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.
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.
And it's the UX designer's job to specify the click target area based on best practices and usability testing with real users.
If this is the click target area specified by the designer (or it was simply unspecified) then it's absolutely the designer's fault. I'm a UX designer and I've made mistakes like this before, though this one is pretty egregious because the issue is core to the interaction.
It's sometimes easy as a UX designer to forget to specify some of the smaller details (though this example isn't what I'd call a "small detail"), particularly because they're the kinds of things you don't notice when they work, and I don't have to implement it. The developer has to sit down and write code for what will or will not happen.
I've made mistakes in the past where in an mobile interface I neglected to specify the click target area for some controls. Typically the minimum clickable area we'd use was something like 44x44 but the visual was smaller than that, and I didn't specify it, so the developer made the visible element the one that would respond to the click events. It was too small and it caused issues. I owned up to that one, I didn't want to let the developer take the blame for that.
I've also been fortunate enough to work with developers who would notice these things and then ask me if it was intended and whether they should increase the clickable area. I was always so grateful to have colleagues like that, and I'd always offer to set some time aside to come take a look at things on their local environment before they moved things forward just to catch any issues where they could immediately fix it instead of having to push fixes later on.
I don't know where the failure happened at Apple, but based on what I've seen from "Liquid Glass" it's clear there's some real institutional failures involving either the design leadership, the development leadership, or somewhere in between both. It's really quite embarrassing the quality of GUI and UX that has come out of Apple recently.
This is the first time ever where the hurdle of rolling back my iPhone to an earlier version of iOS feels worth the effort. I disabled as much of the liquid glass effects as I could because I found it difficult to read and now it all looks like shit, whereas before I could read it and it looked nice.
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?
Exactly. I don't know how about "big design houses" like Apple, but in my small shop designers _only_ care about static screen stories. They don't care how user will click those icons, how focus will work, how any dynamic aspects of complex UI works.
In past it was "given" by desktop env, now it's all rebuilt in material or other design but without any advanced behavior, it only "looks good on static screen".
At a place like Apple, I can bet that it's not like some contract engineering shop where a blob of programmers just sit there blindly implementing whatever is written by someone else in Jira tickets. The final product that ships in the OS is going to be the result of massive, often heated negotiation between HI and the engineering DRI. A huge change to the look and feel is unlikely to be implemented if there's strenuous objection from engineering leadership.
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.
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.
Consistency is the absolute fucking worst design principle.
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.
> The designers are at fault because they prioritized visuals over usability
I bet designers aren't at fault here either because Liquid Glass violates at least three rules of design every second that passes.
https://www.vitsoe.com/us/about/good-design#good-design-is-i...
Instead OP mentioned "visual artists"; I agree. Liquid Glass is an art show; something that belongs in the realm of concept cars, not on the road.
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.
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.
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> It’s a mistake to look at what people say on the internet.
Touché.
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?
> hyper-malleable control surface [...] (the stream deck is popular for a reason!).
I agree with the sentiment - making a control surface that adapts to the user's current task makes total sense to me, and is a compelling feature in theory.
The execution (and how the touchbar differs from the Stream Deck) is where I think the argument falls apart. There is effectively zero ability to navigate the touchbar without using your eyes and taking your focus off the display, and your work. The Stream Deck can easily be used without looking. A static grid of real buttons whose function changes within context is a more useful implementation in the real world, even though it is technically _less_ capable.
IMO the touchbar concept is flawed in exactly in the same way as the modern car user interface.
Why put it above the _keyboard_, though? what you described sounds just like the macOS menu bar, but perhaps a bit more customizable. Why not just do that (make the menu bar more customizable)?
As a user of the touch bar, I _hated_ having to look down from the screen, and move my hands away from the keyboard home row / touchpad area, _all the way up_ to the touchbar area to finally use it. It completely breaks the flow every single time. I don't think just inserting physical Fn keys beneath it would have won me over at all.
I'm not familiar with the stream deck, haven't even heard of it until just now.
Full agree. The TouchBar was a genuine innovation that gave new ways to interact with data and context. But without the function keys (and the real ESC) there were frequent accidental touches on the bar and a real tactile loss for existing function key intuitions. And now an extremely rare, genuine, programmable HCI innovation is scuttled because of an unthought-thru roll out. A missed opportunity. (I keep my 2019 MBP with the good keyboard largely for this, but ultimately the laptop was ruined by the super hot Intel cpu, which also makes the touch bar uncomfortable to use at times.)
Bret Victor being behind the touch bar explains so much about its potential. Apple has such a weird track record of releasing really interesting stuff that they let languish without enhancement. And then you have weird episodes where they have too much conviction on the wrong things, like the butterfly keyboard, where they release multiple iterations which all end up failing.
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 have difficulty reading the light gray text on white/bright background that too many sites favor these days. I have a pretty good 4K 32 inch monitor. Even with a full Adobe color space capable and calibrated device in a darkroom I don't want to read that combination.
I don't get it, I have medically tested 120% color vision (it was a lengthy test), definitely nothing wrong on my side, so I don't understand at all what the designers and coders are seeing that they think that that is a great idea. The difference between the pixels is objectively bad, one can take a screenshot and look at the background versus text pixels.
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.
To be fair to those designers, color reproduction is a really hard problem, and shitty monitors have terrible color reproduction.
You want your designers to have accurate color reproduction for obvious reasons, but they should be testing their work on shitty monitors, too.
They were denied any attempts to put them on mass market laptops.
> You want your designers to have accurate color reproduction for obvious reasons
I don't know, I conclude the opposite. If you need accurate color reproduction when you publish online, you are doing something wrong.
I used to co-own a small digital printing business, so I'm aware of what all of it means, and I had an appropriate monitor myself and a paid Adobe Design Suite subscription.
But for the web, when our setup is too good it's actually a detriment. It is predictable that you end up publishing things that require your quality setup. There is a good reason not to bother with a high quality monitor usable for serious publishing and photo/video editing when you only do web thing. Which is exactly why when I bought my last monitor, which is for business work and coding and web browsing and other mundane things, I deliberately ignored all the very high quality displays, even though the company would have paid whatever I chose. It is not an advantage for that use case.
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 want OS vendors to stop prioritizing "design" above performance. Opening a Finder window used to be instant, now it takes 0.3s-1s. Opening Safari used to be instant, now it takes seconds. Even menus in the menu bar take a few dozen milliseconds too long, which becomes obvious when you compare it to apps with custom truly-instant hamburger menus.
Computers are faster than ever, every task other than UI rendering is finished faster than ever, but these geniuses keep slowing down the UI with every update. It's criminal.
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.
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.
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 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.
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> fixing an obviously broken spec
Going off spec is not the correct way to deal with this, and I could see how that might get you in trouble. It's counter productive.
Better choice is to escalate, but at some point you have to simply disagree and commit.
>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 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).
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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.
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.
Apple scrollbars have never looked uglier. I would prefer them to always show but they're so ugly I keep it default. On Aqua they looked great! On Windows they're still great!
> 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.
Many of the complains surrounding the former iOS7 and today's Liquid Glass are tied to the requirement of the interface never moving. Which isn't just an unreasonable requirement, but a ridiculous one.
Just like iOS7+ it is possible to position and layer interface elements in a way where the visual effects will render a screenshot difficult to read, but in practice the elements are frequently in motion or as you've already pointed out easy to make them move. That motion is what negates the layering problems, thus making visual occlusions rare, short-lived and easily resolved.
There is a certain unreasonableness in ignoring that reality, and also ignoring that there is a user setting to keep a full-sized version of the scroll bars always visible.
This isn't to take away from legitimate criticisms such as the issue with the resize hotbox not being updated to match the more rounded corners, but rather highlight that not all online forum criticisms comes from a bona fide place.
> since it's so easy to scroll, you can always just do a little two finger scroll wiggle to have it appear
That changes the effort required to show useful information from zero to more than zero. Which, while it not be a great quantitative change, is an enormous qualitative change.
Like Chesterton's Fence, it was there for a reason.
"At last (and at least) we have reclaimed that narrow vertical strip of screen real estate on the screens eastern-most vestige! Now to find a good use for it!"
The true annoyance is that in many cases explicitly enabling them does not restore the original functionality.
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.
Sadly, this doesn't restore the 'resize box', you just get scrollbars ending in a weird curve.
Yes, the scroll bars settings affects the scroll bars.
They are still very low-contrast compared to what was.
The scroll bars for those curious: https://imgur.com/a/uhVO8IA
> 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.
This is endemic now. Cinnamon does it by default and I hate it. I only managed a partial fix, and then I had to do more work per-app (especially Firefox) to make them behave.
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.
I actually don't think there's anything wrong with horizontal scrollbars, as long as you're using an input device (like an Apple trackpad) that makes it equally easy to scroll either axis.
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.
I don't see what's wrong with both, or even whatever combination you choose to configure.
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.
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.
> To be fair, this grip indicator only (and still) exists when the window has a status bar.
Here's a resizable window in Platinum that has a drag handle but does not have a status bar: https://guidebookgallery.org/pics/gui/settings/appearance/ma...
edit: I missed "Windows" in GP comment. Well let it be known that at least Platinum wasn't like this :)
What's up with that, anyway? Statusbars are great. They are one of the most useful parts of the window.
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...
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.
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!
Man, I love platinum. I know the internet favours Aqua by a wide margin (and fairly so, it is gorgeous), but something about platinum just feels right to me.
Yeah, but scrollbars are bad and every bathwater has its baby.
(P.S. scrollbars aren't even bad)
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.
You grab the corner to move the corner, not the window. You grab it and move it (the corner), just like the plate.
> 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.
We hold the edges of things to pull to expand them. Sliding doors, table cloths etc.
