Mac. It runs great and it looks great. It’s a mistake to look at what people say on the internet. They are usually hopelessly contrarian.
[dead]
The navigation top bar on iOS especially is a huge improvement overall. Especially for views that stack a safe area bar in the second line.
I know enough people at Apple who are at the mercy of the overlord design teams, and it sounds exactly like what you described
I've met some great designers as well. They usually come from more modest backgrounds.
It's kinda the rule for programmes too.
The ones that went to a small liberal arts school you've never heard of programming as their second career are usually more effective to work with then the Stanford/MIT crowd.
The problems start I think, when you have an expectation that your collaborators are somehow either superhuman or subhuman and not peers.
Humility and mutual respect gets things done.
Apple designers used to build interactive demos in Macromedia Director, so I'm assuming they knew a bit about scripting. That probably helped them think in a way that really clicks with software development.
I've worked with some younger designers who couldn't even put together a consistent click-dummy once the client wanted to see flows outside the happy path. To be fair, all they really had to go on was their education and Figma's panels.
This is a pretty discriminatory comment that I’ve honestly seen zero hint of in reality. And this is coming from someone who didn't go to a particularly prestigious school. I honestly rarely even find out what school my colleagues went to school. But the ones I know who did go to those prestigious schools are beyond humble.
Not really. That's bad faith. I've worked at lots of places, probably hired about 200 engineers over my career so far and have noticed this pattern.
I stopped looking at the educational background years ago in a fear that it would influence my bias either way. We shouldn't base someone's suitability at 40 upon what opportunities they were afforded at 17.
I do have a somewhat prestigious pedigree btw. I removed it from my resume around 2010 and never looked back
> I swear, this reign of visual artists as dictators has to stop.
> I'm sure people noticed this issue internally and brought it up but some thing by some designer was seen as biblically sacred and overruled all reason.
Funny how Apple went from Jony Ive sacrificing hardware usability for "beauty" (touch bars and butterfly switches) to Alan Dye mucking up macOS and iOS with Liquid glAss.
The Touch Bar implementation sucked but I'm going to defend that attempt 100 out of 100 times. If Apple didn't remove the function keys I think it would have been a hit feature. There wasn't proper commitment to the feature.
True, if they'd kept the function keys and just added the touch bar above it it would have been great. Weird thing is there was more than enough space for both so I don't understand why they didn't do that.
Yeah but still, function keys for me are so important I don't like switching them for any reason. Even the Fn+ functions for like volume etc I don't really like, I would much rather have additional buttons for that.
In that sense a touch bar in addition to function keys would be very nice, because it's a much smoother way to adjust volume.
Curious why you liked it so much. Removing the fn keys was a big no-no, yes, but also it was just located in a place I'm never going to look at. So why do you think it would've been a hit feature?
The fn keys you can almost circumvent, but the escape key? Common!
The original version removed the ESC key as well. By the time they added it back, the damage was done.
I worked for a company with a large website. The designers were elite and worked in a darkroom on expensive Apple equipment. At some point, it turned out that users couldn't see a certain color on the website because it could be seen on an Apple monitor, but not on a mass-market laptop's TFT screen.
I worked at a really large social media company, and there was a design which looked beautiful on all of the employee's high-res screens and monitors but used too much space and just didn't work for most of the users. It never got launched, which feels like what should have happened here.
Your comment reminded of these fantastic sketch.
The Expert (Short Comedy Sketch) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg
I need evidence that sufficiently large organisations don't eventually devolve into… whatever that is. And then, names, so I can apply there, while there's still some work ethics left in me.
Seems like you could make the corners round (not making a judgement on that in any way) and still give the resize handle a more sensible size/shape/location right? As in this isn't a visual design problem.
It's tricky because you're now cropping into rectangular apps which may actually use all the pixels they get and want hit testing in them.
When Windows went to a 1 pixel border and shadow effects, it still had hit testing in a region around the window to account for that. No idea what they're doing with rounded corners in Win11.
>I swear, this reign of visual artists as dictators has to stop.
Visual artists and graphic/ux designers weren’t exactly claiming for Tahoe either.
The point is that Apple's own design team was.
In my experience, part of the problem lies in visual artists not wanting to iterate the way software development does. Sure, they might iterate on the design as they work on it, but once they've found their final design, they strongly resist changing it, even as the actual development and testing of the software to implement it iterates and finds problems.
It's a throwback to BDUF.
that’s a lot of words to say “bad at their job”.
If they aren’t willing to try out their design and find issues with it, or be open to feedback from others, they’re incompetent.
Looking at the non-tech people in my life, exactly ONE had a positive initial reaction after installing ios 26. Do these people at apple not do “normal” user testing?
That's a bit like software developers iterating until all unit tests pass, and then considering all user feedback dumb.
>I'm sure people noticed this issue internally and brought it up but some thing by some designer was seen as biblically sacred and overruled all reason.
I disagree. Seems more like the group that implemented border radius at the OS UI implementation level did not work with the group that handles window sizing. Not everything is a conspiracy.
Of course it's not "a conspiracy", but it is a major, gigantic, huge, alarming failure by Apple. Resizing a window is just about the most basic and useful thing a window system can do after opening a window, and Apple totally messed it up. It's like they've never worked with a window before, but TBH though, their window system has always sucked.
I think the mistake comes from when UI/UX started calling themselves a part of product leadership, vs basically being one of the team.
That’s not a bad thing (user experience is important) but remember that Liquid Glass was designed by someone without a UI background. Alan Dye designed the boxes iPhones come in and was installed by Jony Ive, an industrial designer. Neither of them had training or experience in usability, and all of the UX people I know are basically complaining non-stop about how many basic UX principles the 26 releases violate.
Wasn’t Jobs the one that set that dynamic up, where Ive was basically the #2 at Apple? It seemed to work as long as Jobs was there as the final quality filter.
Yep, Jobs knew what he wanted and he generally had good taste. He would push everyone until he got what he thought was right and spend extra to get it. Supposedly he sent the original iPod team scrambling to find a new headphone jack just before launch because he didn’t like the mushy tactile feel of the jack they had selected. He wanted a very tactile “click” as the headphones snapped in.
I believe the heavy sarcasm is completely justified, I second it.
Most of the software creeping towards complete unusability devolve through non-practical apparence tweeking bullshit, ruining usability, while the functionality is intact (apart from bugfixes).
The other reason for decay is the overcomplication - pilin new and new marginal things on the top of the functionality heap - combined with sloppines, rushing through things, but that's an other discussion.
Did we reach a peek in software quality recently? So things only go down from here? I have this growing itchy feeling. I feel obstructed, forced to jump hoops, also disgust touching an increasing amount of software, most of those used for many many years without trouble (i.e. did not really registered its usage, it was doing things silently and well, but now starting to jump into my face or kick my legs).
[dead]
Compare to Aqua and Platinum where every resizable window/pane had a big square drag target clearly labeled as such with some diagonal lines:
https://guidebookgallery.org/pics/gui/system/managers/filema...
https://guidebookgallery.org/pics/gui/system/managers/filema...
It also - as seen in that screenshot, had large, always visible scrollbars where it was easy to see how far down you were in a folder or document, and could easily click and drag to scroll to where you needed. Now in the service of minimalism we have scrollbars that consist of a thin, semi-transparent line that fades out after half a second and is nearly impossible to click and drag due to how small it is.
If one chooses "Always" under the "Show scroll bars" option on the Appearance System Settings panel. They will be rewarded with thick*, always-on scroll bars that do not disappear.
*They're the same thickness as Aqua.
The scrollbar thing is a more widespread mess. I've seen plenty of apps (cross platform) which hide the scrollbar as a tiny grey bar only visible when scrolling. Which on some TN panels is neigh invisible... If I can't see the scrollbar there is no additional stuff to read. I'm now pretty sure this is apple's bad design leaking though to the rest of the world.
> Now in the service of minimalism we have scrollbars that consist of a thin, semi-transparent line that fades out after half a second and is nearly impossible to click and drag due to how small it is.
You can make them always on still. I've done so ever since their disappearing act started. It's not even much hidden, it's in the "Appearance" setting pane.
They're still too small and too light. Some times when a document is big enough I'm actually not able to find the scroll thumb on macOS Sequoia. Some times wiggling the scroll thumb around by scrolling slightly back and forth with my mousewheel/trackpad helps to make it visually appear, but other times I just have to give up.
These developers also haven't bothered to test with any mouse other than an Apple Trackpad, which turns the scrollbars on by default.
Of course we all make mistakes, but anyone who has made this mistake should really fix it!
The default modality changed.
Classic Macs were designed for the mouse or trackball. Modern Macs are designed for multitouch scrolling. When it's easy to get the scrolling infrastructure on demand, the desktop might not need the same click-first affordances.
You're missing the fact that the scrollbars also indicate where you are in their range, which is important regardless of how you do the scrolling itself.
You don't even have to scroll. Placing two fingers on the pad makes the scrollbar appear immediately. I'm happy for each additional pixel of space on my screen, but I also think a scrollbar should be completely configurable userland behavior.
In the Aqua image the big bright blue scrollbars stand out far, far more than the content. That sucks, honestly. So does the percentage of the screen dedicated to their presence.
Also, horizontal scrollbars suck. One thing later versions of Finder did well was adjust columns to minimize the presence of them.
We just don't need UI that big anymore. These days our cursors are much more accurate, from the magical Mac trackpad to high DPI optical mice, and we're 40+ years into GUIs so the limited number of people who opt-in to a full computing experience can already be expected to know the basics.
Yes Tahoe sucks, but going back to Aqua or classic MacOS would also suck, just in a different direction. If you actually spend time using classic MacOS and Aqua these days, man is it frustrating to get basic things done. Everything is so slow and you're constantly resizing windows to see whats in them. I own several Macs from the 80s-00s and they are really in need of many quality of life updates that later MacOS revs added. On a modern Mac, enabling 'show scrollbars' gets you to a pretty optimal Finder experience, minus all the stupid Mac bugs and Tahoe nonsense like this article points out.
Hard disagree with all of this. I feel like I am constantly lamenting the simplicity and usability of old scrollbars and cursing their will o the wisp modern implementations.
Scrollbars used to be invisible to me. They only bubbled up to my consciousness when I needed them, and then there was no friction in their use. Now I am having to think about them constantly. To me that is 'standing out'.
Very much agree. Nostalgia is a hell of a drug. Not saying GP's opinion was pure nostalgia, but a lot of people certainly selectively remember only the good parts as they complain about the now.
It should be noted the drag handle was removed back in Lion. And the square cutout was removed in Panther, both of which were iterations of Aqua.
(and yes Lion was garbage, first upgrade I skipped since Tiger, and definitely the first "what the fuck are they doing").
Going back to Lion would almost feel like bliss compared to Tahoe. Hell, bliss compared to Big Sur.
Note that downside: you could only resize from that bottom right corner, not from any other edge!
I do think that was better overall, and it's something I miss about Snow Leopard, but I can see why they changed it.
>Note that downside: you could only resize from that bottom right corner, not from any other edge!
This was one of the worst things about MacOS and why they lost me as a user early on. I used to be a Mac Sysadmin for 3 years, and the awful window system (and Finder) made it a living hell. I still don't find much to like about the GUI part of MacOS.
Better in that it was clear, but worse that you had to resize from the bottom right. Made expanding to the left, or up, very annoying. I'd take the current situation over this.
True, but not a 1:1 comparison, because Classic Mac OS windows were much better at staying where you put them, even between sessions. John Siracusa wrote a lot about how this was missing from Mac OS X: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2003/04/finder/
People also didn't regularly plug classic Macs into external monitors, changing the screen resolution temporarily.
For this and many other reasons, I just don't think the paradigm would work today. It's philosophically smart but limiting in too many other ways.
Yeah that is also true. I have had that experience with certain CD-ROMs (maybe like two or three ever but has happened) on my PowerBook 2400c. If the authoring machine had a higher display resolution than my machine, and the author had the writable disc image's window open to a place outside my screen resolution, and the window positions got saved to the DesktopDB/DesktopDF, and the DesktopDB/DesktopDF got written to the CD-ROM, then it would open in the position outside my screen resolution every time my own DesktopDB/DesktopDF got erased. One particular artist's CD-ROM is completely outside of it which annoys me every time.
Relevant TA: https://web.archive.org/web/20090625152558/http://support.ap...
Windows also used to have a "grip" indicator. Nowadays I only see this in resziable textboxes in browsers...
To be fair, this grip indicator only (and still) exists when the window has a status bar. It's part of the Windows status bar design, not of the window design. Of course, many more applications used to have status bars than they do now, so that's why you see it less often.
Why did they stop this?
It was parctical (just like clearly visible scrollbars).
And my conviction is that computers are for practical and not the pretty things primarily. Can be pretty but not on the expense of usability. This last one is increasingly and sadly untrue nowadays!
Great comment. I had forgotten how much better things were in terms of visual indicators. Slick looking design should never come at the expense of usability.
Well prepared article, and the window resizing pisses me off also!
For practical reasons I am stuck inside Apple’s macOS garden, but I wanted to share a few things that at least make me feel content using macOS:
First, I have at least two VPS systems so via mosh/ssh/tmux I always have Linux dev environments, the ability to use throwaway VPS for sandboxing, etc.
Second, when actually working on macOS I stick with tools that make me happy: Emacs and terminal windows, a uv-based Python enviroment and tuned-up Common Lisp, Haskel, and Clojure dev environments.
Anyway, I am just sharing my ‘macOS therapy’ - hope it helps someone here.
Wait I literally thought the ChatGPT desktop app has been broken for months (both dragging and resizing the window has been super inconsistent).
Could it be that I just need to drag the window outside of the pane..?
This post is very well presented and it highlights how absolutely bizarre the latest update was. The video demonstration was also very well done.
I remember a few years ago, people complained when Apple merely made the entire operating system uglier. (Something about a gradient on the battery?) A lot of people would talk hyperbolically ("apple KILLED macos!"), and that's indistinguishable to an outsider when an update like this brings other people out of the woodwork to say, "Hey, these changes are genuinely bizarre and absurd, what happened?"
I especially liked the part with the hand trying to grab the plate. Perfect imagery.
That was a sensible chuckle indeed... but then it also made me realize that grabbing things IRL _moves_ them, not _resizes_ them. Nothing IRL really resizes.
So while it makes a lot of sense to grab inside the object to move it, IMO it actually makes less sense to grab _inside_ the object to resize it. (Imagine the reverse argument -- IRL you can actually grab the middle of the plate to move it, but if grabbing the middle of the window resized it, that would also be very bad.)
I've been trained to grab the edge to resize windows. So I wouldn't try to reach so far inside the rounded rectangle as OP, although it doesn't invalidate their entire argument.
> Nothing IRL really resizes
A few things sorta do.
If you want to increase the size of saran wrap or aluminum foil, you grab the edge and pull. Same for increasing the size of toilet paper before tearing it off.
When you want to stretch your fitted sheet onto your mattress, you grab the corner and pull to stretch it over.
When you want to make your pizza dough larger, you toss it above your head in a circle, so I guess that one doesn't really match the macOS gesture, I guess you should be spinning windows to make them bigger.
However, when you're doing other baking things, like placing fondant or a pie crust, you do stretch from the edges some.
Reinventing Aero shake.
> IRL you can actually grab the middle of the plate to move it
Really wouldn't recommend it though, all sorts of consequences for the food (if present), your hand, the hygiene of the plate and potential damage to underlying surfaces. Generally preferable to pick it up and put it down again.
You grab the corner to move the corner, not the window. You grab it and move it (the corner), just like the plate.
I laughed at the animation quite hard - it’s the perfect analogy for the issue at hand!
Pun intended?
Me too, made me chuckle :)
The graphic actually helped me a lot to understand why you have to touch things to grab them, seeing as I am a 2-day-old baby.
imo this comment wasn't worth creating a new account for
Everybody has a big ego when it comes to their own sense of humor, till they create an account on hackernews and get told they should stop being funny. I hope the other guy gets it
The old linux/X11 method of meta+dragging to move or resize windows from anywhere in the window, not having to hunt for the edges of the window, is so obviously superior to Windows and MacOS it's downright silly. They both should have swallowed their pride and implemented this 30 years ago.
Moving windows like this is already built into macOS but it's hidden behind a flag for some reason:
defaults write -g NSWindowShouldDragOnGesture -bool true
I recommend altSnap to get this functionality on Windows.
Easy move + resize solves this
What's jarring is not even that macOS Tahoe has such weird shapes of windows. What really astonishes me is that nobody seems to have anticipated how users would try to resize windows, and did not reshape the corner drag area (which I would expect to be a quarter-circle, or a quarter-ring along the rounded edge). This can't be a mistake, this can only be deliberate cutting corners by management in order to ship ASAP. And then nobody cared to issue an update.
Verily, the last UI redesign that was based on honest research and watching real users act was WinXP.
What feels plausible to me is changing the underlying 19x19 px control would break layout of many existing apps, and the design team was hell bent that window corners had to be that round. I’d say it’s simply form over function, and that likely a meta-level argument about user empowerment or whatnot won.
Exactly my point. It was too hard to make the grab box different. It was not too hard to pretend that the hyper-rounded corners would also make some layouts look and maybe act problematic. It was not too hard to splurge time and effort on liquid-glassing the entire UI toolkit.
In a word, it's hubris. It's not care about the user, it's not even care about market domination or setting a fashion trend; both have been flunked. It looks like somebody's ego needed an affirmation, or someone's grip on corporate power needed a demonstration. It's a bad, bad sign of a deadly corporate disease.
Agreed. I think you may be too generous with hubris -- that requires agency, but it may just be incompetence. I don't generally like the "old days" argument, but this is consistent with overall trends -- it's frivolous.
I get a sense that this is ultimately a matter caused by the board. It would have been briefed on and likely been the ultimate leader on the overall product and services strategy and pipeline. All this frivolous Tahoe Liquid Glass smoke and mirrors redesign, and even the unified OS release numbering gives me the impression that they’re either out of ideas or there’s a blank spot in the pipeline/timeline. I think there’s a case to be made that the helm lacks some direction now that Steve Jobs’ pipeline seems exhausted and momentum needs to be generated without him.
Considering how Vision Pro rollout and the AI development went, I’m having doubts about Apple adapt to an AI world, e.g., fundamentally rethinking what hardware means if you no longer need to interact with a screen or hardware in a similar fashion anymore, i.e., keyboard and GUI manipulation.
It did seem like they fixed iOS slowly after 7, where they went too far with flatness.
It’s not cutting corners. Apple does most of their testing using strictly internal resources, like secret “mini malls” in the Silicon Valley area. They fail because this testing biases their sampling; users must sign draconian NDAs to participate, among other things. These samples are effectively biased due to Apple’s corporate culture regarding secrecy and competition. So, Apple actually works very hard. It’s just they culturally prefer a lot of techniques that their competitors (e.g. Google and Facebook) have throughly proven as inferior.
But is Google better? Not really, they killed a lot of good products like Reader.
But is Facebook better? Not really, Cambridge Analytica and Metaverse and .. facebook products are disposable.
But I think these Apple UX bugs are misdiagnosed. Yes they are atrocious. But think about how atrocious and non-representative and non-competitive Apple’s testing population is.
This all is pretty curious! But my point is that every developer involved would notice how crazy the end result is. No need for a focus group to demonstrate that emperor's new clothes barely cover the body, and don't match the body parts.
But nobody from likely hundreds of people inside Apple involved in the project was able to effect a change towards sanity. I'm afraid many just didn't feel like speaking.
In the spirit of not being intimidated, I am going to just say what I’ve been wondering; if this could be a result of the oppressive nature of all the “DEI” stuff at Apple having turned into a kind of intimidation cudgel. Are you going to speak out and point out the emperor has no clothes if doing so will have your head?
The circular self-congratulation of DEI introduces an intimidation factor where the objective and scientific truth is inherently no longer the basis for decision making because there are multiple layers of a kind of aristocratic privilege that cannot be questioned, let alone criticized, because critique of their actions equals critique of their divinity, i.e., becomes heresy.
So we end up with this point where no one pointed out the increasingly ridiculous reductions of the emperor’s clothes, only ever cheering on with positive affirmations, to the point that everyone’s intimidated to even point out the emperor is walking around stark naked.
