However, in my experience the mandate to drastically redesign a product or "make it look more modern" have always come from sales and/or product owners, and in turn they're driven by competitors and customer choices.
What is happening here is Apple is unifying their product lines. All OS versions have converged to 26, 27, 28. The M processor runs iPads, Laptops and Vision. You can install iOS apps on macOS.
The headset is not a hit but it's a sign of things to come. The hardware will get better and I'm expecting seamless handoff between all your apple devices. Start a facetime call on your laptop in your office? Transfer that to your visionOS headset and start walking. Move to the living room and toss that app at your apple TV and finish up the call from the couch.
We've seen apple move toward unifying their various OS interfaces for a long time. People were forecasting this when OS X 10.6 started using the app store and app icons taken straight from the iPhone.
As the article says, liquid glass works best for spatial computing. That's apple's next big bet and the whole ecosystem is going to cater to it.
Who asked for this? What do the end users have to gain from this? So far, I've seen the macOS design steadily regress for no good reason whatsoever. The new settings app in particular is a disaster. Not only is it a UI that scrolls, a big no-no in desktop UI design, it also severely lacks affordances, and the hierarchy of the settings themselves feels rather arbitrary. What I've seen of macOS Tahoe goes even further with this touchscreenification.
I've never used an iPhone as my main phone and never owned an iPad so I don't feel qualified to speak about them.
I've also never seen a Vision Pro in person, but I treat it as a cool tech demo that solves no real practical problems. So far, VR has been mostly used for gaming, but Apple doesn't seem very interested in that use case.
Again, who asked for this?
Again, I think what people see as "getting rid of desktop design patterns" in macOS is mostly aesthetic. Mac apps remain Mac apps, they retain all the aspects of their interfaces that make them Mac apps.
More evidence in the way iPadOS 26 adopts certain aspects of the macOS interface, but does them in an iPadOS-oriented way that you wouldn't really say the two OS are converging, more that they're doing really weird impressions of each other — but underneath the grease paint, the same actors as always remain, each with their strengths.
(In saying that, System Settings is an abomination)
Have you seen the settings in the new Xcode? This iPad-ass crap keeps infesting various apps.
Overall, the current Apple seems to be very scared to lay things out in two dimensions. Every new UI they build and almost every old UI they redesign is just a sad vertical stack of stuff.
The combined title bars and toolbars that were introduced in Big Sur are not an aesthetic change. It's a very visible downgrade. Tahoe further downgrades that by removing the bottom border of that top bar.
> such as Launch Pad (which emulates the iPadOS home screen) being replaced by a more generic list of apps using the same interface as Spotlight
That is a welcome change. But that's about the only one. They also made the alerts denser, reverting part of the Big Sur redesign, but, again, because they are so afraid of horizontal layout, the icon is just awkwardly above the text instead of to the left.
Yes, and I agree that it's bad. Though, I did say the System Settings app was crap, and it's taken a leaf from that.
To be honest, I think that Apple could do this split view settings window well in macOS. Other operating systems have had something like it for years. Apple just shits the bed repeatedly here for some reason.
> Overall, the current Apple seems to be very scared to lay things out in two dimensions.
I'll grant you this to be true. Though, I noticed this a much longer time ago than just now. Specifically, the way that they removed the context-sensitive toolbar in Pages, Keynote, and Numbers '09 and shoved it all into the sidebar. When they revealed the iPad and web interfaces, though they look similar, much of the mobile interface is actually radically different from the macOS design.
> The combined title bars and toolbars that were introduced in Big Sur are not an aesthetic change. It's a very visible downgrade.
I'm not sure that those are particularly iPad or iOS inspired, though. That feels more like Dye doing his "trying to get rid of the UI" thing rather than anything indicating a platform merge.
That said, I'm a bit scared we'll get the iPadOS '26 traffic light window controls (that are tiny until you hover them) in macOS…
I take your point that this change was functional, not just aesthetic, but I still don't see it as part of any conspiracy to displace the Mac. Just a lack of care.
> That is a welcome change. But that's about the only one.