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
It's funny. one of the most significant UI axioms I ever learned came from Bill Atkinson: "Always make the 'click zone' a little larger than the visual indication of the affordance." This becomes tricky or impossible for some things like touch-keypads, but for most things it makes the difference between frustrating and magical.
Apple seems to have forgotten its own innovations.
> This post is very well presented
I suspect you must be very careful, overwhelmingly complete and understandable presenting this kind of stuff.
otherwise:
- if it isn't, the post might be buried in drama.
- or else, the post will be another obscure warning that nobody sees.
for me, I noticed after the ios 26 "upgrade" I must continually forget, then repair my bluetooth devices. But I don't have the benefit of a clearly understandable article that calls apple out.
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.
There's also the problem that not every window in Tahoe has the same corner radius. Some people thought this was laziness/lack of polish or a bug, but Alan Dye confirmed on a podcast that it was intentional.
So then they're left with a conundrum: do they adjust the 19x19 region on a per-window basis, depending on the per-window corner radius, or do they stick with one standard drag region? Probably it should be the former, but that comes with its own set of issues.
That's like asking, "if the title bar can have different sizes, should we make the hot area for moving the window also of different sizes?" The answer to both questions is "obviously yes!" The shape of the thing and how it responds to user input do not match by coincidence.
Do you recall what podcast? I know hearing him say this was intentional is only gonna make me frustrated, but I’m dying to hear the justification for such a bad decision.
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’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.
I didn't immediately jump to it, but here's why I mentioned it. DEI is essentially nothing more than "brown nosing", as you put it; manipulation of various factors for personal gain.
In DEI type con jobs, it is just administered by an odd and even contradictory hodgepodge of people/identities who are hijacking different characteristics, or more accurately, maybe manipulating characteristics differently.
Where brown nosing also manipulates things like flattery, currying favor, narcissistic positioning and sabotage; DEI manipulates things more like sympathy, graciousness, generosity, and empathy. At the same time is also employs psychological and emotional coping mechanisms, like gratuitous pride and affirmation, while also making heavy use of rather harmful personality traits like shaming, blaming, blame shifting, cooption, purloining, appropriation, and emotionally abuses people generally.
It's all very common and typical of extreme and malignant narcissism, including the put on, fake self-congratulation you often see the DEI type crowd engaging in where they lay on the affirmation of equality and equity so heavily that it usually just highlights the contradiction with reality most people experience.
I hope "cutting corners" in this context was an intentional pun.
It did seem like they fixed iOS slowly after 7, where they went too far with flatness.
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.
Well put. I dual booted because I still can't trust my CachyOS desktop not to do something surprising during important calls. But damn it is relieving to have full control again.
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...
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.
Is there any particular distro you're using KDE on for this to work flawlessly on a Thinkpad? I have a Carbon Gen 6 on Windows 10 but one day will need to migrate. The device itself is sound and reliable.
Thank you very much
Thank you
Yeah, I used whatever the default was, Gnome or Xfce. I'll seriously try KDE next time then.
GNOME has exactly the same quirky behavior with rounded windows, where the drop shadow is actually the clickable area to resize the window.
Exactly, I was reading this on CachyOS Gnome. I was like, wait a minute, I've this exact same issue for years on Gnome (maybe on KDE as well, not sure).
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.
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.
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.
So you don't get a separate set of random video-related problems depending on which you use
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.
I am quite sympathetic towards Tuxedo, and am considering to replace my work laptop (a 6yr old MBP) with one of those when it stops working, but those are Apple and gaming laptop prices, not mass market prices.
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> 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
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.
You guys still use Word?
Seriously, I think it depends if you're talking about business or home. For business, sure. For home—and this is quite relevant to the rest of your comment—I think it comes down more to gaming.
It is, it is copilot 365 now.
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?
This question is forcing me to do some deep thinking about my time there, which I haven't done is quite a awhile.
Some people left early, like Don Lindsay. Don was instrumental in bringing Aqua to life, along with Bas of course, and led the team up and through the release of Cheetah and more. This task wasn't easy at all. To me it seems like he was finally going to receive some reward of those hard years of work. But instead he chose to leave to go to Microsoft. This boggled my mind, as leaving to Microsoft to me seemed incomprehensible. Maybe Don had enough of the abuse? Maybe he was sick of the increasingly crowded commute? The daily visits from Steve pointing out every detail of the UI that bothered him? Did you know the UX designed many of the big banners and posters for the WWDC events. Steve didn't want any old graphic designer to do those, so Bas, Imran and others would work on them. Don had to deal with that too.
When Steve left to receive cancer treatment in 2004, he still had influence, Bertrand Serlet was running engineering, Jony Ive was focussed on industrial design. We were working on Tiger with the brushed metal interface and there was a lot of activity on that. Tim Cook was running the business, but Bas and others were keeping the ball rolling on the UX with remote input from Steve.
I wasn't around for the next two leaves of absence, the last one being final, but heard that things were becoming increasingly fractious with camps emerging around Tony Fadell, Scott Forstall, Jony Ive and general politcal unpleasantness as Tim Cook was given various ultimatums about "I won't work with this or that person." Everyone was trying to say that they represented the vision of Steve and somehow knew what would Steve do given any sitution. Geez, if we knew what Steve would do or wanted, there could have been a lot of really distressing confrontations avoided over the previous years.
This type of internal sniping didn't happen with Steve around, or if it did, it wasn't very effective. I think it would have gotten you fired. Tony Fadell pushed it to the limit with Steve and Scott. I remember someone once asking Steve about getting free lunch at Apple, like you could get at Google and they were told "If all you want is free lunch, then you should be working at Google."
For me, there was a certain amount of clarity that came from Steve's abusive behavior. It could wear you down on one level, but also brought focus and drive to getting things done. I think it was very unhealthy one one level and very exciting on another. There weren't endless meeting on calendars discussing minutia. It also meant that the obvious horrors of the Tahoe wouldn't happen. Steve himself would have grabbed the windows with different corner radii, stacked them up and excoriated whoever was responsible. Some of my work was called "real bottom of the barrel shit", "the worst he has ever seen" and told "this is not the way we do things at Apple." I assure you, what he was complaining about was nothing remotely close to what we are seeing in Tahoe.
The extent of my writings are here in HackerNews comments. I don't have the time or discipline of Andy to be able to sit down and write like he does. Maybe someday, but for now I am using the free time I have outside of work to make music and ride bikes as fast as I can.
The mess of Tahoe didn't just happen on the watch of Tim Cook, Craig Federighi, Eddy Cue, Phil Schiller, it happened because of them.
Tim Cook has no taste and no sense of quality. He merely counts beans really well. Craig Federighi is responsible for the most precipitous drop in Apple's software quality since the late 80s and early 90s. Eddy Cue is responsible for some of Apple's worst software (music, iCloud, services), and Phil Schiller… what exactly does he do again?
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.
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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.
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
FWIW I have a note in my dot files that for this to take effect you need to logout and then log back in, not sure if this is (still?) the case.
I think you still need to. I just tested and it doesn't take immediate effect. Which means I’ve now got to try to remember that keyboard shortcut and try it out the next time I restart...
I recommend altSnap to get this functionality on Windows.
I use this all day everyday. Love this, changed how it feels to work with GUIs for me.
Easy move + resize solves this
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.
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.
Honestly, for me, the loss of resource forks in the transition from Classic Mac OS to Mac OS X was a real sore spot for me. Sure, a UNIX-based OS like OS X was going to facilitate a different paradigm for file handling by default, but Apple really should have found a way to keep resource forks as a thing. I loved how intuitive file handling was in Classic Mac OS. No pesky three letter file extensions driving program associations and the like.
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.
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.
Quickly and loudly is pretty good. It's much preferable to loudly with a five year delay.
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.
And yet, sometimes the criticism is warranted, and sometimes it's not. That's why it's good not to overgeneralize about patterns.
I think that’s unnecessary waffling. Of course there are exceptions, but the prejudiced negative views that the old and the young hold of each are generally wrong.
For example, the constantly recurring critique that the music of the young is not about musicality[1] is always wrong. It's as wrong today as it was about Elvis.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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").
> It wasn't meant as a rebuttal.
“As much as I like to *” is a common way to start a rebuttal (the subsequent “I’m not going to see/do that” is implied by that turn of phrase).
> but I thought that listing a very commonly used application alone would be enough to challenge the article's assertion
So it was a rebuttal? Why the disingenuous doublethink?
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.
Judging by this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46599464
It seems to be common.
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 used it up till 2011. It had multiple top-cases replaced under the extended warranty, display CCFL was changed a few times due to flickering, disc-drive got swapped once, new logic board because the audio-jack was stuck on SPDIF, new power adapter.
The only device I ever got Apple Care on and I got thousands in repairs covered for free. This was from before Apple would just replace the entire device.
All my other MacBooks have been trouble free luckily.
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.
I believe that sentiment to some extent. As soon as you establish an org, they will keep generating projects for themselves. Almost no manager will tell you that their work is complete and it is time to downsize their team. If you have an UX team with N people, the team will make sure to generate workload for N people, probably even more.
On top of that, managing a huge redesign is a great career opportunity for everyone involved. The incentives are simply stacked in favor of doing redesigns for their own sake all the time. You need a clear minded top level manager to stop these kinds of ideas.
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...
Car designs do change all the time, mostly just for novelty too.
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.
I agree with you, on Ubuntu MATE 24.04.2 enjoying getting work done instead of popups and unfathomable UI changes. Let's be friends.
I usually find these apple design nitpick articles tiresome but the gif of the guy grabbing at the plate was hilarious and also accurate about user expectations
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.
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.
Yes, because of simply going to my Utils folder in Launchpad, I want to launch Spotlight (someday) and type in:
"Open the SD-card data-recovery application I installed a few years ago"
So elegant!
Oh look, right now on the HN front page is an article about why this sucks: https://tidepool.leaflet.pub/3mcbegnuf2k2i
What AI component?