I could see how a combination of the DEI intimidation tactics with the advent of AI, the hash economic factors, and general desire to not rock the personal benefit boat could have resulted in institutional paralysis.
Is there anyone with a force of personality left at Apple? Ultimately, this is on Cook as the Chief Executive Officer poorly executing. It really makes you wonder if the leadership doesn’t actually use any of their own company’s products. How do you not notice these glitches immediately like everyone else if you are using them? I could see Cook not having even regularly used an iPhone or actively interacted with any Apple product himself in years as his real life Siris around him do every single thing for him every day all day, besides maybe giving him briefs on screens that happen to be iPhones and iPads. At that level you actively have to make choices to remain connected to the ground. I doubt Cook finds being grounded comes easy.
Why do you immediately jump to saying DEI?
You say DEI then describe brown nosing. That's a thing that happens in any org.
As much as I like to hate on a new OS like the next person, I think it's worth pointing out we're probably not seeing the full picture here:
When trying to reproduce the problem as shown in the article by resizing the Safari window currently displaying the article, the drag cursor changes shape at the visible border of the window, not the shadow and consequently, dragging works as expected.
This might be an application- or driver specific issue, not necessarily a common Tahoe issue.
This is absolutely true. The demo in the original article seems quite deceptive in that respect. Nobody would attempt to resize a window by launching their cursor at the corner with great speed as the demo shows. The resize pointer seems to show in exactly the right place, and allows for an extra hit area slightly outside the rounded corner — I don’t see any problem with that.
As for the fact that one cannot resize from inside the window, it makes absolute sense for every other corner of the window, where the user would instead be clicking an icon or some other button (try the top right corner of the finder, where the search button sits).
So, while I agree on the whole that Tahoe is a huge step backwards in terms of design, this seems like an odd gripe to point out, as it doesn’t in fact seem to be an issue at all.
Edit: clarification
> As for the fact that one cannot resize from inside the window,
if you check the screencast I posted, you'll see that you can indeed resize from inside the window. Not by a huge margin, but definitely from inside the actual window boundaries.
Indeed, just enough. And the correct resize pointer shows all along the rounded edge, so I agree, this doesn’t seem like the problem it’s made out to be.
> Nobody would attempt to resize a window by launching their cursor at the corner with great speed as the demo shows.
... great speed? Interpolating from the zoom, I would say its not fast at all.
I’m referring to the demo in the original article. The mouse pointer moves rather rapidly onto the inside of the window. You can just about see the resize pointer flashing as the user does so. I don’t think I ever attempted to resize a window with such erratic mouse movements. Approaching the corner at reasonable speed shows the resize pointer where expected.
Yes, that demo. You can clearly see the resize pointer flashing briefly, but the user continues aiming right inside the window. I’m not sure why he’s not stopping when the resize pointer appears. It seems erratic.
I'm not sure "it works this way in Application A, and this other way in Application B" is a particularly strong rebuttal.
It wasn't meant as a rebuttal. Just as a point of thought: By showing that at least one application doesn't exhibit the problem, I thought I was showing that the problem might not be related to the Tahoe redesign at all but might have other causes.
It definitely serves to prove that this is not a design-issue but just a simple bug and thus has at least some chance of being fixed.
FWIW, I cannot reproduce the issue demonstrated in the original article with any window of any application on my machine (M1 Mac Studio), but I thought that listing a very commonly used application alone would be enough to challenge the article's assertion ("the macOS designers are stupid because they make me do something that doesn't make sense in order to resize windows").
Something that baffles me about macOS: the pointer bug. I’ve been aware of this for ages—as far as I can recall, since Snow Leopard; maybe others have insight—and it still hasn't been fixed.
Simply put: the pointer doesn't always switch context properly. So, you'll have it hovered over a resize control and it will refuse to change from the default pointer. Or you'll be working, and suddenly notice the pointer is a 'drag' one, even though nothing's being dragged and nothing draggable is active.
I would love anyone with any knowledge, especially an (ex-)insider, to shed light on this issue.
This feels like a surprisingly good moment for Linux desktops to position themselves as real alternatives and actually gain ground.
MacOS Tahoe has been heavily criticized for its UI decisions, especially Liquid Glass, which many people feel actively hurts usability rather than improving it. On the other side, Windows keeps piling on user-hostile features, dark patterns, and friction that increasingly frustrate power users and regular users alike.
Distributions like Ubuntu, Fedora, Mint, and others have mature desktops, solid performance, and fewer design decisions that get in the user’s way.
I honestly cannot remember another moment where both major desktop platforms were being questioned this openly at the same time. If Linux is ever going to take advantage of dissatisfaction at scale, this feels like it.
>This feels like a surprisingly good moment for Linux desktops to...actually gain ground.
I agree, and its likely that both macOS and Windows will continue to get worse.
That said, it's important to be realistic because users can and will put up with quite a lot of discomfort before switching, and this is because for every bad feature or misstep, there are 100 others that are so good you don't even notice them. And when you switch, you start noticing all those others features you never noticed before, because they are now gone. Some of these features will be hardware, some OS, some application support, and some of them you can fix and some you just have to get used to.
An approach I recommend is to add a linux laptop to the mix. You can buy a used, powerful laptop cheap, install Linux on it and try to use it for a time, keeping your other machines around. Chances are you'll find various trade-offs - Linux will NOT be a strict improvement, it will have downsides. Linux is particularly weak with power management and certain devices like fingerprint readers. Depending on the apps you use, it can be weak there, too. That said, Linux is very usable, easy to install, and you should try it. But I think it does people a disservice to imply its better on every axis. It's better on some, worse on others.
Linux desktops aren’t all immune to excessive minimalism and UI churn either. Just look at Gnome where they’ve decided it’s good in terms of usability to put all options in a hamburger menu and remove any sorts of sensible config options from the UI (a while back it was basic things like “show icons on the desktop”) to achieve this supposed sleekness.
Also Gnome disappeared after 2, got replaced with Unity in Ubuntu which was a whole new ugly thing, then that got replaced with Gnome3 which is very different from Gnome2, also Xorg got deprecated...
GNOME has exactly the same quirky behavior with rounded windows, where the drop shadow is actually the clickable area to resize the window.
If you applied these standards of critique to Linux UIs, this post would be an entire encyclopedia, indexed by DE. I'd take even the worst modern Mac OS (Lion?) over that.
I feel like people who say this haven't seen KDE in a very long time. On a thinkpad it not only "just works", it works flawlessly, never demands attention without justification (i.e. no ads or superfluous items in notifications), every bit of hardware works, all the special keys, fingerprint reader and it's all recognized and usable and configurable from KDE.
Also alternatives to Office, browsers, and pretty much anyone who can come along and say "we make tools that do what you want them to do."
All of these are longshots, but it really feels like we've hit a historic level of discontent.
This won't happen until Microsoft Word is available on Linux.
It's like the console wars — different camps say "our console is better, it has more teraflops." In reality, nobody cares about that — buyers will get the console that has the games.
Linux isn't there (on the desktop), and I doubt it'll ever be. It lacks so much: newbie support, drivers, easy configuration (user friendliness in general), and software. There's so much software that doesn't run on Linux. Linux also lacks mature frameworks that make development for macOS and .NET easy. The only thing desktop linux does well is browsing. That would be enough for most people, but they also have tablets and phones, and no need for a desktop.
User friendliness isnt that bad depending on distro, configuration is fine, but not great.
The big problem isn't friendliness, it's that you don't buy a laptop with it installed. Most people are not realistically going to install a different operating system, they're going to use the one the laptop comes with.
It's unusable even with the "user-friendly" distros like Mint and Ubuntu. Starting with the fact that Mint and Ubuntu don't even agree on what window system to use.
[dead]
> lacks mature frameworks that make development for macOS
Really? And windows does?
C#, or rather .NET, is pretty decent. I rate it lower than the macOS frameworks for UI development, but it brings a lot of functionality, which has been refined since the days of Visual Basic. Linux simply doesn't have that development effort. Completely understandable, but it holds Linux back, in particular on the desktop.
If you're not convinced: look at the difference between desktop Linux and Android. Although Android Studio seems to be a bit of a disaster nowadays, there's a lot of development support for Android, and it shows in the 1.6 million apps that have been built for it. Android has got what people crave: easy, slick, user-friendly apps, no technical hassle. It's an uphill battle, and at the same time, the focus is shifting away from desktop. So I think the year of Linux for the desktop will likely never come.
Absolutely
We're at the stage where almost any UI change no matter how small on Macs is heavily criticized. It seems a lot of people are getting very upset over a lot of micro detail. There's no way to please all of them. I've upgraded to Tahoe. Honestly, I barely notice any difference. It looks alright. There's very little for me to get upset over here. I'm pretty sure I'm in a bucket that describes the overwhelmingly large majority of users here: indifferent about the changes, overall not too upset, barely notice it.
As for Linux. I also have a Linux laptop with Gnome for light gaming (Manjaro). It's alright. But a bit of a mess from a ux point of view. Linux always was messy on that front. But it works reasonably well.
The point with the distributions that you mention is that they each do things slightly differently, and I would argue in ways that are mostly very superficial. Nobody seems to be able to agree on anything in the Linux world so all you get is a lot of opinionated takes on how stuff should behave and which side of the screen things should live. This package manager over that one.
I've been using Linux on and off for a few decades, so I mostly ignore all the window dressing and attempts to create the ultimate package manager UI, file managers and what not and just use the command line. These things come and go.
It seems many distros are mostly just exercises in creating some theme for Gnome or whatever and imitating whatever the creator liked (Windows 95, Beos, Early versions of OSX, CDE, etc.). There's a few decades of nostalgia to pick from here.
The changes in Tahoe do not fall under the bucket of "no matter how small". We have grown to accept many small, but very annoying changes, starting from disappearing scrollbars to not showing full URL in Safari, to name a few, which were all driven by smaller touchscreens on iPhone/iPad, but with Tahoe things became quite extreme.
Does anyone know if Stephen Lemay replacing Dye will potentially "save" the increasing mess that is OSX, at least UX wise, or is it more of a meaningless figurehead swap in a big org?
Tahoe is tragically bad by almost every UX measure, and following various Apple subreddits i wonder if they just don't care anymore - since the majority of people are shocked by the amateurishness of both bugs and design choices in the latest update - this comes on top of literally every major bug being ignored from the alpha to releasing anyway then continuing to ignore feedback.
I worked on Finder/TimeMachine/Spotlight/iOS at Apple from 2000-2007. I worked closely with Bas Ording, Stephen Lemay, Marcel van Os, Imran Chaudry, Don Lindsey and Greg Christie. I have no experience with any of the designers who arrived in the post-Steve era. During my time, Jony Ive didn't figure prominently in the UI design, although echoes of his industrial design appeared in various ways in the graphic design of the widgets. Kevin Tiene and Scott Forstall had more influence for better or worse, extreme skeumorphism for example.
The UX group would present work to Steve J. every Thursday and Steve quickly passed judgement often harshly and without a lot of feedback, leading to even longer meetings afterward to try and determine course corrections. Steve J. and Bas were on the same wavelength and a lot of what Bas would show had been worked on directly with Steve before hand. Other things would be presented for the first time, and Steve could be pretty harsh. Don, Greg, Scott, Kevin would push back and get abused, but they took the abuse and could make in-roads.
Here is my snapshot of Stephen from the time. He presented the UI ideas for the intial tabbed window interface in Safari. He had multiple design ideas and Steve dismissed them quickly and harshly. Me recollection was that Steve said something like No, next, worse, next, even worse, next, no. Why don't you come back next week with something better. Stephen didn't push back, say much, just went ok and that was that. I think Greg was the team manager at the time and pushed Steve for more input and maybe got some. This was my general observation of how Stephen was over 20 years ago.
I am skeptical and doubtful about Stephen's ability to make a change unless he is facilitated greatly by someone else or has somehow changed drastically. The fact that he has been on the team while the general opinion of Apple UX quality has degraded to the current point of the Tahoe disaster is telling. Several team members paid dearly in emotional abuse under Steve and decided to leave rather than deal with the environment post Steve's death. Stephen is a SJ-era original and should have been able to push hard against what many of us perceive as very poor decisons. He either agreed with those decisions, or did not, and choose to go with the flow and enjoy the benefits of working at Apple. This is fine I guess. Many people are just fine going with the flow and not rocking the boat. It may be even easier when you have Apple-level comp and benefits.
My opinon; unless Stephen gets a very strong push from other forces, I don't see that he has the will or fortitude to make the changes that he himself has approved in one way or another. Who will push him? Tim Cook, Craig Federighi, Eddy Cue, Phil Schiller? The perceived mess of Tahoe happened on the watch of all of these Apple leaders.
Thanks for this interesting read.
I’m asking you to judge people’s state of mind here, which is near impossible, but please bear with me…
> Several team members paid dearly in emotional abuse under Steve and decided to leave rather than deal with the environment post Steve's death.
Normally during an event like this there is a change in culture as well which I think we have seen under Cook. So why did they assume that the abusive situation would continue? Jobs was generally known to be harsh to the point of abusive, but if the situation did not change on his death maybe the abuse was equal parts cultural rather than just from the CEO, so why not leave earlier?
Thanks for the first hand insights. Do you know if much has changed in the past 18 years since your tenure there?
I still have friends who work there. Some of them came to Apple from Be or Eazel, and are still working on Finder, Safari, Dock, etc. A lot has changed and in my opinion not for the best. Compared to them, my time there was a flash in the pan. When I look at Safari, Finder and the general state of the UI, I am deeply saddened. I see a bizarre combination of stagnancy, gratuitious change and general aimlessness across the desktop and mobile. I also have a deep distrust of anyone who works at big company, let alone a big company on one component for a long amount of time. To me, it leads to a focus away from external customers and to becoming an expert at internal politics. I probably need counseling, but I loved the dictatorship of the Steve era. Yes, we can point to flaws like the Mac Cube or the hockey puck mouse, but I really appreciated someone just maniacally fixated on getting things done and cutting through the BS that I saw later on in jobs in big tech.
It would be nice if veterans of the post-Steve era would post on here. Maybe they are scared, bound by NDAs or could care less. Like I said, I need some mental health treatment about my time(s) at Apple I was there working on Final Cut Pro after Be, went to Eazel, and then rejoined Apple as part of Steve's mass hiring of Eazel employees at the behest of Andy Hertzfeld.
[dead]
He will prevent it from getting much worse than it would have under another decade of Dye, but I don't think he can totally reverse the trend.
I think this is just what happens to companies as they get older. Most of the people who pioneered the Human Interface Guidelines aren't at the company anymore, and management doesn't see much financial growth in Mac sales compared to AI and services.
> compared to AI and services
It's probably the services (Care, iCloud, Music, and even TV), Apple's AI isn't on the overall map at all compared to the competition.
A lot of Apple's services revenue is Apple Store mobile games, AIUI.
Lemay's appointment was widely celebrated, but he'd been at apple since 1999 and never got the gig. My guess is that there are valid reasons for that that may not be design-related.
This behavior is similar to Windows 11. You have to position the mouse just outside the window. It is non-intuitive and awful.
These are problems humanity solved over 35 years ago (see NeXTSTEP). Why are these designers breaking basic features that worked for over 35 years?
Call me cynical but I think designers need to occasionally break things that were already solved long ago to justify their continued relevance. Explains a lot of redesigns that make things only worse, reshuffling interfaces, hiding things behind menus in form over function redesigns, etc.
Non-tech people tend to think similarly about developers, breaking things that worked fine until yesterday / last week / last month, for no user-visible benefit.
Sometimes that's true.
The exact same thing applies to development. How many things broke because of a React rewrite or moving to micro services?
I wish the average dev would recognise this.
This is probably not a coincidence. I can pretty much guarantee you a developer said something to a designer like "hey, most of this is outside the window, is that fine?" and the designer said back "well, I think so, but let's check what Windows did," and then they okayed the decision at least in part because Windows did it.
Which is all the more bizarre, because historically it was usually Windows which copied MacOS ;)
That the roles got reversed became painfully clear when macOS copied the Windows Vista style popup mess for access permissions.
The macOS style popups are arguably worse.
Windows Vista may have been plagued by programs assuming administrator access for everything but at least it isolated the security prompt.
You can verify that you're interacting with a real UAC prompt (by pressing ctrl+alt+delete for instance, which can be configured to he required before approving a prompt).
Any program can replicate the macOS security dialogs. You just have to hope that you can safely enter the password to your account into one, or activate TouchID when prompted.
Fun fact: NEXTSTEP went 10 years without shipping a basic design refresh, except in prereleases (4.0PR1 and traces in 4.0PR2.) This was because it was a good fucking GUI that did its fucking job, and had "usability before aesthetics" as a core design tenet in its developer documentation.
Steve's brain fell out when he got back his throne at Apple. Aqua was a mistake.
Engineers (hopefully) come to learn the value of Chesterton's Fence young, because engineering failures tend to make themselves known quickly and loudly.
Designers probably have perverse incentives. Showy new designs get promotions. Even when they hurt usability, it's often only in insidious ways.
Yes, this. I've worked with designers who only see the product as a personal art project for their portfolio. Business and user problems are secondary to them.
Do not hire visual designers as UX designers - unless you know what you're doing.
The best UX designers design to solve business and user problems and work within constraints.
My guess is that both Apple and Microsoft people see this as a tradeoff.
If the anchor point for window resizing was more inside the window, then you encounter an annoying problem where youre trying to click or drag content, but you end up just resizing your window instead.
The obvious solution is to just keep the old bezel that separate the content from the scroll wheels / resizing handles and make it visually obvious what you're doing, but apparently they think that's too ugly.
History always repeats itself. The young generation always thinks the old generation was rubbish and they have nothing to learn from them and can do better.
> overall, the young copy the elders and contend hotly with them in words and in deeds, while the elders, lowering themselves to the level of the young, sate themselves with pleasantries and wit, mimicking the young in order not to look unpleasant and despotic.
"Socrates", in Plato's Republic
None of us are immune to cycles in fashion, and the need to differentiate ourselves and our work from what came before, even if what came before was pretty much a solved problem.
Maybe it's humanity's way of escaping local minima, or maybe it's an endless curse which every generation must bemoan.
> None of us are immune to cycles in fashion, and the need to differentiate ourselves and our work from what came before, even if what came before was pretty much a solved problem.
I am. If it isn't broke, I don't fix it. And I suspect others are as well. The problem is that too many people are not immune, so it doesn't matter if some are.
And the elder generation is always convinced that the young generation is degenerate, incompetent, and destined for ruin.
Yup! And the cycle continues.
IIRC, win8 was the last windows to have thick graphical window borders, and that was after they got rid of the texture/aero look from vista/7, so at that point you at least had something graphical to grab onto which (mostly?) matched where the cursor was. Then in win10 onwards they shrunk the border down to one pixel with the zone around it where you can click off the window but still affect it.
On the back of my mind I think part of this was the move to fit scaling to large resolution monitors (i.e. 4k+) work better, as a graphical border of a fixed pixel width will shrink proportionally compared to a border that is as thin as it can be. For a while I've felt that it's a missed opportunity on high res displays to not use more detailed art for window chrome as pixel wide will only get smaller and more difficult to distinguish, such as the minimize/maximize/close icons which remain pixel wide line art even at big scaling.
I think the designers at Microsoft use Macs as their daily driver or so. So much usability thrown away the last years to look more like Apple.
the inability to just hold win+mouse1 to move or win+mouse2 to resize is driving me insane compared to KDE
I love how this information is produced. Succinct, excellent and simple visuals, clear argument, and a solid amount of sarcasm and cynicism to keep us entertained and to provide an air of senior technical person.
MacOS always had its own quirks, but it had a good intuitive design that was well thought out.
All the Apple engineers and other visual designers get quite defensive really quick when we mention that Tahoe really screwed things up, because it's more than just a transition into glass design, but a complete dismissal of design principles, to the point that the entire system is slowly becoming user hostile.
Every critique of the 26 series can be explained like this article with really in depth design principles, which is already engraved in Apple design guidelines, but Apple itself just dismissed it all. Everything from being able to clearly distinguish UI elements, to general accessibility, to discoverability, everything got worse.
Operating Systems are one of the most complicated systems we created, not because they're a collection of processes and thread, but because everything is built on top of them and creating something that's well thought out and stable, and intuitive is really hard. Designers just randomly creating visual elements just because it looks cool and not paying attention how people are going to use it is simply half assing the whole thing.