Ironically, it's one I can't stand! I missed being able to do the pinch gesture to bring up Launchpad and then find my app icons without having to type or scroll a ridiculously long list in a teeny tiny window.
Launchpad made sense to me, but it should've had an option to automatically sort or tidy up the icons in the style of the App Library or the new Spotlight-based interface.
Yet, in their eagerness to transition their newer fanbase of loyal bicycle riders to the Mac mega-truck, they didn't so much as add oomph to the bike as attach pedals to a lorry.
We have until 2030!
That said, if macOS continues to receive such shoddy treatment from its design team, I may not be using macOS by then to even care if it's going out the door. I may already be gone.
It is obvious that Apple is moving in that direction. I have never met a single person who actually wants this, however.
Is it?
I like a UI without a minimum screen size. I am livid when I can't use a fixed-size-settings dialogue because a driver/monitor is misbehaving so I'm at min resolution. The sort of issue where you have to find another machine so you can "count tabs" for keyboard navigation to get at things off-screen.
Many other cases: e.g. I like to use VMs or RDP in small windows. I also like to resize a settings window into something tiny or tiling it when doing something I need to do toggle something back and forth.
I agree it's bad if it's a long list of barely related things you have to scan each time to find what you want. The "categorised scroller" type dialogue vscode uses for settings in in theory the best of both worlds... but I keep finding myself accidentally scrolling beyond my intended category causing myself much confusion.
God I hope not, the last thing I want is having to put on a stupid VR headset everyday for work. Either we stick to good ole screens or we skip straight to neural links, none of this VR bull-shieet. And I used to own a Quest device, fun for some games, but not for prolonged work.
>As the article says, liquid glass works best for spatial computing.
I'd love to see proof of that. Because I feel like it's the exact opposite. Imagine all the street and traffic signs being also translucent and made of glass, the accident rates would spike. It looks cool in sci-fi movies, but IRL accessibility is severely lacking.
1. They claimed they would never do that. But we know how much words corporate bullshit carries
2. You cannot unify interfaces that are operated in completely different ways.
There's no "unified interface" that works well on a single-app-at-a-time smartphone with touch and on a 5k screen with multiple apps, a keyboard, and a mouse.
> As the article says, liquid glass works best for spatial computing. That's apple's next big bet and the whole ecosystem is going to cater to it
No, it doesn't work best for spatial computing. This idiotic statement started as a way to justify Liquid Glass on Twitter.
On top of that, if it "works best for spatial" means that literally every other device will work worse because of the unification no one asked for.
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However, the answer is simple: it's a vanity project by a person with next to zero design experience thrust into a position of power
If Apple wants to make iPhones cool again, my suggestion would be to loosen their iron grip on it and let people customize and build wacky new experiences around it with no corporate oversight. People on the ground know what's cool better than some trillion dollar company. Similar to the Windows theming and shareware scene of the 90s. But that would kill Apple's golden goose, and they'll have none of that.
What's actually happening is that companies are expected to a different standards, by customers and other companies alike. By trying to anticipate these expectations, companies go ahead and do the changes that they think will strengthen the brand that they are trying to project. That's all there is to it, the rest is implementation.
And third-party app developers hate OS updates too, especially, again, the kind that change the UI design. Apple is the most expensive company in the world so the cost of these redesigns is a rounding error for them. For smaller app developers, this incurs significant extra costs for the only reason of Apple just feeling like it.
What people tell, and how people act are two very different things. For multiple reasons too, I'm not meaning this in a malicious way at all. Feedback is very useful, but needs careful interpretation. Tangential, but this is why telemetry works very well: it paints a more realistic picture compared to what people report.
What freaking "insult"?
Nice hallucination though, thinking that re-designs for no other purpose than re-designing are and should universally be acknowledged as the bee's knees.
Maybe the world really just doesn't need as many designers as you seem to think it does.
You can't have designers messing with the UI every performance review cycle, if you have no designers.
Win-win for the shareholders who want to save money and for the consumers who want the UI to stay the same as they got used to.