Spotlight is used to train ML models on Apples servers. There is no private information used and they go through a process to remove PII information.
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.
How do you search for applications you don't remember the name of?
And Apple's categorization is trash, a huge regression. There is absolutely no advantage to anything offered now over Spotlight, which not only allowed FASTER search (because it only searched applications), but allowed you to group applications as you saw fit (which didn't preclude an OPTION to have Apple do it).
It also allowed you to launch several applications faster, because it kept your last-used group open. For example, if I sat down to do some development, I opened my Dev Tools group and could launch the four applications I typically use together with only eight clicks.
That's exactly what I did with Launchpad most of the time. But Launchpad gave you the option of both. Are they also going to take away categorisation in Preferences and force you to search for everything there too?
It works great on phone, on the operating system there are numerous applications that you don't care about.
Exactly, so why would you want to make users scroll through all of them?
Mac OS comes with something like 80 apps out of the box. I have over 200 on my system, and I'm pretty stingy with space. I immediately delete stuff I try and don't like.
So the noobs who know nothing about Spotlight typically come back with some absurd suggestion like "put a shortcut to the Applications folder in your dock."
Um.. no. Not even close.
You can still make subdirectories in /Applications.
This is not reliable; it messes up some applications.
I love how someone downvoted a fact.
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.
This is a weird one. I think their reasoning was that most people don't use Launchpad, so they integrated it into Spotlight to eliminate redundancy.
I much prefer the new app launcher in Tahoe, but it was created at the expense of Launchpad, which some people actually relied on. I don't know why they couldn't have kept both options.
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.
> It feels like a 'unification tax. Sacrificing desktop utility to align with non-Desktop modalilties
No. Launchpad is just the iOS springboard brought to Mac, with big icons and folders and pages. When it was added people complained of "iOS-ification".
This time they made a proper, unique Mac equivalent, integrated in Spotlight and built around the keyboard. It's not as good, the window was too small in 26.0, doesn't support uninstallation like Launchpad, but it's definitely less iOS-like.
I think you have it backwards. The new app launcher is unequivocally more like iOS. Like iOS' app launcher it: 1. does not support making your own folders which launchpad had 2. has groups per app type like "Creativity" or "Productivity" which are literally taken verbatim from the iOS app drawer/launcher page. Both designs are obviously inspired by iOS but I don't see it as a mac optimized version at all.
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.
Maybe they didn't want people seeing their awful new icons at large enough sizes that the seams would be showing...
Yep. I hate it. Its easier to open the Finder and use the shortcut to open the application folder.
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.
It may have jumped the shark, but it may be that now there's space for actual experimentation and innovation again. This talk from Scott Jenson (who worked at Apple in Human Interfaces) was thought-provoking and gave me a little optimism: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fZTOjd_bOQ
I'm so glad I haven't updated.
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 is Windows, but it might shed some light on the situation. I have a Qt application that I made, and occasionally when I switch from one window to another, the cursor doesn't switch from resize to normal, or vice versa, until I move the mouse. The precise effect is consistent, but difficult to describe, hence why the "sometimes". I think it happens because I'm not handling the window switch event as one that may require re-evaluating the cursor shape.
Absolutely, I've always suspected that it's something to do with that. There's also something about the underlying tech that makes the macOS pointer behave 'more independently' of the rest of the UI, like it's running in a separate thread? I've definitely noticed scenarios in the past that would 'block' the pointer from updating (even its position) on Windows, that wouldn't on Mac.
So maybe the pointer is not as tightly-coupled to the underlying UI components, so some scenarios can cause them to briefly lose track of each other?
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
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.
I might even give Apple a tiny bit of credit if some designer had piped up at some point and said "you think we should square off the corners when the app is 'maximised'"? But, no, either nobody pointed out that the emperor wore no clothes, or they were ignored.
(I say "maximised", even though that isn't the right term, because there is no right term. I don't mean 'full screen', since the borders are actually squared off properly in that mode, thank the lord; I mean 'full screen except for the global menu bar')
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.
I think it is really telling of the quality of the UI when the best way to use it is after enabling a bunch of accessibility settings. I found the Liquid Glass color background effect make some websites unusable on Safari due to the background becoming the same color as the text.
I know most wont care but to me the biggest red flag was when they changed the cursor stem to be like the windows cursor stem, it's angled geometrically correct but when you actually stare at it then it looks wonky and wrong. It's one of those things an amateur designer would assume is correct because theoretically it is but a talented designer knows the angle has to be off to feel correct.
It looks wrong because it isn't symmetrical. If you go into System Settings -> Accessibility -> Display increase your pointer size, screenshot it, and rotate it, you can see that it's not symmetrical. It looks wonky because it is wonky.
Should we crowdfund some billboards in Cupertino expressing how big a misstep we collectively think Tahoe/iOS 26/Liquid glAss was?
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.
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.
There's no relief in open source. I've watched Ubuntu and Gnome copy some of Apple and Microsoft's worst ideas over the last 20 years and somehow put an even worse spin on them. I fully expect to see "Gnome 52 - Liquid Sugar" or something in a couple of years.
>There's no relief in open source. I've watched Ubuntu and Gnome copy some of Apple and Microsoft's worst ideas
The whole point of FOSS is that a single groups decision or opinion do not dictated your computing. There are enough forks or alternatives.
Proprietary software prisoners will do absolutely everything to appease there abusive prison guard except simply quit walking into the golden cage every morning.
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.
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.
the person responsible for this mess was poached by meta a month ago.
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.
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. Desktop/PC operating systems aren't going away, but the industry have decided that it's no longer a relevant product category.
Half of humanity is not very smart. Once you've sold computers and software to everyone who is smart, you have to sell to the not smart half. And that not smart half isn't going to like or even be able to use complex software. Since there are far more people out there simply consuming things and few people creating things, the bias is going to be for the simpletons.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Ugh, this caught me as well.
And it's not just Tahoe. The various iOS/WatchOS updates from the fall are all broken in one way or another.
For example, WatchOS's music app can't play more than 2-3 songs from a downloaded playlist without crashing.
The WatchOS Outlook app won't launch (which also means the watch face complication is broken).
iOS Safari's search bar/address bar periodically freezes after you enter a search term. If you click the bar, the search term disappears, so you have re-type it.
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.
Yes, downvote facts.
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.
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.
The whole article is tongue in cheek. And I struggle to find any comment here that would actually verify and confirm (or not) the results of the author.
So here I am, random hacker news links verifier.
Scrolling to the image below "So, for example, grabbing it here does not work:" text and reproducing the issue with a small caveat: just moving cursor 1 (ONE) pixel right turns the cursor into the "diagonal resizing mode" cursor. Overall, the resizing area of the window corner is comfortably bigger than the author draws. Dragging empty space outside the rounded corner is weird but what isn't in today's user interface designs?
All in all have never experienced difficulties resizing windows in macos.
Miss the times of windows 95/98 and macos 9 (as some other commenters here) when OS UI was designed by humans and for humans and everything was explicitly clear including the area for window resizing.
I agree with this. I was curious and tried it out just now - there's a good part of the inside corner that is draggable and a decent amount outside as well. The cursor changes to indicate resizability make it quite difficult for me to make a mistake here.
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.
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.
That's genuine 2000s Linux experience there. Ironic that these days Linux provides a more refined and consistent UX than both MacOS and Windows.
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.
Great article.
I put a Teams meeting on my second monitor. I put Teams on my first monitor. I minimize Teams to look at something in a browser on the first monitor. The Teams meeting on the second monitor minimizes, too.
Mac window management UX is dogshit in a lot of different ways. There are a lot of problems that I either have to just deal with, or try to find some third party app to solve in lieu of Apple actually caring about UX again.
>Apple actually caring about UX again
I doubt Apple ever really cared about UX. It took Apple 24 years after Microsoft's Windows 2.0 introduced resizing a window from any edge, for Apple to finally implement it in MacOS Lion in 2011. Apple UX is ridiculous.
If they cared about UX, they'd throw out their "HIG", hire some competent people, and start over.
Why is the first item on the first menu of every software program "About this software"? Is it because the most frequently used thing by every user is to know what version of the software they are running? Apple specified this in their "HIG" long ago and it never changed, and it's been stuck there ever since. And it's completely stupid. MS Windows applications typically have "About this software" as the last menu item on the last menu, which is objectively a far better place for it than the first thing on the first menu, since it is rarely needed when using an application.
I'd say they have plenty of competent people, the problem is management and process.
The little video seems really weird to me, the author is clearly trying to resize outside of the border?? I just tried it myself and the resize zone feels more than reasonable: https://imgur.com/iip8DIL there's like 5mm on each side of the actual border to grab and resize!
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?
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 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 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...
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.
But is it really stunning? When we first got Aqua and Vista they were stunning because nobody had seen anything like that before. But Liquid Glass isn’t really new in that sense. It’s just some transparency with background blur which anyone who’s used, say, Windows 7, has already seen.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Not upgrading my personal iphone/macbook and I wish I didn’t upgrade my work iphone/macbook (unfortunately I had to)
For the first time in 15 years I am considering to not buy apple as my next phone/laptop regardless of the specs.
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
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
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.
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.
Been using this for a few years, works like a charm: https://rectangleapp.com/
Yeah, I don't even remember the last time I resized a window by hand.
I have realized that I only need 3 window sizes: maximized, minimized, or half-of-the-screen vertically. Rectangle [1] is a great way to get key combinations for resizing and moving my windows around. It works well across multiple monitors and it's free. I didn't even notice this issue, but I see how it could be problematic for people.
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?
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.
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
> 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.
I get this on iOS26 all the time and it's extremely annoying since I don't always have the correct URL. Can't make heads or tails of what triggers it (I don't use Discord).