That's still one of the reasons I believe Alan Dye was let go, fired in a sense, he had power over the company, but with that power he screwed things so much that we need to rediscover all the things related to usability in very high detail as if we're rediscovering the wheel, just so that we can get back to square one.
> All the Apple engineers and other visual designers get quite defensive really quick
Is there evidence of this?
At a meta level, good design is a very useful tool for discussions about good design!
I noticed Apple’s software quality decline the moment they committed to 1-year release cycles. Because an x.0 release inevitably has issues, it offers less than a year of stability (sometimes only a few months if it takes until x.4 to be fully stable) before things get broken again in y.0. And because Apple stops signing old versions pretty quickly, you’re often stuck on an unstable new version if you take the risk and upgrade.
Additionally, it is hard on all developers (Apple included) to release updates for all of its many platforms on the same day, which IMO reduces software quality across the ecosystem.
(Apple also has the luxury of only supporting the latest OS versions with its software. Customers often expect third-party developers to support a wider range of OS versions and devices than Apple does.)
I have been using OS X since 10.4 Tiger. I still remember standing in line at midnight trying to get a copy on DVD. Getting to test all the new features back home in the middle of the night was so exciting! Well worth the €129/€29 they charged for it. Nowadays the yearly releases are more of a "meh". I hit install, they added a new grouping feature to Reminders and that is about all I use from what they added.
Still bitter that my 2006 Core Duo MacBook only had support up to 10.6 Snow Leopard but back then that was over 4 years of being able to use the latest OS, so comparable to four releases with the current cycles.
I used that same MacBook until 2014. At least Snow Leopard was a gem.
I've upgraded because I wanted to have access to the latest OS features but I got to admit I'm not a fan of the UI either. I have an M3 Max with 128GB and sometimes my computer UI feels sluggish. What is even going on?
My biggest beef is there seems to be a lot of bugs in Safari. If I open Discord and switch tabs a few minutes later the tab is dead and a refresh doesn't work you need to retype the discord address again on the tab window.
On a full screen safari If I click on the share button by accident and don't pick any of the options the address bar for that tab becomes uneditable.
In IOS long pressing a video would show options such as opening on a new tab or downloading the file. Now for certain websites the options show for a split second before it switches to the full screen player.
There are many other annoying bugs but those are the most annoying ones.
BTW it's also amusing how not only iCloud doesn't flag a false Apple billing phishing message as junk but Apple """Inteligence""" will highlight it as priority. https://imgur.com/a/HaHxsUR
I’ve noticed a gradual increase in my annoyance with technology over the last couple of years. A lot of things now just feel irritating and not-quite-right.
Eg on my iPhone filling in a password sometime is kinda blanks the screen while I’m trying to fill the password in.
My keyboard is absolutely terrible.
Lots of other little annoyances I can’t remember right now.
This window thing is another good example of just not enough thought being put into things.
I swear Apple broke the iPhone keyboard permanently in like 2015. I don't know what it is, but I can't type reliably on any newer phone I've had, to the point where I call instead of texting. And the rare times I go back to use that iPhone 5 in my car for music, it's so easy to type, so I'm not just remembering wrongly.
And those screens were TINY so how can it now be worse?
I think one of the big issues is the autocorrect seems to make as many correctly typed words into random bullshit words as it does typos into correct words. So you feel like you’re walking on ice, just constantly monitoring what you last typed to make sure it didn’t make it into nonsense.
The old autocorrect didn't seem any better though. I actually disabled it on both, so narrowed it down to purely a keyboard issue.
The keyboard is still bad when you turn off autocorrect.
Often on HN the comments are a better read than the original article.
This time the article is so good -- clear, funny, succinct, accurate -- that it's a better read than the comments.
Why does the UI have to change all the time? Can't they just keep it the same?
If cars were like computers, the steering wheel would be in a different place after every maintenance check.
Anyway, I'm on Linux, using Gnome Classic as my WM, and I don't have these stupid "everything is suddenly different now" issues.
> Why does the UI have to change all the time? Can't they just keep it the same?
Because if they kept it the same, then there would be no need to continue to employ all those UI designers. Therefore, to be assured of their continued employment, the UI designers have to make constant changes to justify their existence. Meanwhile, we get to suffer with their changes.
I see this sentiment sometimes, but don't buy it. What I do buy is that customers, as well as investors expect the company to keep developing new products, create new releases and version. To drive sales.
Companies don't build things to motivate having developers - Remember they are the "cost center", while sales are the creators of value. The developers are a necessary burden and would be axed as soon as they don't provide what is needed.
Old products are boring. New products are interesting. Customers likes new thing. Media writes about new things, even writes negatively if updates are slow to come.
Compare to cars, skis, tennis rackets even dishwashers, new coke, new christmas special of somesuch not the same as last Christmas. Things that have new models every year or season, every six months etc. We create newness, not because it is really needed, but it drives sales.
Moving to a once a year makes Apples products guaranteed to get buzz, sales repeatedly. And investors can predict when that will happen. All are happy. Almost.
Most of these changes aren't that disruptive because they keep the fundamentals, but there are a few things Apple makes sure you never get used to like iTunes/Music or iPhone Photos.
What bothers me about Linux is that realistically your entire DE will change at some point if/when the one you're staying on becomes too unsupported. They did this kinda recently at work, not cause IT wanted a fresh new look but because of some compatibility issue.
Car designs do change all the time, mostly just for novelty too.
Cars have similar UX issues as well. See the whole touchscreen saga.
It's also an issue on Linux, to an extent. GNOME has a tendency of forcing UIs on users, and Ubuntu with Unity, now GNOME again, etc. Though, thankfully, since the user is free to choose their own desktop environment and window manager, it's not as pressing of an issue.
I realized many years ago that simpler UIs deliver the best UX. This is a large reason why I love the command line so much. Most programs have a fixed and stable interface, and can be composed to do what I want. For graphical programs I prefer using a simple window manager like bspwm on X, and niri on Wayland. These don't draw window decorations, and are primarily keyboard-driven, so I don't need superfluous graphics. I only need a simple status bar that shows my workspaces, active window, and some system information. I recently configured it with Quickshell[1], and couldn't be happier. I plan to use this setup for years to come, and it gives me great peace of mind knowing that no company can take that away from me. I will have to maintain it myself, but there shouldn't be any changes in the programs I use to break this in a major way.
[1]: https://github.com/imiric/quickshell-niri/tree/main/fancy-ba...
Great first blog post! The corner highlighting in the gifs and images was very clear. Also, I really like the formatting of how you inserted the gifs inline with border radius and shadow effect: I haven't seen blogs with your styling and it was refreshing.
Modern interfaces are digging a bigger and bigger gap between UI and UX, while UI-UX is actually a balancing act.
Let's face it, new glass UI is stunning - not for everyone's taste, like everything in art - but it has the Wow effect. Fresh look, transparency, new colors, wow! Same goes to many, not all, web sites, apps, etc.
On the UX side, with some exceptions, it is a disaster, though. Why on Earth would I want an ill-readable text behind a semi-transparent panel? Windows that only use 90% of my OLED screen I paid for? Do I want every web app invent its own navigation? Not in my worst dreams.
I like the new UIs, designers do an excellent job. Now, we must also bring back the UX people! Real user-oriented UX, not dark patterns UX that trick users to sign up for services they don't need. Its a pity, the latter actually killed the UX domain I think.
First failing autocorrect on iOS, now this... Love how it is solved in Omarchy Linux - Super Key + Right Mouse Button anywhere on the window.
It's not just that I haven't upgraded my Mac, but also I'm actively avoiding buying a new or refurbished one until (if) they fix all this stuff, because there will be no way to downgrade to an earlier version…
I haven’t tried it in many a year but I’m fairly certain that if you have the installer, you can downgrade to any version that runs on your computer.
Tahoe is proof is that UX for desktop has finally jumped the shark.
In all my years using computers I have never been so disappointed so profoundly by a 36 gigabyte operating system upgrade.
I'm so glad I haven't updated.
A lot of the design changes over the last decade seem largely Jobs-ian marketing driven. The round corners and friendly surfaces were useful in bringing the mass market into computing. Now that computer use is ubiquitous, it will be interesting to see if we start migrating back to the way the original programmers envisioned things like always-visible scrollbars and obvious click targets.
We've spent billions. Are UIs a lot better off than Windows 3.1?
I find it very ironic that Apple's Mac hardware is the best it's ever been, and some of the best (if not the best) in the entire industry, yet their software team seems intent on burning down their entire reputation. Maybe they think that's better than getting fired over the laughingstock that is Apple Intelligence
This is very well presented and I hope Apple sees it. And this is the kind of thing that I don’t think would fly with Steve Jobs, most likely with very harsh reaction. Attention to the details was a big part of Apple’s DNA much because of him, and it’s a bit sad to see that eroding.
I use easy-move-resize [1] to resize windows from anywhere inside the area of the window, using a modifier key. In my case I like using cmd + middle mouse button + drag.
This is standard in Gnome and a must for me back when I switch to MacOS for work.
I use https://rectangleapp.com which has been a lifesaver. I only use the following three shortcuts and disable the rest:
cmd+option+f = maximize to fill entire screen
cmd+option+ctrl+left/right = move window to other monitor on left/right
I occasionally use cmd+option+left/right if I need to have two windows side-by-side on the same monitor.
MacOS window sizes have always felt weird to me - no easy way to maximize without making it go into full screen mode.
As I was writing this, I just realized that hovering on the green traffic light shows a menu to choose some window placement options.... not sure how I never realized this before, but even the "maximize" option there doesn't go all the way to the edges - weird.
The doco mentions "left" and "right" mouse. I have the ctrl-click already mapped to right mouse on my trackpad. Before I take the plunge, how well does this work with a trackpad on a MB Air?
Just tried this. Pretty cool. Kinda strange how the mouse cursor doesn't move with the window, but still might be worth using.
I came here to say something similar. Ever since I found out about alt + left click drag anywhere in window to move, and alt + right click drag practically anywhere on any side to resize, anything else feels user-hostile.
I rarely use windows anymore, but just like you installed a tool to get this behavior.
This UI feature saves approx 3 seconds on average for resizing windows. Plus, more importantly it more predictably works, and is an easier target to hit than a 2-10 wide pixel line or square region.
My biggest peeve with macOS Tahoe is the App Launcher redesign.
It seems like a clear regression in usability. By moving from a high-density, full-screen experience to a constrained, scrolling window, they’ve increased the interaction cost for launching apps via the mouse. It feels like a 'unification tax. Sacrificing desktop utility to align with non-Desktop modalilties. Does anyone see a functional upside here, or is this purely aesthetic consistency?
The removal of Launchpad was an inexplicable blunder. The OS now provides no way to organize your applications.
Why would I want my dev tools, audio apps, 3-D-modeling apps, and office apps all jumbled together?
It's as if Apple is trying to catch up to Microsoft in the race to regress.
> The removal of Launchpad was an inexplicable blunder.
It wasn't a blunder. It was absolutely intentional to force users to start using the AI component.
I suspect someone probably pointed out no one would use it because launchpad has a better UX, so they removed it and forced the three finger pinch to launch spotlight.
I'm currently using the following to fix it.
- Bug in preferences that disabling show home also disables 3 finger pinch.
- I'm using AppGrid as my new launchpad.
- Using better touch tool to activate launchpad with 3 finger pinch.
What AI component?
They want you to search. I probably have 200 apps on my phone and their automatic categorization is good enough for me. Most common ones I just search anyway.
It works great on phone, on the operating system there are numerous applications that you don't care about.
You can still make subdirectories in /Applications.
This is not reliable; it messes up some applications.
I was shocked when I first hit this. I'm also confused as to why the settings app constrains the window size but I think it did that in the previous version too - not a justification!
I complained about it to a team mate and he thought it was fine and I was weird for using the app launcher and not cmd-space. Although on Windows I always use win-r to run stuff.
Tahoe UI changes and LG are such a mistake and Apple being Apple will probably just double down on it.
I don't know why it's so laggy when you open it. First time you open and scroll it jitters and not all app icons are loaded, so they kind of chunk and overlap.
You get worse icon pop-in if you add your app folder with grid view to the dock. These aren't stored on the network, so it's baffling they take so long to load the icons.
Maybe they didn't want people seeing their awful new icons at large enough sizes that the seams would be showing...
It’s consistency with the rest of Spotlight. I imagine they want to enhance it, but getting people to use it might be the first step.
Yep. I hate it. Its easier to open the Finder and use the shortcut to open the application folder.
I downgraded back to Sequoia after 1 day.
I have no idea what Apple were thinking, this OS is basically unusable, and extremely ugly.
I hope I won't somehow be forced to upgrade at some point.
Apple needs to start thinking about their users again instead of shareholders.
I've used every release of macOS since the Mac OS X Public Beta in late 2000. Until now. I'm skipping 26 altogether and hoping 27 tones down the worst excesses of the Alan Dye era.
See: [shipping the org chart](https://betterthanrandom.substack.com/p/shipping-the-org-cha...)
That egg scramble plate GIF is pure gold.
It’s a great analogy but I wish, in the video, he had been grabbing the plate and it somehow didn’t move. Then, when he grabbed the air outside of the plate it should have magically moved. That would have highlighted how crazy Tahoe is.
Yeah, but to be fair to Apple, the guy wasn't even trying to grab the shadow of the plate.
Rounded corners are ironically symbolic of the dumbing-down that's affected the software industry. Instead of the sharp precision of 90-degree corners, we get vague curves that don't make sense anymore as though the corners have been worn away.
Apple is at the point where they need a Jobs-ian correction again.
Steve Jobs would have had a fit over this product line. As '97 era Jobs put it, "The products suck! There's no sex in them anymore!"
My modest proposal for Apple diehards (especially employees) is to feed all the data that exists on Jobs into a multi-modal model so that Apple can hear just how much their shit sucks from Jobs' digital ghost.
A good starting point would be the https://stevejobsarchive.com/
It's not just Apple though. Something is wrong in the software industry. Desktop/PC operating systems aren't going away, but the industry have decided that it's no longer a relevant product category.
Windows is going down a strange path, where it's productivity is suffering because Microsoft is measuring success in terms of CoPilot adoption. Apple is stuck trying to invent the next iPhone, but in the meantime they are trying to make the iPhone sexy by slapping on a new skin. Then they forgot about macOS and quickly moves over some stuff from iPhone. Neither of the products apparent have UX designers anymore and QA is meeeh.
I don't understand either company. Both use to have talented UI/UX teams and actually listened to them. Is it really just short term stock price thinking that make them both forget that their operating systems should be about productivity and user ergonomics?
> Something is wrong in the software industry
Software and technology went from being a productivity tool to an ad delivery vehicle (or delivery vehicle for whatever bullshit is en-vogue like media subscriptions, AI, etc - that ultimately sooner or later comes back to ads).
Turns out you don't actually need much UX or design when the product's productivity capabilities no longer affect your bottom line.
My question is what those people think will happen when the transition completes and everything fully became an ad delivery machine with no productivity features? Ads only work as long as people have disposable income to spend on the advertised products/media, and they won't be having any money if you break the productivity tools they used to make said money. Ads can't work if the entire economy becomes ads.
>"The products suck! There's no sex in them anymore!"
Enter "Lickable Pixels" -- the phrase that stuck to describe the Aqua era.
Introducing Mac OS X's Aqua interface, Jobs said at Macworld in January 2000: "We made the buttons on the screen look so good you'll want to lick them."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aqua_(user_interface)
Then there was the red hot irresistibly sexy and well designed IBM Thinkpad TrackPoint -AKA- Keyboard Clitoris -AKA- Joy Button, and IBM's explicitly lascivious "So Hot, We Had To Make It Red" ad.
https://www.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/hodidb/so_hot_we_...
Ted Selker, the inventor of the TrackPoint, told me the story of how that ad got written and refined by focus groups: He slyly suggested the slogan, and IBM's ad designers begrudgingly put it on the page in small text in the corner, below the photo and ad copy. Then they A/B tested it with the text a little bigger, then a bit bolder, then even higher, and it finally worked its way up to the top of the page in BIG HUGE BOLD TEXT!
More about Ted's work:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34425576
Ted Selker fondly reminds me of "Mr. Lossoff" the "Button Man" in "A Nero Wolfe Mystery” episode “The Mother Hunt”, where Archie drops in on "Mister Lossoff’s Distinguished Buttons” in the garment district of New York:
https://youtu.be/h-QgWOSVKm4?t=724
He's totally THAT enthusiastic, a distinguished expert fiendishly obsessed with buttons! He even carries around a big bag of replacement Joy Buttons that he hands out for free like candy to anyone who’s worn theirs out.
I know this from personal experience: Ted and his wife Ellen once ran into me working on my Thinkpad at some coffee shop in Mountain View, and Ted noticed my worn out Joy Button. He excused himself to run out to his car to fetch his Button Bag, while Ellen smiled at me and rolled her eyes up into her head and shrugged, and we hung out and talked until he got back. I really appreciated a nice new crisp one with fresh bumpy texture, because mine was totally worn down, and it made his day to get rid of a few. (I imagine their house has hoards of boxes and piles of bags full of them!)
The common thread: design that makes you come. Back for more, that is. Buttons to lick till they click. Nubs to rub till they're bald. Products you touched obsessively until they're worn smooth. Tahoe gives us clownish corners we can't even grab. Apple dropped the ball -- and frankly, it's a kick in the nuts.
To be fair, Liquid Glass is as fuckable as it gets, but please Johnny I'm just trying to do my taxes here.
It has more of a Real Doll vibe to me.
Should we crowdfund some billboards in Cupertino expressing how big a misstep we collectively think Tahoe/iOS 26/Liquid glAss was?
No. Direct that money to open source projects and let Apple ruin itself.
I think people wildly underestimate how expensive skilled software development, leadership and especially design is (considering even Apple can't apparently find good designers).
The price of renting a billboard isn't going to cover more than a week's worth of those people's fees. Billboard-induced shame has actually much more chance of succeeding.
If you do, make them play that scrambled egg GIF from TFA in an endless loop. They'll eventually get it.
Yes, I would gladly contribute $25. You can rent partial time on an electronic billboard on Highway 101 for under $2K per month.
I'd like to see a Super Bowl ad sponsored by one or more of the big Linux players.
"Hi, I'm a Mac."
"And I'm a PC. Wow, you suck, Mac. What the hell happened?"
"Yo momma, PC."
<wild gesticulating and arguing ensues for 20-30 seconds>
"Hi, I'm Linux. Neither of these people care anything about you. You see, you're not their customer anymore. When you're ready to make computing personal again, check us out."
I guess you're not thinking like a marketer/product person (and I don't claim to be one either, at least not anywhere skilled), but your proposed ad shows exactly what's wrong with the Linux mentality and why it didn't go anywhere with consumers and won't go anywhere until this changes.
The ad should show something people want, not vague promises of being their customer or personal computing (a term essentially unknown by the new generations). Show something the new machine can do that the competition can't - built-in adblocker, cross-compatibility with Mac and Windows apps via VMs/rented servers, etc.
the person responsible for this mess was poached by meta a month ago.
If they didn’t realize how broken things are by themselves, mere pressure from the outside won’t be turning the ship around.
It's hard to realize things when you're in an echo chamber.
It's also hard to measure the quantity and genuineness of bitching online because people complain about everything and there's an inherent incentive online to complain to bring in ad revenue regardless of how genuine it is.
But it's a direct and unmistakeable sign (to you and your peers and colleagues) when someone paid actual money to rent a billboard just to remind you how much you fucked up.
A translucent billboard with some white text would drive home the point.
Are there even any billboards in Cupertino?
please yes, they could use some real world roasting
I mean, I don’t hate it, but it seems like a clear step back.
I recently learned about a shortcut you can enable for moving windows, is something similar around for resizing? On linux I do this via alt + left click and alt + right click
`NSWindowShouldDragOnGesture` setting allows you to drag windows at any point if you hold ⌃⌘
`defaults write -g NSWindowShouldDragOnGesture -bool YES`
I'm using Easy Move+Resize, though, I don't recommend using cmd as the only modifier (you're already using ctrl+cmd, so shouldn't be a big deal), since that screws up with cmd clicking on links to open in a new tab.
I just want to add that designers are usually bullied by upper management into designing beautiful things that make upper managers look good with their friends. No matter how impractical those beautiful things are.
Edit: Oh, and the "beauty" is in the eye of the managers.
Liquid glass is a piece of crap from Apple. I didn’t update my iPhone, nor my Mac. I will hold for as long as possible, and will consider switching away from the apple ecosystem if they do not address this fiasco of an update.
I still call it liquid ass.
When resizing, I expect to drag from the edge of a window. This is exactly how it works in macOS Tahoe, with a sufficient drag zone on the both sides. The only "strangeness" is that the drag zone extends further outside the window in the corner zone. IMO this is nice.
All that said, I REALLY would love to have a hotkey combo I can beep pressed down to resize anywhere over the window. Just like in many Unix/Linux window managers.
Yeah, I have to agree. The blog post seems convincing when you look at the images, but now that I've actually been playing with it, I can always drag the corner to resize. In fact, the corner provides much more draggable area than the window edges do. There's no problem.
So I agree it's strange that the drag zone extends so far beyond, but that's not really something to complain about...? Everywhere inside the corner where it feels reasonable to resize, it resizes. The article is expecting an absurd level of a drag zone on the inside.
Again, the large drag zone outside the corner is kinda weird. But honestly that's more just an understandable artifact of the corner drag zone being a square. If it were me, I probably wouldn't bother to round off one corner of the drag zone either.
There's a lot of stuff to criticize about Tahoe, but this would be about last on my list...
There is this obscure setting you can enable to be able to click anywhere on a window while holding Command + Control to move it.
defaults write −g NSWindowShouldDragOnGesture −bool true
This only supports moving around windows, not resizing.
And yet Mac OS didn't support resizing from edges, or any corner of the window except the lower-right ONE, until well into the 2000s. Incredibly dumb.
I laughed for a solid 5 minutes at the video of grabbing a plate.
Thank God this is not just me. I thought I was going insane.
Has text selection also changed? When I drag a block and copy it, I often find I've missed the first character. It's happening almost every time and I swear this wasn't happening to me before.
This complaint is made with a level of consideration and effort that Apple should aspire to when they make the OS itself. Bravo!
This app I found to fix the problem on my system: https://mikkelmalmberg.com/moves
FWIW: option double click sny corner to make any window full-screen without going into full screen mode.
Double click any side or corner to move it to the edge of the screen, and hold down option to make the effect symmetric.
Nice - I didn't know about that one!
I just found out today that hovering over the green traffic light icon shows an arrange menu... but the "maximize" option there leaves some padding on all sides of the window - weird.
I swear by https://rectangleapp.com/ - same outcome but with keyboard shortcuts instead of the mouse.
Ah yes, the classic Apple move of hiding basic functionality behind obscure shortcuts. Thanks for the tip.
Wow, this was so well presented! I almost didn't click on the article since I assumed it would be a meandering explanation about awkward edge cases or something. But this is so clearly and succinctly demonstrated! Amazing work by the author.
OSx updates have turned into a "lottery". Typically your machine goes down 50% in performance, and starts acting like a Commodore from 1982.
They keep on asking me to upgrade to some new OS, I consistently keep on telling it to sodd off!
Maybe I'm too old and every modern computer is a marvel to me, but as someone switching between win/macos/linux all these complaints amuse me. While in windows I'm using powertoys and I can move/resize windows using any space inside a window. It's the same with linux/gnome - a couple of config settings. Then, when I started using macos I looked for a similar solution - found BetterSnapTool and just started using it.
Not sure if it replaces everything, but I have been using https://rectangleapp.com and would not be able to use MacOS without it.
yes, looks like BetterSnapTool and rectangleapp have some overlapping functionality https://folivora.ai/bettersnaptool
I guess I found BetterSnapTool first and it solved my issues with window management in macos.
Wait which powertoy does resizing and moving of windows? I've been using AltSnap while still having powertoys installled for changing caps lock behaviour.
You're actually right, it's AltDrag for resizing and moving + PowerToys for snapping/zoning.
I get your point and think it is a matter of when things are relatively "perfectly" done as in iOS/MacOS, every little anthill seems like an eruption volcano, but let's also not make excuses for some of the rather disgusting issues in Tahoe that Steve Jobs' would have never allowed to ship.
I can't recall them all right off the top of my head, but I waited til 26.2 to update because of all the comments I saw about glitziness, and this resizing issue is just one of the quirks I have noticed are still not resolved; not to mention that my M4 Mac has not crawled and locked up as often as it has since I updated to 26.2. But again, to put it in perspective, that's only been very little hassle compared to what seems to be nothing but misery, suffering, and existential questions suffered by the wretched souls condemned to Windows.
Edit: another issue I have noticed in iOS is that now things like saving bookmarks in Safari is no longer a two step/tap process using long-press, it's a three step/tap process....WHY?? Same with "add to home screen". Also, the long press horizontal context menu (i.e., copy, paste) now does not slide left to reveal more options, it just changes mode to a vertical list. What is going on??? That's sickening...in my opinion. Horizontal, vertical? Pick one.
Second Edit: I just experienced another Tahoe glitch in at least Safari, where hyperlinks become un-clickable and the only way to resolve that is to seemingly restart safari. I don't find that acceptable in Safari of all places.
I was just reminded of another glitch in iOS, when typing if you select the left most suggested word, the selection highlight is not only aligned with the rounding and position of the underlying rounded background, it literally overlaps/extends beyond the background. Again... rather gross.
Apple is completely lost, exhibit #3281.
Also, years after reporting, you still need to pause typing for one second after switching keyboard language via keyboard shortcut, otherwise the original language stays selected.
This controversy could have been avoided if the GUI changes in Tahoe had been opt-in only. In other words, the Sequoia GUI should have remained the default, with the option of choosing to switch to Liquid Glass.
When has Apple ever really allowed you to do anything like that?
IMO: There should be 2 update channels, Security updates(MANDATORY), <ALL OTHER UPDATES>(no reason to be mandatory). end of discussion.
Never noticed this change, but unlike the blogger I never try to grab the window inside the corner. I tend to aim for the edge itself.
That's funny. I perceive resizing windows as easier now, because the cursor change is more dramatic when it gets in the resizing area. Pre-Tahoe, the diagonal one in particular looked almost the same, except with an arrow end in the bottom. Now it splits into two triangles.
I still operate off muscle memory, so it's not actually easier or harder, of course.
Yeah the really misleading part of the screenshots in this article is that it doesn't show the "resize cursor", which basically makes this a non issue.
Also, for anyone reading this who hates the general aesthetic, go into Accessibility and hit "reduce transparency". This has been a desirable setting for last few OSX versions.
I tried this resizing (also on Tahoe) and I can't reproduce this. It has a fairly well sized area around that corner in which I can click and drag to resize.
I always stay one major version behind so I only get security patches after an initial, yearly upgrade. Not experiencing Tahoe myself yet, I felt that perhaps the UI issues people are talking about were a tad overstated, but the example in the article states it very plainly.
I'm taken aback. Change the look, that's fair enough. But it should have some usability testing for this kind of thing before it goes out the door.
After using Tahoe for a week, I've found I leave it in my bag. Window operations are painful and it feels like a bad try at a tablet os without a stylus or touch screen. Fortunately, my Mac is now the auxiliary laptop and I can do everything I need to do with my linux laptop.
Wow that's an insane bug and I'm hoping it is a bug.
I'm glad I saw this blog post. I'm not going to upgrade until stuff like this gets addressed.
I have a few computers. Win, MacOS, Fedora, and iOS for mobile.
Out of all the things, the UX I cannot forgive is:
1. Hold Siri button
2. say "Create appointment at 3PM tomorrow."
The result is that no alert/notification/warning of this appointment occurs, unless I open the appointment and create the alert manually, at least at time of event. I cannot imagine any use case where one would create an appointment that required no reminder.
If I had created this appointment via Gmail or even Outlook, and synced... then there are notifications.
My point here is that the UX rot at Apple is not new. I am curious as to how this rot begins at BigOrg, and how it can be cured, if it can be addressed. I have never worked at BigOrg, so I really don't get it. Is there some missing UX role in the c-suite? How does my gripe, or Tahoe... ever happen? I understand how it happens at MSFT, but is this just what happens at all BigOrgs, eventually?
Whether appointments have an alert by default or not is a setting in the Calendar app.
Oh wow. Confirmed!
However, can you please explain to me the use case of "Siri, create an appointment at 3PM tomorrow" - where I would want no alert, at time of event, at the very least? I am pretty good at imagining edge cases, and I cannot imagine even one.
I have never been more upset at a default setting. I want to name and shame, and worse. Who made this call, a hippo? Think of the lost productivity at scale. "It just works UX" was supposed to be the entire point of Apple.
I would imagine a majority of office workers create appointments with no alerts. They're looking at their calendar all day.
That's only speculation, but that's why it's a setting. You can have it either way.
I would entertain this explanation, if actual office productivity calendars like Gmail and Outlook did not only have at time of event alert defaults, but also 10 mins prior by default. You know, like something actually useful.
Sorry, I have been spinning out on this for a while. I might be ridiculously upset about this. But, remember what Jobs said about boot times at scale?[0] Well...
I must be the minority that barely noticed any changes after upgrading to Tahoe.
I have not had any problems resizing. Honestly, I think my resizing got more precise with Tahoe. In earlier versions I had sometimes wrongly clicked for horizontal and vertical resizing. It's better now for me at least.
And I do not get why people so upset with Tahoe. I really really love it.
I highly recommend Moves, which makes it possible to resize with a modifier key drag within any part of the window: https://mikkelmalmberg.com/moves
I don't really care if it's because of bizarro designer hegemony, device unification, cost cutting, bad developers or something else, but it's astonoshing how far the desktop paradigm has fallen (and not just in MacOS). What baffles me the most about things like this isn't that crap slips through, it's that crap accumulates in an alarming rate and that apparently tech-savvy people aren't just seemingly fine with stuff like this, but will happily step up and defend it.
It all started with a dumb move to replace input language icon flags with text.
Apple keeps being a hardware company unfortunately.
Their software is not nearly as good as it could and should be if they had real competition.
Windows/linux is not a competition since they dropped bootcamp. Because that implies switching to a subpar hardware.
I had a failing work laptop that had bad battery power and finally just said fine, give me a Mac. The battery and build quality is the only good thing I can say about it. I absolutely hate the OS, despite using MacOS in the past and felt only mildly inconvenienced. It is still amazing to me how unwieldy it is to make keyboard shortcuts, have tiling that isn't embarrassingly bad, and something that is visually consistent. Now I know most people aren't using this tool like I do and Linux has been historically bad at this, but lately, I'm not so sure. KDE and COSMIC seem to handle these cases flawlessly, and even GNOME, which is divisive in the DE discussion seems to get these things right. MacOS/Windows have officially crossed over to being more cumbersome rather than less than your bog standard Linux distro. Have you ever tried to do anything other than adjust volume for your sound settings on Windows 11? It's absurd. You can see the remnants of the Windows 10 attempt at simplifying it with a new flavor of 11 nonsense, and to really do anything meaningful you STILL end up with the old school Control Panel style settings window. A company worth billions couldn't come up with something better for decades. Tahoe is a similar stumble. How does one take these companies serious as a consumer product anymore if you're anything but a casual browser user?
No one serious ever talks about "upgrading" to Tahoe without the quotes. I hope Apple are seriously embarrassed about this and determined to mend their ways.
Use rectangle and this will never be a problem for you.
If I would be running this company I would imagine a person, or the entire group of persons, who implemented this were nothing else but saboteurs sent by a competitor. I would fire the whole team immediately.
I am glad that I restrained myself from buying a macbook and went for a thinkpad. I think I saw icon issue on Tahoe not long ago on HN.
I know that macbook has been crushing laptop market with their M chip. Macbook is amazing for sure. I very much enjoy using it at work. But for personal computing, I need Linux setup.
I haven't upgraded to Tahoe yet, but overall MacOS is still solid. It has lots of quirks that would benefit from a quality of life release, but generally the OS gets out of the way and the hardware is solid. I could not say the same about Windows and to an extent Linux.
Apple really screwed the pooch on this last set of UI upgrades. They have been known as UI experts for decades and then they produced this unusable mess. I’ve upgraded my iPhone and iPad, but I’ve been delaying upgrading MacOS, hoping that they will fix most of the mess before I switch. If I was Tim Cook, I’d be looking for a scalp. This is as bad as the butterfly keyboard mess in terms of usability, IMO.
This is why Steve Jobs demoed software. Watch when he unveils Aqua, there’s a couple of slides of the lickable visuals and then he sits down and demos it. He clicks and taps and shows it working. Because that’s what you the user will do.
He’ll show boring things like resizing windows because those things matter to you trying and if he cares about resizing windows to this degree then imagine what else this product has.
Apple today hides behind slick motion graphics introductions that promise ideal software. That’s setting them up to fail because no one can live up to a fantasy. Steve showed working software that was good enough to demo and then got his team to ship it.
> He’ll show boring things like resizing windows
If you use something long enough, you'll get used to its idiosyncrasies. Jobs would have clicked and dragged 10px away from the rounded corner here instinctively. This is why the owner of an old car can turn it on and drive away in a blink while his son has trouble: hold the accelerator 10% down, giggle the key a little while turning, pull the wheel a bit, ... all comes natural to the owner.
So why would he have different instincts?
> This never happened to me before in almost 40 years of using computers.
> If you use something long enough, you'll get used to its idiosyncrasies.
Or you don't and get constantly annoyed by some basic thing that is broken (the owner of an old car would curse it every day when giggling the key)
Yes, and Mac owners will do the same thing. I don't use MacOS but people will just figure out the new behavior, be briefly annoyed by it, and then get used to it and move on. Apple could have done better here but users acclimate to much worse UX than this.
Who asked for those rounded windows anyway? They create so many problems; every app has its own border-radius, and it wastes precious screen space...
Are we reaching the death of UI design? Feel like we're now at the point where being mid-bad makes something one of the best for many.
I miss Windows 7 and OS X.
Scott Jenson - who worked on the classic Mac for Apple, and Android for Google - recently gave a talk on this:
https://youtu.be/1fZTOjd_bOQ?si=BVOxUPjoULhwiclE
The tl;dw is that copying UX lets others invest energy in identifying the paradigm. Linux, which tends to be starved for resources, has historically been reasonably well served by letting Apple and Microsoft define UX, while Linux focuses on implementing it. However, those headlining companies haven't been investing in desktop UX excellence in recent years. It's time for open source projects to embrace experimentation and take the mantle of cutting edge UX, because Apple et. al. aren't paving the way anymore.
I think we need to call it as what it is, half assed design.
I have been using Moom for a long time for especially two things:
- moving windows without holding from any particular position
- resizing windows without grabbing a particular corner
Life changing small things.
I didn't realize it was moom giving me my "move app to other monitor" hotkey, and moom didn't launch on startup after upgrading to tahoe. I've been using that hotkey for years.
That's when I realized there's no default hotkey for moving an app to an external monitor. That is absolutely wild. (Happy to be wrong)
I think there is an option in Keyboard Shortcuts to set a keybinding for moving to other displays, but it‘s not by default like in Windows.
For this kind of stuff Raycast is more than enough though. I use its window management features extensively.
Probably off topic question [coming from someone who spends 99.99% in i3+iOS+maximed windows in W11]: when do you need to have overlapping windows, or even windows that you resize by hand? Windows should take a zone in your screen. Punto. Even W11 has understood that by now.
I have a multitude of complaints about Tahoe, many of which others have already pointed out. One more thing that doesn't get mentioned as often but probably should is their new placement of the volume / brightness level UI which pops up when you change those two.
It used to be in the middle of the screen and worked just fine. But then someone thoughts of putting it exactly where browser tabs usually are and I _constantly_ find myself in a situation where I change the volume and try to click on a tab that this UI is on top of. Then I need to move my mouse outside the UI otherwise it stays there, and wait for it to disappear before I can change tabs. It's infuriating.
Also the resize cursor is completely unreliable, the cursor often doesn't change to the resize one when the mouse is over the correct resize areg. So it's even harder to tell if your cursor is in the right place before clicking. If you click in the wrong place it can have frustrating consequences, like activating another window or even clicking something inside it.
I have had issues with resizing Quick Look windows with their rounded corners on macOS for the last several major versions, well before Tahoe. The resize cursor indicator there also doesn't seem to appear at the correct location for the actual resize handles.
I've had the same struggle whenever I tried some Linux distro in my life. I don't know why but resizing windows is so fiddly.
I have been using Rectangle and Spectacle before it. Wanting to resize windows like in this article isn't natural to me anymore.
Same. Once in a while I end up on a screen share with someone and see that they have all these odd sized windows and they try to drag them around and resize them - drives me crazy!
There is no option to simply decrease the corner radius?!
Overlapping windows seem like a dated skeumorphic paradigm at this point. I almost never want to see just part of a window.
For a long time, I've found that either full screen or tiling (driven by keyboard shortcuts) is a far less frustrating a way to interact with windows, so I almost never use window-resizing. Window resizing is also horrendous when you try to do it with a touchpad.
Of all the Linux features to copy, they chose this.
I actually wish macOS would clone Alt-dragging from anywhere to drag and Alt-right clicking to resize from anywhere from Linux (at least GNOME and KDE Plasma have this built-in). That would certainly solve most of the complaints in the original post.
macOS has Cmd + Ctrl + drag to move windows. Alt + drag seems unlikely given that it's already often used for "copy" actions.
I just tried that on Tahoe (26.2) and it didn't drag the window with Ctrl+Cmd+drag. Is it supposed to work on all windows?
It's sort of hidden feature (I could bet that before "system preferences.app" redesign you could have found it there, but I don't see it anymore).
This comment explains how to do it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46585551
Oddly, the one thing it doesn't work on for me is the main area of the System Preferences window. Everything else I've tried seems to work, though.
KDE doesn't actually suffer from this problem.
*GNOME features, not Linux features. No such issues over here on KDE.
I have often felt like GNOME is the most Apple-y of desktop environments; they're very form over function. Not surprising to me at all that both would pick a design that seems beautiful until you try to use it.
Indeed, no such "invisible drag areas" here either using just FVWM2.
Shortly after Windows 10 came out I was joking that Microsoft finally made a Linux distribution (by replicating all the jankiness we usually associate with it).
Now I guess it's Apple's turn.
Wait, they implemented Alt-Drag/Right drag?
I believe the parent is referring to how GNOME 3.0 had some really bad resizing grabs. Single-pixel widths at the edges, and almost impossible to hit corners.
Latter versions significantly improved it.
Has been a major issue for me with Xfce and Gnome over the years, mostly just switched window managers.
I was about to suggest Xfce as an example where window resizing is effortless due to the <super>+<right click> behavior. You can just grab the rough sector of a window to resize it.
Any reason why you're not using it?
Sort of! Cmd + Ctrl + drag moves windows now.
Interesting, in the era of productivity tools I just realised I don't re-size windows anymore. I just use Swish or Spectacle.
I don't have this problem, and I can't seem to reproduce it.
I thought this was going to talk about the struggle of sizing windows to arbitrary widths. I often try to keep slack and my email windows side by side and Mac OS seems to go out of its way these days to frustrate my efforts and maximize the one window or the other.
The resize corners grab area is also very frustrating though.
I've used Rectangle for years so I can arrange windows more quickly. Not good for arbitrary sizes, more for set positions.
I install Rectangle App on any mac I use. The keybinds are convenient and the auto-sizing/tiling is pleasant as can be.
I'm one of those who instinctively click OUTSIDE the windows. I guess your instincts depend how long have you worked on a Mac.
tribunals
the cherry on top is the delay between the drag start and the window begining to resize
I haven’t had to move the mouse near a window corner to resize it in years — I just hold down the Shift and Fn keys and the window under my mouse resizes as I move it. Strongly recommend getting BetterTouchTool for this - changed my life.
I don't know what you have, it works on my machine. Just tried it. I can grab the rounded corner (+- few px inside/outside). I can't grab the corner like shown in the gif. I am on Tahoe 26.2 (25C56)
After a bit of testing, the target area seems to have certain dimensions that are based on pixels (19x19 according to OP). With a lower resolution, the corners become much easier to grab. I have had no issues resizing windows, and I'm on 26.0 (25A353).