Safari 26 slowly leaks something on older macOS releases and opening new tabs or typing into the address bar becomes unbearably slow after a while[1]. The best solution is to downgrade to Safari 18.6 - though this seems to only work on Intel Macs.
Basically a total mess. I don't want to upgrade my MacBook to 26, but Apple seems to be embracing some dark patterns in their update dialog and I'm worried I'm going to accidentally upgrade and enter a world of pain one day.
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/1nm534e/sluggish_saf...
They've made Tahoe available on some older Intel hardware, and in my case it rendered my MacBook Pro barely usable. Obvious planned obsolescence in this case convinced me to fully jump ship.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
Use rectangle and this will never be a problem for you.
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.
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.
Agreed. The problem is that native window management is pretty bad in macOS. And the 3rd party tools solving the problem aren't that great on top of being expensive sometimes.
Apple could fix it, but instead they made overlapping windows for iPadOS, which is even dumber considering the smaller display area.
I think it doesn't matter what they do; part of their clientele is fully captive, another part is only there for the status, and the last part is just using it rudimentally, so anything is OK.
I think there are some pretty awesome third party tools. I am incredibly happy with my setup.
BetterTouchTool + Alt Tab + TaskBar is my setup.
All apps used with any frequency mapped to keyboard shortcuts, mostly using right side CMD key. CMD C Chrome, CMD V VS Code, CMD T Terminal, CMD F Figma, CMD S Slack, CMD E Edge, CMD OPT A Activity MTR, CMD OPT CTRL F Firefox and not that many more.
And then for windows, it's left side CMD OPT ENTER maximize, CMD OPT LEFT left screen, etc etc. And then others for quadrants. If I need to multiwindow, it's rarely more than 3 things, and most of the time it's just 2.
Having alt tab mean cmd tab is windows style is huge. Many of these things aren't directly related to window management but I find myself not thinking about it at all, when I used to think about it all the time with Macs.
iOS on iPad has split screen mode now. It's pretty decent. Wouldn't defend it tho.
Alt Tab is alright, but it's not as smooth as native Windows window management. It always has a lot of overlays/orphaned/invisible windows hanging out in there.
Something like that really needs to be implemented at the OS level to be trully competent.
TaskBar is cool but I'm not a fan of needing to have something like a dock constantly taking vertical space while we have the menu bar on top. After years of using both, I think Microsoft decision to bundle both into a single taskbar is just much better. And the menu bar is annoying when you use multiple monitors.
I personally use Moom for windows layout, which gives you something close to PowerToys and is pretty decent. Still, it is an added utility app that you have to pay for; Apple should ship it with the OS at this point.
iPadOS is almost irrelevant for productivity anyway; there are too many flaws and limitations, and all the software are expensive subscriptions. My point is that they had a blank slate to come up with something better but still decided to just copy what they already had, which completely defeats the purpose of having a newer platform/OS.
In the end, many of Apple's UI decisions looked good when computers were simpler, but nowadays they show their limitations heavily. Windows has many architectural flaws and not as good software for some niches, but the workflow feels better.
> Agreed. The problem is that native window management is pretty bad in macOS. And the 3rd party tools solving the problem aren't that great on top of being expensive sometimes.
Linux desktops have great ground-up support for tiling window management, whether as an optional behavior (Gnome/KDE/ChromeOS), or strict tile enforcement (i3/xMonad).
> I think it doesn't matter what they do; part of their clientele is fully captive, another part is only there for the status, and the last part is just using it rudimentally, so anything is OK.
It's too bad even technologists often fall into those categories these days.
Yeh, Linux desktops are pretty good nowadays; the problem is just software support. If commercial software were easier to make/sell for Linux, that would be great.
There are not a lot of technologists left, and they are dominated by the crowd anyway. Apple used to cater more to people who really liked computers, but now they try to sell to everyone, so the objectives have changed a lot, sadly.
I must be the minority that barely noticed any changes after upgrading to Tahoe.
Well, moving/dragging windows on windows 11 (earlier?) is no picnic either, with the scrollbar nazis having decided, that windows title bars must be the next to die. Apparently this is all intentional, and app developers are encouraged to leave tiny drag-concentration-camp areas somewhere in what used to be the titlebar, which today's presumably incredibly IT savvy users are then expected to decode with no problems whatsoever. Well paint me green and call me a dinosaur, because to me it looks like each app chooses to interpret those 'guidelines' in its own way, and often in a way I fail to decode reliably.
In my head, I can hear GPT laugh hysterically, while it explains to me that I can just continue to use alt-SPACE to bring up the MOVE system menu, if I am overwhelmed, while it gleefully assures me that MSFT has 'no current plans to get rid of that feature' (which we know is Kremlin-speak for 'the system menu is NEXT brother'.
And also, it reminds me of minimalist design furniture design, where e.g. handles are hidden, and you just press a secret area to toggle e.g. a cabinet door open. I wish we could take all designers and architects, and people who encourage them, who wants to do such designs, and lock them inside TESLAs which we then push from a bridge into cold water, and then watch them try to exit those same TESLAs from under the water. If it's good design, it should be be a problem. MUHAHHA.
To make this easier in MacOS:
defaults write -g NSWindowShouldDragOnGesture -bool true
Funnily, all this weirdness was already solved with the original titlebars, which did not try to be both a drag handle and a menu. Apparently, only peasants use windows that are not maximised. Which reminds me, it has now been 2 years or more since microsoft turned keyboard-layout-switching from a standard feature into a standard bug :-/.
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.
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.
This complaint is made with a level of consideration and effort that Apple should aspire to when they make the OS itself. Bravo!
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.
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!
What does it take for a megacorp to admit a mistake and correct it???
I think it all boils down to this one question. It’s not complicated.
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.
Hopefully getting a true UX practitioner in as Head of Design will help avoid these incredibly obvious usability issues.
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.
tribunals
the cherry on top is the delay between the drag start and the window begining to resize
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.
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.
The hand grabbing the plate made me audibly laugh
I've spent months building a proper window manager for macOS, and the fundamental problem isn't the UI — it's that macOS has no proper window management API.
Third-party apps have to use the Accessibility API, which was designed for screen readers, not window manipulation. Some windows simply refuse to be resized below certain thresholds, and there's no way to query the minimum size in advance. You request 500px width, get 800px back, no error.
The real question is: will Apple ever provide a proper public API, or will this remain a cat-and-mouse game with Accessibility permissions?
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.
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 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.
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…
on a mac you can downgrade freely if the hardware supported it at one point, isn’t like all their other hardware which prevents you from downgrading, all arm mac’s can downgrade to sequoia
Hmm - that's a point. Thanks.
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.
The cursor changes when you get to resizing corners and edges, so I don't suffer from the problem pointed out in the original article. However, I do find something annoying: sometimes when I'm resizing (or maybe dragging) a window, it gets expanded to fill the whole screen.
I think that kind of behaviour ought to be controlled by the green dot at the top-left of windows, not by some particular mouse movements.
There was a time when the changes to the mac UI were quite good, or at least not annoying. Sometimes it seems as though they are changing stuff just to change stuff.
Is this the fairly new window tiling option? Do you have it enabled?
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.
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.
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..?
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
The era of Apple design with great care to little details is long gone.
I don't have this problem, and I can't seem to reproduce it.
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.
There's a superficial relationship because XFCE is often configured with a dock-like taskbar, but GNUstep is a GNU clone of Cocoa and the window manager from NeXTSTEP. It tries to mimic early macOS a bit more deeply.
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.
I've noticed the occasional momentary failure to resize a window, and this probably explains it, but it's worth noting that the cursor changes to a "resize arrows" cursor when it enters the resizing zone, so as long as I'm paying attention I know exactly when I can or can't click and drag to resize. It is preposterous that much of the zone actually lies outside of the visible bounds of the window.
Good point. I'm not on Mac anymore but this would really tick me off too.
In fact I am not on Mac anymore because with every release there were more features I didn't use (because they only work within the Apple ecosystem) and more and more things that ticked me off. Eventually I decided it wasn't for me anymore, after being on the platform for more than 15 years. Oh well. I am very happy on KDE now.
It's bad but not as bad as Windows 11. I swear I have a 2x2 pixel grid on my 4k monitor where I can grab the window resize handle, and it doesn't align to where the window's actual corner is at all.
Even worse: because the min/max/close buttons are all shunted into the top right corner, if you're trying to resize from the top right and you miss, you close the window.
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
IMO: There should be 2 update channels, Security updates(MANDATORY), <ALL OTHER UPDATES>(no reason to be mandatory). end of discussion.
I was just looking into this today. I want to keep my computer updated with the cli tool softwareupdate. Before I was using the flag --all to apply any update, but then tried to change it to --recommended as I wanted to avoid any major macOS upgrades (ie Tahoe). But Tahoe is listed as a recommended upgrade.
Now I call it with --required which only applies critical and security updates. Then I call it again with --safari-only, and one more time with --list to see what remaining updates are available. Frustrating (but sadly not surprising) there isn't a way to apply all available updates excluding major OS updates.
If you pay attention to the cursor, instead of aiming at the corner of the window, the UI gives you great feedback of where you should click: when the cursor changes to 2 arrowheads pointing diagonally or orthagonally to the window, resizing is available. Why aim for inside the window? I do think the expanded corner radius of Tahoe sucks badly.
This is the sort of thing that apple (used to?) take pride in doing well. e.g. new hires in orientation would be asked if there was anything 'special' about their offer letter and it was a thicker more premium kind of paper. Emphasizing the magical 'feel' that differentiated apple products.
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 agree. I would like to buy a new Mac but that would mean I'm forced to use macOS 26. It may be years before I buy a new Mac.
This is the first UX issue I have seen since moving to MacOS 26 that I have been able to reliably recreate and haven’t been able to just attribute to a subjective opinion. I never knew about before this post mainly because any window resizing I do is via rectangle. It’s definitely a flaw they need to address.
IMHO, Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard was the pinnacle of Mac OS X. When I "upgraded" to 10.7, they lost me. It was then that I switched to Linux full time, and I haven't looked back. Every now and then I do pull out my Wallstreet with Mac OS 9 on it so I can relive the heyday of old school computing.
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
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.
I'm on latest Tahoe and M3 MBP and the issue is even worse than the author describes. There is about a 5px window also for grabbing the straight edges of the window to expand in one axis only.
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.
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.
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.
Is this a monitor resolution or custom HiDPI scaling issue or something? I genuinely do not have their issue with resizing windows, nor do my tolerances seem anything as odd as they claim to have.
Seems like most the attention this is getting is people wanting to grave dance Apple at any chance given.
This is a fake issue. You should just be using window snapping which finally is included directly in the os
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.
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.
Steve Jobs would never have let this ship.
Tahoe’s UI is a disaster. Giant buggy controls. Sad to see where macOS has ended up. Apple used to have so much attention to detail in their UI design - now it looks like it’s “anything goes”.
It's not unusable, but this whole update cycle hasn't offered much in the way of improvements. It's basically a bad UI, Safari updates (which shouldn't be coupled to the OS), a phone app and additions to system apps I don't touch.
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.
I can't remember the last time I resized a window. Does everyone not already install Magnet or an alternative first-thing to emulate the impeccable DWM?
It's obvious, the new Apple UI (and Liquid Glass) is optimized for visionOS, not macOS or iOS.
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.
Interesting! Thanks for that
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]
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.
Let’s also not forget the introduction of unnecessary and confusing icons: https://tonsky.me/blog/tahoe-icons/
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!
See: [shipping the org chart](https://betterthanrandom.substack.com/p/shipping-the-org-cha...)
The share buttons on iOS seem to fail like 15% of the time as well. Randomly.
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).
This 100%
Please please please make this better Apple. Or just give us an option for square windows.
Result of UI people work on UX. As an industry we need to de-hyphenate UI and UX.
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. >:(
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 wonder if it's because there's a hidden agenda of introducing a touch friendly interface where pixel perfection doesn't matter. Maybe the rumors are true about a touchscreen MacBook.
Even if this is true, it doesn't justify breaking the interface for keyboard/mouse users. They're big enough to handle both cases.
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.
These are the sorts of small details that I remember Apple being known for and putting a lot of thought into, often times a little obsessive.
Not to say this isn't the case anymore but
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 would highly recommend Magnets to anyone users who prefer shortcuts anyway: https://magnet.crowdcafe.com/
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.
Flipping things around as I see it as a desktop Linux user: "OMG this one thing doesn't work in macOS, looks like 2026 wont be the year of the macOS desktop!"
Apple does not want you to resize windows. They want to set the window size for you so don't need to re-adjust it. Apple always knows what's best for the customer.
Omg, I though I could only just grab that super tiny edge. Turns out can grab the "air" around it. Thanks for the heads up, makes life a lot easier!
This app I found to fix the problem on my system: https://mikkelmalmberg.com/moves
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
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…
I tried to resize my already mostly fullscreen window now, and I cant, as it always triggers the hot corner for notes. I guess I have to have full sized windows then.
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.
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.
i am positive there's a bug in tahoe where the login screen passsword text input is waiting for something to settle in the background, either with my weird unicomp keyboard, a remap i do, or even the external monitors.
my password is always incorrect unless i count to about 20 or 30 seconds. once i have 'redocked' for the day, unlocking it subsequently doesnt have the requirement. but every dock insertion, it comes back.
Yes! It takes a LONG time for my bluetooth keyboard to connect, after the login screen is shown.
That looks so ridiculous that it has me wondering how hard of a technical change it would’ve been to change that drag target, and if they just punted on it.
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.
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.
Tahoe is the first macOS I'm planning to skip if 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.
There is no option to simply decrease the corner radius?!
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.
The OS which requires you to click in order to update also makes it, uh, challenging to resize windows. Sublime. A tiling manager would never.
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.
First failing autocorrect on iOS, now this... Love how it is solved in Omarchy Linux - Super Key + Right Mouse Button anywhere on the window.
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.
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...
It is case of Corporate Memphis induced design, SF people increasingly detachment from common sense, and general sign of societal decline.
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'm on Tahoe and really not seeing this issue.
I'm one of those who instinctively click OUTSIDE the windows. I guess your instincts depend how long have you worked on a Mac.
Interesting, in the era of productivity tools I just realised I don't re-size windows anymore. I just use Swish or Spectacle.
Again it’s becoming painfully clear that people at Apple do not use their own systems in any meaningful way.
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.
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.
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
I'm so glad I'm still on sequoia!
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 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.
I never had this problem for ages. As I use hammerspoon with hotkeys to resize and move the apps between displays.
And the HiDPi/retina issues with 32” Dell monitors for example especially when using rdp is super annoying.
> 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!"
This is clearly an issue, and it isn't even the biggest issue on macOS Tahoe UI.
one of my biggest fears is to upgrade my mb air by mistake will stay on sequoia as longer I can
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?
That pic/movie of trying to grab the corner(?!) of the plate full of food...
priceless
Also Finder can never remember to start the new window size as I last left it.
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?
They took our scroll bars and now they are coming for our resize controls.
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.
I laughed for a solid 5 minutes at the video of grabbing a plate.
Might be the best problem TLI5'ing GIF I've seen :)
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.
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.
I just tested and didn't have any issue.
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.
>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.
That omelette does look delicious though.
It makes me really happy when companies continue to fuck up and enshitify their software because it adds more ppl to the Linux/FOSS evosystem. I have a MBP and I love it dearly (the hardware, macOS is fine), but Apple has been disappointing me with each software update on macOS and iOS. The quality of their software is degrading so badly. I know Asahi linux is around, but Im at the point ill just go full Framework and make my ecosystem Linux based (with GrapheneOS on my nee pixel). Just so tired of companies doing such a bad job with billions and billions of dollars. It’s truly unbelievable.
And what to do about the slow mouse?
Weird. I have no such trouble.
> 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?
MacOS 26 is an UI disaster!
I second this. The design team at Apple must rework their copy as soon as possible.
MacOS 26 is an UI-disaster!
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.
I’ve been an Apple user since before there was such thing as Mac, OS X or macOS has been my daily driver for over 20 years. The SIP bullshit, buried dark pattern allow buttons to download programs. The totally out of control background processes and snooping and remote online checks for every program execution nanny state bullshit. I’m 100% done with iOS macOS all of it.
New Desktop is FreeBSD+MATE. Config is a pain initially but idc.
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.
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 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.
Stop using MacOS?
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 will never update to tahoe. if it becomes forced I'll switch to linux idgaf
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?
use rectangle, it's OP
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).
This is why I’m always wait as long as possible to update major versions, seems like there is fuckups big and small in every single major macOS update.
I've noticed this as well and it's infuriating. It's extremely unintuitive and I constantly find myself missing the resize zone.
The idiotic rounded corners of Tahoe are so ugly I just wish I didn't upgrade. I hope Apple will make the radius configurable.
Darkest before the dawn
Dawn of the year of the Linux desktop!
Let's be honest, everything windows on macOS is and always has been an utter cluster fuck.
Another thing to add to the list of reasons why I'm not upgrading.
I'm surprised you can even see the border of each window lol
Volume bar now blocks access to the latest tabs in the browser
This is so simple.
This makes me angry.
Imagine Steve Jobs allowing this to happen.
"You're holding it wrong!"
Going to stay on Sonoma for another year
Meanwhile, window management in linux is Superior.
lmao mac.
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> Note: This does not change the rounded corners of individual app windows. It only restores the straight silhouette at the edges of your display.
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They want you to do the pinch in/out gesture /s
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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.?
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.
This is a constant irritation for me on Windows.
I work on a desktop Windows/Mac application that takes forever and a day to launch (CAD package), and pops up a million pop-ups during the process. I try to get minor admin tasks done while it is compiling/launching, but it steals focus every 10 seconds!
Still beats using XCode, though
Windows 11 also broke the active window from focusing when waking from sleep. Whenever I wake my PC, no window is active. I'll still have a fullscreen Chrome or whatever, but if I try to do Ctrl+T to open a tab nothing happens because nothing is in focus. I have to Alt+Tab once to bring it into focus.
Change the ForegroundLockTimeout registry setting to increase the timeout, or you can set it to the max integer value to never let the app steal the focus.
by default if you haven't typed anything for a little bit Windows allows an application to steal focus. If you change that value you can prevent windows from ever stealing focus or change how long they have to wait before they're allowed to.
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.
Depends on your hardware. On my machine cyberpunk runs at 40fps on Linux but around 60fps on windows. Which is annoying as I’d rather it be better
And even Mac is doing well with games, most of my library runs natively. Baldurs Gate 3 runs better on the newer Apple chips than my somewhat aging gaming PC.
Yeah it's just the kernel anti-cheat now which is keeping me on windows. I'm fully ready to swap to linux but unfortunately I do like to play games that need it.
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.
I agree.
Mac OS used to be rock solid. We had machines at work that had uptime measured in years. My own machine would go months.
It doesn’t anymore. Restarted twice today.
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.
I have Win10, mac and Ubuntu, in 3 different machines I'm using constantly. None of them is perfect, but windows is just infuriating, macos in the middle, and I can more or less live with ubuntu...
Can you even consider Android a singular OS? I personally don't in the same way I don't consider Fedora and Ubuntu the same OS, and there's far more differences between something like HyperOS and AOSP/PixelUI as there is between Ubuntu and Fedora.
Android is an app platform.
I assumed he was talking about desktop OS
Did the same just end of last year, NVME drive, gobs of RAM, and yet... sometimes the whole UI freezes solid for multiple seconds at a time when I close one out of my 30-40 Chrome tabs. I know it's not a cheap app to run, but this doesn't happen on MacOS.