I just remember all the people who will tell you that Apple (and Google, and Microsoft) have teams of people testing this stuff therefore it's great and your opinion that there is a problem is wrong. >:(
Made a decision on not to upgrade midway installation. Feels like it payed off. And I am on M2 256 GBs so it would have been worst for me.
The era of Apple design with great care to little details is long gone.
Apple's window management has always sucked, with the absurdly crippled resizing being a longstanding embarrassment.
Into the 2000s, the only way you could resize a window on the Mac was to drag its lower-right corner. That is it. NO other corner, and no edge. So if the lower-right corner happened to be off-screen because the window was bigger than the screen, you were kind of screwed. You had to fiddle with the maximize & restore gumdrops to trick the OS into resizing the window to make that ONE corner accessible. Then you had to move the corner, then roll all the way up to the title bar and move the window, then roll back down to the corner... until you had the window sized and positioned as you wanted.
When Apple grudgingly added proper window-resizing, it made it as obscure as possible. Since Apple remains ignorant of the value of window FRAMES, there is no obvious zone within which the resizing cursor should take effect. There is no visual target for the user. This has always made an important and fundamental part of a windowed GUI a ridiculous pain in the ass on Macs.
And as the author here notes, it has gotten even worse. Not only will the window often refuse to resize, but you'll wind up activating whatever app lies behind the window you're trying to resize... hiding the one you were dealing with.
I'm hoping something like this takes off on FreeBSD: https://github.com/gershwin-desktop/gershwin-desktop
I've only owned macbook laptops but have run Linux at work since 2002. The lack of cohesion and non-stop changes in Linux is just as tiring and this MacOS Tahoe stuff. Gnome 3 cared just as little for users. FreeBSD + KDE Plasma is pretty good now, but lacks feeling and design.
that looks like xfce?
I think they took the window manager from it to make running gtk apps easier. Admittedly gershwin or similar have a long way to go, but gnustep has the basic design from openstep. There's another similar project but from the ground up.
Apples products are still the best on the market, but if they keep this up; they will sooner or later become irrelevant.
"Best" is a relative term. It depends on the purpose / criteria
Normally bug reports should include the exact version and machine.
I personally don't see this behavour on Tahoe 26.2 and an M2 MBP.
My first reaction was that it never bothered me, but now I realize I also didn't update to Tahoe yet. I'll wait a bit longer...
That's genuine 2000s Linux experience there. Ironic that these days Linux provides a more refined and consistent UX than both MacOS and Windows.
All that 'glass' eye candy is a sheer sign that looks is more important to Apple than usability. And I don't even care for how it looks.
The iOS compass redesign is particularly egregious
I think you meant the Measure app, but yes. I hate it so much.
yes thats the one
I’ve updated my phone and now it can’t talk to MacOS and I don’t want to upgrade. I can’t imagine much about sharing internet or whatever has changed between these OS versions…
Might be the best problem TLI5'ing GIF I've seen :)
Window-resize radii seem to be a fixable problem (make it a user setting!) on many OS's. I can only -wish- that my Linux distro's resize radius wasn't -painfully- small. I've probably wasted HOURS fishing around until the red icon popped up.
Funny, on Linux I just use the special key (normally alt or super) to do all my window moving and resizing. It requires no precision at all and works even in tiling WMs without titlebars. I always found it weird Macos and Windows don't have this and it's a little painful to need to be precise with the mouse.
Could be distro-dependent. Yep I can use a key to move a window ... depending on where I 'grab' ('alt' works anywhere, 'super' only outside the browser window). But horizontal, vertical resizing requires a THIN edge, and diagonal re-sizing requires grabbing a tiny corner (character-sized), keys have no effect.
So… it’s a good thing that the design emperor is poached by Meta, yeah?
Funny enough, I never suffered this because my mouse pointer has always been configured to be comically large. So I had adapt with inaccurate click area for many many years due to my own cause.
one of my biggest fears is to upgrade my mb air by mistake will stay on sequoia as longer I can
I started using aerospace, a window tiling manager a long time ago and will never look back. Once you get used to the keybindings there's nothing better.
Its not a great update and hopefully with Dye out they will make some changes, but personally I don't have this issue.
Do you mean you don't observe the same thing? Or that it doesn't cause you difficulty?
I observe the same thing but it doesn't cause me difficulty. I think I more or less aim for the edge, vs the inside or outside.
Also, the cursor changes
Most of the Tahoe and Liquid Glass related gripes are overstated or sometimes just against the idea of changing anything well-established
I disagree. I generally don't get too upset by UI changes - having been programming since before Windows I've seen many of them - but LG is a loser.
I upgraded my mac to Tahoe and I don't like any change to the UI that I have noticed.
I upgraded my phone the other day, thinking it was just an update to whatever it already had, and ended up with LG on there and it is a disaster. I enabled the 'more opaque' feature and it did almost nothing.
LG is an awful experiment IMO. I'd put it at worse than Vista (which I skipped) and Gnome 3 which didn't bother me because I don't expect anything from linux desktops. I also skipped Windows 8 so not sure about the ranking there. But I'd say it's that level of disaster.
From a company that spent decades harping on about taste, usability, human interface guidelines etc, it’s a train wreck. If Microsoft did it you’d just shrug your shoulders and carry on with life because good taste and usability was never a core promise.
And what to do about the slow mouse?
At least it is not as bad as on Windows 11. There the resize area is inside or outside the visible frame depending on which side and which corner of the window.
I game on windows because of anti cheat software requirements. Windows is garbage. The windows + tab order is never consistent. Not having a good built in shell and don't get me started if you ever have to edit the registry for anything. Super poor experience.
I fully agree, but the winkey + tab order is simply in order of last used, with the most recent being at the upper left and oldest at the lower right.
Result of UI people work on UX. As an industry we need to de-hyphenate UI and UX.
Question for people who have installed Tahoe. Of the regions in the article, which bring window focus / key window? Is it area clipped to the round rect? Or is it similarly weird?
If there was a background window in that area outside the corner, would it receive the click event?
> Of the regions in the article, which bring window focus
Just did a quick test in a VM, and it seems all of them. I.e. if you could resize the window, clicking that space (even if empty) brings it into focus. But then I also tested on Sequoia and the same happens.
It seems then that basically everything remained the same except for the visual presentation of the corner.
Thanks for going to the effort!
> everything remained the same except for the visual presentation of the corner
This either seems very well-researched change, or very shallow one.
>It seems then that basically everything remained the same except for the visual presentation of the corner.
Which just goes to show how holistic design is utterly lacking. They seem to think just swapping bitmaps is "UI redesign".
[dead]
I never had this problem for ages. As I use hammerspoon with hotkeys to resize and move the apps between displays.
This 100%
Please please please make this better Apple. Or just give us an option for square windows.
I'm on Tahoe and really not seeing this issue.
I think another problem is the tiny resize cursor, on windows (at least on mine) it is a lot bigger and more distinct compared to regular cursor and when your cursor changes to resize arrow it is more apparent.
I don't really see/care where my mouse exactly is. If it is outside or inside the window. Once my cursor turns to resize cursor, I just start dragging.
Seems very clear now that we are going to see touch screen MacBooks. Which is a very silly idea. But explains why the UI "snaps" like an iPad, and everything is designed for touch.
I'm shocked this update was pushed by the same company that created the HIG. I guess companies really do keep growing to the point of mediocrity.
Surprisingly, this is an issue on Windows and Linux too -- macOS has just joined the sad party.
The location of the drag region is either the 10px-or-so just outside the window (GTK apps), or just inside the window (I see this in Electron apps). On GNOME, anyway.
On Windows this is caused by the removal of the thick window border with Win10. It wasn't really removed, it was just made transparent instead, thus the drag region moved outside the visible window to avoid the content size changing (for backwards compatibility). Apps often end up in a broken state too, because if you eschew system decoration, you lose the invisible border (which you don't even know you have), and it's easy to end up with a 1px drag region.
It's infuriating, because of the issue the author highlights -- you try and grab the window corner and fail.
It's a sad state of affairs, and a great example of how the basics are going backwards on desktop.
I noticed this and modified the .car to just make window corners sharp. It looks a bit jarring, but functionally speaking, it feels like a big improvement.
Just this week it also dawned on me the impracticality of the large corners after twice in a row failing to grab the corner of a window. Tahoe is absolute amateur hour.
Unrelated but iOS 26 is so bad and janky that I've finally decided to switch to an android phone. I hate it so much. Thank god I haven't upgraded to Tahoe.
The rounded corners are stupid to begin with. They are also there in a maximised window, meaning you now always have a slight visible border around your app and see the background in the corners.
Absolutely stupid design
When performing the resize action on any windows, the cursor changes to the resize cursor. The only time it doesn't change to the resize cursor is when you're not focused on that specific window. I don't really see the frustration this article is trying to portray.
They took our scroll bars and now they are coming for our resize controls.
I’ve been more and more confused by Apple’s product positioning for MacOS. They still have a sizeable “pro” (emphasis not sarcasm) market that spans across a very aspirational set of careers: Film, YouTubers, developers, photographers, artists, musicians, etc.
Considering how many people only buy a MacBook PRO no matter what they plan on doing with it, they really need to keep the actual salary-earning pros happy with it or else it’ll lose all credibility. A Mac in a recording booth has a look to it that sells well, but that aesthetic won’t last if you stop seeing them. Being an effective tool for the pro minority should honestly be the priority for MacOS, even at the cost of making it incongruous from iPadOS/iOS. *
* disclaimer: what do I know honestly haha, I’m sure they’ll print money anyway.
I just saw the upgrade notification and thought to myself "no, thank you".
Still running Sonoma on my MBP and iOS17 on my phone.
I've been using this to mitigate the problem: https://github.com/makalin/CornerFix
Sucks that I need another app though
> Note: This does not change the rounded corners of individual app windows. It only restores the straight silhouette at the edges of your display.
Also Finder can never remember to start the new window size as I last left it.
Windows is following the same path. In both it’s getting harder and harder to tell the window boundary and where to drag it resize.
> Since upgrading to macOS Tahoe, I’ve noticed that quite often my attempts to resize a window are failing.
That should nudge users away from this rather primitive method of window resizing using tiny 19px corners and instead set up a productivity app where your can use the full 33% of the window size (so conveniently huge! and of course customizable) to resize via an extra trigger (for example, using a modifier key)
(nice plate picture joke!)
I set up Raycast (https://www.raycast.com/) with the same keybinds as Magnet (https://magnet.crowdcafe.com/) because I learned those first and haven't looked back.
Look back and discover a better way, those are not ergonomic defaults even though you got used to them. But also convenient app switching beats having your content get shifted around due to constant window resizing, that workflow mostly works for stuff you need "permanently" side by side. And on laptops this also runs into screen size limitations
"I need to resize my window."
"You shouldn't need this."
"My reading comprehension failed, help me!"
"You should use this more convenient way to fulfill your window resizing need!"
Tahoe is the first macOS I'm planning to skip if I can
It's obvious, the new Apple UI (and Liquid Glass) is optimized for visionOS, not macOS or iOS.
What's going on at Apple? I don't own any Apple devices but the intuitive UI is their biggest selling point (even if a colleague had to explain that I have to drag the program to some window to install it).
This seems like a very strange thing to release for a company that's supposed to care about the details.
Inside the window is where the content is. It makes sense for most of the resize hitbox to be outside that. They could make it bigger though for sure, or add an accessibility option for it.
Yeah, I'll be on Sequoia until it's unbearable (probably 4 more years), and then I'll either put Linux on that machine or I'll just buy a non-Mac. Been using Macs since Snow Leopard but between ios 26 or whatever it is and this shit, I'm done.
I'm on macOS 15.4 on a 2021 M1 Max. I haven't rebooted for months.
Is it possible for me to update to whatever was released just before "Tahoe", or will it just put me on that now?
Yes you can still update to 15.7.3 the usual way in Settings
It'll present you the Tahoe upgrade but underneath in small print it'll show other updates, which you have to then open and manually select the 15.7.3 update
And you really should keep up on the point updates because there's been a ton of major security patches since 15.4
Steve Jobs would never have let this ship.
Idk. I don’t resize windows with the mouse at all. I use the key bindings to move to a tile position or fill screen.
I almost always never use a mouse for more than maybe moving a tab to another window.
So I am wondering, are people fighting using a Mac in the most effective way simply because of old patterns and habits?
Maybe you don't use the mouse because it just doesn't work as expected? ;)
> So I am wondering, are people fighting using a Mac in the most effective way simply because of old patterns and habit
"Most effective" doesn't mean "most intuitive". I don't want to learn keyboard shortcuts just to move or resize a window. That's the entire premise of graphical user interfaces.
What if your needs aren't as simple and you want to increase the size just a bit to fit more text than the tile permits and you don't want to waste the whole screen for that?
Aerospace is the answer :)
I wish I found out about it earlier. Aerospace is a tiling window manager for MacOS. As someone who prefers keyboard navigation over mouse navigation, I can't recommend it enough.
yabai too! I have fn + right-click set to resize window under cursor
Yep, came here to say this. It's the only thing that makes macos useable.
It’s a massive UI failure, design over function, something Jobs would have never tolerated.
I’m glad other people are pointing this out. At first I thought my eyes were going. It’s especially bad with the magic mouse for some reason.
It is comical how far apple has fallen with its UI overall.
They were praised for their human interface guidelines, and yet they now break almost every rule. I appreciate things change but those guidelines haven’t even evolved they have just been ignored.
Have they truly innovated in the last 10 years? What capitalist reason is for them to actually invest the manpower in the enshittification of the product experience? It feels counterintuitive. Maybe they are just too big to communicate internally?
That's like xfce!
did downgrade because of stuff like this. never look back.
it’s like windows and iOS teamed up to upset everyone
The curves are a lie, the window is still square, can we stop putting lipstick on the pig, I just want my computers to work not look like some computer in a sci-fi movie.
That omelette does look delicious though.
And the HiDPi/retina issues with 32” Dell monitors for example especially when using rdp is super annoying.
Those big radius borders are a waste of space just for the sake of fashion. Form follows function not the other way around.
And the title bars of the windows. On a 13” screen, that’s a fair percentage of available screen real estate down the toilet
i went to Sonoma from Tahoe. it felt like an upgrade rather than a downgrade. why Sonoma? it was the version appeared in Recovery mode.
but its size still makes me use scientific notation to write it in kilobyte unit.
i am calling everyone(apple google..) here to switch their mindset to: "how can we reduce code size?", "what can we get rid of?", "how small can my product be?"...
set rules to measure everything in kilobytes and make your employees realize how big the number you are typing.
if every company thinks like that and stop the madness for a year or two, we might be able to solve the main issue: obesity.
I would love to go back to more skeumorphic system interfaces. The layered panes of glass metaphor has been a pain in the ass from a usability perspective from the get go, enough so that I cheered to hear of Alan Dye leaving Apple.
I don’t have this issue at all. I have a very generous amount of space to grab the corner with and it changes mouse pointer to the diagonal arrow.
Edit: despite all the negative feedback, I’m quite happy with Tahoe and I enjoy the visual changes. I think some of the subtler changes is more intuitive and Spotlight’s improvement is quite nice.
Pleased that I'm not alone. The comments here suggest that I should just bin my Mac and buy a Linux-capable machine instead since MacOS is now "unusable", "heinous", "diabolical", "worst OS EVER".
I updated, carried on enjoying the best desktop experience (IMHO). It's not perfect, but was and remains better than the alternatives for me. Very little "struggle".
I agree it makes using my computer worse, but I'd like to see how far Apple is willing to go here.
They won't do perfectly circular windows, that would be crazy— but I think we all know they can go further than this.
I agree that a circle would be too much. But they could at least do a full squircle instead of this half assery so that we don’t have to look at those ugly flat sides. /s
Seems to me Apple is getting ready to make the black arrow mouse pointer obsolete.
In the next generation or two iPads and MacBooks are going to essentially merge as a product line.
I wouldn't be surprised if Apple abandons classic macOS (w/ Terminal and a filesystem) all together. To continue to support developers all they need is a tweaked Xcode for Apple dev and their version of WSL for everything else. All the parts are already in macOS/iPadOS (native virtualization and containerization).
iMac and Mac Pro are all but dead now too. Mac Mini and Mac Studio will be the only desktop options and will be bought by people who are Millenials and older or ML/AI praciticioners. We may even see a special AI/Local LLM Mac Studio that would be the equivalent of mac pro of the ai era.
Your fingers will need these big round edges to grab. They may let you use a bluetooth mouse but they aren't going to cater their UX to you.
They year of the Linux desktop has come as commercial desktop OS's die.
It is case of Corporate Memphis induced design, SF people increasingly detachment from common sense, and general sign of societal decline.
Stop using MacOS?
Not updating to Tahoe and hoping they make a major change for whatever is next. My M1 is getting a bit long in the tooth, and was thinking about upgrading to an M5, but not if it comes with Tahoe.
I've noticed this as well and it's infuriating. It's extremely unintuitive and I constantly find myself missing the resize zone.
From "Safari 15 on Mac OS, a user interface mess" https://morrick.me/archives/9368 from 5 years ago:
--- start quote ---
The utter user-interface butchery happening to Safari on the Mac is once again the work of people who put iOS first. People who by now think in iOS terms. People who view the venerable Mac OS user interface as an older person whose traits must be experimented upon, plastic surgery after plastic surgery, until this person looks younger. Unfortunately the effect is more like this person ends up looking… weird.
These people look at the Mac’s UI and (that’s the impression, at least) don’t really understand it. Its foundations come from a past that almost seems inscrutable to them. Usability cues and features are all wrinkles to them. iOS and iPadOS don’t have these strange wrinkles, they muse. We must hide them. We’ll make this spectacular facelift and we’ll hide them, one by one. Mac OS will look as young (and foolish, cough) as iOS!
--- end quote ---
At the time it was only Safari that they wanted to "modernize". Now it's the full OS.
Tahoe is a nightmare. I’m Literally not buying a new Mac because of it.
Dye destroyed macOS. I don’t know what they do, but they have to backtrack.
I started with an Apple Lisa. I’ve never enjoyed Apple products less than I do right now. And there were some rough days in the 90s! I switched from a AW Ultra 3 to a Garmin. Considering an S26 because of the semi-matte screen. The Mac, though, I probably can’t replace, but man Tahoe/Liquid Glass sucks.
I would highly recommend Magnets to anyone users who prefer shortcuts anyway: https://magnet.crowdcafe.com/
Volume bar now blocks access to the latest tabs in the browser
Let's be honest, everything windows on macOS is and always has been an utter cluster fuck.
Darkest before the dawn
Dawn of the year of the Linux desktop!
> Living on this planet for quite a few decades, I have learned that it rarely works to grab things if you don’t actually touch them.
Hilarious. Is Apple attempting to defy the laws of physics?
I will never update to tahoe. if it becomes forced I'll switch to linux idgaf
the macOS window manager has been awful for many years
Crazy how all the mainstream desktop OSes became shit all at the same time. If I was crazy enough, I might think that the government is giving us a message that we all need to move to Lennox because the state-mandated back doors are being co-opted by a foreign entity to spy on us.
Going to stay on Sonoma for another year
Another thing to add to the list of reasons why I'm not upgrading.
Imagine Steve Jobs allowing this to happen.
"You're holding it wrong!"
>Living on this planet for quite a few decades, I have learned that it rarely works to grab things if you don’t actually touch them:
Yes, but that is skeuomorphic design, which is old and ugly. We live in the era of anti-skeuomorphic design, where nothing makes any sense but it looks sleek.
Meanwhile, window management in linux is Superior.
lmao mac.
This is so simple.
This makes me angry.
I find MacOS terrible (any version) and wish my employer would not force Mac upon me. I hope one day we will be able to use Linux on Mac hardware (in enterprise setting).
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
They want you to do the pinch in/out gesture /s
[dead]
[dead]
Why are you posting AI-generated slop to HN?
i haven't resized a window with a mouse in almost a decade
Curious, how do you resize windows instead?
On windows at least, I almost always use 'alt+space; x' to maximise windows, as well as winkey+left/right/up/down, which is really the only resizing I do. Having to use the mouse is a pain.
....with a keyboard? on macos I use Rectangle, on linux I just use the built-in resizing keyboard shortcuts
"I downloaded a separate application to make resizing windows easier" is not a point in favor of MacOS's window resizing decisions.