Didn’t someone recently uncover that this was usually do to ram losing bits over time? ECC would fix it? Maybe I’m misremembering
I'd say that most PC users have vague knowledge that linux or MacOS exists.
Popular as in populous as in numerical
> That is incidentally one of the many papercuts that are widely accepted in Windows
A flashing cursor in an inactive text box. Possibly the most annoying of bugs.
Looking at you Windows, COMRAD and every login I ever do.
Check/change your ForegroundLockTimeout registry value.
by default if you haven't typed anything for a little bit Windows allows an application to steal focus. If you change that value you can prevent windows from ever stealing focus or change how long they have to wait before they're allowed to.
I've been beefing about this for decades; X Window didn't do this by default and you could adjust window manager behavior however you liked to prevent windows stealing focus in X, even for newly realized windows. Microsoft Windows decided for some reason the newest window gets focus, which is annoying as heck. I really don't want my attention involuntarily switched because my window manager things it knows better than I do where I should be looking.
You want to change the ForegroundLockTimeout registry key or set it via power shell.
by default if you haven't typed anything for a little bit Windows allows an application to steal focus. If you change that value you can prevent windows from ever stealing focus or change how long they have to wait before they're allowed to.
Windows has a ton of little settings you can tweak like this if it's not working quite how you like it.
I personally tweak it the other way to allow a window to pop up and still focus sooner .
If you set up via PowerShell you can do it more dynamically and if you're doing it via the API there's behavior in there too force a lock
> Don’t try to interact with a windows desktop while it is still booting up
I experience the same with macOS. For example Discord steals focus.
I remember using the NT5 betas (that became Win2k) and being so pleased that the focus (not) stealing was working much better. They "fixed" that for the final release
They have changed the default focus lock timeout behavior over the years, but you can still very easily tweak it to whatever you want
Macs have largely been the same. It is just a matter of buzy compute and letting all the accumulated tasks complete.
When you buy powerfull computers, this problem basically doesn't exist, both on Windows or macOS. Since Macs have historically been more expensive and premium, even the cheaper model was powerfull enough to finish the boot sequence fast enough that the desktop would feel snappy almost instantly. On the other hand, cheap PCs struggle to accomplish every task in a timely manner.
I am amazed about how stupid and ignorant is the average Mac fanboy. I have been a Mac user first and foremost, but you guys are just full of shit.
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.
well said. well, sad. but true ...
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?
This is starting to make sense. In the past I've been confused at a seemingly useful question thread there and the answer from some other user there with some like "top support user" badge or something, is just not an answer at all, and then the thread gets locked because they deemed it resolved.
> They are there for users to help other users.
lol. Can't tell you how many times I've clicked "I have this problem too" on a page where users can't help each other because apple is doing/hiding something stupid.
I've been troubleshooting this on and off since early December.
There's a handy Python script here to show log which application is stealing focus: https://superuser.com/a/874314
If you find it's SecurityAgent then you might be hitting this bug: https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/807112
I suspect it's related to a JIT privilege management app my company uses.
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.
My hand was at least 40cm away from the touchpad, no it wasn't disabled.
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.
The window losing focus but OP reports is due to this:
https://support.logi.com/hc/en-us/articles/37493733117847-Op...
Which would only happen if you are using it wireless.
It happened to me this morning.
> Logitech mice with their drivers work great.
That's not macos fault in this case, it's just that Logitech mouses (MX Master at least) doesn't act well at all without driver. Like, for scrolling, it's like the mouse is sending raw smooth scrolling each time you just touch the wheel and without the driver that presumably fake it on the computer side, there is no synchronisation between your actual scroll and the steps you physically feel in the wheel.
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.
Gotta use Scroll Reverser unfortunately. Sometimes even that breaks though. Sad
I have a Logitech MX Vertical and it works flawlessly.
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.
the steermouse g502 combo is just incredible. been my staple for years
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.
It's not, it's just increasingly badly made. Started creeping in the release before Sequoia
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.
Agreed. Since sharing input between multiple applications (and the OS services) is its primary role, you would think that UI designers would have “thou shalt not steal focus” as a commandment, but that is not the case.
My latest version of the problem is with Ubuntu Gnome. Upgrade software and, later, you will be interrupted with a pop-up window to enter your system password. Not only is this an interruption, I’m always doubtful that this is the system asking for a sudoer password!
UIs, in my experience, are very bad at handling “interrupts”. Sorry, my dad designed chips, so I use that hardware term when talking about notifications and other times another application needs to notify or get the input from user. Personally, I’d have the UI change the color/texture of the system menubar/taskbar and wait for the user to click it.
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.
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
I have no information to add, but I also have started experiencing this after “upgrading” to Tahoe. Never was a problem before.
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 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.
Tahoe made at least one undocumented change to timer events in the GUI. This resulted in a difficult to debug problem in solvespace. I suspect we were doing something "wrong" and had to correct it, but the fact remains they made a change to how some GUI events work and didn't tell anyone.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> people like you are going to have to start voting with their wallets.
You think I CHOSE to be miserable? Sorry, I have kids, and you know, they don't exactly live on dog food, but even that costs money. My job requires me to use a Mac. And please don't tell me to "find a better job". I've been programming for over twenty years, only once I was given a clearance to pick "whatever kind of machine you want". For my personal computing I do use Linux.
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...
I replied to the parent post, but in short, I used it through a subscription service that specifically didn’t update until the ownership issues were clarified to their (and ultimately my) satisfaction.
The screen recording permissions are needed for it to be aware of when menu bar icons update so it can move them in and out of the menu bar; I believe later versions allow you to skip screen recording permissions if you’re willing to forgo that feature.
If all you need is to hide infrequently-used menu entries so they don't spill under the notch, then zNotch is a pretty good alternative.
Oh decent timing, this happened to me first time today, I even looked down at the track pad to see if my hand was close enough to accidentally swipe it because I felt it wasn't
Do you have a logitech mouse? If so you need to reinstall the logi and/or G Hub apps. The cert changed and that's what's causing it to fail and keep grabbing focus away. Incredibly strange bug.
https://support.logi.com/hc/en-us/articles/37493733117847-Op...
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.
By chance are you using any Logitech stuff? I have a similar issue and narrowed it down to one of the Logi Options taking focus away randomly.
I had the same issue, and in my case it turned out it was caused by Logitech G Hub which was running in the background. I uninstalled it and did not experience the issue again. My suggestion is to check any background process that might be doing that.
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.
> 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.
So its not just me!
I updated to iPadOS 26 on my iPad Pro, opened Safari, and tried to log into a website. For some reason the full-screen keyboard didn't load, all I could get was a miniature thing that floated on the left part of the screen (like the two-handed layout but with the full keyboard in one half, like typing on an iPhone 5s).
The memes about Steve Jobs turning in his grave are true. He would not have stood for slop like this for even a moment. Apple's quality game was miles higher back in the day.
Even if they tried to do some kind of Snow Leopard maintenance release for all of their products, I don't think they could raise the bar on quality high enough in just a single release. They'd have to do it a few times with nothing new to show for it.
This speaks nothing of the transition to MacOS looking more and more like a dysfunctional toy since Jony Ive left and Alan Dye took over.
Tiger and Snow Leopard were the peak.
If only Stevesie was still here to roll some heads :(
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.
> They could throw some small portion of their billions of dollars into proper quality control and reproduce it themselves if they wanted to.
How?
How do you reproduce something when you have no idea of the cause and it's not happening on any of your machines?
And remember they don't have just this one unreproducible bug reported. They have thousands.
If you have experience writing software, you're going to end up with a lot of unreproducible bug reports. They're a genuine challenge for everyone, not just Apple.
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.
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.
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
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.
How does that even work?
When you launch an application or open a dialog, you expect the new window to "steal" focus. When you close a dialog, you expect focus to go back to the main window. If it didn't, it would impair usability.
So how would an OS decide when "stealing focus" is allowed and when it is not?
Like, I'm frustrated with it too. I hate when an app pops up a dialog while I'm typing and my next keystroke dismisses it and I have no idea what I've done. But at the same time, I'd hate to have to manually switch focus to a pop-up dialog every single time before dismissing it with Enter or Escape too -- that would be way too annoying in the other direction.
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.
Dunno, not deleting the posts would be a good start.
Exactly. They're just acting like Trump during the pandemic - "no testing - no cases..." Why not just keep the posts and allow people exchange ideas for workarounds?
> 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.
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.
> ... 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.
> 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.
> 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.
The new Windows 11 22H2 task manager?
Works just fine here (1920x1200 125%, 4K 150%, 1080p 100%).
Usually that is a monitor driver issue.
When I still used windows (until windows 10) I always had to download some DPI fixer program to fix blurriness in many native windows programs.
Text rendering × DPI seems to be one of those difficult problems.
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.
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...
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 use two 4k displays with an M1 Pro MBP. They work without any flickering. They’re using HDMI rather than DisplayPort.
I’m also, to get the two external displays without them being mirrored, using a docking station and a display driver from Silicon Motion called macOS InstantView.
This is of course not ideal if you need DP and DSC.
It works over the HDMI ports on Minis and some Pros, and this monitor is connected to the Mac via HDMI. Source: Me, my M1 Mac mini, and my Samsung Neo G8
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.
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.
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.
It was BetterDisplay. Thanks for the hint, will take a look at SwitchResX as well. BetterDisplay looks too complicated for what I need it to do (just switch the screen to 2560x1080 scaled).
It should be, its size is somewhat similar to a 31" 4k I have next to it just the ultra-wide adds those extra inches.
I tried Option of course, that dumped tons of options at me but none of them were about font scaling.
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.