True, but macos x has never had good window resizing decisions.
I never said macOS has good window management.
I use rectangle on my mac for window resizing and generally keep most windows in the sizes that come by default with that.
One of the most annoying things after installing Tahoe for me, that for no good reason an ordinary app would randomly lose its focus. In the midst of my typing. This is unbelievably preposterous and I just can't stop hating Apple for this crap. How the fuck this is acceptable? I just have no words. What makes it even worse that I couldn't even complain about it on their support pages - they just keep removing my comments for being "non-constructive". This is some random bug, and many people have complained about it, how am I suppose to make it "more constructive"? Send them the exact configuration of constellations, the number of monitors I use and their positioning angles, log the keyboard rate and delay, the latency, the level of magnetic interference caused by my Bluetooth devices, etc.?
Dont get me started on the number of times Signal/formerly Skype opened up a dialog in-the-midst of me typing and me accidentally accepting a call because i happened to write 'space' at that moment in time
That is incidentally one of the many papercuts that are widely accepted in Windows, but never were a problem on a mac.
Don’t try to interact with a windows desktop while it is still booting up. Better to wait for everything to settle down, otherwise apps will constantly snatch away focus and your typing will go into random applications.
I recently built a windows PC again for gaming. Haven't used one for years. Everything's fresh, loads of room on hard drives etc and still sometimes it'll just be weird and needs a reset. But it doesn't surprise me, it's sad we've come to tolerate that from the world's most popular OS.
I assumed he was talking about desktop OS
I have the same setup, just Arch instead of ubuntu on my laptop and I very rarely have any issues (like maybe once per month) that require me to reboot.
Familiarity might be the biggest differentiator. I switch between windows on my work computer and fedora gnome on my personal computer (and only interact with Debian server over ssh) so I am more at ease on Windows than I am with something like cachy OS and KDE.
Didn’t someone recently uncover that this was usually do to ram losing bits over time? ECC would fix it? Maybe I’m misremembering
The support pages are not for you to contact Apple. They are there for users to help other users. The cynical person would say they are there to get unpaid labor from other users so Apple can spend less on support.
If you want to report something to Apple you use the "Feedback Assistant App"
> If you want to report something to Apple you use the "Feedback Assistant App"
and watch years go by with no fixes or improvements to basic OS fundamentals.
> Feedback Assistant
They finally found a marketable name for /dev/null.
The support pages are exactly this. They're called Level 0 support in most companies internally.
There's a bunch of hyperactive people in those Apple "support" forums who don't actually help anyone. They respond to almost every discussion thread aggressively deflecting any criticism directed at Apple.
They pretend to offer "solutions" so their posts don't come across as unconstructive, but their solutions are always essentially the same, often culminating in a factory reset. There is never any attempt to get to the bottom of anything or diagnose what the actual issue is.
They are volunteering their time to make people shut up, bow their head in shame and go away. I don't think this is what you want in an open source project.
For Windows support I assume it accrues some benefit to the unpaid support, like it contributes to them getting their Microsoft Certified Windows End User Support Helpful Guy badge.
Then we would have zero support, or they would shut down the forums entirely. Or are you implying that the companies would be forced to finally offer official support?
My MacBook is corporate, and it's therefore loaded with a ton of corporate auto-update, VPN and apparently questionnaire software. Stuff pops up at the most annoying times. And sometimes, indeed it takes focus away from the thing I'm currently typing. Extremely annoying.
But apparently Apple is not the only offender. Just as I was typing this (on Harmonic on Android), a popup popped up, ate a few of the characters I typed and disappeared again. No idea what it said. Why do people do this? Don't hijack let applications I didn't ask for hijack my input.
I wonder whether this could be a touchpad malfunction, causing phantom clicks that move focus. To diagnose, you could temporarily disable it and use an external mouse.
I've had the same issue while using external mouse and keyboard, so I definitely don't touch the touchpad.
I have similar behaviour on a Mac Mini, and only since Tahoe.
a touchpad malfunction that only happens after an OSX update?
When your trackpad worked in a previous OS version and suddenly don't in the newest, that's called a software bug. Not a trackpad malfunction.
I once had a vexing problem with my old Intel MacBook — macOS failed to boot, but Windows seemed totally normal. Can't possibly be a hardware failure, right? The symptoms disappeared after replacing the SATA cable!
External mice also suck with macOS though.
Depends on the mice. As a sibling says, Logitech mice with their drivers work great. The app isn't great and loads a boatload of javascript crap. Can't vouch for bettermouse, never tried it.
Another option which sidesteps the Logi Options crap is Logitech "gaming" mice. These have an integrated memory that actually remembers the configuration set by the driver. So, you only have to put up with the shitty experience once, and then the mouse remembers those settings wherever you use it. Some models can actually remember multiple setting sets.
One of my best mice is a G700s. I haven't used the Logitech G crap in like... ten years? The mouse is still going strong. Its only issue is that it goes through batteries like a hot knife through butter. I like it so much, I actually bought a second one for work. Got it used, since they weren't making them anymore.
I assume it’s getting down votes because it’s off-topic. The parent comment was suggesting external mice as a temporary measure to debug the intermittent issue they’re facing.
Whether or not external micr suck on MacOS doesn’t really matter. The objective was to diagnose an issue.
Recent switcher to macos. I can't find a way to separately set mouse acceleration and scroll wheel momentum.
I use a trackball for RSI reasons, in order to get across the screen in a single flick means high sensitivity, mouse acceleration is absolutely needed to be able to make small movements. This makes my scroll wheel useless because a single scroll moves the page about 1/10 of a line
It's not supported as of now. Tools like Scroll Reverser are still needed to specify scrolling behavior between the touchpad and an external mouse.
That was my experience as well. macOS adopted the iOS UI pattern of list cells using a swipe gesture to show a delete button and other actions. This doesn’t work with mouse and you have to use the right click context menu. This is a constant annoyance when switching between the Mac with an external mouse and the one with a trackpad, as it breaks your muscle memory.
Oh is that supported now? I've always used some tool (ScrollReverser) to fix this.
I loved my Performance MX. I finally had to replace it at work (software wouldn't install after migrating to Windows 11) and the MX Master 3 I got seems much ergonomically worse to me. I also am not a fan of the thumb wheel replacing buttons. Only thing I won't complain about is that the resolution is better. From testing my coworkers' mouses (older Masters) I'm pretty sure they have each been a step downhill from my perspective.
My sister in law gave me her G700S to fix the main button microswitches, and she convinced me that it's the apotheosis of the design - it's what should have replaced the Performance MX. No soft-touch plastic, extra buttons, and the higher resolution sensor. I'll probably have to get one off eBay.
Edit: also all of the Masters have non-user-replaceable batteries.
Those are great but often expensive mice. I wish the Apple tax didn't extend to third party hardware, but here we are.
You have to use third party software to configure them properly, then they work fine. I used logitech’s drivers for a while but they’ve become the biggest pile of garbage I have ever seen call itself a driver. I now use BetterMouse instead.
I have a Logitech MX Vertical and it works flawlessly.
the steermouse g502 combo is just incredible. been my staple for years
I have no information to add, but I also have started experiencing this after “upgrading” to Tahoe. Never was a problem before.
I looked into this and the issue is the inbuilt SecurityAgent briefly taking focus. For me I believe it’s related to some management setting our company has added not getting on with Tahoe.
Focus stealing has been an issue in windowed multi-tasking environments from the beginning. It's certainly been an issue in all macOS/OS X versions I've used since I started in 2011.
I've been using windowed multi-tasking environments since 1986. Never been a problem for me (SunOS -> Solaris -> Linux). I rely very, very, very much on focus-follows-mouse.
This bug isn't that. It's the frontmost app losing focus to nothing.
You are using it wrong.
Just install the SuperTyping app. It's sooo good and intuitive. Totally worth the $189, if you consider how often you need to type something.
I also recommend Little Snitch as firewall and Parallels for virtualization.
Does anyone have a recommendation for bootloader or filesystem app? Preferably subscription model for intuitive accounting.
Interesting. This is exactly the problem I've begun to have on my 14" M2 MB Air. I'm on 15.7.3. The issue started with 15.7.1.
Here I've been thinking it's a hardware problem, like some sort of mechanical intermittent. Maybe not.
I have experienced the same, and still have no idea what is going on.
Especially annoying when every app is likely to have single-key shortcuts which end up being accidentally triggered.
Do you have Admin by Request on your machine (if its a company laptop). That was the culprit for me.
I had this, it was our company's security software prompting an update (Admin by Request) that was getting hidden. An update to that software and the latest tahoe update seems to have resolved that issue.
Delinia does this currently (I don’t think the fix is public yet).
You can run a python script to track the focused window every few seconds to identify what’s stealing focus.
Random possibility - if you have Bartender installed, it's buggy as shit on Tahoe, and has some really weird stuff it does with hiding the cursor and otherwise changing the focus around. I haven't switched off yet because the alternatives don't anywhere near as much functionality, but I probably will at some point soon, because while the updates have made it somewhat better it's still a pretty terrible experience at times.
Avoid using Bartender:
https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/1d8a0wv/if_you_are...
https://talk.macpowerusers.com/t/bartender-change-of-ownersh...
Yep, I’m aware of the (incredibly-poorly-handled) change of ownership. I’ve been using it through a SetApp[1] subscription, and they stayed on the pre-acquisition version for quite a while; long enough that enough details came out about the new owner and I felt _relatively_ okay with continuing to use it after it got updates, especially going through another party. The Tahoe issues are making me rethink that heavily now - but the alternatives I briefly looked at when I upgraded to Tahoe all seemed incredibly lacking in one way or another, and I haven’t wanted to blow up my menu bar yet again :/
[1]: https://setapp.com/
Never heard of Bartender before, seems to be this:
> superpowered your menu bar, giving you total control over your menu bar items, what's displayed, and when, with menu bar items only showing when you need them.
Which also, for some reason has permission to record your desktop and recently had a change of owner? I'd be reformatting my computer so quickly if I found this out about software on my computer...
> how am I suppose to make it "more constructive"?
Obviously by shutting the hell up, you ungrateful serf. The beatings will continue until morale improves.
Seriously, though, if you want this to stop, people like you are going to have to start voting with their wallets.
I finally pulled the plug on macOS a couple years ago for Linux, and I haven't been unhappy about it. However, I did make a point of buying a laptop that was well supported on Linux (a Lenovo X1 Carbon that was in the same price class as an equivalent Mac).
I did the same a decade ago, and I've been fully content with my Linux-only life - but a new MacBook recently arrived along with a new job, so now I'm using Tahoe whether I like it or not. It's generally difficult to vote with someone else's wallet.
The IT department must hate you. I’m not in IT but I think it’s hard to be compliant with some kinds of regulations if you allow end users to run VMs.
I’m in the same situation, have to use Mac for SOC2 reasons after having used Linux for 10 years. The apps are fine, it’s the KDE window management I miss the most, and a VM won’t really help there.
It will be interesting to see how RAM prices affect the behavior of all companies.
I wouldn't mind if this finally lights a fire under certain software companies to also actually optimize their shit for memory use, but... I'm not that optimistic.
I can't speak for all companies, but the feeling I get from mine is that the issue is more about the maintenance and support for Mac rather than the little extra spend to get a MacBook pro instead of the standard windows box.
I appreciate your frustration, but at the same time what is Apple supposed to do? If it's affecting only a tiny number of users, and you just happen to be an unlucky one, and they don't know how to reproduce it, and you can't help them reproduce it, then what? I think they just have to wait until somebody (such as yourself) is able to figure out with some kind of logging what is happening. E.g. the first question to answer is probably what actually gets the focus, if anything? To produce a bug report that at least suggests which area of code might be responsible.
I had a similar problem at one point, then finally figured out it was when I accidentally hit the fn button which triggered the emoji picker window and moved focus to it (IIRC), but it was off-screen because I'd previously used it on a secondary monitor. Reconnecting the monitor and moving the window back to my primary display fixed it. (Obviously, it's a bug to show a picker window outside of visible coordinates, and I think it got fixed eventually.)
But it also might not be Apple at all, if it's some third-party background utility with a bug. E.g. if that were happening to me, my first thought would be that it might be a Logitech bug or a Karabiner-Elements bug. Uninstalling any non-Apple background processes or utilities seems like a necessary first step.
They could throw some small portion of their billions of dollars into proper quality control and reproduce it themselves if they wanted to. It’s an industry-wide malaise, but it isn’t inevitable. It’s amazing that every year it becomes more and more economically nonviable for basic shit to meet the most modest standards of usability, yet we can use the power consumption of a small country to have Copilot in Notepad.
Well, if there's one thing history has shown us (including the history of Apple's own insurgency against the PC), it's that complacency and stagnation make the incumbent a target for every newcomer who does have the drive to make a dent in the universe. And there are always a lot of people with that drive. This is how we keep ending up in the cycle of chaos > new paradigm > perfect software that probably should not be improved upon > collapse under weight of new features > chaos > new paradigm... repeat.
Windows has had a “prevent apps from stealing focus” option for at least a decade. It was one of the things that I still dislike the most about macOS, and Apple can absolutely address this.
Windows itself isn't guilty of this in my experience (lifetime of use until Linux switch last year), but other apps like shitty Akamai. Some years ago a coworker wrote this blog post and a simple tool to find out which programs are doing it: https://forwardscattering.org/post/30
Many Linux display managers let you chose what to do, when a window requests focus. For me on Sway, it just turns the border red.
I chose what happens after. Can recommend. I wasn't even aware of my privilege.
I've found that the login dialog in Win 11 no longer consistently takes focus on the password field. Really annoying to login blind and find your typing was rejected because it doesn't do the sensible thing any more.
GNOME on Linux prevents it. You get a notification "Discord updater is ready" instead which you can activate if you want to give it focus - which I never do. F the Discord updater.
Adobe programs were the worst offenders for this in my experience.
I can tell you bartender 6 has been perpetually broken since release and does this. I finally gave up on it after the devs sent me “fixes” that never fixed anything.
Apple has had 30 years to make UI focus and input stable, and not let something invisible steal input focus. Fortunately for mac, this is much worse on Windows.
Dunno, not deleting the posts would be a good start.
> If it's affecting only a tiny number of users
Tiny number of users with such an enormous user base (10-16% desktop share) still means there's thousands of users affected.
> ... what is Apple supposed to do? ...
This seems like an example of a situation that modern machine learning could help with. Take bug reports permissively and look through all of them for patterns. Loss of focus should be the kind of thing that would stand out and could be analyzed for similarities and recurring features. Making sense of large amounts of often vague and rambling reports has been a problem for a long time and seems like a domain that machine learning is well set for.
I don't understand why Apple change things needlessly. What other purpose does it serve? How does this positively affect the bottom line? How does it improve life for Apple's users? Breaking basic interaction with windows purely because someone feels we should waste more screen real-estate on ornamentation by having bigger radius rounded corners is, for lack of a better word, stupid.
I'd like Apple to focus more on the things that actually matter to users. To fix bugs, to work on performance, to simplify things rather than complicate them. Focus on making it a better platform for doing work and less a playground for pointless fiddling with design and sloppiness.
There has to be work done. Each sprint, new FEATURES must be completed.
Features, people, FEATURES.
> Luckily for Apple, Windows 11 is not exactly in a position to attract switchers.
Yes, but Linux is finally in that position, not to mention we're seeing silicon from intel and amd that can compete with the M series on mobile devices.
Linux isn't in position regarding display/UI. It doesn't handles HiDPI (e.g 4K) screen uniformly, leading to a lot of blurry apps depending on the display abstraction used (Wayland/X11) and compositor (GNOME, KDE, etc, all behave differently).
Let's not even talk about the case when you have monitors that have different DPI, something that is handled seamlessly by MacOS, unlike Linux where it feels like a d20 roll depending on your distro.
I expect most desktop MacOS users to have a HiDPI screen in 2026 (it's just...better), so going to Linux may feel like a serious downgrade, or at least a waste of time if you want to get every config "right". I wish it was differently, honestly - the rest of the OS is great, and the diversity between distros is refreshing.
Since MacOS removed subpixel rendering a few years ago, regular resolution displays have terrible looking text in comparison to Windows or Linux.
Gnome in Linux works great for a decade+ with a single high resolution screen, but there are certainly apps that render too small (Steam was one of the problems).
Different scaling factors on several monitors are not perfect though, but I generally dislike how Mac handles that too as I mostly use big screen when docked (32"-43"-55"), or laptop screen when not, and it rearranges my windows with every switch.
> I kept reading endorsements of Fedora's level of polish/stability on HN but was kinda nervous having used Debian distros my entire life and I’m really happy I finally took the plunge. Wish I tried it years ago!
This. I don't know why, but people forget about Fedora when considering distros. They rather fight Arch than try Fedora. So, did I. Maybe its Redhat. Wish I switched earlier, too. (Although I heard this level of polish wasn't always the case.)
I love Fedora so much. Everything just works, but that's not that special compared to Ubuntu. What is special is the fucking sanity throughout the whole system. Debian based distros always have some legacy shit going on. No bloat, no snap, nothing breaking convention and their upgrade model sits in the sweet spot between Ubuntu's 4 year LTS cycle and Arch's rolling release. Pacman can rot in hell, apt is okay, but oh boy, do I love dnf.
Tho, Fedora has some minor quirks, which still make it hard to recommend for total beginners without personal instructions/guidance IMO. Like the need for RPMFusion repos and the bad handling/documentation of that. Not a problem if you know at all what a package manager, PKI and terminal is, but too much otherwise.
Steam has DPI scaling issues on Windows as well, especially on multimonitor setups.
> Linux isn't in position regarding display/UI. It doesn't handles HiDPI (e.g 4K) screen uniformly, leading to a lot of blurry apps depending on the display abstraction used (Wayland/X11) and compositor (GNOME, KDE, etc, all behave differently).
I have been using a 4K display for years on Linux without issues. The scaling issue with non-native apps is a problem that Windows also struggles with btw.
Yep, I've been running a Windows laptop plugged into a pair of monitors for the past ten years at work, and across multiple laptops and from Windows 10 to 11, this has always been a problem. If I undock to do some work elsewhere and come back, I either have to live with a bunch of stuff now being blurry, or I need to re-launch all the affected programs.
I also have programs that bleed from one monitor onto another when maximized. AutoCAD is one offender that reliably does this -- if it's maximized, several pixels of its window will overlap the edge of the window on the adjacent screen. The bar I set for windows is pretty low, so I'm generally accepting of the jank I encounter in it vs Linux where I know any problem is likely something I can fix. Still, that one feels especially egregious.
Usually that is a monitor driver issue.
Every 4K external display I've connected to every M1- and M2-series Mac running macOS has a known flickering issue with Display Stream Compression that Apple knows about and has been unable or unwilling to fix.
The only reliable fixes are to either disable that DisplayPort feature if your monitor supports it, or to disable GPU Dithering using a paid third-party tool (BetterDisplay). Either that or switch to Asahi, which doesn't have that issue.
The issue is common enough that BENQ has a FAQ page about it, which includes steps like "disable dark mode" and "wait for 2 hours": https://www.benq.com/en-us/knowledge-center/knowledge/how-to...
> or switch to Asahi
I would like to point out that, from my experience on M1, external displays do not work at all over DisplayPort on Asahi Linux at the moment.
I have been experiencing this on my 2k monitors as well (Also BENQ). I tried every "fix" under the sun, eventually it stops after enough voodoo (reboots, unplugs) and cursing.
One of the many random issues on the OS with the best UX in the world (lol). Like music sometimes stopping and sometimes switching to speakers when turning off Bluetooth headphones, mouse speed going bananas randomly requiring mouse off and on, terminal app (iterm2) reliably crashing when I dare to change any keybinding, and many other things that never happened in years of working on Linux.
The best option was the LG UltraFine 24” 4K, which sadly was discontinued years ago.
In my opinion a QHD 23.8” panel is the next best option for developers (any M-series chip handles scaling without issues); I find the common 27” and 32” at 4K a weird spot - slightly too large, slightly too low resolution – and 5k+ options are still rare.
I've used ASUS 4K monitors on M2 and M4 machines without issues.
I recently bought a MacStudio with 512GB of RAM and connected it to a LG 5k2k monitor. For some reason there was no way to change the font size (they removed the text size "Larger Text ... More Space" continuum from the Display section of settings) so I ended up with either super small or super large fonts without anything in-between. In the end I had to install some 3rd party software and mix my own scaled resolution with acceptable font size. This has never been a problem on Linux in the past 10 years, all I needed to do at worst when it wasn't done out of the box was to set scale somewhere and that was it.
Unfortunately, resolutions offered were weird. Native is 5120x2160 but that wasn't offered and scaled resolutions were weird. I guess macOS didn't read monitor's information properly or something. I wasted a few hours frantically trying to figure out how to connect a $12k computer to a 4-year old monitor which should have been a breeze but for some reason wasn't. The same monitor worked fine on Linux or Windows.
Curious what software; I've used "SwitchResX" in the past and it met all my needs...
BetterDisplay has solved a ton of problems like this for me; when MacOS gets confused about non apple monitors, BetterDisplay knows how to fix things.
it's not removed : you have to hold Option when choosing resolutions, and the panel changes to show myriad options.
i think that's what you're describing, anyway.
AFAIK the smallest 5K2K is 34", with a PPI of 163. I don't believe that is treated as "HiDPI" by macOS, is it?
> Linux isn't in position regarding display/UI. It doesn't handles HiDPI (e.g 4K) screen uniformly, leading to a lot of blurry apps depending on the display abstraction used (Wayland/X11) and compositor (GNOME, KDE, etc, all behave differently).
Meanwhile on MacOS my displays may work. Or they might not work. Or they might work but randomly locked to 30hz. It depends on what order they wake up in or get plugged in.
I suspect the root of the problem is one of them is a very high refresh rate monitor (1440p360hz) and probably related to the display bandwidth limitations that provide a relatively low monitor limit for such a high cost machine.
I have similar issues without the high refresh rate. It's a MacOS bug related to sleep/wake corrupting internal display settings.
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/255860955?sortBy=upvote...
After 344 "me too"s and 180+ replies they silently locked the thread to save themselves from more embarassment.
hello fellow AW2725DF enjoyer
But don’t forget to order the “right” (i.e. caldigit) dock. My dell dock is even more of a mess on the Mac than plugging the monitors in directly. Works great with a Dell (obviously) and framework laptop running Win10 and Linux respectively though
I'm not going to claim that every compositor/WM handles high DPI well on Linux, however both KDE and Gnome on Wayland are fine in my experience. I actually find that KDE on Wayland handles mixed DPI better than Windows, macOS doesn't really give you enough control to try.
I am a full time KDE/Arch user and since Plasma 6 haven't had any HiDPI issues including monitors with different DPI or X11 apps - of which there are very few nowadays.
I run plasma 6 on X11 and it also functions amazingly well on 200% scaling.
I use linux at home (with a HiDPI screen) and MacOS for work. The screen works well with both computers. I mostly just use a text editor, a browser, and a terminal though.
Linux has bugs, bug MacOS does too. I feel like for a dev like me, the linux setup is more comfortable.
Same here. I stick to 100% scaling and side step the whole hi dpi issue. I even have a single USB type c cable that connects my laptop to the laptop stand and that laptop stand is what connects to the monitor, keyboard, and mouse.
I know people will say meh but coming from the world of hurt with drivers and windows based soft modems — I was on dial up even as late as 2005! — I think the idea that everything works plug and play is amazing.
Compare with my experience on Windows — maybe I did something wrong, I don't know but the external monitor didn't work over HDMI when I installed windows without s network connection and maybe it was a coincidence but it didn't work until I connected to the Internet.
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/255860955?sortBy=upvote...
MacOS isn't in any kind of position regarding displays. 180+ replies and 300+ upvotes by the 0.1% of sufferers who bother to find these threads, log in, and comment of them. Exteemely widespread, going on for years, thread silently locked.
Wait, has MacOS finally figured out fractional scaling? Last I looked, Linux actually had better support. And now Linux support is pretty good. It’s really only older apps that don’t work.
No, it has not. Scaling is better on Linux and Windows.
Sure, you can find some obscure DEs that don't handle that well yet. Or you could just use Plasma and have it all work just fine, like it did for many years now.
It also doesn't offer a Mac-style desktop environment, which is one of the things keeping me away. KDE/Cinnamon/XFCE lean more Windows-style, GNOME/Pantheon (Elementary) is more like iPadOS/Android in desktop mode. My productivity takes a big hit in Windows-style environments and I just don't enjoy using them.
I hope to put my money where my mouth is and contribute to one of the tiny handful of nascent Mac-like environment projects out there once some spare time opens up, but until then…
I believe menus were available "via API" since an a11y push in GNOME before 2.0 release (atk library and friends).
What was impossible was to stop apps from showing the usual menu bar inside the window.
Obviously, with something so core to the system, plenty of devils in the details.
Yep, I've played with it. Things might've changed but I couldn't get KDE's global menubar to work at all under Wayland, and under X11 a lot of apps don't populate it.
Some of the broad strokes are there, but the details are what matters. Gnome extensions also come with the problem of breaking every other update which quickly becomes irritating.
There are major differences in the design between Windows and Mac desktops, and generally speaking, Linux desktop environments function more like Windows than they do macOS.
The biggest difference is probably that under Windows-style environments, applications/processes and windows are mostly synonymous — each window represents an independent process in the task manager. In a Mac-style environment, applications can host multiple windows each, so for example even if you've got 7 Firefox windows open, there's only one host Firefox process. This is reflected in the UI, with macOS grouping windows by application in several difference places (as opposed to Windows, where that only happens in the taskbar if the user has it enabled).
"Windows style" also comes a number of other patterns, such as a taskbar instead and menubars attached to windows (as opposed to a dock and a single global, system-owned menubar under macOS).
"Mac style" comes with several subtleties that separate it from e.g. GNOME. Progressive disclosure is a big one. Where macOS will keep power user features slightly off to the side where they're accessible but unlikely to confuse non-technical users, GNOME just omits the functionality altogether. It also generally implies a greater level of system-level integration and cross-functionality from apps (including third party), lending to a more cohesive feel.
I recently installed CachyOS and the text was crisp and accurate out of the box on my hidpi screen. So whatever settings and software combinations are required, cachyos got it right, with KDE and wayland at least. All apps I use have been rendered perfectly clear.
GNOME still has some problems with fractional scaling, but KDE works perfectly. I'm using two displays, one with 150% and one with 100%. No blurry apps and absolutely no issues. Have you tried it recently?
Yes. It was actually more tedious to do the inverse when I wanted three screens to do a rotating wallpapers from the same set of folders as I had to set the list of folders three times
So don't use a third party theme.
I've been using fractional scaling on Gnome for years (including on the laptop I'm typing this on) and haven't had any issues. I haven't tried it with two displays that are set differently though. Is that a common thing?
I've not had any issues with 4k display. Mac does handle monitors with different DPIs well, but not really a issue for me. Most hardware I use also just works great. Gaming is great now as well.
The only reason I can't completely switch to Linux is because there are no great options for anything non-programming related stuff I love to do ... such as photography, music (guitar amplifier sims).
My dude, It's been more than capable for years. I have an ultrawide OLED monitor (3440x1440@165hz) paired with a 4K@144hz monitor. Both HDR, different capabilities. Both have different DPIs set, 125% for one, 200% for the other. My setup required less configuration than Windows does. Right click -> Display Configuration -> Set Alignment (monitor position) -> Set refresh rate -> Set HDR -> Set DPI -> Apply. Done.
Don't knock it unless you've tried it.
This was CachyOS btw. Windows actually required MORE work because I had to install drivers, connect to the internet during setup, get nagged about using a Microsoft account, etc.
CachyOS was basically boot -> verify partitions are correct -> decide on defaults -> create account/password -> wait for files to copy -> done. Drivers, including the latest NVIDIA drivers, auto installed/working.
PopOS was very behind other distros in adopting new versions of software until recently due to their epic diversion of building a brand new DE, letting the then existing release bitrot. This created all sorts of issues and incompatibilities that had already been solved for one or even two years in other distros.
Things are changing and improving VERY fast in linux land lately, so being behind by that much is gonna pretty much set you up for disappointment, along all the usual reasons why you ideally want to be on the just dull enough part of the bleeding edge for linux desktop, where you are only getting a few small shallow cuts and hopefully no deep cuts...
Anyway, popular acclaim for popos reached it's peak just when those problems started to show up. It used to be better in years prior, but the reputation tends to lag the actual reality, so sentiment at that point was to recommend it even though it wasn't actually a good choice.
Honestly, give Linux another try four or so months from now. You will get to start fresh on a brand new Ubuntu LTS or the usual new Fedora release. Try Gnome or KDE, see which ones sticks the best with you. Just don't try anything else if you want maximum features, commodity and stability.
Yes, you were unlucky :(
If you’re unlucky in the same way I was, it could actually be a GNOME/GTK issue. Some questionable (?) font rendering decisions were made that for me caused all text in GNOME to be blurry. I hated it so much I switched to KDE but soon realized GTK apps had the same issue.
Eventually I found a fix that worked and now I’m happy. So, next time you can try this. In the file:
~/.config/gtk-4.0/settings.ini
You can add:
[Settings]
gtk-hint-font-metrics=1
Here’s the Arch wiki page that explains it:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/GTK#Text_in_GTK_4_applicati...
If your settings.ini is in a different spot see:
https://docs.gtk.org/gtk4/class.Settings.html
You can already try Fedora 43 KDE Plasma. 125% scaling works like a charm. Or as others say wait until Kubuntu 26.04 LTS.
Not a problem on my Fedora Silverblue 43 machine with dual 4K 27" screens at 125% scaling. Zero blurry apps, including XWayland ones.
Boy, does that fractional scaling should look like shit on any vector graphics.
That’s why Apple used 4k on 22”, 5k on 27 and 6k on 32 to make it crispy always on 200%
MacOS doesn't handle HiDPI screens that well either. The most common and affordable high res monitors are 27" 4K monitors and those don't mesh well with the way macOS does HiDPI. You either have a perfect 2x but giant 1080p like display or a blurryish non-integer scale that's more usable.
And god forbid you still have low DPI monitor still!
There were several promising 5K 27” MiniLED displays announced at CES a few days ago. People speculate that LG has produced the panel for the upcoming Apple Display refresh, but is also making it available for the other display manufacturers.
At some point additional resolution is a dimishing return. The human eye has limits.
In my experience it's a little hit and miss with macOS. You need a monitor that is specifically listed as being supported by macOS. If not you get rather strange results. I had a Dell monitor that, under macOS only, would sometimes freak out and flicker if you had to many electron apps open.
In some sense it's reasonable that you need a supported monitor, it's just strange that Linux can support all these monitors, but macOS can't?
Adjust it to what? Making a 4K monitor look like 1440p (or a non-1080p or 4K desktop) ends up with a non-integer scale on macOS AFAIK. They also completely tore out subpixel font rendering for low DPI displays.
You're supposed to use KDE with Xorg if you want things to just work. KDE with Wayland if you're adventurous.
Therefore newcomers should use Kubuntu or the likes of it
KWin/Xorg AFAIK has been on maintanence duty (i.e. fixes mostly come from XWayland) for >5 years now. KDE has expulsed the Xorg codebase of KWin into a seperate repo in preparation of a Wayland only future.
Even if KDE/Xorg is a stable experience is true now, it will not be true in the medium to short term. And a distro like Kubuntu might be 2 years out from merging a "perfect" KDE Plasma experience if it arrived right now.
lmao not even osx handles this problem properly...
lmfao
Tahoe is uniquely bad in so many ways, so I tried the Asahi Fedora Remix with Gnome on my M2 Mac Mini. Aesthetically I was more attracted to Gnome, it feels like what we lost with Tahoe. Tahoe to me feels like a really chopped Android skin or something. I made it a few weeks on the Fedora Remix but ended up having to switch back to Mac over missing webcam drivers and other random hardware issues. Plus there’s little OS things that Mac does that make it really hard to go elsewhere.
Could you list some of these little things that macOS does and that you miss?
(I usually miss the little Linux-specific things that macOS does not.)
Ah, I get it. I don't like integration of this sort, because it quietly screams "lock in", but do I see how it can be very convenient. So I make do with my own, likely inferior, using Syncthing, and Google Photos for browsing. My music is mostly CD rips, Bandcamp, and some YouTube, and I don't do TV, so it's just easier for me than for normal folks. I can listen to my collection anywhere over a Wireguard connection on my laptop or my phone.
It's a different set of trade-offs; less polish, more control.
Most of my gripes are probably Gnome specific in this case - When you screenshot something it pins the image temporarily on the screen. If I drag into any open app it avoids saving it to disk. - Pressing CMD W or Q consistently closes any app (works on some gnome apps) - Mac keychain passkeys (I don’t own a usb stick) - Third party window management (through accessibility privileges only) - Apps respecting dark mode settings - The app menu (file, edit, window, etc) being in the same spot every time
Definitely not exhaustive since I only spent a few weeks with it. There were also plenty of things I liked about Gnome more but not enough to tip the scale for me
>ended up having to switch back to Mac over missing webcam drivers and other random hardware issues
This has been my experience every time I try Linux. If I had to guess, tracing down all these little things is just that last mile that is so hard and isn't the fun stuff to do in making an OS, which is why it is always ignored. If Linux ever did it, it would keep me.
One solution to this problem is to buy from a vendor that installs Linux for you (e.g. System76). Much like with Apple, they can sell you a fully functional computer that way.
I have to say that almost everything worked out of the box. The webcam is known to not mesh great with Asahi quite yet. Otherwise:
- Machine failed to wake from suspend almost 50% of the time (with both wired and BT peripherals) - WiFi speed was SIGNIFICANTLY slower. Easily a fraction of what it was on Mac - USB C display was no-op - Magic trackpad velocity is wild across apps - Window management shortcuts varied across apps (seems Gnome changes a lot, frequently) - Machine did not feel quicker, in fact generally felt slower than Tahoe but granted I did not benchmark anything
I would happily try it again when the project is further along
Apple is on the record as being neutral at worst on the matter and at best weakly supportive. I think there was an article when the M1 came out where it was reported that the Asahi Linux folks met with some Apple developers where they were encouraged to explore the system and report bugs, but that Apple was not going to offer any support.
Apple has also done things such as adding a raw image mode to prevent macOS updates from breaking the boot process for third-party operating systems. Which is only useful for 3rd party operating system development.
Apple are not hostile, they are indifferent. If they were hostile, it would have been shot down both technically and legally long ago.
I think this is true with an arm mac (and would be tricky to fix that, props to the Asahi folks for doing so much) but for a lot of other hardware (recent dell/asus/lenovo, framework, byo desktops) I find Linux complete. I'm sure there is hardware out there that with struggles but I've not had to deal with any issues for a few years now myself.
I have never had an issue making whatever Frankenstein monster PC I create eventually work in Windows.
It can be very device specific unfortunately. Thinkpad tend to work quote well. I had a Framework that my wife took from me and it's truly fantastic, works out of the box.
"Linux is finally in this position" is a meme at this point.
This year will be the year of the linux desktop for real, I swear!
Windows has a much better chance, alongside WSL, even with all its warts than Linux.
GNU/Linux isn't sold in shops like macOS and Windows for regular consumers, until it goes out from DYI and online ordering, it will remain a niche desktop system.
No, it is not. Apple went down to the same level of Linux, not Linux that became as good as Apple.
Unfortunately today it is a race to the bottom.
As a long-term Linux user, and a regular macOS user, I must say that the motion is mutual. Linux has become way better, and macOS, somehow worse. But resizing and moving windows nearly , and switching between windows (not whole apps) has always been problematic in plain macOS, for reasons mysterious to me.
i agree on the software level, but then we have hardware. M cpus, touchpads, battery life. it's hard to justify using PC hardware.
I fell down the Nix hole this weekend, getting my corp Mac and my SteamOS Legion Go sharing a config. My corp device is a 5k iMac Pro that is going to be kicked off of the network when ARM-only Tahoe becomes mandatory later this year.
I work at Google, which issued a Gubuntu workstation by default when I joined. I exchanged it for a Mac, which I've spent a literal lifetime using, because I didn't wanna fall down a Linux tinkering hole trying to make Gubuntu feel like home. Every corp device I've had has been a Mac.
I'm reading this from a coffee shop. On my walk here, I was idly wondering if I should give Glinux (as its now called) a try when I'm forced to replace the iMac. SteamOS is making Linux my default environment in the same way Mac was for decades prior.
> ARM-only Tahoe Tahoe supports x86. It's the last macOS release that will do so. Did you mean that Google is banning any non-ARM Tahoe box?
This year's too early, but next year for sure.
Yeah, and gaming aside from anti-cheat isn't a broken mess anymore either. Valve has made sure of that.
Linux doesn't have much in the way of quality apps for people who aren't programmers, server administrators, or gamers.
Most people want to get productive work done with their computer, and OS X has top tier apps for every need possible.
No good e-mail app, no good office apps, no good calendar app, no good invoicing app, no good photo editing app, no good designer app, etc
> people who aren't programmers
> No good e-mail app, no good office apps, no good calendar app, no good invoicing app ...
People who aren't programmers use Gmail, Google Docs, Google Calendar, Stripe Invoicing, etc for those various use-cases.
Firefox and Chrome work just fine on Linux, so Linux has all the apps people actually use these days on computers.
I don't know if you've noticed, but Microsoft are moving apps to web versions as well.
In the Hacker News bubble, maybe. In the real world, not even close. The reasons why many a person chooses to use macOS, outside of the "YoU bUy It FoR ThE lOgO" that many hard-core technologists seem to believe, don't exist in any desktop environment.
Sometimes, people think "it can be made to look similar, therefore it's the same" (especially with regard to KDE), and no, just no.
What are those reasons?
> not to mention we're seeing silicon from intel and amd that can compete with the M series on mobile devices.
[[citation needed]], benchmarks please, incl battery life, not promises. "We are seeing" implies reality
Apple's worst release in years (maybe ever), Microsoft's worst release in years (maybe ever), meanwhile mainstream Linux UX has been taking baby steps forward on a nearly-daily basis for a decade straight.
I'm not saying 2026 is the year, but...
2026 is the year of nothing on the desktop so may as well pick Linux.
2026 is the year of the shitty desktop OSes.
Not to beat on my own drum but as a mac convert from the days of Tiger I saw the writing on the wall from miles away.
Still on iOS 18 and macOS 15 (Sequoia). I was a day one upgrader up until now, never had any regrets but this time things seemed very different.
It's worrisome but all is not lost, I'll start sweating for real if next year's releases don't improve things substantially.
Upgrading to iOS 26 was a mistake. All the slow, distracting UI features that only makes the iPhone feel like some slow Android phone is really not an "upgrade" in any reasonable sense of the word.
My phone updated on me and yesterday it took me 10 minutes to figure out how to listen to my voice mail. Like seriously, how do we go from clicking on the name calling to clicking on the name to see the voicemail left by that specific caller and no others
Maybe you didn’t catch this yet, but Apple pulled their latest iOS 18.7.3 update and they seem to only promote iOS 26 now. They really want everyone off iOS 18 :/
https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman/2026/01/07/hundreds-...
You can sign up for Apple beta and keep doing iOS 18 updates.
I may suggest the other option is to buy an iPhone not supporting iOS 26.
- an happy iOS 15 user
Nope, they don't sign iOS 18 updates anymore.
> Still on iOS 18 and macOS 15 (Sequoia). I was a day one upgrader up until now, never had any regrets but this time things seemed very different.
I've tried and returned the iPhone 17 Pro. Love the hardware (especially the camera), but iOS 26 is inefficient (for lack of a better term), and the new camera UI hides too many things.
The Tiger to Snow Leopard era was fantastic. Things were simple and worked.
There was also a great boutique apps ecosystem.
Right now, it seems that macOS is going through its enshittification phase, sadly.
I still remember Snow Leopard - I think that's when I started using Mac.
Most of the upgrades since then I have resisted and not enjoyed, though I seem to recall liking Mavericks.
A lot of the big features each time seem to be about tieing further into the Apple ecosystem, which doesn't interest me at all, since I have no other devices and don't use iCloud.
I think also that Snow Leopard era (unibody) MacBook Pro design was peak Mac. It was really full-featured while also having clean intentional design.
Tiger on a G4 tibook was peak apple.