Fedora 43 with KDE - have been using 140% scaling with my Dell Ultrasharp 32" 4k monitor - no issues whatsoever. I've noticed that the Dells do a pretty good job with Linux - I have used monitors of various sizes ranging from 27" to 43" and never had any issues on Linux.
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.
> 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.
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
hello fellow AW2725DF enjoyer
> Linux isn't in position regarding display/UI.
I’m glad everyone is dogpiling on this statement cause man people seriously have to stop parroting this years out of date claim at this point. Any big well supported distro using Wayland should be fine, at the very least KDE and GNOME are guaranteed work perfectly with HiDPI.
Daily Fedora KDE user here on 4K HiDPI monitor plus another of a different lower resolution, flawless experience using both together in a setup. Fractional scaling also there working perfectly as well and you choose how you want KDE to scale the apps if you want (forcefully or let the app decide).
Gotta be something hardware specific to you like the other guy said cause I literally just did a fresh fedora install on a 4K display a few months ago with zero issues, and majority of people I know also use 4K displays for their Fedora workstations, and that has never once been brought up as an issue. Maybe search around for whatever hardware you’re running, otherwise I really have no idea what would cause that.
Why don't you just set the resolution manually temporarily for the installer to say 1920x1080 at boot time?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Still better than macOS and Windows where third-party theming is basically non-existant.
And we were talking about why Linux wasn't an alternative to macOS, weren't we?
So don't use a third party theme.
That’s not a KDE issue though, blame the themes
Open an X11 app and it will be blurry.
Also fractional scaling is not supported out-of-the-box in GNOME, you have to set a config value to use it IIRC.
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.
I went from Linux (10 years) to Mac (4 years) to Windows (8 months) to back to Mac. (I have not upgraded to Tahoe, and didn't even realize it was so different until recently)
IMO, there's basically no problem Linux has that isn't worse in Windows (at the OS level). Especially once you get into laptops.
My final conclusion was that I hate computers.
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.
Inconsequential minutiae concerning display resolution is absolutely NOT the thing keeping people away from Linux.
Its the "getting every config" right thing that is the problem.
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%
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
>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.
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
For me it's the keyboard and hotkeys.
I use macs at work and Linux at home. There's no uniform way to make a Linux machine accept things like cmd right arrow to jump to the end of the line, etc.
This is the closest attempt, but it has many gaps: https://github.com/rbreaves/kinto
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.
"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!
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?
Well I guess the iMac Pro isn't on the lucky list then. I know it's losing updates (and therefore support) this year.
Unfortunately, I looked into it, and my other options are an Asus CX54 Chromebook or a Lenovo X1. There simply aren't competitive alternatives to Mac hardware, at least not at modern Google.
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.
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.
> Yes, but Linux is finally in that position
I've heard that for almost 20 years now, but it never was.
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?
It's a mountain of little things that add up rather than a few killer features.
It's the way drag and drop is a fundamental interaction in text boxes, the proxy icons in title bars, how dragging a file to an open/save panel changes that panel's current folder rather than actually move a file.
It's how applications are just special folders that are treated like files, how they can update themselves independently of each other or any system packages, how you conventionally put them in the /Applications folder so you can put that folder on the Dock to use directly as a launcher.
It's how all text fields consistently support emacs-style keyboard shortcuts, respond appropriately to the system-provided text editing features such as the built-in Edit menu, text substitutions, and writing features.
It's how you can automate most Mac-assed apps; how you can extend the operating system through app-provided and user-created services to every other application that handles text, files, images, PDFs, through the built-in APIs using AppleScript, Automator, and Shortcuts.
It's how the whole program rather than its last window is the fundamental unit of an application such that document-based applications can exist without a window without also polluting some system tray with an unnecessary icon, how that means workflows expect more than one window open.
It's how there's a universal menu that works for every app, not just conforming ones (i.e. KDE's global menu only shows KDE apps' menus; other apps need a plugin or just don't show at all), how the help menu has a search field to look for menu items, how keyboard shortcuts are bound to the menu items are bound arbitrarily within the program's settings window and can thus be assigned globally in System Settings, how this means all of an application's main features are therefore accessible via the menu bar, how that creates consistency in the menus.
Those are just some things off the top of my head but there are plenty of others, some a bit more user facing, some less. Just examples, a non-exhaustive list.
I'm sure those who don't care about these things will dismiss it but if you've been using a Mac since before macOS, before OS X, or even before Mac OS X, these are things you won't drop for Linux just because the design is a bit uglier.
Of course, if none of these things matter, then the swap is easier. It doesn't mean any DE is a drop-in replacement by any means. Many of the things that make some DEs "Mac-like" are skin deep.
> 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
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.
> The only people I meet who voluntarily use web apps in their day to day are Linux users who have convinced themselves that it is good enough because there aren't any good native apps on Linux.
Funny, there are whole companies, pretty big ones at that, that run entirely on the G Suite. Regardless of OS.
I don't know if you've noticed, but Microsoft are moving apps to web versions as well.
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...
Tried Linux (Omachy) recently and the mouse pointer drops frames or chokes movement under load. Just can't use an OS that does that full stop.
I wouldn't call Omarchy "mainstream". Yes it's very popular among developers but that's about it and under the hood it uses some pretty non-mainstream components like Hyplrand WM.
I would argue the OS closest to "mainstream Linux" is Ubuntu or Fedora with Gnome DE. Gnome has many many faults but it's probably the closest DE you're going to get to what Windows and MacOS have.
it does but you need various config tweaks
Oh God you fell for the hype and used DHH's juiced up distro. I encourage you to try a properly maintained distro e.g. Ubuntu, Fedora, or Leap instead of a racist narcissist's hobby project.
2026 is the year of nothing on the desktop so may as well pick Linux.
2026 is the year of the shitty desktop OSes.
Linux is the worst desktop we have, except for all the others..
Linux’s value proposition would have to be “Everything’s different learning curve yada yada but it’s so clean and well done users will see the light” Meanwhile run ps on an Ubuntu desktop. The same process bloat and shit that ruined Windows and macOS. Linux is a mess, almost by design.
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.
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.
Not anymore. Tried this but the pulled 18.7.3 for beta upgrades too.
They don't allow you to upgrade to iOS 18.7.3 if your device supports iOS 26.
> 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.
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
You can tap on the filter button (three stacked horizontal lines of decreasing length) and select the "Voicemails" filter to view them all.
I did find this later, but that's also very unintuitive. I'm looking at a call log, why would I filter my calls to look at voicemails? I mean even the options there are categorically inconsistent. It is "Calls", "Missed", "Voicemail". voicemail is a different category than received and missed. I'm expecting that because that's what used to be at the top of that page. They taught me that that's what I should expect from the filtering option.
My solution was to change from "Unified" to "Classic" which changes the bottom bar from [("Calls" "Contacts" "Keypad") "Search] to ["Favorites" "Recents" "Contacts" "Keypad" "Voicemail"]. THE ICONS ARE EXACTLY THE SAME SIZE. The only difference is the spacing between them.
But again, this is fucking crazy because going back to the classic mode, if I click on a recent name it starts dialing them. But in the unified mode it gives me information. The unified makes the whole name act as if I'm pressing the info button.
The problem is that Apple created an anti-pattern, TO ITSELF. They taught users that an action did one thing and then used that action to do something completely different. No one on iOS 26 should expect that clicking the call line will take you to the information page and should instead expect that doing so will start dialing that person.
This is the most disappointing aspect of the slide in quality for me.
I working in software and "build features" for a living, and over the years I've come to prioritize reliability, performance, and an intuitive experience over all else. No matter how good the feature set is, if it crashes, is painfully slow, or I can't figure out how to use it, then I don't want it.
Apple used to have that focus, but seems to have lost it of late.
Apple definitely had that focus under Jobs but people now are all too happy to tell you you're holding it wrong and I think Apple internalized this mentality.
But I find iOS 26 absolutely disrespectful. It wants you to use it in ways that previous iOS versions pushed you away from. It's an anti pattern to previous versions. I'm sorry, if you teach users one pattern don't update to have them do the opposite. Nothing is could be less intuitive
My HN comment history shows I've been worried about macOS for quite a while now, too. I'm a bit less optimistic than you, but I hope you're right. I'd really prefer to be wrong.
macOS has been an incredible productive OS for me since I was 15. I'm now 39. In the last few years is the first time in that period that I've seriously begun to wonder if it would be wise to get off the platform. I've already dropped iOS, watchOS (Garmins are actually amazing these days, for what it's worth), and iPadOS. I still use macOS daily along with tvOS when I happen to watch something, but the days seem numbered now. I'm pretty disappointed. I hope it turns around, but I'm slowly preparing myself to be on Linux primarily.
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.
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
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.
Snow Leopard was spectacular. Rock solid, I never had a single problem with the OS. Lots of third-party developers making good software helped, I think shortly after (Lion?) I bought Things, Little Snitch, Sketch, and Alfred.
> 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.
Pretty much. Xcode was quirky but it still is. But the frameworks were well documented and 1 Cocoa book could get you a long way. I loved building Obj-C/Cocoa apps back then.
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.
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 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 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 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.
> Most Windows laptops physically break apart before macOS ceases to support any Apple laptop.
If you buy the $199 Windows laptop that can barely run Windows, yes. Anything comparable in price to a MacBook? Not really.
I bought an Asus Zenbook UX303 a decade ago that had a full aluminium body, a dedicated Nvidia GPU, and cost like 800€. A sibling still uses it today. I've upgraded to an Asus ROG Zephyrus that has a fancy plastic body that doesn't leave sweat and fingerprint traces like my work MacBook Pro does.
> 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.
>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.
>Godwin's law
I'm not calling anyone Hitler, though, just pointing out the flaws that can come with relative comparisons. A known, extreme example here is useful as it's well known and illustrative.
Anyhow, Apple & Android should just support old hardware for longer.
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.
Because if you don't make periodic cosmetic changes, people will think you're going out of business.
It's why your favorite shoe company, that you buy from every 2-3 years when you wear out your favorite shoes, always has new styles and discontinues other styles. Converse is a great example.
But when Apple released macOS Snow Leopard (widely held to be great), it announced 0 new features over Leopard, to much applause. It focused exclusively on fixing issues, and was better for it.
Journalists will report whatever they get fed anyway (notice how they all talk gleefully over the wobbly new iPhone with a jutting-out camera bump when only a few years ago they talked gleefully about how flat the iPhone was, and then gleefully wrote about how their screen estate was invaded by a notch etc), so if Apple focused on fixing issues instead of short-attention-span apps (when was the last time you used "Image Playground"?) the media could report how committed to reliability and quality Apple is, gleefully.
Generally I agree with you. My advice is that when you find a pair or shoes you like pick up at least 3 pair because by the time you need to replace them they'll be gone, but Converse isn't a great example of that because I can get a pair of Chucks which look/fit basically exactly like any pair I've ever had. It's actually kind of nice that Converse doesn't seem to play the same game as the tennis/running shoes I wear out.
FYI: You can't get the cons that they sold about a decade ago. They changed the sole a bit so they are now "slippers" in order to avoid tariffs. (I also suspect there's a reason why they also sell "boots" too.)
I do wish I heeded your advice. I bought some awesome Doc Marten boots/sneaker hybrids called "Boury" a few years ago, and they stopped making them. I can't find any in my size anywhere, like EBay. I walked all around Disney World with them in shorts, and they looked / felt awesome.
There has to be work done. Each sprint, new FEATURES must be completed.
Features, people, FEATURES.
We finally have processors in our pockets that can calculate the pretty lights and colors, so make them calculate, people!
I’d like to use that extra processing and efficiency to get longer battery life when the phone isn’t doing anything special, and to have better performing apps.
Good design should be timeless. For example, I like wat Leica did for their M serie cameras. At a certain point they decided that the design was done, and stopped messing around. For that you need leadership with good taste, because designers will always design.
Mostly, but they made mistakes too. Just look at the M5 vs the M6 vs the M7. The original M6 came out in 1984 and it is still the preferred model to this day in terms of film cameras. The M5 was too large and the M7 was too «electronic». People preferred the cameras that stuck closer to the original DNA. M6 cameras still fetch a pretty penny today. (So much so that Leica made a reissue a few years ago).
Managers are incentivized to do things to the real world that show up as "• Led implementation of [bla]" on their resume.
It's more effort to do things that also make sense than only to produce the bullet point.
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.
It's a pity Lenovo isn't doing Linux support for their Snapdragon laptops. I'd switch.
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.
I still think Alan Dye was secretly fired. When you live in a bubble and everybody around you is propping you up, you think everything is fine and dandy, but users don't care about your or anybody's feelings.
Dye didn't bring something that users didn't know they needed, he brought chaos to the entire ecosystem, and he's the only Apple executive folks are willing to talk garbage about.
I mean, it feels like it would make some sense, and honestly I'd love for it to be true—but everything I've heard, from people who know Apple much better than me and/or have inside sources, is that not only was he not secretly fired, his departure blindsided the C-suite.
If Cook and his other senior staff had recognized the problems Dye was causing and wanted him gone, what possible motivation would they have to make his firing secret? How could it possibly serve them better to have it look like they were chumps?
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
When the iOS 26 video player first leaked, I thought to myself, this has to be some kind of April 1st joke or a knock-off smear campaign or something. Nope, Apple did really half-assed their entire iOS to the ground.
When I read the welcome screen which includes the "hit features", all I remember was
"You can change your icons!" - What? Was that the big issue of my day? (Although, after I saw what they had done to them, it certainly loomed larger in my mind)
and
"Notification summaries that may be incorrect"
Miserable. Won't be upgrading the personal computer, am fast moving away from Apple as a whole, am telling others not to upgrade for as long as possible.
> "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.
Yep, that's a great workaround, as long as you have third-party apps you're happy with.
@xoa may I ask what do you use as iSCSI initiator?
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.
While we're talking about Safari, it also developed this bug where picture-in-picture leaks memory like crazy where it sometimes consumes over 80GB of RAM, gets compressed to nothing but freezes the app to the point where I cannot type anything in the address bar.
Certain features are not supported unles you're on MacOS 26, period, even with Safari TP
At least on Windows 11 it’s possible to disable the rounded corners.
Only because those aren’t required for account centralization, advertising in the main OS menu, or AI “features”.
It's also for a rather unbelievable reason --- if your GPU is not "powerful enough", you don't get rounded corners by default.
You read that right: apparently rounded corners are so resource-intensive that if you don't have or disable GPU acceleration, they'll disappear.
As much as I absolutely hate rounded corners in general, it's astonishing the apparent inefficiency with which MS have implemented them. Then again, mediocrity seems to be par for the course with their developers: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28743687
Thanks for the advise. I have not upgraded, and have no plan to.
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-...
> 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...
I'm not sure if it's pure nostalgia but I long back to the "Lion era" of OS X.
Apple had a HIG and third party developers used it. Different apps looked consistent: toolbar, sidebar etc.
Apps had borders. If there was too much content there were big blue scrollbars.
Buttons had borders. Windows had texture. You could find stuff.
I could go on forever. But the OS was simultaneously better visible to the eye, and less visible to the mind. Stuff worked.
I am still on Sequoia and dont plan to move to Tahoe.
> iOS 8+ did improve on iOS 7’s worst bits
Or iOS 8 and 9 did revert back a lot of iOS 7 changes.
I am not against changing UI, but it seems every time they are doing it they forgot all the lesson learned from previous attempt, and in such short period of time suggest they haven't learned anything.
And that's exactly why I'm waiting for the 27 series to upgrade.
Windows vista was a good OS. Windows 7 was vista with a new skin. People were just really dumb and didn’t realise vista needed new drivers and when 7 came out all the drivers were written so stuff worked and for some reason it made people think 7 was good and vista was bad.
I have maybe unpopular opinion, but Apple always been terrible in UX.
Just to give a few examples which annoys me the most:
- Finder. It just something else. After 10 years of using OSX I still can’t figure out how to use it efficiently for selecting the path - this experience is different every time, depending on the context where Finder was called from. I just don’t get.
- Lack of the true tiling window manager experience. Yes, there is Yabai, but it still suck due to the fact that you can’t have truly independent spaces each with individual layout and stack of windows.
- Infamous Magic Mouse’s charting port at the bottom.
I just wish I could have normal Linux natively on MB Pro.
Regarding the window manager and Finder; I had a better experience with the Windows equivalents way back on Windows 2k or even Windows 98 more than quarter century ago. Truly baffling.
Yes, even the Windows 98 Explorer with IE integration (let's load a JPG of clouds to the left of the file detail pane) was better than modern equivalents. In Windows 10 (or was it 7?) they introduced a stupid column view in detail view that became focused with tab, so you couldn't just tab between the 3 places of directory list, file pane, address bar.
They also added stupid "quick launch" areas with places nobody went, like "3D Objects", and reduced the menu area to a "grope and find a button" ribbon.
The older Explorers were usable like File Manager on Windows 3.11 was: address bars that were usable from the keyboard and mouse (no subdivision buttons for parts of the path), acceptable launch speed, and no extra "features" that were unnecessary (like it ignoring "use same view for all folders" when your directory happens to have MP3s in it - it'll switch to showing rating / bitrate etc.)
I believe all developers should use older versions of the software to see how usable they were in comparison to the modern "improvement".
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.
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.
> 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 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.
Staying with Sequoia and iOS 18 for as long as I can.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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).
Yep on the terminal that would work... though I still think it should be the default.
On the other hand I'm not sure NOPASSWD would affect desktop environments - any desktop stuff goes via PolicyKit or whatever the latest systemd iteration is and I doubt it's smart enough to read Sudo's config (and there's an argument it shouldn't - if anything it should be the other way around, a system-wide generic "this is single-user machine, the only user is effectively root anyway" flag that both Sudo and Polkit should obey).
In both cases yes it's solvable, but I wish it became the default if there are no other interactive user accounts, or at least be easy to configure - if anything, by a simple "don't ask me again" on the permissions popup.
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
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.
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.
I do hope things turn around, but having to wait until September is going to be painful.
I hope so, Tahoe seems particularly bad, but the downhill slide has been happening for several releases.
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.
Just to be playful, Tahoe killed the launchpad and brought us the random size rounded corner madness.
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.
similar here, i bought refurb m3 mbp last nov just to get pre-tahoe
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!
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.
Tahoe: The opposite of Snow Leopard.
oof. i'll be holding off after seeing all this. already have to deal with adobe's bad updates
same here. still running on the previous version on all devices. Gonna sit this out ...
I'm as picky as the next guy, but I'm not seeing Tahoe being THAT BAD. I was holding off, but various events led to me buying a new laptop so I got it by default.
Resizing isn't great, but it's also deeply shitty in Win 11. I feel like window manager thought leadership has failed across the board, but the regression isn't that big of a deal in day to day usage, and is definitely not unique to Apple.
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.
> 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)
The worst part is the audiocore substack that is glitching. I waited to major subversions to upgrade and still got bit. I hate this.
Yeah, for me with a USB headset, the audio will go noisy about two minutes into a video / podcast. It clears up if I restart and doesn't happen when playing to the internal speakers.
sudo killall coreaudiod in the terminal will restart the audio stack without having to restart the full computer. Super annoying.
I wonder if they'll show charts of how few people have upgraded in the same way they mocked Windows 10 adoption and Android versions a few years ago at the Keynote, to rapturous applause. I for one am staying on Sequoia as the OS looks like a children's toy on Tahoe.
>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
It’s such an utter piece of crap.
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