> Tiger to Snow Leopard era was fantastic. Things were simple and worked
Was it also great for developers? (Genuine question.)
Yeah, OS X was definitely the nicest native development experience at the time. Apple's documentation was considerably better and more searchable back then than it is now (especially as it is now for desktop). And even though they've introduced lots of niceties (including Swift), as Apple's piled additional features and APIs into Cocoa/Xcode I find the overall experience quite a bit less coherent or intuitive or ergonomic than it used to be.
I prefer Swift as a language, but Apple's developer documentation back then was clear, detailed, and overall excellent. Occasionally I felt like I was reading a classic CS text rather than a manual. I could always find the guide on the particular facet I was looking for within a few clicks.
xcode has been getting better bit-by-bit. No major regression.
Same I'm on iOS 26 and it's reasonably bad but I figured I might as well pull of the band-aid and have app compatibility.
I can't see a single reason to upgrade to Tahoe. We'll see what 2026 brings.
One huge benefit of Tahoe for me is that you can now hide any menubar icon, even if they don't explicitly support hiding. It's a small thing but that alone makes the upgrade worth it for me
I am also HODLing Sequoia. Started using a Mac 2024.
(Hold On for Dear Life)
Apple software has noticeably declined from my experience, both iOS and macOS. I find the lifecycle of Apple products to be offensively short, also.
If I buy a product and the hardware is good for 10 years (because I looked after it), I expect the software to also run just as well as when I purchased it - that is the case with Linux, why isn't it the case with macOS?
Every year the software upgrades invariably degrade system performance. Outrageous.
I have a fully functional iPad mini for my kids that only supports iOS 12. I can barely install or use any software though because it's not supported on such an old OS.
I personally hold Swift and SwiftUI responsible, as Apple has increasingly adopted them in its own products. Moreover, by introducing frameworks that are exclusive to Swift, the company effectively compels developers to use this rather mediocre language.
> I find the lifecycle of Apple products to be offensively short, also.
Apple is miles ahead of Android when it comes to phones and tablets, most in the Android ecosystem is e-waste four or five years in, while Apple stuff can still be re-sold for actual money at that time assuming you didn't bust your screen.
For laptops, Apple is so far ahead it can't even be described. Most Windows laptops physically break apart before macOS ceases to support any Apple laptop.
Only thing we can maybe talk about is desktop PCs ever since the switch to M that basically made meaningful upgrades impossible, but eh, in my attic there's a 2009 Mac Pro still chugging along as my homelab server + gaming rig.
I'm using a MacBook Pro 2016 for dev still works great, and its still better than every windows laptop available now. The touchpad itself is still superior - its crazy when you think about it. I know people on their 3rd or 4th windows laptop since I've been using mine. I tried a M4 recently and its battery life is fantastic, and its faster so I'll probably upgrade when this one dies, but it still works well.
Edit: just did a google and it seems I can still sell it for about $600AUD, I don't know how anyone is buying a non apple lap top.
The hardware is very good, it can absolutely last 10 years and is miles ahead of competition - which pains me even more that the software degrades. I will eventually install linux on my M1 but I shouldn’t have to.
> Apple is miles ahead of Android when it comes to phones and tablets, most in the Android ecosystem is e-waste four or five years in
I have a very old android tablet (Nexus 7, 2013). I can install Linux on it and it works just fine. I can convert it into a full screen kiosk mode thing that displays photo albums, put it next to my tv as a song controller, etc etc.
Older iPads no longer get updates, and I can't install linux on them. Apple is wildly behind a lot of other hardware in terms of software-support since I can install linux on a lot of other stuff. Apple devices turn into useless e-waste bricks, other devices can get a second life running linux.
> I have a very old android tablet (Nexus 7, 2013).
Yeah, Nexus and being old, that's the thing. Everyone else other than Nexus, you gotta be lucky if you even get kernel sources and device trees that you can compile, but the code quality will usually be so rotten there's no hope of mainstreaming it to the Linux kernel.
> Apple devices turn into useless e-waste bricks
Only the iDevice lineup though. The Intel and M series devices all can be made to run Linux.
>Apple is miles ahead of Android
And Mussolini wasn't nearly as bad as Hitler. A relative measure like this sets an artificially low bar. If these devices had replaceable screens and batteries, they would be good until the mobile standards stopped being supported.
> Apple is miles ahead of Android when it comes to phones and tablets
Eh, I had to use a variety of iPhones for work recently, don't remember which models, from probably the last ~7 years though, and they really felt limited and frustrating on the software side. My already years old Pixel 7 feels miles ahead, and so did my Pixel 4a, even with the worse hardware of the latter. They just feel more capable.
I've been a mac guy for work for at least 15 years though, now with an M4 on Sequoia, and definitely won't be buying anything else (windows for most gaming), but Tahoe is not looking promising.
I agree. This is the first time I regret updating macOs.
I hoped the .1 or .2 would fix things, but I'm still seeing glitches and even random freezes.
Microsoft is a disaster right now, but if the new intel processor can compete on battery life with mac I might go back to linux.
> if the new intel processor can compete on battery life with mac I might go back to linux.
Unfortunately Intel is cutting down their Linux involvement so I wouldn't have high hopes for it. Newer AMD laptops are probably on par with Intel on Linux now.
first time i used tahoe to help a friend w/ their laptop i legit thought it was like a knockoff macos or something, genuinely the ugliest macos version and even in the brief time that i've used it, i've encountered annoying bugs, QC at apple is dead lowkey
I am still on Sequoia and dont plan to move to Tahoe.
> Luckily for Apple, Windows 11 is not exactly in a position to attract switchers.
Yes, because my apple hardware does not run properly with any other operating system. I would have switched to linux a while ago otherwise.
I would love linux on Apple hardware. Lots of people would, I suspect.
I guess Apple has realized that their hardware is so good that they don't have to worry about the software anymore.
I regret dearly the upgrade as well. I've turned a beautiful $3500 hardware into a close to Windows Vista machine that frustrates me daily. Just looking at it kills my productivity instantly, I just use full screen for all my apps now.
I agree. I have been kind of an Apple fanboy but the Tahoe thing is one of the worst products to come out of the company. I really think people should be fired for releasing this.
This is akin to MobileMe -
https://www.cultofmac.com/apple-history/steve-jobs-mobileme-...
Thanks for the advise. I have not upgraded, and have no plan to.
> "I wish I didn’t.”
Can't you do a factory reset/recovery on Mac that lands on the version of macos shipped with the device? Then you could re-upgrade to the os you wanted, without trying it it seems Sequoia is still available in the app store
Yes, you can install any version of macOS that was ever supported for your Mac. (It’s been a long time since they used System Enablers.) I’m so frustrated with Tahoe that I’m about to do this.
But you cannot, in general, migrate your data backwards. Apple's system apps will upgrade their data stores forward only. This isn't a problem if you are willing to e.g. re-download all of your (Mail.app) mail.
@xoa may I ask what do you use as iSCSI initiator?
Yep, that's a great workaround, as long as you have third-party apps you're happy with.
I generally just “reload” everything.
Safari can't be upgraded past a certain point on older versions of macOS. That can cause certain websites to break. Minor but annoying.
Certain features are not supported unles you're on MacOS 26, period, even with Safari TP
Tahoe is a bit shit, yes. But I was there for both Vista and Windows 8 and they were both utterly unusable.
Vista ate every bit of RAM it could find, had severe driver issues and riddled with instabilities. It would not run on half the hardware at the time. I faintly remember a DX10 shitshow as well. And 8 hopelessly tried to apply Metro to the desktop and added a third (or was it forth?) settings panel. Also killed the Start menu.
At least on Windows 11 it’s possible to disable the rounded corners.
When I saw the first liquid glass demo I decided not to upgrade both my phone and macbook for couple of years to come till they fix it.
I was in the market for a new MBP (still on my 2015 MBP). After all of these articles and reports of how terrible Tahoe is, I’m holding off.
I’m hoping they’ll wake up and fix this with the next release, but I’m not super optimistic.
We’ll see.
The M4 I bought last month shipped without Tahoe and hasn’t been updated. If you can get one which isn’t already upgraded, you can leave it on the better release as long as Sequoia was ever supported on that generation.
Tahoe actually harms their hardware sales. I would normally upgrade to the latest MacBook Pro as soon as they become available, but I know that the next M5 generation will come with Tahoe installed and I intend to keep my current machine for as long as I can…
The M1 hurt their future hardware sales, as now, 5 years later, it remains a viable machine. The M1 MacBook Air has become a bit of a meme.
I had to upgrade my iPhone to iOS 26 to setup my watch. I wish I had never done it. Nothing is where it's supposed to be from a UI perspective. Stuff breaks often. I can't use my contact search bar to search contacts. It only searches past calls. What the hell.
I don't like all the changes either, but I just opened the contacts app and started typing a name and it showed me exactly what I expected--several of my contacts with the name I typed. iOS 26.2.
Staying with Sequoia and iOS 18 for as long as I can.
> Tahoe is a macOS mis-step on par with Windows 8 or Windows Vista
Not even close.
It's taken a few steps in the wrong direction, but nothing compaered to the user-hostility of Win8 (attempting to move users from 'real Windows' into locked-down dumbed-down touch-centric mobile-like app store hell), let alone Win11 (creating an e-waste mountain, then pushing AI slop into everything)
same here. still running on the previous version on all devices. Gonna sit this out ...
Given the departure of Alan Dye and his replacement with someone (whose name I have temporarily forgotten) who comes from an actual UI design background, I am very optimistic that the next few iterations of macOS and iOS will actually start to improve the UI situation.
The most annoying part about it is they won't admit the obvious colossal mistake and fix it.
I've blocked Apple's update servers via /etc/hosts so this monstrous thing doesn't sneak onto my machine in the middle of the night, still happily on Sequoia.
though use linux is in a great state. tahoe and windows are really bad right now and i don't regret moving to linux even a little bit.
oof. i'll be holding off after seeing all this. already have to deal with adobe's bad updates
The worst part is the audiocore substack that is glitching. I waited to major subversions to upgrade and still got bit. I hate this.
I switched from Windows 11 to macOS after a disastrous upgrade experience and drastic downgrade in performance on my Windows laptop.
I mean Windows 10 wasn't great but I got used to the taskbar searching the web somehow and the dual config menus everywhere and so on. But 11 was just terrible.
macOS has its pain points but man oh man what a disaster Windows is.
I have had Linux on my personal desktop and laptop forever so that hasn't been an issue, only used Windows for work.
Unfortunately for Apple, Linux has not rotted the same way that macOS has. Will Linux win the desktop wars through attrition because it won't suffer the same enshittification as for-profit software?
If it wasn't for Apple Silicon and its stellar impact on battery life, I'd be gone. iOS 26 might make it happen anyway!
>Tahoe is a macOS mis-step on par with Windows 8 or Windows Vista.
Are you just saying that because it has new glassy windows and is a resource hog? What is that different about Tahoe vs Sequoia?
Not OP, but there are plenty of minor annoyances (I had the "pleasure" of upgrading my work laptop to Tahoe) :
- Apple Music requires one more click to pop the multiplayer, UI is worse and the click hitbox for the progress seek bar is too small
- Volume +/- now acts like a notification (top-right corner of screen and clickable). Horrible design decision (gets in the way of browser tabs)
- The "A > B > C" folder thingy at the bottom of Finder windows is gone, and the tabs' styling looks unsettling
- Weather (and Stocks, to a lesser degree) looks worse, lots of space wasted
I hope so, Tahoe seems particularly bad, but the downhill slide has been happening for several releases.
> Tahoe is a macOS mis-step on par with Windows 8 or Windows Vista.
Other than that weird resize thing written about here (which I didn't notice, thanks SizeUp for providing me with hotkeys remarkably similar to Windows) - why? Vista and 8 were immediately obvious changes in the UI, but in general it still looks and feels just like macOS has for well over a decade now.
New icons, new fonts, but... that's it?
Oh and HyperSwitch for some reason can't switch to Finder windows any more, but that's probably because HyperSwitch hasn't seen an upgrade in years...
Can you interpret this comment for those of us that haven't used windows? All i can recall from "vista" is that it looked good
Off the top of my head: Windows Vista was slow and unstable on a lot of hardware of the time due to significantly higher system requirements than XP and a new display driver model that worked poorly at first, had a very polarizing look, and had quite overbearing UAC -- where XP would just let you do the thing, Vista would ask you three times if you're really really sure you wanted to authorize it.
It had decent bones though -- arguably a lot of its bad reputation was due to hardware/third party driver issues and people trying to run it on old hardware that just couldn't hack it. Windows 7 was well received and is basically the same thing with small improvements and some of the UX issues smoothed over (i.e. less annoying UAC)
Windows Vista was also notorious for going overboard with translucency effects in the default "Aero" style
Microsoft marketing maybhave had a specific preference, but "Aero" and "Aero Glass" are interchangeable. From the same article you linked:
> "Rest in peace, Aero. I liked you, a lot. Still do. And I'll miss you," Thurrott writes
Microsoft's Copilot AI software has been integrated in every corner of the operating system, from the start menu to the notepad to settings. Beyond the intrusiveness of it, it also does not work very well. Other AI mishaps include Recall, which takes screenshots of your desktop every so often, and the original version of Recall stored these in an unencrypted, insecure database.
On top of that, the OS feels more bloated and disorganized than ever, with something like six different UI frameworks all present in various spots on the OS; system settings are scattered across the Settings app (new) and various legacy panels like Control Panel and Network Connections.
What else... Microsoft now requires an online connection and Microsoft account to sign in to your PC; no more local-only accounts allowed.
I'm sure there's more I'm missing. It's not a pleasant operating system.
I added a local-only account to a Win 11 Pro box just two days ago. Nothing seems different to me—the usual horsing around with the no online account stuff but it let me create the account.
Pro will allow it. Home which is what comes with most computers, does not now.
I find that it is quite a pleasant operating system!
Recall is turned off by default and Copilot never nags you to use it (like Gemini on Chromebooks/Google Search/Google Docs does).
I completely agree with the UI frameworks thing though. They really need to remove the Control Panel.
> They really need to remove the Control Panel.
... they really need to provide 100% coverage to all the same settings, THEN remove the control panel.
Compared to both Windows 10 and macOS 26 (my desktop computer is a Mac Mini M4 and I really regret updating it to Tahoe).
Linux obviously has its strengths, so I have a dual boot with the latest Fedora, but I almost always end up using W11, even for personal use.
Most people are fine with Windows, including myself. I find it a good business workhorse with excellent productivity features that I can rely upon, knowing that it will handle pretty much any task I throw at it.
Another factor vs Mac (for me) is that if something to happen to my ThinkPad while I'm at a factory somewhere in rural Uzbekistan, there is always a store in the nearby city where I can grab a Windows laptop for like $400 and continue with the job, and/or have my machine serviced.
Windows has enormous userbase, and obviously you'll hear a high absolute number of criticisms, especially considering that those who actively dislike the OS for whatever reason will take take their time to bring their frustrations online, and those who are fine with it rarely comment about it.
I don't have Copilot in my start menu. It's in Notepad, but that is the only place I've found it. This is on 25H2.
> original version of Recall stored these in an unencrypted, insecure database.
Why do you bother mentioning it, given that's been long rectified and that particular version never made it to the production ring?
> six different UI frameworks all present in various spots on the OS
Windows has always been like this. It wasn't until Windows 11 that the Font dialog was upgraded from a Win 3.x look and feel.
> no more local-only accounts allowed.
Just false.
The Vista comparison is unfair. I think a lot of the bad rap Vista got was from trying to run it on underpowered hardware thanks to marketing XP-era machines as "Windows Vista Capable". I actually ran it on good HW (the kind that could run Crysis) and I didn't have anything bad to say.
Yes, UAC could be considered as annoyance by some but it's no different than "sudo" on single-user Linux machines and we seemingly have no problems with that (I wish we'd move on past that because it is damn annoying and offers no security benefit).
Comparing Vista to modern macOS is insulting. Vista didn't have that level of jank and the UIs were actually quite good, consistent and with reasonable information density, unlike "System Settings" or shitty Catalyst apps.
It's even sadder. Apple has some of the best-performing CPUs on the market. And even with that kind of power under the hood, iOS, iPadOS, and macOS 26 chug and choke and drop frames. What the hell hardware did they target?
> Yes, UAC could be considered as annoyance by some but it's no different than "sudo" on single-user Linux machines and we seemingly have no problems with that (I wish we'd move on past that because it is damn annoying and offers no security benefit).
It was wild to me when I was testing out if I wanted to move over to Linux as my full-time desktop OS how much it was asking for my password. And it didn't even have a mechanism to make it a little less painful such as requesting a short PIN (which I think is a fine option as long as a few incorrect PIN entries forces full password input).
Give your user NOPASSWD if it's really that bothersome. You can also potentially set it up to use a fingerprint reader if you have that hardware.
You had way more issues than that on launch, performance of 3d games sucked compared to XP with the same hardware (I remember at least a 30% decrease of FPS) and usb file transfers were so borked you probably had half of the speed of XP transfering on a usb key (which was the primary method of transfering files at the time).
The UAC wasn't even the main problem, the overall performance of Vista was, everything was so much slower.
Windows 8 was when Microsoft tried to cater more towards Windows-on-tablet use cases. Which lead to everyone, including desktop users, having a fullscreen phone-style app menu take the place of the old start menu. This, for desktop use, is obviously quite disruptive and was hated by everyone.
They addressed most issues in the 8.1 update, like a year later I think.
You know what was worse than desktop users? Server users via RDP.
There was no start button. There are no screen edges to swipe in from. Hot corners are really hard to hit. I still can't believe somebody said "yes, good idea" to using that UI for Server 2012.
I RDP'd into a Windows Server VM a year or so ago and got a full-screen popup for Edge or some shit like that.
If that wasn't bad enough, the popup was a web view, meaning none of RDP's acceleration/client-side compositing was in play and I was greeted with a ~1fps slideshow.
Apple had one of the most successful and known ad campaigns "I'm a mac and I'm a PC" ridiculing Windows Vista, they pretty much summed it up in those.
Getting to Windows 11 today, they have ads in the Start menu. Not exactly appealing to the Apple crowd…
They also ridiculed the permissions popups. But now when I plug my AirPods to charge on my MacBook it opens a permissions popup.
This was added in iOS 26.
https://9to5mac.com/2025/12/08/ios-26-new-airpods-setting-ca...
In iOS 26, you can keep audio playing with your headphones by enabling the new "Keep Audio with Headphones" setting, found in Settings > General > AirPlay & Continuity, which stops audio from automatically switching to nearby devices like car stereos or Bluetooth speakers when you're already connected to your headphones.
This setting, which is off by default, ensures your music, calls, or podcasts stay with your AirPods or wireless headphones, preventing frustrating interruptions when you start your car or enter a room with another speaker.
MetroUI in Windows 8 was pretty universally panned. I thought it was pretty good on tablets and such, but it left a lot to be desired on desktops and hid a lot of functionality, it went too mobile for a lot of people's tastes.
Disclaimer: I was one of the dozens who used a windows phone. The Nokia Lumia 920 was great, you can fight me.
I think a lot of people liked the Windows mobile experience. Shame it didn't quite get enough market share.
Wrong. There was full app compat of WP7 apps in WP8 and Win10 Mobile, and for WP8 apps in W10M. The only full backward app compat break was from WM6.5/WP6.5 to WP7.
I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you're thinking of the lack of device OS upgrades: from WP6.5 to WP7, from WP7 to WP8, and from older WP8 devices to W10M. So no forward compat, but absolutely yes to backward compat.
i guess they needed to release all that pent up backwards incompatibility
Windows 8 featured a notable paradigm shift from a menuing launcher (click start, programs, then the program you want, as an example), to a full screen launcher (Think Android and iOS). And also switched from floating windows (The default for most Linux distros and for Mac AFAIK) to rudimentary tiling windows (Think Android and iOS)
https://youtu.be/RuuqEZnvEoU?t=30
Vista had the right direction, Windows 7 merely continued on it and it became one of the best operating systems ever.
Windows 8 design wasn't bad per se, but they shipped the start screen when it lacks even the most basic features, so you'll return to legacy desktop the moment you want to do anything.
I don't think any of them are like Tahoe TBH.
from my own personal experience, Vista was very slow and buggy at launch, but it did get better over time
It’s such an utter piece of crap.
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]